Go woke, go broke? On black elves, anthropological perspective, and critical approach to “culture wars”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31261/SEIA.2023.23.01.06Keywords:
cinema, woke, discourse, culture wars, entertainment industryAbstract
The text reflects on the issues of wokeness and culture wars in regard to mainstream cinema and its reception. Building on the author’s own ethnographical fieldwork within film industry, it addresses the question of desired anthropological approach to the discourse about representation in popular culture. The case of backlash against certain elements of popular fantasy live action series The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power and The Witcher is used by the author to argue for intersectional analysis rooted in economic perspective that exceeds identity-oriented, binary discursive setup, in search of more nuanced social knowledge, which is something that should constitute anthropological presence in public debate.
References
Adamczak M., 2018, Kapitały przemysłu filmowego, Warszawa, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
Andreeva N., 2017, Amazon Sets ‘The Lord of the Rings’ TV Series in Mega Deal with Multi-Season Commitment, Deadline Hollywood, November 13, 2017, https://deadline.com/2017/11/amazon-the-lord-of-the-rings-tv-series-multiseason-commitment-1202207065/ [accessed: 3.01.2023].
Bailey G., Baugh J., Mufwene S. S., Rickford J. R., 2013, African-American English: Structure, History and Use, Routledge.
Caldwell J. T., 2008, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television, Durham, Duke University Press.
Diamond S., 2017, In Search of the Primitive. A Critique of Civilization, London–New York, Routledge.
De Valck M., 2005, Drowning in Popcorn at the International Film Festival Rotterdam? The Festival as a Multiplex of Cinephilia, in: Cinephilia. Movies, Love and Memory, eds. M. De Valck, M. Haegner, Amsterdam University Press, pp. 97–110.
Edwards W., 2004, African American Vernacular English: Phonology, in: A Handbook of Varieties of English: A Multimedia Reference Tool, vol. 2, ed. B. Kortmann, Walter de Gruyter, pp. 366–382.
Evans P., 2010, Is It Labor’s Turn to Globalize? Twenty-first Century Opportunities and Strategic Responses, “Global Labour Journal,” vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 352–379.
Falzon M. A., 2009, Multi-sited ethnography: Theory, praxis and locality in contemporary research, Aldershot, Ashgate.
Geertz C., 1998. Deep Hanging Out, “The New York Review of Books,” no. 16, pp. 69–72.
Goodale M., 2016, Dark Matter: Toward a Political Economy of Indigenous Rights and Aspirational Politics, “Critique of Anthropology,” vol. 36, pp. 439–457, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X15619017.
Graeber D., 2018, Dług. Pierwsze pięć tysięcy lat, trans. B. Kuźniarz, Warszawa, Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej.
Hazan H., Hertzog E., eds., 2012, Serendipity in Anthropological Research: The Nomadic Turn, Farnham, Ashgate.
Harbord J., 2002, Film Cultures, London–Thousand Oaks–New Delhi, Sage Publications, pp. 14–37.
James D., Plaice E., Toren C., eds., 2012, Culture Wars Context, Models and Anthropologists’ Accounts, New York–Oxford, Berghahn Books.
Kachanoff F., Kteily N., Gray K., 2022, Equating Silence with Violence: When White Americans Feel Threatened by Anti-racist Messages, “Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,” vol. 102, article 104348, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2022.104348.
Kóczé A., 2022, Dual Attack on Social Justice: The Delegitimization of “Woke”/”Wokism”, in: Culture Wars in Europe, ed. E. Kováts, Washington, The George Washington University, pp. 227–236.
Lash S., Lury C. S., 2007, Globalny przemysł kulturowy. Medializacja rzeczy, trans. J. Majmurek, Kraków, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego.
Lutz C., White G. M., 1986, The Anthropology of Emotions, “Annual Review of Anthropology,” vol. 15, pp. 405–436, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155767 [accessed: 12.12.2023].
Marcus G. E., 1995, Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography, “Annual Review of Anthropology,” vol. 24, pp. 95–117.
Marcus G. E., Fischer M., 1999, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in Human Sciences, Chicago–London, The University of Chicago Press.
Maskovsky J., Susser I., 2016, A Critical Anthropology for the Present, in: After the Crisis. Anthropological Thought, Neoliberalism and the Aftermath, ed. J. G. Carrier, Routledge Studies in Anthropology, pp. 177–193.
McDorman R. E., 2012, Understanding African-American English (AAE): A Course in Language Comprehension and Cross-Cultural Understanding for Advanced English Language Learners in the United States. Archived online in PDF format. Retrieved January 6, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_a_second_or_foreign_language [References and notes] [accessed: 12.12.2023].
McLean A., Leibing A., eds., 2007, The Shadow Side of Fieldwork: Exploring the Blurred Borders between Ethnography and Life, Malden–Oxford, Blackwell Publishing.
McPherson M., 2023, The Writers Guild Of America’s Tactical Win Over Hollywood Studios. “Forbes,” December 21, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollymcpherson/2023/09/27/the-writers-guild-of-americas-tactical-winover-hollywood-studios/?sh=142b52fb4b10 [accessed: 22.12.2023].
Oh D. C., 2021, Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture, Rutgers University Press.
Ohri L., 2016, Political Yields from Cultural Fields: Agency and Ownership in a Heritage Festival in India, “Ethnos,” vol. 81, no. 4, pp. 667–682, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2014.989872.
Pakula O., 2021, The Streaming Wars+: An Analysis of Anticompetitive Business Practices in Streaming Business. “UCLA Entertainment Law Review,” vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 147–185, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5070/LR828153859.
Plotz B., 2020, Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350119390.
Raczkowski T., 2020, Wirtualne sale i globalne sieci. Partycypacja w kulturze filmowej w kontekście pandemii, “Prace Etnograficzne,” vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 39–55.
Rashaduzzaman M., Jorgensen J. J., 2022, Amazon’s Influence: The Online Apparel Purchase Intention of Amazon Prime and Non-prime Shoppers, “International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings,” vol. 78, no. 1, DOI: https://doi.org/10.31274/itaa.13446.
Rassoukh R. D., Caton S. C., eds., 2021, Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity, Durham–London, Duke University Press.
Rapport N., 2000, The Narrative as Fieldwork Technique. Processual Ethnography for a World in Motion, in: Constructing the Field. Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World, ed. V. Amit, London–New York, Routledge, pp. 71–95.
Romano A., 2020, A History of “Wokeness”. Stay Woke: How a Black Activist Watchword Got Co-opted in the Culture War, Vox.com, October 9, 2020, www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-history-origin-evolution-controversy [accessed: 12.12.2022].
Tedlock B., 1991, From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography, “Journal of Anthropological Research,” vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 69–94, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3630581.
Wielgosz P., 2020, Gra w rasy. Jak kapitalizm dzieli, by rządzić, Warszawa, Fundacja bęc-zmiana.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.
1. License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
2. Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
3. User Rights
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
4. Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
