The hip-hopsploitation film cycle (original) (raw)

In this dissertation, I examine the articulation of hip-hop in the mid-1980s as it emerged onto the national stage of American popular culture. Using Articulation Theory, I weave together an argument explaining how and why hip-hop went from being articulated as a set of multicultural and inclusive practices, organized around breaking, graffiti, and DJing, to being articulated to a violent, misogynistic, and homophobic hypermasculine representation of blackness as essentially rap music culture. In doing so I also argue that there are real political, social, racial, cultural, and ideological implications to this shift in articulation; that something is at stake in defining hip-hop as both black and rap music culture. I put forward this argument by making three distinct steps over the course of this dissertation. First, I identify a change in how hip-hop was represented and thus articulated in popular media. Through an intertextual analysis of the hip-hopsploitation genre films I show that early hip-hop was being represented primarily as a set of cultural practices cohering around breaking, graffiti, and DJing rather than the now dominant articulation as rap music culture. Next I set forth one possible reason for this shift within the limiting conditions set by the available media technologies and means of commodification. The visual nature of hip-hop's early articulation coupled with the economic inaccessibility of consumer home video made breaking and graffiti difficult to commodify compared to rapping as an aural element. Using "technological determinist" theorists like McLuhan, Innis, and Kittler, I argue that understanding how hip-hop as been historically constructed requires analyzing the limiting effect that the material conditions of media technologies have on the production of hip-hop. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank my family, friends, colleagues, mentors, teachers, and students, both at the University of Iowa and beyond. I consider myself lucky to have found a rich intellectual community in which to embed myself no matter where I've lived. Winters and tornadoes aside, Iowa has treated me well, and I appreciate the patience it's shown this California boy. Of course this dissertation could not have been written without the incredible help of many people, most notably my advisor Kembrew and committee members Aimee, Murray, Tim and Vershawn. Materially speaking, this dissertation would not have been possible without the generous support of the University of Iowa Graduate College's Seashore-Ballard Dissertation Fellowship, which allowed me to dedicate the past year to fulltime work on the project.