Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Hip-Hop as Fantasy Projected on to a Lower Other
First of all, let me admit that I now nothing about hip-hop. So I'm going to approach this from a theoretical point of view.
I think in a way Hip-hop is in a way channeling back the fantasy that the West have projected on them with revenge. The Black race was constructed as the Lower Other who are irrational, exotic and sexualized as an excuse for Western Europeans to assert control over them through imperialism and the slave trade. At the same time "Black" helped to construct of "White" by acting as an opposition. So "Black" (as an unindividualated mass) acts kind of a like screen (that Zizek talked about) for Western Europeans to project their fantasies on. Because of the Enlightenment ideals the "White" identities were hyper-rational and cohesive which left no place for the Real and so they projected the Real onto "Blacks". The Real with all it's unknowable chaos, violence, and bodily drive is a threat rational Western society and the symbolic order. But at the same time it was precisely what the West lacked and wanted. The offensive aspects of hip-hop: sex, violence, and death can be all attributed to the Real. It is what we desire and what we fear. If we think society as a "collective consciousness" then being repulsed by hip-hop and being fascinated by it is really the two sides of the same coin: It's "us" reacting to the real. It's ironic though that the black hip-hop artist is using his/her identity as the lower Other to make money in a society that tires to suppress them. I guess that leads back to Fiske's idea of resistance by "making do". But that's anew topic.
yay! i posted a blog!
