“U, (New) Black(?) Maybe: Nostalgia and Amnesia in Dope”
ResearchPaper EnglishI. Augustus Durham
In March 2014, for an article in GQ magazine, Pharrell Williams invoked the term “the new black”; he further elaborated on the phrase’s definition in an interview with Oprah Winfrey for her show Oprah Prime.A little over a year later, in the summer of 2015, Rick Famuyiwa’s film Dope, executively produced by Williams, was released to rave reviews. Although these two events appear disparate, this article asserts that the film is a cinematic interpretation of Williams’s ideation. By highlighting the movie’s aesthetic nods to hip-hop—clothing, paraphernalia, music, and casting—as forms of nostalgia, and reading the protagonist’s preoccupation with attending Harvard as a form of cultural amnesia reminiscent of rhetoric from bygone cultural movements, the piece questions, what is the “new” that constitutes blackness? In like manner, does the arrival of such a category suggest that “the old black” no longer exists, or does it maintain a paradigmatic influence which stands to impart a lesson on culture and history to the “new”?“U, (New) Black(?) …Faculty63061Indiana University Press