Black Popular Culture Research Papers (original) (raw)

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- Anthropology, Literacy, Education, Literature

A meditation on loitering as praxis in Tarell McCraney + Barry Jenkins' Moonlight--and beyond.

Black public-affairs television programming in New York City
between 1967 and 1968 happened because of a convergence
of several factors. They include (a) the upheavals in urban
America between 1964 and 1967, (b) the release of the Report
of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (a.k.a.,
the Kerner Commission report) and (c) the assassination of
Martin Luther King, the latter two both within months of
each other in 1968. Other equally important factors include
the organic development of Black American-owned and
Black American-oriented media—newspapers and radio
outlets buttressed and informed by more than a century of
Black Left/Nationalist/Pan-Africanist/integrationist intellectual
thought and African-centered/Afrocentric ideology. Using and
critiquing the emerging scholarship on such programming, a
brief historical review of the creation and development of 4==
such shows in 1967 and 1968—WABC-TV’s Like It Is, WNEW-TV’s
Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant, and National Educational Television’s
two locally produced (but nationally broadcast) programs, Black
Journal and Soul!—shows that these programs sought to correct
the Kerner Commission’s critique that the American mass media
show “a White man’s world” by attempting to show, for the first
time, a Black world to large mainstream broadcast markets.

These is the syllabus for LITR 451, which was taught as part of a pair of concurrent courses taught entirely virtually at the intermediate and advanced level during the pandemic-era Spring 2021 semester. At both levels, the course offered students a sampling of fiction by nine different African American (defined broadly as being an author with some measure of personal, familial, and/or cultural association with both Africa and North America) authors who published within the last ten years, including Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Esi Edugyan, Akwaeke Emezi, Tope Folarin, Yaa Gyasi, Okey Ndibe, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Jesmyn Ward, and Colson Whitehead.

La Fundación Alternativas, fundada en 1997 con voluntad de configurarse como cauce de incidencia y reflexión política, social y cultural en España y su entorno europeo, es hoy un lugar indiscutible de encuentro y elaboración de ideas y... more

In this article I draw on theoretical paradigms from the studies of the cultural industries and ethno-cartography to examine grime music's status as a micro-creative industries sector, in which music video production operates an as a system of radical counter-mapping that challenges hegemonic systems of spatial control. In a time of increased post-Brexit nationalism, BLM and heightened levels of racial exclusion in the media industries the grime music sector represents a space of contestation, where moving image technologies are deployed by young black creatives to claim urban space and disrupt the managerial processes of the post-industrial 'creative city'. In my analysis, these music video texts are not simply 'produced' out of a particular physical context but also operate to metonymically anchor their producers in the urban topography they inhabit. It is this imperative that has powered the growth of grime as a youth culture and fueled its creative disruption, as both a semi-autonomous cultural industries sector and as a set of transgressive symbolic practices.

- by Dr Orson Nava
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- Music, Media Studies, Ethnography, Race and Ethnicity

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah is an African American trumpeter, composer and producer from New Orleans, Louisiana. He has written compositions and performed improvisations committed to social justice themes. His cultural work is a natural extension of his community service training directed by his grandfather Donald Harrison Sr. His composition 'Danziger' (2012) gives voice to the unarmed citizens injured and killed by police as they crossed the Danziger Bridge in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. 'Danziger' extends from his stretch music theory which aTunde Adjuah describes as disassembling and reassembling musical ideas so that his compositions and improvisations can be understood holistically. While aTunde Adjuah's interpretation of the Danziger Bridge shootings is funneled through the ontological cornucopia of his trumpet and references his particular community, the message he sends out through his custom-made trumpet bell is universal because his critique supports everyday human rights.

In this essay I examine the racial achievement gap in American education in terms of an impaired psychosocial developmental process. I argue that the well-documented academic underperformance of certain minority groups may stem from the unfavorable resolution of a key developmental crisis in constituent members’ early scholastic experience. I go on to suggest that individual educators can play an important role in eliminating the achievement gap by changing the way they teach in their own classrooms. In part, they may do so by adopting a "transcultural" pedagogy or teaching style, according to which both teachers and their minority students develop (at minimum) transcultural proficiencies and (at maximum) transcultural identities, as a promising way to achieve two important ends. First, the fostering of an academically-industrious self-concept in members of historically underachieving minority groups and hence, second, the closing of the achievement gap "from the bottom up"—one classroom at a time.

- by Brian D . Earp
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- Sociology, Economic Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory
- by David E. Low
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- Cultural Studies, Comics Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Comics

Aesthetics of Excess examines how the bodies of women and girls of color are racialized through cultural discourses of aesthetic value that mark them as excessively sexual “others,” and how in turn, aesthetic value is generated through the presentation of their bodies. Finding that the sexualized styles of working class Black and Latina women and girls generate cultural capital when appropriated in contemporary art, while drawing mockery and denigration in everyday contexts, the book argues that aesthetics of excess are targeted for regulation when embodied by women and girls of color because they signify forms of class, gender, sexual, and racial difference that agitate norms of respectability and social mobility. Conversely, when classified as “art,” these aesthetics generate value in galleries and museums as ironic, streetwise, and edgy. The book employs participatory research with young women of color, critical readings of art and popular culture, and autoethnography to provide new frameworks for understanding the relationships between cultural production and racialized bodies that can be variously exploitative and socially transformative. The book is grounded in Hernandez’s community arts work with Black and Latina girls through Women on the Rise!, an outreach project she established at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Florida.

- by Jillian Hernandez
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- Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Visual Culture, Black Popular Culture

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and... more

An analysis of the Netflix series, "When They See Us", by Ava DuVernay and the racial biases in police activities, the reevaluation needed in interrogation processes, and the blasphemous involvement from former president, Donald Trump, in... more

- by Megan Milo
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- African Studies, Television Studies, Film Analysis, Women & Film
- by Richard Elliott
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- Music, Black Popular Culture, John Coltrane

In this article I consider how discourses of crisis and politics of respectability make it difficult to imagine black boyhood. While both forms of intervention are guided by good intentions, they nonetheless stymie research and critical engagement with how black boys experience boyhood. This article considers how a speech by President Barack Obama functioning as a precursor to formal announcement of the My Brothers Keeper initiative demonstrates the difficulty with distinguishing black boys from black men and, therefore, from developing interventions and research, in general, that attends to the needs, interests, and ways of being of black boys. I propose that in the absence of discursively focused research and empirical data, the inner thoughts and lives of black boys can be located in culture, specifically soundscapes created by black male recording artists that offer disruptive imaginations.

I teach courses such as “Black Popular Culture in D.C.” and “Beyoncé,” and other topical courses in race, gender, sexuality, class, spatial politics, and language using popular culture. This is a lesson plan I've designed for use in... more

- by Nikki Lane
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- Cultural Studies, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Music, Gender Studies

As medicine emerged as a humanist and scientific
discipline positioned to cure and eradicate disease, there were
great hopes that it could additionally transform race relations
because of the principles of universalism—particularly the notion
of value-free clinicians with good hearts and helping hands. Yet,
American medicine, like other White controlled institutions,
maintained a deliberate path of racial marginalization and gross
inequalities mainly ensconced in racial ideology over the Black
body. Centuries-old racist practices have consequences and
repercussions for its targets. As this paper demonstrates, looking at the experiences of African Americans, the effects of living with unrelenting racism(s) has produced significant physiological damage in the form of the stress response.

Am 28. März 2016 wurde ein Augenzeugenvideo mit dem Titel "Campus employee assaults white student for cultural appropriation'" auf YouTube hochgeladen. Binnen Stunden wurde es viral geteilt und entfesselte umgehend eine öffentliche Debatte über Haare, Freiheit und Rassismus. Das knapp einminütige Video zeigt einen weißen Studenten namens Cory Goldstein, der von einer schwarzen Frau an der San Francisco State University wegen seiner Dreadlocks angegriffen und beleidigt wurde. Seit diesem Anlassfall werden Haare auf YouTube nicht nur als modisches Accessoire, sondern auch als ein politisches Thema angesehen.

- by Ramón Reichert
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- Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies

Ao entender que gênero, sexualidade e raça podem ser concebidas como marcas das diferenças, sendo vias de condução para categorias epistemológicas de saberes, refletimos sobre a operacionalização de Pantera Negra pelo jornalismo de cultura pop como vetor de pedagogias sobre Nós e o Outro. Discutimos estudos sobre tais diferenças visando contextualizar, problematizar e apontar como nossas concepções sobre as dissidências são construídas através de processos complexos. Apontamos como o jornalismo e a cultura midiática estão engendrados a tais processualidades, dissertando como a cobertura jornalística do pop – e, mais especificamente, do universo nerd – configura territorialidades semióticas. Assim, operacionalizamos os conceitos visando entender o que os materiais jornalísticos do Omelete e do Delirium Nerd ensinam sobre as diferenças de gênero, sexualidade e raça. São apontados, por fim, caminhos e questões para compreender o jornalismo de cultura pop como território pedagógico.

- by Christian Gonzatti
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- Black Popular Culture, Superheroes, Critical Cultural Studies, Jornalismo

In negotiating the representation of the black female as grotesque within Afrofuturism, spectacles in popular culture, such as Kanye West's video, strike an uncanny similarity to images produced by black women artists. The author grapples with such questions and phenomena by examining the respective works of Wangechi Mutu and Shoshanna Weinberger as they relate to black women's grotesqueries in Afrofuturism. Much like Minaj's performance, Mutu and Weinberger simultaneously enjoy and critique aberrations of the "ideal" beauty.

- by Jared Richardson
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- Contemporary Art, Critical Race Theory, Black feminism, Black Popular Culture
- by Davarian Baldwin
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- Intellectual History, Cultural History, Urban Studies, Consumer Culture

This chapter aims at pointing out the correspondences between the transformative Five Percenter process of self-cultivation outlined in the Supreme Mathematics and previous interpretations articulated and transmitted in the sapiential... more

- by Esther A D E T U T U Borokinni
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- Black Popular Culture

Indice, premessa e bibliografia

- by Kara Keeling
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- Hip-Hop/Rap, Black Popular Culture

A cultural Analysis of the brief point in Marvel Comics history when creators attempted to avoid addressing contemporary racial politics by changing the name of the company's preeminent African superhero, the Black Panther, to the Black Leopard so as to avoid association with the American political party of the same time while paradoxically tying the character even more deeply to the struggle against South African apartheid in the 1970s.

- by Christopher Maverick
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- African Studies, Comics Studies, Comic Book Studies, Comics

We are the 99 per cent of the population who are subjected to the system and you are the one per cent who benefit from disproportionately high advantages. The slogan of the indignant is forceful and carries a populism which breaks with... more

In 2019, we watched 'The possibility of spirits' as part of two anthropology courses at the University of Glasgow: the Masters course 'Religion in Society' , and the Honours course 'Cosmology, Ritual and Belief', both taught by Diego Maria Malara. We all found the film endlessly fascinating, but, because it sparked particularly lively debates in our classes, we felt the need to further explore some of its complexities with the director, Mattijs van de Port. The following questions stem from these class debates, but, in their current form, have been shaped by Alex Gibb (student on Cosmology Culture and Belief), Leonie Colmar, Martha Gardiner (students on Religion in Society), and Diego Maria Malara.
https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/socialpolitical/research/sociology/blogresearch/interviewsseminarslectures/headline_762885_en.html

- by Diego Maria Malara
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- Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, Social Anthropology, Ethnography
- by christina knight
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- Theatre Studies, Visual Culture, Drama, Black Popular Culture

Mark Dery, "Wired Man's Burden: The Incredible Whiteness of Being Digital," in _AfroGeeks: Beyond the Digital Divide_, ed. Anna Everett and Amber J. Wallace (Santa Barbara: U.C. Santa Barbara, Center for Black Studies Research, 2007). This paper was based on my May 21, 2005 keynote lecture of the same name at the 2005 Afrogeeks conference (“Global Blackness and the Digital Sphere”), masterminded by Anna Everett, director of the UCSB Center for Black Studies, and hosted by UC Santa Barbara. Other participants included Dick Hebdige, Alondra Nelson, and Mendi and Keith Obadike, among others.

As creations of an artist living between Senegal and France, the paintings of Iba N’Diaye embody the transnational discourses that are now the focus of art history as we reassess the sources, influences, and legacy of Modernism. This analysis focuses on the stylistic and technical influences of N’Diaye through his lived experiences in Paris during the 1950s, followed by a demonstration of how he adapted Modernist styles and themes upon his return to Senegal in 1958 – a synthesis he would continue developing after finally relocating to France around 1964. In contrast to his colleagues at the École des Arts du Senegal, Professor N’Diaye encouraged newly liberated African artists to engage with international discourses of Modernism, believing that these young artists would discover cultural emancipation that did not manifestly occur with the end of formal colonialism. As N’Diaye’s students learned formal studio techniques and studied art history – echoing the training and vision of modernity he absorbed in Paris – the students of other instructors intentionally ignored external (Western) referents and influences. N’Diaye’s work represents both an engaging example of Modernism that is colored by actively living in different world regions, as well as a vehicle for transmitting Modernist styles to West Africa and the global Black Diaspora.

- by Richard de Koster
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- African Philosophy, Black/African Diaspora, Modern Art, West Africa
- by Davarian Baldwin
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- Masculinity Studies, Black Popular Culture
- by C. Riley Snorton
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- Queer Studies, Queer Theory, Black feminism, Black Popular Culture

Rethinking the American gangster figure from The Godfather to Ghost Dog.

One of the most well-known perceptions of contemporary African-American males comes from hip-hop music, a genre dominated largely by Black men. The overly sexual, hypermasculine, angry and aggressive persona is a characteristic of these performers. However, in recent years, this toxic masculinity has been challenged and deconstructed by mainstream artists. Important voices in hip-hop, such as Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West and Jay-Z are embracing a more truthful and intellectual approach to what it means to be a Black man in the United States. This paper sets out to explore these changes, exemplifying them through the lyrics of commercially successful and critically acclaimed rappers.

- by Nóra Máthé
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- Music, Popular Music, Masculinity Studies, Masculinity