Thank you for your critique, I really appreciate your engaging in such depth and making me step back and think hard.
There's a big difference from white people appropriating black history and individuals appropriating corporate productions. Stealing from the dispossessed isn't revolution.
That is completely true. I still feel inclined to argue that the mainstream appeal and commercialism of the Talib Kweli song, as well as the explicitness of its address, lets its context carry into the vid rather than being evacuated from it be read as repurposing Harry Potter into a story whose racial analogies wouldn't be insults. But it's entirely possible -- rather more than possible actually -- that this is a wishful interpretation on my part and involves me seeing the vid through rose, or revolution-, tinted glasses. It may, in fact, be more that *I think it would be possible* to make a radical Harry Potter vid to Talib Kweli than that I think this vid actually does that work.
Both here and in your own subsequent post, you treat "political" and "revolutionary" as synonyms and elide the specific racial component of my critique
You're right about the subsequent post, which was lazy in the extreme; I even saw that I was doing it but decided to post anyway instead of deleting everything but the vid rec or saving it until I had more energy, as I should have done. In this one I definitely *tried* to make the distinction, but clearly it didn't work. I didn't intend to elide race from the part of my response that talked about revolutionary politics, but reading it back I see that I did. I guess in trying for a reparative reading of a text that definitely does elide race (which is both HP itself and the vid) it's hard not to end up perpetuating that move.
the problem isn't the use of a musical style traditionally associated with blackness being used for white characters, it's the use of a particular and consciously historically situated song in such a way that its history is erased even as it's used: its black politics are made to stand for politics, but not for black people.
You talk below about the use of songs in vids and the primacy of the visuals, and Coppa's essay in TWC talks about that in a lot of depth. That essay made me realise that (not being fully trained up, as it were, in the main vidding community) I don't always read vids this way; when I have knowledge of the song, I am quite likely to foreground its context and content in my interpretation. I think in this case I was doing that and thinking 'Harry Potter and black revolutionary struggle in the US, what an unexpected conjunction that actually applies interestingly to certain themes in the text' rather than 'this is Harry's beautiful struggle'. Which certainly doesn't make it *right* in any way, or do anything about the visual absence of people of color, only explains why I didn't perceive the vid as erasing the history which is there in the song.
Re: The Beautiful Struggle
There's a big difference from white people appropriating black history and individuals appropriating corporate productions. Stealing from the dispossessed isn't revolution.
That is completely true. I still feel inclined to argue that the mainstream appeal and commercialism of the Talib Kweli song, as well as the explicitness of its address, lets its context carry into the vid rather than being evacuated from it be read as repurposing Harry Potter into a story whose racial analogies wouldn't be insults. But it's entirely possible -- rather more than possible actually -- that this is a wishful interpretation on my part and involves me seeing the vid through rose, or revolution-, tinted glasses. It may, in fact, be more that *I think it would be possible* to make a radical Harry Potter vid to Talib Kweli than that I think this vid actually does that work.
Both here and in your own subsequent post, you treat "political" and "revolutionary" as synonyms and elide the specific racial component of my critique
You're right about the subsequent post, which was lazy in the extreme; I even saw that I was doing it but decided to post anyway instead of deleting everything but the vid rec or saving it until I had more energy, as I should have done. In this one I definitely *tried* to make the distinction, but clearly it didn't work. I didn't intend to elide race from the part of my response that talked about revolutionary politics, but reading it back I see that I did. I guess in trying for a reparative reading of a text that definitely does elide race (which is both HP itself and the vid) it's hard not to end up perpetuating that move.
the problem isn't the use of a musical style traditionally associated with blackness being used for white characters, it's the use of a particular and consciously historically situated song in such a way that its history is erased even as it's used: its black politics are made to stand for politics, but not for black people.
You talk below about the use of songs in vids and the primacy of the visuals, and Coppa's essay in TWC talks about that in a lot of depth. That essay made me realise that (not being fully trained up, as it were, in the main vidding community) I don't always read vids this way; when I have knowledge of the song, I am quite likely to foreground its context and content in my interpretation. I think in this case I was doing that and thinking 'Harry Potter and black revolutionary struggle in the US, what an unexpected conjunction that actually applies interestingly to certain themes in the text' rather than 'this is Harry's beautiful struggle'. Which certainly doesn't make it *right* in any way, or do anything about the visual absence of people of color, only explains why I didn't perceive the vid as erasing the history which is there in the song.