Jonathan Munby

Manhattan Melodrama's “Art of the Weak”: Telling History from the Other Side in the 1930s Talking Gangster Film

Ever since gangsters first appeared on the American screen (officially with D. W. Griffiths Musketeers of Pig Alley , in 1912) they have been involved in a prolonged battle with the forces of “legitimate” culture. Having fought their fights from the wrong side of the street gangsters have continually drawn attention to the line which separates legitimate from illegitimate Americans. This has raised problems in accounting for the gangster genres significance. In stigmatizing the ethnic urban poor as criminal, the gangster genre betrays its origins in a nativist discourse which sought to cast “hyphenated” Americans as “un-American” and in need of “ Americanization. ” Yet, as perhaps the most powerful vehicle for the nationalization and popularization of ethnic urban American life, the gangster genre overturned many aspects of its iniquitous origin, playing an important part in the re-writing of American history from the perspective (and, as I shall demonstrate, quite literally in the voice) of the ethnic urban lower class. This contradiction is characteristic of the dynamic and changing role American popular culture artifacts play in the mediation of the nations history. Regardless of the poetic and ideological licence gangster fictions take with the very real socio-historical problems of the ethnic urban poor, the central conflict which informs these narratives remains the question of social, economic, and cultural exclusion.

The work of art in the age of hip hop reproduction: Ice-T and the cultural capital of keeping it real again in Kings of Vice (2011) and Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap (2012)

In turning his talents to fiction in his 2011 debut novel, Kings of Vice, gangsta rapper Ice-T has faced a particularly intricate challenge in “keeping it real”. At this point in the twenty-first century, the credibility of hip hop’s harder core seems to have been undermined by the distance gangsta rap has travelled from the street realities that gave it birth in the 1980s to the millionaire enterprises that have emerged since. A “rapocracy” of incredibly successful rappers and producers, most of them associated with gangsta rap (such as Diddy, Dr Dre, Jay-Z and Russell Simmons), has taken the gangsta ill-logic of exploiting the street for maximum profit to the extreme. Ice-T’s intervention in this dynamic has been to try to remind us of hip hop’s more “auratic” origins while acknowledging that the past is indeed a different country. The turn to authorship of books and making of documentary films in the context of a post-2008 economic meltdown environment constitutes an imaginative way to revivify the creative possibilities of the gangsta. The very title of Ice-T’s 2012 documentary film, Something Out of Nothing: The Art of Rap, betrays an almost nostalgic yearning for a purer age and the form that erupted out of it. This same retrospective paradigm for thinking a better way forward for gangsta aesthetics is also at the heart of Kings of Vice. Ice-T’s inventive return to origins shows us how even at a moment of its maximum commodification, gangsta culture (precisely because of its contradictory relationship to capitalism) can provide a uniquely critical perspective on a deregulated world.

From Gangsta to Gangster: The Hood Film’s Criminal Allegiance with Hollywood

In the early 1990s, a series of films made by African Americans focusing on the plight of the black inner city provoked mass media attention and an attendant moral panic. Although small in number and short-lived, this cycle of ghetto-centric films tapped into an increasingly volatile climate of racial discontent fuelled most infamously by the televised airing of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers beating up black motorist, Rodney King, in 1991— an incident which sparked the Los Angeles rebellion one year later following the acquittal of the policemen involved. Collectively categorized as ‘hood’ films, Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991), Boyz N the Hood (1991), New Jack City (1991), Juice (1992) and Menace II Society (1993) brought a sense of hardcore realism about the African-American inner-city experience that mainstream feature films had failed to represent adequately.

Signifyin' Cinema: Rudy Ray Moore and the Quality of Badness

This article engages the limits of both film and race studies in their approach to heterogeneous and “low” forms of African American cultural production through an analysis of the films of Rudy Ray Moore. While Moore’s films have been almost entirely overlooked in both film studies and black studies, they were extremely popular among black youth of the 1970s and have exerted a powerful influence on today’s hardcore hip hop artists (and their understanding of how to turn black market entrepreneurship into global enterprise). The theory of “signifying”, advanced most rigorously by black literary theorist Henry Louis Gates Jr, helps explain how and why Moore has slipped through various critical nets — and grounds a claim for why we should take “bad” black film seriously. Close film and context analysis illustrates how Moore’s low‐budget films “signify” on Hollywood and the system of expectancies that go with putatively “good” filmmaking and reveals the extent to which they constitute a hybrid cultural and multimedia practice. As vehicles designed to elaborate on the badman of black folklore, Moore’s films contribute to the long history and rich language of “toasting” in African American oral culture and music. As such, far from being emblematic of black filmmaking’s impoverished relationship to mainstream cinema (as a cinema manqué), these films constitute vital precursors to the hip hop music video.

America at the crossroads: An introduction

The present moment of social and cultural transformation requires us to develop trans-national and post-national ways of knowing. We now see in retrospect that industrialization, nationalism, and the Cold War were not just historical events, but also epistemologies and ontologies. They directed our attention toward investigations of national identities and national cultures. They encouraged us to define politics in terms of citizenship and the state. They led us to look for universality, uniformity, and sameness as preconditions for social justice. Yet our experiences in the post-industrial, post-nationalist, and post-Cold War eras confront us continuously with cultural practices that cannot be pinned down to any one place, with political projects that go beyond demands by citizens on states, and by struggles for social justice that rely on partial, perspectival, and differential consciousness. We encounter unexpected allies and enemies; our political and cultural projects proceed through principles of identification and affiliation, rather than through identicality and coalition. This special issue of Cultural Values brings together scholars from the U. S. and the U. K. to explore the nature of national identity in the U. S. at the start of a new century. They present a composite picture of intercultural conflict and creativity, of the seeming compression of time and space, of the rapid emergence of new identities and the ghostly return of old ones. Contemporary cultural production in the U. S. does not erase older narratives of national identity, citizenship, and subjectivity, but rather recontextualizes them in light of emerging understandings, ideas, and identities. They underscore the contradictory processes at the present time that make it equally impossible for us to either embrace or to evade the national identities that we inhabit, but instead make it necessary for us to fashion new ways of knowing. The rapid movement across the globe of people and products that characterizes the present era influences nearly every aspect of contemporary culture and politics. Traditional assumptions linking culture to place have been disrupted by the emergence of new modes of production and distribution, new communications technologies, and new alignments of private and public power. In the United States today, emerging patterns of migration, trade, investment, and military intervention affect everything from the national origins of babies