No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
In character as elder among a group of barbers who work in an African-American shop on Chicago's Southside, Cedric Entertainer limps as he paces before his audience of coworkers and customers. He has just called into question Rosa Parks's status as an icon of civil rights. He concedes an inch before advancing his argument by yards, I'm going to give her her just due. Her act led to movement and everything, but she damn sure wasn't special. The room fills with roars of protest and laughter. Eddie is insistent, She didn't do nothing but sit her black ass down! Another barber, Jimmy James (Scan Patrick Thomas), launches into a lecture with a characteristically superior air, Eddie, not only is what you're saying not true. It is wrong and disrespectful for you to discuss Rosa Parks in that way. But Eddie is undeterred. Wait, wait, wait. Hold on here. this a A rare moment of consensus-everyone concurs. Is this a barbershop? I mean, we can't talk straight in a barbershop, then where can we talk straight? We can't talk straight nowhere else. You know, this ain't nothing but healthy conversation. ... Ain't nobody exempt in barbershop, you know that. Nobody exempt. You can talk about whoever, whatever, and whenever you want to in barbershop. Barbershop (2002) was a highly successful installment in emergent film genre that might be called comedy. Virtually personified by rapper Ice Cube, who starred in Barbershop and wrote Friday series,1 urban comedies are an outgrowth of hood of early 1990s, such as Boyz in The Hood (1991, in which Ice Cube debuted as a screen actor); Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991); and Menace II Society (1993). Keeping realism and inner-city setting that characterized those films, urban comedies make case that, even without glossing over issues like drugs, gangs, and street crime, urban communities can be source of humor as well as critical rage or moral panic. Indeed, by situating city as a source of humor and cultural knowledge (Foucault 1980:82), urban comedy genre undertakes a more positive representation than discourse that is usually deployed on economically marginalized, racially segregated urban core (see Kelley 1998). An implicit vindication or celebration of marginal communities and subjugated knowledge also has a place in ethnographic projects, including field of folkloristics. By placing the folk at center of intellectual/representational work, folklorists are always engaged somewhat in economies of meaning and value, intervening to shift grade of hierarchies among people, spaces, truths, and genres of expressive culture. Barbershop reflects these folkloristic concerns within its subject matter, since barbershop owned by protagonist Calvin (Ice Cube) and its Southside setting are both far from typical cinematic imaginary of Chicago. For that matter, Barbershop hardly resembles most other Hollywood films set in windy city. This resonance, however slight, between a genre of film and a type of scholarship suggests an unusual way to discuss intersection of folklore with cinema. Bracketing for time being very interesting questions of whether film is folklore in a quintessentially modern form, or whether films use folkloric material to tell new stories, I propose to work with idea of film as a technology of representation and argument that operates in ways similar to ways that folklorists work. Developing a dialogue between genres of scholarship and entertainment is worthwhile on a number of fronts: for one, it opens new pedagogical possibilities for introducing students to folklore and cultural theory. In addition, viewing a film as conducting folklore-like work allows folklorists to gain new perspectives on what they do. This experience may be a self-congratulatory one, allowing a scholar to imagine that a screenwriter might have taken an influential class or read a monograph. …
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.