Black Culture Research Articles

Blue Gums, Black Bodies, White Supremacy: Narratives of Racial Contagion in the Late Nineteenth Century

AbstractThis article explores the sudden spate of stories concerning the so-called “blue gum negro” (the Blue Gum) that circulated in the national press from the late 1880s to the late 1890s. These reports concerned purportedly blue-gummed, Black assailants, whose bite was alleged to be poisonous, and of whom African Americans were supposedly terrified. This article argues that, although these narratives reinforced white notions of Black criminality and credulity, they marked a particular moment of racialization, in which fears of bodily contagion, generated by the recent revolution in germ theory, were harnessed to notions of embodied racial difference, to express and galvanize white anxieties about racial impurity. Because Blue Gums embodied dysgenic menace, white journalists and writers were often reluctant to disavow their existence, instead capitalizing on the slippage between figurative and literal language that characterized discourse on race. However, in appropriating Black culture and presenting a figure from folklore as a racial type, white writers betrayed not only the essentially superstitious character of racial thought but also the interwoven nature of dominant and subjugated cultures in the United States.

Xyloid Sexuality

Abstract The Kenyan-born, US-based artist Wangechi Mutu is fascinated by the human body and its nonhuman possibilities. In Mutu's collaged works, human forms are repeatedly ripped apart and reassembled within fantasy landscapes that speak of decomposition and regrowth. This article analyzes the significance of trees to Mutu's project of dismantling the human. Drawing from critical plant studies, forest ecology, cultural anthropology, and the mycological turn, it argues that Mutu's artworks forcefully reclaim the nonhuman as a site of Black expressive culture. These artworks blur ontological distinctions between the human and the arboreal through xyloid sexuality, a weirding of human eroticism and reproduction that pushes desire, procreation, and sexual fulfillment beyond species boundaries. Mutu's use of xyloid sexuality can be understood as a radical utopian gesture to supplant the violence of the colonial gaze with a powerfully more-than-human Black gaze.

Jamaican-Canadian ‘Poetics of Relations’: Dub Poetry, Musical Rhythm, and Flows of Transnational Black Consciousness

The article places dub poetry in the context of traveling sounds of music and oral poetry between the Caribbean, Canada, and England. Looking at dub poetry from a hemispheric and transnational perspective and through the lens of Glissant’s ‘poetics of Relations,’ the article puts focus on Canadian dub poetry and relates it to Jamaican beginnings and diasporic extensions in Britain. As the article shows, dub poetry plays a key role as transnational and transgeneric sound archive (Antwi) and as poetic form of yearning for completion, thus adding new narratives to a larger discourse of Black transnationalism that is by no means limited or necessarily linked to “pan-Africanism or other kinds of Black-isms”. Instead, dub poetry also responds to all kinds of international movements such as anti-colonialism, socialism and feminism to create transnational imaginaries and historiographies of diasporic Black cultures.

Breaking bridges to the Pied Piper: how Black feminists digitally wreck the legacy of R. Kelly on Ebony.com

ABSTRACT While existing scholarship on R. Kelly primarily focuses on hashtag activism via #MuteRKelly, #FastTailedGirls, and #SurvivingRKelly, this essay considers the role of investigative journalism in documenting decades of R. Kelly’s sexual violence against Black women and girls. Using Gwendolyn Pough’s concept “bringing wreck” and Regina Duthely’s expanded version of “digital wreck,” this study analyzes nine articles published from 2013 to 2015 on ebony.com, the digital version of the Black-oriented magazine Ebony. In response to R. Kelly’s reentry into hip-hop, I argue that Black feminist bloggers as journalists aimed to digitally wreck patriarchy and capitalism through their rhetorical strategies on ebony.com. This project performs an interface analysis of ebony.com in conjunction with a rhetorical critique of these editorial attacks against the artist. It demonstrates how Black feminists engage in radical acts of blame to digitally wreck public sentiments towards abusive celebrities within the space of commodified news organizations. There are three types of digital wrecking practiced by Black feminists on ebony.com: expressing marginality, blaming misogynoir agents and practices, and reimagining Black culture by challenging sexual violence.

“How Many Black Hippies Do You See?” The Counterculture in Black and White

Historians have treated the counterculture largely as a white phenomenon and drawn sharp boundaries between its escapism and the political engagement of the Black freedom struggle. A look at the counterculture's origins and growth in the late 1950s and the 1960s reveals that the counterculture intersected with Black culture in many ways. White beats, hipsters, and hippies generally admired the civil rights movement's support for equality and nonviolence, but sometimes scoffed at its effort to gain integration into American society. Hippies considered themselves outsiders from society and imagined that they shared affinity with Black Americans. Blacks’ responses to the counterculture ranged from contempt to curiosity to embrace. Some Blacks despised the hippies’ lifestyle and political apathy, but others considered the counterculture an important challenge to “the System.” American culture, style, literature, and music were all affected by the counterculture's experimentalism. The counterculture changed white culture, Black culture, and American culture. Drawing boundaries between cultural forms proves less instructive than focussing on the connections between them.

Abjection of Coloured Women and their Tragic Journey of Trifold Oppression in Toni Morrison's Beloved and The Bluest Eye

The world is gifted with various distinguished creatures irrespective of colour, creed, energy, work and so on. "Black" as a race is socially constructed by human being and this stereotype crosses the line when the so called white people imposed tortures quoting the skin colour and treating them as untouchables. The word "black" representing people itself is a falsified racist classification based on their skin colour for their dark complexion. Based on the trifold oppression they face, her writings states how people are denied from equality and subjugated as slaves in their own place. Morrison has won many prizes and awards and she is also a renowned speaker at major literary gatherings. She has a great concern on coloured people in general and so she reflects the trifold oppression and effortlessly she bring out the richness of black culture and it's ethnicity by reconstructing black images through her writing. Toni Morrison writes the novel having coloured people as the central characters especially women. Only with Morrison, there was a turning point in the history of Black women's literature. This paper attempts to investigate the brutal state of coloured women who have experienced trauma in various forms. This study also broods over the trifold oppression in the form of race, gender and class which leads them to slavery throughout their lifetime.

Traversing the Urban Soundscape: Black Sonic Geographies within The Minneapolis Sound

AbstractThis paper illuminates The Minneapolis Sound's emergence from the urban soundscapes of late 20th century Minneapolis. Turning to the 1960s and 1970s, I trace the genre's geohistorical emergence to a Black diasporic community who found within marginality the possibilities to spatialise an experimental world across the urban margins. Disclosing how this experimental world was upheld by improvisatory musical ensembles and their dynamic reaffirmations of a Black sense of place, the paper reveals how The Minneapolis Sound was insurgently pioneered as a Black sonic counter culture amidst unequivocal oppression. I then temporally propel the paper into the 1980s and 1990s and explore how the artist Prince and band The Time radically re‐imagined the city's anti‐Black spatial histories towards more just ends. This elucidates how, after emerging from the spatiality of the racialised metropolis, The Minneapolis Sound provided a speculative avenue of decolonial poetics through which alternative Black futures were made imaginable.

Identity Politics as Lingua Franca?

Abstract Although identity politics dates back to the 1960 s, it has acquired a new urgency since the ascendance of Black Lives Matter in the late 2010 s. And while identity politics, as a critical framework, was developed in the United States, its rhetoric has since been taken up in much of the rest of the world. This article argues that the terminology of US-style identity politics is especially ill-suited to Germany, a country in which race does not exist as a legal category, and discrimination and inequality do not revolve around a Black/white axis. It points out, moreover, that the German appropriation of certain words and concepts – such as diversity, political correctness, cancel culture, woke, intersectionality, and others – clashes both with their usage and meaning in the US and with the demographic changes that have transformed post-Second World War German culture. In order to illustrate this clash, this article compares Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning musical A Strange Loop (2019) with Yael Ronen’s Slippery Slope (2021), a critically acclaimed musical performed in English at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater. It critiques Slippery Slope’s appropriation of the buzzwords of identity politics and notes with regret that German theatres are ill-equipped to perform the plays of the most important playwrights working in the US today, a new generation of African American writers, including Jackson, whose work is steeped in the performance traditions of Black American cultures.

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye : A Critical Analysis

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye : A Critical Analysis

Performing Nigerianness: Equivocal Identities and Digital Legibility of White Women Comedians

Abstract Sabina Yuhas (@Overszabi) and Juliana Belova (@juliewanderz or Oyibo Marlian) are Hungarian and Russian women, respectively, who are fascinated by Nigerian popular culture. Despite their successes in exploiting Black culture to attain wealth and fame in the Nigerian mediasphere, their works have hardly been studied. Close readings and nuanced analyses of their selected TikTok skits show a multiplicity of images that are neither fully European nor Nigerian—equivocal identities—mediating Otherness. However, the longstanding power asymmetries between Africa and Europe characterize their enactments as commodification of Blackness, accounting for why Nigerians who perform “Europeanness” do not attain corresponding success.

Pop culture resentment: testing existing and alternative measures of white racial attitudes

ABSTRACT Understanding white Americans’ attitudes toward Black Americans is crucial in US public opinion. However, survey measurement of these attitudes is hampered by social desirability bias, low discriminant validity, and the potential for heightened demand characteristics and backlash. I propose a new measure: music genre preference. Consistent preference for genres historically and popularly linked to white culture over those linked to Black culture may partly reflect white Americans’ attitudes toward Black Americans. Using four online surveys comparing the performance of racial resentment, stereotype measures, and genre preference on social desirability, predictive and discriminant validity, and research awareness, I find that genre preference either outperforms or matches the established measures on these criteria. Genre preference thus provides a viable alternative for measuring white Americans’ attitudes toward Black Americans, and potentially other group attitudes in both the United States and other cultures. This also provides an example of sensitive question design using proxies that elicit attitudes without discomforting the survey taker or alerting them to the purpose of the study.

The Development of Jazz in China and Its Intercultural Influence on Chinese Pop Music, from the 20th Century to the 21st Century

Abstract What is the intercultural significance of jazz for the development of Chinese pop music? The main content of this dissertation is to study and discuss the period when jazz music entered China and how it affects the development of past and present Chinese pop music. In today’s society, intercultural research is ubiquitous. Since the birth of civilization, people from different disciplines and artistic fields have been trying to build cultural bridges.1 China has a long history of culture and music development. With the changes of the times, China’s music civilization has been continuously developed and changed with the replacement of various dynasties in the past. In addition, Confucius’s Confucianism has influenced the development of Chinese music and music education. The history of jazz music is not very long, but it has become an indispensable element of today’s social music culture. Perhaps it is because jazz has rich musical style features, such as improvisation and unique jazz scales. In addition, the musical content of its expression is democratic and free. The musical form of Jazz music originated in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it is a combination of African black culture and European white culture. It is a kind of “hybrid” music form that affects the development of Chinese music with deep-rooted civilization, especially some Chinese pop music. The dissertation will study how jazz integrates Chinese music to produce Chinese pop music, as well as the intercultural influence of jazz, and how Jazz affects the pop singers of Chinese pop music.

Candomblé in Public: How Religious Rites Become Civil Technologies in Salvador, Brazil

Abstract In 2019, right before arriving in Salvador, Brazil, to develop missionary activities, an international Protestant organization declared that this city – the center of the black culture in the country – was “known for its people’s belief in spirits and demons.” The statement soon triggered indignation from activists and devotees of Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion that is a key element of the city’s history and identity. This article analyzes the transformation of this case into a public problem, which demanded different forms of reparation and affirmation of religious differences. The text debates the extension of Candomblé's semiotic community in Salvador and how the circulation of its symbols in different social contexts furthers the dissolution of boundaries between “religion” and “politics.” I pursue such ideas by describing a form of civil protest that moves liturgical forms from the Candomblé temples to public spaces. Such civil protest technology engages music, dance, and a set of materialities, presenting an instructive performance of the constitution of “religion” and the “public” in a post-colonial landscape.

Oppressive Even As It Inspires

Abstract In this article, we trace the evolution of the connections between Black America and (Black) Europe since the mid-twentieth century and the study thereof. We do so through the lens of ‘Black American centrality,’ referring to the ways in which perceptions of Black America serve as an outsized reference point in European understandings of race, ‘Blackness,’ and Black (European) emancipation struggles. This allows for exploring the dilemmas that the, at times overwhelming, visibility of ‘Black America’ poses to Black Europeans, particularly during the current moment of flourishing Black European culture, politics, and scholarship. In that context, we show how both U.S.- and Europe-based scholars of Black American history and Black European history have approached Black American-European connections differently. The article concludes with suggestions for how these fields can engage with each other to develop academic approaches that account for but do not privilege the position of Black Americans within diasporic exchanges in the North Atlantic region, which is currently an underexplored area in diaspora studies.

Decentering the Patent: Opportunities to Reframe American Innovation Rhetorics

ABSTRACT Rhetoricians have long critiqued gendered (Gurak; Koerber) and racial (Banks; Haas) biases in rhetorics of science and technology. However, we have yet to fully consider how the patent, as a genre, perpetuates these biases both in the constraints it places on contemporary definitions of invention and innovation and in how it distorts historical narratives about who invented in the past. Delineating the patent’s limitations as an index of inventive activity, this article advocates for more expansive understandings of invention. It argues that American patents have, since the nineteenth century, affirmed a dominant “rhetoric of innovation” that has since functioned as much as a marker of privilege as it has an index of inventiveness. Using the example of early twentieth-century Black hair culture, this article suggests other ways of recovering historical inventiveness among groups of Americans possessing their own, alternative “rhetorics of innovation” that reflect their culturally situated strategies for empowerment.

“An Opportunity to Reclaim a Place”: A Critical Analysis of Media, Memory, and BLM Plaza DC

In June 2020, protestors in Washington, D.C. gathered peacefully outside the White House fences to protest George Floyd’s murder. Instead of acknowledging George Floyd’s murder or the racist policies that too often result in the death of Black men, women and children, former President Donald Trump staged a photo outside of St. John’s Church. Just a couple days later D.C.’s Mayor Muriel Bowser commissioned local D.C. artists and D.C. government officials to paint in massive yellow letters on 16th Street just outside the White House, “Black Lives Matter.” Lipsitz (2011) asserted that Black expressive culture, like street murals, can function as “repositories of collective memory,” (pg. 60), and can also transform and activate community. Mass media play a critical role in the construction of sites of memory and repositories of collective memory, like Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. Informed by both Stuart Hall (1997) and Henry Lefebvre’s (1991) concepts of representation, this research will explore the role of newspaper, specifically the Black Press, in the representation of Black Lives Matter Plaza DC (BLM Plaza DC) and its formation of BLM Plaza’s collective memory. My analysis conveyed that the Black Press represented BLM Plaza DC, a site of Black expressive culture, as a Black spatial imaginary. The Black Press’ representation of BLM Plaza DC helped construct BLM Plaza DC as a Black memory-making project that decentered the white gaze and recalled the names of Black people from our past and present that have fought for social and racial justice.

“Soul on Ice”: Black Commodification, Race, and the National Hockey League

The NHL has a long-standing, problematic relationship with race. The North American sporting and racial climate have brought even more attention to this reality. A notable tactic to counter the accusation of reinforcing racism within sports corporations, including the NHL, is publicly associating themselves with minoritized organizations. This often occurs through formal partnerships or the acquisition of minoritized-founded entities, initiatives, and organizations. This paper considers how salient discourses of race and Blackness are articulated by the hosts and contributors of NHL Studio’s Soul on Ice: The Podcast (SOIP) as an acquired NHL entity. The NHL aims to reposition itself on issues of race and the portrayal of Black members within hockey through SOIP. The podcast gives a platform to empower Black voices within White hockey culture but also problematically enmeshes the NHL within the commodification of Black culture and hardship. The acquisition of Soul on Ice: The Podcast by the NHL is used to sanitize and shield the league while reinforcing the normative Whiteness of hockey. Further, the consequences of the leagues’ commodification of Blackness and the nuanced experiences of Black NHL players and community members shared via the podcast are unpacked.

“We Know It's a Library”: Black Space, Black Women's Labor, and Radical Black Joy

The Junior Scholars Program (JSP) is a tuition-free youth learning program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. At JSP, Damaris, a former JSP instructor, was introduced to Kadiatou, the Schomburg Center's former education and outreach programs manager. They write collaboratively to (re)member the dialectical relationship between Black women's labor, Black Space, and Radical Black Joy.

Sending Language into Battle: Interview with Hortense J. Spillers

Abstract In this conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva, which unfolded over a period of twelve months, Hortense Spillers comments on critical political events and moments, which coincide with major markers in her academic trajectory. Each of these historical and personal milestones becomes, then, the backdrop against which one can appreciate how much of her thinking and writing are critical reflections and analytical interventions on questions and themes that prevailed at a given juncture. Through Spillers's comments on what has animated her writings on the Black sermon, the flesh, psychoanalysis, and Black culture, for instance, we gather the image that is the most appropriate presentation of Black thought, which is that of thinking in the thick of it.

Leandro Mbomio, the “Black Picasso”: Spanish state propaganda, Blackness, and neocolonialism in Equatorial Guinea

ABSTRACT In 1968, Equatorial Guinea’s emergence as an independent nation signaled a pivotal chapter in Spain’s national identity, deeply grounded on an imperial narrative. Around this juncture, Leandro Mbomio was etching his mark on Spain's cultural milieu as a sculptor. His success and persona reflected the image, voice, and thought the Francoist state sought in its former African subjects. Amid Spain’s stringent media censorship, the official narrative that emerges from Mbomio’s career is captivating. He was celebrated as “the black Picasso” and deemed emblematic of Black culture in Spain. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: How did the portrayal and reception of Mbomio reflect Spain’s shifting views on Equatorial Guinea, “Black Africa”, and the broader understanding of “Blackness” at the time?