Loading...
Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
This panel puts recent popular entertainment media into conversation to reveal new cultural logics of appropriation that have been used to reinforce colonial, anti-Black, and class-based forms of power or to actively reimagine it. In the wake of what has been referred to as a ‘racial reckoning’ in the U.S., as well as renewed attention to multiple forms of discrimination, many popular media have sought to perform awareness and in some cases, a response, to calls for justice. Yet what appear at first as strategies for change instead often amount to reaffirmations of existing power structures and colonial techniques. Likewise, some media that seemingly offered banal pop fare introduced nuanced reimaginings that both intervened upon and reified colonial tropes.
Christina Aushana examines how the recent inclusion of more Black women protagonists in cop shows is a technique that sustains the anti-blackness of policing; Lauren Berliner investigates how several mainstream streaming media texts now incorporate Internet cultural trends from the margins as part of corporate production logics; Caroline Collins explores the ways Beyonce’s Black is King juxtaposes simultaneous diasporic appreciation and appropriation of African cultures to offer a visual—and even prosthetic—form of repatriation during a moment in which Black folks were craving particular forms of connectivity, affiliation, and in some instances, home; Susah Harewood examines the iterative production of books and film of Paddington Bear as an example of the cultural economics of the unceasing project of colonialism, and the ways in which it reaffirms, justifies, and instantiates imperial hierarchies.
Repurposing Inclusion: The Conscription of Black Women Protagonists in Contemporary Cop-Shows in Sustaining Police-Based Anti-Blackness
Christina Aushana, University of California San Diego
One of the dilemmas of modern policing concerns the incorporation of the voices of over-policed communities into institutionally-bounded conversations about policing. The notion that “disadvantaged communities,” as identified by community policing (Espejo 2014) and procedural justice (Lind and Tyler 1988) experts, should be included in discussions about police reform emerges across the literature in sociological and organizational studies of policing. However, the precise mechanisms by which community voices are materially considered by law enforcement agencies are highly circumscribed, often limited to monthly meetings between specific members of the community and law enforcement, and community events. In this talk, I interrogate a more widely accessible form of supposed inclusion of marginalized voices in policing: the cop-show. Paying special attention to the reinvention of cop-show narrative arcs post-George Floyd, and more broadly post-2015 Ferguson, I examine the intersection of Black women in cop shows—and particularly the recent proliferation of Black women law enforcement protagonists—as a technique that while touted as representation in fact sustains the anti-Blackness of policing. Specifically, under the guise of inclusion, I argue these popular culture products mobilize the conscription of Black female bodies into these service roles, illustrating just how intractable reformist projects are even within seemingly disruptive reinventions. Taken together, the inclusion of Black women in these influential media is a familiar and troubling demonstration of how Black and Brown community members are superficially invited, through the progressive narratives of populist inclusion, to role-play “the relationship between antiblackness and late liberal statecraft” (Shange 2017, 7).
The Memes of Production: The Appropriation of User-Produced Media in Covid-Era Films and Television
Lauren S. Berliner, University of Washington Bothell
As movie theaters closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns across the globe, films were released directly to online streaming media platforms and new television programs proliferated in these same online spaces. With fears of contagion adding complications to the coordination of filming live-action productions, producers were pushed to develop new approaches and techniques to making media. Simultaneously, user-produced media content exploded across a variety of platforms like YouTube and TikTok, and memes circulated practically in tandem with the content they sought to parody. What emerged in this moment, is a new subgenre of media texts in which mainstream corporate media productions increasingly incorporated references to user-produced online media in an effort to seek relevance with Internet-saturated audiences while evading the complexities of live-action logistics planning. In this talk I identify the ways in which this trend mirrors other junctures in the history of media industrial history--most notably the rise of “reality tv” in the face of the writer’s strike of the early 2000s-- and examine the ways in which the creation and monetization of everyday media makers’ labor becomes incorporated into industry practice. Looking specifically at The Mitchells vs The Machines (2021) and the Netflix comedy/nature show Absurd Planet (2020) I ask, how does algorithmic success of appropriated everyday media reinforce the distribution and circulation of the media texts that have appropriated them? How does the incorporation of user-produced media impact the valence, impact, and meaning of the original creations?
Visualizing Repatriation: Diasporic Appropriation and Appreciation in Beyoncé and Shatta Wale’s ‘Already’ Music Video
Caroline Collins, UC San Diego
Within recent discourse regarding Black cartographic imaginaries, scholars of diaspora and cultural studies and those attending to the mobility and reciprocity of forms of Black cultural production, have advanced frameworks that challenge notions of a Black diasporic epicenter, instead granting primacy to localized translations and remixes that eschew unidirectionality towards a common home. In the summer of 2020, however, when the cultural zeitgeist around notions of (anti)Blackness renewed attention towards systemic inequality and police violence, traditional and reinvented takes on notions of diaspora and African and African American solidarity were awash in American think pieces, social media, and popular culture, offering accessible entry points to not only celebrate (re)constructed notions of a common Black motherland but through which to reimagine conceptions of repatriation. Using film theory and media and cultural studies approaches, this talk brings one such example of this reimagining under critical analysis. Specifically, this talk offers a close reading of Beyonce's Already music video from her Black Is King visual album released in Summer 2020 (on the heels of The Lion King [2019] film reboot it accompanied). Paying special attention to narrative and technical elements within the video including mise-en-scene, cinematography, and the monomyth this examination reads the video's juxtaposed and simultaneous diasporic appreciation and appropriation of African cultures to examine the ways in which the video offered a visual—and even prosthetic—form of repatriation during a cultural moment in which Black folks were craving particular forms of diasporic connectivity, affiliation, and in some instances home.
Paddington Goes to Work Reconstructing the Empire
Susan Harewood, University of Washington Bothell
This paper investigates the repetitive imperial work at play in the making and remaking of mediated versions of the character Paddington Bear. Originally created by Michael Bond, the first Paddington book was published in 1958. Since that time there have been numerous books and those books have been adapted into nearly every conceivable medium. The 2014 release of the smash hit live-action Paddington film, has triggered a new round of media production and franchising that does not seem likely to end any time soon. The academic attention that Paddington books and media content has received has primarily celebrated or gently questioned Paddington as a character that permits Britons to negotiate migration and being confronted with the presence of ‘the Other’. Academic scholarship, then, seems to examine Paddington as addressing empire’s aftermath. However, in this paper I explore the iterative production of ‘Paddingtons’ as an example of the cultural economics of the unceasing project of colonialism. I argue in this paper that paying simultaneous attention to the media texts and the economic culture that sees Paddington Bear being reproduced time and time again tells us something important about the work that Paddington does to reaffirm, justify, and instantiate imperial hierarchies of place, race, class, and gender. Thus, the paper highlights that coming to understand Paddington’s imperial work requires we stitch together Paddington’s lovability, the excellence of animated aliveness and the brutal and extractive economic logics that have made Paddington, and related media content possible.
Don’t Look Too Closely: Appropriation, Incorporation and Repatriation in Popular Media
This panel puts recent popular entertainment media into conversation to reveal new cultural logics of appropriation that have been used to reinforce colonial, anti-Black, and class-based forms of power or to actively reimagine it. In the wake of what has been referred to as a ‘racial reckoning’ in the U.S., as well as renewed attention to multiple forms of discrimination, many popular media have sought to perform awareness and in some cases, a response, to calls for justice. Yet what appear at first as strategies for change instead often amount to reaffirmations of existing power structures and colonial techniques. Likewise, some media that seemingly offered banal pop fare introduced nuanced reimaginings that both intervened upon and reified colonial tropes.
Christina Aushana examines how the recent inclusion of more Black women protagonists in cop shows is a technique that sustains the anti-blackness of policing; Lauren Berliner investigates how several mainstream streaming media texts now incorporate Internet cultural trends from the margins as part of corporate production logics; Caroline Collins explores the ways Beyonce’s Black is King juxtaposes simultaneous diasporic appreciation and appropriation of African cultures to offer a visual—and even prosthetic—form of repatriation during a moment in which Black folks were craving particular forms of connectivity, affiliation, and in some instances, home; Susah Harewood examines the iterative production of books and film of Paddington Bear as an example of the cultural economics of the unceasing project of colonialism, and the ways in which it reaffirms, justifies, and instantiates imperial hierarchies.
Repurposing Inclusion: The Conscription of Black Women Protagonists in Contemporary Cop-Shows in Sustaining Police-Based Anti-Blackness
Christina Aushana, University of California San Diego
One of the dilemmas of modern policing concerns the incorporation of the voices of over-policed communities into institutionally-bounded conversations about policing. The notion that “disadvantaged communities,” as identified by community policing (Espejo 2014) and procedural justice (Lind and Tyler 1988) experts, should be included in discussions about police reform emerges across the literature in sociological and organizational studies of policing. However, the precise mechanisms by which community voices are materially considered by law enforcement agencies are highly circumscribed, often limited to monthly meetings between specific members of the community and law enforcement, and community events. In this talk, I interrogate a more widely accessible form of supposed inclusion of marginalized voices in policing: the cop-show. Paying special attention to the reinvention of cop-show narrative arcs post-George Floyd, and more broadly post-2015 Ferguson, I examine the intersection of Black women in cop shows—and particularly the recent proliferation of Black women law enforcement protagonists—as a technique that while touted as representation in fact sustains the anti-Blackness of policing. Specifically, under the guise of inclusion, I argue these popular culture products mobilize the conscription of Black female bodies into these service roles, illustrating just how intractable reformist projects are even within seemingly disruptive reinventions. Taken together, the inclusion of Black women in these influential media is a familiar and troubling demonstration of how Black and Brown community members are superficially invited, through the progressive narratives of populist inclusion, to role-play “the relationship between antiblackness and late liberal statecraft” (Shange 2017, 7).
The Memes of Production: The Appropriation of User-Produced Media in Covid-Era Films and Television
Lauren S. Berliner, University of Washington Bothell
As movie theaters closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns across the globe, films were released directly to online streaming media platforms and new television programs proliferated in these same online spaces. With fears of contagion adding complications to the coordination of filming live-action productions, producers were pushed to develop new approaches and techniques to making media. Simultaneously, user-produced media content exploded across a variety of platforms like YouTube and TikTok, and memes circulated practically in tandem with the content they sought to parody. What emerged in this moment, is a new subgenre of media texts in which mainstream corporate media productions increasingly incorporated references to user-produced online media in an effort to seek relevance with Internet-saturated audiences while evading the complexities of live-action logistics planning. In this talk I identify the ways in which this trend mirrors other junctures in the history of media industrial history--most notably the rise of “reality tv” in the face of the writer’s strike of the early 2000s-- and examine the ways in which the creation and monetization of everyday media makers’ labor becomes incorporated into industry practice. Looking specifically at The Mitchells vs The Machines (2021) and the Netflix comedy/nature show Absurd Planet (2020) I ask, how does algorithmic success of appropriated everyday media reinforce the distribution and circulation of the media texts that have appropriated them? How does the incorporation of user-produced media impact the valence, impact, and meaning of the original creations?
Visualizing Repatriation: Diasporic Appropriation and Appreciation in Beyoncé and Shatta Wale’s ‘Already’ Music Video
Caroline Collins, UC San Diego
Within recent discourse regarding Black cartographic imaginaries, scholars of diaspora and cultural studies and those attending to the mobility and reciprocity of forms of Black cultural production, have advanced frameworks that challenge notions of a Black diasporic epicenter, instead granting primacy to localized translations and remixes that eschew unidirectionality towards a common home. In the summer of 2020, however, when the cultural zeitgeist around notions of (anti)Blackness renewed attention towards systemic inequality and police violence, traditional and reinvented takes on notions of diaspora and African and African American solidarity were awash in American think pieces, social media, and popular culture, offering accessible entry points to not only celebrate (re)constructed notions of a common Black motherland but through which to reimagine conceptions of repatriation. Using film theory and media and cultural studies approaches, this talk brings one such example of this reimagining under critical analysis. Specifically, this talk offers a close reading of Beyonce's Already music video from her Black Is King visual album released in Summer 2020 (on the heels of The Lion King [2019] film reboot it accompanied). Paying special attention to narrative and technical elements within the video including mise-en-scene, cinematography, and the monomyth this examination reads the video's juxtaposed and simultaneous diasporic appreciation and appropriation of African cultures to examine the ways in which the video offered a visual—and even prosthetic—form of repatriation during a cultural moment in which Black folks were craving particular forms of diasporic connectivity, affiliation, and in some instances home.
Paddington Goes to Work Reconstructing the Empire
Susan Harewood, University of Washington Bothell
This paper investigates the repetitive imperial work at play in the making and remaking of mediated versions of the character Paddington Bear. Originally created by Michael Bond, the first Paddington book was published in 1958. Since that time there have been numerous books and those books have been adapted into nearly every conceivable medium. The 2014 release of the smash hit live-action Paddington film, has triggered a new round of media production and franchising that does not seem likely to end any time soon. The academic attention that Paddington books and media content has received has primarily celebrated or gently questioned Paddington as a character that permits Britons to negotiate migration and being confronted with the presence of ‘the Other’. Academic scholarship, then, seems to examine Paddington as addressing empire’s aftermath. However, in this paper I explore the iterative production of ‘Paddingtons’ as an example of the cultural economics of the unceasing project of colonialism. I argue in this paper that paying simultaneous attention to the media texts and the economic culture that sees Paddington Bear being reproduced time and time again tells us something important about the work that Paddington does to reaffirm, justify, and instantiate imperial hierarchies of place, race, class, and gender. Thus, the paper highlights that coming to understand Paddington’s imperial work requires we stitch together Paddington’s lovability, the excellence of animated aliveness and the brutal and extractive economic logics that have made Paddington, and related media content possible.
Bio
Christina Aushana is a 2019 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow and doctoral candidate at UC San Diego, where she is completing her dissertation, “Staging Vision, Screening Others: The Performance and Visual Culture of Contemporary Policing.” Her writing on everyday policing practices and their relationship to cinema has been published in Surveillance & Society, and her article on performance and police academy training is forthcoming in a special issue of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. She was recently named a 2021-2022 University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow.
Lauren S. Berliner is Associate Professor of Media & Communication Studies and Cultural Studies at University of Washington Bothell where she teaches courses in digital media studies and visual culture. She is the author of the book Producing Queer Youth: the Paradox of Digital Media Empowerment and co-editor of Feminist Interventions in Participatory Media: Pedagogy, Publics, Practice. Her writing has also appeared in JCMS, The Cine-files, several edited book collections, and can be seen in a forthcoming issue of Feminist Media Histories (Spring 2022) She is also a co-curator of The Festival of (In)Appropriation, an annual showcase of experimental media, with Jaimie Baron.
Caroline Collins is the Cathryn P. Gamble Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. Her research examines the politics of public remembrances of the American West through archival methods, ethnographic study, media production, and public history exhibition. She is currently working on her first manuscript, Erecting Eden: The Public Remaking of Race and Place in the California Origin Story. Her public scholarship includes the Cal Humanities funded six-part Cal Ag Roots podcast and traveling exhibit, We Are Not Strangers Here: African American Histories in Rural California made in collaboration with the California Institute of Rural Studies, the California Historical Society, the California African American Museum, and Exhibit Envoy.
Susan Harewood is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington Bothell. Her research examines media, music, and Caribbean popular culture as key sites at which historical and contemporary relations of power are contested. Her published work has appeared in a number of journals and edited collections.