Watch Cultural Criticism and Transformation (66 minutes).

Filmmaker Information and Transcript are available online.

Part 1: On Cultural Criticism

Why Study Popular Culture?  Because “popular culture is the primary pedagogical medium, it is where the learning or pedagogy is.

Critical Thinking as Transformation

• Critical thinking is at the heart of anybody transforming their lives.
• We all use culture to negotiate the politics of difference to develop agency.
• Hooks found the primary difference between students in or not in conditions of privilege, was a profound difference in their sense of agency.

The Power of Representation

• Who has power to create representations and decide who does what to whom?
• Who determines meaning of representations?
• Hooks discusses films Kids and Braveheart.

Motivated Representations

• Hooks examines: What motivation caused Wayne Wang to cast thief as African American in film Smoke, beyond economic profit?
• What motivates reproduction of dehumanizing stereotypes in gender, race and other representations?

Why? white supremacist capitalist patriarchy

• Hooks uses the phrase to describe an institutional structure with interlocking systems of domination that define our reality… and we all frame ourselves in relation to this political world.
• We will not understand if we only look through the lens of race or of gender.

Enlightened Witness

• We observe representations and responses with a proactive sense of agency.
• We use our literacy, media literacy and our critical thinking to determine what we see and to decolonize out minds

Part 2: Doing Cultural Criticism

Constructed Narrative

• Hooks discussed documentary Hoop Dreams (1990) as a constructed narrative and not a complete account. 

Dealing with OJ

• News constructed as race based spectacle, though the public response was similar across race.
• Guy Debord (1967) Society of the Spectacle, described this media behavior pattern.

Madonna: From Feminism to Patriarchy

• Hooks describes how her feminist celebrity was reinvented as realigned patriarchy.

Spike Lee: Hollywood’s Fall Guy

• Hooks questions how filmmaker Lee’s success is framed as failure in Hollywood media.

The Voyeur’s Gaze

• Critical analysis of the film KIDS, described as an example of how the media seduces audiences with images of “transgression”, which actually reinforce and do not challenge gender and race based hegemony with stereotyped images of sexual and racial domination.

Rap: Authentic expression or market construct?  

• Hooks says it is important to examine distinctions between authentic cultural expression or voice and economically constructed media products that use gender and race based hegemony.

Color Coding Black Female Bodies

• Hooks explores continuing patterns of gender and race based subordination in media including reinscribing a color based caste system, where ideas of authenticity become meaningless.

Consuming Commodified Blackness

• Imitation of cultural difference is different from real change rooted in cultural understanding.
• It is possible to consume culturally distinctive products, without ever building deeper cultural understanding of difference.
• This allows white privilege to remain unexamined.

Hooks claims Americans are obsessed with transgression and content that grabs our attention, but does not really challenge race, gender, and other hegemony systems.  

 

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Reference

Jhally, S. (1997). Cultural criticism & transformation. [Motion picture]. Northampton, MA. Media Education Foundation.