Magic

“There Is No<i>New</i>Black Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

When we think of United Nations (UN) peacekeepers, the first image that is conjured in our mind is of an individual sporting a blue helmet or a blue beret (fig. 1). While simple and uncomplicated, these blue accessories represent an expression and an embodiment resembling that of a warrior, sent to bring peace to conflict-torn communities. UN peacekeeping first conceptually emerged in 1948 in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war that ensued following the United Kingdom’s relinquishing of its mandate over Palestine, and the proclamation of the State of Israel. “Forged in the crucible of practical diplomacy” (Rubinstein 16), unarmed military observers were deployed to Palestine to monitor the hostilities and mediate armistice agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbours. This operation, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), significantly exemplified the diplomatic and observational capabilities of military men, in line with the UN Charter’s objectives of international peace and security, setting henceforth a basic archetype for international peacekeeping. It was only in 1956, however, that peacekeeping formally emerged when armed UN forces deployed to Egypt to supervise the withdrawal of forces occupying the Suez Canal (informally known as the ‘Second Arab-Israeli’ war). Here, the formation of UN peacekeeping represented an international pacifying mechanism comprised of multiple third-party intermediaries whereby peaceful resolution would be achieved by transcending realist instincts of violence for political attainment in favour of applying a less-destructive liberal model of persuasion, compromise, and perseverance (Howard). ‘Blue helmet’ peacekeeping operations continue to be regarded by the UN as an integral subsidiary instrument of its organisation. At present, there are 12 active peacekeeping operations led by the UN Department of Peacekeeping across the world (United Nations Peacekeeping). Fig. 1: United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) sporting blue berets (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-troops-awarded-un-medals-for-south-sudan-peacekeeping-mission) But where did the blue helmets and berets originate from? Rubinstein details a surprisingly mundane account of the origins of the political accessory that is now a widely recognised symbol for UN peacekeepers’ uniforms. Peacekeepers’ uniforms initially emerged from the ad hoc need to distinguish UN troops from those of the armed forces in a distinctive dress during the 1947 UNTSO mission by any means and material readily available, such as armbands and helmets (Henry). The era of early peacekeeping operations also saw ‘observers’ carry UN flags and paint their vehicle white with ‘UN’ written in large black letters in order to distinguish themselves. The blue helmets specifically came to be adorned during the first peacekeeping operation in 1956 during the Suez crisis. At this time, Canada supplied a large number of non-combatant troops whose uniform was the same as the belligerent British forces, party to the conflict. An effort to thus distinguish the peacekeepers was made by spray-painting surplus World War II American plastic helmet-liners, which were available in quantity in Europe, blue (Urquhart; Rubenstein). The two official colours of the UN are ‘light blue’ and ‘white’. The unique light “UN” blue colour, in particular, was approved as the background for the UN flag in the 1947 General Assembly Resolution 167(II), alongside a white emblem depicting a map of the world surrounded by two olive branches. While the UN’s use of the colour was chosen as a “practical effect of identifying the Organization in areas of trouble and conflict, to any and all parties concerned”, the colour blue was also specifically chosen at this time as “an integral part of the visual identity of the organisation” representing “peace in opposition to red, for war” (United Nations). Blue is seen to be placed in antithesis to the colour red across several fields including popular culture, and even within politics, as a way to typically indicate conflict between two warring groups. Within popular culture, for example, many films in the science fiction, fantasy, or horror genres, use a clearly demarcated, dichotomous ‘red vs. blue’ colour scheme in their posters (fig. 2). This is also commonly seen in political campaign posters, for example during the 2021 US presidential election (fig. 3). Fig. 2: Blue and red colour schemes in film posters (left to right: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Captain Marvel (2019), and The Dead Don’t Die (2019)) Fig. 3: Biden (Democratic party) vs. Trump (Republican party) US presidential election (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-15/us-election-political-parties-explained-democrats-vs-republicans/12708296) This dichotomy can be traced back to the high Middle Ages between the fourteenth and seventeenth century where the colour blue became a colour associated with “moral implications”, rivalling both the colours black and red which were extremely popular in clothing during the eras of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance (Pastoureau 85). This ‘moral metamorphosis’ in European society was largely influenced by the views of Christian Protestant reformers concerning the social, religious, and artistic use of the colour blue (Pastoureau). A shift in the use of blue and its symbolic connotations may also be seen, for example, in early Christian art and iconography, specifically those deriving from depictions of the Virgin Mary; according to Pastoureau (50), this provides the “clearest illustration of the social, religious, and artistic consequences of blue's new status”. Up until the eighteenth century, the colour blue, specifically ‘sky blue’ or light blue tones resemblant of the “UN” shade of blue, had minimal symbolic or aesthetic value, particularly in European culture and certainly amongst nobility and the upper levels of society. Historically, light blue was typically associated with peasants’ clothing. This was due to the fact that peasants would often dye their clothes using the pigment of the woad herb; however, the woad would poorly penetrate cloth fibres and inevitably fade under the effects of sunlight and soap, thereby resulting in a ‘bland’ colour (Pastoureau). Although the blue hues worn by the nobility and wealthy were typically denser and more solid, a “new fashion” for light blue tones gradually took hold at the courts of the wealthy and the bourgeoisie, inevitably becoming deeply anchored in Western European counties (Pastoureau). Here, the reorganisation of the colour hierarchy and reformulation of blue certainly resembles Pastoureau’s (10) assertion that “any history of colour is, above all, a social history”. Within the humanities, colour represents a social phenomenon and construction. Colour thus provides insights into the ways society assigns meaning to it, “constructs its codes and values, establishes its uses, and determines whether it is acceptable or not” (Pastoureau, 10). In this way, although colour is a naturally occurring phenomenon, it is also a complex cultural construct. That the UN and its subsidiary bodies, including the Department of Peacekeeping, deliberately assigned light blue as its official organisational colour therefore usefully illustrates a significant social process of meaning-making and cultural sociology. The historical transition of light blue’s association from one of poverty in and around the eighteenth century to one of wealth in the nineteenth century may perhaps also be indicative of the next transitional era for light blue in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, representative of the amalgamation or unity between the two classes. Representing the ambitions not only of the organisation, but rather of the 193 member-states, of attaining worldwide peace, light blue may be seen as a colour of peace, as well as one of the people, for the people. This may be traced back, according to Pastoureau, as early as the Middle Ages where the colour blue was seen a colour of ‘peace’. Colours, however, do not solely determine social and cultural relevance in a given historical event. Rather, fabrics and clothing too offer “the richest and most diverse source of artifacts” in understanding history and culture. Artifacts such as UN peacekeepers’ blue berets and helmets necessarily incorporate economic, social, ideological, aesthetic, and symbolic aspects of both colour and material into the one complete uniform (Pastoureau). While the ‘UN blue’ is associated with peace, the beret, on the other hand, has been described as “an ally in the battlefield” (Kliest). The history of the beret is largely rooted in the armed forces – institutions typically associated with conflict and violence – and it continues to be a vital aspect of military uniforms worn by personnel from countries all around the globe. Given that the large majority of UN peacekeeping forces are made up of military personnel, peacekeeping, as both an action and an institution, thus adds a layer of complexity when discussing artifact symbolism. Here, a peacekeeper’s uniform uniquely represents the embodiment of an amalgamation of two traditionally juxtaposing concepts: peace, nurture, and diplomacy (often associated with ‘feminine’ qualities) versus conflict, strength, and discipline (often associated with ‘masculine’ qualities). A peacekeeper’s uniform thus represents the UN’s institutionalisation of “soldiers for peace” (Howard) who are, as former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold proclaimed, “the front line of a moral force” (BBC cited in Howard). Aside from its association with the armed forces, the beret has also been used as a fashion symbol by political revolutionaries, such as members of the ‘Black Panther Party’ (BPP) founded in the 1960s during the US Civil Rights Movement, as well as Che Guevara, prominent Leftist figure in the Cuban Revolution (see fig. 4). For, Rosabelle Forzy, CE

The Philosophical Attitude of Eugene Hütz, Singer of Gogol Bordello

Narrative is a pervasive aspect of human culture in both entertainment and education. Historically, humans have been the primary agents behind the creation, telling, and adapting of narrative. However, as society's reliance on digital technology for both entertainment and communication increases, the need for more innovative approaches to represent, perform, and adapt narrative experiences increases as well. With recent research advances, computer systems now have the means to organize experiences into a narrative form enabling them to interact and communicate with human users in novel and intuitive ways that were not possible a short time ago. A computer system that possesses narrative intelligence can interact with and communicate with human users in novel and intuitive ways. The research presented through the Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshop represents the state of the art in the use of computational representation and reasoning about narrative for entertainment, communication, and education. The academic research community is continuing to make advances in intelligent computing that bring these experiences closer to realizing the full potential of the computer as an interactive medium. The Intelligent Narrative Technologies III (INT3) workshop at the 2010 Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) conference brings together participants from the research community and industry in an effort to accelerate technology transfer to commercial games. Computer games are a natural modality for storytelling because of the sense of immersion and transportation into a virtual world with compelling characters and the promise of opportunity to interact with characters and the world in a meaningful way. Many experiences in virtual worlds are entertaining but not necessarily strictly games. A second goal of the INT3 workshop was to explore the role of narrative intelligence in facilitating other forms of computer-based entertainment, education, and training. Narrative appears prominently in many forms of entertainment and interpersonal communication, including novels, movies, and machinima. Narrative can also play a role in education and training. Novel techniques for entertaining, training, and education have been developed in such fields as narrative understanding, narrative generation, storytelling, virtual cinematography, models of emotion, narrative cognition, and natural language generation. The 2010 INT3 workshop is the third in a successful sequence of symposia and workshops on artificial intelligence in representation and reasoning about narrative. The one-day INT3 workshop features 17 paper presentations from authors around the world on topics ranging from narrative understanding, emergent storytelling, player evaluations, narrative discourse, improvisation, and story generation.

As a range of critical pedagogues have argued, the curricula that young people are exposed to today has broadened immeasurably, due to the ever-increasing prevalence of popular media texts and cultures. The implications for social studies educators here is far ranging though little explored. In this paper, I look at how historical knowledge is mediated to young people in popular culture, how young people choose to mobilize such knowledge, and the consequences they face therein. Focusing on the film Panther (1995) (about the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense), and drawing on a series of focus groups with African American adolescents at a local community center, I look closely at what popular texts young people resonate with as well as how they pick them up and deploy them to deal with historical contingencies, here a proposed march in town by the Ku Klux Klan. I stress, throughout, the importance of looking, in concrete and situated ways, at how young people make history relevant in the here and now, how they, to echo Della Pollock, “make history go.”

For more than two thousand years Cleopatra has been an inspiration of artists. At the turn of the 20th and 21st century she became one of the icons of our (European) perception of Egypt. She is certainly better known than the builders of pyramids or Ramesses the Great, and she is remembered better than the names of ancient rulers. One may even venture to claim that although little is known, she is a familiar, not to say clichéd figure. One needs to consider what hides behind the representations of Cleopatra we encounter everyday in various aspects of popular culture—advertising, products of daily use, television. In my opinion, we only perceive the picture contrived by Octavian and the writers devoted to him—a femme fatale of the antiquity, an ambitious and ruthless temptress. Horace, Propertius, Florus and Pliny conveyed in their works an image of Cleopatra which met Octavian Augustus’ expectations: of a woman defeated in the eyes of the victor. A cursory read of their works in the 18th century, in the wake of renewed interest in antiquity following the discovery of Pompeii and Herculanum, led to uncritical repetition of Cleopatra’s depiction—first, in the historiography, and then in popular culture. Stereotypes concerning Egypt developed, reinforced by the descriptions of travelers. In the light of the latter, the country appears a quintessence of the Orient, with all its riches and delights. The figure of the last queen of ancient Egypt suited such notion perfectly. The most interesting issue is that today, when through archeological and historical research Cleopatra’s life became known in greater detail, the popular culture, advertising and cinematography in particular, keeps on perpetuating the stereotypical representation of this extraordinary woman. I incline towards the views of M. Krajewski, who claims that popular culture has become a lens sifting reality, and in striving to become an integral element of reality, it selects whatever is helpful (discarding the rest). The answer to the question of whether the image of Cleopatra originates from sources or stems from our stereotypes of Egypt, is, I think, a complex one. It was precisely the superficial reading of sources rediscovered, as it were, in the 18th century, that brought forth the stereotypes, whose reverberations in popular culture of the 20th and the 21st century created a specific picture of the last Egyptian queen. The “present–day” picture of Cleopatra is in a way a remote echo of Augustian propaganda, whose charm still holds sway over us. I wished to demonstrate this dependence by showing various aspects of popular culture, from press to cosmetics. Popular culture adopted those features of Cleopatra that help sell merchandise—youth, amorous intrigue, alleged beauty and murder. We cannot escape the influence she exerts on us and our lives, yet what lies beneath the facade of a pretty face with a ureus-adorned temples deserves consideration. In the case of Cleopatra VII it is a fascinating history of life and death of one of the most influential women of her times.

New(s) Readers: Multimodal Meaning-Making in AJ+ Captioned Video

Human culture has recently gained unprecedented importance in explaining the uniqueness of our species. Throughout the history of formal education human culture was the topic of interest of subjects like sociology, behavioral biology, and cultural psychology. Recently, various aspects of human culture have elegantly been analyzed utilizing the theory of mind. The present communication critically considers the views of various disciplines about human culture in the light of history and contemporary knowledge. Social norms of a human group govern many aspects of culture. Critical analysis suggests that collective capacities of minds of the group as repository of social information are important in understanding human culture. Similarly, biology of a cultural group, not the individual biology as well as the genome, not a candidate gene can explain nature of human culture satisfactorily. Size as well as the heterogeneity of the human group, their biological endowment including genetic makeup, capacities of the brain and mind determines the richness of social information in a social repository. However, uniform statement is perhaps not applicable to human culture because of its vast diversity, fragility, and context and thus it may lead to oversimplification.

The age of Trump has ushered in a reorganization of the way American culture circulates through the world. Beginning with the 2015 campaign, the global circulation of Trump’s rhetoric ruptured the crucial divide between popular culture and political discourse, the conditions under which the “American century” functioned. The essay discusses the relationship of the rise of the digital technologies to new social forms that began emerging in the final years of the twentieth-century, accompanied by novel forms of entertainment. The increasing popularity of reality television and social media as entertainment inform what I call the selfie-determination of nations: a digitally mediated, imagined community of the disconnected. This mediated context of social organization is the digital ground upon which Trump campaigned and thus far governs, and connected to the rise of global populisms. Under Trump the US political system itself has become a form of global entertainment.

As with so much of the medieval period, our knowledge of the drama of the Middle Ages remains sporadic, vague and frustratingly incomplete. Outside the general problems of the survival of texts in manuscript from this period, it must also be considered that drama itself is a form which does not lend itself to written record or fixture. Much of drama in the broadest sense is spontaneous and transient and cannot be written down even in the present day environment of literacy and the printed word. Even in our current society of books, films, tape and video-recorders it is interesting to review what among the many forms of drama and entertainment is recorded and registered for posterity: theatre plays, television drama, soap opera, films, TV advertisements, alternative theatre, pub shows, comedians’ routines, street theatre, school plays, improvisations, festival theatre, satirical reviews, buskers … and this is still ignoring almost all of the types of musical entertainment which also involve drama, such as opera, dance theatre, musicals, rock concerts, pop or rock videos and so on. Very often we record only what we feel to be worthy, important or instructive to others rather than the forms of entertainment which we know best and experience most frequently and which very probably reflect our feelings, understanding and organisation of our world in a much more accurate and revealing manner.

Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1925

Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1925

Huey P. Newton and Bobby G. Seale were two men who founded The Black Panther Party for Self Defense on October 15,1966 to oppose police brutality against American blacks, and to revolutionize the people in Oakland, California. The bravado and the nature of the Black Panther Party (BPP) appealed to youth across the nation where branches were initiated in major metropolitan areas. Most of the literature written about Newton and Seale and the BPP focuses on police shoot-outs, court trials, and the historicity of what members call “the Party.” My interest in the Party centers on a topic most would think completely remote from the purpose of the Panther platform. In this chapter I focus on poetry and its relationship to the organization’s development, presenting new information about the significance of poetry to each of the founders. Surprisingly, poetry was not only a regular feature in the BPP’s newspaper, The Black Panther, but a poem and a poetic recitation caused the initial arrest of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale a year before they started the organization. With poetry an important aspect of black life and culture, Panther poetry circulates a reexamination and extension of “badman” lyrics that reach from America back to Africa.

From Library Journal: "A comprehensive book, providing information on the rationale for connecting pop culture to library services and offering a range of projects to get students into the library." Integrating Pop Culture into the Academic Library explores how popular culture is used in academic libraries for collections, instruction, and programming. This book describes the foundational basis for using popular culture and discusses how it ignites conversations between librarians and students, making not only the information relatable, but the library staff, as well. The use of popular culture in the library setting acknowledges the importance of students’ interests and how these interests can be used to understand their information needs in unique and interesting ways. By integrating popular culture into library collections, instruction, and programming, librarians present research and discovery in ways that connect with students and the broader community. This book demonstrates that academic libraries using popular culture find it to be an effective tool, both for instruction and programming. The editors are librarians who utilize popular culture in various ways to provide instruction and reinforce information literacy concepts in their own practice. Readers will find chapters written by a variety of authors from different types of academic libraries, including community colleges, comprehensive universities, research universities, and law schools. These unique perspectives offer readers different ways of thinking about how librarians can incorporate students’ interests in popular culture to promote the mission of the library. In addition to well-known examples such as Hamilton: The Musical, Pokémon, Harry Potter, Black Panther, and Barbie, readers will also encounter lesser-known library applications of popular culture, including cartoneras, zines, fantasy maps, gaming collectives, and paranormal walking tours. All of these examples highlight the multiple way libraries leverage popular culture to expand their reach and identity with students and the community at-large.

“FromLibrary Journal: ””A comprehensive book, providing information on the rationale for connecting pop culture to library services and offering a range of projects to get students into the library.”” Integrating Pop Culture into the Academic Libraryexplores how popular culture is used in academic libraries for collections, instruction, and programming. This book describes the foundational basis for using popular culture and discusses how it ignites conversations between librarians and students, making not only the information relatable, but the library staff, as well. The use of popular culture in the library setting acknowledges the importance of students’ interests and how these interests can be used to understand their information needs in unique and interesting ways. By integrating popular culture into library collections, instruction, and programming, librarians present research and discovery in ways that connect with students and the broader community. This book demonstrates that academic libraries using popular culture find it to be an effective tool, both for instruction and programming. The editors are librarians who utilize popular culture in various ways to provide instruction and reinforce information literacy concepts in their own practice. Readers will find chapters written by a variety of authors from different types of academic libraries, including community colleges, comprehensive universities, research universities, and law schools. These unique perspectives offer readers different ways of thinking about how librarians can incorporate students’ interests in popular culture to promote the mission of the library. In addition to well-known examples such as Hamilton: The Musical, Pokémon, Harry Potter, Black Panther, and Barbie, readers will also encounter lesser-known library applications of popular culture, including cartoneras, zines, fantasy maps, gaming collectives, and paranormal walking tours. All of these examples highlight the multiple way libraries leverage popular culture to expand their reach and identity with students and the community at-large.