Hello Shalini, Thank you for introducing this video into the In Media Res forum. It is, indeed, a bit bizarre beginning with the difficulty in reading it. That is, there is no clear message or meaning as to the relationship between Barack Obama and Bollywood performance or Indians. Because of the importance (literally the sign-ificance) of the image of Obama, there is an implied political meaning to the piece ~ but there is such a disconnect between the figure who hopes to be the next American president and the singing/synching and dancing/gesturing that I feel it is not semiotically productive (whether or not it was intended to be). Can you tell us what the lyrics of the song are, and the background of this particular Bollywood music?
I also wanted to thank everyone for their comments and the really interesting discussions we are having on all clips. LeiLani, you are right about the insider/outsider split and indeed I was watching in the limited audience I was with to see who laughed when and at what? Also was it nervous laughter or a hearty guffaw?
Verbal humor in general allows us to laugh at something that we understand to be true and so I do think there are “racial alignments” in how we perceive humor. However, I also believe that our positions are not fixed. One question of interest would be to ask when do we shift alignments? What kinds of moves (in a comedy) encourage us to shift and what prevents us?
In the case of Harold and Kumar is it the appeal to the universal (romance narrative) or the consumption of weed? The confrontation with Southern stereotypes does play with “whiteness” and insider/outsider racial positions though it does seem there are only two options in the film—Harold and Kumar or whiteness. Some might even argue that they are a variation on “whiteness.”
Thanks for the terrific feedback and sorry for the lag in responding (17 hr time difference to blame there). Shilpa, I think your comparison between CCP and M.Night Shyamalan is really apt - and the question, what happens when we stop being the object of media/cultural production and become producers ourselves is a wonderful way to frame this clip and what’s happening in US popular media as more Asian Americans get behind the mike, camera, and computer screens. Personally, I think “reducing the shock value of seeing difference” can in itself be a profound and important political move and/or indication of changes afoot (though there’s always of course the possibility of co-optation by neocon forces that such images herald the “end of race/racism” etc). L.S., thanks for the insightful response - definitely CCP seems to have taken a very different route than artists of color like Spike Lee or Wayne Wang, who started off by specifically representing Black and Asian American cultures/experiences/identities, respectively and have since crossed over into the “mainstream” while(like Lin, Shyamalan and others) continuing strategically to represent “race” in more subtle ways. It’s also of course important to consider different media context they’re coming from: music v. movie industries - and the different foci: aural v. visual - along with the perceived dominant default racial position listeners/viewers historically have been presumed to assume (with hip hop: Black masculinity; with Hollywood: white masculinity) LeiLani, I totally share your desire to “read race” into texts by Asian Americans, particularly given that we are nowhere near the kind of visibility in US popular culture white or even other nonwhite people have. But reception is your forte not mine! =) I guess I’m searching for a way to come up with new or hybrid critical frameworks/methodologies to interpret texts like CCP’s (and others mentioned in comments and showcased this week in clips) are appearing - and I think in certain ways challenging/pushing us to rethink the ways we’ve discussed racial and ethnic representation in media thus far. Finally, Shalini - thanks so much for your very helpful suggestion re: one way to read this video. I hope we’ll be able to meet irl someday. It had occurred to me that consciously or unconsciously - the plethora of white American imagery here gets conflated with US capitalist consumer culture, which CCP is clearly critiquing via hip hop. I guess what I wonder is how he uses hip hop as an oppositional black strategy if this is the case. And this brings up much larger questions around race, identity politics, and authenticity that are central to hip hop culture, especially now as it has become such a dominant, global style/language/industry and academics talking about that culture. It also brings to mind L.S.’s clip and the image of the working-class Asian American men dancing in masks of various colours (is this appropriation or homage on the part of the performers; whichever the case, how does it differ from white perfomers referencing/performing blackness). And finally, the question I keep coming back to here and in my own work: what does AA representation (by Asian Americans and non-AAs) tell us about position/role of AAs in the changing racial landscape of the US?
Hi Jane- Thanks for introducing me to this artist and his work. In response to your question and the discussion here, I wonder if appropriation of whiteness and white imagery might be another way to think about this video. Appropriating hip-hop from blacks, and other cultural productions from particular racial groups is often noted, but we rarely look at the category of whiteness as being “about race.” I’m struck by the near homogeneity of white images in the video when these historical periods also contain plenty of images of people of color. Is Cool Calm Pete possibly depicting what he sees as the white hegemony of the post-war consumer period by using hip-hop as an oppositional black strategy?
I am really looking forward to seeing this film, Shilpa. And I’m also enjoying this conversation as it stretches across the week. I realized that for both L.S. and Jane’s piece the theme of audience reception keeps coming up - the extent to which dancing Asian bodies exert control over their audience, for instance. So I’m wondering how humor and audience work in Harold and Kumar. Racial/ethnic humor often hinges on an insider/outsider split — who gets the joke? How does getting or missing the joke force us to align ourselves racially? — if only for the time it takes to laugh.
These are some provacative questions you pose, Jane. The video you present here does make me think about how Euro-American texts are read as “not about race” while Asian American texts must be “only about race.” On the other hand the impulse toward the erasure of race is so strong and the absence of Asian Americans in media is so widespread that, as a reader, I continually want to read race back onto texts. I don’t want to prescribe how an artist _should_ represent a racial identity, but I do want to think about how we position ourselves as readers and to think about how the salience of race rises and falls according to context.
Jane, This is an intriguing piece to consider, definitely, not only in terms of the film/video itself, but in raising your question about the rapper Cool Calm Pete. I think there are several issues that emerge, including: authorship, audience/reader response, and the notion or application of identity politics. As you described, your students don’t know and don’t think about the rapper being Korean American ~ does it change their interpretation of the video when they find out? Cool Calm Pete seems to have established a position of being an author/artist who is Korean American from the East Coast in a way he is comfortable with. I also think, within the context of racial politics, artists of color have to establish ‘credibility’ in a different way than non-minority artists. Where once upon a time, a director like Spike Lee was expected and also elected to create ‘Black Cinema’ he has since been able to do films that don’t fit strictly into a category (SONOFSAM, for instance). Perhaps artists like Cool Calm Pete is taking a different route, beginning his artistic career without being directly pegged as “an Asian rapper.” The particular race and the particular genre/venue probably factor in as well.
What I am wary of is the ideological stance that some (majority and people of color alike) take of: s/he’s a writer or director or politician (etc.) “who just happens to be Asian or Black (etc.). which aligns itself with a neoconservative “color blindness” which posits that “race doesn’t matter.” Of course it does. At the same time, I rather like the idea ~ and the successful execution of ~ an unexpected “oh, he or she directed or sang or wrote — or danced (JabbaWockeeZ) or was funny (Harold/John Cho, Kumar/Kal Penn, Margaret Cho) like that?” It challenges the expectations that an Asian American artist’s work would be ‘about’ being Asian American.
I like Justin Lin’s philosophical, artistic and (business) strategic approach, which is that all his work, whether BETTERLUCKTOMORROW or FASTANDTHEFURIOUS (3 and 4!) are Asian American by virtue of the fact that he is lending his perspective to making the films. In what way do we ask or consider how the identity of a 4th generation white American of mixed ethnic heritage directly affects her or his work? We don’t, really. They are granted a wider frame to create work, as should we all be.
Hello L.S.
You ask a really important question to think about in relation to ethnic humor. There’s been quite a lot of work on the history of Black and Jewish comics but I haven’t seen a whole lot (with the exception of Margaret Cho) on Asian American comics. There was also an awful film by Albert Brooks (“Looking for Humor in the Muslim World”) that asks a very similar question. How is humor cultural and how is it ethnic?
With Harold and Kumar it seems that they are playing off different types that follows Felix and Oscar of the “Odd Couple” but with contemporary political and ethnic references. What happens in the second film is that both characters go back and forth from being objects of humor to being producers of humor (in control of the reception of the joke). The scene at the airport is one where Kumar is the object and then becomes in control of the narrative although it is at the expense of the black security guard. What’s missing from the clip is the white supervisor who surveys the situation and allows Kumar to pass. What does this say.
And yes, you are right—we should definitely continue these conversations! Thanks for your questions.
This is a wonderful clip—thanks for introducing it! I think the question you bring up (how is Asian American expressed in popular culture as opposed to how do Asian Americans perform and interact with popular culture?) starts with the difference between being the Object and being the producer of culture. Cool Calm Pete is the producer of his material so his approach may be informed by his ethnic identity but it’s not the only way to read him. I see this with M.Night Shyamalan as a director. His films are not Asian American but he populates his films (sometimes with cameos) with different races and ethnicities as part of everyday life. Perhaps that’s one way of thinking “beyond race” is to reduce the shock value of seeing difference.
Hello Shilpa, This is a great way to enter into a conversation about Asian American media representation and culture ~ a conversation that will certainly continue beyond the week. I am wondering if you can elaborate upon the fact of Asian American protagonists in HAROLDANDKUMAR and the notion of heroes or heroic figures? As you know, one of my areas of focus is race and genre, and what “results” or consequences or small victories there might be when Asians are telling jokes and involved in the delivery of yes, stoner humor, but also political humor. To me, laughter is like dancing ~ an overtly personal and emotional expression. Which is not usually associated with Asians in the American context. What do you think about Harold and Kumar/Penn and Cho and their relationship to the power of humor?
Hello Shalini, Thank you for introducing this video into the In Media Res forum. It is, indeed, a bit bizarre beginning with the difficulty in reading it. That is, there is no clear message or meaning as to the relationship between Barack Obama and Bollywood performance or Indians. Because of the importance (literally the sign-ificance) of the image of Obama, there is an implied political meaning to the piece ~ but there is such a disconnect between the figure who hopes to be the next American president and the singing/synching and dancing/gesturing that I feel it is not semiotically productive (whether or not it was intended to be). Can you tell us what the lyrics of the song are, and the background of this particular Bollywood music?
Hi LeiLani and all,
I also wanted to thank everyone for their comments and the really interesting discussions we are having on all clips. LeiLani, you are right about the insider/outsider split and indeed I was watching in the limited audience I was with to see who laughed when and at what? Also was it nervous laughter or a hearty guffaw?
Verbal humor in general allows us to laugh at something that we understand to be true and so I do think there are “racial alignments” in how we perceive humor. However, I also believe that our positions are not fixed. One question of interest would be to ask when do we shift alignments? What kinds of moves (in a comedy) encourage us to shift and what prevents us?
In the case of Harold and Kumar is it the appeal to the universal (romance narrative) or the consumption of weed? The confrontation with Southern stereotypes does play with “whiteness” and insider/outsider racial positions though it does seem there are only two options in the film—Harold and Kumar or whiteness. Some might even argue that they are a variation on “whiteness.”
Hi everyone,
Thanks for the terrific feedback and sorry for the lag in responding (17 hr time difference to blame there). Shilpa, I think your comparison between CCP and M.Night Shyamalan is really apt - and the question, what happens when we stop being the object of media/cultural production and become producers ourselves is a wonderful way to frame this clip and what’s happening in US popular media as more Asian Americans get behind the mike, camera, and computer screens. Personally, I think “reducing the shock value of seeing difference” can in itself be a profound and important political move and/or indication of changes afoot (though there’s always of course the possibility of co-optation by neocon forces that such images herald the “end of race/racism” etc). L.S., thanks for the insightful response - definitely CCP seems to have taken a very different route than artists of color like Spike Lee or Wayne Wang, who started off by specifically representing Black and Asian American cultures/experiences/identities, respectively and have since crossed over into the “mainstream” while(like Lin, Shyamalan and others) continuing strategically to represent “race” in more subtle ways. It’s also of course important to consider different media context they’re coming from: music v. movie industries - and the different foci: aural v. visual - along with the perceived dominant default racial position listeners/viewers historically have been presumed to assume (with hip hop: Black masculinity; with Hollywood: white masculinity) LeiLani, I totally share your desire to “read race” into texts by Asian Americans, particularly given that we are nowhere near the kind of visibility in US popular culture white or even other nonwhite people have. But reception is your forte not mine! =) I guess I’m searching for a way to come up with new or hybrid critical frameworks/methodologies to interpret texts like CCP’s (and others mentioned in comments and showcased this week in clips) are appearing - and I think in certain ways challenging/pushing us to rethink the ways we’ve discussed racial and ethnic representation in media thus far. Finally, Shalini - thanks so much for your very helpful suggestion re: one way to read this video. I hope we’ll be able to meet irl someday. It had occurred to me that consciously or unconsciously - the plethora of white American imagery here gets conflated with US capitalist consumer culture, which CCP is clearly critiquing via hip hop. I guess what I wonder is how he uses hip hop as an oppositional black strategy if this is the case. And this brings up much larger questions around race, identity politics, and authenticity that are central to hip hop culture, especially now as it has become such a dominant, global style/language/industry and academics talking about that culture. It also brings to mind L.S.’s clip and the image of the working-class Asian American men dancing in masks of various colours (is this appropriation or homage on the part of the performers; whichever the case, how does it differ from white perfomers referencing/performing blackness). And finally, the question I keep coming back to here and in my own work: what does AA representation (by Asian Americans and non-AAs) tell us about position/role of AAs in the changing racial landscape of the US?
Hi Jane- Thanks for introducing me to this artist and his work. In response to your question and the discussion here, I wonder if appropriation of whiteness and white imagery might be another way to think about this video. Appropriating hip-hop from blacks, and other cultural productions from particular racial groups is often noted, but we rarely look at the category of whiteness as being “about race.” I’m struck by the near homogeneity of white images in the video when these historical periods also contain plenty of images of people of color. Is Cool Calm Pete possibly depicting what he sees as the white hegemony of the post-war consumer period by using hip-hop as an oppositional black strategy?
I am really looking forward to seeing this film, Shilpa. And I’m also enjoying this conversation as it stretches across the week. I realized that for both L.S. and Jane’s piece the theme of audience reception keeps coming up - the extent to which dancing Asian bodies exert control over their audience, for instance. So I’m wondering how humor and audience work in Harold and Kumar. Racial/ethnic humor often hinges on an insider/outsider split — who gets the joke? How does getting or missing the joke force us to align ourselves racially? — if only for the time it takes to laugh.
These are some provacative questions you pose, Jane. The video you present here does make me think about how Euro-American texts are read as “not about race” while Asian American texts must be “only about race.” On the other hand the impulse toward the erasure of race is so strong and the absence of Asian Americans in media is so widespread that, as a reader, I continually want to read race back onto texts. I don’t want to prescribe how an artist _should_ represent a racial identity, but I do want to think about how we position ourselves as readers and to think about how the salience of race rises and falls according to context.
Jane, This is an intriguing piece to consider, definitely, not only in terms of the film/video itself, but in raising your question about the rapper Cool Calm Pete. I think there are several issues that emerge, including: authorship, audience/reader response, and the notion or application of identity politics. As you described, your students don’t know and don’t think about the rapper being Korean American ~ does it change their interpretation of the video when they find out? Cool Calm Pete seems to have established a position of being an author/artist who is Korean American from the East Coast in a way he is comfortable with. I also think, within the context of racial politics, artists of color have to establish ‘credibility’ in a different way than non-minority artists. Where once upon a time, a director like Spike Lee was expected and also elected to create ‘Black Cinema’ he has since been able to do films that don’t fit strictly into a category (SON OF SAM, for instance). Perhaps artists like Cool Calm Pete is taking a different route, beginning his artistic career without being directly pegged as “an Asian rapper.” The particular race and the particular genre/venue probably factor in as well.
What I am wary of is the ideological stance that some (majority and people of color alike) take of: s/he’s a writer or director or politician (etc.) “who just happens to be Asian or Black (etc.). which aligns itself with a neoconservative “color blindness” which posits that “race doesn’t matter.” Of course it does. At the same time, I rather like the idea ~ and the successful execution of ~ an unexpected “oh, he or she directed or sang or wrote — or danced (JabbaWockeeZ) or was funny (Harold/John Cho, Kumar/Kal Penn, Margaret Cho) like that?” It challenges the expectations that an Asian American artist’s work would be ‘about’ being Asian American.
I like Justin Lin’s philosophical, artistic and (business) strategic approach, which is that all his work, whether BETTER LUCK TOMORROW or FAST AND THE FURIOUS (3 and 4!) are Asian American by virtue of the fact that he is lending his perspective to making the films. In what way do we ask or consider how the identity of a 4th generation white American of mixed ethnic heritage directly affects her or his work? We don’t, really. They are granted a wider frame to create work, as should we all be.
Hello L.S. You ask a really important question to think about in relation to ethnic humor. There’s been quite a lot of work on the history of Black and Jewish comics but I haven’t seen a whole lot (with the exception of Margaret Cho) on Asian American comics. There was also an awful film by Albert Brooks (“Looking for Humor in the Muslim World”) that asks a very similar question. How is humor cultural and how is it ethnic?
With Harold and Kumar it seems that they are playing off different types that follows Felix and Oscar of the “Odd Couple” but with contemporary political and ethnic references. What happens in the second film is that both characters go back and forth from being objects of humor to being producers of humor (in control of the reception of the joke). The scene at the airport is one where Kumar is the object and then becomes in control of the narrative although it is at the expense of the black security guard. What’s missing from the clip is the white supervisor who surveys the situation and allows Kumar to pass. What does this say.
And yes, you are right—we should definitely continue these conversations! Thanks for your questions.
Jane,
This is a wonderful clip—thanks for introducing it! I think the question you bring up (how is Asian American expressed in popular culture as opposed to how do Asian Americans perform and interact with popular culture?) starts with the difference between being the Object and being the producer of culture. Cool Calm Pete is the producer of his material so his approach may be informed by his ethnic identity but it’s not the only way to read him. I see this with M.Night Shyamalan as a director. His films are not Asian American but he populates his films (sometimes with cameos) with different races and ethnicities as part of everyday life. Perhaps that’s one way of thinking “beyond race” is to reduce the shock value of seeing difference.
Hello Shilpa, This is a great way to enter into a conversation about Asian American media representation and culture ~ a conversation that will certainly continue beyond the week. I am wondering if you can elaborate upon the fact of Asian American protagonists in HAROLD AND KUMAR and the notion of heroes or heroic figures? As you know, one of my areas of focus is race and genre, and what “results” or consequences or small victories there might be when Asians are telling jokes and involved in the delivery of yes, stoner humor, but also political humor. To me, laughter is like dancing ~ an overtly personal and emotional expression. Which is not usually associated with Asians in the American context. What do you think about Harold and Kumar/Penn and Cho and their relationship to the power of humor?