GLOBAL BLACK SELF-FASHIONINGS: HIP HOP AS DIASPORIC SPACE

This essay examines how the “black” racial significance of hip hop culture is received, interpreted, and redeployed within the Afro-Atlantic world. Beyond questions of cultural consumption and reproduction, it is argued that hip hop's expanding global reach has facilitated the contemporary making and moving of black diasporic subjects themselves. Here, African descendant youth in an array of locales use the performative contours of hip hop to mobilize notions of black-self in ways that are at one time both contestive and transcendent of nationally bound racial framings. Hip hop in this way can be seen as enabling a current global (re)mapping of black political imaginaries via social dynamics of diaspora. In pursuing this argument, this essay looks toward hip hop movements in Brazil, Cuba, and South Africa as compelling, yet varying examples of how transnationally attuned identities of blackness are marshaled in the fashioning of diasporic subjects through hip hop.     

Dovzhenko Studio in the 1960s: Between the Politics of the Auteur and the Politics of Nationality

Abstract

This article examines the aesthetics and politics of filmmaking in Soviet Ukraine in the 1960s as a lens through which to view the mechanisms of defining and representing national difference in Thaw-era Soviet culture. Management at Dovzhenko Studio in Kyiv during this time gave a green light to young filmmakers to explore a modernist and ethnographic poetic by reasoning that such a style was rooted in the traditions of Ukrainian national cinema, the founder of which was the studio’s namesake, Oleksandr Dovzhenko. While always controversial, director-auteurs such as Sergei Paradzhanov, Iurii Illienko, and Leonid Osyka consistently justified their works of “poetic cinema” on the basis of fulfilling the studio’s explicit goal to represent Ukraine through “traditional” means. Kyiv filmmakers, however, found their freedom curtailed not solely by central authorities concerned with ideological problems, but also by a film industry increasingly concerned with its ability to make a profit. Today in Ukraine, the legacy of so-called poetic cinema is fraught with accusations of elitism as the purveyors of cultural memory try to uncover a more popular history of Ukrainian cinema.     

Cinema and Highlife in the Gold Coast: The Boy Kumasenu (1952)

The Boy Kumasenu (Sean Graham, Gold Coast, 1952) produced by the Gold Coast Film Unit during the 1950s, before independence in Ghana, had a public impact and success with local Ghanaian audiences that other colonial films never achieved. About a boy, Kumasenu, who moves from a rural village to the city of Accra, the film attempts to represent an African experience of modern life, using a local cast. This article explores the film’s popular reception by drawing on advertisements, newspaper coverage, reviews, awards it received, as well as contemporary personal correspondence and retrospective interviews with the filmmakers. It proposes that the film’s appeals lay in its inclusion of highlife, its fashions, styles and music, popular in the Gold Coast, alongside cinematic conventions of documentary, drama-documentary, neorealist film styles and the Hollywood gangster genre, already familiar to urban Ghanaian audiences. Furthermore, its theme of urban youth and citizenship evoked the concept of the “African Personality,” an identity that Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party would link with highlife music at independence. By tapping into the popularity of cinema and highlife, the film promoted nascent nationalist sentiments, and became associated with anti-colonialism and social change in the newly emerging independent Ghana.     

A Cesspool of Intrigue: Les' Kurbas,Oleksandr Dovzhenko,and the Film Industry in 1920s Soviet Ukraine

Abstract

In the 1920s, theatre innovator Oleksandr “Les'” Kurbas (1887–1937) made three short films for the Vseukrains'ke Foto-Kino Upravlinnia [All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration] or VUFKU. His film career was short-lived, however. Lambasting the VUFKU as a “cesspool of intrigue,” Kurbas left film for good to focus exclusively on theatre. His films never gained wide release, and have since been lost. Kurbas’s brief foray into cinema could therefore be considered a non-moment, yet because Kurbas objected not to the medium itself, but to the institutions creating film, his encounter with the VUFKU illuminates the larger process of the formation of the Soviet film industry. Kurbas’s departure from film occurred simultaneously with the arrival of Oleksandr Dovzhenko (1894–1956), and their crossed paths show how the structure of the Soviet film industry shaped artistic possibilities. The institutional transformation of VUFKU into Ukrainfilm, the regional affiliate of the all-Union film monopoly Soiuzkino, signalled a cultural shift: from a film industry in Soviet Ukraine, to a Soviet Ukrainian film industry, one both part of wider Soviet cinema production and slotted specifically into a Ukrainian niche. Ultimately, this article argues that this process of consolidation and centralization in the film industry complicated the development of culture in the Soviet regions.     

Racial Authenticity in Rap Music and Hip Hop

This article reviews the history of scholarship on racial authenticity within studies of rap music and hip hop. The concept of authenticity currently enjoys a central place in sociological work on popular music, subcultures, and racial identity. As a music and cultural form that straddles all three of these fields, the debates surrounding authenticity within rap and hip hop are as contentious as any. Using the year 2000 as an arbitrary dividing line, this article presents the late 20th century foundations of research on authenticity and race within hip hop, then moves on to discuss more recent developments in the academic literature. Despite hip hop scholars’ increased emphases on discourses of space and place, and processes of culture and identity formation, the field continues to be framed through notions of essential blackness, and critical interrogations of white hip hop legitimacy. After providing an overview of the state of the field, it is argued that greater attention to language use among hip hop enthusiasts, and a particular emphasis on hip hoppers who fall outside the black–white racial binary will prove fruitful in reinvigorating these longstanding debates. Ethnographic studies of local underground hip hop scenes within the Unites States are recommended as a logical place to begin.     

“An Instrument for Reaching Into Experience”: Progressive Film at the Rockefeller Boards, 1934–1945

The emergence of progressive filmmaking in the interwar period is often associated with John Grierson, the British documentary movement and the influence it traced abroad. This paper argues, however, that more particular attention needs to attend the specific context for progressive filmmaking in the United States. To make this argument, this paper foregrounds two strands of progressive filmmaking that were pursued alongside, and often in tension with each other at the Rockefeller Boards between 1934 and 1945. The Rockefeller Boards pursued both a version of social‐realist documentary in the Griersonian tradition as well as a project focused on “human relations” films. As this paper suggests, the human relations project contrasted with Grierson's social documentary by linking film to a particular kind of psychological interior; a self not oriented to the social world but to the internal spaces of psychological and personality development. This implies a complex process of cultural diffusion in which Grierson's model was filtered through, and ultimately displaced by, a set of concerns and preoccupations unique to the American context.     

‘First things first,I'm the realest’: Linguistic appropriation,white privilege,and the hip‐hop persona of Iggy Azalea

The ‘hip‐hop nation’ is a multiethnic, transnational community that originates from and privileges urban African American experiences. Scholars have explored ways that non‐African Americans worldwide use linguistic features of African American English (AAE) as a way of constructing hip‐hop affiliated identities. The current paper ties these strands together in a study of the linguistic patterns of white Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, who makes use of AAE in her music, but not in other public speech. Our study presents a variationist analysis of copula absence in her lyrics. Findings show that her rates of this hallmark feature of AAE are extremely high, when compared to similar analyses of other rappers. We argue that her overzealous application of AAE features in her music, in order to create a specific linguistic style, enables a success that rests ultimately on the appropriation of African American language and culture, and the privilege that whiteness affords.     

The work of art in the age of hip hop reproduction: Ice-T and the cultural capital of keeping it real again in Kings of Vice (2011) and Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap (2012)

In turning his talents to fiction in his 2011 debut novel, Kings of Vice, gangsta rapper Ice-T has faced a particularly intricate challenge in “keeping it real”. At this point in the twenty-first century, the credibility of hip hop’s harder core seems to have been undermined by the distance gangsta rap has travelled from the street realities that gave it birth in the 1980s to the millionaire enterprises that have emerged since. A “rapocracy” of incredibly successful rappers and producers, most of them associated with gangsta rap (such as Diddy, Dr Dre, Jay-Z and Russell Simmons), has taken the gangsta ill-logic of exploiting the street for maximum profit to the extreme. Ice-T’s intervention in this dynamic has been to try to remind us of hip hop’s more “auratic” origins while acknowledging that the past is indeed a different country. The turn to authorship of books and making of documentary films in the context of a post-2008 economic meltdown environment constitutes an imaginative way to revivify the creative possibilities of the gangsta. The very title of Ice-T’s 2012 documentary film, Something Out of Nothing: The Art of Rap, betrays an almost nostalgic yearning for a purer age and the form that erupted out of it. This same retrospective paradigm for thinking a better way forward for gangsta aesthetics is also at the heart of Kings of Vice. Ice-T’s inventive return to origins shows us how even at a moment of its maximum commodification, gangsta culture (precisely because of its contradictory relationship to capitalism) can provide a uniquely critical perspective on a deregulated world.     

Film Games*

This paper presents data on how film students practice filmmaking skills by devising and playing games. In their games film students suggest images for films and correct one another's notions about the methods for or appropriateness of realizing these images on film. By using increasingly complex games as a series of exercises, students develop greater skill in anticipating programs in making films they imagine. The apparent effectiveness of these games suggests playful behaviors which may seem insignificant because they are not “serious” could be important mechanisms for socializing people's imaginations, tailoring them for a particular kind of problem and problem-solving.     

CINEMAGOING AS A CONDITIONAL PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE

This paper is part of the recent shift within the ‘New Cinema History’ from the attention for the film text to a broader consideration of the social and cultural history of cinema. In the last years, research did not only concentrate on the production and meanings of the pictures, but it also saw an increased interest in the distribution, exploitation and consumption of film. Interest for film as a consumable good has come from various disciples such as Cultural Studies, sociology, anthropology, political economy, geography and oral history. This study is based on oral accounts. Research on memories of going to the movies has contributed significantly to defining the spatial and social conditions of the cinematic experience. Yet this illuminating bottom-up approach of lived cinema cultures is mostly limited to the Anglo-Saxon experience of American films in English spoken film markets. As part of a larger research project on cinema culture in Flanders, 62 inhabitants of Ghent, Belgium, were interviewed concerning their moviegoing habits from the 1930s to the late 1970s. The oral history project aimed to analyze the significance of cinemagoing in a local community defined by class, language and a ‘pillarized’ society. The main research question in this paper is how particular was going to the movies in a local film market not overwhelmingly defined by American distributors or Hollywood movies and what were the sociocultural mechanisms behind moviegoing. In doing so we look at the entwinement of the experienced everyday life with the memories of choosing a movie theatre, remembering a movie and recollections of choosing cinema as leisure. Memory reclamation of local moviegoing as non-textual empirical research can define a parallel media history of cinema culture in Ghent and supplement the international research on cinemagoing experiences.     

Online video sharing: an alternative channel for film distribution? Copyright enforcement,censorship, and Chinese independent cinema

Regarding piracy as the crime of stealing copyright holders’ rightful profits, many creative industries, such as the film, music, and gaming industries, are battling for stricter administrative and legal enforcement against copyright infringement. However, there is a counterargument that piracy could benefit copyright holders in the form of free promotion. Given China’s strict censorship of film content, this paper investigates how online piracy complicates the distribution of independent films in China. The advance of cyber technology and high-speed Internet access has not only fueled the spread of online film sharing, but has also encouraged public participation in the debate on the complex relationship between piracy, copyright, and censorship. Taking Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin (2013) as a case study, this paper evaluates the alternative business models for Chinese independent cinema put forward by Chinese netizens.     

Cultural studies as praxis: (making) an autobiographical case

This autobiographical essay ‘takes cultural studies personally’, drawing on experience, identity and the personal to indicate how and why the author is proponent of and is working on developing a model of cultural studies as social justice praxis despite the constraints academia in general and of the university as an institution in particular. The paper travels roughly from the author’s student and teacher days in Sierra Leone through his graduate student days in Canada to his current role as university teacher in the USA. He selectively concentrates on his experience as a teacher of literature (and African multi-role utilitarianism), education and cultural studies (using one of his cultural studies courses and students’ questions about the utility of cultural studies as example), his shifting and overlapping racial/ethnic identities (African/black) and the politics of identity, and his thoughts on the place of theory in cultural studies and a black approach to theory (black ambivalent elaboration) as contributory factors. While this account acts in its own way as an argument for conceptualizing cultural studies as praxis, the primary focus is more modestly on my own autobiographical account as a specific case. In fact, an autobiographical approach is employed precisely to be specific and in the attempt to avoid the pitfalls of over­generalization and the authority of authenticity.     

Making waves: trauma and ethics in the work of lars von Trier

The cinema of Lars von Trier can be characterised in diverse ways, but one of the most striking and memorable aspects of his work in the “Europa trilogy” (Element of Crime 1984; Epidemic 1987; Europa 1991) and the more recent “Goldheart trilogy” (Breaking the Waves 1996; The Idiots 1998; Dancer in the Dark 2000) is the centrality of trauma in both narrative and form and the corresponding emphasis on ethics. Each of these trilogies sets out to scrutinise ambiguities and ambivalences around binaries such as good/evil and guilt/innocence through the exploration of socio‐cultural trauma such as war and plague in the earlier trilogy, and through more individually‐inflected trauma in the latter one. Interestingly, von Trier flags the inter‐relation between the success of the ideals that are central to his narrative forays and the gender of his protagonists (Smith , p. 24). How, then, might it be possible to make sense of the slippages and confusions implicit in von Trier’s film‐making in order to discern his ethical concerns, and how might these concerns be articulated through cultural assumptions about gender and ethical identities? This essay explores the ethical assumptions and imperatives that mark out von Trier’s work, signalling the role of the spectator in the formation of the ethics of his cinematic project. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and feminist notions of ethics, the paper asks whether von Trier’s work is merely to be framed in terms of postmodern provocation or whether his manipulations of cinema and all its accoutrements ought rather to be understood in terms of a radical artistic endeavour designed to foreground the importance and potential of cinema as a site of scrutiny of the inter‐relation between ethics, trauma and gender.     

Filming a Stalinist War Epic in Ukraine: Ihor Savchenko’s The Third Strike

Abstract

The article examines the production history of Ihor Savchenko’s film Tretii udar [The Third Strike, 1948], a World War II epic and the most significant project of the Kyiv Film Studio in the first post-war years. Using the example of The Third Strike, the author demonstrates how Stalinist cinema as an institution influenced Soviet film directors’ thematic and ideological choices as well as their style. Specifically, the supervision of such projects by the USSR’s political centre served to integrate Ukrainian film makers into Soviet cinema by fostering Soviet versions of the country’s political and social history and by preventing Ukrainian film makers from pursuing stylistic practices that might have become foundational to Ukrainian cinema. Filming a Stalinist war epic in postwar Ukraine was especially difficult in view of the Soviet struggle against Ukrainian nationalism. By featuring soldiers of different nationalities, The Third Strike underscored the idea of the “fraternal friendship of the Soviet peoples” during the war, which became a canonical element in Soviet depictions of the war. In this way, Ukrainian artists ingratiated themselves with the Soviet authorities and proved their loyalty to Russia.     

Perceptions of Misogyny in Hip Hop and Rap: What Do the Youths Think?

This article presents the results of an exploratory study conducted at a community forum sponsored by a prominent African American church and a historically Black university. These institutions are concerned with negative messages given to African American females about their appearance and their morals. The data presented describe the population of female (68.6%) and male (31.4%) participants ages 18 to 24 and inform us about their perceptions about hip hop and rap music, especially as they relate to misogyny. This study found that listening habits and age were significant in understanding youths' views about misogyny.     

The Defeat of the Guitar Army: Don DeLillo,John Sinclair,and the Rock Revolution

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street is seldom analysed as a serious engagement with the rock music and countercultural politics of the 1960s, yet these constitute its historical context, its subject matter, and its central concerns. An historicized reading positions the novel as an intervention into contemporary debates about the causes and consequences of the defeat of the 1960s ‘rock revolution’. These debates were most thoroughly synthesized by the rock culture’s chief agitator and organic intellectual John Sinclair in his 1972 book Guitar Army. Like Guitar Army, Great Jones Street dwells on the connections between the political failure of the rock revolution and the provenance and validity of rock’s anti-rational aesthetic. Sinclair finds political hope in re-emphasizing rock’s anti-rationalism, rooted equally in black music and the psychedelic experience. More sceptical, DeLillo offers a very different reading of the rock culture’s view of African American aesthetics and its use of psychedelics.     

THE GHETTO FABULOUS AESTHETIC IN CONTEMPORARY BLACK CULTURE

With diamonds, mink, and champagne, black popular culture has, in recent years, made an audacious spectacle of conspicuous commodity consumption. Commonly termed ‘bling’, the ‘ghetto fabulous’ aesthetic of these flashy displays has prompted vociferous debate about the cultural meanings of contemporary black consumerism. Is it pathological? Subversive? Deviant? Since the nineties when it first appeared, the ghetto fabulous aesthetic has left its mark on a range of cultural productions from music videos to ghetto lit, fashion to film, walking a familiar line from defiance to bowdlerization, from raucous wild child of the streets to co-opted product tagline.

This essay explores a new cinematic genre within this repertoire, the ghetto fabulous genre of black film that has emerged to variously castigate and congratulate black investments in ghetto fabulous bling. Appearing at the close of the twentieth century, the genre reflects key shifts in the political imaginary and economic transformations of the ‘post-soul’ era. Drawing on two such texts, Barbershop (Tim Story 2002) and Barbershop 2: Back In Business (Kevin Rodney Sullivan 2004), studio films with all-black casts and directed by young African-American filmmakers, this analysis focuses on their engagement with contemporary cultural tensions over class and consumerism, their narrative containment of a transformative black politics, and their reconciliation of post-soul priorities with hegemonic discourses of the market. I argue that ghetto fabulous films are quintessential products of the post-soul era, their allegorical priorities in pointed accord with neo-liberal individualism and the promise of class transcendence. Performing crucial work of hegemonic cooptation, these texts offer archetypes of the ghetto entrepreneur and black enterprise itself as a salvational sphere for the urban poor. Reining in unruly desires, these texts draw working-class African Americans into the capitalist fold, articulating a post-soul politics that preaches black acquiescence with hegemonic discourses of advanced capitalism.     

The blame game: news,blame, and young homicide victims

Media have represented blame in homicide cases as attributable to a victim or an offender; we provide a more nuanced category of shared blame. We examine stories covering young homicide victims to demonstrate how shared blame is operationalized in print news, noting stark differences across a victim’s race and gender. We conduct a content analysis of the Orlando Sentinel newspaper and police reports from Seminole County and Sanford, Florida, from 2000 to 2012. Stark racial and gender differences are apparent in the way the content is framed and how the victims are depicted. The newspaper’s representation of young African American males is consistent with existing stereotypes of the “criminal black man.” We discuss the larger implications of our findings and how our results apply to high-profile killings of young homicide victims including Trayvon Martin.     

JUNO (JASON REITMAN, 2007): A PRACTICAL CASE STUDY OF TEENS,FILM AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Jason Reitman's Juno (2007), the story of how a teenager handles her pregnancy, is the kind of film that leaves no one indifferent. Released at a time of conflicting discourses on sexual education, Reitman's film addressed the confusion experienced by teenagers as they came of age in a context where patterns of masculine and feminine behaviour were rapidly changing. In this essay I argue that Juno offers a complex understanding of the disorientation suffered by adolescents during the 1990s – a time when anti-sex discourses coexisted with an increasingly sexualized youth culture. This said, my intention is to move towards the film in a roundabout way by focusing, first, on why so many, supposed ‘cultural criticisms’ of films turn out to be so superficial. In this introductory section, the argument will be made for an approach in film analyses that takes full account of cinema as a visual medium. After exposing my critical stance, I shall draw nearer to the film itself by examining various of the overlapping contexts that, together, created a conducive space for its success – namely, the political scene; changing attitudes towards sex and gender; and most importantly, cinema's aesthetic dimension and the impact of genre conventions in the film-viewing experience. Once the complex diagram of differing (and sometimes contradictory) forces at work in Juno has been mapped out, my aim is to link these conjunctures to a detailed analysis of a key scene in the film as a means of demonstrating how the combination of film studies and Cultural Studies can operate as a method that eschews too easy, ideologically oriented, assumptions.