ORIENTALISM:

The Link between culture, imperial power & colonialism

the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism

Edward Said Culture and Imperialism, 1993: xiii

all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, through the functioning of the category of the subject

Althusser (1971:190)

Ideological state apparatus (ISA), is a theoretical concept developed by (Algerian born) French philosopher Louis Althusser which is used to describe the way in which structures of civic society – education, culture, the arts, the family, religion, bureaucracy, administration etc serve to structure the ideological perspectives of society, which in turn form our individual subject identity. 

5. Hegemonic struggle (Gramsci) the chance to reclaim . .

‘from America, black voices will take up the hymn with fuller unison. The ‘black world’ will see the light

FRANTZ Fanon ‘on national culture’

Conceptual theoretical idea that helps you live in the times we live in now.

Characterized by new technology new media.

Parody v Pastiche

pastiche is a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist

parody is a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony

intertextuality: surface signs, gestures & play

preoccupation with visual style: memento is very visual.

fragmentary, decentred nature

Meta narrative overall big structure

BRICOLAGE is a useful term to apply to postmodernist texts as it ‘involves the rearrangment and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’ (Barker & Jane, 2016:237). Similarly, INTERTEXTUALITY is another useful term to use, as it suggests signs only have meaning in reference to other signs and that meaning is therefore a complex process of decoding/encoding with individuals both taking and creating meaning in the process of reading texts

Narrative Theory

Structuralism has been very powerful in its influence on narrative theory. Its main virtue is that it is most interested in those things that narratives have in common, rather than in the distinctive characteristics of specific narratives.

Thompson makes a distinction between a narrative which may be regarded, broadly speaking, as a communication which ‘tells a story’. The story generally consists of characters and a succession of events, combined in a way which displays a certain orientation or ‘plot’. As such, narrative is the overall structure involved in communication, which can be broken down into: ‘story’ and ‘plot’.

1. Tztevan Todorov (Tripartite narrative structure):

A really good way to think about NARRATIVE STRUCTURE is to recognise that most stories can be easily broken down into a BEGINNING / MIDDLE / END. The Bulgarian structuralist theorist Tztevan Todorov presents this idea as:

• Equilibrium
• Disruption
• New equilibrium

2. Vladimir Propp (Character Types and Function) STOCK CHARACTERS to structure stories

CHARACTERS FUNCTION TO PROVIDE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE:

1. Hero
2. Helper
3. Princess
4. Villain
5. Victim
6. Dispatcher
7. Father
8. False Hero

Seymour Chatman: Satellites & Kernels

• Kernels: key moments in the plot / narrative structure
• Satellites: embellishments, developments, aesthetics
• This theory allows students to break down a narrative into 2 distinct elements. Those elements which are absolutely essential to the story / plot / narrative development, which are known as KERNELS and those moments that could be removed and the overall logic would not be disturbed, known as SATELLITES. Think about the way satellites orbit something bigger like a planet. Satellites can therefore be thought as useful to develop character, emotion, location, time and so on, but NOT ESSENTIAL. In this way they are really useful creative elements but not essential to the story.

Roland Barthes: Proairetic and Hermenuetic Codes

• Proairetic code: action, movement, causation
• Hermenuetic code: reflection, dialogue, character or thematic development
• Enigma: the way in which intrigue and ideas are raised – which encourage an audience to want more information. (creates puzzels/questions)

Although the words proairetic and hermenuetic may seem very complex, it is easy for students to grasp in that moving image products are either based around ‘doing’ / ‘action’ or ‘talking’ / ‘reflection’. Look at this sequence from Buster Scruggs (Dir J Coen E Coen 2018), which is basically divided into ‘some talking’ (hermenuetic codes) which leads into ‘some doing’! (proairetic codes)

Key words: Elision- Ellipsis where you miss things out

time often moves backwards (flashbacks) or forwards (flash forwards) at moments which break the linear sequence. 

Time can also run simultaneously, in that it is possible to play-out different narratives at the same time: simultaneous or parallel narratives. 

Narrative strands are even able to be flagged up as something that needs to known (or will be fully developed) later, known as foreshadowing. This raises the concept that the audience are then given some information, feelings, ideas or logic that the on-screen actors do not have access to, which is called dramatic irony.

As such, some elements may emerge and play out but actually turn out to be of little value, meaning or consequence to the overall / main parts of the narrative – these can be called non-sequitars. Nevertheless, the use of light & shade is very important in terms of constructing an effective and enjoyable narrative.

Postmodernism can be understood as a philosophy that is characterised by concepts such as RE-IMAGINING, PASTICHE, PARODY, COPY, BRICOLAGE. It’s an approach towards understanding, knowledge, life, being, art, technology, culture, sociology, philosophy, politics and history that is REFERENTIAL – in that it often refers to and often copies other things in order to understand itself.

Parody v Pastiche 

pastiche is a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist

parody is a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony

BRICOLAGE is a useful term to apply to postmodernist texts as it ‘involves the rearrangment and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’ 

Intertextuality: Text inside another by being referenced

Shuker refers fragmentary, decentred nature of music videos, breaks up traditional understandings of time and space so that audiences are ‘no longer able to distinguish ‘fiction’ from ‘reality’, part of the postmodern condition’ (ibid).

Shuker notes, two points are frequently made about music videos: ‘their preoccupation with visual style, and associated with this, their status as key exemplars of ‘postmodern’ texts.’

Surface and style over substance
‘in a postmodern world, surfaces and style become the most important defining features of the mass media and popular culture‘ (Strinati: 234).

A brief economic, historical and societal backdrop to Postmodernism.

In 1959, Richard Hoggart (Uses of Literacy) noted the shift in modern societies particularly the impact on our ‘neighborhood lives’, which was ‘an extremely local life, in which everything is remarkably near‘ (1959:46).

In other words, there is an argument that postmodern culture is a consumer culture, where the emphasis on style eclipses the emphasis on utility or need. So that ultimately there is no real value to postmodern culture other than the need for consumption. If this is the case, then it is possible to link postmodernist cultural expression with broader shifts in society, specifically around economics and politics.

Fragmentary consumption = Fragementary identities.

This process of fragmented consumption separating, splitting up and dividing previously homogeneous groups such as, friends, the family, the neighborhood, the local community, the town, the county, the country and importantly, is often linked to the process of fragmented identity construction.

So in summary, the focus on FRAGMENTATION OF IDENTITY is characterised and linked to an increase of consumption and the proliferation of new forms of digital technologies. In effect, another key characteristic of postmodernism is the development of fragmented, alienated individuals living (precariously) in fragmented societies.

 Jean Baudrillard would describe as IMPLOSION which gives rise to what he terms SIMULACRA. 

 Jean Baudrillard together with Fredric Jameson,  Jean-Francois Lyotard’s. The loss of a metanarrative

 SIMULACRA. The idea that although the media has always been seen as a representation of reality – a simulation, from Baudrillard’s perspective of implosion, it is has become more than a representation or simulation and it has become SIMULACRUM not just a representation of the real, but the real itself, a grand narrative that is ‘truth‘ in its own right: an understanding of uncertain/certainty that Baudrillard terms the HYPERREAL.

You can look at another post that looks at identity, representation and the self. But here it is specifically looking at identity and representation through the lens of Empire and Colonialism.

From the perspective of the Atlantic slave trade.

ORIENTALISM:

The Link between culture, imperial power & colonialism (Edward Said)

Link between culture, imperial power and colonialism

‘an economic system like a nation or a religion, lives not by bread alone, but by beliefs, visions, daydreams as well, and these may be no less vital to it for being erroneous’ (V.G. Kiernan).

THE ORIENT AS THE ‘OTHER’ Jacques Lacan

CONSTRUCTED through the lens of WESTERN COLONIAL POWER. So as much as the concept and image of ‘the West’ itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.

Louis Althusser: ISA’s & the notion of ‘Interpellation’

all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, through the functioning of the category of the subject.

Hailed/interpellated: the way you are called and how others view you and how you therefore view yourself.

Hailing the dominant ideas

Frantz Fanon:

The Wretched of the Earth (1961): Fanon was born in the French colony of Martinique and appears to recognise the ‘mechanics of colonialism and its effects of those it ensnared.

Frantz Fanon took an active role, proposing the first step required for ‘colonialised’ people to reclaim their own past by finding a voice and an identity. 

1. Assimilation of colonial culture corresponding to the ‘mother country’ Chinua Achebe talks of the colonial writer as a ‘somewhat unfinished European who with patience guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European.’ (1988:46)
2. Immersion into an ‘authentic’ culture ‘brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted’
3. Fighting, revolutionary, national literature, ‘the mouthpiece of a new reality in action’.

Syncretism, double consciousness & hybridisation

mechanisms for understanding cross-cultural identities. Paul Gilroy 

His theme of Double Consciousness, derived from W. E. B. Dubois, involves ‘Black Atlantic’ striving to be both European and Black through their relationship to the land of their birth and their ethnic political constituency follow this wiki link for more on this point.

‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural polyvalency’(many cultural identities).

Systemic Societal Sexism

Misogyny: This is a term that derives from psychoanalysis and essentially means a fear and hatred of women

Sexism: the systematic ways in which men and women are brought up to view each other antagonistically, on the assumption that the male is always superior to the female

Patriarchy: a mechanism used by males as a way of exerting power and control in society

Sexism from an institutional perspective and at an individual level:

Feminism: a critical articulation for equality

<Feminist<>Female<>Feminine>

As a final part of this brief introduction, it is useful to draw upon Toril Moi’s (1987) crucial set of distinctions between: ‘feminist’, ‘female’ and ‘feminine’.

• Feminist = a political position
• Female = a matter of biology
• Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics

Laura Mulvey:

1975 polemical essay:

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‘. Central to her thesis was the role of the male gaze, a theoretical approach that suggests the role of ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look,’ in contemporary visual media.

One is based around Freudian psychoanalytic concept of scopophilia (‘taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze‘ ie OBJECTIFICATION)

another is vouyerism (the sexual pleasure gained in looking)

fetishism (‘the quality of a cut-out . . . stylised and fragmented‘), the way in which parts of the female body are presented as something to be ‘looked at’ and therefore ‘objectified‘ and ‘sexualised‘ – ‘close-ups of legs . . . or a face‘, of lips, hips, bums, tums, thighs, legs and breasts, etc. etc) which are exaggerated through cinematic conventions of ‘scale’, ‘size’, ‘focus’.

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed and their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact.

Music Video: ‘The Dreamworld?’

Sut Jhally‘s work at the Media Education Foundation (where Jean Kilbourne also produced much or her work) draws a connection between the aesthetics of pornography and the codes and conventions of the music video.

Raunch Culture – 3rd Wave Feminism

• an emphasis on the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion
• individual and do-it-yourself (DIY) tactics
• fluid and multiple subject positions and identities
• cyberactivism
• the reappropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes
• sex positivity

Intersectionality: Queer Theory

Hook: Multicultural Intersectionality

As Barker and Jane note, ‘black feminists have pointed ot the differences between black and white women’s experiences, cultural representations and interests’ (2016:346). In other words, arguments around gender also intersect with postcolonial arguments around ‘power relationships between black and white women’. So that ‘in a postcolonial context, women carry the double burden of being colonized by imperial powers and subordinated by colonial and native men’ (ibid).

structuralism: most interested in those things that narrative have in common.

Time: is generally linear.

Chronology: it is sequential.(video mostly random)

Space: different spaces being connected.

Narratives have an underlying or an underpinning theme. ( isolation by the beach)

Rules to narrative:

Tzetvan Todorov: Equilibrium, disruption, new equilibrium, (Tripartite narrative structure):e.g. beginning middle and end.

Freytag’s pyramid: visual illustration of your drama. Exposition, climax!, denouement.

Vladimir Propp: (stock characters who perform stock functions) For example, if you have a villain you probably have a victim.

Claude Levi-Strauss: Binary oppositions: This is where you understand narrative structure e.g. good vs bad.

Seymour Chatman: satellites and kernels: kernels are the main things in the story. Satellites orbit round they are not essential but they are helpful.

Narrative: is the overall structure

Story: is the things and themes

Plot: how things are arranged

1.  Pastiche – any form of creative work that imitates the work of another artist or group of artisits.
2. • Bricolage – work created out of a diverse range of things that happened to be available
3. • Intertextuality – the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text.
4. • Implosion – a therapeutic technique in which clients imagine and re-live aversive scenes associated with their anxiety
5. • cultural appropriation. –  the adoption of an element or elements of one culture by members of another culture

The video is mostly shot in a dark street and often cuts to a shot of him alone in a club. This video really reflects isolation as joji is walking alone through a dark street at night and is alone at a club emphasising isolation or that he is different.

The beginning of this video the camera closes into the singer and shows the audience he is in a dark place and trapped in a tight box. with nowhere to move most of the video is shot within this box which shows he is alone and no one is there to help him.

This video is shot in bright day within a massive area however in the video it begins with just post malone and his car as if he is reflecting. The scenery in the back round really emphasises isolation as within all this land all their is that is their is post malone and his car.

Just like post malone khalid uses the same method within his video to emphasise isolation.