hello wonderful people welcome to week two of our class uh give me one second and I'm going to share my screen I hope you can see that uh okay hi today we're going to discuss black looks in Black popular culture for which we have two readings uh Stuart Hall what is black in black popular culture and B Hook is uh loving Blackness as political resistance now please ensure that you uh do not capitalize uh her name she wrote it in lower case herself she adopted her grandmother's name as a a pseudonym when uh she was
writing and uh she wanted to uh draw attention to her work and not to herself this was was her way of paying omage to um female legacies rather than draw attention to herself so let's be mindful of uh not capitalizing Bel Hook's name okay this week we do not have any media text to supplement our readings uh we'll be engaging with two very important theorists I may even say the most important theorist in our course they've contributed immensely in the field of critical theory in Black popular culture now I know that these readings can be
challenging as they lay the theoretical Foundation to our course uh hooks is fantastic she's Chef kiss uh and so is Hall however Hall can be a little intimidating to read trust me a lot of academics professors including me find him challenging uh to navigate so today my goal is to make Stuart Hall's uh essay as accessible to you as I can and um then we sort of bring in hooks in a way that uh they complement each other and we go over both their contributions and how they're relevant uh to how we'll be reading black
pop Lookout show you this course uh now these two texts are the length through which we will frame the media and the text that uh we'll study throughout the course so you can either listen to my lecture and then do your readings or you can um do your readings and use my lecture as a supplemental resource for your readings whatever is easiest for you okay we begin so St Hall was a Jamaican uh born cultural theorist political activist and Marxist sociologist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom along with uh Richard hogart and uh
Raymond Williams he was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now uh known as British cultural studies or the Birmingham School of cultural studies so they were the uh pillars of emergent uh studies in the field of cultural studies and paved the way for the rest of the world his essay what is black in um black popular culture was published in a collection of essays titled black popular culture now what is he arguing in this essay first and foremost Stewart Hall bases his argument in historicity something that I want to
address here is that whenever whenever you engage a text or a piece of media try to understand its historicity what is the history that is um the Tex is situ ating itself what is the moment that the text is set in and is responding to um as through this history it is um you know you'll you'll place the uh text in a very specific kind of situation which will help you analyze it better and engage with it more meaningfully so hall right at the outset argues that each historical moment is unique and he renders a
different connotation of black in black popular culture to each of these historicals so he offers context to the specific historical moment that he was writing in and talks about how the term Black Culture emerged when he was writing so he was which was the beginning of uh 1990s so he uses Corell West's article the new cultural uh politics of difference and he gives us a genealogy which means he traces is the development right he um he navigates how the development of black culture has been and has led to this very crucial moment of the present
situation of Black Culture so he says there are three General coordinates that has led us to analyzing Black Culture the way we do in this day and age um how we finally arrived uh how have we finally arrived at this moment where we're uh engaging Black Culture what has led to it what has gone behind it so there are these three coordinates that he gives us the first is the displacement of Europe as the universal subject of culture um you know after colonization Europe was sort of dismantled as the be all end all of culture
and people started engaging different ideologies or start sort of steering away from Europe right right I mean we still colonized in a lot of ways but we started steering away from Europe being the be all and all the second was the emergence of the United States as a world power as a a consequence of colonization itself United States emerged as a world power right so he talks about um how we situated this new form of Black Culture in the United States and because it United States was a center of uh Global cultural production and circulation
right so how a lot of what we were engaging was coming from the United States and the third he says was the decolonization of the third world which culturally marked the emergence of uh us decolonizing our mindsets the way we think so these were the three coordinates that led to this moment was Reckoning with Black Culture um he says that these three moments gave rise to what he calls a deep and ambivalent fascination with difference now as the West were um made to give up their colonies and as they started dispersing they became more and
more fascinated with something that is different something that is distinctive they became fascinated with what was this thing called difference right something that was not white it was different from White most of the colonizing mission was uh because they were fascinated with this difference and this otherness so this uh kind of difference he says has a touch of ethnicity the kind of exotic as we say in England a bit of the other that was a very bad British acccident sorry guys um anyway I couldn't help myself uh the question of what is black in black
popular culture is raised as a response and as a reflection of this phenomena so it all comes down to Reckoning with this difference and acknowledging the other in our course we will learn how black popular culture not just acknowledges this difference how it subverts and disrupts white supremist ideologies and celebrates this difference this Blackness so so going back to what West uh sorry uh going back to what Hall says he criticizes uh this Fascination that the West had with difference because he says that it was very fleeting it was um it was this this Fascination
was in a it it it uh sort of formed itself in a way where it only convenienc the West it was uh this Fascination was portrayed in a way which was very onedimensional and they saw difference only through their lens right so um he says that the difference that we engage with must generate creative uh possibilities and it should actually mean something right like something should actually come out of us engaging that difference it shouldn't be just for the sake of it right it shouldn't be just for the sake of us engaging black popular culture
we're engaging it something meaningful has to come out it so he says that the difference um perpetuated something that we know as marginality now marginality has been used as a term that uh diminishes its own potentiality however I want us to note that marginality can be liberating and this is what he says he says that it occupies a space that is distinctive right and because it occupies this distinctive space it invariably subverts what is normative now what do I mean by this Whenever there is a dominant entity there are um alternative identities that emerge from
that entity because they responding to that dominant entity um these alternative ideologies have the potential to subvert because they're a direct consequence of this uh dominant phenomena so they invariably resist for instance um let's consider patriarchy right it was this dominant it still is uh this dominant phenomena which is why feminist studies emerged as this alternative site which directly responds to the dominance or the cultural hedgman of patriarchy so if we want to um understand marginality we have to see it in uh through a lens that sort of um becomes this alternative space and multiplies
if that makes sense um he writes we cannot forget how cultural life above all in the west but elsewhere as well has been transformed in our lifetimes by the voicing of the margins within culture marginality though it remains periperal to the bound uh broader mainstream has never been such a productive space so he says that marginality is obviously peripheral to the dominant space if this is the if this is the center it still occupies the periphery the margin however it still has the potential to shift sh the power dynamics because it still occupies the margin
right it perpetuates this this cultural politics of difference and in doing so it leads to this production of new identities and appearance of new subjects on the political and cultural stage and this is what is liberating this is why we have so many countercultures responding to and challenging hegemony the dominance space so marginality does produce uses counter identities and alternative realities that challenge the system that is the nor okay um Now we move on to something very interesting he complicates the term popular culture itself um he says that popular culture has you know always been
uh counterposed with something that is uh high class or Elite because it it Roots itself in everyday experiences right it it has its base in the experiences Pleasures memories and traditions of the people and um the connections with the local aspirations with uh with the ordinary folks so this is when he brings in mik bak's wgar and the carnivalesque these the theory of the carnivalesque roots itself in something that is you know ordinary something that is excessive something that grotesque the everyday the vulgar something that is beneath lying beneath the high culture right so this
is how we understand popular culture he says something that is in direct opposition to high culture and he um understands that this is the popular notion of the word popular in popular culture thus he says popular culture has become a dominant form of global culture of power and capital so because it you know it is the popular it occupies the space of power and capital so when you think about it it is supposed to relay everyday experiences however it ends up becoming the FR space which only the people in power have access to have sorry
have access to it ends up what Paul calls the space of homogeneization put it potentially stereotypes in order to control the narratives and representations so black popular culture itself becomes this contested term as it is bound to be contradictory think about it it becomes this contradictory space because it is black in which IT addresses marginality yet it is talking about popular culture which is addressing not only the every day but also the power and the bureaucracies that govern these narratives so he's saying that it the term black popular culture cannot be simplified it is complex
and he says the reason that it is complex is that you know um we have to stay clear from homogenization if you're oversimplifying it you're clubbing all lack experiences as one which is absolutely incorrect right there are intersectional realities and this is what we'll be learning in this course and this is what um Hall addresses that the the key here is to give importance to identifying distinctiveness right of distinctiveness of the term black how the signify of black itself can mean so many things to uh so many people in so many different ways so black
experiences not just account for the American black experience but a diasporic experience as well which is so variegated and so unique and multiple so when engaging a black experience Paul asks us to pay attention to three ideas to ster clear from this homogenization he says we should uh first address the style the genre that we are engaging with right right like the style that the text is written in or is relayed in this will tell us a lot about the experience that we're engaging then he says let's focus on writing how these characters are written
what are their realities how are they represented third he says we have to pay attention to the body because uh according to him the black body is deemed as the only only cultural capital that black folks have right it's the it's the body that is being disseminated as black so he says these are the three key things that you have to pay attention to whenever you're engaging a text um in order to understand how they're so distinctive even if they're talking about this larger similar uh well not similar but like this larger unifying experience um
this wonderful quote uh that he has is it uh we have worked on ourselves as the canvases of representation so the black body itself becomes a canvas of representation there's so many ideologies that the body itself is representing so how is it that the body is being represented and then this brings us to the gender question which further brings us to the question of sexuality ethnicity and class this is how you engage a text now all of this is to um stear us towards the dangers of essentialism now what does he mean by essentialism um
it is the very practice of reducing an attribute uh of an entity to its Essence she's behaving this way because she's a girl how reductive right it's this this glorified way of stereotyping uh the Miram Webster's Dictionary defines is essentialism as the practice of regarding something such as a presumed human trait as having innate uh existence or Universal validity rather than being a social ideological or intellectual construct so something that is um that is actually ideological and distinctive becomes very reductive and derivative it's it becomes determined because of the nature of how it's supposed to
be if that makes sense that is what I mean by an essentialist reading and that is what St Hall means by essentialism so um it becomes presumptuous uh of the black experience because it determines the black experience for its Blackness itself and all encompassing black experience which is a negation right not all experiences are similar so he says that in certain moments in our histories essentialism has proven to be unifying um if I have to give you an instance during the British rule when all Indians you know came together positioning and demanding for the exact
same thing for an entire country that was what Hall calls um Hall brings gri speac here and says it was strategic essentialism so in certain moments in history essentialism was um generative however um He suggests that when engaging the black experience uh essentialism is debilitating it uh is weak because it naturalizes and dehistoricized difference mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural biological and genetic which we have to steer away from so this is why you know essentialism could be reductive uh it could also mean you know valorizing Blackness as a uh category
because of its Blackness is debilitating so the challenge here is to ensure that this representation that we're engaging with means something it creates alternative idea uh identities new possibilities and it reimagines uh it is only uh through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves he says that we come to know we how we are constituted and who we are so it is only through the way we're actually reimagining or reenvisioning ourselves that we you know reckon with ourselves and that happens through the lens of representation which has to be intersectional it has to
be and it always is right like life is intersectional there is so many ideas that are always intersectional in the way that they intersect uh the axis of gender sexuality ethnicity race and class so we have to um steer clear from essentialism and understand Blackness for its distinctiveness for the specificity that that Blackness derives um this spe uh specificity is what he terms as a dialogic approach which he also borrows from mikal Bakin it means that you know literally it means that you're in dialogue with multiple realities rather than following a certain essentialist approach you're
in you're in dialogue you're you're mitigating several other factors while engaging a certain kind of representation okay and he says that it is to the diversity not the homogeneity of the the black experience that we must give our undivided creative attention to what a wonderful way to actually say that realities are intersectional and let's pay attention to the distinctiveness the distinctiveness of this difference um and that's how we will understand you know black experience more meaningfully and more specifically okay wow that was Paul um I know it was a lot probably and I'm sorry about
that but you know um I'm sure uh we learned something from that and Hall becomes you know uh the central U purist to mold the lens of our course so he's very important and I hope that I made it slightly easier for you to engage Hall uh which is why when you read it and you read these JG just refer to this lecture and you understand what he's actually saying so what are the main takeaways that we had from Hall's article uh first is the question of black in black popular culture is a historical not
a racial category it is not just because it's black it means what is the historicity of the specific black that we talking about uh we also learned about the West's fascination with difference and how do we actually understand this difference as distinctiveness um marginality is a productive space and it challenges the cultural hegemony so it actually becomes a liberating space and how we will read um you know several texts as marginal uh space which actually Empower and liberate right uh then we learn black popular culture will always remain a contradictory space very important right because
the term popular culture is fraught with so many contradictions itself and black being a term that connotes marginality you know it sort of makes the whole like the black popular culture term very um contradictory in itself becomes very complex uh let's steer clear from essentialism and uh always maintain a dialogic approach over an essentialist approach to understand any representation that you're engaging with okay that was Stewart Hall I hope this helps you read and understand and engage the article better now we will be moving on to our uh iin our Queen B hooks um so
B hooks was an American cultural theorist and educator she died actually quite recently as recent as a couple years ago um this article is the first chapter to her book Black looks race and representation if you notice these two are written in the same year Hall and uh hooks they they were all theorist working at the same time working towards uh black popular culture at the at the same uh time in the decade and responding to the same moment so there are a lot of similarities and they converge at a lot of points we'll we'll
talk about that um I won't be spending uh as much time discussing Hall cuz she is relatively uh much easier to understand you know the most beautiful thing about the way she writes is it's as if she's talking to a friend which is very refreshing and endearing so I really strongly encourage you to read Hall and hooks both but I I think you might enjoy hooks a little more because she's her language is more accessible I hope you enjoy Hall too okay I'll stop talking about that um in this chapter she talks about something which
sounds as simple as loving Blackness but it becomes as complex as it being an act of political resistance now the concepts of Blackness and love are often divorced from each other within the social context of white supremacy um Blackness as a term has often been so denigrated uh within the context of contemporary Western culture it is often created in opposition to the Notions of love so the very thought of Love while discussing blackness in itself becomes revolutionary she writes um who who who sorry she writes loving Blackness is rarely a political stance that is reflected
in everyday life when present is seemed suspect dangerous and threatening hooks argues that Blackness has become this quintessential signifier of uh what oppression means in the United States so when you engage the idea of love with black the very idea becomes so threatening and it's it's almost dangerous to the uh White supremist ideologies that we're surrounded with because it it subverts the dominant ideology it's upwards what we're actually supposed to think or do so um loving blackness in itself becomes an act of psychological and political decolonization it's a process that challenges the dehumanization of black
subjects in their contact with white supremacy so loving Blackness becomes a discourse on anti-racism itself which seeks to move beyond the ratio dehumanization of Blackness and to reclaim black life now when we will study um rap and the body you know we'll be looking at Childish Gambino we'll be looking at Queen Latifah uh in the context of gender uh we'll study Beyonce and motherhood and Beyonce and body or we'll be studying standup comedy in terms of uh Wanda syes comedy or Dave Chappelle we will learn how these medor Texs are theor ing their love for
Blackness and celebrating it right how they're so intersectional they're so variegated they're talking about so many different aspects but the unifying aspect of the center is love reclaiming their Blackness um so hooks's discussion on loving Blackness also emerges from the reading uh sorry the writings of uh Kel bestest um in nalism in Black America you know it if you see uh Hall also was using Kel West's Theory to push his argument further so let's like let's think of Kell West you know and Hall and hooks being buddies and writing at the same time for a
similar movement at a similar moment talking about similar things and had a similar purpose so they derive from each other's work a lot right um so um what was I say okay Corell West's Theory and the way uh hooks uh talks about uh love emerges from a very specific National and racial Arrangement within the US it's very important to note that it's it's very specific to the United States in this context um So within the American context African-Americans have been victimized within uh turbulent National History of uh racial act exclusion discrimination segregation enslavement and impoverishment
so hooks's and West's response to racism are predominantly concerned with a racial healing of America as a nation however as Hall mentions it is important to note that this racialization is variated and vernacular it's rooted in diasporic experiences it is rooted in distinctiveness of the black experience with multiple truths so the racial healing hence needs to happen beyond the US on a global scale so the concept of loving Blackness goes beyond the United States and becomes a a poent part of developing anti-racist strategies so loving Blackness uh she writes as a political resistance transforms our
way of looking and being and thus creates conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life the very Act of loving Blackness especially in the face of society's attitudes and um Prejudice uh about Blackness is a way of standing against white supremacy in all the Myriad ways in which it presents itself now this is very important what she use is that to actually engage with the term whiteness itself what she says to understand Blackness we have to deconstruct whiteness itself she argues that the construct of whitness is
a sign needs to be interrogated you know how we are discussing Blackness here but it is so important to understand that Blackness exists only in opposition to whiteness so our first business of order is to interrogate white supremist Notions that construct whiteness and govern Blackness historically black individuals have been compelled to see themselves as lacking as they determine themselves through this white supremist lens the need to unlearn these attitudes and values uh that are governed by white supremist ideals uh for the deconstruction of the category of whiteness is imperative so Hall Central thesis here is
not just Blackness it's about deconstructing white pess which is so necessary to Envision or reimagine Blackness um because socialized within supremist Educational Systems and a racist mass media where you know we've internalized racism so much black people are convinced or have been convinced that their lives are not complex enough for ad representation th they become you know they've they've been deemed Unworthy of sophisticated critical analysis and wow this is for any entity that is othered to whiteness but specifically we're talking about how um because of uh how white supremist ideologies govern us we're compelled or
we have been compelled to think that you know Blackness does not deserve the iCal analysis that it actually warrants right one of the key ways to deconstruct this whiteness she argues is to understand the Perils of homogenization itself again Hall is also talking about the same frame she introduces a feminist critic here on Race by highlighting the importance of difference now how is her critique on of difference feminist here um she says that you know it is very important to understand that we should actually valiz difference and not uh talk about our unifying uh ideologies
through sameness oh my God what do I mean by that um we cannot say that we're all the same or that we we all have the same 24 hours hours in the day or that you know um we have the same DNA we scientifically do not but this is to say that we should give importance to difference and we should not fall prey to you know liberal ideologies that say oh we're you know diversity and plurality is because we're all the same so um she acknowledges the dangers of homogenization by saying moving away from the
notion that an emphasis on sameness is the key to racial Harmony aware feminist activists have insisted that anti-racist struggle is best Advanced sorry that's Advanced by uh theory that speaks about importance of acknowledging the way positive recognition and acceptance of difference is a necessary starting point as a work to eradicate white supremacy acknowledging and accepting difference in celebrating it and um recognizing that difference exists right so liberal ideologies often offer lip service to a version of diversity and plurality where you know we're all one clinging so hard to the Notions of sess she also quotes
M Michael Jackson's lyrics at one point uh in the chapter it is not matter if you're black or white it literally does so homogen ative experience is um both Hall and uh what Hall and hooks both ask us to steer away from and understand the difference also like the kind of difference that we are talking about and capital or cultural capital has fallen in love with difference right because anything that's distinctive you also want to show because it's cells so cultural difference cells she says uh she rorts that in many cases Blackness becomes the spies
that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture that's not how we're going to reckon with difference um conversing with Hall here hooks pays attention to the kind of distinctiveness and difference that we celebrate it's not just about representation right you guys uh but for but how and what it is that being represented and how is it being represented if you are showing black experience through white supremist lens it is as harmful if not more than an absence of representation such representation um teaches black folks to internalize racism and is ingrained in
a collective in Consciousness in such a way that it becomes difficult to unlearn she also asks us to pay attention to the intersections of race class sexuality and gender so your AIS of analysis have to fulfill all these intersections now we see how Hall and hooks both argue a similar thing engaging Blackness for its distinctiveness the signifier black is not enough it is beyond that right so the focus of our course is on spectatorship on black looks in popular culture in particular the way Blackness and black people are experienced in literature music television and film
our aim here is to create like them or by using their the theories radical interventions into way into the ways uh which we talk about race and representation in a massive part of History we've seen images of black people that reinforce white supremacy uh popular culture thus becomes a lot of the times a project of internalized racism so it is important to understand the kind of difference that we celebrating and it is important to understand acknowledge and accept that difference speaking of you know sometimes how uh our you know racism is sort of internalized in
uh popular culture there's a lot of furor around um the Oscars when um Angela did not win uh for her role in uh Black Panther and there was a lot of social media furor and debate which did um contest this uh Oscar decision because uh well Jam Le ctis won for her role in everything everywhere all at once she was exceptional and so was Angela basser and the the new an ances of her character and what she was portraying as people have argued was was much more again it I it could be wrong it's not
my opinion just something that is in the media discourse but this is to say that how uh the Oscars jury itself is so um you know their their ideologies that they have for years are so internalized that it will take a long time to even um maybe accept a performance like Angela B I don't know if that makes sense but um yeah image making and producing is political and how are these images constructed and marketed is also political um black intellectuals and artists are looking for ways to write and talk about race and representation to
transform the image that is been there around for so long so our aim in this course is to adopt a process of looking at black looks that allows us to counter the seduction of these images and uh that threaten and dehumanize uh or that threaten to dehumanize or uh colonize the goal of our course is to look at Blackness through new eyes through Eyes Of Love and through the complex lens of gender sexuality race and privilege the challenge is thus to transform the image to create Alternatives in producing images with subvert and transform World Views
moving us from the dualistic thinking of good versus bad representation is more complex than that we will look at how Blackness is re-imagined the re here is very powerful you know it is you're revisiting something it's a it's a second chance to your looking your your um rereading of visual text in alternative ways in ways that it resists in ways that it challenges unsettles disrupts and liberates we'll be looking multiple texts like that right like we have a whole section where we're looking at uh reimagining Blackness uh we're looking at AF futurism in Black Panther
we're looking at uh reimagining Horror in um uh get out and I think the entire course is just built around how how is it that we're adopting the lens at this Blackness that we uh reviewing or um reimagining so yeah I hope that you'll join me in reimagining these uh refreshing representations of black performances that we'll analyze and I do understand that today's class was probably overwhelming and uh was as it was so heavy in theory but I promise that you will learn something new each week in a much less uh daunting way the hope
is to get the wheels of your brain turning and I wish you uh you know you join me in it you know I do I do wish that I were in person to engage with you and you'd help me think better and um you know unlearn so many things and learned so many things and we would have had such a retting discussion and uh we would have you know just we would feed off of each other's energies but that's okay oh well I'm looking forward to uh reading your thoughts uh on uh The Forum discussion
forum each week and thank you for listening and I hope you have a very good week I will stop sharing sorry that this is so awkward okay thanks guys
