SOC 902 Lecture #7 The Hood Film PDF

SOC 902 Situating the Hood Film within New Black Cinema, Rap Music and Masculinity SOC 902 Part ONE New Black Cinema > Hood Film  New Black Cinema > Hood Films Between Apocalypse and Redemption (Michael Eric Dyson, 1992) The primary task of “black film criticism...

SOC 902 Situating the Hood Film within New Black Cinema, Rap Music and Masculinity SOC 902 Part ONE New Black Cinema > Hood Film  New Black Cinema > Hood Films Between Apocalypse and Redemption (Michael Eric Dyson, 1992) The primary task of “black film criticism does not posit a rigid sphere of academic analysis but class into question regimented conception of disciplinary boundaries while promoting overlapping and intersectional diverse areas of inquiry” For example, the relationship between the police and African-American communities in the United States has become one of the most engaging discussions of the political and social landscape in the last twenty-five years.  CRT & Hood Films As such, Critical Race Theory (CRT) argues that depictions of the Black community and Blackness in the media has contributed to the negative perceptions, abject stereotypes and structural racism long centralized in American culture. Specifically, this discrimination is not strictly limited to the police, but is also and importantly are reflective of the overall criminal justice system  CRT & Hood Films CRT argues that the circulation of various historical stereotypes has produced an “everyday ideology” confirming young Black men specifically as criminogenic while further fueling prejudice and discrimination. As such, the above provides the critical, social and academic foundation through which Hood films are examined sociologically. Specifically, Hood films alongside SCT and CRT facilitates interrogating these issues from a place manifestly counter-hegemonic in its representations of race in America, but also multifaceted in its critical and complex address of also gender, the family, gender roles and access and opportunity.  CRT & Hood Films For example, Boyz in the Hood (John Singleton, 1991) a) demonstrates how social policy and marginalization ensure the maintenance of geographic restrictions in movement, freedom, mobility, as well as restrictions in opportunity for social, economic and political success b) includes diverse and varied representations of women, gender and motherhood as intersecting issues re. a) above b) reveals the intersection youth, community, politics, rap music, identity and history as a critical ground to communicate these very issues  CRT & Hood Films To provide context and an example of critical thinking re essays: In Social Rhetoric and the Construction of Black Motherhood (2013), Nicole Rousseau examines the 2011 film The Help and states the film was “presented to the new millennium audience as an indictment of the world as we once knew it, and the film is clearly critical of the bravado and inhumanity wielded by middle-class Whites in the midcentury South.” Additionally, Rousseau states the film “further highlights the varied impacts of the structural racism, which dominated the lives of Black women who served as domestic laborers, yet the film fails to thoroughly explore the lived experiences of Black women of the era. Instead, the Black women are only seen in relation to the White women and their families.” SOC 902 Part TWO  CRT & Hood Films Michael E. Dyson (1994): Rap music is a form of “profound musical, cultural, and social creativity. It expresses the desire of young Black people to reclaim their history, reactivate forms of Black radicalism, and contest the powers of despair and economic depression that presently besiege the Black community as crisis.” For example, “while mainstream America has only begun to register awareness of the true proportions of this crisis, young black males have responded in two independent popular cultures: rap music and black cinema.”  CRT & Hood Films Between Apocalypse and Redemption: John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood (Michael Eric Dyson, 1992) Singleton’s casting of Ice Cube as a central character (Doughboy) is shrewd, allowing him to seize symbolic capital from a “real life rap icon” while overlapping Cube’s NWA persona with a filmic persona – both navigating a geographic space rendered catastrophic: South Central Los Angeles Boyz thesis: to communicate the crisis in SCLA while mythologizing the tropes and narratives that dominate it. That is, while gang life is central, it is not exclusive. Instead, Singleton illustrates the institutional structures in place that have created this catastrophic, geographic space. Ice Cube Doughboy  CRT & Hood Films Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Tricia Rose,1994) Rap music and hip-hop’s trajectory positions both “as highly influential, powerful and profitable and “the mainstream acceptance of rap and hip hop reflects a trajectory that moves from rejection to reluctant acceptance and then to full blown incorporation and co-potation” For Rose, rap music and hip-hop’s relationship to popular culture “contextualizes both as a type of popularity readily understood social fact: black culture is cool culture.”  CRT & Hood Films Keith M Harris: Black Crossover Film Boyz reflects the role of rap music within the crossover hood film. The popularity of music and expressive culture of the period provides Boyz with “an aural mise-en-scène of urban blackness, which: a) serves to reflect the anti-heroic romance of Doughboy who is “living for the hood” and, b) provides the film with an easy musical and marketing tie-in - a visual and aural aesthetic and a recognizable rap star in a central role  Hood Films and Geography Hood films are united, for the most part, by: 1) largely African-American creative talent, contemporary urban settings (Los Angeles or New York) 2) a strong connection to youth rap and pop culture 3) a thematic focus on inner-city social and political issues such as poverty, crime, racism, drugs and violence. Consequently, film critics and scholars were quick to explore and interpret this uniquely confined set of film Hood Film and Geography  Hood Films and Geography In Pierre Bourdieu's (1984) terms, the “mapping” of the hood film – and its location – reveals this subgenre as embodying and expressing a particular class habitus – an internalized form of class condition. Through this class conditioning, Boyz, for example, dramatizes the very production of this habitus, particularly with its primary focus on coming-of-age storylines, masculinity, race, power, opportunity and familial disruptions. Boyz avoids the classical narrative paradigm of the gangster’s (Doughboy’s) rise and fall because as it suggests (argues) his crime is not caused by individual choice alone but is actively the result of systemic problems plaguing the black community since “white flight” White flight: racially mixed city living gave way during the 50s/60s to a more homogenous, suburban ideal in which areas such as SCLA – formally diverse and working class – are largely abandoned, professionally (businesses left), politically, and in terms of population.  Hood Films and Geography As such, notable in Boyz is the lack of diversity seen in Do The Right Thing, for example, and instead its world is drawn as one of crime, community and survival. Whiteness and Boyz: White characters are peripheral, if not entirely absent, however in this absence, whiteness is implicitly present, and explicitly critiqued as a hegemonic, socially structuring force. Whiteness is signified through the use of off-screen space as the surrounding and surveilling organization of the city as inner and outer, the organization of the inner-city as the enclosure that becomes the hood. This aesthetic and discursive figuration of space configures and re-enforces the “hood” as containment, as entrapment, as a space from which to escape.  Hood Films and Geography As Furious (Tre’s dad) and a neighborhood elder points out, in the hood, the space of blackness, the inner-city now turned hood, is not a safe haven, is not that space of renewal but is a space of suppression, surveillance and genocide. Causation: the inner-city is one of control and repression and one that is isolated by the absence of whiteness as that absence is the result of white flight and post-industrial decay – leaving the area largely devoid of access to capitalism, opportunity, mobility or even, a future.  Hood Films and Geography Boyz in the Hood demonstrates then: Spatial relations are power relations. The space occupied by these young people is produced and socially constructed by the means of production. That is, constructed by 1) un/employment and labor relations 2) by class and race 3) by the social, educational, political and economic systems which ultimately exclude those who occupy the hood SOC 902 END OF LECTURE