Jack Black
Jack Black is Associate Professor of Culture, Media and Sport
Jack's research examines the interrelationships between sociology, media and cultural studies, and psychoanalysis – publishing on topics relating to nationalism/national identity, gender, celebrity, journalism and terrorism; theoretically informed analyses of power and cultural representation; and ecological approaches to nature, culture and leisure/sport.
Supervisors: Prof. Joseph Maguire
Phone: 07999658012
Address: A213, Collegiate Hall, Collegiate Crescent, Sheffield, S10 2BP
Jack's research examines the interrelationships between sociology, media and cultural studies, and psychoanalysis – publishing on topics relating to nationalism/national identity, gender, celebrity, journalism and terrorism; theoretically informed analyses of power and cultural representation; and ecological approaches to nature, culture and leisure/sport.
Supervisors: Prof. Joseph Maguire
Phone: 07999658012
Address: A213, Collegiate Hall, Collegiate Crescent, Sheffield, S10 2BP
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Books by Jack Black
Moving beyond the well-trodden assertion that race is a social construction, and working against demands that simply call for more representational equality, The Psychosis of Race explores how the delusions, anxieties, and paranoia that frame our race relations can afford new insights into how we see, think, and understand race's pervasive appeal. With examples drawn from politics and popular culture—such as Candyman, Get Out, and the music of Kendrick Lamar—critical attention is given to introducing, as well as explicating on, several key concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis and the study of psychosis, including foreclosure, the phallus, Nameof-the-Father, sinthome, and the objet petit a. By elaborating a cultural mode to psychosis and its understanding, an original and critical exposition of the effects of racialization, as well as our ability to discern the very limits of our capacity to think through, or even beyond, the idea of race, is provided.
The Psychosis of Race speaks to an emerging area in the study of psychoanalysis and race, and will appeal to scholars and academics across the fields of psychology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and the arts and humanities.
Broad and ambitious in scope, this book uses sport and physical activity as a lens through which to examine our catastrophic societies and spaces. Acknowledging that catastrophes are complex, overlapping phenomena in need of sophisticated, interdisciplinary solutions, this book explores the social, economic, ecological and moral injustices that determine the personal and emotional impact of catastrophe. Drawing from international case studies, this book uniquely explores the different landscapes and contexts of catastrophe as well as the affective qualities of sporting practices. This includes topics such as DIY skateparks in Jamaica; former child soldiers in Africa; the funding of sport, recreation and cultural activities by extractive industries in northern Canada; mountain biking in the UK; and urban exploration in New Zealand. Featuring the work of ex-professional athletes, artists, anthropologists, sociologists, political ecologists, community development workers and philosophers, this book offers new perspectives on capitalism, nature, sociality, morality and identity.
This is essential reading for academics and practitioners in sociology, disaster studies, sport-for-development and political ecology.
By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be ‘politically correct’, this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. In doing so, it engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC Debates’, contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC ‘mockumentary’, The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies.
Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film.
Papers by Jack Black
Moving beyond the well-trodden assertion that race is a social construction, and working against demands that simply call for more representational equality, The Psychosis of Race explores how the delusions, anxieties, and paranoia that frame our race relations can afford new insights into how we see, think, and understand race's pervasive appeal. With examples drawn from politics and popular culture—such as Candyman, Get Out, and the music of Kendrick Lamar—critical attention is given to introducing, as well as explicating on, several key concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis and the study of psychosis, including foreclosure, the phallus, Nameof-the-Father, sinthome, and the objet petit a. By elaborating a cultural mode to psychosis and its understanding, an original and critical exposition of the effects of racialization, as well as our ability to discern the very limits of our capacity to think through, or even beyond, the idea of race, is provided.
The Psychosis of Race speaks to an emerging area in the study of psychoanalysis and race, and will appeal to scholars and academics across the fields of psychology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and the arts and humanities.
Broad and ambitious in scope, this book uses sport and physical activity as a lens through which to examine our catastrophic societies and spaces. Acknowledging that catastrophes are complex, overlapping phenomena in need of sophisticated, interdisciplinary solutions, this book explores the social, economic, ecological and moral injustices that determine the personal and emotional impact of catastrophe. Drawing from international case studies, this book uniquely explores the different landscapes and contexts of catastrophe as well as the affective qualities of sporting practices. This includes topics such as DIY skateparks in Jamaica; former child soldiers in Africa; the funding of sport, recreation and cultural activities by extractive industries in northern Canada; mountain biking in the UK; and urban exploration in New Zealand. Featuring the work of ex-professional athletes, artists, anthropologists, sociologists, political ecologists, community development workers and philosophers, this book offers new perspectives on capitalism, nature, sociality, morality and identity.
This is essential reading for academics and practitioners in sociology, disaster studies, sport-for-development and political ecology.
By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be ‘politically correct’, this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. In doing so, it engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC Debates’, contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC ‘mockumentary’, The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies.
Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film.
Paying particular attention to the development of alt-right conspiracies—from fringe online communities to popular social media spaces, such as Twitter—we examine how online criticisms of the ‘take the knee’ protest, during the 2020 European Football Championship, sought to deride the tournament for being subject to a cultural Marxist, ‘woke agenda’. Detailing the extent to which alt- and far-right discourses have become mainstreamed, we first address how the decision to take the knee before the start of England’s games became linked to criticisms of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and second, we reflect upon the modality of conspiracy and its role in perpetuating examples of anti-white racism through fear, paranoia, and racial hate. For this reason, our conclusions speak to the conceptual and analytical importance of conspiracy across sport and society.
“The work of theorizing the role of race in the constitution of the subject has only just begun” (Seshadri, “Afterword”, 303)
It is widely asserted that race bears no epistemological significance, especially when seeking to delineate “racial” differences in the human population. Indeed, while such assertions serve to dismiss race as a false distinction, nothing more than a “social construction”, they nonetheless uphold an ontologization of race that just as easily reifies racial differences as much as it seeks their critique. In fact, despite the untenability of race, it is in its very resilience that its significance to Lacanian psychoanalysis can be found. By way of exploring this significance, this paper will draw from a Lacanian conception of psychosis in order to introduce what it will define as “the psychosis of race”. Specifically, Lacan’s account of psychosis will lend a new perspective to the central importance of lack and alienation in processes of racialization, perceived as an ‘illusion of being’ (George, “From alienation to cynicism” 361), while also exploring the effects of race in both masking and accentuating examples of racial visibility. It will be discussed how Lacan’s structure of psychosis, and the difficulties in articulating one’s subjective position, can become reproduced as part of a racial logic that pursues its very certainty in the racialization of both the subject and the other. This paper will make sense of such racialization by locating race as structurally grounded in the foreclosure of the Name of the Father, the jouissance of the Other and in the subject’s relation to the objet a. It is in accordance with the Lacanian objet a—the objet a of race—that its presence in psychosis exhibits the advertence of a racial anxiety, which works to fix the subject to a delusional ‘racial essence’. Here, assumed racial differences can be conceived as returns in the Real, expressed in examples of racial paranoia and fantasy.
Alongside the song’s success, the line, ‘It’s coming home’, continues to hold a popular resonance across social media, as well as being sung and chanted at football grounds, pubs and fan parks. What is more, the song is not without its controversies, with its lyrics and themes serving as a notable example of English arrogance, which remains unperturbed by a lack of footballing success.
In this paper, critical attention will be given to examining the song’s ‘comic’ significance during the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Set alongside a broader critique of irony and satire as comic forms, this paper will argue that it’s lyrics and themes offer a unique insight into the relationship between contemporary English nationalism and football.
Notably, this insight will be supported by Slavoj Zizek’s account of melancholy as well as Robert Pfaller’s work on interpassivity. Together, this will be used to highlight how the song’s national sporting themes remain tied to a certain form of English melancholy, which, at its heart, can be re-approached through a critical analysis of the comic form. By re-approaching accounts of English nostalgia and hubris, it will be argued that examples of English melancholy offer the potential for promoting collective forms of comic expression. Indeed, when contextualized alongside England’s lack of footballing success (both male and female), both the song, and its cultural significance, will be used to expose how hubristic forms of national assertion can be interpassively refracted through a sporting nationalism that is decidedly comic and reassuringly benign.
These aims will be demonstrated in newspaper coverage of the Canadian-born, British tennis player, Greg Rusedski. It will be noted how media framings of Rusedski centered on a particular feature of his body – his “smile”. In order to elucidate on the significance of Rusedski’s “smile”, Lacan’s (1997) notion of the “fragmented body” will be used to critically examine how the other’s body can prove effective in helping to elucidate wider anxieties, confusions and contradictions regarding English nationalism/national identity. Specifically, analyses of Rusedski’s “post-imperial” Otherness (an Otherness which centered on his “smile”) will serve as a demonstration of the splits, voids and contradictions which underscore a coherent and constituted (national) “us”. Through their elicitation in English national newspapers, these examples will emphasise how it is through “the body” that the nation’s inherent limitations are enacted via forms of obfuscation that work to both separate and delineate the ‘other’.
It will be argued that this “limit” can be brought to bear via Lacan’s notion of the “extimate” (extimité), defined by Alenka Zupančič as “an excluded interiority or an included exteriority” (Zupančič, 2019: 90). In particular, understandings of the extimate – and its relation to a psychosocial understanding of the other, the body and the nation – will reveal how Rusedski’s “smile” provided an uncanny disturbance for the English national press; one in which wider anxieties and tensions regarding English nationalism were constructed, framed and represented.
In contrast to this framing, and with specific critique being given to the notion of ‘inclusivity’, it is argued that Farah reflected a multicultural subject whose ‘otherness’ was minimalized or ignored, instead being used to promote some idealized form of harmonious British multiculturalism. Accordingly, by exploring the ‘antagonisms’ which remain integral to multiculturalism, diversity and cultural difference, this seminar proposes new ways of approaching ‘difference’, as reflected in cultural formations. For this, two terms are drawn upon: ‘parallax’ and ‘parapraxis’.
Notably, through the practice of comedy, Zizek’s ‘parallax view’ and Elsaesser’s ‘parapraxis’, are used to highlight how the ‘working through’ of cultural differences as well as their associated tensions, can help draw attention to those moments of cultural miscommunication, where such tensions are revealed as faux pas or performed failures.
Indeed, while there is a wealth of work exploring how gender is framed within the media, this paper will seek to examine the media careers of six professional women working within the sports journalism industry. Drawing upon interviews conducted with women working for local (Yorkshire, UK) and international (Sky Sports) media organizations, interviewee responses revealed the gender dynamics and power relations that structured working environments as well as the prescribed roles that women performed when working in these environments. This included discussions of the challenges that the women faced as well as apparent improvements which had been made for women in the sports media industry.
From these responses, specific attention is afforded to exploring how each woman responded to questions relating to their career development, career ambitions and the opportunities available to them to progress within the industry. In doing so, Elias and Scotson’s (1994) ‘established-outsider’ relations and Matthews’s (2014) ‘pastiche hegemony’ will be used to examine the power relations that frame working environments as well as the potential opportunities which are available to challenge working environments within the media industry.
Certainly, the women’s success provides a striking contrast to the men’s team who, in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, failed to win a match for the first time since 1958 and did not proceed past the group stages. To this end, 2015 offers a unique opportunity to examine shifting press narratives of sporting achievement, gendered expectations and the female apologetic.
Given the infancy of the domestic professional league in England (the Football Association Women’s Super League began in 2011) and their history of only qualifying for 50% of previous World Cup tournaments, England women’s success was largely unanticipated by both the English media and sport fans in general (Taylor, 2015). Indeed, the success of the women’s team coincides with work that has highlighted the problematic coverage of women’s sport in the printed press (Christopherson et al, 2002; Vincent et al, 2007), the discursive management of soccer as a privileged site for maleness and masculinity (Williams, 2014) and that exceptional performances are necessary for women's sport to attract significant media attention (Ravel and Gareau, 2014). Newspapers play a key role in representing gender norms in sport (Pfister, 2015) as the discursive construction of gender boundaries serves to frame both male and female athletes in particular ways.
Consequently, this study employs a qualitative investigation of the press’ coverage in order to identify how framings of the women’s team were reconfigured in accordance with their on- field performances. Newspaper articles were chronologically examined via open coding.
To date, this study has found that coverage of the team increased as they progressed through the tournament and, by positioning the women as heroes, was almost uniformly positive. However, their success was simultaneously patronised with infantilising discourses that reinforced their hegemonic femininity. In particular, audiences were reassured of the players’ status as mothers and partners. The extent to which this reflects a revised version of the female apologetic, given that several of the team are openly gay, will be debated.
Our analysis identifies that the women’s success was frequently used as a tool to unpick the England men’s failure at recent World Cups and to deride the culture of English soccer more generally. This highlighted that the male version of the game was commonly brought to the forefront as the familiar frame of reference. Lastly, the women’s unanticipated success was reconfigured from a tentative position of ‘hope’ to a self-congratulatory, neo-liberal assumption of ‘legacy’ for women's soccer in England.
Certainly, whereas depictions of English culture may be widely known, the distinct lack of cultural expression in areas such as the media, reveal a notable polarity between England and the other home nations. In the face of a possible Scottish exit from the Act of Union and in light of recent comments by English footballer, Jack Wiltshire, the desire for England to have its own ‘constitutive story’ within Britain, presents an opportunity to discuss and debate English identity, post 2012 (Colley & Lodge, 2013).
Accordingly, this paper will present a selection of the English press’ coverage on both the Diamond Jubilee and London Olympic Ceremonies in order to reveal how both tabloid and broadsheet publications reflected notions of anxiety, self-deprecation and national malaise. Here, it will be argued that while such notions suggest a lingering attachment to the former British Empire, when placed in the context of Britain’s post-imperial decline, these findings can help to elucidate upon discussions pertaining to English national identity, the post-imperial decline of Britain and the possibility of an independent Scotland.
Dr Jack Black, an Associate Professor of Culture, Media, and Sport at Sheffield Hallam University. We discuss Jack’s latest book 'The Psychosis of Race: A Lacanian Approach to Racism and Racialization' (Routledge, 2023) and explore what psychoanalysis might offer sport. We also discuss his UKRI/AHRC funded project, 'Tackling Online Hate in Football', which analyses examples of online hate across digital media platforms.
On this episode of New Books Network, your host Lee M. Pierce (they) interviews author Jack Black (he) about psychoanalysis, PC culture, The Office, and the subversive potential of comedy to change our collective experience. Race, Racism and Political Correctness in Comedy engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC debates’, contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC ‘mockumentary’, The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies. Jack Black is a Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. After completing his postgraduate studies at Loughborough University, his research has continued to explore the interrelationships between sociology, media and communications and cultural studies.