What is this “Black” in Black Popular Culture
I largely agree with Hall’s point about popular culture - a commodified and stereotyped entity, a mythic place of dominance, presented as a theater for what the “popular” desires and fantasies constructed to tell us about how the world thinks of black people. However, some aspects felt a bit of a contradiction - of a contradiction. I felt very drawn to the piece and compelled to understand it, but I feel that I’ve mostly fallen short.
What I found myself still to be confused about was the notion of cultural Black signifiers - and what their relations were to just existing as distinct to Black communities, as opposed to essentialist frames of thinking about culture. “ we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct…The essentializing moment is weak because it naturalizes and dehistoricizes differences, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic.” (p. 111) Is this what we are doing?
Again, I was overwhelmed by the piece but simultaneously compelled(??). I generally felt confused about how to theorize “popular” aspects of Black culture versus Black popular culture and where Black communities fit within this analysis. This is entirely apart from the eventual commodification within the mainstream. I wouldn’t necessarily define this as the “pure culture” that Hall references, but it’s undoubtedly distinct to a community. (I think I might just be entirely missing the point).
Encoding/decoding
In thinking about the production process of broadcast news, everything is intertwined between the network executives. The producers, the on-screen talent, and the audience that consumes yet dictate the standard of what is being run - This piece reminds me a lot of Erving Goffman’s work on Dramaturgy and thinking about the encoding/decoding processes as operating between a front and backstage; and more specifically the degree of habituation of naturalized codes. I was especially drawn to Hall’s theory, as the audience serves as both the source and receiver. In thinking about the processes that go into production, I wonder what Hall would think about “diverse representation” in meso-media settings; how important or non-influential is diversity in the newsroom to combat various structures of understanding?
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