Modern Blackness Research Articles

Measuring the Harlem Renaissance: The U.S. Census, African American Identity, and Literary FormOn Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America

Measuring the Harlem Renaissance: The U.S. Census, African American Identity, and Literary FormOn Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America

A History of the African American NovelAfrican American Writing: A Literary Approach

A History of the African American NovelAfrican American Writing: A Literary Approach

Linguistic techniques of the self: The intertextual language of racial empowerment in politically conscious Brazilian hip hop

This article describes the bodily aesthetics, patterns of consumption, and daily linguistic practices undertaken by hip-hop affiliated youth in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1990s. I argue that through their participation in politically conscious hip hop, poor male Brazilian youth attempt to racially transform their bodies into a form of ‘modern blackness.’ I focus, in particular, on the quoting of rap lyrics in daily conversation, a linguistic practice that offers audible evidence of one’s consumption of hip hop style. I suggest that linguistic strategies of racial empowerment constitute forms of ‘techniques of the self’ that allow speakers to manage the racial appearance of the body through an avoidance of the traits that are negatively associated with blackness in Brazil.

The War Against Hip-Hop

The book is about the political context of Gangsta rap and the cultural style it has produced. The culture war that swirls around all this has become an abstract conversation about authenticity. The question seems to be Is it art or poison? We explore the context that is missing from the debate. Gangsta Rap is thought of as music, we interpret it as identity politics: a continuation of the 60’s style militancy by other means. The urban rebellions of the 60s brought by smashing windows. The insurgent urban culture of today brings wreck by inversion: by valorizing the very social identity that Greater America has tried to demonize and degrade. It brings wreck as well by providing a vivid news report about ghetto conditions. The book argues the culture war functions as denial: It is part of the larger project of masking racial caste by attributing the conditions of the ghetto to culture. Also, the book historicizes the middle class objection to Gangsta Rap to show that the objection of the assimilados represents a split, in the 21st century, over the meaning of black identity.Decoding Black Noise:When the mainstream listens to Gangsta Rap it hears only nihilism and violent lyrics. is no message, this is just 'black noise.' Many blacks including academics have joined this chorus. Clearly these critics listen from a great distance. The music has message, it says in a word, Ain’t a damn thing changed. My book reveals that within this perspective of anger and alienation there is a complex set of dualities: The post-racial myth v. urban experience of social isolation; modern blackness (the middle class version) v. post-modern blackness; embracing stereotypes v. seeking respectability. There is a radical incommensurability here, middle class observers probably will not agree with it but it is perspective. It is a struggle by members of an “underclass” who are trying to renegotiate the meaning of their isolation. In this chapter I try to lay the groundwork for a discussion of how structural racism persists but is invisibilized by the media. In film and in television the ghetto is a nightmare world of thugs and predators this creates a narrative of us v. them. Tellingly, it has been referred to (by one of the policemen involved in the Rodney King beating) as planet of the apes. It is made to appear not only as criminogenic but a foreign place, another country. Later chapters will discuss how hip-hop attempts to make visible spaces and people society has sought to make invisible.

Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica

Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica

:Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica By Deborah A. Thomas.Durham, NC, and London, UK: Duke University Press, 2004.

Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica By Deborah A. Thomas.Durham, NC, and London, UK: Duke University Press, 2004.

Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica. Deborah A. Thomas

<i>Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica</i>. Deborah A. Thomas

Book Review: Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica

Book Review: Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica

Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica:Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica

Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica. Deborah Thomas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 358 pp.

African American Manhood in the Making of Caribbean (Inter)Nationalism

My father has been obsessed with Billy Eckstine for as long as I can remember. As a black boy coming of age in colonial Jamaica in the 1950s, my father had before him many images of dignified, educated, black and brown West Indian professional men: teachers and civil servants, trade union leaders and lawyers. But Billy Eckstine was different. The devastatingly handsome African American crooner led big bands composed of jazz luminaries like Dizzy Gillespie. Eckstine refused to walk through the back door of any Jim Crow American establishment because, as Miles Davis later recounted, “B didn’t take no shit off nobody.”1 Yet this race rebel came packaged in the accoutrements of High Style: the tailored suits, the cigar holder, the throngs of screaming black—and white—women. Eckstine played music that was inescapably associated with blackness; yet he was thoroughly modern. In the colonial Caribbean, blackness and cosmopolitanism were mutually exclusive traits. Yet here was Billy Eckstine, a black man, an American: he was Modern Blackness, personified. Reading Michelle Stephens’s Black Empire, I was reminded of the admiration my father’s generation had for African American men like Paul Robeson and Billy Eckstine.2 And I was

Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica

Modern Blackness is a rich ethnographic exploration of Jamaican identity in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. Analyzing nationalism, popular culture, and political economy in relation to one another, Deborah A. Thomas illuminates an ongoing struggle in Jamaica between the values associated with the postcolonial state and those generated in and through popular culture. Following independence in 1962, cultural and political policies in Jamaica were geared toward the development of a multiracial creole nationalism reflected in the country’s motto: “Out of many, one people.” As Thomas shows, by the late 1990s, creole nationalism was superseded by “modern blackness”—an urban blackness rooted in youth culture and influenced by African American popular culture. Expressions of blackness that had been marginalized in national cultural policy became paramount in contemporary understandings of what it was to be Jamaican. Thomas combines historical research with fieldwork she conducted in Jamaica between 1993 and 2003. Drawing on her research in a rural hillside community just outside Kingston, she looks at how Jamaicans interpreted and reproduced or transformed on the local level nationalist policies and popular ideologies about progress. With detailed descriptions of daily life in Jamaica set against a backdrop of postcolonial nation-building and neoliberal globalization, Modern Blackness is an important examination of the competing identities that mobilize Jamaicans locally and represent them internationally.

Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica, by Deborah Thomas

<i>Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica</i>, by Deborah Thomas

The Emergence of Modern Blackness in Jamaica

The Emergence of Modern Blackness in Jamaica

Modern blackness: nationalism, globalization, and the politics of culture in Jamaica

Modern blackness: nationalism, globalization, and the politics of culture in Jamaica

Modern Blackness: “What We Are and What We Hope to Be”

Research Article| September 01 2002 Modern Blackness: “What We Are and What We Hope to Be” Deborah A. Thomas Deborah A. Thomas Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Small Axe (2002) 6 (2): 25–48. https://doi.org/10.1215/-6-2-25 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Deborah A. Thomas; Modern Blackness: “What We Are and What We Hope to Be”. Small Axe 1 September 2002; 6 (2): 25–48. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-6-2-25 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSmall Axe Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Small Axe Incorporated2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Modern Blackness: &amp;quot;What We Are and What We Hope to Be&amp;quot;

Modern Blackness: &amp;quot;What We Are and What We Hope to Be&amp;quot;