Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists by Emily Ruth Rutter, and: Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture by Aria S. Halliday (review)

Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists. Emily Ruth Rutter

The dominant reading of the book of Jonah—that the hapless prophet Jonah is a lesson in not trying to run away from God—oversimplifies a profound biblical text, argues Amy Erickson. Likewise, the more recent understanding of Jonah as satire is problematic in its own right, laden as it is with anti-Jewish undertones and the superimposition of a Christian worldview onto a Jewish text. How can we move away from these stale interpretations to recover the richness of meaning that belongs to this short but noteworthy book of the Bible? This Illuminations commentary delves into Jonah’s reception history in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts while also exploring its representations in visual arts, music, literature, and pop culture. After this thorough contextualization, Erickson provides a fresh translation and exegesis, paving the way for pastors and scholars to read and utilize the book of Jonah as the provocative, richly allusive, and theologically robust text that it is.

This article analyses two ‘famous’ dissections that go into the Black material interior of Victorian era celebrity: Sarah Baartman’s dissection by French scientist George Cuvier as it is rehearsed by press of the day and artists, biographers and historians in its aftermath and Mary Seacole’s description of her autopsy of a New Grenadian infant, a victim of cholera, in her 1857 Crimean war memoir. Both are infamous events in the spectacle of Black women’s celebrity bodies in the nineteenth century, elucidating how this celebrity is undergirded by cultures of death and, more acutely, dissection that haunt the radical rise in the classificatory scientific ‘order’ of the day. Within a historic culture of public autopsies and the pilfering of Black and poor cadavers from cemeteries to fuel medical education, this essay asks where do these famous dissections and their afterlives fit into the nineteenth-century narratives of race, science and sexuality? What can the fixation on the inside of the body tell us about the intersection of the nineteenth-century cultures of death, racial classification and celebrity? I argue that the racialised, sexualised cadaver and the act of autopsy are objects and authors of nineteenth-century Black women’s celebrity as surely as live, visual and print culture representations of the time.

Efforts to reduce disparities in obesity prevalence affecting Black Americans are having limited success. One reason for this may be the disproportionate, ethnically targeted marketing of foods and beverages high in fat and sugar (FBHFS) to Black consumers. Such marketing promotes high consumption of FBHFS, leading to excess caloric intake and unintentional weight gain. We convened focus groups with Black men and women (total n = 57) in collaboration with community groups in three localities to elicit their views, as consumers and parents/caregivers, about targeted FBHFS marketing and potential ways to combat it. At each location, trained community members facilitated two sets of focus groups: one for adults aged 18 to 25 years and another for adults aged 26 to 55 years who had a 3-to-17-year-old child at home. Each group met twice to discuss food and beverage marketing practices to Black communities and reviewed a booklet about ethnically targeted marketing tactics in between. A directed content analysis of participant comments identified and explored salient themes apparent from initial summarization of results. Results show how parents are concerned with and critical of pervasive FBHFS marketing. In particular, comments emphasize the involvement of Black celebrities in FBHFS marketing—how and why they engage in such marketing and whether this could be shifted towards healthier foods. These findings suggest a potential role for counter marketing efforts focused on Black celebrity endorsements of FBHFS, possibly with a youth focus. They also underscore the need for additional, qualitative exploration of Black consumer views of ethnically targeted FBHFS marketing more generally.

Jezebel Unhinged: Losing the Black Female Body in Religion & Culture

Percorsi di gender performance: fotografia tra arte e moda dagli anni Novanta ad oggi

<p>“So, if today’s dad is no longer the all-business provider who is less emotion ally engaged than Mom, and he’s not the bumbling, disconnected dad of the past 30 years in popular culture (read: Homer Simpson), then who is he?” <em>Pops in Pop Culture</em> explores contemporary representations of the father in order to contribute to our understanding of who he is in the twenty-first century. The question “who is he?”1 along with related queries like what does he do, what does he want, and what do we expect of him have been driving discourses of fatherhood throughout Western societies over the past decade. The media is especially preoccupied with the changing roles of, and consequent challenges and rewards for, the so-called “new father” of the millennium. Recent newspaper and magazine articles set the tone: “Modern Fathers Face New Expectations” (from which the opening quotation is taken), “Men Get Depressed about Not Having Kids,” “Daddy Is Not a Babysitter,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New (Vacuum) Bag,” “Don’t Call Him Mom, or an Imbecile,” “Ways to Be a Great Father, Regardless of Your Sexuality,” “Dreams of a Stay-at-Home Dad,” “Involved Dads Want a New Identity,” “Calling Mr. Mom?” and “Manifesto of the New Fatherhood.” Headlines like these announce a variety of topics and debates about paternal identity, ones that inform this collection. <em>Pops in Pop Culture</em> considers how fatherhood is defined in relation to masculinity and femininity, the shifting structures of the heteronormative nuclear family, and perceptions of the father as the traditional breadwinner and authoritarian versus a more engaged and involved nurturer.</p> <p><br></p>

<p>“So, if today’s dad is no longer the all-business provider who is less emotion ally engaged than Mom, and he’s not the bumbling, disconnected dad of the past 30 years in popular culture (read: Homer Simpson), then who is he?” <em>Pops in Pop Culture</em> explores contemporary representations of the father in order to contribute to our understanding of who he is in the twenty-first century. The question “who is he?”1 along with related queries like what does he do, what does he want, and what do we expect of him have been driving discourses of fatherhood throughout Western societies over the past decade. The media is especially preoccupied with the changing roles of, and consequent challenges and rewards for, the so-called “new father” of the millennium. Recent newspaper and magazine articles set the tone: “Modern Fathers Face New Expectations” (from which the opening quotation is taken), “Men Get Depressed about Not Having Kids,” “Daddy Is Not a Babysitter,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New (Vacuum) Bag,” “Don’t Call Him Mom, or an Imbecile,” “Ways to Be a Great Father, Regardless of Your Sexuality,” “Dreams of a Stay-at-Home Dad,” “Involved Dads Want a New Identity,” “Calling Mr. Mom?” and “Manifesto of the New Fatherhood.” Headlines like these announce a variety of topics and debates about paternal identity, ones that inform this collection. <em>Pops in Pop Culture</em> considers how fatherhood is defined in relation to masculinity and femininity, the shifting structures of the heteronormative nuclear family, and perceptions of the father as the traditional breadwinner and authoritarian versus a more engaged and involved nurturer.</p> <p><br></p>

<p>“So, if today’s dad is no longer the all-business provider who is less emotion ally engaged than Mom, and he’s not the bumbling, disconnected dad of the past 30 years in popular culture (read: Homer Simpson), then who is he?” <em>Pops in Pop Culture</em> explores contemporary representations of the father in order to contribute to our understanding of who he is in the twenty-first century. The question “who is he?”1 along with related queries like what does he do, what does he want, and what do we expect of him have been driving discourses of fatherhood throughout Western societies over the past decade. The media is especially preoccupied with the changing roles of, and consequent challenges and rewards for, the so-called “new father” of the millennium. Recent newspaper and magazine articles set the tone: “Modern Fathers Face New Expectations” (from which the opening quotation is taken), “Men Get Depressed about Not Having Kids,” “Daddy Is Not a Babysitter,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New (Vacuum) Bag,” “Don’t Call Him Mom, or an Imbecile,” “Ways to Be a Great Father, Regardless of Your Sexuality,” “Dreams of a Stay-at-Home Dad,” “Involved Dads Want a New Identity,” “Calling Mr. Mom?” and “Manifesto of the New Fatherhood.” Headlines like these announce a variety of topics and debates about paternal identity, ones that inform this collection. <em>Pops in Pop Culture</em> considers how fatherhood is defined in relation to masculinity and femininity, the shifting structures of the heteronormative nuclear family, and perceptions of the father as the traditional breadwinner and authoritarian versus a more engaged and involved nurturer.</p> <p><br></p>

Current editions of social studies textbooks include reproductions of paintings, historical and contemporary photographs, sheet music, and other artistic representations as well as student activities such as writing plays, describing and interpreting works of art, creating murals, or role-playing historical events. Although a few researchers have examined alternative uses of artistic forms as historical evidence and as tools for expression, the artistic representations in social studies textbooks and the ways those expand or limit the social studies curriculum have not been a subject of inquiry. In this study, I analyzed 3 fifth-grade textbook series (Harcourt Brace; Houghton Mifflin; and Macmillan/McGraw-Hill) and the teachers' editions for the distribution of artistic forms of representation and the social studies content with which those representations were associated. In addition, I used the central activities in the arts as ways to view the implied and explicit uses of the arts suggested in the text...

En Estados Unidos el feminismo no surgió de las mujeres que de forma más directa eran víctimas de la opresión sexista; mujeres golpeadas a diario, mental, física y espiritualmente; mujeres sin la fuerza necesaria para cambiar sus condiciones de vida” (Hooks, 2004, p.33). Las activistas feministas eran blancas y burguesas, mientras que las mujeres negras eran una mayoría silenciosa.
 Si bien muchas mujeres participaron del Black Power, el movimiento era definido y articulado en los medios, la cultura popular y las artes por hombres. Los grupos mantenían una organización patriarcal, estructuras caracterizadas por el liderazgo masculino. Ellas “tomaron conciencia de la naturaleza de la dominación masculina cuando militaban en espacios anticlasistas y antirracistas con hombres que hablaban al mundo sobre la importancia de la libertad mientras subordinaban a las mujeres en sus filas” (Hooks, 2017, p.22). Había un no lugar destinado para las mujeres negras entre las feministas blancas y el Black Power de los hombres.

Black Women and U.S. Pop Culture in the Post-Identity Era

Dionne Brand's memoir, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, touches on the author's childhood in Trinidad and adulthood in Canada but is equally concerned with understanding and intervening in the larger histories among which Brand situates her identity. A lush work of memories, poetry, and criticism, the work presents vignettes from the author's life alongside her meditations on writing, history, mapmaking, and most important for this essay, the archives. Brand's memoir is replete with supporting materials that range from ffteenth-century journals and letters to contemporary critical theory, from geographers' logs to films and pop culture. Her sources are rich and varied, and they can be broken down into three general types: the historical archives written during the “age of exploration” and the slave trade; the contemporary archives of newspapers and journals; and the creative archive of postcolonial writers, or what I am calling the neo-archive. Brand's memoir participates in an entire genre of postcolonial and in particular Caribbean literature that addresses the colonial archive. She thus provides a singular overview of the neo-archive by bringing many of these texts into dialogue with one another, and she explores as well the dialogue between such texts and the dozens of archival fragments she incorporates into her self-portrait.

Review: <i>The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging</i>, by Rebecca Wanzo

Aria S. Halliday. 2022. Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press