Playing with Race/Authenticating Alterity: Authenticity, Mimesis, and Racial Performance in the Transcultural Diaspora

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
John G. Russell
Keyword(s):  
Racial Performance

The Filmmaker as DJ

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-317
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Constituent Element ◽  
Film Images ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Racial Performance ◽  
First Time ◽  
Music Recordings ◽  
Film Form

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) is structured around a compiled score of almost sixty popular music recordings. Scorsese himself, working with editor Thelma Schoonmaker and using digital editing tools for the first time, assembled and arranged a diverse body of pre-existing music into a unified score that plays for more than two of the film’s three hours. This article offers a close analysis of Scorsese acting as composer—crafting Casino’s compiled score in the manner of a DJ—and, in reciprocal fashion, editing film images and narrative to recorded music. Casino demonstrates highly varied, multivalent relationships between musical form and film form. Indeed, musical form proves a constituent element of Casino’s construction at multiple levels of magnification. The large-scale form of the score as a whole articulates the larger arc of Casino’s dual narrative. The strategic deployment of musical styles (from jazz to rock to pop) and the targeted use of lyrics as voiceover (often subtly deploying aspects of racial performance in popular styles) serve to differentiate narrative strands and fill out otherwise unspoken characterization. Scorsese builds several sequences in Casino on a direct, often audible relationship between song forms and narrative unfolding, creating song scenes in which compiled tracks heard as musical wholes grant a musical shape to discrete narrative units. Casino’s complex use of music does not, however, penetrate the inner lives of the film’s three primary characters, who seem unaware of the musical flow Scorsese employs to set their story dancing. The analysis draws upon the filmmaker’s own words about his creative process and offers select comparisons to other Scorsese films with compiled scores.

Apu’s Brown Voice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shilpa S. Davé
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Asians ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Simpsons ◽  
Voice Performance ◽  
Indian Immigrant ◽  
Animated Characters ◽  
Racial Performance ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Voice

This chapter discusses the character Apu, exploring how his appearance on the television show The Simpsons in the 1990s was a departure from previous Hollywood and television representations of South Asians in the United States. Whereas South Asians were previously depicted as brief visitors or exotic foreigners, Apu symbolizes a permanent Indian immigrant presence in the United States. Yet, his brown-voice performance racializes and differentiates him from other Americans. The chapter theorizes the use of brown voice and discusses how animated characters, in particular, become a significant subject to study vocal accents and voiceovers. Animated characters are unique because one of their most important defining features is their voice, and, thus, animation emphasizes the voice as a site of interest in thinking about racial performance.

Transmedia storytelling and transmediated bodies in Fullmetal Alchemist (2017)

Asian Cinema ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-202
Author(s):  
Kukhee Choo
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Fan Culture ◽  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Action Film ◽  
Racial Performance ◽  
Live Action ◽  
Globally Distributed

Hagane no Renkinjutsushi (Fullmetal Alchemist) (2001, Hagaren in short) is a Japanese comic book franchise that not only expanded into a larger supersystem through its transmedia storytelling on multimedia platforms, but also through the global fandom of cosplay (the Japanese term for costume play), a form of popular culture that is heavily promoted by the Japanese government’s Cool Japan policy. Hagaren is set in an unidentifiable European landscape, a common depiction in many Japanese manga and anime, yet, in the 2017 live-action film that was globally distributed on Netflix, audiences witness a full Japanese cast performing European characters. This cross-racial performance, or yellow washing, challenges the border-crossing narrative and global viewership of the Hagaren’s manga and anime franchise. By examining how Hagaren’s supersystem developed out of the interplays of media industries, fan culture and broader governmental policies, this article aims to excavate the multifaceted politics of not only cross-border consumer identities, but also cross-racial performances propagated by the transmediation of Japanese popular culture on the global stage.

Authenticity on “Black Twitter”: Reading Racial Performance and Social Networking

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (7) ◽  
pp. 591-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raven S. Maragh
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking ◽  
Acting White ◽  
Full Understanding ◽  
Online Identity ◽  
Racial Authenticity ◽  
Negative Case ◽  
Acting Black ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Racial Performance

This article investigates the complex rhetorics of racial authenticity online, intermixing ethnography and critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) to understand African American users’ investments in enacting race in their social networks. The piece uncovers “acting white” as a significant discourse that shapes online identity and group performances. Examining rhetorics of racial authenticity including insider knowledges in relation to “acting white” and “acting black,” I map Twitter users’ negotiations with individual and collective notions of racial ingroup markers. I put forth the finding of “performance in the negative case,” as interviewees discuss their lack of participation in their ingroup based on diverse perceptions of racial authenticity. I argue that a full understanding of racial authenticity, performative participation, and nonresponsiveness opens up identity and race formulations to include complexities of what is and is not expressed via interaction and performance.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document