Miguel Mellino

Abstract

This essay focusses on a particular cultural codification of the historical black-American question that characterizes a variety of recent Hollywood films. Its starting point is one of Stuart Hall’s most famous essays: What is this Black in Black Popular Culture (1992). The principal assumption is that the election of Obama has induced the production of Hollywood films about the historical black-American question which conveys not only a further commodification of Blackness as a «style-life», but also its incorporation into the traditional narration of «the American dream». The essay argues that the African-American question is here codified as a cause bound to be acknowledged within a nation that, accordingly to the coloniality of its self-representation system, conceives of itself as a sort of promised «land of human rights». The essay maintains, instead, that the only black feature in the American dream – as the continuous series of black killings due to institutional violence clearly shows – is still a persistent racial nightmare. This dark side of the American «neoliberal-penal state» can be conceived of as a brutal interruption of this cultural codification.

Miguel Mellino is Lecturer on Postcolonial Studies and Interethnic Relationships at the University of Naples «L’Orientale». He is the author of Stuart Hall: Cultura, razza e potere (ombre corte 2015), Cittadinanze Postcoloniali. Appartenenze, razza e razzismo in Italia e in Europa (Carocci 2012), La Critica Postcoloniale. Decolonizzazione, capitalismo e Cosmopolitismo nei Postcolonial Studies (2005, translated into Spanish La Critica poscolonial. Descolonizacion, capitalismo y cosmopolitismo en los estudios poscoloniales, Buenos Aires, Paidos, 2008), La Cultura e il Potere. Conversazione sui Cultural Studies (2006, with Stuart Hall, translated into Spanish La cultura y el poder, Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 2010), Post-Orientalismo. Said e gli studi postcoloniali (2009). He is the editor of the Italian translations of Frantz Fanon’s Ecrit Politiques, Pour la Révolution Africaine (2006) and L’an v de la révolution algérienne (2006), and Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme (2010).