February 2012
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An article I’ve written called “Chris Brown, Male Violence and Racist Rants”, on why domestic abusers (like Chris Brown) can make a come back but those that engage in racist rants (like Mel Gibson or Michael Richards) can’t, has been accepted and uploaded onto Racialicious. Check it out here.
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Soap Operas and the Third World
Around the world, from North India to South Africa, there are dozens of television and radio shows that tightly weave social themes into entertaining narratives, a technique often referred to as “entertainment-education.” Writers develop fictional characters that model positive or negative behaviors, and through their stories and struggles, audiences learn about issues ranging from...
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George Clooney and Darfur
“In the case of Darfur, it’s been the greatest failure of my life.”
- George Clooney (2010)
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George Clooney has been advocating for a resolution to the Darfur conflict for over five years. He has smuggled cameras into Darfur refugee camps with his journalist dad to film an expose, set up the group Not On Our Watch, worked with the UN, and even had a private meeting with...
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Marilyn Monroe and Gay Marriage
Had Marilyn Monroe’s film been called ‘How to Register a Domestic Partnership with a Millionaire,’ it would not have conveyed the same meaning as did her famous movie, even though the underlying drama for same-sex couples is no different.
- Judge Stephen Reinhardt, US Court of Appeals (Ninth Court), ruling that Prop 8 (the law that banned gay marriage in California) is unconstitutional.
I...
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Madonna and the Middle East
Madonna will not be adhering to the Israel cultural boycott, unlike some of her celebrity cohorts such as Julianne Moore (her old Body of Evidence costar), Cynthia Nixon and Elvis Costello. On the contrary, the Material Girl’s new tour launches in Tel Aviv in May.
Madge has a special affinity with Israel (as she says in American Life, she’s not a Jew, but she is a follower of...
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Rita Moreno as the Developing World
Who’s Rita Moreno!?!? Rita Moreno is everything. She’s a Puerto Rican in West Side Story, a Burmese slave in The King and I, a South-East Indian in Father Knows Best, an American-Indian in a thousand D-Grade Westerns, a Middle Eastern princess in a thousand D-Grade Aladdin ripoffs and a plain ole white girl in Singing in the Rain (because Gene Kelly cast her and doesn’t see...
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January 2012
56 posts
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White Saviours and the Third World
Whitey’s got your back, Nelson Mandela. Check out this great article on gay blog AfterElton about the White Savior trope (ie. how movies about racial minorities’ rights almost always have at its centre a white hero. eg. The Help, The Blind Side, The Last Samurai, The Last of the Mohicans, The Flowers of War). The writer makes a good comparison, that if Milk was set up so the hero was...
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Danny Glover and the Haitian Historical Hero
Danny Glover had a hard time raising funds for his directorial debut film, Toussaint, because financiers complained the film did not include any white heroes. Toussaint is a biopic about the historical black hero Toussaint-Louverture, an ex-slave in the 1700s who won independence for Haiti from the French, making Haiti the first black nation to free itself of imperial rule and become a...
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Kanye/Will.i.am and the AfroPop/KPop World
Kanye West has signed up D’Banj (the Nigerian ‘King of AfroPop’) for his G.O.O.D Music record label (Kanye and D’Banj pictured above). Will.i.am is working with 2NE1 (the Korean ‘Queens of KPop’) for the girl group’s American debut album.
Both D’Banj and 2NE1’s albums should be coming out very soon. Are there any other examples of American...
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Rewriting The Devil Wears Prada
Remember that scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Andy (Anne Hathaway) sniggers as Miranda (Meryl Streep) and her colleagues argue over which of two very similar belts match an outfit and Andy gets served? It always pisses me off. It goes like this:
Miranda Priestly: Something funny? Andy Sachs: No. Nothing. It’s just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. You know,...
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The Lady and the Burmese Government
Michelle Yeoh stars in Luc Besson’s The Lady (2011) as Aung San Suu Kyi, the first woman in all of Asia to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Suu Kyi is amazing: She is a Burmese woman who started a life in England with her English husband. Suu Kyi returned to Burma to visit her dying mother, saw first hand the army’s repression of the people, and so founded a party to challenge the...
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Björk and the Politics of Iceland
Perhaps the biggest victim of the GFC (2008 - ) was Iceland which literally went bankrupt. How did Björk, the first thing everyone thinks of when they think of Iceland, react?
“I thought I would never ever get involved in politics, because when I was younger you couldn’t get un-cooler than that! Then I saw how they were planning to change Iceland from an untouched natural spot into...
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Mickey Mouse and the Arabic World
Are Arabic Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck comics really just Trojan horses filled with problematic Western values? Nadim Damluji is like, um totally.
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Asian Culture and the Pop Music World
Hello readers, I have a question. What’s going on when Westerner pop artists - let’s take Nicki Minaj and Gwen Stefani as examples - use Asian imager..
ORIENTALISM!
Woah. … woah. Yes, I guess that’s a lot of it. Check out this article here that argues Nicki Minaj (eg. in her Your Love and Check It Out videos) “steals” Asian cultural imagery, perpetuates...
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Pop Culture and the South Africa/Israel Boycotts
Alright, I’ve become a bit obsessed with the South Africa anti-apartheid boycott. I’ve already posted about Linda Ronstadt and Paul Simon breaking the boycott to the scorn of anti-apartheid activists/the world. There were lots of others - Frank Sinatra, Tina Turner, Queen, Ray Charles, Cher and Elton John to name a few - who often became the subject of boycotts themselves upon their...
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Paul Simon (half of Simon and Garfunkel; Carrie Fisher’s ex) released Graceland (Simon’s comeback album; #81 of the 500 Greatest Albums of all Time as selected by Rolling Stone) in 1985 (a year). It was a huge deal. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year, sold millions of copies, and was the first ‘World Music’ album to be a crossover hit. You probably remember it for...
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Linda Ronstadt and the South Africa Boycott
Linda Ronstadt is special, and yet she went to South Africa. She is special, and yet she chose to perform in a reviled racist country. She is special, and yet she gave six concerts in the cradle of apartheid. She is special, and yet she lent her talents to an especially mean place. She is special, and yet she allowed her very specialness to be exploited by an outlaw nation in search of...
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Shit People Say and the Global South
Latoya Peterson has done an awesome job compiling the different Shit ***** Say videos to show how the meme, from Shit Girls Say to Shit White Guys Say to Asian Girls and even Shit Everyone Says to Rape Victims, has gone from perpetuating stereotypes to challenging them. Though, admittedly, the ones that challenge them don’t get as many hits. Hmm. Also check out the non-First World-centric...
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African Culture and the Pop World
Do you want to know what’s hot in African pop culture? Told in a hilarious irreverent hipster-ish style? By a British-Nigerian host that’s really pretty and charming? But still kind of humble and approachable? Who you get more attracted to when you discover from a Google search that he’s really nice and into saving the environment? But who will ultimately break your heart...
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The Definition of Obama
Santorum: n. 1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum.
A little context. Dan Savage made the name ‘Santorum’ synonymous with the gooey byproduct of anal sex as a protest against Rick Santorum’s anti-gay stance. It entered into pop culture and has been the Republican presidential candidates’...
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Estelle and the African Boy
Estelle compares American Boys to African ones in her new reinterpretation/mashup/tribute/cover of Nigerian singer D’Banj’s hit song, Oliver Twist. Not to give too much away but apparently after assessing Kanye, Usher, Tinie Tempah, Jamaicans, the English and a few others, she concludes African boys are pretty much unbeatable. Noted.
Check out Estelle’s Oliver Twist here....
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Mulan and the Disney Makeover
Check out this article on Disney’s Mulan (1999), the lukewarm reception the film got when released in China, the shits China already had with Disney because of Kundun (1997) and its uncomfortable Americanisation of Chinese culture! The picture says it all!
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Marky Mark and the War on Terror
If I was on that plane (that crashed into the World Trade Centre on 9/11) with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.’
- Mark Wahlberg, who was supposed to be on one of the 9/11 planes but fortuitously changed his flight a week...
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Martin Luther King Jr and the White Moderate
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is...
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Celebrities and the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Similar to the international sanctions campaign that led to South Africa lifting apartheid, there is currently an international sanctions campaign aimed at Israel on behalf of Palestinians. Part of this campaign (known as ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’) is a ‘cultural boycott’ where artists are refusing to perform in Israel until Israel cleans up its act. Supporters...
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The official face of Barbados
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Superman and the Indigenous World
Lacrosse was invented by Native Americans. And now they’ve come to take it back… with the help of Superman (Brandon Routh). Watch the trailer for Crooked Arrows here. I don’t remember the last time I saw Native Americans in a movie set in present times.
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Michael Moore and A Separation
Michael Moore is the most famous director in Iran. Everyone knows his movies because they’re shown on national TV there.
- Asghar Farhadi, director of A Separation. Fox News ate this up.
Farhadi also joked how difficult it was for his own films to be seen in Iran. A Separation won the Best Foreign Film Golden Globe last night, the first Golden Globe in Iran’s history! The win last...
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Zizek, Kung Fu Panda, Berlusconi and Iran
Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic coordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing. The fat panda dreams of becoming a kung fu warrior. He is chosen by blind chance (beneath which lurks the hand of destiny, of course), to be the hero to save his city, and succeeds. But the film’s pseudo-Oriental spiritualism is constantly undermined by a...
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Noam Chomsky and Pop Culture
Interviewer: What about what the American masses are actually watching? Wasn’t a sitcom like Roseanne or a cartoon like The Simpsons in some way progressive? Wasn’t this radical popular culture?
Chomsky: This isn’t real popular culture, the real art of the people. This is just stuff which is served up to them to rot their minds. Real popular culture is folk art -...
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Garbo Laughs
Ninotchka (1939) is a romantic comedy where a tough Soviet Union communist (Greta Garbo) falls in love with a rich playboy capitalist (Melvyn Douglas). It’s a witty funny sassy movie (written by Billy Wilder, amongst others) and the politics at the heart of it are really fascinating to watch play out.
Also interesting is its production history during a time when many Hollywoodians...
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UPDATE: Sesame Street and the Third World
Terrible update to report. A week or so ago I posted about all the different versions of Sesame Street from around the world. The one that particularly impressed me was the one from Palestine known as Sharaa Simsim which helped kids deal with their feelings of helplessness and anxiety. Sharaa Simsim, however, is now in trouble.
To punish Palestine for appealing to the UN for statehood, the US...
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Kim Kardashian and the Third World
Kim Kardashian recently went to Haiti to draw the world’s attention to the plight still suffered by the Haitians two years on from the devastating 2010 earthquake that left 1.5 million homeless.
I normally don’t like to poo poo celebs who try to help low income countries… but poo poo. The timing of this trip smacks of insincerity. The whole thing looks like little more than a...
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The 99 and the Superhero World
For comic book readers in Arab countries, the world often looks like this: superheroes save American cities, battle beasts in Tokyo and even on occasion solve crimes in the French countryside. But few care about saving the Arab world.
If Naif al-Mutawa (creator of The 99) has his way, that is about to change. Young Arabs will soon be poring over a new group - and new genre - of...
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Rachael Ray and the Third World
“Take off your keffiyehs (traditional Arab scarf) or the Americans will think you are terrorists and kill you.”
This was what one Iraqi shouted to another when caught in the crossfire during a deadly battle between the Americans and insurgents in 2004 (Cockburn P, The Occupation, 142).
Interestingly enough, this was the same advice Rachael Ray got when wearing a keffiyeh in a...
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Lost in Paradise (2011) (known as Rebellious Hot Boy and the Story of Cười, the Prostitute and the Duck domestically), Vietnam’s first film to feature love between gay men, is ‘helping to change attitudes in a country where homosexuality is often seen either as a disease or a source of ridicule.’