Jonathan Munby | Lancaster University (original) (raw)

Papers by Jonathan Munby

Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022

University of Chicago Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2013

University of Chicago Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2013

Journal for Cultural Research, Jul 1, 2007

Routledge eBooks, Apr 8, 2016

European History Quarterly, 1999

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2007

In the early 1990s, a series of films made by African Americans focusing on the plight of the bla... more In the early 1990s, a series of films made by African Americans focusing on the plight of the black inner city provoked mass media attention and an attendant moral panic. Although small in number and short-lived, this cycle of ghetto-centric films tapped into an increasingly volatile climate of racial discontent fuelled most infamously by the televised airing of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers beating up black motorist, Rodney King, in 1991— an incident which sparked the Los Angeles rebellion one year later following the acquittal of the policemen involved. Collectively categorized as ‘hood’ films, Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991), Boyz N the Hood (1991), New Jack City (1991), Juice (1992) and Menace II Society (1993) brought a sense of hardcore realism about the African-American inner-city experience that mainstream feature films had failed to represent adequately.

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Feb 4, 2021

Rudolph Fisher was unique among Harlem Renaissance authors in making Harlem itself the exclusive ... more Rudolph Fisher was unique among Harlem Renaissance authors in making Harlem itself the exclusive focus of his writing. Across a rich body of work (of short stories and novels), he demonstrated keen powers of social observation in revealing how class, regional, phenotypical, and generational distinctions defined Harlem and shaped an appropriate literary aesthetic. Fisher’s satirical yet loving eye is matched by a musical ear in stories about African Americans becoming modern in the black metropolis. Southern greenhorns are vulnerable to being fleeced by urbane northern hustlers. Grandmothers bearing the memory of the South fear and admire in equal measure the way Harlem shapes their grandchildren. Blues and jazz underscore vernacular speech, as street talk engages rural accents and bourgeois tongues. And such sensitivity to the city’s quotidian features informs Fisher’s ultimate understanding of Harlem as the space of encounter between logic and faith, science and superstition for African Americans

Journal for Cultural Research, Dec 1, 2013

In turning his talents to fiction in his 2011 debut novel, Kings of Vice, gangsta rapper Ice-T ha... more In turning his talents to fiction in his 2011 debut novel, Kings of Vice, gangsta rapper Ice-T has faced a particularly intricate challenge in “keeping it real”. At this point in the twenty-first century, the credibility of hip hop’s harder core seems to have been undermined by the distance gangsta rap has travelled from the street realities that gave it birth in the 1980s to the millionaire enterprises that have emerged since. A “rapocracy” of incredibly successful rappers and producers, most of them associated with gangsta rap (such as Diddy, Dr Dre, Jay-Z and Russell Simmons), has taken the gangsta ill-logic of exploiting the street for maximum profit to the extreme. Ice-T’s intervention in this dynamic has been to try to remind us of hip hop’s more “auratic” origins while acknowledging that the past is indeed a different country. The turn to authorship of books and making of documentary films in the context of a post-2008 economic meltdown environment constitutes an imaginative way to revivify the creative possibilities of the gangsta. The very title of Ice-T’s 2012 documentary film, Something Out of Nothing: The Art of Rap, betrays an almost nostalgic yearning for a purer age and the form that erupted out of it. This same retrospective paradigm for thinking a better way forward for gangsta aesthetics is also at the heart of Kings of Vice. Ice-T’s inventive return to origins shows us how even at a moment of its maximum commodification, gangsta culture (precisely because of its contradictory relationship to capitalism) can provide a uniquely critical perspective on a deregulated world.

University of Chicago Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2013

Journal of American Studies, Apr 1, 1996

Ever since gangsters first appeared on the American screen (officially with D. W. Griffith&am... more Ever since gangsters first appeared on the American screen (officially with D. W. Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley, in 1912) they have been involved in a prolonged battle with the forces of “legitimate” culture. Having fought their fights from the wrong side of the street gangsters have continually drawn attention to the line which separates legitimate from illegitimate Americans. This has raised problems in accounting for the gangster genre's significance. In stigmatizing the ethnic urban poor as criminal, the gangster genre betrays its origins in a nativist discourse which sought to cast “hyphenated” Americans as “un-American” and in need of “ Americanization. ” Yet, as perhaps the most powerful vehicle for the nationalization and popularization of ethnic urban American life, the gangster genre overturned many aspects of its iniquitous origin, playing an important part in the re-writing of American history from the perspective (and, as I shall demonstrate, quite literally in the voice) of the ethnic urban lower class.This contradiction is characteristic of the dynamic and changing role American popular culture artifacts play in the mediation of the nation's history. Regardless of the poetic and ideological licence gangster fictions take with the very real socio-historical problems of the ethnic urban poor, the central conflict which informs these narratives remains the question of social, economic, and cultural exclusion.

From World War to Waldheim

University of Chicago Press, Dec 31, 2019

Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022

University of Chicago Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2013

University of Chicago Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2013

Journal for Cultural Research, Jul 1, 2007

Routledge eBooks, Apr 8, 2016

European History Quarterly, 1999

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2007

In the early 1990s, a series of films made by African Americans focusing on the plight of the bla... more In the early 1990s, a series of films made by African Americans focusing on the plight of the black inner city provoked mass media attention and an attendant moral panic. Although small in number and short-lived, this cycle of ghetto-centric films tapped into an increasingly volatile climate of racial discontent fuelled most infamously by the televised airing of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers beating up black motorist, Rodney King, in 1991— an incident which sparked the Los Angeles rebellion one year later following the acquittal of the policemen involved. Collectively categorized as ‘hood’ films, Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991), Boyz N the Hood (1991), New Jack City (1991), Juice (1992) and Menace II Society (1993) brought a sense of hardcore realism about the African-American inner-city experience that mainstream feature films had failed to represent adequately.

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Feb 4, 2021

Rudolph Fisher was unique among Harlem Renaissance authors in making Harlem itself the exclusive ... more Rudolph Fisher was unique among Harlem Renaissance authors in making Harlem itself the exclusive focus of his writing. Across a rich body of work (of short stories and novels), he demonstrated keen powers of social observation in revealing how class, regional, phenotypical, and generational distinctions defined Harlem and shaped an appropriate literary aesthetic. Fisher’s satirical yet loving eye is matched by a musical ear in stories about African Americans becoming modern in the black metropolis. Southern greenhorns are vulnerable to being fleeced by urbane northern hustlers. Grandmothers bearing the memory of the South fear and admire in equal measure the way Harlem shapes their grandchildren. Blues and jazz underscore vernacular speech, as street talk engages rural accents and bourgeois tongues. And such sensitivity to the city’s quotidian features informs Fisher’s ultimate understanding of Harlem as the space of encounter between logic and faith, science and superstition for African Americans

Journal for Cultural Research, Dec 1, 2013

In turning his talents to fiction in his 2011 debut novel, Kings of Vice, gangsta rapper Ice-T ha... more In turning his talents to fiction in his 2011 debut novel, Kings of Vice, gangsta rapper Ice-T has faced a particularly intricate challenge in “keeping it real”. At this point in the twenty-first century, the credibility of hip hop’s harder core seems to have been undermined by the distance gangsta rap has travelled from the street realities that gave it birth in the 1980s to the millionaire enterprises that have emerged since. A “rapocracy” of incredibly successful rappers and producers, most of them associated with gangsta rap (such as Diddy, Dr Dre, Jay-Z and Russell Simmons), has taken the gangsta ill-logic of exploiting the street for maximum profit to the extreme. Ice-T’s intervention in this dynamic has been to try to remind us of hip hop’s more “auratic” origins while acknowledging that the past is indeed a different country. The turn to authorship of books and making of documentary films in the context of a post-2008 economic meltdown environment constitutes an imaginative way to revivify the creative possibilities of the gangsta. The very title of Ice-T’s 2012 documentary film, Something Out of Nothing: The Art of Rap, betrays an almost nostalgic yearning for a purer age and the form that erupted out of it. This same retrospective paradigm for thinking a better way forward for gangsta aesthetics is also at the heart of Kings of Vice. Ice-T’s inventive return to origins shows us how even at a moment of its maximum commodification, gangsta culture (precisely because of its contradictory relationship to capitalism) can provide a uniquely critical perspective on a deregulated world.

University of Chicago Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2013

Journal of American Studies, Apr 1, 1996

Ever since gangsters first appeared on the American screen (officially with D. W. Griffith&am... more Ever since gangsters first appeared on the American screen (officially with D. W. Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley, in 1912) they have been involved in a prolonged battle with the forces of “legitimate” culture. Having fought their fights from the wrong side of the street gangsters have continually drawn attention to the line which separates legitimate from illegitimate Americans. This has raised problems in accounting for the gangster genre's significance. In stigmatizing the ethnic urban poor as criminal, the gangster genre betrays its origins in a nativist discourse which sought to cast “hyphenated” Americans as “un-American” and in need of “ Americanization. ” Yet, as perhaps the most powerful vehicle for the nationalization and popularization of ethnic urban American life, the gangster genre overturned many aspects of its iniquitous origin, playing an important part in the re-writing of American history from the perspective (and, as I shall demonstrate, quite literally in the voice) of the ethnic urban lower class.This contradiction is characteristic of the dynamic and changing role American popular culture artifacts play in the mediation of the nation's history. Regardless of the poetic and ideological licence gangster fictions take with the very real socio-historical problems of the ethnic urban poor, the central conflict which informs these narratives remains the question of social, economic, and cultural exclusion.

From World War to Waldheim

University of Chicago Press, Dec 31, 2019