Abstract
A group of men, huddled around a small TV screen, are absorbed by what they are viewing. On the screen is footage of a man—Rodney King—being viciously beaten by several police officers, as he lies prostrate on the ground. The men who are watching the television screen are members of rap group N.W.A., and Los Angeles is about to erupt as four police officers who were involved in the incident are acquitted of using excessive force.
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- 1.
The film title is taken from N.W.A.’s debut studio album, which referenced the spatial territory that N.W.A. inhabited, Compton, L.A., California.
- 2.
For example, the film does not deal with a range of issues, including the groups misogynistic themes and Dr. Dre’s violence against women.
- 3.
Although this was not the case for all the men, some of whom rejected masculine performativity.
- 4.
Barak Obama in an interview with the New York Review of Books in 2015.
- 5.
Other experiences face the same issue, for example, grief in western societies is something that language largely fails adequately to capture.
- 6.
Although rates of suicide and self-harm are culturally specific, concern about suicide in prisons is such that the World Health Organization has considered the issue (WHO 2007). Moreover, as I mentioned at the outset, many of the men and women ex-prisoners I have worked with are now dead.
- 7.
The importance of thinking about identities politically should not to be confused with identity politics. As Butler (1997) amongst numerous others has highlighted, social categories of identity fail to identify accurately.
- 8.
For example, social workers, foster carers, care workers, probation officers and so on.
- 9.
Numerous politicians have moved into television in particular. Whilst others have pursued political careers having been actors, writers etc.
- 10.
Inaccessible in multiple meanings of the word; for example, academic work may be written in an obscure, difficult and exclusionary fashion, and also due to publishing restrictions that prevent open access to academic work.
- 11.
In another example of viscous culture, Ferrell was referred to as ‘something of a U.S. urban Robin Hood’ in a media article about his research on dumpster diving (Wiley 2011).
- 12.
For further discussion on Crimewatch see Jewkes (2011).
- 13.
I am also reminded here of the case of Christopher Jefferies, wrongly identified as a suspect in a murder case, he was vilified in the mass media in Britain. Jefferies became involved in Hacked Off, a campaign group for an accountable press, set up following the phone hacking scandal in the UK. A fictionalized drama of his case, The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies, was broadcast in 2014.
- 14.
Not that we should forget that many lives and the stories that they could tell are cut short.
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Farrant, F. (2016). Towards a Viscous Understanding of Culture. In: Crime, Prisons and Viscous Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49010-0_10
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