Ava Du Vernay, an Unexpected Independent Black Queen in Hollywood?This essay analyzes the ambiguous position of Ava DuVernay in Hollywood. After a late-career change to filmmaking, DuVernay has been catapulted to a position of power and privilege at the core of the industry. I interrogate her surprising trajectory as well as her still in-between posture: How does she reconcile being from the independent world and wearing as a badge of honor having been able to craft works on her own with having become a major Hollywood powerhouse? How does she cope with her desire to tell Black people's stories and having recently reached a select position in a predominantly White and male industry?
Close-Up: Contemporary Black Horror: The Work of Horror after Get OutThis essay examines the current cycle of Black horror in the context of both cultural and material labor to consider the following questions: What is it that horror, specifically, has to offer to representations of Blackness, especially in the context of the current movements to defend Black lives that have gained broad coalitional support? What is the work that the horror genre is doing-culturally, politically, economically-now that the genre is so frequently being reframed by the lived experience of Black people and the biopolitical inscriptions of Blackness onto both individual bodies and entire populations?
Close-Up: Hip-Hop Cinema ‘True to the GameF. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton (2015) offers critical insights into the extent
to which the logic of neoliberal economics shapes mainstream representations of hiphop. The film’s focus on its male protagonists’ struggles against racism and poverty presents a rags-to-riches narrative that affirms hegemonic discourses about the American
dream, thereby overlooking intersectional forms of systemic oppression that continue
to shape black lives in and beyond the United States. Gray’s decision to foreground
N.W.A. hits such as “Fuck tha Police,” while glossing over the gender politics of songs
(e.g., “A Bitch Is a Bitch”), allows one to consider the extent to which N.W.A. affirms
hegemonic values. Straight Outta Compton validates bell hooks’s contention that the
“sexist, misogynist, patriarchal ways of thinking and behaving that are glorified in gangsta rap are a reflection of the prevailing values in our society, values created and sustained by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”1
The closing montage, which frames
the protagonists as commercial success stories, unwittingly reveals that Dr. Dre and Ice
Cube did stay true the game,2
one defined by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy—
not Black Nationalism.
Dancing in the Margins: Experiences of African American Ballerinas“Where are all the Black Swans?” Gia Koulas asked in 2007. The
question begs to be answered, yet in my search for “black swans,” I found few
leading light-skinned swans and even fewer leading dark-skinned ones. Color
casting has riddled the African-American community throughout the American
history. The divisions within the African-American community have been an
unpleasant cornerstone of the African-American experience. They did not simply
exist in the African-American community but seeped into all sectors of society
where African-American people were and are present. This paper explores how these
issues have been influential in American ballet and reveals the color casting that is
rarely addressed. The significance of this persisting issue is not so much its presence,
which has been noted time and time again, yet its inability to evolve.
Keywords Colorism . Black ballerina . Black dance . Double-consciousness .
Controlling images
Documenting the US-Mexico Border: Photography, Movement, and ParadoxThe article discusses the documentation of political issues concerning the U.S.-Mexico border through photography. Topics explored include the intention of photojournalist Don Bartletti to document the immigration process through his photographs "Interstate Pedestrians," different perspectives on illegal immigration captured by Border Film Project photographs, and the 2010 photography exhibit "Working the Line," presented by photographer David Taylor in Chicago, Illinois.
Latina Bodies in the Era of Elective Aesthetic SurgeryUsing a multi-methods approach (for example, ethnographic interviews, participant observation, content analysis of television shows), I explored Latina women's experiences with the plastic surgery industry. This article illustrates how multiple actors - doctors, beauty pageant promoters, stylists, beauty queens, media and plastic surgery consumers themselves - construct notions of universal beauty. The reality television show Dr. 90210 and the Miss Universe Pageant competition are analyzed to understand the ways in which multiple actors/agents influence Latina/o beauty ideals and how these in turn influence plastic surgery practices. This article also explores the ways in which ethnicity, race and cultural ideals disrupt, and at times, shape plastic surgery practices. What I call the Maja woman emerges as the universal beauty ideal for Latinas.
Making Images, Restoring Personhood: Frederick Douglass, Emmett Till, and the Re-Framing of African American TraumaThis essay aims to explore the role of kinship in the photographic portrayal of African Americans within contexts of abolitionism and lynching. It presupposes that kinship works both as an imposed category--subjecting Black lives to a shared condition of precarity and mourning based on race--as well as a potentially productive category--enabling a collective transcendence and reframing of this imposed precarity through an active mobilization of grief and mourning as a socio-political act. Based on these considerations, it explores the photographic archive of Frederick Douglass and the public funeral service of Emmett Till, focusing on questions of agency, personhood, and the role of photography. Drawing on Christina Sharpe's concept of the "wake", as well as David L. Eng's explorations of "racial melancholia", I consequently argue that photography can serve as a potent tool to work through individual grief and trauma, as well as turn this grief into a means of reframing historical phenomena such as slavery and lynching in the public discourse.
The Politics of Colonization in Ryan Coogler's Black PantherIn 2018 preceding the release of Black Panther, amid a sea of positively effusive reviews for Ryan Cooglers film, a sudden onslaught of extremely negative reviews began to appear on the internet. Negative reviews for a film are not uncommon, yet these were so far out of the norm that they began to draw the concern of film aggregation sites such as Rotten Tomatoes. So perturbed was the site by what it was witnessing in the reviews of Black Panther that Rotten Tomatoes dispatched their security team to "closely monitor" the platform and began to block and delete reviews "as quickly as possible."1 In 2018 Black Panther became the target of racists, determined to ruin the ratings of the first Marvel Comic Universe (MCU) film to feature a Black central character and mostly Black cast. This essay will investigate two critical aspects surrounding the release of Cooglers Black Panther. The first is the nature of the negative reviews surrounding the release of the film in 2018. The second is an exploration of Cooglers critique of colonization in Black Panther. Lastly, Cooglers portrayal of the fictitious kingdom of Wakanda is analyzed in concert with Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957, 1991), in order to shine a light on the anticolonial structure present in Black Panther.
Remapping Koreatown: Folklore, Narrative and the Los Angeles RiotsThe writer examines the folkloristic reaction among Korean Americans to the extraordinary devastation of Koreatown in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. He argues that both the performative and narrative responses of Korean Americans quickly began the process of reclaiming spaces that had been forcibly redefined through several days of protracted rioting from vibrant Korean American commercial areas to places of extraordinary violence. This narrative response, he explains, reveals the close connection between place and identity: In the aftermath of the riots, when Korean American identity had been threatened by the physical destruction of the built environment, the ability to recall in narrative both the earlier Koreatown as well as instances of defense and resistance gave narrators a chance to start reinscribing a Korean American identity onto the now charred and wrecked landscape.
Situating Representation As a Form of Erasure: #OscarsSoWhite, Black Twitter, and Latinx TwitterThis article explores how Latinxs have responded to the visibility of campaigns and movements such as #OscarsSoWhite. It outlines the discourses Latinxs have deployed on Twitter to justify their demands for inclusion in the media industries and how notions of competition, coalition building, and solidarity operate between various ethnoracial groups in digital media activism. The article theorizes “Latinx Twitter” and its anti-Blackness and explores the clashes this counterpublic has had with Black Twitter by analyzing the discourses surrounding the hashtags #OscarsSoWhite, #NotYourMule, and #OscarsSoWhiteAndBlack. It advances the notion of competing ethnoracialized counterpublics to explore how race and ethnicity operate relationally in the U.S. and how competition among marginalized groups impacts media activism.
The Social Implications of Metaphor in Bong Joon-ho's ParasiteThe purpose of the present article is to study the social implications of repetitive metaphors in the film and of the word Parasite (2019) and to observe what makes the life of a lower-class family parasitic within a typical capitalistic society. In the mainstream discussion, the metaphorical functions of such words as 'smell,' 'insects,' 'the rock,' and 'the party' are assessed within the context of the film. The central questions of the article, therefore, are: What are the recurrent and metaphorical motifs in the plotline and how can their implications be related to the overall theme of the film? How does Parasite exhibit the clash of classes in a capitalist society? To answer the questions, the present study offers a comprehensive analysis of its recurring metaphors as well as its treatment of the characters who visibly belong to two completely different classes. Through a complex story of two families whose fate gets intermingled, Bong Joon-ho masterfully presents a metaphoric picture of a society where inequality is rampant and the poor can only experience temporary happiness in the shadow of the rich (represented by the Park family).
Towards a Latinidad Feminista: The Multiplicities of Latinidad and Feminism in Contemporary CinemaThis essay examines the multiplicities of Latinidad and feminism as portrayed in contemporary cinema. Using the films Selena (1997), Girlfight (2000), and Real Women Have Curves (2002) as case studies, the author argues that these films mark a moment in U.S. cinematic history in which diverse and complex Latinidades feministas are represented. This representational analysis offers insight into how these films demonstrate the dynamics and intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class while challenging gendered and racialized notions of authenticity. Ultimately, the author contends that despite their status as popular commodified forms, these films embody a Latinidad feminista that transgresses historical representations of Latinas in U.S. cinema in offering Latina subjectivities that are hybrid, fluid, and complex.
Visible Black Motherhood is a RevolutionVisible Black Motherhood is a Revolution
Danielle Fuentes Morgan
Biography, Volume 41, Number 4, Fall 2018, pp. 856-875 (Article)
Published by University of Hawai'i Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Ebsco Publishing (13 Mar 2019 06:10 GMT)
https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.201
What Was Asian American Cinema?The article discusses what Asian American cinema is and how it is typically defined. The internet meme campaign #StarringJohnCho in which popular film stars are replaced with the Asian American actor is considered. Topics include an overview of the history of Asian American civil rights movement, how a film can be considered Asian American based solely on having an Asian American director, writer, or star, and replacing Asian roles with white actors.
Zoot to Boot: The Zoot Suit as Both Costume and SymbolAn essay is presented on the role of the zoot suit in the history of the Chicano community in Los Angeles, California. The author reflects on discourses of popular memory, cultural capital, and symbol construction to discuss the Zoot Suit Riots and the Sleepy Lagoon Murder case. Other topics include animated cartoons as cultural propaganda, group identification in East Los Angeles, and the song "Zoot Suit Riot."
