Lord of the Monsters: Minstrelsy Redux: King Kong, Hip Hop, and the Brutal Black Buck
2008; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Socioeconomic Development in Asia
ResumoKing Kong! Kingg Kongg!! Kinggg Konggg!!! If king kong had been home with his kids and his old lady and his neighbors helping to protect their turf from the invaders he never would have gotten hauled across the ocean and ended up getting shot off the top of the empire state building and what was that boy doing up there in the dark with that woman anyway (Gossett 63) HAVE YOU HEARD OF SILAS KPANAN'AYOUNG SIAKOR? HE'S NOT A DICTATOR like Charles Taylor or a rap star, or an athlete. Silas Siakor, according to Michelle Nijhuis of Grist Magazine, put his life on the line to save Liberia's rain forests, everybody's rain forests. Charles Taylor used the profits from ravaging the rain forest to bankroll his civil war. Big time capitalists in the Oriental Logging Company were gunning for Mr. Siakor because he cramped their slash-through-the-big-timber style. He won against these thugs, many of whom are now on trial, by getting proof to the UN of arms smuggling and ecological devastation that ultimately helped oust the aforementioned Taylor. Under threat of death, Mr. Siakor toppled a mighty corporate edifice and a corrupt ruler without tearing anybody up or blowing shit to pieces. When you advance-Google Mr. Siakor, he gets 559 hits (on May 24, 2006). Despite his death-defying triumphs, he and other African or third world men doing what Hattie Gossett suggests in her King Kong poem are not the prototypical cultural icons of black masculinity. This is not simply a question of publicity--Mr. Siakor is an invisible warrior partly because he is hard to perceive in our cultural landscape. Monster Mind Space The cultural landscape is a fantastical realm where anything can be associated with anything else. Our metaphorical minds are constructed to generate and appreciate analogy, parable, simile--this, in fact, is how we understand and organize our world. Most of what we know or believe, we don't directly experience, but understand through storytelling as analogous to our limited experiences. (1) In this wondrous story-landscape, relentlessly iterated associations become truth, making it difficult to see that which is not repeated. Even in our so-called post-Enlightenment, scientific age, usage is truth. An indexical connection between the two sides of a metaphorical equivalency is irrelevant and multiple/divergent parings do not negate one another. (2) In other words, you may, as I do, find the reductive racial/gender readings of Kong unenlightening; or you may vociferously proclaim that your cultural production transcends time, space, race, and gender. You may swear that you are not presenting yet another version of black male/gorilla brute who lusts after innocent white womanhood and gets lynched for his audacious passion, but if she's blonde and civilized and he's dark, wild, monstrously violent, and at home in the heart of darkness, when he tumbles a hundred stories to his death once again, you are perpetuating the cultural landscape you claim to abhor. (3) well what I want to know is what about kong's wife and his kids mrs kong and the little kings whatever happened to them after he deathwished and tripped him-self right out of their lives did they have an insurance policy to fall back on simian social security a pension perhaps did mrs kong get a job as a maid in a circus monkey act and visit the kids at her mama's house when the show was laying over (Gossett 64) Whatever else it is, King Kong is an adventure-tragedy of racial/gender identity as constituted in the American, Hollywood, world imagination. This tale, forged in the sexism/racism of its and our time, cannot purge itself of the dramatic basis for the story and remain wildly popular. (4) Imagine King Kong going after a blond male actor, a young Robert Redford. …
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