Before BBQ Becky

In 2018, a White woman called the police on two Black men who were holding a cookout on the shores of Lake Merritt in Oakland, CA. Branded “BBQ Becky” by Black Twitter, this incident ricocheted around the digital mediascape, contributing to a national debate about racist policing and the dangers of “living while Black.” Many commentators interpreted the struggle over Black cultural practices at Lake Merritt in terms of the now common, even generic, narrative of tech-induced gentrification in the Bay Area. But this elided the fact that the violence of BBQ Becky reproduced an enduring drive to regulate Black geographies and sounds as a means to control the post-emancipation social order. This article argues that scholars and activists need to attune to the “racial reverberations” that continue to loop in contemporary spatial struggles, especially ones involving sound. Drawing upon archival and ethnographic materials, it provides a recursive account of struggles over Black public cultures in Oakland from World War II until the present, thus suggesting that the racial/spatial control embodied in BBQ Becky can’t be reduced to the gentrification narrative alone. Ultimately, this article centers the temporalities of African American epistemologies and musics to realign U.S. gentrification studies with the haunting rhythms of geographic harm and repair experienced by those most impacted by urban dispossession.

Podcasts and new orality in the African mediascape

While podcasts as a storytelling media have exploded in popularity in the West since 2014, the uptake and consumption of this sonic new media was relatively slow in Africa until recently. This article explores amateur and start-up entrepreneurship podcasts that came to dominate the African mediascape during the medium’s coming of age moment between 2014 and 2018. I extend Walter Ong’s observation that broadcast and electronic media recreate the experience of oral performance, to show how the oral and aural dimensions of podcasting represent a set of approaches that can be described as new orality. This article also draws connections and distinctions between what I term the “dialogic schema” of African tech podcasts and “traditional” forms of narrative storytelling in African public cultures, as well as the emerging forms of mobile digital practices that, like podcasting, challenge easy distinctions between written and oral and literacy.

Conclusion

This chapter interrogates the geopolitical implications of a contemporary development in the region’s media industries — the institutionalization of location shooting into modes of nation branding that commoditize cultural signs in line with the states’ soft power objectives. Drawing from examples of recent location-shot film and media, including En Chen’s Island Etude, Chi Po-lin’s Beyond Beauty, and Zhejiang TV's Keep Running, I demonstrate how location shooting since Taiwan’s membership in the WTO has been institutionalized within the discursive contours of the “Love Taiwan” movement, a process which can be compared with the PRC’s marketing of the “Chinese Dream” to domestic tourists via convergent and place-based film and televisual media. While the resulting national brands could not appear more different, these discourses operate on the shared assumption that for place identities to be readily consumable and exportable, they must be coherent within a global “experience economy” that circulates images of distinctive yet fixed cultural identities. This reduction of place into readily consumable cultural signs can be contrasted with the enigmatic representation of Shanghai found in Jia Zhangke's I Wish I Knew, which fashions on-screen Doreen Massey’s notion of the “progressive place,” a poststructuralist reinterpretation of place that focuses on conflicting sociocultural processes that imbue spaces with richly layered meanings. Building on Massey's concept of the progressive place, this chapter argues that location-shot film and media in China and Taiwan, more than offering diversely themed experiences, have untapped potential in cultivating alternative public cultures through reflexive, minor, and performative modes of place making.

The Anglosphere and Indigenous Politics

This chapter examines the challenges posed by the heritage of imperialism and colonisation to the concept of the Anglosphere. It explores transnational cooperation and collaboration between indigenous communities, arguing that indigenous peoples have created a transnational counter-public sphere. This indigenous public sphere has developed in the context of globalised norms of indigeneity and collaborative work in drafting the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). It reflects shared cultural values, and the common experience of colonisation, as well as recent shared activism. It demonstrates collaboration beyond the purported borders of the Anglosphere, and challenges the assumption of homogeneous and shared public cultures in each Anglosphere state. It also counters the argument that Anglosphere countries have a common and shared relationship between public culture and political values and institutions. The chapter focuses on the relationship between New Zealand Maori and Indigenous Australians, and their recent collaboration in advocating for constitutional change and Indigenous recognition in Australia.

Queer South Asian Diasporas

Queer South Asian Diasporas can refer to the individuals and communities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people who trace their ancestry to the South Asian subcontinent, but have lived beyond its borders. These communities and individuals generate vibrant forms of cultural production: writing, activism, filmmaking, performance art, and creative manipulations of everyday practice. Additionally, queer diaspora can refer to a particular way of analyzing South Asian public cultures and discourse through a transnational lens with an eye toward the ways that normative genders and sexualities are managed and manipulated to secure and undo nationalist projects. Given the dislocation rendered by pushes and pulls from multiple nations and communities, a common theme in the theorization of queer diaspora and the representation of LGBTQ South Asian life is the struggle over and production of “home” as physical space, affective landscape, and shared embodiment. Theories of queer diaspora help scholars understand how some practices that are not particularly associated with mainstream queer identities can be interpreted as queer, especially when read in the context of South Asian histories. The homosociality of South Asian domestic life, filmic conventions, and ritual practices lend themselves to queer interpretations. While these intimacies do not read as queer to everyone, LGBTQ South Asians precisely apprehend these queer possibilities as alternatives to white and Western gay habitus. Also, queer diaspora explains that migrant, postcolonial subjects are often perceived as having non-normative genders and sexualities given the ways that imperial projects have managed those aspects of human life. This framework is reflected in the narratives of LGBTQ South Asians who name how their (un)desirability is based on race, including the hair on their body, their ethnic heritage, and the stereotypes they are associated with.