Thesis Presentation - Advice and Notes

I've written up some of Phil's advice from my thesis presentation today so the advice stays fresh in my memory. I've got quite a clear understanding of where I'm headed with my thesis, I just need to cut down and focus a bit more. I think I'll be using 'Get Out' as my case study to support a discussion about black tropes, theories of race, and scientific racism.

Notes:

• Postcolonialism - look at specifics, theories of race, scientific racism, you don't necessarily need Freud or Marx unless you find it useful.

• Gone With the Wind was invisibly racist.

• Look at who has theorized most reputably about race relations and anthropologies. Claude Lévi Strauss. 

• Enlightenment project of dividing races into categories, look at postmodernism slides. White/ European privilege sneaking through.

• Look at scientific racism, Darwinism and the study of race, Find the people that critique this work and those critiques will be useful theoretical frameworks.

• Reservoir dogs, Spike Lee's opinions on Quentin Tarantino.

• Digital blackface, Sex Education: a black actor that has been put into a trope.

• Choose one out of 'Get Out', Black Panther, Spider-Verse.

• Get Out is a film about racism, Black Panther is a film that has facilitated a discussion about racism. 

• Get Out continued the representiations on screen; the black maid, the groundskeeper, smiling docile black man. it is about the debate itself in the commentary of the film.

•  Black Panther gets its head above the debate, asserts itself and uses this incredibly conventional genre and causes a transformative, social phenomenon.

•  Spider-Verse because it's about animation and diversity more generally, but it's not just about having a black Spider-Man, it's about a universe in which all people can be spider-man. 

• Get out because it is a critique and it's a specific genre and the director himself is positioning black characters in a genre where there's even less latitude. 

• The genre of Blaxploitation, a moment in 70s cinema where it was all about black characters, there were suddenly black actors on the screen like Pam Grier, Shaft, in terms of progressiveness, there was the 'pimp' and other tropes.

• The other place where you still see black representation being expressed in ways which suggest that things aren't very progressive is in porn. Taboo, inappropriate fantasies figures, you see race relation playing out there. While looking at more progressive tropes, there is still this kind of place that is frequented by lots of people where things haven't moved on very far at all. 

• The tropes of the black brute, the mammy, the comedic uncle tom's cabin smiling docile black man in the fields you see in 'Get Out', but they are being used for a critical effect. In the plot, there's still tropes like; black men are fast, black men can dance etc. 

• Chapter 1 - A users guide to black tropes in literature, fiction, advertising, and representation.

• Chapter 2 - Theories of Race, scientific racism to help understand those tropes.

• Chapter 3 'Get Out' as a case study with critique and reflection on the previous chapters.