I think we as an Australian society, particularly, within the sphere of the youth sector have become more forthright and accepting of two focal challenge points, — LGBT rights-equality and celebrating and embracing ethnic diversity and multiculturalism on Australian television and media.
Invisibility in mainstream culture is an important issue: we all want and need to see people like us in mainstream culture when growing up in order to not feel like we are completely abnormal or subhuman.
Although most well informed people know that race is a social construct, and it does not scientifically exist. The concept of a “race” still institutionally and socially puts people of any
political, sexual, cultural and abstracted reason at a disadvantage.
I think in this frame of reference, and with the rise of the environmental justice paradigm shift occurring as a relatively familiar contextualised construct within most existing subcultures of society today - we have in my eyes evolved from our predecessors, quite ordinarily not more so radically than observed.
It has often been commonplace to assert roles of ‘heroes’ and ‘icons’ on mainstream cinema and television, or any medium as predominately Anglo-Saxon ethnocentric, and of male patriarch and this through out pre-post modern eras shaped one’s cultural worldview and thus how they experience the world.
But, as Bob Dylan sung, “Times are-A-changing.” Indeed.
We have seen various ways in which popular ideas about the self in society have changed, so that identity is today seen as more fluid and transformable than ever before.
Twenty to thirty years ago, analysis of popular media often showed that mainstream culture was a backwards-looking force, resistant to social change and pushing people back into traditional categories. Today, it seems more appropriate to emphasise that, within limits, the mass media is a force for change.
The traditional view of a women as a housewife or low status worker has been completely kick-boxed out of the picture by fearless successful ‘Devil Meets Prada’ and ‘Kick Ass’ iconoclasm, of the sorts.
It’s delirious, (not to detract from the gender struggle that remains an actual issue) but ’feminism’ has conquered and reimagined the veil of conformity, in mass media culture - to the point, where male stereo typicalness is ironically perceived as ‘homosexual’, point in case, “ No homo “ is a slang term in hip hop used by a man to distance themselves from the stereotype of closeted gay and bisexuals. But, at the same time it can be more complex. Say, parenthetically, a straight ‘bro’ comes in for a hug, saying “no homo bro”. Is he quietly questioning his own sexuality?
Imagine a scenario, where you are having a merry old time, having a modest conversation over a beer or two about hopes, dreams, future as such. You know those awesome conversations that make good friends into best friends. You easily create the environment and give him the opening he needs to tell you secrets - you know, a kindle of an unannounced ‘bromance’ (that’s a actual word, officiated into the dictionary) is about to happen - does not upholding the ‘bro code’ of keeping these secrets, make you gay? Ironically, with a twist, this generation implies Yes or its more likely a quirk of humanity like how we spread memes.
Hashtag #Don’t manscriminate. As counter revolutionary that campaign may sound, is it? Is it more patronising for men to hold the door for a woman nowadays ? Has gender indifference completely been empowered or exploited in mass culture? where nothing even matters?
I can say for myself, growing up that I don't know for certain — with the whole ‘western historical backlash against feminism’, whereby the celebration of neoconservative, traditional values were prominent; it were not so prominent in my cultural upbringing.
How could it? With shows like ‘Will & Grace” and jiving to Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ was seen as harmless fun not objectification of the preference of anybody or somebodies sexuality.
I don’t necessarily generalise for most of the millennials but to me I am neither left or right or centre . Up, until this day I am not plagued by the xenophobic paranoia that is inherent in some people, it’s not coded anywhere in my cerebral hemispheres, and I don’t see homophobia being perpetuated anywhere because I simply don’t see it in that limelight. You can be whoever you
want. There is literally nothing stopping you, if you are a guy who wants to put on make up, vice versa, if your’e a girl who wants to play rugby — Except, perhaps political correctness and political egomaniac grandstanding, which I suppose plays well among certain audiences given to theoretical assumptions to critical questions that otherwise require practical solutions. This brings about the point of minority. A minority is a statistic. So many people are told they must learn to live with the societal symptoms and the consequent inconveniences and limitations, to an extent this is true, but if we value ourselves as human beings, we must demand we ask for no other treatment other than we are human beings with a right to chose.
— “ Diversity and variety, will replace the centralised uniformity of today. “
As being part of the new wave group of politically minded rappers, and being of emigrant background, and living in Sydney’s Inner West, I am too well adjusted to diversity and is too proud of Australia being a cosmopolitan society- and the progressive direction it is had decided to go in, is respective of our first nations peoples oppression, and disenfranchisement.
The interpretation of diversity and variety in our youth culture, is self-evident nowadays especially, with people of diverse backgrounds being more represented and accepted in media like Ahn Do, Waleed Aly, Lee Lin Chin, Nazeem Hussain, Ellen DeGeneres etc, and with their televised interaction of the watching nation, it is giving us a hint of Australia’s multicultural nuance and complexities, without, the ‘burden of representation being weighed upon the consciousness asserted in peoples minds.
But, sometimes, as a Hip hop constituent, I internalise a point of view; when and if does borrowing from other cultures become appropriation ?
It it is very well known that Rock and Roll started as a predominately black music genre. It had its roots in ragtime blues and soul, two genres founded by Afro-Americans. It served as the soundtracks for their socio-political aspirations and frustrations. Yet, it wasn’t until a guy named Elvis, came and made it mainstream, that white listeners began to listen. This is where, my moral
dilemma comes to course. Do [we] need to take our scenes more seriously, and protect them from bandwagon-jumpers Because it’s integrity, not money, that’ll save youth culture sinking further into the abyss. It’s easy to excuse our lack of interest in preserving what is ours by gesturing flaccidly at post-modernism, or to disguise it all as apoliticism or to tell yourself “its just a Kanye and Kim Kardashian thing”…but thinking like that has caused huge damage to the grassroots of our subcultures, furthering that absence of place and difference that steers young identities off the map, sending our generation a tad mental. It’s hard to really believe in anything when it’s being sold back to you six months later in some kind of dilute form.
Take hip hop as an example. It is the offspring of jazz and rock and roll, and a movement built off the back of the US civil rights movement, but there is juxtaposing contradictions whereby two main forces clash; one representing the great wealth and power of the established order, and the other struggling for independence, autonomy, and social change, but in Australia, with the dialectically opposed characteristics of both the oppressor and the liberationist, obviously a counter-hegemonic culture would emerge
- the Australian platform for hip hop was first fundamentally founded by a group of white brothers (the Def Wish Cast), presumably themselves, by indexing the stolen generation people struggle of white or black identity, or the penal colony argument - the artists legitimised themselves as real rappers equally sensitive to these struggles inherited from other cultures. Same-same with southern Italians identifying as brown than white.
This has dehumanised me in a way, as I am not black nor white.
But, the ‘statistics’ don’t represent me as a whole. I’m going to quietly interject to a change of subject by noting, if you do your research, Filipinos are of Austronesian/ Australoid roots, and aren’t of just one race. The genetic diversity and structure of the main three islands population, have been investigated at a local, regional, and interregional level, and our Aeta/Agta community remains consistent with our long outstanding ancestral DNA. Although, it is now generally accepted that human settlement of Island Southeast Asia commended during the late Pleistocene, the relative contribution of this early migration to the present-day Philippine gene pool still remains mysterious. A more recent period of immigration occurred during 13,000 years ago and is associated with the spread of the Malayo- Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family, from Taiwan aborigine, via the Philippines, to Near and remote Oceania.
Effectually, this pre-wires me to a disposition of adopting a ‘black’ identity, or a brown one which can easily be equated synonymously together.
I get and accept, belonging to one group rather than another is something worse than a moment in a comedy of manners - or rather, it misses the way that a larger comedy of manners has always shaped what we mean by culture. Cultural mixing - hybridisation - if you like, is the rule of civilisation, not some new intrusion within our own. Healthy civilisations have always been mongrelised, hybrid, corrupted and expropriated and mixed. Healthy societies seek out that kind of corruption because they know it is the secret of pleasure. I can’t help to picture, the colonialist counting their health in the number of imported spices on their shelves.
True to my dialogue though, what I ultimately speak of is, the transcendence of all brokered boundaries, and how it applies to my perception of young people now, in direct correspondence of the face of diversity. This can be further, allegorised or interpreted though my understanding of Hip Hop. Where does a Asian (Filipino) fit in this picture?
I digress.
In line with queering the normative scope of the ‘hip hop nation’, as settled by native rappers and scholars alike. I step into a well-mapped territory with questions aimed at interrogating how nation is conceptualised within the context of hip hop. What happens, I ask, to notions of authenticity based on hip hops apparent blackness when Filipino youth make hip hop their own?
Filipino youth involvement in hip hop has shown how hip hop reconfigures the normal boundaries of Filipino-ness predicated on nostalgia and cultural links with an idealised homeland.
Filipinos representative nature in hip hop, is prominent; and makes a case that engagement of Filipino youth experimenting with hip hop culture speaks to the broadening racial scope of hip hop-and of what it means to be BROWN — such involvement is also problematic in that it upholds deracialized accounts of hip-hop and renders difference benign.
Looking at the ways in which Filipino hip hop enthusiasts legitimise their place in an expressive form historically associated with African Americans, examines what these complex forms of identification reveal about the contours and trajectory of contemporary U.S racial formations and discourses in the post-civil rights era.
Queering then becomes an activist technology which re-articulates and challenges the norms which inform ones placement or displacement from the country. Cultivated by the links and fractures of whiteness, in the Philippines, I use the act of ‘witnessing’ to address the context of mestiza or mestizo whiteness, which illustrates the biopolitical pedagogies that teach people their ‘proper’ place within colonial, post colonial and neocolonial relations of power/knowledge,
The impossibility of witnessing can take a different form within contexts, say you analyse the focus on Nazi death camps, the focus does not (and cannot) simply bear witness the violence of death worlds. Equating the violences of that examines to the injustices marked in this anecdote to be a disservice to the context. Here, I am not detailing the ‘impossibility’ that is engendered in the act of witnessing. So, rather I ask, what are the discursive practices which make it ‘impossible’ to speak so freely on racial matter? In asking this, I am aware that witnessing is not simply deployed through speech. For instance, if you explore the act of witnessing racial prejudice in terms of visuality, wherein ‘non-whites’ are usual represented as racialised stereotypes. Witnessing beyond recognition, discusses witnessing as a form of visual recognition, wherein to be witness to racism involves eyewitness accounts of its extreme trajectories. Extending, to this notion of witnessing as a form of visual recognition by arguing that witnessing goes beyond recognition; Attests that what is at stake in witnessing is precisely the unseen in vision - the process through which something is seen or not seen. Here, gestures towards the discursive systems and regimes of power/knowledge of cultural self that enables something to be seen as natural or normal, legitimate or illegitimate. In this context, it contextualises analysis on witnessing in terms of visuality, complicating the metaphors of vision to explore how social norms and interactions are actually recognised and negotiated. What i refer to mainly is the ‘voice acts’ as the means through which witnessing occurs. And, how that is explored in different ways in which bodies the ‘voice’ of a people through music.
In light of this, how does this combination of visuality/speech/sound queer colonising power?
How does art’s ability to observe and comment bear witness to the biopolitical pedagogies deployed through different forms of whiteness? what can prevent this act of witnessing? — Silence is not as good as to bearing witness. In the context that I discuss, silence speaks of the hegemonic modes through which consensus to a normative social order is established, an order which demands an acceptance of its norms. Acceptance in this case, assumes that subjects remain silent about the injustices that can occur in sustaining this normative social structure. Simultaneously, acceptance entails a silence about injustice because people may not perceive that anything is unjust.
Critical race studies display a way in which to speak up, out and against the ways in which this silence is encouraged and condoned. Rigorous work of Bell Hooks, speak against the insidious forms of white privilege that structures how subjects can belong or not belong to (white) social orders. They visibilise the invisibilised ways in which whiteness accrues its normative status through self, governmental and institutional technologies of power.
Reminding you, I say all this is in the context of mestiza/o whiteness, visibilising the invisibilised ways in which whiteness is normalised - in regards to the Philippines - the challenge that lies in bearing witness to the hyper- visibilised manner in which mestiza/o whiteness constitutes Filipino identity through columnist mechanisation of the self, the state and the nation.
— It was through the music and movement of proletarian art, I became more consciously aware about certain perspectives of race theory and how that attempted to articulate the complex relationship that exist between culture and ideology. But, the examination of race relations widely enough, hasn't given proper evidence to bear, for an ideology of Asians inclusion in hip hop to be pervasively accepted by a generation, it would seem to require some more evidence, however limited, of its existence. What is it about the fact that Asians are deemed less prototypical of their overarching racial groups due to the mismatch between their identities and gendered race stereotypes? By channelling this silence, it demonstrates further how this binarised relationship between my peoples identity of being, brown, in the pretext, of castilian colonial governance on contemporary Filipinos, and how the assertion of Filipinos to envision their brownness as something to be proud of, and reclaimed, not as something to be erased, speaks to invite other Filipinos, to idealise their ethnic eccentrism instead of mestiza/o whiteness and use these forms of power to assert spaces of agency and privilege for themselves in Hip Hop music. In discoursing brownness in this manner, makes it for other racialised Asian identities to be ignored.
To cite an example from my own experience, one time a family friend member, said “…you look black like Ap de Ap, a member of the group Black Eye Peas (who is of Filipino decent), and I’m sure she was exited about this fact, deployed as a revelation. But, I brushed this declaration off met with laughter and disbelief. See, to some Filipinos, their skin is more ‘orient’ in pigmentation, so they do not equally equate themselves to a ‘black’ identity, in whereas blackness in this situation is equated to Hip Hop, because of that, being Filipino did not equate to blackness/brownness and that assertion to me was equally met with extreme doubt. Because, it wasn’t at all taboo for me.
However, transparent this effort for Asian collaborators might be adopting this transcendent view of hip hop argue that some fans will still erase its multiracial history in order to emphasise hip hop as a culture, only for Black people.
In summation, I think, the above interpretation of hip hop and its ties with ethno- cultural diversity is the perfect personification of how over the years we have seen youth pop culture and its identity evolve. It is my contention that the fact that we live in globalised, diversified times necessitates a rethinking of the old received orthodoxies in terms of subcultural and mainstream studies. And, the mass medias constantly expanding flow of information increases peoples knowledge of life. Via the media people are presented with all aspects of life long before they have a chance to experience them first hand. Pop media potentially offers the possibility of escaping one’s circumstances and reinventing identities but also potentially plays a role in articulating or even reinforcing young peoples gender, ethnic and class identities.