A LETTER TO THE FREE:

Common:

• Stage name Common (formerly Common Sense)
• American actor and rapper
• Mainstream attention was from work with the Soulquarians
• Won a grammy for best R&B Single, with the song “Love of My Life”
• When acting he played in films like; John Wick Chapter 2, Street kings and American Gangster along with many others.
• Birthday: March 13, 1972 (age 49)

A letter to the free quotes:

“Slavery’s still alive, check Amendment 13” – references proof for the song, makes people realise that they haven’t actually seen that slavery is gone, they’ve only heard and thought they knew. However in Amendment 13 its said that you can still be a slave if you’re a criminal.

“Prison is a business, America’s the company” – shows that America is profiting off of arresting people, specifically black people.

“Instead of ‘n***a’ they use the word ‘criminal” – this is an example of how slavery hasn’t disappeared, its just changed to be something else that people turn a blind eye to because its behind a prison wall. As well as this, the racial slur used displays that its those same, white, racist people that still have the power and instead of openly acting in slavery, they “arrest” black people for little or no reason at all, then getting them into slavery in prison.

13th Amendment:

• The film explores the “intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States”
• the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime.
• She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, discussing how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations.
• Made $566 USD in box office

Youth Culture: Jodie’s presentation 

Culture is what influences people’s hearts, minds and opinions. This is the site of popular change.

○ Attempts to change to laws or legislation
○ Organised political movements
○ Public protests
○ Petitions, marches

● Antonio Gramsci: Italian philosopher writing in the 1930s
Key Terms:
● Hegemonic: dominant, ruling-class, power-holders
● Hegemonic culture: the dominant culture
● Cultural hegemony: power, rule, or domination maintained by ideological and cultural means.
● Ideology: worldview – beliefs, assumptions and values

POSTCOLONIALISM:

The Shadow of Slavery:

Most locations wealth comes from the 400 years of slave trading. Places like the UK thrived off of slave trading between America and Africa. African kings traded other tribes prisoners for guns, plants and guns, then America traded plants, guns and substances for slaves.

Edward Said:

“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

Edward Said – “In this view, the outlying regions of the world have no life, history or culture to speak of, no independence or integrity worth representing without the West.“

ORIENTALISM:

Europe’s view at the oriented of the world, implying the the west side of the word is better than the east, promoting stereotypes. For example stereotypes like Muslims are terrorists and black people are criminals, orientalism is what those races define the wests views on them.

Jacques Lacan:

“We cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not“

We can never discover who we are, because we cannot look at ourselves from the outside. We can only apprehend a reflection of ourselves. Finding ourselves is useless, we will never find out who/what we are, however we can find out who we are not.