Black Culture Research Articles (Page 1)

ABSTRACT Investigation into how the UK curriculum, specifically school literature, represents Black culture and characters and its potential psychological implications for Black students is scant. This small scale qualitative study explored these important but undocumented areas. Semi-structured interviews with eight Black participants aged 17–52 discussed their prior experiences of literature in education. The subsequent Reflexive Thematic Analysis of the interview data generated themes, including Literature of Past & Pain; Literature of Positivity & Possibility; and Questioning Power in the Classroom & Literature Curriculum. Cultural responsivity of teachers in selection and facilitation of literature lessons were key factors in mediating students’ experiences. The final theme What Should The Future of School Literature Be? shifts the focus towards future change actions, promoting the flourishing of Black students through literature. Limitations of the current research, including that it is devised from a White British perspective, are noted, and recommendations for further research are proposed. Implications for educational psychologists, teachers and the curriculum are discussed.

African American studies—a discipline grounded in celebrations of Black culture and resistance to anti-Blackness—is now being piloted in Advanced Placement (AP)—an educational program that has long excluded Black people and promoted dominant cultural norms. In the parlance of Audre Lorde, AP may be a “master’s tool“ incapable of dismantling racism. This case study of two AP African American studies classes investigated whether the course can teach students how they might undermine anti-Black racism. Findings suggest that the course has a strong potential to encourage Black joy but neglects to interrogate racism as a modern-day systemic phenomenon. This shortcoming calls into question the capacity of AP African American Studies to prepare students to democratically challenge anti-Black racism.

ABSTRACT This article tracks the dynamics and aesthetic transformative potential of “jazz crazy Highlife” in the 1950s. Drawing on ethnographic research and knowledge production on Highlife with Highlife-makers as well as in-depth archival research on recorded music, photographs and newspaper articles not yet read in investigations on Highlife, the article offers a reading of how colonial elite press discourse articulates changes in sentiment and meaning related to popular music as the Gold Coast approaches political independence. Although full of contempt, these accounts grant a special insight into the process of decolonising the aesthetic-political regime of the colonial class and at the same time reveal a dynamic history of popular Highlife-making and its interrelated aspects of dance-band formation, cultural agents, institutions and modern media dissemination, contextualised through ethnographic research. This all suggests a subtle aesthetic-political process at work in which structures of feeling from below became structures of power and decolonisation through popular music effects on social transformation. The article draws attention to two critical forces in this process neglected so far: the sound of Highlife and, as these changes appear as the outcome of black Atlantic music culture, the transnational entanglement of Highlife as Anglophone West Africa’s first modern popular music.

The Black Metropolis existed at least since the Middle Ages, and through the Middle Passage shaped Black cities in the Americas from Salvador and Havana, to Miami and New York. It a place, a space and a state of mind animated by Black life, Black culture and Black history. As a place, its architecture and architects, shape and are shaped by built environments, creating a refuge that is more than “a city within a city.” As a space, the Black Metropolis is marked by class, gender, sexuality, work and time. It holds contested meanings, reflecting those who make it and how they navigate it. As a state of mind, the Black City is world building and placemaking evidenced in literature, art, culture, virtual spaces and being – in Blackness itself. The so-called “reckoning” of 2020 is at root, Black world making, a mass Blackening that shaped cities globally. If only fleetingly. The Black Metropolis, and Black scholarship about it, is oriented to a future that foregrounds Black thought and Black thinkers; demands accountability; and both is and about Black worldmaking. Black queer urbanism and Black memory work calls for scholarship rooted in Black knowledge production, in healing, reckoning, helping, restoring, honoring Black life.

ABSTRACT In this autobiographical article, the veteran writer Michael Gonzales reflects upon Black culture in Harlem in the decades following Langston Hughes’s death in 1967. While alluding to films, authors, and musicians who helped shape Black expression, Gonzales provides a snapshot of Black working-class life for Harlemites, especially young Black men, during the early stages of the post–civil rights era. In doing so, Gonzales sheds important light on cultural experiences that swayed his decision to become a writer.

Video games are celebrated for providing unique interactive experiences that allow players to construct their own narratives through play. However, Black gamers have been repeatedly denied representational agency to craft their own narrative and design game characters that reflect their true selves. To explore how a community of Black gamers has used game modifications (mods) to address representation, we conducted a qualitative study of 22 Black players of "The Sims" life simulation game. We investigate how "Black simmers" create and integrate mods and custom content to represent Black identities and culture in their gameplay through the lens of a 'community of play.' As a sensitizing concept, we also understand participants' testimonies through the lens of Black feminist thought. We found that participants have cultivated a community that exists as a site of theoretical praxis. Further, the community centers mentoring, collective care, storytelling, and Black joy, as well as performs the labor necessary to preserve this gaming space for Black players -- drawing further implications for resisting hegemonic whiteness in the games industry through a pluriversal game design practice.

Contemporary discourses around digital anti-Blackness, especially the use of Blackness as an object of viral material, have raised questions on how Black digital cultural productions can avert ongoing exploitation. This paper asks, can the expansiveness of Black digital culture, particularly as it exists within vernacular and less visible spaces, circumvent the dominant hand that seeks to exploit and commodify? First, I examine the unique use of Blackness as a sentimental resource online that, when made digitally viral, becomes a commodified spectacle. Next, I move to engage Black cultural production that exists in the more marginal, quotidian, and non-viral spaces and propose the notion of a vernacular Black digital culture. This is exemplified through an Instagram case study of @brownstonearchives, a digitality that engages creative innovation, intimate space making, and selective (il)legibility to counter the exploitive spectacularization of Blackness.

In 1991, at the first and only Black Popular Culture conference, held at Studio Museum in Harlem, an object speaks. This is no ordinary object. This object is an object aware of its objecthood, aware that those who had invited it had come to study it. This object is positioned affirmatively to the “specific occasion” that Black literary scholar Hortense Spillers had intimated the Black American male was handed, a regaining of “the power of ‘yes’ to the ‘female’ within.” What sort of black femmescape does this object perform in? How sickening must it have been? We should see.

This article discusses the relevance of education for ethnic-racial relations in Brazil, highlighting the historic role of the Unified Black Movement (MNU) in the inclusion of African History and Afro-Brazilian Culture in school curricula, as established by Law 10.639/2003. It analyzes the context of structural racism and cultural whitening as obstacles to valuing Black identity, arguing that education is a central tool in confronting these historical inequalities. The systematic exclusion of Black history and culture from school content contributed, for centuries, to the maintenance of a racist social structure, where the Black population is marginalized and its contributions are rendered invisible. The actions of the MNU were decisive in building collective awareness about the need for anti-racist education, and the enactment of Law 10.639/2003 represents an important legal milestone in this process. Nevertheless, there are countless challenges to its implementation, from the precarious training of teachers to the absence of adequate teaching materials and institutional resistance to curricular change. The analysis points out that the effectiveness of the law depends on political and pedagogical commitment to valuing ethnic-racial diversity and overcoming inequalities. Thus, schools must become spaces for social transformation, capable of promoting the recognition of Black identities, combating racism, and contributing to the construction of a fairer, more equitable, and plural society. The appreciation of Afro-Brazilian and African cultures, therefore, is not just a legal requirement, but an ethical and educational imperative.

Review of “Black Culture, Inc. How Ethnic Community Support Pays for Corporate America”

ABSTRACTThis autobiographical article recounts a White woman's efforts to establish a center for teaching and learning (CTL) in a large HBCU in the southern part of the United States. She describes the ways in which tenets of critical feminism, feminist pedagogies, and adult learning and development informed her approach to faculty development. She explores her own complicity with racism and the ways that she her experience with Black culture, identities and history have profoundly impacted her view of the world.

Black Festive Culture in Early Modern Mexico

Abstract This review essay offers an account of how two recent volumes challenge and revitalize the contemporary practice of Black literary study. Issuing from beyond the disciplinary bounds of Black literary study, Lisa Biggs’s The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation and the edited collection, Intersecting Aesthetics: Literary Adaptations and Cinematic Representations of Blackness offer generative models for renewal. By foregrounding how Black expressive cultures develop under constraint, the volumes engage in both critique and repair elegantly negotiating (rather than reductively collapsing) the field’s persistent oppositions between formalism and politics, critique and care, and scholarly method and sociological insight. Their attention to neglected arenas, the literary and performance cultures fostered in carceral institutions and the understudied domain of Black adaptation across literature and film respectively, demonstrates how sustained attention to form, context, and audience can expand the boundaries of Black literary inquiry.

Black caregivers of children with autism express that there are gaps in both knowledge and acceptance of disabilities within their communities. This lack of information and resources provided to Black communities can lead to tensions within families regarding autism diagnoses and how to support individuals with autism in their families. As part of a larger qualitative study, 23 Black caregivers of children with autism shared their experiences with the messages received from family members about their child's autism diagnosis. Two overarching themes emerged regarding family messaging: Lack of Understanding and Denial of Autism and Supportive Acceptance and Inclusion. Six subthemes were identified that highlight the nuance within the messaging content. These findings can inform strategies to develop culturally tailored interventions to support Black caregivers in navigating the range of messages received from family members when their child receives a diagnosis of autism. Further research should build on these findings to investigate how directly this family messaging links to broader messaging in Black culture regarding autism, as well as how both family and cultural messaging may interact with factors such as awareness or use of autism resources, attitudes toward research, and long-term social and behavioral outcomes for Black children with autism.Lay abstractBlack caregivers of children with autism say there are gaps in knowledge and acceptance of disabilities in their communities. This lack of information and resources can cause tensions in families about autism diagnoses and how to support their children. This study talked to 23 Black caregivers to learn about their experiences with the messages they received about their child's autism diagnosis from family members. We found two main themes: Lack of Understanding and Denial of Autism, and Supportive Acceptance and Inclusion. Within these themes, parents shared different experiences, like family members denying autism exists, not wanting to learn about it, or being very supportive and inclusive. Black caregivers also talked about the emotional toll the negative messages take on them. This work is important because it can help create culturally tailored support for Black caregivers of children with autism, so that they can engage with family members in more supportive ways. Future research should look at how these messages affect the use of autism resources, attitudes toward research, and long-term outcomes for Black children with autism.

This article proposes an interpretation of the term “racial enclosure,” and examines its conceptual relevance for the field of African American literature and for Black Studies, more broadly. Enclosure’s definitions and applications proliferate—it is at once a spatial and geographic form, a historical and legal process, and an epistemic system of individuation and taxonomy. I ask how we might work with a historically grounded concept of enclosure that does not reduce it to, nor dismiss entirely, its abstract and symbolic applications. I suggest that it is precisely the relationship between its historical and material valences and its abstract and conceptual valences, that makes “racial enclosure” an urgent formulation for scholars of black life, history, and culture.

Spoken word poetry in nursing education: A concept analysis.

The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom by Sarah L. H. Gronningsater (review)

In this essay, the author conceptualizes and coins the term Corporate Blackfishing to describe the practice of corporate entities appropriating Black music, culture, and urban esthetics, often times via digital technology, in an effort to monetize glamorized aspects of blackness in ways that exploit racial stereotypes and trauma and export them to the mainstream. This essay raises critical questions about AI ethics and corporate social responsibility. Using the case of AI-Cyborg Rapper, FN Meka, the author problematizes the commodification of that struggle, the Black experience, and Hip Hop specifically amid the rise and rampant use of artificial intelligence. The author posits, that if public relations, normatively, should aspire to help society become better places to live and work, then critical scholars must question the implications of corporate promotional and public relations tactics used prominently in Hip Hop music, culture, and commercialization.

Throughout history, communities have struggled to build homes in places actively hostile to their presence, a challenge long faced by African descendants in the American diaspora. In cities across the U.S., including Washington, D.C., efforts have often been made to erase Black cultural identity. D.C., once a hub of Black culture, saw its urban fabric devastated during the 1968 riots following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Since then, redevelopment has been slow and, more recently, marked by gentrification, which has further displaced Black communities. Amid this context, Black architects such as Michael Marshall, FAIA, and Sean Pichon, AIA, have emerged as visionary leaders. Their work exemplifies Value-Inclusive Design and aligns with Roberto Verganti’s Design-Driven Innovation by embedding cultural relevance and community needs into development projects. These architects propose an intentional approach that centers Black identity and brings culturally meaningful businesses into urban redevelopment, shifting the paradigm of design practice in D.C. This collective case study (methodology) argues that their work represents a distinct architectural style, Black Modernism, characterized by cultural preservation, community engagement, and spatial justice. This research examines two central questions: Where does Black Modernism begin, and where does it end? How does it fit within and expand beyond the broader American Modernist architectural movement? It explores the consequences of the destruction of Black communities, the lived experiences of Black architects, and how those experiences are reflected in their designs. Additionally, the research suggests that the work of Black architects aligns with heutagogical pedagogy, which views community stakeholders not just as beneficiaries, but as educators and knowledge-holders in architectural preservation. Findings reveal that Black Modernism, therefore, is not only a design style but a method of reclaiming identity, telling untold histories, and building more inclusive cities.

ABSTRACT Astroworld, a 2021 concert festival headlined by the rapper Travis Scott, ended in tragedy when dangerous overcrowding killed 10 of the 50,000 attendees and injured thousands of others. In the aftermath, news reports and commentary focused on the “why” and “how” of the tragedy; the search for responsible parties drove the coverage. Using textual analysis to examine the festival’s coverage in 11 major news and popular culture publications, this study finds that preexisting interpretive schemes for Black music and Black crowds drove this discourse, invoking and stoking broader cultural anxieties about Black culture and constructing a racialized matrix of blame and risk. Analysis of this case provides insight into the explanatory nature of race after crisis, exploring the ways news coverage is informed by racialization as well as how the unequal dynamics of blame drive news coverage of tragedy.