The CivilianWorks curricula examines identity and politics in mass media through the examination of Hip-Hop and Film. I’ve used these curricula as a foundation for teaching artist residencies, workshops and guest lectures.
The curricula is grounded in Fanonian and (land-specific) Freireian pedagogy and operates through the understanding of media as a societal function that allows for internalized, interpersonal, cultural, institutional and systemic conditions that people experience. Indigenous people, Black people and other marginalized groups of people have bore the brunt of colonial, capitalist, patriarchal and racist oppression due to dehumanizing institutions that frame discourse which can be found amongst the trappings of media.
My educational work aims to shed light on these issues while engaging students and educators in questioning the limits of media and communication within a colonial-capitalistic society and also questioning what people should do to take back community control of the media for the progress of working communities and for the repatriation of land for Indigenous people all over the world.
Abstract 1: “Hip-Hop as a Cultural Tool for Radical Organizing”
examines the organizational uses of Hip-Hop in politicizing youth of the Hip-Hop generation. Originating within Black and Puerto Rican communities in the Bronx, NY, Hip-Hop began as a community-based culture that created safe, non-violent spaces for working class communities of all ages.
The commodification of Hip-Hop packaged cultural elements of MCing, DJing, Graffiti Writing and Breaking along with Hip-Hop’s narratives for the dissemination within popular culture, creating movies such as Beat Street and acts such as The Sugarhill Gang. As Hip-Hop culture gained more popularity in the 90’s, legislative changes in telecommunication laws ushered in an era of corporate conglomeration, greatly reducing the already limited democratization of media ownership and access in America. Hip-Hop culture was soon to become an industrialized commodity, serving to a national audience negative images of working class people of color.
Hip-Hop has recently started to become institutionalized in the Non-Profit Industry and the Higher Education Industry; we are now faced with questioning the limits of incorporating Hip-Hop culture within state institutions and pondering on how the Hip-Hop generation as a cultural movement should work to remain accountable to the working communities that the culture derives from as well as being accountable to the Indigenous people and their rights to the land that Hip-Hop was developed on.
Abstract 2: “Orientalism in Film: Decoding Imperialist Narratives”
examines microaggressions found in the Star Wars series and other fiction films and engages participants in questioning the basis of political correctness within radical political discourse and the historical framing of systemic oppression. Participants will focus on the plight of Asian peoples, specifically on Filipin* people in the United States, in order to understand the generational impacts of diasporic poverty and settler privilege caused by colonization.
Fiction films are a means of escape from reality yet are always based on the imaginations and ideology of real people; the production of films such as Star Wars are often conceived in the white, affluent, cisgender, male imagination. Such origins of imaginative landscapes allows for the dehumanization of the “other”; the being that does not fit within the norm of the status quo. Some of the oldest historical documents characterize Asian people as “orients”: “subhumans” originating from Eastern countries of “backwards”, “savage” culture, in need of humanitarian aid and civilization.
Such narratives continue to impact whole economies of colonial societies, shaping generational wealth and psychology, and have been accommodated in commercial productions as characters such as the Ewoks from “Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi”. The Ewoks are orientalized caricatures of Indigenous Asian people as seen through their depiction as hairy, small and weapon-wielding, through their fictionalized language that steals from Kalmyk-Oirat (Kalmyk origin) and Tagalog (Filipin* origin), and through their actions of childish violent behavior. Based off of the analysis of Asian archetypes in the Star Wars franchise as well as other films, participants will engage with how imperialism has historically shaped media and the images of colonized people as well as the economic institutions that has transitted Asians to the United States as both cheap labor and also as incorporated settlers.
