The 'Other' laughs back: Humour and resistance in anti-racist comedy

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 The Author.This article outlines the ‘reverse discourses’ of black, African-American and Afro-Caribbean comedians in the UK and USA. These reverse discourses appear in comic acts that employ the sign-systems of embodied and cultural racism but develop, or seek to develop, a reverse semantic effect. I argue the humour of reverse discourse is significant in relation to racism because it forms a type of resistance that can, first, act rhetorically against racist meaning and so attack racist truth claims and points of ambivalence. Second, and connected to this, it can rhetorically resolve the ambiguity of the reverse discourse itself. Alongside this, and paradoxically, reverse discourses also contain a polysemic element that can, at times, reproduce racism. The article seeks to develop a means of analysing the relationship between racist and non-racist meaning in such comedic performance.ESR

The Jurisprudence of Transformation: Intellectual Incoherence and Doctrinal Murkiness Twenty Years After Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music

Examining recent judicial opinions, this Article analyzes and critiques the transformative-use doctrine two decades after the U.S. Supreme Court introduced it into copyright law in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music. When the Court established the transformative-use concept, which plays a critical role in fair-use determinations today, its contours were relatively undefined. Drawing on an influential law-review article, the Court described a transformative use as one that adds “new expression, meaning or message.” Unfortunately, the doctrine and its application are increasingly ambiguous, with lower courts developing competing conceptions of transformation. This doctrinal murkiness is particularly disturbing because fair use is a key proxy for First Amendment interests in copyright law. This Article traces the evolution of transformative use, analyzes three key paradigms of transformative use that have gained prominence in the post-Campbell environment, and offers suggestions for a jurisprudence in which transformative use is a less significant component of the fair-use analysis

A Copyright Right of Publicity

This Article identifies a striking asymmetry in the law’s disparate treatment of publicity-rights holders and copyright holders. State-law publicity rights generally protect individuals from unauthorized use of their name and likeness by others. Publicity-claim liability, however, is limited by the First Amendment’s protection for expressive speech embodying a “transformative use” of the publicity-rights holder’s identity. This Article examines for the first time a further limitation imposed by copyright law: when a publicity-rights holder’s identity is transformatively depicted in a copyrighted work without consent, the author’s copyright can produce the peculiar result of enjoining the publicity-rights holder from using or engaging in speech about her own depiction. This Article offers novel contributions to the literature on copyright overreach and: (1) identifies a legal asymmetry produced in the interplay of publicity rights, copyright law, and the First Amendment; (2) examines the burdens on constitutionally protected speech, autonomy, and liberty interests of publicity-rights holders when copyright law prevents or constrains use of their own depiction; and (3) outlines a framework for recognizing a “copyright right of publicity” to exempt the publicity-rights holder’s use from copyright infringement liability. Notably, this Article contributes uniquely to the literature by revealing new insights gained from an exclusive first-hand perspective of an internationally recognized celebrity whose persona was prominently depicted without prior notice or consent in a wide-release feature film

Cultural Environmentalism and Beyond

This article is part of a symposium issue entitled Cultural Environmentalism @ 10, occuring on the tenth anniversary of Prof. Boyle\u27s book, Shamans, Software, and Spleens. In this article Prof. Boyle offers his thoughts on the failings, limitations, occasional promise, and possible future of the ideas discussed in the symposium including both the work on cultural environmentalism and the surrounding ideas on authorship, the rhetoric of economic analysis, the structure of intellectual property scholarship, and the jurisprudence of the public domain

A nation under our feet : Black Panther, Afrofuturism and the potential of thinking through political structures

In this article, the focus is on Black Panther: a nation under our feet, a comic book series written by American public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates. The point of departure is Coates's idea of 'the Mecca', a term he uses in his earlier non-fiction. It refers to a space in which black culture is created in the shadow of collective traumas and memories. We argue that in a nation under our feet the fictional African country of Wakanda functions as a metaphorical Mecca. This version of Wakanda is contextualised in terms of the aesthetics of Afrofuturism and theories on the influence of ideology in comic books. The central focus of the article is how this representation of Wakanda questions the idea of a unified black people and how Wakanda, like the real world Meccas described by Coates, display internal ideological and political struggles among its people. We argue that the various characters in a nation under our feet represent different and conflicting ideological positions. These positions are metaphors for real world political views and in playing out the consequences of these ideologies, Coates explores African and global political structures without didactically providing conclusive answers to complex issues

The Indian family on UK reality television: Convivial culture in salient contexts

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below, copyright 2012 @ the author.This article demonstrates how The Family (2009), a fly-on-the wall UK reality series about a British Indian family, facilitates both current public service broadcasting requirements and mass audience appeal. From a critical cultural studies perspective, the author examines the journalistic and viewer responses to the series where authenticity, universality, and comedy emerge as major themes. Textual analysis of the racialized screen representations also helps locate the series within the contexts of contested multiculturalism, genre developments in reality television and public service broadcasting. Paul Gilroy’s concept of convivial culture is used as a frame in understanding how meanings of the series are produced within a South Asian popular representational space. The author suggests that the social comedy taxonomy is a prerequisite for the making of this particular observational documentary. Further, the popular (comedic) mode of conviviality on which the series depends is both expedient and necessary within the various sociopolitical contexts outlined

George Orwell: The English dissident as Tory anarchist

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 The Author.This article examines the nature of George Orwell's Tory anarchism, a term that he used to describe himself until his experiences in Spain in 1936. The argument developed here says that the qualities that Orwell felt made him a Tory anarchist remained with him throughout his life, even after his commitment to democratic socialism. In fact, many of those qualities (fear of an all-powerful state, respect for privacy, support for common sense and decency, patriotism) connect the two aspects of his character. The article explains what the idea of a Tory anarchist means, describing it as a practice rather than a coherent political ideology, and moves on to examine the relationship between Eric Blair, the Tory anarchist, and George Orwell, the democratic socialist. It makes the case for his Tory anarchism by drawing out recurring themes in his work that connect him to other Tory anarchist figures such as his contemporary Evelyn Waugh. Thus Tory anarchism is presented as a conservative moral critique of the modern world that can connect figures who hold quite radically different political beliefs

Dadaism (Re)activated. Artzins and Dada

The article analyses in what way artzins (independent art and literary journals published in Poland in the 1980s and 1990s) drew inspiration from the Dada tradition, and how they made its philosophy live again. Artzins are seen here both as a medium of literature and art and as specific forms of artistic expression (press art). The article attempts to show why artzins and their authors were interested in reviving the avant-garde and Dada ideas. It also investigates how Dadaism functions today in the form of contemporary works and styles which are influenced by this avant-garde movement. What is more, the article tries to answer the question about the nature and definition of Dadaism shaped and reflected by today's artistic projects

Lolita Fashion: A trans-global subculture

While there are some who would argue that the origin of Lolita fashion can be traced back to fiction (namely, the 1955 novel, Lolita, which was adapted to film in 1962 and again in 1997) and has relevance to sexual attractiveness with reference to the young, this popular style developed more recently into a subcultural identity in Japan as a distinctive style in its own right. This article regards Lolita as an independent street fashion and subculture and explores this particular culture that Lolitas (those who wear this distinct fashion style) have created. Although a small-scale subculture, Lolitas demonstrate an obvious way of thinking and behaving which reinforces their identity of which fashion plays a significant role. The fashion style suggests escapism through fantasy as it can be interpreted as a visual resistance against conventional culture and is therefore of interest to a range of disciplines including fashion, culture and behaviour theorists. The article explores this subculture in the UK context to provide a better understanding of British Lolitas and evaluates the marketplace to offer a retail-marketing perspective

ICCan I call you Mommy? 1D Myths of the feminine and superheroic in Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean 19s Black Orchid

This article uses Claude Lévi-Strauss's linguistic theories to examine the intersection of superheroic and feminine myths in Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Black Orchid. It reveals how this text substitutes traditionally feminine tropes (such as mothering, passivity and purity) and taboos for the more usual elements underlying the superhero myth, and explores the effects of this replacement. It is the contention of this article that, to date, the superheroine myth has followed a similar structure to the superhero myth. Figures such as Wonder Woman fight and lead alongside their male counterparts, using masculine notions of leadership and camaraderie. Elements such as idealised physiques apply equally to both genders and the majority of superpowers seem gender-neutral. Of course the number of male superheroes certainly outweighs the female, and gender stereotypes have been used (the cover of Adventure Comics #401 shows Supergirl 'absolutely terrified of a mouse!'), but overall the same (masculine) notions underpin both male and female superheroes. It often seems that the feminised superheroic has yet to be fully constructed and explored. This article will initially summarise Lévi-Strauss's linguistic model of myth, before applying the same to the traditional superhero myth in order to reveal its underlying binaries and gender bias. It then applies this model to Black Orchid. Areas addressed will include the superhero and violence (via an exploration of feminine passivity and the motif of the climactic battle), the superhero and power (considering myths such as Mother Nature and the motherland), and the superhero and identity (using a case study of the May Queen). It concludes that Black Orchid's subversion of the superhero is achieved by its employment of feminine myths, and that in so doing it is able to resolve the power conundrum and identity fracture that underlie this genre