While Studying Blackness, Racquel Gates Takes Pop Culture, and Reality TV, Seriously
拉奎尔·盖茨对黑人文化，流行文化和真人秀节目一视同仁
The research of Professor Racquel Gates, who teaches in the Film and Media Studies Program at the School of the Arts, focuses on blackness and popular culture, with special attention given to taste and quality. She is the author of the 2018 book, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture, in which she pushes back against claims that negative portrayals of Black characters hinder Black progress. Such television shows as Basketball Wives and movies like Coming to America, says Gates, play on supposedly negative images to ask questions about assimilation and upward mobility. Gates opens up new lines of inquiry for Black cultural studies by showing how such portrayals provide a respite from the demands of respectability, and explore subversive ideas.
艺术学院电影和媒体研究项目教授Racquel Gates的研究重点是黑人和流行文化，他特别关注二者的品味和质量。在其2018年出版的著作《双重否定：黑人形象和流行文化》中，她对关于黑人人物的负面描绘阻碍黑人进步这一说法进行了驳斥。盖茨说，《篮球妻子》和《来到美国》此类电视节目与电影借用所谓的黑人负面形象来探讨有关同化和阶层流动的问题。盖茨为黑人文化研究开辟了新的方向，她提出合理合情的要求，以给予研究一定缓冲的空间，与此同时，她借此探索具有颠覆性的新思想。
In 2020, Gates was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She used the grant to support work on her next book, Hollywood Style and the Invention of Blackness.
2020年，盖茨被美国电影艺术与科学学院评为学院电影学者。她将所赠款项都投入到下一本书《好莱坞风格和黑色的发明》的创作中。
Committed to bringing together film studies in an academic context and film appreciation in more popular settings, Gates maintains a robust public engagement. Her work appears in both scholarly and popular publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Film Quarterly, as well as podcasts, and on film and television programs.
盖茨的研究公众参与度高，是因为她一心致力于将拥有学术背景的电影研究与广受欢迎的电影赏析相结合。其作品在多家学术和主流刊物上发表，其中包括《纽约时报》、《洛杉矶书评》和《电影季刊》，以及播客和电影电视等节目。
Gates discusses her varied research projects with Columbia News, along with her summer plans and the enthusiasm of her School of the Arts students.
盖茨与哥伦比亚新闻讨论了她的各种研究项目，分享她的夏季计划并展示了艺术学院她的学生对于研究的无限热情。
How did your research on blackness and popular culture develop?
你对黑人文化和流行文化是如何展开研究的？
It’s hard to be Black and live in this country and not have an interest in blackness and popular culture. If you’re watching movies with your parents as a kid—which is always the memory that I go back to—the conversation is inevitably going to touch on matters of representation and the politics of stereotype, performance, etc. That’s not necessarily the extent of what my parents talked about with movies, of course, but it was always present as at least part of the conversation.
身为一个黑人，生活在这个国家，很难不对黑人和流行文化产生兴趣。要是小时候和父母一起看电影——这是我的童年记忆——聊天过程中自然而然就会涉及到例如立场和政治刻板印象、表演等问题。当然，这些话题不一定就是我父母就电影谈论的范围，但它们总会是聊天话题的一部分。
In my own educational background, I began to focus intently on popular culture when I spent a junior year abroad in France and noticed that—in a country that was so adamant that race didn’t matter—French rappers and pop culture artists were talking quite explicitly about race and racism. It was a lightbulb moment for me, because I made a mental shift from seeing popular culture as entertainment to understanding it as both entertainment and political critique.
就我的教育背景而言，我是法国上大三的时候，开始研究流行文化，我还注意到——在一个如此坚定地认为种族无关紧要的国家——法国说唱歌手和流行文化艺术家们大谈种族和种族主义。于我而言，这一刻具有历史性意义，因为我的思想从此发生了转变，我从视流行文化为消遣娱乐，到理解它同时包含娱乐和政治批评双重意义。
In your first book, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture, you argue that some of the most disreputable representations in Black popular culture can strategically pose questions about blackness, Black culture, and American society. Can you provide an example?
在你的第一本书《双重否定：黑人形象和流行文化》中，你认为一些黑人文化中一些最具有争议性的表现反而可以反映黑人本身的特性、黑人文化和美国社会。你能给出具体的例子予以说明吗？
In the introduction of my book, I focus a lot on comedian Katt Williams, and specifically how he often isn’t recognized for making insightful ideological critiques in his comedy, partly because he doesn’t announce himself as a social commentary comedian. And because he delivers his message with a tone of irreverence—he curses a lot, dresses in a flashy way, uses brilliant and sometimes absurdist extended metaphors—I think that many people don’t associate that mode with hard-hitting social critique. But I argue that all of those things essentially enable an even more radical commentary on everything from Barack Obama’s image to Flavor Flav.
在书的导言中，我把重点放在了喜剧演员凯特·威廉姆斯身上，特别是他在喜剧中因为提出有见地的意识形态批评而不被认可，而部分原因就是他没有宣称自己只是一个社会评论喜剧演员。因其总是用鄙夷不屑的语气传递信息——身着华服，言辞犀利，有时言语中大用隐喻——我想大部分人不会把这种舞台表演模式与刺耳的社会批评相联系。但我认为，所有这些行为与言辞实质上使得评论更为犀利激进，从总统奥巴马的形象到普通黑人歌手。
How will you explore this thread in your next book, Hollywood Style and the Invention of Blackness?
在你的下一本书《好莱坞风格与黑色的发明》中，你将如何延续这条主线？
My first book was about contemporary popular culture, and the new one is about classic Hollywood and aesthetics. Those seem like quite different topics, but at my core, I’m always interested in taking a thing that people think that they already know and presenting it in a new light, with a new interpretation. So, in Double Negative, that meant taking disreputable objects and making the case for their value—a chapter on reality television that talked about it as a site for radical queer and feminist intervention.
我第一本书是关于当代流行文化的，新书则是关于经典好莱坞和美学的。这二者似乎是完全不同的话题，但我的核心一直都是就我感兴趣的人们已经熟知的事物，从一个新的视角给出新的思考。因此，在《双重否定》一书中，我将为难以启齿事物的价值进行辩护——这是电视真人秀中的一段，这类真人秀主要是围绕着激进的酷儿和女权主义干预话题的。
In Hollywood Style, that means taking a look at some things that people take as gospel—like the idea that Dumbo is a racist film because it traffics in minstrel traditions—and asking what other ways we might look at things if we shift our interpretive framework a bit. To be clear, I don’t negate the problematic stuff, but ask what new insights we might gain about the foundations of American film and media if we consider things in a new light.
在好莱坞风格中，这意味要看一看一些人们认为是福音的东西——比如说《小飞象》是一部种族主义电影，因为它贩卖了吟游诗人的传统——并问如果我们稍微改变一下我们的解释框架，我们还可以用什么其他的方式来看待事情。为了明确起见，我并不否定这些原就漏洞百出的思考，而是想知道若是我们从全新的角度思考问题，我们又会对美国电影和媒体有什么新的见解。
Why is 'Reality Television' one of your favorite courses to teach?
为什么“真人秀”是你最喜欢教的课程之一？
It’s the one course I teach that is constantly changing depending on what’s going on the semester that I teach it, and on the composition of the class participants. This makes it the most dynamic and “of the moment” of my courses. At the start of each session, I ask the students what happened in the world of reality television that week, and I frame our discussion around their answers. Even though the course is very much about television network history—and there are some aspects that are foundational when I teach it—Reality Television has been a radically different course each time. Some semesters, we end up focusing more on the idea of geographic location, and emphasize how reality tv promotes a skewed vision of specific cities or neighborhoods.
这是我教的一门会随着实践内容发生变化的课程，它会不断地变化，而这取决于我教的这学期发生了什么，以及课堂参与者的差异性。正是这种变化与差异性让我的课程活力四射、“与时俱进”。在每节课开始时，我都会问学生们那一周电视真人秀里发生了什么，我会围绕他们的回答来组织我们的讨论。这门课程主要是围绕着电视网络历史这一内容的，并且我教的都是基础性内容，但每周的电视真人秀却让我的课程与众不同。一些学期，我们将关注点更多的放在地理位置的概念上，并着重强调真人秀节目是如何影响特定城市或社区发展现状的。
In 2016, the entire course was grounded by the idea that Donald Trump and Cardi B were arguably the most influential human beings in our country, and we explored what their reality television backgrounds could tell us about why that was the case. This spring semester, there was so much Kim Kardashian and Kanye West news happening each week that the course inevitably became more Kardashian-centric than it ever had been before, with a strong emphasis on notions of womanhood and domesticity.
2016年，一整年的课程都是围绕唐纳德·特朗普和卡迪·B这两个我们国家最有影响力的人的，我们探讨了他们的电视真人秀背后的意义。今年春季学期，每周都会听到很多金·卡戴珊和坎耶·韦斯特的新闻，因而这门课程比以往任何时候都更加以卡戴珊为中心，特别强调女性和家庭生活的概念。
How does your guest curatorship of the Icons exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image fit into your body of research?
你在移动图像博物馆的图标展览的客座策展人身份是如何适应你的研究的？
One of the things that was so nice for me about being asked to curate that exhibition is that it allowed me to think in a visual language as opposed to exclusively in a written one. Also, as someone who gets really excited by material film culture, the opportunity to focus on posters and lobby cards in addition to the films themselves was particularly inspiring. I got to ponder what story I wanted to convey to museum visitors, what message they would take away after looking at the posters that I selected.
对我来说，被邀请策划那个展览的一个好处是，它让我用视觉语言思考，而不是仅仅用书面语言。此外，作为一个真正对物质电影文化兴奋的人，除了电影本身外，还有机会专注于海报和游说卡，这让我备受鼓舞。我开始思考我想向博物馆的参观者传达什么故事，他们在看了我选择的海报后会带走什么信息。
I wanted to show a range of images of Black women, from the glamorous to the abstract to the representational. I included some greatest hits like the poster from Foxy Brown, an independent film like The Watermelon Woman, and Catwoman—a film that was a commercial and critical failure, but a huge success in terms of a big budget genre film led by a Black actress. It was important for me to show the diversity within Black womanhood and films centered on Black women, rather than just celebrate the fact that Black women starred in them (though the exhibit certainly does that, too). Like all of my research, I tried to invite people to focus on this seemingly unimportant or dismissed thing (movie posters, in this case), and make the case for its significance, as well as its ability to tell us a new story about blackness and film.
我想展示一系列黑人女性的形象，从迷人的到抽象的再到具象的。我选择了一些很有特点的海报，从一部独立影片《狐狸布朗》，到商业和评论烂片《西瓜女人》和《猫女》，但这些影片成功的一方面是它们是由黑人女导演执导的大预算类型电影。对我来说，展示黑人女性和以黑人女性为中心的电影的多样性是很重要的，而不仅仅是庆祝黑人女性在其中扮演主角的事实（尽管展览肯定也是这样做的）。像我所有的研究一样，我试图邀请人们关注这个看似不重要或被忽视的东西（在这个例子中是电影海报），并证明它的重要性，以及它告诉我们一个关于黑色和电影的新故事的能力。
Advice for anyone going into the film industry?
你对想要进入电影业的人有什么建议吗？
As a professor of critical studies rather than production, I try to stay in my lane, which means not giving advice about the film industry, a space in which I have no direct professional experience. I do, however, encourage my students to be active fans of film and media culture. I emphasize that they should be full participants in the subjects that they love, which means reading books and articles about their chosen focus areas, and watching lots of things.
作为一名专注于批判性研究而非电影制作的教授，我尽量保持自己的风格，这并不是说我不想对电影业提出建议，而是因为我在电影上并没有直接的专业经验。但，我鼓励我的学生成为电影和媒体文化的铁粉。我认为他们应该完全参与到他们喜欢的主题中，这意味着阅读有关他们所选择的重点领域的书籍和文章，并观看大量的影片。
I try to discourage them from taking an overly confident or condescending attitude towards media that they view as “bad,” “dumb,” or “unoriginal.” Rather, I stress that they understand themselves and their work—whether it’s research or creative projects—as part of a larger conversation that has been going on for over 100 years.
我试图阻止他们对媒体采取过于自信或居高临下的态度，因为他们认为媒体是“坏的”、“愚蠢的”或“没有创意的”。相反，我强调的是，他们了解自己和他们的工作——无论是研究还是创造性项目——作为一个更大的对话的一部分，这个对话已经持续了100多年。
What are you working on now?
你现在在忙什么？
I recently drafted a short piece for CNN.com about Kim Kardashian wearing Marilyn Monroe’s dress at the Metropolitan Museum of Art fashion gala in early May, and all of the intense reactions that the dress prompted. I’m going to expand that into a book chapter for Hollywood Style and the Invention of Blackness. I had already planned to have a chapter in the book on Monroe, and I wrapped my Reality Television course not long ago, so this is one of those nice times when a few different threads came together organically.
最近，我为CNN.com起草了一篇短文，讲述了金·卡戴珊（Kim Kardashian）在5月初的大都会艺术博物馆（Metropolitan Museum of Art）时装盛典上穿着玛丽莲·梦露（Marilyn Monroe）的礼服，以及这件礼服引发的所有激烈反应一事。我将把它扩展成一本书的章节，即《好莱坞风格和黑色的发明》。我已经计划在书中为梦露安排一个章节。不久前我结束了我的真人秀课程。这是一个好的时代，可以将不同的主线有机结合在一起。
Any exciting summer plans?
有什么令人兴奋的暑假计划吗？
Besides sleeping and not teaching? Haha. I always spend the first few weeks of the summer getting my life in order: Cleaning my apartment, decluttering, getting back into the habit of regular physical movement, and catching up on movies and tv shows that I never got around to watching during the semester. Then I’ll mostly spend the summer working on a chapter or two for the new book, and doing some preliminary research and brainstorming on a new project that I’m just starting to formulate.
除了睡觉和不教书？哈哈哈，我总是在夏天的头几个星期把我的生活安排得井井有条：打扫公寓，整理房间，重新养成经常锻炼的习惯，看那些我在学期里没有看过的电影和电视节目。然后，我会花整个夏天的时间为新书写一两章，并对我刚刚开始制定的一个新项目做一些初步的研究和头脑风暴。
I also try to be much more deliberate about spending quality time with my family during the summer. I especially like to watch movies and tv shows with my six-year-old twin boys. A few of my biggest research lightbulb moments—like the stuff that I’m writing about Dumbo—are the direct result of watching things with them.
我也试着在夏天和家人一起度过美好的时光。我特别喜欢和我六岁的双胞胎儿子一起看电影和电视节目。我一些大的创作灵感——比如我正在写的关于《小飞象》的东西——是和他们一起看东西的直接结果。
What's the best part of teaching at the School of the Arts?
在艺术学院教书最好的体验是什么？
The students are so incredibly passionate, both about their own work as well as the things that we study together in class. They bring such a high level of enthusiasm into the classroom that—for me—it feels less like me up there lecturing, and more like an enjoyable conversation. I genuinely feel like I learn so much from them, sometimes in ways that they may not even realize.
学生们热情似火，令人难以置信。无论是对自己的工作还是课堂上学习的内容，他们都热情高涨。对我来说，感觉不像是我在讲课，而更像是一场愉快的谈话。我真的觉得我从他们身上学到了很多东西，有时是他们甚至没有意识到的。
