SO478 - week 13

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These are my notes from January 16 for SO478 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

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Race and media

Readings

No notes for this week.

Representing Black Britain by Sarita Malik (chapters 1 & 9)

A book from 2002.

Locating the ‘Radical’ in Shoot the Messenger by Sarita Malik

A paper from 2013.

Diversity pie by Clive James Nwonka

A paper from 2015 by the lecturer.

Lecture

This was an excellent lecture given by Clive James Nwonka, a researcher with the Inequalities Institute, which connected issues of race representation within the media to larger questions of politics, ideology and capitalism. No seminar this time (the lecture started late)

• film and media (and the culture industry in general) are ideological tools to shape how people view the world
• this lecture is indebted to Stuart Hall’s theories on race and cultural studies
  • chronically, begins with Stuart Hall arriving in the UK from Jamaica as part of a larger effort to fill labour gaps in the UK by “importing” foreigners
  • of course, these new arrivals were often denied access to various services/goods
• clip from Flame in the Streets (1961), showcasing common (negative) views on interracial marriage
  • quote from Nina Hibbin (film critic): you can’t just fight the colour bar by displaying it; you have to fight it passionately, otherwise you end up fanning the flames
• on film studies and how we should interpret films
  • one view is to treat a film as you would a text
  • the cultural studies view, though, is more reader-response-oriented; a film needs an audience to give it meaning
  • on the importance of social realism and sociopolitical films that often self-deconstruct/self-undermine? asking you to question the film? (not sure what my notes are saying here)
• clip from National Front protests (English nationalism) with a fascinating quote: “we’re not racists, we’re realists”
• clip of the lovely Margaret Thatcher in an interviewing discussing the National Front and immigration
  • saying that the country is being “swamped” by people of a different culture, whereas British culture has done so much for democracy and the world lmao
  • saying that people go to the National Front because they’re the only party talking about it—about the perils of immigration—and so if the Tories want to win, they’ll have to start talking about it as well (sounds familiar)
  • if we deconstruct what she’s saying, it really doesn’t come down to immigration as such; it’s about race and cultural identity, about homogeneity
• in 1981, during the recession, unemployment among black men was 82% and they were much more likely to get arrested for various institutional reasons
  • culminated in the Brixton Riots of 1981, Newcross Massacre (fire) cover up
  • April 1981, Scarman reporthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarman_Report) on the Brixton riots: although it didn’t really acknowledge institutional racism, it at least accepted that black people face greater societal difficulties (which he mainly boiled down to issues of cultural assimilation)
  • and the films created around this time reflected this
  • black youth faced a double bind: not only were the institutions they had to deal with in society racist, but the fictional worlds they could escape to rarely had more promising (realistic) depictions, not to mention role models
    • symbolic relationship between black youth being portrayed as criminals in media & treated as such by police
  • 1982, channel 4 was created as an outlet for media focused on ethnic minorities (and as a space for left-wing, more radical ideas in general)
• Babylon, 1981, Franco Rossi: exemplar of critical realism
  • shows how people interact with institutions & illuminates the power dynamics at play
  • deemed too radical for the BBC—shunted to channel 4 instead (fears that it would incite uprisings against police through showing how corrupt it all was)
• Michael Wayne on theory of anti-national national film
  • showing divided and fractured society underneath the illusion of unity of a nation, exposing mechanisms of ideology
• book recs:
  • Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis and Culture, Media, Language
  • Paul Gilroy’s Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack
  • New Times with Marxism Today, edied by Stuart Hall (after the fall of the Soviet Union)
• now on New Labour and how they embraced the concept of multiculturalism, managing cultural differences through shared cultural unity
  • different from silos, idpol in the 80s
  • core idea: that you could build a post-racial society through cultural appreciation
  • New Labour embraced “culture”, established first minister of film
    • recognising that film contributes to social cohesion
  • in 1999, when New Labour came into power, they commissioned a report on the death of a black boy (Stephen Lawrence) which the Tory govt that was in power at the time had refused to investigate
    • this was one of the first public admittances of institutional racism
  • in Lord Scarman’s original report, he didn’t mention film/media but after this report, it became more of an issue
  • quote from Tony Blair (2007) on cultural lack of discipline, rather than economic inequality, being the problem
• concept: cultural/general verisimilitude
  • doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be actually “true” according to social reality
  • rather, it’s about whether the audience believes it to be true (cultural hegemony)
  • (Baudrillard inevitably comes to my mind here: meant to simulate a culture that doesn’t really exist in reality)
• clip from Bullet Boy (2005): striking realism, exemplified through the vernacular, music, settings
  • creating epistemologies in the process—narrative sociology
  • on the horizon of expectations: we’ve already been conditioned to find certain images believable (e.g., a black boy holding a gun)
• Top Boy (meant to be the UK’s answer to _The Wire__), another example of cultural verisimilitude
  • even just the poster itself was a media Event with a capital E
  • the release was soon after the 2011 riots, and one Guardian article decided to connect the two, despite the fact that there was no mention of the riots or anything like them in the show
    • points to hidden associations on the part of the writer
    • good quote from the article tho: “no jobs, no prospects and no power beyond their own postcode”
• on diversity in film
  • different from inclusion and different from equality
  • fits in with the New Labour ethos, which is heavily politicised and commodified and (one might say) not actually genuine
• clip of the stabbing scene from NW (adaptation of the Zadie Smith novel)
  • Stuart Hall’s positive/negative theory
    • positive images among a dominant negative repertoire don’t displace the negativity—if the primary binaries are in place they continue to frame the meaning
  • the way the film is made, the stabbing scene feels more voyeuristic than anything else (like a gaze into the life of the Other)
  • “black neoliberal aesthetic” (amazing)
    • black people are still criminalised
    • “neoliberal” here refers to the fact that there is a market for these commodified images
  • when the man (the stabber) draws up his hood in NW, that’s the moment he becomes the Other in the eyes of the audience
    • beyond diegesis (i.e. the actual plot), he is transmitting a signal to the audience that they are well aware of; he is putting on a mask
  • quote from Stuart Hall: “Far from only coming from the still small point of truth inside us, identities actually come from outside, they are the way in which we are recognized and then come to step into the place of the recognitions which others give us”
  • “black” and “crime” become symbiotic, naturalised; we need radical skepticism to counter
• channel 4 fractured the media landscape in negative ways; it became a marginal outlet for all the “ethnic stuff”
  • “separate but equal” by other means
  • somewhat similar vein: moonlight was portrayed as a movie about blackness (another example of neoliberal framing, commodification)
    • similarly with 12 years a slave: the very premise of the plot, that here was a black man that didn’t “belong” with all the other slaves
    • the question we should ask here is: what is it about the media ecology that requires this kind of image? especially when Brad Pitt makes a cameo as this weird white saviour character
• on diversity quotas
  • they don’t fundamentally challenge root inequalities; they’re very surface-level, paper over the problem
  • they shut down discussion
  • setting an arbitrary number
  • evades a deep questioning of the whole idea of meritocracy
  • very New Labour lol
  • we should also be asking: who receives the benefits of such quotas?
    • certainly not the lowest common denominators
    • it’s those who already have cultural capital in the first place, who fit into the existing system with least resistance

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