Conjured from Fragments: KMD's Mr. Hood and the Transformative Poetics of the Golden Age Rap Album

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 400-423
Author(s):  
James G. McNally
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Black American ◽  
Game Show ◽  
Picaresque Novel ◽  
Creative Transformation ◽  
Ice Cube ◽  
Public Enemy ◽  
Sampling Transformation ◽  
Simulated Game

AbstractBetween 1988 and 1991, the rap album took flight. Under the dual impetus of innovations in sampling, and of the album form itself, an explosion of youthful creativity ensured the rap album, mined for more self-consciously artistic potential, emerged as a multi-layered artform that revealed a similarly multi-layered Black genius. For innovators like the Bomb Squad (Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Son of Bazerk), Prince Paul (De La Soul) and others, the rap album was now often “more” than just a rap album. It could at once take on the characteristics of a radio show, a simulated game show, a talking comic book, a picaresque novel, an Afrofuturist vaudeville, or a visit to the movies—and, through any of these, invoke a multitude of stories and critiques from marginalized young Black perspectives.Drawing on a variety of ideas from Black American cultural studies, particularly those focused on creative transformation as a form of transcendence, this article analyzes the multi-layered creativity of one of this period's most unsung, yet ultimately important albums: KMD's showpiece of sampling transformation and satiric narrative wit, Mr. Hood. Best known as the album that initiated the career of the MC/producer later known as MF DOOM (arguably the most revered figure in underground rap post-1999), it also initiated his surreal approach to sampling non-musical material from sources in popular culture and envisagement of rap as a kind of modern-day folklore. Attempting to find a new way of working across the layers of the rap album—the magical interplay of mood, beat, references, verbal samples, storytelling, etc.—the article argues that such sample-based flights of the imagination represent a continuation of the Afro-magical tradition Theophus Smith calls Conjuring Culture.

scholarly journals The Hybridization Of The Noir Genre As Expression Of Ethnic Heritage: Rafael Navarro’s Sonambulo

2021 ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Anna Marta Marini
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
American Film ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Book Series ◽  
Film Genres ◽  
Fundamental Reference

In his ongoing comic book series Sonambulo, versatile artist Rafael Navarro has been able to channel his Mexican American cultural heritage by creating a unique blend of narrative genres. In his work, Navarro exploits classic American film noir as a fundamental reference and hybridizes it with elements distinctive to a shared Chicanx heritage, such as lucha libre cinema, horror folktales, and border-crossing metaphors; the construction of an oneiric dimension helps bring the narrative together, marking it with a peculiar ambiance. Drawing heavily on a diverse range of film genres, as well as ethnocultural pivots, this comic book series carves out a definite space in the panorama of the Mexican American production of popular culture, adding a powerful voice to the expression of US ethnic minorities.

From Claude Bernard to the Batcave and beyond: using Batman as a hook for physiology education

2011 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Paul Zehr
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
General Public ◽  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Scientific Understanding ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Scientific Concepts ◽  
Exercise Science ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Claude Bernard

Communicating physiology to the general public and popularizing science can be tremendously rewarding activities. Providing relevant and compelling points of linkage, however, between the scientific experiences and the interests of the general public can be challenging. One avenue for popularizing science is to link scientific concepts to images, personalities, and icons in popular culture. Currently, comic book superhero movies and television shows are extremely popular, and Batman was used as the vehicle for popularizing concepts of exercise science, neuroscience, and physiology in my recent book, Becoming Batman: the Possibility of a Superhero. The objective of this book was to bring scientific understanding to the broader public by using the physical image and impression everyone has of Batman and his abilities and then connecting this to the underlying science. The objective of this article is to share some of the details of the process and the positive and negative outcomes of using such an approach with other academics who may be interested in similar activities. It is my goal that by sharing this experience I may stimulate like-minded readers to initiate their own similar projects and to also be emboldened to try and integrate popular culture touchstones in their own teaching practice.

Bruised and Battered: Reinforcing Intimate Partner Violence in Comic Books

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 584-611
Author(s):  
Tammy S. Garland ◽  
Christina Policastro ◽  
Kathryn A. Branch ◽  
Brandy B. Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Intimate Partner Violence ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Partner Violence ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Intimate Partner ◽  
Convenience Sample ◽  
Book Series

Previous studies have examined intimate partner violence (IPV) in popular culture; however, little attention has been given to the presence of domestic violence myths in comic books. Using a convenience sample taken from popular comic book series, this content analysis examines the prevalence of IPV and the myths used to justify such portrayals. Findings indicate that the reinforcement of IPV through myths is clearly evident within mainstream comic books. Discussion of the negative impact of the acceptance and reinforcement of IPV myths is addressed.

Latinx Popular Culture and Social Conflict: Comics, Graphic Novels, and Film

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Luis Aldama
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
The United States ◽  
Corporate America ◽  
Consumer Market ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Cultural Imaginary

Despite Latinxs being the largest growing demographic in the United States, their experiences and identities continue to be underrepresented and misrepresented in the mainstream pop cultural imaginary. However, for all the negative stereotypes and restrictive ways that the mainstream boxes in Latinxs, Latinx musicians, writers, artists, comic book creators, and performers actively metabolize all cultural phenomena to clear positive spaces of empowerment and to make new perception, thought, and feeling about Latinx identities and experiences. It is important to understand, though, that Latinxs today consume all variety of cultural phenomena. For corporate America, therefore, the Latinx demographic represents a huge buying demographic. Viewed through cynical and skeptical eyes, increased representation of Latinxs in mainstream comic books and film results from this push to capture the Latinx consumer market. Within mainstream comic books and films, Latinx subjects are rarely the protagonists. However, Latinx comic book and film creators are actively creating Latinx protagonists within richly rendered Latinx story worlds. Latinx comic book and film creators work in all the storytelling genres and modes (realism, sci-fi, romance, memoir, biography, among many others) to clear new spaces for the expression of Latinx subjectivities and experiences.

Slavoj Žižek, Rex Libris, and the Traumatic Real

2015 ◽  
Vol 71 (6) ◽  
pp. 1265-1288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary P. Radford ◽  
Marie L. Radford ◽  
Mark Alpert
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Information Science ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Library And Information Science ◽  
Slavoj Zizek ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Book Series ◽  
Slavoj Žižek

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to use the work of philosopher Slavoj Žižek to gain insights into representations of the librarian and the library in contemporary popular culture. Design/methodology/approach – A psycho-analytic reading of the comic book series Rex Libris using Slavoj Žižek’s treatment of Jacques Lacan. Findings – Žižek’s approach can provide novel and previously unconsidered insights into the understanding of librarian stereotypes in particular and representations of the library in general. Research limitations/implications – This paper is limited to the representations of the librarian and the library in one comic book series. Its findings need to be generalized to representations in other forms of popular culture. Originality/value – As far as the authors know, this is the only paper that has applied the work of Žižek in the library and information science (LIS) literature. As such, not only are the insights into the representations of librarians and libraries important, this paper also acts as a valuable introduction to the work of Žižek for the LIS community of scholars.

Ms. Marvel's America

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
General Reader ◽  
Immigration History ◽  
Cultural Frameworks ◽  
Community Pedagogy

This book is a scholarly examination of the comic book character of the new Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, from multiple disciplinary approaches, including religious studies, gender studies, cultural studies, communication, and pedagogy. The essays cover topics from fashion, immigration history, technoculture, and fandom and are intended for a broad range of general and academic readers, from comics fans to comics scholars. The book’s four main sections—“Precursors,” “Nation and Religion, Identity and Community,” “Pedagogy and Resistance,” and “Fangirls, Fanboys, and the Culture of Fandom”—apply specific theoretical and cultural frameworks to their examination of the character. The book closes with a one-page comic by comics scholar and artist Jose Alaniz, as well as an exclusive interview with author G. Willow Wilson by gender studies scholar Shabana Mir. The editors’ wide-ranging expertise, from comics and religious studies to literature, gender, and popular culture, inform and shape this volume suitable for both undergraduate and graduate classrooms, as well as the general reader.

scholarly journals Wierzenia z perspektywy estetyki japońskiej. Mushishi Yuki Urushibary

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 93-107
Author(s):  
Natalia Dmitruk
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Japanese Literature ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Japanese Aesthetics ◽  
Human And Nature

Religious beliefs from the perspectiveb of Japanese aesthetics: Mushishi by Yuki UrushibaraThe Japanese culture is often portrayed as unique, in particular when compared to broadly-understood Western culture. It is important to notice, however, that the main trait of the Japanese culture is its openness towards outside influences and the ability to modify them to fit better with the Japanese system of values. The same could be applied to the Japanese aesthetics, which concernsm various aspects of life, not only the ones that would be described as art in Western culture. The contemporary Japanese culture and the aesthetics along with it is occasionally a  combination of tradition and modern ideas; the works of popular culture, which includes comics and animation, may hold the most interesting cases in that regard. This article describes the issues of the Japanese aesthetics in Mushishi, a  comic book by Yuki Urushibara. The author, while inspired by the classical works of Japanese literature and legendary tales, presents her own stories, in which the primary aesthetic value is the harmony between human and nature, sometimes represented by the supernatural beings known as mushi.

scholarly journals Formation and Development of the Iconography of the Mesmeric Seance in the Second Half of the 18th — Late 19th Centuries

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-242
Author(s):  
Daria O. Martynova ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Wonder Woman ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Second Wave

Analyzing the evolution of the iconography of such a phenomenon as mesmerism in the second half of the 18th — mid-19th centuries, the author shows that the scenario of modern hypnotic representation and its gestures were established by mesmerists in the second half of the 18th century, followers of the parascientific theory that caused discussions and intrigued doctors and artists for centuries. Analyzing the development of the iconography of mesmeric seance, the author identifies two waves of popularity of this subject: the first wave in the 70–80s of the 18th century and the second wave during the first decade of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Such a duration is due to the fascination with the supernatural and inexplicable, reflected in various styles and trends. In this article, the author tries to show how the development of the iconography of the mesmeric seance provoked the appearance of the hypnotist or magician trickster, who became integrated into popular culture that later began to mark the majority of hypnotic actions, spiritualistic sessions or miracle shows. The author also illustrates how the image of a “controller” in the face of a man formed and confirmed the paradigm of a powerless, mysterious and controlled woman. As a result, it is concluded that hypnosis and mesmerism became common theatrical spectacles in the 20th century, cultivating the power of men (patriarchal society) over an exhausted woman, which is reflected in the works of Georges Méliès, Alfred Hitchcock, and even in the comic book Wonder woman.

Dynasties

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Zalasiewicz
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Heat Release ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Burgess Shale ◽  
Shopping Malls ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Tectonic Plates

Developing a methodology is everything in a science. Once you have it, you can go on to extract information, facts—a narrative—from the natural world. To human scientists and non-scientists alike, the use of fossils as evidence of past events on Earth is now taken for granted, is indeed ingrained into popular culture. Dinosaurs, for instance, stalk through our TV screens and cinemas and shopping malls, as virtual animations and plastic models and soft fluffy toys and comic book covers. An Age of Dinosaurs is widely accepted as a long-vanished era, a world lost within deep time. Our extraterrestrial investigators will, at some stage in their studies, be ready to try to recreate for themselves the eras of long-vanished animal and plant dynasties on this planet, to construct a coherent history out of the scattered relics preserved in the Earth’s abundant strata. By coming to understand the Earth’s marvellously regulated heat-release engine, that drives the tectonic plates, they will appreciate the continuous creation and preservation of strata. By getting to grips with the more subtle puzzle of how sea level has risen and fallen, they will have some idea of the finer controls on the preservation of the stratal record. And, as they grapple with these problems, they would undoubtedly try to put the strata themselves into some sort of order, just as did our Victorian and pre-Victorian predecessors. These pioneering geologists, after all, could recognize a prehistory when they saw one, even as they were still far from divining the workings of the Earth machine that lay at the heart of the story they were pursuing. What kind of strata will be available for study, one hundred million years from now? Many, if not all, of the classic fossil localities that we treasure today will have gone forever, eroded into scattered grains of sedimentary detritus that will ultimately accumulate on sea floors of the future. The Solnhofen Limestone of Germany, that yielded the archaeopteryx, will likely be gone. The Burgess Shale of British Columbia, with its wonderful array of early soft-bodied organisms from the Cambrian Period, half a billion years back, is almost certain to disappear, perched as it is high up a fast-eroding mountainside.

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.

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