Cultural Criticism and Transformation

Why Study Popular Culture?:  bell hooks briefly discusses her book Outlaw Culture in relation to her concerns with problematic patterns appearing in popular culture.  She tells how sometimes she found the best way to teach students or individuals about "otherness" was by relating it to a medium they were familiar with, the media and popular culture.  "I related something very concrete in popular culture to the kind of theoretical paradigms that I was trying to share with them through various work, people seem to grasp it more and not only that, it would seem to be much more exciting and much more interesting for everybody. Because popular culture has that power in everyday life." (bell hooks On cultural criticism)

Hooks then continues on to explain that unlike critical theory that may be hard for a lot of people to access or understand, popular culture is able to reach the masses and be more likely to be easily understood by them.  Thus, it has become increasingly more popular for the masses to be educated by popular culture rather than theory based essays.

Critical Thinking as Transformation: bell hooks states: "I think thinking critically is at the heart of anybody transforming their life and I really believe that a person who thinks critically, who, you know, may be extraordinarily disadvantaged, materially, can find ways to transform their lives, that can be deeply and profoundly meaningful in the same way that someone who may be incredibly privileged materially and in crisis in their life may remain perpetually unable to resolve their life in any meaningful way if they don't think critically."

She then continues on to share her experience about "teaching at very fancy private predominantly white schools to teaching at an urban, predominantly non-white campus in Harlem".  Despite the variance of national academic rank, she states that students at both schools were brilliant, but the schools differentiated in how students saw themselves. Students at the prestigious schools knew their worth and had a sense of entitlement about their futures because so much has been promised to them in attending these schools.  While students at the Harlem school did not share their same sense of entitlement because nothing has been promised to them. "It has more to do with their sense of entitlement about having a future and when I see among my really brilliant students in Harlem, many of whom have very difficult lives, they work, they have children, is that they don't have that sense of entitlement, they don't have that imagination into a future of agency and as such, I think many professors do not try to give them the gift of critical thinking".  

The Power of Representation: Hooks debates the direct link between representations(in pop culture)and how we live our lives, that are often denied, such as; the over-sexualized woman that obeys the male fantasy and black men always being cast as the villain.  "I feel that it's frightening that as mass media uses more certain kinds of representations for specific impact and effect, we're also being told that these images are not really that important".

Motivated Representations: Hooks continues off of the last chapter The Power of Representation and tells more about how racist casting has been so commonly seen on screen and leads to more prejudice off-screen:  "We look at the recent movie Smoke where the thief is a black kid. Now in the original script – it's based on the story by Paul Auster – in the story there's no racial identification of the character. So when I talk to Wayne Wang who directed the film, I said, "Why did you choose to make the thief black?" He putters and stutters around but he can't say, he will not say, because the only thing he can say is, "This will give this movie more zip to make the thief black, it will make it more compelling to people. It will give a kind of good guy, bad guy quality to it and it will just make it all the more stimulating, because he would have to admit that the fact that he simultaneously in making that choice is also reproducing certain kinds of racial stereotypes." Nobody wants to lay claim to consciously constructing these images that perpetuate white supremacy, racism, etc.  And the ironic thing is that I can sit in classrooms in universities where my students don't want to accept that someone consciously creates that representation...A certain sense that reality is being documented and, again, you know, I think that part of the power of cultural criticism and cultural studies has been its sort of political intervention as a force in American society to say, there really is a conscious manipulation of representations and it's not about magical thinking, it's not about like pure imagination, creativity, it's about people consciously knowing what kinds of images will produce a certain kind of impact".

An Example of Motivated Representation: Leaving Las Vegas & the Backlash Against Feminism: Hooks once again traces back to the chapter The Power of Representation by focusing on how woman are represented on film.  One of "the most successful political movement in the United States over the last twenty years was really the feminist movement and that there is a tremendous backlash to feminism that is being enacted on the stage of mass media.  So that films like Leaving Las Vegas really are about ushering in a new old version of the desirable woman that really is profoundly misogynous based and sexist. It's no accident, we know that when women went into the factories in the World Wars because men were not here, that when those wars ended, mass media was used to get women out of the factory and back into the home, well in a sense mass media is being used in that very same way right now, to get women out of feminism and back into some patriarchal mode of thinking and movies to me are the lead propaganda machine in this right now".

In Part Two, she demonstrates the value of cultural studies in concrete analysis through such subjects as the OJ Simpson case, Madonna, Spike Lee, and Gangsta rap. The aim of cultural analysis, she argues, should be the production of enlightened witnesses - audiences who engaged with the representations of cultural life knowledgeably and vigilantly.(Kanopy)

Why "White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy?": Hooks breaks down why they coined the term White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy, which can be summarized by the following quotes: "I began to use the phrase in my work 'white supremacist capitalist patriarchy' because I wanted to have some language that would actually remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality...To me an important break through, I felt, in my work and that of others was the call to use the term white supremacy, over racism because racism in and of itself did not really allow for a discourse of colonization and decolonization, the recognition of the internalized racism within people of color and it was always in a sense keeping things at the level at which whiteness and white people remained at the center of the discussion".

Enlightened Witness: This chapter focuses on being critical of what we see on screen and it can be summarized by the following quotes from the section:  "And the issue is not freeing ourselves from representation. It's really about being enlightened witnesses when we watch representations, which means we are able to be critically vigilant about both what is being told to us and how we respond to what is being told...I don't think we will get much further in terms of decolonizing our minds. So that we can both resist certain kinds of conservatizing representation and at the same time create new and exciting representations.

In Part Two, she demonstrates the value of cultural studies in concrete analysis through such subjects as the OJ Simpson case, Madonna, Spike Lee, and Gangsta rap. The aim of cultural analysis, she argues, should be the production of enlightened witnesses - audiences who engaged with the representations of cultural life knowledgeably and vigilantly.(Kanopy)

Part two consists of:

Constructed Narrative: In this passage, Hooks deconstructs the choices made in the production of a film that narrates how the work will be read.  Hooks makes a point that casting directors and other prominent people working on a film make conscious choices of casting and when certain types of people are routinely cast in the same position.  She makes a point that these routine types of molds people are cast in help to reinscribe stereotypes that are both harmful on and offscreen.

Dealing with O.J.: bell hook's states that she felt the O.J. Simpson trial was a spectacle from the beginning to the end. This passage from Dealing with O.J. sums up this section well: "The one time that I did go on television and I said that I could be on Good Morning America, and I could be asked about the O.J. Simpson case and it stipulated all beforehand that I could be asked one question, I was asked to just give my response, but they really wanted me to say, who was innocent and who was guilty. And what I said was that the only thing I really knew about the O.J. Simpson case was that it began and ended with male violence and that no one to my knowledge ever speculated that there were a bunch of women waiting outside that house to hack anybody to death, you know, cut the cameras, that's not the quote that anybody wanted to hear, they wanted the black woman to be choosing against the white woman or to be protecting the black man, they wanted this whole racialized scenario. When the issue is male violence against women, let's bring on some other kind of issue that makes us not pay real attention to male violence. And that's why race offered the perfect sort of screen to have another drama that everybody could be linked to".

Madonna: from Feminism to Patriarchy: This quote sums up this chapter:  "Madonna always laid claim to being a female artist who was breaking new ground and in her own testimony laid claim to an engagement with feminist politics. A lot of times people act as though feminists bring an unwarranted critique to Madonna but I think Madonna receives so much attention from feminists precisely because she positioned herself as a woman within the music industry who was going to break new ground and who was going to challenge the sexism of that industry. And, as we know, for early on in her career she actually did live out that particular practice and that's I think, why many of us continue to have affection for her as a cultural icon even as we feel incredibly disturbed by the fact that stardom, which by its very nature has to be reproduced again and again, meant that at a certain point as an aging woman, Madonna had to have a new gimmick to renew interest in her, and it's not surprising that a major part of her re-invention of herself becomes a re-attachment to sexism".

Spike Lee: Hollywood's Fall Guy: This passage opens with: "If I had talked about Spike Lee filmmaking before he made Girl 6, I would really be assessing him very differently from my assessment of him after he's made Girl 6 because I find Girl 6 to be a movie that not only challenges Hollywood, I feel that it's a critical read on Hollywood. I mean, that moment in the opening of the film you have Quentin Tarantino saying that he's going to make the best black film".  She then critiques this aspect by saying: "Black people aren't needed to produce black cinematic culture because white people can produce that culture and there's a lot of critiques of Hollywood and a certain value system in Girl 6 that Spike Lee himself has played along with in order to get to the position where he can use Hollywood as a vehicle to make certain critiques". This section then continues on into Hollywood films about the black experience written and told by the white man and critiques their substance and validity.

The Voyeur's Gaze: In this passage, bell hooks critiques the film Kids by Harmony Korine.  She states that despite all of the good things she heard about this film "it seemed like the perfect embodiment of the kind of postmodern, notions of journeying and dislocation and fragmentation and yet when you go to see it, it has simply such a conservative take on gender, on race, on the politics of HIV..."These to me were so much of the conservative strategies underlying the transgressive surface of the film and it's just another sad moment where people are seduced by transgression in and of itself, as though transgression makes you radical and not what you are transgressing in the service of".

Rap: Authentic Expression or Market Construct?: "I mean one of the things that's amazing to me is that there has been this demand somehow that rap musicians be more moral and more ethical than anybody else in American culture as they approach the business of creating a product and making money. And for me this is not to condone the sexism and the misogyny of rap but it is to say that this has to be seen in the larger framework of cultural production within capitalism in our society and that far from being different from multinational corporations and their processes of gaining greater and greater wealth one might argue you know that rap musicians, especially the success of a certain kind of misogynistic anti-feminist, anti-woman rap, is totally in line with, if you find a product, that gives you the maximum profit and reward, then push that product whether you actually believe what you're saying or not. It seems to me that we must first acknowledge that they are making strategic choices and we must then critique both those choices and their impact. The damage in the long run to black life when pugilistic eroticism, when rape and assault become the defining aspects of erotic exchange between black females and males in youth culture, that fall out, that genocidal fallout is so much greater for the culture than the individual who becomes wealthy as a result of that, and the individuals surrounding that individual who perpetuate their wealth, the larger corporations who produce that music and give it to the world. And that's precisely why it's become very meaningless to talk about is there an 'authentic'? Is rap authentic? Because once you become part of the machinery of an advance technological capitalism system of production that is all out for the most profit, questions of authenticity become to me totally stupid and meaningless. Because it's already not anything that you can speak of any more as indigenous, it doesn't have a marginal location any more. So you can't talk about it as authentic to that marginal location because it's simply not there. It is 'authentic' then to what it is".

Color Coding Black Female Bodies: The entire passage from this section "Well I think that rap videos, like all major videos right now, have reinscribed the female body in very traditionally sexist pornographic, within the framework of the traditional sexist pornographic imaginary. To the extent that rap music or any kind of black music uses more black female bodies, the black female body comes into greater representation solely along the sexual terms that we have historically been represented within mass media. The hot pussy, the prostitute, the slut, the vulgar girl, the girl who is willing to do what the nice girls won't do, etc. All of these images and representations that have been a function of racist and sexists stereotypes get reproduced in rap videos, but the most noticeable aspect of the objectification of black female bodies in rap videos, for black women and men is the color caste system gets reintroduced and affirmed. It's quite rare to see darker skinned black females among the groups of women that are seen as sexually viable and desirable in most music videos whether rap or otherwise because in fact, it is the light skinned, preferably long haired, preferably straightened haired female who becomes once again reinscribed as the desirable object, this again is one of the tragic dimensions right now of race in America because more than ever before color caste systems are being overtly affirmed as through, you know, we didn't change this, we didn't fight against it, so now all we can do is embrace it and live out the consequences of it".

Consuming Commodified Blackness: I believe that American culture is obsessed with transgression. And to the degree that blackness remains a primary sign of transgression, one could talk about American culture and mainstream culture as being obsessed with blackness, but it is blackness primarily in a commodified form that can then be possessed, owned, controlled, and shaped by the consumer and not with an engagement in black culture that might require one to be a participant and therefore to be in some way transformed by what you are consuming as opposed to being merely a buyer. Anecdotally that to me is the difference between a young white male from the suburb who's consuming black music in the form of rap and who's wearing the same kind of clothes as other, you know, hip hop musicians but then in fact when he encounters a young black male on the streets feels the same racialized fear and demonizes that person as any white person who's had no contact with that music, so that there's no correlation often between the consumption of the commodity that is blackness and the culture from which that commodity comes, or that provides the resource base and that's no different again from us thinking of Third World countries. There's a way in which white culture is perceived as too Wonder Bread right now, not edgy enough, not dangerous enough. Let's get some of those endangered species people to be exotic for us and it's really simply, I think, a more upscale version of primitivism, resurging. When blackness is the sign of transgression that is most desired it allow whiteness to remain static, to remain conservative, and its conservative thrust to go unnoticed. So as we're having a mounting Fascism in the United States that is perpetuated increasingly by liberal young, moneyed, liberal, white people, if they are wearing black clothes or listening to black music, they can be perceived as transgressive, as radical, when in fact, once again, we see a separation between material aspirations and cultural and social interests. So that at any point in time they can drop their interest in blackness and do whatever they need to do to reinforce their class interests, the interest of white supremacy, the interest of capitalism and imperialism and I think that this is frightening because it's so deep and profound. It really suggests the way in which fantasy will I think, more and more mediate Fascism as it has always done in the past. Pretend that you're going somewhere that you're not really going and you can stay in place and be ready to serve the state when the state calls you because you really haven't left home. And I think that's a lot of what's happening".