Module 3

6/8/24, 9:59 PM CSOC202: Popular culture
Introduction
This module and Module 5 are two parts of a larger uniform narrative and curriculum. This module is
purposely specific in its content, focusing primarily on popular culture between 1985 and 1995.
Module 5 picks up where this module concludes. Future modules will focus on race, gentrification,
marginalization, power and mobility.
This module continues to situate and further employ many of the core concepts earlier modules have
introduced including ideology, hegemony, social conflict theory, symbolic interactionism,
encoding/decoding and media framing. Additionally, this module is centred on examining the various
ways in which Black culture and popular culture intersect, intermingle and conflict in terms of
representation, stereotype, ideology and hegemony, as well as popularity, social and cultural capital,
influence, rebellion and power. More specifically, this module introduces New Black Cinema and the
Hood Film as socially and politically active modes of cinema posing a challenge to the existing cinematic
popular culture produced by Hollywood. Central to the time period of this new cinema this module
examines – the 1980s and 1990s – is a centring of rap music and hip-hop culture, as well as sneakers
and basketball, as compelling reflections of a counter-hegemonic challenge to the ideological framework
structuring the dominant representations and narratives of race in American popular culture. Various
arenas of Black-specific popular culture have negotiated the opportunistic overtures of mainstream
popular culture, and this includes rap music and hip-hop culture. For example, Black popular culture has
been variously characterized as occupying an inherently oppositional, or counter-hegemonic, space
wherein the marginalized voices previously restricted to the margins of dominant culture are now active
in a controlling role in the production of the various cultural texts privileging the voices of experience
within the Black community and the cultural expressions prominent within.
Recurring Concepts
Key concepts to review and recall from earlier modules include:
Ideology and hegemony

Stuart Hall: Reception theory and the Encoding/Decoding model
The Culture Industry Thesis and the production of popular culture
Challenging the High Art-Low Art binary opposition
Topics and Learning Objectives

Topics
https://de.torontomu.ca/de_courses/templates/m/?c=455CB2657AAA59E32FAD80CB0B65B9DC&m=3&p=212972 1/19
This module will include the following topics:
The social construction of race

Racism and Racial Hierarchy
Critical Race Theory
Hollywood, New Black Cinema and Hood Film
Intersectionality
Learning Objectives
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
Centre and examine the contributions of the writers, directors, films and music that have
contributed to the rich history of Black popular culture while consuming current, contemporary
popular culture
Using critical race theory, analyze how films within New Black Cinema followed by Hood Film
address social mobility, social justice, power, and autonomy
Readings
Required Readings
Rose, T. (1994). Voices from the margins: Rap music and contemporary black cultural
production. In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary
America. Wesleyan University Press.
Massood, P. J. (1996). Mapping the hood: The genealogy of city space. In “Boyz N the
Hood” and “Menace II Society.” Cinema Journal, 35(2), 85–97.
The Concept of Race

Race categorizes human beings based on inherited biological or physical characteristics (such as skin
colour or facial features). Although seemingly a neutral descriptive tool, the concept of race has
functioned historically as a weapon, one used to draw false connections between specific physical
characteristics and a set of behavioural traits.
Example
For example, common sense racism is identified through such socially-mediated constructions
suggesting one race is especially skilled at a task that another struggles with, or suggesting
someone of a particular race must be interested in a type of music or sport. Additionally, race is a
hegemonic concept that justifies social inequalities by falsely implying that marginalized groups
have inferior abilities; to understand racism then, we also need to understand the concept of race
itself.
According to Omi and Winant (1986), “Everyone learns some combination, some version, of the rules of
racial classification… often without obvious teaching or conscious inculcation. Race becomes ‘common
sense’” (p. 62). This consideration of race suggests race is constituted as an objective reality, free of the
subjectivities permitting divorced, in many ways, from interpretation or constructed meaning. This is also
true of the racial categories that are presented and reified throughout society, but which are nonetheless,
socially defined.
The seemingly consistent categorization of people based upon identifiable physical attributes reinforces
the notion that these categories are objective groupings. This can be seen in the fact that students often
resist the idea that “white” or “black” or the other racial classifications, as they are commonly conceived,
are not objective, scientific, biological categories, but rather, that they represent notions that developed
historically and that have no biological significance beyond the meaning attributed to them by the
members of society.
The Construction of Race

In the early 1900s a functionalist-type theory was developed by a British Sociologist named Herbert
Spencer (1820–1903) that “scientifically” established a hierarchy of races and their potential for social
advancement. Like other functionalists, Spencer advocated differentiation and integration as the means
by which societies develop and modernize. He saw society as an organism that through societal
evolution grew to varying degrees of complexity. However, for Spencer, the driving mechanism behind
societal evolution is competitive struggle. He compared human societies to animal species and argued
that they develop through a competition for resources where the strongest survive. Spencer himself
coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.”
Spencer made the connection between society and race by theorizing that so-called simpler societies
reflect simpler races, i.e., that non-western societies that do not show a potential for science, rationality,
or industry (features of western modernization) are lower on the evolutionary ladder. Spencer did not
consider that societies develop differently and not always in the same direction, and Spencer’s theory
came at a time of global expansion where many non-western cultures were being encountered and
hence were being studied by anthropologists, who used western standards to evaluate many cultures.
Out of social evolutionism came a racial hierarchy that situated the white race at the top because of their
allegedly complex societies and other societies beneath them in a ranking order. This hierarchy
confirmed the “natural” order of things where whites, on the basis of a specious claim to “evolutionary
supremacy,” were considered naturally endowed for dominance.
Many of the terms included above elicit rightful consternation; Spencer’s purported hierarchy traffics in
language marginalizing non-white intelligence and bodies all the while establishing a “racial hierarchy”
that has not only endured in many ways, but has also left a significant footprint in the history and annals
of popular culture.
Cultural Criticism & Transformation book cover.
Source: Media Education Foundation
In her illuminating essay, Eating the Other, bell hooks (above left) reveals that media representations
of the racial Other – those not white – are vulnerable. That is, the image itself is not vulnerable, but
rather the source of the meanings, narratives, stereotypes and experiences the image represents is
vulnerable: the body or bodies that are mediated onto the screen by the dominant mechanisms
governing mainstream media, popular culture, for example.
Black Looks: Race and Representation book cover.
More specifically, hooks states that many representations of the Other reflect that so-called “racial
Source: Spencer
hierarchy” Open Library
established and the representations are able to “sustain a romantic fantasy of the
‘primitive’ and the concrete search for a real primitive paradise” (hooks, 1992, 370). For example, hooks
describes dominant white attitudes toward whiteness and the Other, and suggests that popular cultural
foregrounds whiteness as bland and boring, lacking many of the “exotic” characteristics popular culture
simultaneously ascribes to the Other, and hooks then writes, “non-white people [seem to have] more life
experience, [are] more worldly, sensual, and sexual because they [are] different” (hooks, 1992, 368).
The Production of Race

As Omi and Winant explain earlier in this module, in some manner everyone learns some combination or
equation purporting to explain racial categories, or hierarchies, as normal, natural and “common sense”
while also establishing that “common sense” to the point it becomes ideological: a set of beliefs that are
naturalized through dominant (and influential) media, political groups, corporations and governments. As
hooks, Omi and Winant all explain, these beliefs are then attributed to a person or group of persons. For
example, popular culture includes a host of examples confirming a dominant cultural belief that has seen
and consumed non-white bodies as exotic, as well as forbidden, sexual or hypersexual, fetishistic and
deviant.
Those fantasies and stereotypes that circulate through popular culture may be mythological, but they are
also cultural constructions that popular culture naturalizes as truths, and as the myths circulate over and
over and over they eventually settle neatly into “common sense.”
For hooks then, the mythologies in popular culture that naturalize Asian women as submissive and
subservient, or the Black male body as representing a forbidden or fetishistically-desired experience.
This Othering while desiring rehabilitates a racial lack – that is, that “blandness” hooks illustrated is
rendered less so through consuming or experiencing an eroticized or exoticized body. More specifically,
in referring to a group of white men whom she overhead discussing their sexual conquests with non-
white women, hooks writes,
“getting a bit of the Other, in this case engaging in sexual encounters with non-white females,
was considered a ritual of transcendence, a movement out into a world of difference that
would transform, an acceptable rite of passage. The direct objective was not simply to
sexually possess the Other; it was to be changed in some way by the encounter” (Hooks,
1992, 368).
As hooks confirms, those representations centring marginalized bodies as objects of fetishistic or

exoticized consumption do not reside solely within the fantasies and fictions of popular cultural
television, cinema, literature or advertising, but also exist outside of popular culture and in the
colloquially termed “real world.” While one viewer then may consume popular culture simply as a
mainstream text that is popular for a reason – “if it’s so popular then most people must watch it, right?” –
others may consume that same popular culture through an entirely different lens. For example, for hooks
popular culture represents a contested and inflammatory terrain, a place where ideologies are circulated,
imposed and maintained, but also where they are resisted, subverted and rejected.
Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory (CRT) reveals many of the troubling elements of Spencer’s conception of race and
also emphasizes the critical and interpretive thinking hooks explains while examining representations of
race and the various examples of racism as they appear across all forms of dominant and popular
culture. CRT endeavours to better understand how those marginalized by systemic racism are affected
by social and cultural perceptions of race that persist both on the screen and in the social world. As a
framework that can be used to theorize, examine and challenge the ways race and racism implicitly and
explicitly impact social structures, practices and discourses, CRT labours to reveal rather than conceal.
Four introductory tenets of critical race theory that sociology – and students of sociology – can borrow
while critically examining popular culture include:
Understanding racism as an existing and defining characteristic of American society.

Racism as an active malignancy that weaves through and intersects with all social structures and
institutions.
Racism’s formation through whiteness and ideologies of colourblindness
Privileging and engaging narrative storytelling to centre the reality of racism and racial oppression
in the experiences and stories of those marginalized, both formally and informally.
With this four-part system in place then, a dominant and privileged viewer is positioned to scrutinize
representations of race in popular culture while also recognizing how racism is reproduced, maintained
and protected through the various capabilities of popular culture. For example, hooks’ salient illustration
of racialized bodies as objects of consumption intersecting with ideology, hegemony and representation,
as well as with race, gender and mythology.
Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality

As the general history of the West has revealed both broadly and closely, the concept and experiences
of race are not static; but if race is instead to be understood as a social construction unrooted to any
scientific or biological fact, this realization then – one that Omi and Wanant (1986) argue is difficult to
arrive at – must be the result of negotiating the consistent historicizing of race as an objective,
unambiguous truth instead of understanding racial categorization as figuring prominently in the
naturalizing of racial ideologies that erect and maintain varied forms of social stratification. Moreover,
despite race being identified as a social construction, race indeed represents the lived experiences of
those racially Othered, while in turn exposing various real – and experienced as real – categories of
social inclusion and exclusion, mobility and restrictions of mobility, and equality and inequality.
In her own words, Kimberly Crenshaw defines intersectionality as “a lens through which you can see
where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race
problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework
erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.” (Crenshaw, 2017).
Intersectionality is both instructive and revealing, asking that rather than focusing simply on only the
racism or marginalization experienced, intersectionality addresses the broader issues that intersect with
the initial or primary discrimination experienced. To be sure, Crenshaw is in no manner seeking to
diminish or marginalize the experiencing of racism, but instead identifying the additional issues
contributing to the marginalization.
For example, as Crenshaw explains, racism cannot be fully understood without first investigating how it
“intersects and collides with other axes of oppression, such as patriarchy” (Crenshaw, 1989, 140).
Widely regarded as a theoretical development that has broadened the scope of both critical race theory
and feminism, intersectionality contends that gender alone may not be the sole element in determining a
woman’s “place” in society. As Crenshaw informs, “Black women can experience discrimination in ways
that are both similar to and different from those experienced by white women and Black men. Black
women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women’s experiences; sometimes
they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet often they experience double-discrimination –
the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And
sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black women – not the sum of race and sex
discrimination, but as Black women” (Crenshaw, 1989, 149).
Summary: Social Construction and Production of

Race, Critical Race Theory, and Intersectionality
Race intersects with other social identities and areas of oppression and inequality. For example,
race and gender can intersect producing a “double-discrimination” women of colour are subjected
to experiencing.
Popular cultural representations of race and racial difference are central in the reproduction of
racial and racist ideologies, including the so-called “common sense” beliefs that assign socially
imagined stereotypes to racialized bodies.
Racial categories are not objective, inherent, or fixed; however, they are categories that endure
while also maintaining many structures and institutions in which racism and discrimination endure,
also.
Whiteness, in terms of privilege, power and mobility, is often experienced as a natural order of a
way of life. For example, colour blindness’s claim that “I don’t see race.” This claim may seem to
be a social and fictional “racial neutralizer”; however, it more so reveals the privileged power of
those making the statement in not “having” to see and experience race as a result of racism.
Hollywood and Popular Cinema

Each of the sociological theories and theorists addressed throughout this module enable looking in on
Hollywood with a scrutinizing and suspicious gaze, and this is not without many compelling reasons.
Hollywood, as a capitalist system solidly established as the dominant arena in the cultural production of
film and television, is subject to an analysis that locates Hollywood as a site of popularity and profit, but
also discord and discontent, in particular as Crenshaw, Hall, hooks and West all contend in
complementary and individual ways. For example, each has individually provided engaging and critical
insights into popular culture while also encouraging viewers to consume these cultural texts in an active,
engaged and questioning manner rather than as passive, complacent consumers.
According to Stuart Hall, “within culture, marginality, though it remains peripheral to the broader
mainstream, has never been such a productive space as it is now. And that is not simply the opening
within the dominant spaces that those outside it can occupy. It is also the result of the cultural politics of
difference, of the struggles around difference, of the production of new identities, of the appearance of
new subjects on the political and cultural stage” (Hall, 1993, 106). Additionally, Hall argues that when a
culture industry as powerful as Hollywood is challenged, that struggle sparking that challenge is over
cultural hegemony, a struggle Hall believes to be as active in popular culture as anywhere else (Hall,
1993, 106)
In this particular instance, cultural hegemony is identified as the power, domination and control
Hollywood leverages in maintaining and protecting the established norms, beliefs, values and
expectations that established and profitable genres such as the romantic comedy or “feel good” drama
rely on. This summary, however, is as misleading as it is illustrating, and Hall states that “cultural
hegemony is never about pure victory or pure domination (that’s not what the term means); it is never a
zero-sum cultural game; it is always about shifting the balance of power in the relations of culture; it is
always about changing the dispositions and the configurations of cultural power, not getting out of it”
(Hall, 1993, 106). For Hall then, culture is best understood as an area of contestation, challenge and
potentially, change.
An Introduction to New Black Cinema

In his essay, “New U.S. Black Cinema,” Taylor Clyde identifies New Black Cinema as a cultural moment
born out of the Black Arts movement of the Post-Civil Rights era of the 1960s (Clyde, 1983). Initially
referred to as the L.A. Rebellion or the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, the L.A Rebellion was
made up of a group of young Black filmmakers emerging from the UCLA Film School starting in the late
1960s and continuing until the last half of the 1980s, their New Black Cinema subsequently becoming
the primary moniker or term of reference.
As Clyde explains, the ideology of the movement’s early years reflected many of those same issues
addressed by the Civil Rights and Post-Civil Rights movements, fundamental among them, a concern
with establishing a self-determining black cultural identity, a social justice imperative that the later
filmmakers of New Black Cinema continued via its determined resistance to the film ideology of
Hollywood (Clyde, 1983).
Core Features of New Black Cinema
Core features of New Black Cinema, aside from a determined antagonistic relation to Hollywood,
included three directions:
a dimension of realness as an extension of social reality

a relationship to Afro-American oral traditions and storytelling
a connection and intimacy with Black music
Keith Harris picks up New Black Cinema as it exists in the 1980s as a period of Black cultural production
operating in and outside Hollywood that begins with Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986). As Harris
explains, the ensuing cycle of New Black Cinema’s “‘mainstream’ and independent films sparked debate
as being films by, for, and about African Americans and informed by cultural nationalism, Afrocentrism,
black aesthetics, and black pop cultural forms like hip hop and gangsta rap” (Harris). This political
filmmaking is reflected on by bell hooks as she states, “[t]o become filmmakers, black artists start from
the standpoint of resistance, no matter the culture they work in. That is why the term black filmmaker
signifies something different from the term filmmaker” (hooks, 1996).
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)

movie poster.
Source: Do the Right Thing on Wikipedia
She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, 1986)

movie poster.
Source: She’s Gotta Have It on Wikipedia
Enter: Spike Lee

Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986) and Do The Right Thing (1989) were both were released in
the latter half of the 1980s, and this was an interesting time for popular culture as
Rap music was making significant inroads within mainstream popular culture as the newly
established music videos-only formatting of MTV in America and Much Music in Canada both came
to produce a rap-specific programming: MTV’s Yo! MTV Raps and Much Music’s Rap City
premiering on televisions not long after.
Rap music’s relationship to fashion, sneakers and basketball was becoming increasingly influential
as the stylized “image” of rap music became a marker of “cool fashion.”
Nike signed a young basketball player named Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal punctuated
by the designing and production of the Air Jordan I sneaker by an as-then unknown young sneaker
designer, Tinker Hatfield.
In Provocations on Sneakers (2009) Dylan Miner informs that during the pre-1986 period of sneaker
consumption, purchasing patterns were more closely aligned with use-value, as opposed to brand loyalty
or social status. For example, as Miner states, the rise of Air Jordans and post-1986 sneaker
consumption was marked by a complex system of meaning, status, race and power, and a shift from a
sneaker’s use-value towards their social “juice value” (Miner, 2009, 88), a clever spin on use-value and
identifying the active mobility of a mass-produced commodity such as a pair of sneakers to be
transformative for the individual, as well as transformed by the individual themselves (Miner, 2009, 88).
Analyze the Screenings: Do the Right Thing

Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) not only creates space for Black cultural expressions and
narratives to exist, Lee ensures that both thrive as dominant and defining characteristics of the film. The
film is not a romantic comedy, nor is it an action film or a romance, and while it is certainly categorically a
drama, it is also far too reflective of the “real world problems that exist out there,” and as a result may be
best described as a “social drama” that also satisfies the three thematic directions marking the initial
earlier films of late 1960s New Black Cinema. The Brooklyn neighbourhood that forms the film’s
backdrop is a vibrant, colourful and visually dazzling inner-city corner of the larger borough, and as a
racially geographic and demarcated space, rap music and hip-hop culture, as well as a host of images
referencing basketball culture, are just some of the cultural familiars of that time and space (1989). That
is, the rap music, hip hop and basketball the viewer sees on the screen are three of the central “cultural
familiars” of that moment in time, a sweltering hot summer day in 1989 in Brooklyn, New York.
Basketball As Social Commentary

In his Am I Black Enough for You?: Popular Culture from the “Hood” and Beyond (Todd Boyd,
1997), Boyd examines sport and its wearable objects such as sneakers, hats, and jerseys as having
traditionally been read as masculine, and states that since the 1970s “basketball has been constructed
as masculine and basketball has signaled the embodiment of blackness in contemporary popular
culture” (Boyd, 1997, 54). Additionally, in his Young, Black, Rich and Famous: The Rise of the NBA,
the Hip-Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture (Todd Boyd, 2003), he states
that basketball is “the most visible stage” where a lifestyle of Black masculinity is played out” (2003, 12),
and the basketball court represents an important space for racial and cultural definition, in terms of
masculinity, the family, community and power.
In He Got Game (Spike Lee, 1998), Jake Shuttlesworth (Denzal Washington), recently released from
prison, plays a game of basketball with his son, Jesus (Ray Allen) while wearing a pair of Nike Air Jordan
13s. The scene was shot during the summer of 1997, and not only were the sneakers yet to be released
to the general public, but Michael Jordan himself had yet to even wear them in a game, and would not
until the following October when the NBA’s 1997–98 season of play began. As a time prior to
mainstream internet use, for the vast majority of people, He Got Game provided basketball fans and
sneaker enthusiasts with a first glimpse and a preview of the soon to be released sneaker, a savvy move
on behalf of both Lee and Nike, as the sneaker quickly became one of the most coveted and valuable in
the pantheon of sneaker culture.
Introducing the Hood Film
Boyz N The Hood (John Singleton, 1991) movie poster.
Source: Wikipedia
In a general sense, this section of the module continues to critically examine representations of race as
they circulate through popular culture, but in doing so also continues to privilege a gaze and analytical
direction that examines those representations through Critical Race Theory while understanding that
New Black Cinema begins with an ideological foundation that positions social resistance and social
commentary as primary characteristics of its challenge to the hegemony of Hollywood’s popular cinema.
More specifically, and according to Michael Eric Dyson, the primary task of Black film criticism and
spectatorship should not be to endorse a form of academic analysis marked by rigid disciplinary
boundaries but instead should promote overlapping and intersecting forms of analysis that foster diverse
areas of inquiry (Michael Eric Dyson, 1992, 35). Additionally, this section also introduces a new element
to this module, and examines dominant ideologies of crime, criminality and policing as characteristic of
systemic racism while fuelling further discrimination, inequality and restrictions in mobility and
opportunity, violations that further marginalize those living in an inner-city neighbourhood, or hood.
Lastly, central to this section is a further centring of rap music as increasingly popular and influential, as
well as its mobilization as a multidisciplinary genre that extends beyond the Billboard or MTV music
charts and into youth culture, subculture, the suburban enclave, and onto the screens of popular cinema,
as well as the soundtracks of popular cinema.
As a subgenre born out of New Black Cinema, the reality of the world inside the Hood Film is, as Harris
explains, a space of definitive Blackness; white bodies rarely appear and if so as authority figures such
as government officials, politicians or police officers. The inner-city neighbourhood, now termed “the
hood,” is no longer the safe haven it once was, it is not a space of urban renewal or gentrification, but it
is a place “that demonstrates that spatial relations are power relations and that space is produced and
socially constructed by the means of production, in other words, by unemployment and labor relations,
by class and race, by the social, educational, political and economic systems which exclude those who
occupy the hood” (Harris, 13).
As Harris notes, by 1991, there were nineteen films by Black directors scheduled for release, and by the
end of 1991, at least twelve of them had secured Hollywood studio backing (Harris, 3). This statistic
reflects Stuart Hall’s analysis of Black popular culture’s relationship to cultural hegemony as not a matter
of gaining unilateral power or total domination, but it is about shifting the balance of power in the
relations of culture, and shift indicated by New Black Cinema’s working inside and outside of the
Hollywood studio system, yet also in specific reference to the rapidly popular hood film, as dependent on
the hood itself as a denotative reference of the “real world” as it connotatively represents it in the
“fictional film world.” The hood film, however, retains “a dimension of realness that signals its reflection of
social reality, the world outside the film that also thematically exists inside the film, as well. As Barry
Keith Grant explains it, however, the hood film, as a cinema genre, neatly negotiates and avoids the
exploitative tendencies and nature of Hollywood in its representation of the hood through acute social
commentaries that draw on sociology and criminology.
As Grant states, “[L]ike many classic gangster movies, such films as Boyz N the Hood (1991),
Juice (1992), Menace II Society (1993) and Dead Presidents (1995) emphasize the environmental
influence on criminal and antisocial behavior, but they explore this theme somewhat differently. If the
classic gangster's rise to the top of the mob is on one level a validation of capitalism and the American
Dream, the ’hood movie exposes a darker side, the result of years of racist exploitation. These films
[hood films] avoid the classical narrative paradigm of the gangster’s rise and fall because they espouse
the view that crime is not caused by aberrant individuals but is the result of systemic problems of
mainstream society which they define as white, patriarchal, and capitalist and thus requires collective
solutions” (Grant, 193).
In his essay, “Between Apocalypse and Redemption: John Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood” (Michael Eric
Dyson, 1992), Dyson begins by noting the stark and intended confrontational manner in which Boyz N
The Hood introduces itself with nothing more than white words across a black screen stating a
horrifying fact of life while “living in the hood.”
Opening scene of Boyz n the Hood.
Source: YouTube
According to Dyson, “these words are both summary and opening salvo in Singleton’s battle to
reinterpret and redeem the black male experience. With Boyz N the Hood we have the most brilliantly
executed and fully realized portrait of the coming-of-age odyssey that black boys must undertake in the
suffocating conditions of urban decay and civic chaos” (Dyson, 1992, 122). Dyson further centralizes the
social conditions the film explores while also critiquing the stereotypes they entrench and states that
while the film “is a painful and powerful look at the lives of black people, mostly male, who live in a lower-
middle-class neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles”; at the same time it is also “a filmic
demythologization of the reigning tropes, images, and metaphors that have expressed the experience of
life in South Central Los Angeles. While gangs are a central part of the urban landscape, they are not its
exclusive reality. And though gang warfare occupies a looming periphery in Singleton’s film, it is not its
defining center” (Dyson, 1992, 125).
The Hood Film as Mainstream Popular Culture
The surging popularity of the hood film alongside its relationship with an already established rap music
culture positioned the hood film as a both an ideological resistance towards dominant culture and
capitalism, as well as a thriving, new and highly marketable popular cinema. This theorizing of the hood
film as representing a challenge to dominant culture resulting in its inclusion in, rather than its
domination over, popular culture again echoes the earlier sentiment Hall provides. Additionally, this then
positions the hood film as an appropriate example of a crossover film, and as Harris explains, “the
concept of crossover used here is informed by the music industrial notion and phenomenon of ‘going
mainstream,’ moving from one market audience to another, while still grounded in a particular tradition,
gaining a wider audience, while not losing the original audience, or the majority of that original audience”
(Harris,1). For example, the challenges earlier New Black Cinema posed to the dominant ideological
representations of race recurrent in Hollywood movies is continued through the hood film as it exists and
operates both inside Hollywood while also remaining outside and “true to itself.”
In her influential book, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
(Tricia Rose, 1994), Rose states that rap music’s rapid upward trajectory position it “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-optation.”
Additionally, she articulates rap music’s relationship to popular culture and contextualizes both as in
possession of a type of popularity readily understood as confirming a social fact: “black culture is cool
culture.” In particular, and especially in terms of a suburban and largely white mainstream audience
through which rap music and the hood film provided a mobilized, curious and voyeuristic gaze, able to
listen to and look in on Black culture.
The multicultural and geographically diverse nature of the popularity of rap music by 1990 was vital to
the production of hood films as it (a) offered assurance to Hollywood financial backers that their
investments were secure and (b) a rapper’s mainstream appeal and popularity provided a beneficial
musical tie-in. For example, a list of rappers whose mainstream appeal was settled in advance of their
being cast include not only Ice Cube, but also Ice-T (New Jack City, 1991) Tupac Shakur (Juice, 1992;
Poetic Justice, 1993) and DMX and Nas (Belly, 1999), among many others, and to varying degrees of
screen time. Finally, and as Harris summarizes, these new crossover “stage to screen” performers
provided star power as well as authenticity, their established rap career legitimizing their crossing over,
and ultimately confirming the hood film as accessible and appealing to a wide-ranging demographic of
film, music and popular culture fans and audiences (Harris,17–18).
Dyson states that the reality of “life in the hood” and the authenticity Singleton secures in representing it
accurately is enhanced by his casting of Ice Cube as it “allows him to seize symbolic capital from a real
life rap icon, while tailoring the violent excesses of Ice Cube’s rap persona into a jarring visual reminder
of the cost paid by black males for survival in American society” and “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” (Dyson,1992,124).
Analyze the Screenings: Boyz N The Hood

Hood films such as Boyz N the Hood prioritize within their images and narratives a social commentary
that addresses the restrictive containment of the geography of a neighbourhood as it is demarcated as
racialized space (or hood) that is subject to both formal (the police) and informal (various) modes and
gazes of surveillance. Additionally, Harris identifies the popularity of the hood film in the early 1990s as
demonstrative of the inner-city as a cinematic setting representationally signified in rap music and
gangster rap as objectively marketable beyond a presumed audience of only urban, Black youth.
Instead, the hood film, and all the attendant social and popular cultural characteristics it contains are
understood as appealing to the cautious, but curious gaze of those comprising the wider demographic
and audience Harris details.
In the following scene, viewers look in on a popular gathering spot on Friday nights in South Central Los
Angeles. Busy, hectic and made up various groups of young, Black men and women, the social scene is
a visually stimulating one, as stylish young people intermingle in and around customized low-rider cars
as their conversations and dialogue flow easily along.
In the screening below, Tre and his best friend, Ricky, Doughboy’s younger brother, stop in one
afternoon to visit with Tre’s father, Furious. After Ricky makes a casual remark about the neighbourhood
where Furious, an insurance adjuster, keeps his office, the two teens find themselves in Furious’ car en
route to what turns into an impromptu sociology lecture.
Summary
The module has introduced you to representations of race in popular culture. In particular, you have
studied representations of Blackness in New Black Cinema and the Hood Film. This focus is an
especially key area of study, as both Do The Right Thing and Boyz N The Hood reveal. More
specifically, each film is regarded as a key text in the production of Black popular culture but also in
studying the role of each in crossing over into so-called “mainstream” popular culture. For example, the
late 1980s and early 1990s reflect an important time in popular cultural history as Black culture itself – a
culture with an already long, rich and critical history in terms of music, style and cinema – began to
formally become increasingly influential and powerful in popular culture as New Black Cinema, the Hood
Film, hip-hop culture and rap music, as well as the Black television sitcom you will be introduced to in
Module 4, all began to become formal components of dominant culture at large.
Assignments
Module 3 entry due by Friday at 11:59 p.m.
References
Boyd, Todd. Am I Black Enough for You?: Popular Culture from the “Hood” and Beyond.
Indiana University Press. 1997.
Boyd, Tood. Young, Black, Rich and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip-Hop Invasion,
and the Transformation of American Culture. Bison Books, 2003
Crenshaw, K.W. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal
Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8..
Crenshaw, K.W. Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later.
Retrieved from https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality-
more-two-decades-later
Dyson, Michael Eric. Between Apocalypse and Redemption. Cultural Critique, No. 21 (Spring,
1992), pp. 121–141.
Grant, Barry Keith. ”Strange Days: Gender and ideology in new genre films.” In Murray Pomerance
(Ed.). Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: Gender in film at the end of the
twentieth century (185–199). Albany: State University of New York Press. 2001.
Harris, Keith M. Black Crossover Cinema. 2011.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9780470671153.wbhaf079
hooks, bell. “Eating the other: Desire and resistance.” In Black Looks: Race and
Representation, pp. 21–39. Boston: South End Press, 1992.
hooks, bell. Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies, 1996)
Miner, Dylan A. T. "Provocations on Sneakers: The Multiple Significations of Athletic Shoes, Sport,
Race, and Masculinity." CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 9 no. 2, (2009) p. 73-107. Project
MUSE, doi:10.1353/ncr.0.0075.
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1994
Snead, James. 1985. Recoding Blackness: The visual rhetoric of Black independent film.
Whitney Museum of American Art:The New American Filmmakers Series. Program 23, 1–2.
Taylor, Clyde. “New U.S. Black Cinema.” New York: Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983, pp. 46-48,
West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” Russell Ferguson et al. (eds.), Out There:
Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Cambridge: MIT Press (1990).

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6/8/24, 9:59 PM CSOC202: Popular culture

Key concepts to review and recall from earlier modules include:

Ideology and hegemony

Topics and Learning Objectives

This module will include the following topics:

The social construction of race

The Concept of Race

The Construction of Race

Cultural Criticism & Transformation book cover.

Source: Media Education Foundation

The Production of Race

As hooks confirms, those representations centring marginalized bodies as objects of fetishistic or

Critical Race Theory

Understanding racism as an existing and defining characteristic of American society.

Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality

Summary: Social Construction and Production of

Hollywood and Popular Cinema

An Introduction to New Black Cinema

Core Features of New Black Cinema

a dimension of realness as an extension of social reality

Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)

Source: Do the Right Thing on Wikipedia

She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, 1986)

Source: She’s Gotta Have It on Wikipedia

Enter: Spike Lee

Analyze the Screenings: Do the Right Thing

Basketball As Social Commentary

Introducing the Hood Film

Boyz N The Hood (John Singleton, 1991) movie poster.

Opening scene of Boyz n the Hood.

The Hood Film as Mainstream Popular Culture

Analyze the Screenings: Boyz N The Hood

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