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African American Gay Men

Stuart Hall asserts that “by definition black popular culture is a contradictory space. It is a site of strategic contestation.” Therefore, “it can never be simplified or explained in terms of the simple binary oppositions that are still habitually used to map it out: high and low; resistance versus incorporation; authentic versus inauthentic; experimental versus formal; opposition versus homogenization.”1 Thus, there is cause for a new and broader assessment tool than traditional prognosticators allow. Cultural scholar Harry Shaw links all black popular culture to black culture. “Black popular culture in America holds a peculiar status in that, unlike Western popular culture in general, it has no counterpart in Black high culture.” Moreover Shaw concedes that all of African American “culture is to a great extent Black popular culture, for there is no identifiable Black culture that cannot be or is not readily embraced by the wide spectrum of Black society. Black culture is popular culture partly because it continually looks toward the roots of the common Black experience and draws from those roots for its creativity.”2 Finally he correctly posits that as black creativity continues to proliferate, popular forms move out of the community to be adopted and appropriated by the larger mainstream audience.

Considering Meme-Based Non-Fungible Tokens’ Racial Implications

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

Within the Black community, popular culture has always been a resource and tool of resistance against oppression. This volume documents and analyzes the numerous ways Black popular culture has critically considered notions of social justice. In this edited volume, it is posited that Black popular culture is more than merely entertainment. Black Popular Culture and Social Justice: Beyond the Culture is a seminal interdisciplinary text that examines the use of various genres and mediums of Black popular culture to engage diverse political, social, gendered, and economic concerns. This introductory chapter lays out the three sections of this text. Section 1, “Black Television, Movies and Social Justice,” examines racism, sexism, intersectionality, police brutality, feminism, and politics on the small and big screen. Section 2, “Black Music and Social Justice,” examines Black music and Black radio shows’ intersection with the fight for social justice. Section 3 “Black Speculative Fiction, Comics, Protest Art and Social Justice,” explores the roles that Black science fiction, comic books, and comic book characters and visual artists engage in social justice efforts. This compilation demonstrates the numerous ways Black popular culture is involved and assertive in the fight for social justice.

In African-American literary thought, Henry Louis Gates's book, The signifying monkey (1988) was a breakthrough in so far as it argued for a vernacular theory for cultural expression in black communities. However, some critics missed Gates's point, and began to suggest that a singing culture is biologically inherent in black people; that the evolution of different musical styles are sui generis to black people only and that unless one is coming from this black culture, one has no access to understanding the rhetorical devices used by black singers. This emphasis on cultural absolutism (Gilroy 1993) denies acknowledgement of creative diversity amongst black artists from America. This article uses some selected songs from Immortal Technique, one of the finest singers to debunk the above assumptions and reveal how the command of musical techniques or rhetorical devices in music is a function of communal socialisation as well as individual creativity and innovation. The article explores the notion of how particular styles in popular culture can create new meanings and content in black popular culture in America.

Black British Culture and Society brings together in one indispensable volume key writings on the Black community in Britain, from the 'Windrush' immigrations of the late 1940s and 1950s to contemporary multicultural Britain. Combining classic writings on Black British life with new, specially commissioned articles, Black British Culture and Society records the history of the post-war African and Caribbean diaspora, tracing the transformations of Black culture in British society. Black British Culture and Society explores key facets of the Black experience, charting Black Britons' struggles to carve out their own identity and place in an often hostile society. The articles reflect the rich diversity of the Black British experience, addressing economic and social issues such as health, religion, education, feminism, old age, community and race relations, as well as Black culture and the arts, with discussions of performance, carnival, sport, style, literature, theatre, art and film-making. The contributors examine the often tense relationship between successful Black public figures and the media, and address the role of the Black intellectual in public life. Featuring interviews with noted Black artists and writers such as Aubrey Williams, Mustapha Matura and Caryl Phillips, and including articles from key contemporary thinkers, such as Stuart Hall, A. Sivanandan, Paul Gilroy and Henry Louis Gates, Black British Culture and Society provides a rich resource of analysis, critique and comment on the Black community's distinctive contribution to cultural life in Britain today.

The Paralysis of Analysis in African American Studies provides a philosophical examination of Black popular culture for the first time. From extensive discussion of the philosophy and political economy of Hip-Hop music through to a developed exploration of the influence of the postmodernism-poststructuralist ideology on African American studies, Stephen C. Ferguson II argues how postmodernism ideology plays a seminal role in justifying the relationship between corporate capitalism and Black popular culture. Chapters cover topics such as cultural populism, capitalism and Black liberation, the philosophy of Hip-Hop music and Harold Cruse’s influence on the ‘cultural turn’ in African American studies. Ferguson combines case studies of past and contemporary Black cultural and intellectual productions with a Marxist ideological critique to provide a cutting edge reflection on the economic structure in which Black popular culture emerged. He highlights the contradictions that are central to the juxtaposition of Black cultural artists as political participants in socioeconomic struggle and the political participants who perform the rigorous task of social criticism. Adopting capitalism as an explanatory framework, Ferguson investigates the relationship between postmodernism as social theory, current manifestations of Black popular culture and the theoretical work of Black thinkers and scholars to demonstrate how African American studies have been shaped.

Part 1 What's going on? Black popular culture: The culture of hip-hop Rap music and Black culture - an interview Spike Lee's neonationalist vision Michael Jackson's postmodern spirituality Be like Mike? - Michael Jordan and the pedagogy of desire Bill Cosby and the politics of race Between apocalypse and redemption - John Singleton's Boys n the Hood. Part 2 Beyond the Mantra - reflections on race, gender, and class: Probing a divided metaphor - Malcolm X and his readers The liberal theory of race Racism and race theory in the nineties Leonard Jeffries and the struggle for the Black mind Sex, race, and class: two cases The plight of Black men Black grass-roots leaders Reflections on the 1988 presidential campaign. Part 3 This far by faith - Black religion: Mixed blessings - Martin Luther King Jr, and the lessons of an ambiguous heroism Martin and Malcolm For Jonathan's sake - the morality of memory - a sermon Rap culture, the church, and American society God almighty has spoken from Washington DC - American society and Christian faith The promise and perils of contemporary gospel music.

Reviewed by: Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Identity Kristin Moriah (bio) Miller, Monica L. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Identity. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Monica Miller claims that the history of black dandyism is virtually unknown in spite of the fact that its traces surround us. Black bodies' ability to contain and confront the ethos of key cultural moments and the attendant complex relationships between cosmopolitanism and the corporation, postcolonialism and visual culture are the subjects of Miller's Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Identity. In this volume, Miller shows "the ways in which Africans dispersed across and around the Atlantic in the slave trade—once slaves to fashion—make fashion their slave" (1). Miller has performed a cultural excavation, sifting through fragments of visual and literary culture to trace a history of black style and assemble the first history of black dandyism. Her work deserves a place among the finer recent contributions to black performance studies, including Marvin McAllister's White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour (2003) and Harry J. Elam Jr. and Kennell Jackson's Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture (2005). Slaves to Fashion provides a platform from which further theorizing of the relationship between black bodies, culture, and commerce can commence. [End Page 1137] Slaves to Fashion delineates a cultural practice black subjects are not often thought to engage in. Black men have been excluded from most studies of dandyism. Even among scholars of the black Diaspora, Miller's situation of black dandyism within the realm of other modes of black performance is singular. Her study of the shifting visual, literary, and theatrical representations of black people, and black men's move from luxury object to stylish subject, provides a means by which to reevaluate black masculinity within the Diaspora. As Miller points out, "black dandyism is often seen as being imitative of Western dress and as a sign of one's aspiration to enter the mainstream, but when interpreted as a signifying practice, it becomes instead a dialogic process that exists in relation to white dandyism at the same time as it expresses, through its own internal logic, black culture" (14). Miller's work is not merely an extension of previous investigations into the power of black signifiying. Slaves to Fashion takes a nuanced approach to its subject matter by treating black style as performance, as opposed to simply theorizing the performativity of blackness. In the first chapter of her work, "Mungo Macaroni: The Slavish Swell," Miller painstakingly outlines the forced cosmopolitanism that characterized the lives of black slaves and servants. In England, Isaac Bickerstaffe's highly successful play The Padlock (1768) featured an assertive and nattily clad slave named Mungo Macaroni. The use of the term "Mungo" to describe black swells can be traced to this play. "Mungo Macaroni" draws attention to the dark figures often left to sit on the sidelines of eighteenth-century studies. Mapping a transatlantic movement from Africa to the Americas and to England, Miller explains that black dandy figures first emerged in eighteenth-century England as status symbols for their owners. Separated from the British colonies (and thus from the site of the production of their owner's wealth), the black dandy's lifestyle mirrored the lifestyle of the upper classes, even though his social position was tenuous. Luxury blacks piqued curiosity and captured the public's imagination. One of the first English plays to use blackface, The Padlock went on to successful runs in America and was influential in early American theatrical productions. Miller explains that in the figure of Mungo Macaroni and his real life counterparts, one could read "the complicated prehistory of African-diasporic identity formation and representation" (41). In the next chapter, "Crimes of Fashion: Dressing the Part from Slavery to Freedom," Miller shows the relationship between "two indigenous dandyish performative traditions": American slave carnivals and blackface minstrelsy. Miller writes that "in the colonial period and throughout the nineteenth century in America, black dandyism, as enacted at these indigenous festivals, was a practice that destabilized...

FOLK AND URBAN COMMUNITIES IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN'S FICTION: OCTAVIA BUTLER'S PARABLE OF THE SOWER Madhu Dubey Brown University In "The Politics ofFiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston," first published in 1991, Hazel Carby seeks to account for the recent academic revival of Zora Neale Hurston' s southern folk aesthetic . Carby argues that Hurston's writing, locating authentic black community in the rural south, displaced the difficulties ofrepresenting the complex and contested black culture that was taking shape in the cities and that the current academic reclamation of Hurston' s work illustrates a parallel logic of displacement. Carby concludes with the suggestion that present-day critics of African-American literature and culture "begin to acknowledge the complexity of [their] own discursive displacement of contemporary conflict and cultural transformation in the search for black cultural authenticity. The privileging of Hurston ... at a moment of intense urban crisis and conflict is perhaps a sign of that displacement."1 Carby's provocative argument can be extended beyond its specific reference to the academic recovery of Zora Neale Hurston, and applied to the turn toward southern folk culture taken in so much of the criticism surrounding novels by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and others. Although most of these writers have published city novels, criticism on these novelists has tended to privilege those selected texts and textual elements that help consolidate a black feminine literary tradition derived from southern folk culture .2 Following Carby's logic, we might argue that these critical texts are executing a "discursive displacement" of problems of urban literary representation, but this displacement is itself an oblique form of response to the widely prevalent rhetoric of contemporary urban crisis . This rhetoric, magnetized around the notorious term "underclass," tends to frame the issue of urban crisis essentially as a crisis in black culture and community. In popular media and academic discourses, the underclass is commonly represented as a recalcitrant urban mass polarized against an expanding black middle class and caught in an illicit culture ofpoverty.3 Given the public sway ofthese discourses, it is not surprising that so much recent African-American literature is 104MadhuDubey framing urban crisis as a problem ofrepresentation, and grappling with the questions of whether and how the writer can bridge class divides and speak for, as well as to, a wider black urban community. This problem of representation is exacerbated by the fact that contemporary literary readerships are highly specialized and restricted as well as racially and culturally diverse, and are certainly not coextensive with "the black community." The southern folk aesthetic exemplifies a "discursive displacement" of this crisis in literary representation in the sense that, if black community is perceived to be irreparably fractured in the contemporary city, the folk domain ofthe rural south operates as a site where integral black communities can be imaginatively restored. These face-to-face models of community are typically bound together by ties of place, distinctive cultural modes ofknowing (clustered around the term "conjuring ") and styles of communication (oral tradition). The turn toward southern folk culture works essentially to guarantee the writer's ability to identify, address, and speak for a wider black community. For example, Alice Walker declares, in a much-quoted passage from her essay "The Black Writer and the Southern Experience," that "what the black Southern writer inherits as a natural right is a sense of community . Something simple but surprisingly hard, especially these days, to come by."4 Ifwe accredit current discourses ofurban crisis, black community does appear surprisingly hard to come by these days, requiring as it does difficult acts of mediation across intraracial class, regional, and cultural distinctions. The literary turn toward a rural southern past helps short-circuit this labor of mediation, furnishing community as the writer's "natural right." Alice Walker's remembered image of wholesome southern community hinges on a "cooperative ethos"5 that mitigates intraracial class divisions, precisely the ethos that is often said to have dissolved in the contemporary city. Houston Baker, in his study of black women novelists, specifies the type of community implicit in the southern folk aesthetic, as he opposes the "mulattoization"—or racial dilution—of black urban...

The term gangsta rap started to gain currency in 1989. Its first American broadsheet appearance was in Los Angeles Times (Hilburn 1989), when controversial single Gangsta, Gangsta by N.W.A. (Niggaz with Attitude) was in Billboard's Hot Rap Singles chart. (1) The coinage denoted fresh and provocative rap sound--a cocktail of bass-driven and usually minor-key tracks, heightened first-person street gang rhymes, irreverent and humorous stories, and antiestablishment social commentary on deindustrialized black life--created by cluster of rap artists chiefly in Los Angeles region. The genre tag stuck, and by early 1990s, this most controversial strain of hip-hop was fast becoming market leader. At same moment that gangsta rap began to make an impression with audiences and critics, debates were heating up in field of black cultural studies. Across Atlantic in England, Stuart Hall proclaimed the end of innocent notion of essential black subject in 1989 conference paper and article entitled Ethnicities--a controversial statement that was to take on manifesto resonances. Along with other notable scholars, Hall (1996c, 443-444) identified a significant shift in black cultural shift away from essentialist strategies of replacing their bad forms with our good ones and toward new phase, which was concerned with the struggle around strategic positionalities. He characterized shift as move away from focusing on of representation (a dualistic approach to cultural politics: Is it good or bad? authentic or not?) and toward concern with politics of representation. This view entailed looking behind relations of individual media representations and self-representations of blackness in order to explore wider determinants and deeper structures that shape black popular-culture terrain and that frame and inform practice of both culture workers and critics. Hall's pronouncement of phase was in fact as much prescriptive as descriptive. In 1992, he provided an extended version of this challenging critique, revised this time for U.S. intellectual arena. He delivered paper What Is This `Black' in Black Popular Culture? at New York conference, and this paper was positioned as kind of keynote article (before those of Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West) in influential conference collection Black Popular Culture (Dent 1992). Hall's address conveys note of critical exuberance and intellectual mission: [B]lack popular culture ... can never be simplified or explained in terms of simple binary oppositions that are habitually to map it out: high and low; resistance versus incorporation; authentic versus inauthentic; experiential versus formal; opposition versus homogenization (Hall 1992, 26). Although simplified for rhetorical effect, Hall's description of still habitually used binaries were perhaps nowhere more apparent than in much of gangsta rap's reception. The polemical critical climate, provocative and, to many, offensive nature of gangsta rap, and high stakes resulting from music's close connection to an impoverished lived experience all contributed to emergence of variety of totalizing judgmental responses. The subgenre was frequently cast as incorporated and inauthentic (gangsta rappers as cultural dupes, as slaves to system, as neo-blackface minstrels). Alternatively, critics read it as resistant and authentic (gangsta as black, proletarian voicing, as antipolice, antihegemonic protest). Very often, and in line with longstanding trends in criticism of black cultural forms, critics understood gangsta rap as experiential rather than formal, construing gangsta as social realism (reflecting grim realities of so-called black experience) and at same time as formally basic, as musically debased, and as aesthetically unworthy of close attention. …

Reviewed by: Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America Glen Mimura (bio) Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, edited by Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Vii + 365 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-3922-9. One of the most dynamic developments in Asian American Studies over the past decade has been its growing regard for popular culture. This is not to suggest that the field has historically ignored popular culture: along with articles on racism in mass media and mainstream culture in 1970s’ community-based movement and scholarly publications, Eugene Franklin Wong’s On Visual Media Racism (1978) examined the roles of Asian Americans on and behind the silver screen during Hollywood’s early and classical eras, and Elaine Kim’s Asian American Literature (1982) situated works by Asian American writers in relation to high literary and popular-cultural discourses of race.1 However, such early studies set up the terms by which popular culture would be largely examined by Asian Americanists well into the 1990s, and still partly today: 1) disproportionate attention to dominant commercial media while neglecting popular media produced by Asian Americans; 2) regard for the ‘popular,’ in contrast to more properly literary or artistic works, as lesser, secondary objects significant primarily for their reproduction of racism; and 3) analytical treatment of the popular, following the methodological habit of literary studies, as texts with little or no reference to their mass reception and interpretation. Recent scholarship, however, has productively shifted the field’s understanding of popular culture in two ways. First, it has opened what counts as popular culture beyond such familiar objects of commercialized entertainment as films, television, and popular music and literature, to encompass ordinary cultural objects and practices, their consumption and use, and the everyday relations in which they are embedded. Second, incorporating the methodological advances of cultural studies, the recent scholarship has expanded its critical frame beyond [End Page 121] text-centered analysis to simultaneously engage texts, audiences, and institutions, and the technologies that mediate their interrelations. These shifts are well-represented in the recently published anthology, Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, edited by Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. Comprised of twelve chapters and a wide-ranging introduction, the book offers an excellent survey, although not without some unevenness reflective of the growing pains of this field or subfield. Some pieces are very strong and compelling, others less so—even disappointing in a few cases, where promising research is shortchanged by a methodological or theoretical ‘poverty’ indicative of popular culture’s emergent status in Asian American Studies. This is to be expected and perhaps even unavoidable at this historical moment, given that Asian American popular culture studies is still characterized by individual projects pursued mostly autonomously from one another, supported by intermittent rather than continuous, sustained dialogues by its participants, as exemplified by the landmark anthology, Black Popular Culture.2 Instead, Alien Encounters is a showcase of widely varying research, anchored by brilliant contributions by such leading practitioners as Sunaina Maira, Mimi Nguyen, and Wendy Chun. Yet key developments in the field also provide coherence to the collection. Most notably, one finds feminist analysis more extensively integrated than in other aspects of Asian American Studies. This is both welcome and necessary, if unsurprising, in a book that valorizes objects and discourses historically denigrated as overly feminine (food and cooking, Indo-chic self-fashioning), crudely masculine (import car cultures, pulp fiction, hip hop), or otherwise vulgar or inauthentic (ethnic variety show videos, drag king performance). Methodologically, nearly every chapter also appreciably deepens or expands either Asian America’s ‘archive’ or ‘field sites,’ illuminating an impressive range of unstudied or understudied youth cultures, musics, art, media, performance, and everyday practices and discourses. Two stand-outs that bring these elements together are Nhi T. Lieu’s study of diasporic niche media and Sunaina Maira’s critique of orientalist practices such as henna. Both authors craft ethnographically thick descriptions of their objects and carefully situate them in contexts simultaneously local, transnational, and historical. As Lieu concisely notes, the Paris by Night videos voraciously consumed by refugee and post-refugee generation Vietnamese...

Review: Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture, by Racquel J. Gates

The Law and Black Folk Katy L. Chiles (bio) Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery by Bryan Wagner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 307. $37.00 cloth. Ever since W. E. B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, scholars have deliberated over what it means to have a soul, to be black, or to be part of the folk. In Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery, Bryan Wagner gives us a new way to consider these issues that is provocative and, indeed, disturbing. Blackness, Wagner claims, is not something passed down through bloodlines or as a cultural inheritance; rather, it is a certain type of statelessness produced when one is allowed to exist—but only without standing—in the eyes of the state. Furthermore, it is this understanding of blackness (one of statelessness, not of soulfulness) that grounds what we commonly call the black vernacular tradition. Indeed, this version of the black tradition predicates its own emergence on its engagement with the law that would construct the existence of its practitioners only as one of criminality. For Wagner, if we miss understanding this aspect of blackness, we miss the violence recorded in these cultural expressions. Wagner proposes this alternative history of the black vernacular tradition by debunking some of what he calls the central myths of its accepted history and by detailing the ethnographic procedure that made certain kinds of music into folk music (253). He begins by showing the way in which the laws arising out of a natural law tradition [End Page 339] produced a particular notion of blackness. For him, the term police power refers not just to the formalized institution of law enforcement (although it certainly includes that) but also more broadly to the power of the state to produce certain types of subjectivities through the writing and enforcing of law. Indeed, the state's sovereignty relates to its police power, and, in the particular case of blackness, the state's police power sees blackness only "for the presumed danger it poses to public welfare" (6-7). Furthermore, this power was not only consolidated in the state itself, as it was extended as a "racial privilege of all whites over all blacks, slave or free" (7). Because this police power conceptualized blackness only as a threat, it legitimated any effort to eliminate that potential threat preemptively before it could culminate in action. For Wagner, the black vernacular tradition arises out of its interaction with this kind of legal thinking, and we'd be better served by understanding how black culture responded to police power rather than by misunderstanding "the voice's insistence for a positive property such as soulfulness" (21). Indeed, as Wagner states, [M]y aim is to specify the historical statement against which the black tradition has dramatized its own emergence. Whether it is abstracted in codes or embedded in cases, the law leaves a paper trail that can be used to reconstruct the historical coordinates that are invoked in the tradition's representative structures of self-address. (21) One of Wagner's most powerful examples is the history of Uncle Remus, the African American character created by Joel Chandler Harris in Atlanta at the close of the nineteenth century. Probably many Americans think of Uncle Remus either as the storyteller featured in Harris's Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1880) or as the demeaning narrator featured in Disney's 1946 film, Song of the South. What Wagner reminds us of, however, is the seriousness with which folklorists took the Uncle Remus stories for their "scientific worth" (116). As Wagner details, Remus became structurally important both to the study of black folk culture and to the professionalization of that type of study. Remus, then, influenced folklorists' "theories of black tradition, in particular those theories that would describe the tradition as a cultural inheritance from Africa;" indeed, he "structured the archive through which the tradition has been imagined" (122). By reading through issues of the Atlanta Constitution, the newspaper that initially published Harris's Remus pieces, Wagner links the production of this character with the debate simultaneously...