A Postmodern Perspective on Childish Gambino's "This Is America"

Table of contents

1. INTRODUCTION

2. A POSTMODERN PERSPECTIVE ON "THIS IS AMERICA"
2.1 Whatispostmodernism?
2.2 Compatibility of hip-hop and postmodernism

3 POSTMODERN FEATURES IN "THIS IS AMERICA"
3.1 Pastiche, Ironyand Intertextuality
3.1.1 The imagery
3.1.2 The dancing and the music
3.2 This Is Americaas postmodern "chaotic critique"

4 CONCLUSION

1. Introduction

Childish Gambino's "This Is America" has quickly become a worldwide phenomenon after its upload in 2018. Countless YouTube videos and web magazines have tried to decrypt the enigma behind the music video. In particular, the vast amount of allusions that can be found in the video and the combination of different genres open up spaces for different discourses. Donald Glover, who is the artist behind the persona Childish Gambino, is reluctant to comment on the video saying that he wants it to be just "out there". There are plenty of ways to approach and analyse the music video and the song. However, this automatically limits the meaning ofthe song to a single discourse, be it a discourse about racism, identity or social criticism and it does not give credit to the considerable number of symbols which both Donald Glover and director Hiro Murai concealed in the video. For a scholar of literary studies, this "mingling" of different genres and images goes beyond artistic creativity, even though it also goes under this banner. Instead, after a couple of viewings, the impression arises that this music video could be seen as a piece of postmodern art. Video, text and music are inextricably linked with each other, albeit the difficulty to associate them to a specific genre. As the title anticipates, this song intends to portray divergent realities of America, and at this point, it is crucial to make clear that postmodernism disdains the idea of one History, Culture or Reality. Instead, postmodern art aims at emphasising pluralism, the ex-centric and multiple representations by referring to these concepts or metanarratives in the plural form (Hutcheon, 1988, p. 12).

Postmodernism as a framework, not as a historical period is particularly suited for the music video "This Is America" because, as Arthur Asa Berger argues, postmodernism "is very much involved with visual culture, images, the media, and the notion that 'representations of the real have become increasingly important'. More important, some would say, than reality" (Berger, 2003, p. 15). Giving a clear-cut definition of postmodernism contradicts the basic idea of postmodernism which at its core declines lists, categories, and hierarchies. However, for the sake of convenience, this term paper will delineate central postmodern traits that are prevalent in most of the writings about postmodernism. These findings will be used to put the music video under scrutiny to see if these features are identifiable. The next step is to elaborate on the overt political and social criticism that arises from the music video if we see it through a postmodernist lens.

Having said this, I argue that the music video for "This Is America" can be seen as a supreme example of postmodern art because it uses typical postmodern traits, such as pastiche, fragmentation, and the transgression of limits.

2. A postmodern perspective on "This Is America"

2.1 What is postmodernism?

Defining postmodernism proves to be a complicated endeavour that could effortlessly fill many encyclopaedias. The problem starts right at the beginning when it comes to the question of the origin of postmodernism. Broadly speaking, postmodernism followed directly after modernism. However, there is no fixed year which marks the end of the former and the beginning of the latter. It further depends on whether postmodernism is considered as a historical period or as a, as Jonathan Kramer puts it, "attitude" and citing Umberto Eco "a way of operating" (Eco as cited in Kramer, 2016, p. 6). The historical period which could be labelled as American postmodernism started roughly after World War II. Modernist art always recurred to ideal standards such as "culture and national identity, and totalizing explanations in history, science and culture" (Berger, 2003, p. 102). However, the traumatic experience oftwo world wars shattered this illusion, and postmodern artists started to find different representations of reality and developed a more suspicious attitude towards these ideals. Postmodernism is strongly linked to the emergence of late capitalism with its uniformisation of mass culture and consumer society. If one considers postmodernism as such an attitude, then, Jonathan Kramer argues, "every period has its postmodernism" (Kramer, 2016, p. 6).

Not only every period has its postmodernism, but postmodernism also permeates a wide variety of domains, such as architecture, literature, painting, film, philosophy, television, and supremely crucial for this term paper music. Postmodernism here is not just a modus operandi or a specific "genre" that the artist can adopt. Instead, it is more of a, as Linda Hutcheon defines it, "problematizing force in our culture today" which questions the common-sensical and the' natural" (Hutcheon, 1988, p. xi). Postmodernism is both a critical attitude towards institutions, social inequalities, and hierarchies and a modus operandi for the artist. Postmodern art deliberately wants to get rid of cultural boundaries and aims at transgressing "previously accepted limits ... of particular arts, [and] of genres" to the extent that there are, as Hutcheon points out, fluid borders between genres (Hutcheon, 1988, p. 9). On the surface, postmodern art could be understood as an art form where anything goes and where there are no pre­established rules. This simplification has led detractors to attack postmodernism, labelling it as "ahistorical or dehistoricized". In response to this, Hutcheon makes clear that postmodernism is also situated within a historical sphere and it has to be situated there because "all it can do is question from within. It can only problematize ... the 'given' or 'what goes without saying' in our culture" (Hutcheon, 1988, p. xiii). Postmodernism is both historically grounded and self-reflexive, but it makes clear that history is a human construct and that the past is only accessible through textuality (Hutcheon, 1988, p. 16). Similarly, Bakthin argues that "our writing or speech is always tied to ideas and thoughts that have been communicated in the past" (Bakthin as cited in Berger, 2003, p. 47). A key feature of postmodernism is the intertextual and parodic use and abuse of text, media and other sources of the past, which Hutcheon labels as "ironic parody" (Hutcheon, 1988, p. 27) or Jameson with a slightly negative connotation as "pastiche" (Jameson, 1984). This concept will be elaborated further in the designated subchapter below.

Another crucial element of postmodernism is the bridging between elite and popular art or, as Kramer puts it, the challenging of the boundaries between high and low art (Kramer, 2016, p. 9). The postmodern artist uses instances from both extremes to the extent that he adopts a playfulness in his use of language which Theresa Ebert dubs as "ludic postmodernism". The counterpart, she argues, is "resistance postmodernism". The difference is that the latter "in its heteroglossia of speech, samples, and noise [is] aimed directly at the ideologies of racism" by actively refusing and attacking the categories of the dominant. Potter, however, argues that, in hip-hop, one can find both instances. The songs are on the one hand "politicized incursions against the dominant", and on the other hand, they are "founded on the verbal play of signification; in this sense [they do] not exclude the "ludic" from [their] modes of resistance" (Potter, 1995, pp. vii—viii).

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