Lauryn Hill Research Articles

Concerning Violence: Fanon, Africa and temporality

This article examines the political significance of temporal structures in Om våld (Concerning Violence) (), a documentary that takes its title from the chapter of the same name in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The film comprises archive footage shot by Swedish television crews in Africa between the mid-1960s and 1987. It pairs images with extracts from Fanon’s book, read by singer and activist Lauryn Hill. This assemblage both celebrates African campaigns of liberation and complicates the claim to be ‘here and now’ embedded in archival material by overlaying it with a retrospective (often melancholic) vantage point, that of a postcolonial moment. On occasion, Concerning Violence comes close to reproducing a temporal framing that consigns Black Africans to the symbolic immobility critiqued by Fanon and, more recently, Achille Mbembe. How does the film endeavour to avoid this? How successful is it in arguing for the enduring relevance of Fanon’s thought?

Review of How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity by La Marr Jurelle Bruce (Duke University Press)

'How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind' offers a poignant study of what author La Marr Jurelle Bruce calls 'mad methodology,' extending care and consideration to Black artists historically, fictionally, and contemporaneously rendered mad by oppressive anti-Black capitalist discursive practices. Reflecting on the creative practices of Buddy Bolden, Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Dave Chappelle, among others, Bruce provides a clear-cutting analysis of the ways normative cultural logics work to figure Black art and protest as inherently mad.

Tomorrow Our Seeds Will Grow: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and the Changing Landscape of Hip-Hop

The release of Lauryn Hill’s 1998 album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was a watershed moment in the history of hip-hop and the intersection between music and race. On this album, Hill created a narrative that embraced Black love, attempted to educate audiences, and drew on Black musical heritage, elevating Black womanhood and nuancing perceptions of Blackness in American culture. Through musical and lyrical analysis, this paper explores the importance of Miseducation's narrative within the cultural milieu of the late 1990s and its continuing impact on hip-hop and Black American culture.

Review: She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Joan Morgan

Joan Morgan. She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill . New York: Atria, 2018. 176 pp. I remember the first time I listened to Lauryn Hill's 1998 solo debut The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill . It was roughly two weeks after the album's release, and I was spending the weekend with

Interludes in Madtime

Madtime is a renegade rhythm, a radical mode of doing and feeling time that coincides with phenomenologies of madness. This essay details four variations of madtime: the quick, restless time of mania; the slow, sorrowful time of depression; the infinite, exigent now of schizophrenia; and the spiraling, zigzagging now-then-now-then of melancholia. Madtime is unruly, smashing clocks, tearing calendars, building makeshift time machines, dancing to the voices in its heads, disobeying the dominant beat, and swerving instead into the metaphysical offbeat. In the process, it defies the Eurocentric, heteronormative, capitalist, rationalist clock-bound time that prevails in the modern West (what I call “Western Standard Time”).To bear out (and sound out) madtime, this essay reveals those radical temporalities in black expressive cultures, most especially black music. Sampling songs from Buddy Bolden, Nina Simone, Charles Mingus, Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, and Frank Ocean—and occasionally lyrical literatures from Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and Adrienne Kennedy—this essay unfurls a medley of “interludes in madtime.” Indeed, madtime functions as an existential time signature in black radical music-making and self-making. Throughout these pages, readers are invited to ponder how madtime might also serve as a rhythm and schedule for black protest movements.

Afterthoughts: Romanticism, the Black Atlantic, and Self-Mapping

JOEL PACE Afterthoughts: Romanticism, the Black Atlantic, and SelfMapping True navigation begins in the human heart. It’s the most important map of all. —Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey1 “Be a cartographer, a map maker, Be able to find Afro-American land, Search thoroughly, it may be close to black land. Be amended: j/jths . . —Lonnie Lynn2 They came with ships and guns Enlightenment That is why today Enlightenment They call us third world Enlightenment We are no third world Enlightenment We have always been first Enlightenment All I need to say is set your minds to Africa Check your world map and see Zero degrees down and across —Fela Kuti, “Africa Center of the World”3 1. Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, “Curating Humanity’s Heritage,” Ted Talk, 24 Feb­ ruary 2011, http://awakentopeaceandlove.blogspot.com/20i1/02/elizabeth-lindsey-curatinghumanitys .html, accessed 16 December 2016. 2. Lonnie Lynn AKA Pops (Common’s father), featured on Common’s “It’s Your World,” Be (Sony, 2005). 3. Fela Kuti and Roy Ayers, Music of Many Colors (M. I. L. Multimedia, 1996). SiR, 56 (Spring 2017) 113 114 JOEL PACE S AINT PAUL LIES COVERED IN BLANKETS OF WHITE. SO MUCH SNOW FALLS that rapper Slug of Atmosphere has referred to the state as “Minnesnowta,” and it remains on the ground so long that Prince’s title, “Sometimes It Snows in April,” is not hyperbole but a factual reflection on the weather in his beloved Twin Cities.4 Just two winters ago, Prince’s brief appearance on the Grammys reminded the world that, in his words, “like books and Black lives, albums still matter.”5 Spoken a year and a half before the fatal shooting of a black motorist in a suburb of St. Paul, these words continue to ring true in a state that will always remember both Prince and Philando Castile. In the wake of Castile’s death, the continually accruing layers of whiteness that city employees attempt to remove in or­ der to allow for free passage for all take on a symbolic meaning. Mapping a metaphorical connection between winter and slavery has precedent in Lauryn Hill’s lines: “After winter, must come spring / Change, it conies eventually,” as well as in Phillis Wheatley’s “The frozen deeps may break their iron bands.”6 Like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Wheatley’s and Hill’s lines chart the changes of the seasons as linked to the inevitability of progress in civil liberties.7 Prince speaks about books, Black lives, and albums in the same breath. All three are also implicitly connected in the Fela Kuti lyrics, quoted above, which remap the racist legacy of the Enlightenment ideologically, underscoring and anticipating the Black Lives Matter Movement’s urgent call for “Curriculums That Critically Examine the Political, Economic, and Social Impacts of Colonialism and Slavery.”8 Kuti’s lyrics reclaim mapping from its colonialist past by charting the places that were left off the map and changing the orientation of the map to expose the lines the colonizers erased, distorted, or never delineated, and this coda suggests applying just such a strategy to Romantic studies to help answer some of the following questions and pose new ones, all provoked, in one way or another, by the preceding essays in this issue of Studies in Romanticism. In what ways does the present-day political climate—with unprece­ dented documentation and protest of police shootings of African Ameri­ cans, the US presidential election, and the Brexit vote—speak to Romanti­ cism and vice versa? What will the field look like if the map zooms out 4. Atmosphere, “Say Shh,” Seven's Travels (Rhymesayers, Epitaph, 2003). 5. Prince Rogers Nelson, Presentation of Album of the Year, 57th Grammy Awards, 8 February 2015; Prince, “Sometimes It Snows in April,” Under the Cherry Moon (Warner Brothers, 1986). 6. Lauryn Hill, “Everything is Everything,” The Miseducation ofLauryn Hill (Columbia and Ruffhouse Records, 1998); Phillis Wheatley, “On Imagination” (line 25). 7. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind” (final line). 8. Movement for Black Lives, https://m4bl.net, accessed 16 December 2016. AFTERTHOUGHTS 115 from England until the Atlantic is at...

Black Rage: On Cultivating Black National Belonging

In performances in Atlanta; Philadelphia; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Rio de Janeiro; Chicago; and Denver in 2012, Ms. Lauryn Hill carved out space to voice black rage. In videos uploaded to YouTube, Hill sings, raps, talks, and riffs varied renditions of the song “Black Rage (Sketch),” a remix of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's “My Favorite Things.” During her November performance at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, drumbeats punctuated Hill's rapping and singing. Her performance took the audience on a journey meant to leave no one behind; it moved from the highly choreographed rendition of the song with musical accompaniment and Hill acting as lead vocalist and band conductor to her slowly speaking the lyrics of the song and occasionally offering analysis of her words over the shouts and applause of audience members. She explains the line “when I'm feeling sad,” saying “that's a depressive mood.” As the title of her song suggests, in each reiteration Hill issues a different draft of the song, sketching her sound, mood, tempo, and emphasis with each new audience. Although renditions of the song shift, the lyrics consistently recount the physical, psychic, economic, and environmental vulnerability of black people in the United States. The lyrics transform the original song's references to beloved objects—“blue satin sashes” and “snowflakes”—into ironic things such as “Black human packages tied up in strings,” which Hill described in her Philadelphia performance as a reference to bureaucracy but which also resonates with familiar images of lynching. Shifting from the original song's depiction of the curative capacity of things to offset feeling bad, Hill explains that her set of things prevents fear: “I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don't fear so bad!”

Book Review: Fieldwork in Theology: Exploring the Social Context of God's Work in the World

Fieldwork in Theology: Exploring the Social Context of God's Work in the World. By Christian Scharen. The Church and Postmodern Culture. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2015. xviii + 117 pp. $19.99 (paper).What is fieldwork in theology? Fieldwork is both social scientific observational research and the aim of M.Div. placements, learning about how to be and to serve the church dwelling among its constituents. In this short book, Christian Scharen blends those two senses together, articulating methodology for localized, observational theological research.This book is introductory. It seeks to enable the church to make social commitments in new, more deliberate and humble way, rather than reacting perennially to the dominant culture's consumption habits or putatively retreating from the altogether. Scharen argues that social theory can help the church practice the (social) logic of incarnation. It offers tools for rigorous self-reflection, avoiding idealist illusions, and finding communion with the other in concrete ways. Social science can articulate aspects of congregational life which have become invisible, thereby articulating how the church and God are at work.As whole, this hook's methodology and invitation rest on the outwardlooking orientation of theology articulated in the first chapter. In this chapter, Scharen opposes his position on the relation between church and to that of Stanley Hauerwas, whom he characterizes as withdrawing a colony of heaven behind strengthened bulwark opposite the world. By contrast, Scharen argues for the church to awaken, to enact anarchic 'giving away' of itself in and for the sake of the world (p. 7). He grounds this response to the church's cultural displacement in our post-post-Christendom era in the theology of Rowan Williams. If there is to be no gap between the gospel and our common life, then driven an acknowledgment of its failings into greater openness to the other, the church must find itself pressing by virtue of its very life ... against the sources of division and fear to engage in radical communion with (p. 13). The practice of dispossession as theological practice opens the scholar to opportunities for being caught up in Jesus' own life through communion over which she exercises no independent power.At the core of subsequent chapters, Scharen introduces and discusses Pierre Bourdieu, his antecedents Gaston Bachelard and Maurice MerleauPonty, and his student Loic Wacquant. Scharen leads into each of the main chapters of the book, each covering one of the figures just named, through musical prelude. His reflections on songs John Legend and The Roots, Esperanza Spalding, Lauryn Hill, and others tie this book to his earlier Broken Hallelujahs (2011). …

Still Life with Young Black Woman’s Face Etched into a School Desk

Still Life with Young Black Woman’s Face Etched into a School Desk Cortney Lamar Charleston (bio) Everything is everythingWhat is meant to be, will beAfter winter, must come springChange, it comes eventually —Lauryn Hill Locks, felled like piano wires of rain over brown eyes—this is what I remember most clearly. And her name, true, either Iman, spelled like a declaration, or Yman,spelled like a question, and one to which I must admit that I don’t know: not much, not a thing at all. We are, or were, just a bit too young to fathom even a fraction of the Lord’s rationale for the workings of the world. During weekday mass, we said our prayers as taught and went back to class, our uniforms ironed onto our very personalities, hurriedly, with wrinkles setting into awkward creases. This is to say we knew when to obey,which was almost always, and we knew when to act out of our skin, in those thin moments, when, in the instinctof young color, we clapped our hands to the beat, sang along to what some right-winger would label obscenity—being kids first, and being satisfied with what that meant for three or four minutes at a time. About her life, I didn’t know much or why. Her grandmother was her guardian, arching over her like the vaults of a church. I filed that into a manila folder, how a social worker might, except [End Page 151] I wouldn’t truly know, not deep into the bloody business of life back then, though there were always the gun songs blazing in the night like a waste of a good guitar. There werealways the car alarms and the sirens and the sneaker prints stamped into the sidewalk near 83rd & Yates: a running stride.As they say, everything is everything, or it was, before it came apart at the fringes beyond our reaching hands, like dreadhairs gone astray at the tips from touching too much water. To think, she could be a ghost now by any number of means, for any reason, good or not. Accidentally, like a pregnancy, or planned, like a pregnancy, and me, filled with so much blood, aging color, making a declaration spelled, maybe, like her name: I, man. She: what? Another girl gone, a whisper in the alley? Reclusive musician? Public defender, perhaps? I want to believe she’s somewhere watching the nightly newsright now, asking a question spelled like her name might be, the air empty of any answer, her mind wandering, wonderingwhat happened to the sweet little boy with the gap in his teeth, if everything is everything. Like it was. Like it ain’t and neverreally been because the wheels on that yellow bus went round and round, not stopping even on a drop-off. Because the sixty seconds from that door to the next one were our only allowed outside, all times otherwise spent locked inside: school, house, or hallelujah. So, have mercy on us. Hope we were meant to be. [End Page 152] Cortney Lamar Charleston Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Cave Canem fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee based in Jersey City, New Jersey. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Eleven Eleven, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Iowa Review, the Journal, Pleiades, Rattle, Spillway, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Copyright © 2016 Middlebury College Publications

Fanon’s Nordic Adventure: A Brief Study of Translations and Reception

Fanon seems to have played an exceptional role in Scandinavia, and especially in Sweden. Last year’s appearance of Goran Olsson’s documentary film Concerning Violence. Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self Defense , based on the first chapter of Les Damnes de la terre and narrated by Lauryn Hill, only goes to show that he is still highly relevant. When working toward the completion of this special issue on Frantz Fanon in a Caribbean context, I came to reflect upon his position in the North wondering if it would be possible to map Fanon’s presence in Sweden, and from this mapping, understand why Fanon has been a prevailing reference for academics, intellectuals and artists. Studying Fanon’s presence involves various subjects and disciplines since it raises questions of how the Left has evolved, of how certain concepts are transposed from one language and context to another reality in another language depending on factors such as who introduced Fanon, through which channels and to what purpose. What follows here is an essayistic pilot-study, more based on conversations and observations than on theory and methodology. Hopefully, it will offer the reader a basic outline and a description of a phenomenon in what we can call a “peripherical translation zone” that may, even though it is incomplete, contribute to decentering translation studies, and allow us to estimate the tremendous impact of Fanon in this region, an impact that, as we shall soon see, has far more ramifications than one would tend to believe.

Strange Sampling: Nina Simone and Her Hip-Hop Children

This essay examines how contemporary hip-hop artists, as diverse as Cassidy, Common, Lauryn Hill, Talib Kweli, and Kanye West, invoke Nina Simone as both a heuristic and musical material that recalls a particularly radical moment of American culture and simultaneously undergoes transformation as they cite her in response to the aesthetic and political forces of their times. Through their songs, Simone emerges as both a compelling singer and a cultural signifier, a virtuoso and political visionary, whose sampled voice, pianism, and performative strategy enable these artists to access a version of “sonic black radicalism”—Simone’s daring reinvention of musical categories, which, animated by the radical politics of the 1960s, created a new musical vision of blackness and model of sonic experimentation and performance strategies for a new generation of hip-hop artists and listeners to follow.

The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness by Kevin Young (review)

Reviewed by: The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness by Kevin Young Howard Rambsy II Kevin Young. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2012. 476 pp. $25.00. Kevin Young’s book The Grey Album represents a notable moment in the contemporary study of African American literature. First, single works like Young’s that present or theorize links between dozens of African American artists [End Page 179] from so many different eras are increasingly rare. Second, relatively few professors and perhaps even fewer well-known poets write such expansive African American cultural histories. Finally, the level of coverage that Young’s book received in popular news outlets was quite uncommon for a scholarly work on African American literature. The Grey Album is also the title of DJ Danger Mouse’s mash-up of Jay Z’s The Black Album with instrumentals from The Beatles’ The White Album. At the core of Young’s book is the notion of “storying,” a catch-all term for multiple creative approaches that black folks have employed to relay accounts of their experiences or express themselves. Those approaches include slanted truths, outright lies, “the blues code of life, tragic, and comic,” “learning to write on the sly,” “Henry Box Brown mailing himself to freedom,” “slaves composing poems for money to buy their freedom,” “passing,” “not Sally Hemmings [sic] but the story of Sally Hemmings and her descendants we always knew ’bout,” “dreambooks,” “the human beatbox,” and more (3-4). Young’s The Grey Album is in part about literature, in part about music, in part about encompassing “most everything” in a cultural history, and largely about black creativity (16). Young covers considerable ground, identifying and explaining key and interconnected aspects of an expansive body of writers and artists, including Phillis Wheatley, Bessie Smith, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Brown, Tupac, Lauryn Hill, and Colson Whitehead, to name some of the many figures whose careers and works Young discusses. He devotes extended attention to Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Beat writer Bob Kaufman, and offers a discussion of modernism in seeking to locate its “origins specifically in black culture. The change, the roar, the very swing in the ‘Anglo’ culture, might well be said to be exactly this too-often invisible African American influence” (138). In the closing sections of the book, Young moves to another kind of poetry by concentrating on rap music. Although we now have several superb scholarly works on hip hop, Young makes a unique contribution to the field by frequently drawing links to the genre, other musical and literary traditions, and his own cultural development. Among other insightful observations, Young notes that rap music “sought to show and prove that it ain’t a question of using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, but of what you do with your skills, taking your beats and rhythms from anywhere—the street, mainstream culture, dirt roads, obscure records, seemingly incongruous cultures, and ultimately, from your own flow—and rhyming over them” (343). Those signature qualities of hip hop are, consequently, integral to Young’s scholarly approach. His inclinations as a poet and former deejay are on full display in The Grey Album as he incorporates or samples familiar lines from poetry and African American folk sayings into his observations throughout the book. At best, his approach enlivens conventional scholarly prose and embeds the book with a broad sense of black consciousness, demonstrating in the process Young’s intelligence and skills at absorbing enormous bodies of information concerning American and African American literatures, music, and expressive cultures. At the same time, the use of folk sayings, poetic lines, and lyrics does obscure rather than clarify some of Young’s observations, at moments. Young’s search for and presentation of a unifying feature of African American expressive culture corresponds to Henry Louis Gates’s notion of Signifying, and before that, Eugene B. Redmond’s suggestion in his groundbreaking book Drumvoices (1976), that coded, rhythmic patterns unite black poetic expression across hundreds of years from Africa to the modern writings of black writers in the U. S. Even farther back, Young’s...

It’s All in the Name: Hip Hop, Sexuality, and Black Women’s Identity in Breakin’ In: The Making of a Hip Hop Dancer

It’s All in the NameHip Hop, Sexuality, and Black Women’s Identity in Breakin’ In: The Making of a Hip Hop Dancer Carol E. Henderson (bio) [A]s evidenced by the zombie-like stare in my neighbor’s eyes, the ghetto’s dues for emotional immunity is high. —Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost Despite the diversity of fans and artists on the commercial margins, then, the public struggle over hip hop is waged over the images, stories, and market power associated with black male and black female bodies. —Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars Hip hop has long been a lightning rod for discussions of black womanhood and sexuality. Such conversations were more cordial in the 1980s and 1990s when the landscape of hip hop included the voices of female MCs and deejays who, in the words of the Queen and Monie Love, “[were] the ones to give birth/To the new generation of prophets because it’s Ladies First.”1 These affirmations of black femininity, self-respect, and self-love were echoed by rap artists such as MC Lyte, Lauryn Hill, neo-soul psalmists Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, among others, who proclaim, as Hill does in “Everything is Everything”—“From the beginning/My practice extending across the atlas/ I begat this/flippin’ in the ghetto on a dirty mattress/You can’t match this [End Page 47] rapper/actress/More powerful than two Cleopatras/MCs ain’t ready to take it to the Serengeti/My rhymes is heavy like the mind of Sister Betty [Shabazz].”2 Hill’s nod to African history—her allegiance to the cultural strength and regal dignity of African women such as Cleopatra and Sister Betty Shabazz—her reference to “dirty mattresses” and “the ghetto” encapsulates in rhythmic cadence the complex and creative journey of “spitting rhymes” in unladylike spaces. More to the point, Hill—and likewise her contemporaries—draws on the strength of those who came before her to exhibit a gracefulness fashioned from challenging situations—a self-assurance that turns a negative into a positive—a self-confidence that allows a “rose” to grow from concrete.3 However, in recent years, a changeling has appeared. Instead of ladies first, it is skeezas, gold diggers, sac chasers, and chicken heads at the front of the line. The very change in the ascriptive language afforded to many a young sistah—language deemed acceptable and socially relevant in certain circles—directs attention to the politics of naming, and how rewrapping the black female body in the cloak of raunchy liberalism has caused a stutter in the very ways in which we collectively dialogue about our personhood. But, of course, these conversations aren’t new. Even in the nirvana of hip hop bliss, there were rumblings and eruptions of the nasty girl—that rapper that uses her sexual wiles and feminine flesh—her brash bravado—to gain an upper hand on her male nemesis and/or female rival. Rappers like Lil’ Kim, Trina, Foxy Brown, and Missy Elliott extol the “virtues” of “punanny power”—that unbridled capacity to, in the words of Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, “work it” standing up, lying down, or on all fours. Sex becomes, in this instance, the instrument of choice—a mechanism that unveils the Achilles heels of men who are “hard” in public, but behind closed doors, succumb to the skilled exploits of women “gifted” to perform sexual fantasies that border on the sadomasochistic and pornographic. Likewise, this same sexual power can expose the weakness of female rivals who are not willing to engage in such acts or take it to the next level in an effort to “one up” their competition. Both maneuvers are performed in an effort to “procure the capital and currency represented by the fame, power, and riches of the hip hop star,” as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting points out. This currency is then “consumed, collected, and cosseted between [the] thighs and lips” of women driven to negotiate and renegotiate in the landmine of polemical and contradictory impulses.4 These reinscriptions of the identity markers that determine how “around-the-way” girls or “ghetto chicks” will be viewed and positioned in the...

Diggin’ You Like Those Ol’ Soul Records: Meshell Ndegeocello and the Expanding Definition of Funk in Postsoul America

Today's absolutist varieties of Black Nationalism have run into trouble when faced with need to make sense of increasingly distinct forms of black culture produced from various diaspora populations. . . . The unashamedly hybrid character of these black cultures continually confounds any simplistic (essentialist or antiessentialist) understanding of relationship between racial identity and racial nonidentity, between folk cultural authenticity and pop cultural betrayal.Paul Gilroy1Funk, from its beginnings as terminology used to describe a specific genre of black music, has been equated with following things: blackness, mascu- linity, personal and collective freedom, and groove. Even as genre and terminology gave way to new forms of expression, performance aesthetic developed by myriad bands throughout 1960s and 1970s remained an im- portant part of post-1970s black popular culture. In early 1990s, rhythm and blues (RB one part Nina Simone, schooling one about life, love, hardship, and struggle in post-Civil Rights Movement America; and one part Sarah Vaughn, experimenting with numerous timbral colors of her voice. One critic called her a jazzy Odetta with gangster rapper inflections, insinuat- ing that her raw and organic sound and instrumental performances linked her with singer/guitarist who inspired an evolution in racial and cultural consciousness of blacks during height of freedom movement of 1960s and 1970s and explicit in-your-face aesthetic of gangsta rap.2 Oth- ers referred to her as the female Prince, noting strong similarities between two musicians.3 Indeed, both wrote, produced, and played majority of instruments heard on their debut albums. The level of genre-bending musical experimentation in which both have engaged at times has also placed them on periphery of black music trends and black radio formatting. Their respective public images and stage personas reflect how both have challenged mainstream readings of sexuality and gender by creating ambiguity through androgynous dress and lyrics that convey at times spectrum of love relationships. Regard- less of these readings, it was clear that Ndegeocello's entrance and presence on mainstream stage of 1990s popular music challenged perceptions and definitions of performance (musical and otherwise), gender identity, and con- ceptions of blackness as America awaited newness of next century. But what helped propel Prince to new levels of popularity among alternative audiences seemingly stifled career of Ndegeocello.Plantation Lullabies advanced a style that consisted of live instrumenta- tion coupled with street-smart lyrics reflective of influence of 1960s poets Giovanni, Sanchez, and Scott-Heron and a vocal style that harkened back to 1970s soul singers like Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack. However, less than two years after its release, confluence of style heard on album was illustrative of neosoul or alternative R&B style that some positioned as representative of postsoul generation's return to old-school per- formance aesthetics of previous decades. Despite being initially linked with this style and its resulting milieu, by 1997 and 1998, when Erykah Badu's al- bum Baduizm and Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, respectively, dropped, Ndegeocello was noticeably absent from discussions about how genre of neosoul was birthing a more conscious female voice and perspective in postfunk black popular music. …

“The People Inside My Head, Too”: Madness, Black Womanhood, and the Radical Performance of Lauryn Hill

Lauryn Hill was twenty-three years old when her 1998 solo debut album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill , burst upon the global music market and swiftly became one of the most acclaimed and popular hip hop albums in history. Heralded by a hip hop beat, crooning love songs and rally cries, beaming black pride, and clamoring womanist wisdom, Hill scaled the treacherous summit of global pop stardom and was hailed as genius and prophetess. However, within four years Hill fell from the favor of much of the mainstream market. To have many pundits tell it, she veered across the thin line that supposedly separates genius from madness and prophecy from lunacy. This essay explores how various publics and pundits impute madness to Lauryn Hill and--most centrally--how Hill herself produces, mobilizes, and brandishes madness for radical art-making and self-making. Toward these aims, I closely examine her 2002 Unplugged 2.0 live album, as well as other performances, interviews, and media accounts. Her voice tuned to a mad pitch, Hill speaks truth to power and issues a sound that sometimes booms, sometimes sputters. Ultimately, this meditation upon Hill's life and work yields rich insights on black womanhood, performance, protest, and madness in American popular culture and beyond.

The Bible and American culture: a sourcebook

INTRODUCTION The Place of the Bible in the Paradox of America Biblical Archetypes and the Idea of 'America' How the Bible is Interpreted What is the Bible? Criteria for Selection Overview of the Chapters CHAPTER ONE: SPREADING THE WORD Missionizing Production and Distribution Translation The Book among books? John Eliot's Brief Narrative Charter of College of William and Mary Jonathan Edwards, 'A Divine and Supernatural Light' Continental Congress Authorizes Bible Printing The Jefferson Bible The American Bible Society Liberal Responses to Calvinism The Student Volunteer Movement Isaac Leeser and the Translation of Hebrew Scripture Francis Kenrick's Translation of the Pentateuch The Jewish Publication Society Dei Verbum The New American Bible The Gullah Bible The Green Bible Biblezines CHAPTER TWO: THE BIBLE AND THE REPUBLIC Settlement and God's Providence The First Charter of Virginia John Winthrop, 'A Model of Christian Charity' Fundamental Orders of Connecticut Dissent Among the Dissenters: The Bible and the Challenges of Colonial Governance The Examination of Anne Hutchinson at the Court at Newton The Massachusetts Witchcraft Trials Cotton Mather, from Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions Samuel Parris, 'Christ Knows How Many Devils There Are' John Hale, 'A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft' Quaker Pennsylvania and 'The Keithian Schism' Founding the Republic Prayer Before the First Continental Congress The Prayer of Rev. Duche Before the Continental Congress The Call to War, the Challenge of Peace Patrick Henry's Call for Revolution Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address Franklin D. Roosevelt as the Nation's Pastor Congress Declares the Bible 'the Word of God' Public Display of Religion Abington v. Schempp The Ten Commandments in the Alabama Courthouse Legal Responses Sporting Events and Religious Expression Verses in Eye Black CHAPTER THREE: THE BIBLE AND AMERICA'S GREAT DEBATES Slavery and Abolitionism: Pro-Slavery Arguments The Sin of Ham Slavery and the New Testament Slave Owners' Publications A Slave Catechism After Emancipation Slavery and Abolitionism: Anti-Slavery Arguments The Barnes Hypothesis Theodore Dwight Weld The Spirit of the Scriptures Biblical Typology Experiences of African Americans Resistance and Revolt in Charleston Frederick Douglass Women's Public Role and the Vote Sarah Grimke Sojourner Truth Preaching the Bible and Women's Equality Anna Julia Cooper Women and Social Reform The Woman's Bible Anti-Suffrage Arguments and Scripture Horace Bushnell James Cardinal Gibbons Debating the Bible's Authority: The Higher Criticism Controversy William Newton Clarke Inspiration: The 'Princeton Doctrine' The Briggs Case Debating the Bible's Authority: The Modernist/Fundamentalist Showdown The Fundamentals Curtis Lee Laws Harry Emerson Fosdick Debating the Bible's Authority: Evolution and Creationism T. DeWitt Talmage Henry Ward Beecher John Zahm William Jennings Bryan The Scopes Trial Reforming Society The Social Gospel The City as Menace Labor Unions Temperance The Women's Christian Temperance Union The Struggle for Civil Rights Anticipating the Movement Support for Segregation Martin Luther King, Jr. Fannie Lou Hamer Black Liberation Theology Inclusion of Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transexual Persons Paul's Statements in Romans 1 Another Interpretation of Romans 1 CHAPTER FOUR: READING IN THE MARGINS Identity and Textual Interpretation Jarena Lee The Bible as Patriarchal African American Women's Experience The Text Interprets Itself The Prophetic Corrective A 'Hermeneutics of Suspicion' A Gay Theology of Liberation The Bible as Intimate Friend Experience and the Authority of Spirit The Holiness Movement The Azusa Street Revival Letter from Bro. Parham Speaking in Tongues Catholic Charismatic Renewal Imagining Babylon and Thy Kingdom Come The Shakers 'I, Nephi,...': The Book of Mormon William Miller Ellen G. White on 'The Book of Books' Charles Taze Russell, 'Earth's Night of Sin to Terminate in a Morning of Joy' Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science Elijah Muhammad, 'What is Islam? What is a Muslim?' Jim Jones, 'The Letter Killeth' Message from the Apostle David Koresh and the Seven Seals CHAPTER FIVE: THE BIBLE AND ARTISTIC EXPRESSION Art Edward Hicks, Peacable Kingdom Harriet Powers' Bible Quilt Edmonia Lewis Bessie Harvey Tobi Kahn Poetry Phillis Wheatley Emily Dickinson Robert Lowell Samuel Menashe Musical Lyric 'There is a Balm in Gilead' 'My Mother's Bible' 'The Greatest Story Ever Told' 'Hallelujah' Lauryn Hill, 'Forgive Them Father' The Novel Herman Melville, selection from Moby Dick James Baldwin, selection from Go Tell It on the Mountain

“I Used to Love Him”: Exploring the Miseducation About Black Love and Sex

This paper analyzes the rhetorical function of the tropes of love and sex in the quintessential break up song, “I Used to Love Him,” from Lauryn Hill's multi-platinum 1998 album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Through a textual analysis that emphasizes the recurrent tropes of synecdoche and metaphor, I argue that, despite the song's seemingly liberating and empowering message, its conception of love is rooted in movements towards new forms of domination as opposed to self-actualization. This critical examination of a black love relationship within hip hop's myriad mediated representations of loveless black sex contributes to the resurgent interest in discourses on love.

From Black Theology and Black Power to Afrocentric Theology and Hip Hop Power: An Extension and Socio-re-theological Conceptualization of Cone's Theology in Conversation with the Hip Hop Generation

In this paper Dr James H. Cone's Black Theology and Black Power is put in conversation with two hip hop socio-theologians, Lauryn Hill and Talib Kweli. The next move in Black Theology will be led by the hip hop generation and this move will be towards an Afrocentric/African centered theology. The method and socio-theological conditions that surrounded Dr Cone's work are compared and contrasted with the present state of affairs in the African-American community. Dr Cone was writing after the assasinations of Malcolm X and Dr Martin L. King Jr. Hip hop is writing after the election of President Barrack Obama. Hip hop is raising theological questions. As one generation celebrates the realization of a dream, hip hop is rapping about a nightmare. The theological tension between Cone's generation, my generation, and hip hop are also explored.

Prophets of the hood: politics and poetics in hip hop

At once the most lucrative, popular, and culturally oppositional musical force in the United States, hip hop demands the kind of interpretation Imani Perry provides here: criticism engaged with this vibrant musical form on its own terms. A scholar and a fan, Perry considers the art, politics, and culture of hip hop through an analysis of song lyrics, the words of the prophets of the hood. Recognizing prevailing characterizations of hip hop as a transnational musical form, Perry advances a powerful argument that hip hop is first and foremost black American music. At the same time, she contends that many studies have shortchanged the aesthetic value of rap by attributing its form and content primarily to socioeconomic factors. Her innovative analysis revels in the artistry of hip hop, revealing it as an art of innovation, not deprivation. Perry offers detailed readings of the lyrics of many hip hop artists, including Ice Cube, Public Enemy, De La Soul, krs-One, OutKast, Sean “Puffy” Combs, Tupac Shakur, Lil’ Kim, Biggie Smalls, Nas, Method Man, and Lauryn Hill. She focuses on the cultural foundations of the music and on the form and narrative features of the songs—the call and response, the reliance on the break, the use of metaphor, and the recurring figures of the trickster and the outlaw. Perry also provides complex considerations of hip hop’s association with crime, violence, and misogyny. She shows that while its message may be disconcerting, rap often expresses brilliant insights about existence in a society mired in difficult racial and gender politics. Hip hop, she suggests, airs a much wider, more troubling range of black experience than was projected during the civil rights era. It provides a unique public space where the sacred and the profane impulses within African American culture unite.

The rise of calypso feminism: gender and musical politics in the calypso

The sky is the limitWe rising, we rising, we woman rising,(Easlyn Orr, cited in Ottley 1992, p. 154)In February 1999, two women of Afro-Caribbean ancestry won their respective societies' highest musical honours. On 14 February, Singing Sandra was crowned Trinidad-Tobago's Calypso Monarch 1999 – the second woman ever to win this coveted title, a full twenty-one years after the country's first woman calypso monarch, Calypso Rose. Two weeks later in the USA, Lauryn Hill received five Grammy awards, the most in any single year for a female performer or a hip-hop artist. This trend continues in Great Britain, where ‘rude girl’ DJ Patra has a growing posse of fans, and in West Africa where the pop music stylings of Benin's Angelique Kidjo and Mali's Oumou Sangaré enjoy mass followings.