Night Of The Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead is a 1968 zombie film. Within this film the main character, Ben hold up in a Pennsylvania farm house while at the same time trying to protect themselves from the recently dead - the zombies. However, this film tackles race not within the movie as much as it does on the outside.

Though from the outside this movie may look like the classic zombie horror film it made a giant decision within its casting. During a time where black actors were not often cast as the lead, Duane Jones portrayed the main character Ben. During the 1960's black characters were often given the over the top personalities as we saw in Spike Lee's "Bamboozled," but instead Ben was a central character with no "ethnic" personality traits. As reported in How Casting a Black Actor Changed, Night of the Living Dead, "Director George Romero agrees with that recollection: “Duane Jones was the best actor we met to play Ben. If there was a film with a black actor in it, it usually had a racial theme, like 'The Defiant Ones.' Consciously I resisted writing new dialogue ‘cause he happens to be black. We just shot the script. Perhaps 'Night of the Living Dead' is the first film to have a black man playing the lead role regardless of, rather than because of, his race ("How Casting a Black Actor Changed, Night of the Living Dead.")."  Even the director knew that he was taking a large risk by portraying a script that was written for a non-specific race with a black actor.

Though we still see racial casting problems (#OscarsSoWhite, anyone?) this movie took a giant step towards the right direction. Of course there will always be problems in casting for race specific characters, but for a character that can be portrayed by any race, the door should be open for any one to be casted. In this case Romero knew that Jones was the best character to portray Ben, regardless of the times and the fact that black actors didn't usual play the "serious" role.

Module 9 Example: #OscarsSoWhite

PROMPT

This week's video tackled the concept of hegemony and it's totally ok if you're still having a bit of trouble with it.  Here is another video that summarizes the idea really well with a visual metaphor: Cultural Hegemony (2:24 minutes) along with this one: Hegemony: WTF? An Introduction to Gramsci and Cultural Hegemony (6:26 minutes).

With this in mind and the examples that I identified in this week's video on hegemony, your goal is to identify a hegemonic struggle, past or present between the mainstream culture (e.g. the white and pure milk within the video above) and a subculture or counterculture that has found some way to infiltrate but not necessarily changed. For this, it is probably useful to link to an article or blog post (note: this should be news-focused, not information focused), that discusses the issue.  I don't recommend searching merely for your topic AND hegemony--trust me, that won't really work. Instead, look for articles that talk about how a marginal group is trying to impact the dominant culture.  

Within your post, you should include the following:

1. Identify the subculture or counter-culture that you're going to discuss. (1 paragraph)
2. Identify how and why it comes into conflict with the mainstream culture. (1 paragraph)
3. How this conflict has created some but not necessarily significant change and how we can understand the hegemonic forces at play within this scenario.  (1 paragraph)

Be sure to be specific with your example and to use the language and ideas from the video.

Relevant Labels/Tags:  Hegemony, dominant group, subordinate group, [specific arena/topic that you are exploring]

EXAMPLE

I'm going to talk about the #OscarsSoWhite debate that heated up in the announcements of the Oscar nominations for 2016 within this idea of cultural hegemony.  For those unfamiliar with what it was about, here is a basic primer.  Now, since their inception, the Oscars have been almost overwhelmingly white.  On this site, you can see the breakdown of nominations and actual wins, which shows winning is a pretty rare concurrence. Like many areas of popular culture, a white dominant culture has largely controlled the decisions (what movies get made), and prestige (who gets recognition).  This year, after the second year in a row of no African American nominations in the major acting areas, despite there being strong contestants, struck a nerve among the African-American community and other allies.  

The tension gained enough attention to warrant news reports in major publications and news stations of people boycotting the Oscars.  It became clear that the interest in and purity of the Oscars as the leader in the film cultural tastes was being challenged.  So they did react in two particular ways.  The first is that they made commitments to change their selection process, making there was much better representation of diverse identities among the Academy voters (currently, it is 94% white & 77% male).  The second is that they allowed Chris Rock to perform some rather controversial remarks as part of his role as host to the Academy Awards.

Now, many would look at both of these and believe that this was legitimate progress and celebrate it.  After all, the judges are more likely to be more diverse in the future and Chris Rock did at times throw some hard punches at the Academy Awards with regards to the history of racism and even false-categories of films.  Both seem to challenge the status quo, but do they?  In the case of making the pool more diverse, this is often the reaction that dominant institutions take when charged with not being inclusive of minorities.  And while this inclusion is good, it's a hegemonic practice to lessen the threat but not to do anything about it.  

Supreme Course Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said the following about women on the Supreme Court:  “So now the perception is, yes, women are here to stay. And when I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that."  This is an example of actual change.  By including a few women instead of radically changing the institution, the institution knows that the dominant values will still stay in place and to a certain degree, the injustice will continue, but there is less concern about it since there are representatives involved.  So we have superficial but not necessarily substantive change.  It's an interesting question for the Academy Awards--if they entirely reversed the racial and gender make up (6% white, 23% male) of the voters, would there be significantly different films being selected?  And if so, what does that say about those who are currently voting and why they are voting?

Even with Chris Rock's appearance, he may be critical of the concept, but by still performing and still making people laugh, he alleviates the issue rather than raises it.  He makes people feel slightly uncomfortable with his remarks, but in the next moment is onto the next joke.  Again, he superficially challenges them, but things stay largely the same.  

This is cultural hegemony at work.  The conflicted group (in this case, African Americans and allies), raise up resistance but by this time next year, given the superficial inclusive changes, they are likely to not be as resistant.