An aesthetic of (re)appropriation: Remediating practices as history and identity in LA Rebellion film and hip hop sampling

Abstract

This article examines remediation practices as forms of Black creativity in films associated with the ‘LA Rebellion’ and in hip hop from its first two decades. As used here, remediation has two meanings. It stands for the use of prior media in subsequent works, be it the file footage incorporated by the UCLA-based filmmakers of the ‘LA Rebellion’ (the name given to Black filmmakers who studied and produced films between the late 1960s and 1980s), or the use of sampling and turntable-manipulated breakbeats that defines early hip hop. However, remediation is also used here for its potential as a corrective. Although postmodernity’s pastiche is discernible in the remediated elements of texts associated with these separate but contemporaneous movements, there is something specifically Black in the freely appropriated and repurposed prior creative work towards transformative ends. Beyond any postmodern effect, these practices reflect specific ideas related to politics, revolution and counter-ideological impulses opposed to the dominant white culture that surrounded these artists, and to which their texts respond. This transformative reuse ‐ visual or aural ‐ expresses what Foucault termed ‘counter-history’ and ‘counter-memory’ ‐ revealing subversive texts that complicate and challenge white cultural and historical hegemony.