Download or read book The Idea of Black Culture written by Hortense Spillers and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2021-08-02 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Main blurb (for internal use only - CHECK BEFORE USING IN PRINTED PUBLICITY): Hortense Spillers's THE IDEA OF BLACK CULTURE will consist of six chapters, described below, in some detail (she has supplied more detail than I give here). Her book exploits Eagleton's successful title, and like Eagleton's book, grounds its subject (but more thoroughly) in its history. The engagement here - the controversy, as to what can be meant by the term 'Black Culture' and the necessity to bear witness to history - will run through her several strands of argument. More obviously in her sights, in her concluding chapter, are those people (treasonable clerks), like Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Cornel West, who, in her view - have used African-American/Black Studies to their own financial ends, usurping and exploiting their history in a cult of personality. Spillers is an eminent and adversarial figure, acquainted personally with many of the greats of African-American culture. Her work bears steady witness to the plight of African-Americans, to the full history of slavery, North (she has written in her latest book on the horrific breeding farms in Massachusetts) and South. 1) Black culture as a discursive field-in fact, of intersecting discursive fields-self-consciously pursues the question of origins, either explicitly or implicitly. Because the motive idea of black culture is advanced as an oppositional form, its theoreticians have had to decide not only what it excludes (is the logic of choice already decided in this case?), but what it must exclude, relative to an absolute "beginning," often embodied in a wide array of symbolic and figurative devices summed up as "Africa." It is important to insist on a distinction here between the massive geopolitical complex of the African continent, with particular reference to Subsaharan Africa, and the plethora of poetics attendant upon literary notions of "Africa," which frequencies are not only not synonymous and commensurate, but describe different orders of cases entirely; often enough, these realms of attention are elided as if they were twina. The question of genesis is by far the most prestigious problematic of scholarship and writing on the culture of black life-worlds, inasmuch as any given moment of social and political practice is predicated, even when implicitly emergent, on where the culture comes from; the current Afrocentric fashion in the United States, for example, is not new, though many of its tenets and tonalities have been redrafted as a contemporary response to the mid-century movements in Civil Rights and the Black Nationalist resurgence subsequent to it. Afrocentric theory has never dominated the field of cultural explanation, but it is fair to say that it has always been a contender, solidly poised against "integrationist/assimilationist" appeals on the one hand and "nationalist/separatist/essentialist" claims on the other. Much of the writing about the black culture problematic tends to poach on the ground of its nearest textual and contextual neighbors-history, politics, and economics-and can hardly be imagined without reference to "race" as theory, as interlinked material practices, as the bane or boon of public policy and address. In (more or less) monolingual communities, as in the United States and Great Britain, "culture" and "race" attend the same school, whereas the lines are drawn quite otherwise in multi- or bi-lingual national formations, as in the complicated instance of Canada, or in bilateral religious spheres, as in the case of Ireland. To say so is not to suggest that "race" does not appear in various interarticulations (with religious, linguistic, and national/nationalistic cartographies), neither is it to say that monolingual systems of language do not engender what Hazel Carby has called "differently oriented social interests within one and the same sign community." But juxtaposing "race/culture" does show how one of the lines of force might be described through a stage of heterogeneously poised cultural valences. While "race" for the most part marks the battleground in Diasporic African communities, it is the "it" that means different things in different black cultural regions; in certain Caribbean communities, for example, one is not black in Kingston, or Basse Terre, or Fort de France for the same reasons that she might be in St. Louis, or Atlanta, USA. In the former instance, "race" loses some of its pernicious evaluative force since the community operates by the social logic of the "same," while in the latter, the confrontation of heterogeneous subjects, contending for status, for superior talisman, designates "race" as an absolutely reified property, negatively weighted, in marked and unmarked positionings. Not too clearly, the taxonomies of marking, of stigmatizing, might be as ingeniously derived as a given situation demands, but the unseen trick is that the mark always follows an arbitrary path; "blackness," for instance, is not inherently remarkable as we can think of certain contexts in which it actually "disappears" as a strategy of discrimination. Conventionally, however, it is one of the master signs of difference. Where "race" pressures are aligned in binaristic display, Afrocentric theories of culture arise as the most impassioned counterclaim. But after all, Afrocentric views of culture and their competing conceptual narratives are situated within rhetorical systems of address that may be said to constitute the discursive field of black culture. In the opening chapter, then, we will attempt to lay out a conceptual scheme of instances of black culture's discursive field according to fours stress points: a) the hagiographical tendency, which posits black heroes in a mimetic tradition of writing and celebration that traces back to the lives of the Saints; decisively marked as an intellectual technology that replicates and re-enforces the mythic cult of the "leader," the hagiographical figure is manifest in divergent textual venues, form Negritude, to the "New Negro" of the Harlem Renaissance, to certain contemporary critical paradigms, even, to coeval Aftocentric postures; b) the teleological tendency, while related to a), projects a closural motive that opposes it: along this axis, black culture, liberated from the constraints that have paradoxically hemmed it in and defined it simultaneously, would sit, primus inter pares, at the great feast of world cultures. Whereas in the hagiographical outline, black culture follows a retroversive path, in the teleological, its coronation lies ahead. One points toward the past, the other toward an already fulfilled future; c) the sociological-historiographical figure, with its secular emphases, takes its name less from specific disciplinary interests within the social sciences than the general disposition to account for the cultural phenomena before it by way of the checks and measures of "reality" as well as the impact of historical cause and effect; this particular view places black culture squarely in the world of change and of the contingent. Perhaps it could be said in this case that there is "black culture" only insofar as it elaborates a "measurable" politics, a viable economics, and a soundly rationalized historical progression, often comparatively framed; d) the metacritical-theoretical figure shows little of a) and b), makes frequent raids on c), and might be thought of as the most "self-conscious" of these routes of rhetorical procedure. Its aim, refracting a gamut of post-modernist writing practices, is to bring "black culture" in communication, as a writing, with a "hermeneutics of suspicion"-in other words, with the ironical and paronomasic play of signs; much of the work in this discursive field is inhabited by academic critical projects on the arts, e.g., literature, music, dancing, and the plastic arts, as well as a newly concatenated cluster of objects (unspecified) that go by the collective name of "cultural studies." "Culture" here is not delimited as a fairly well defined category of alignments, but stretching out in amoebic unruliness, occupies the whole of the life-world, much like history and politics were perceived to do in the post-Second World War period. These lines of conduct, which I am designating here as kinds of rhetorical attitudes, may exist in combination, as well as discrete patterns of address, but each is advanced in the interest of attempting to penetrate its claim to the how of it, for running beneath the press of any rhetorical system, which either excludes or elides what would challenge it, lest its systematicity fall apart, is the key, I believe, to the modalities of cultural self-perception that play back over and over again. What all of these dispositions have in common is advocacy; perhaps we might put it down as a rule-in order to survive as a narrative about "black culture"-conceptual or otherwise-the maker must tell a good story, even when it is a critical one. To that degree, and the fabulists of black culture are not alone in this, culture, as discursive economy enacts defensive ends. It is warfare at the level of the scriptive. 2) As a field of material practices, black culture(s) makes a cut in Western time, creates its pockets and fissures, disabuses it of the illusion of "wholeness." We may be well justified in claiming that black culture gives the West its identity, or in short, a way to know what it is for in recognition of what it imagines it is against. In certain details of a binaristic staging,, opposition disappears as these forces in agonism become mutually framed and entangled. In a demonstration of this principle, I should like to examine in the work's second chapter various artistic and other cultural phenomena deployed on six cityscapes, anchored to a comparative reading: 1) Detroit, with Motown and the black church; 2) London with the Caribbean Artists' Movement (CAM); 3) Paris with Negritude and "Presence Africaine"; 4) Manhattan with black dance and jazz; 5) "Today": the moment in which we are located in Toronto with West Indian writing, and 6) Kingston at the table (or making Jamaican fried chicken in Berlin when you have to leave off the "poppin John" because you cannot find the black or red beans). These cuts across the times of representative spaces of the Western city are made in order to put flesh on the bones of an abstraction, but the sites themselves offer a rich vantage on developments in the unfolding saga of diasporic African peoples. Unsatisfactory because of its necessarily severe statistical limits and because it is confined to our just-closed "si?cle de fer," this repertory of choices, if successfully maneuvered, will permit permutation and addition (for example, the annual carnivals in Brazil and Trinidad, as well as black New Orleans' "Mardi Gras," or the "negrismo" movements of Cuban modernism) and will argue forcefully that "culture" is "movement" through a material scene (in that regard, "culture" is "acting"), and unlike the tree felled in the forest, but no one heard it, only becomes the stuff of culture through witnesses. Culture is, therefore, a participatory forum, one way or another, "high," "low," "middle," and it proceeds by social contagion-the more, the merrier! By definition "popular," culture must eventually account for the relay of arrangements by which a given community of subjects translates the things of its ecosystem, the "supports" that "nature" provides, including the range of social precedents, into the tasks and devices of the spirit; culture in that regard perhaps renders a quintessential demonstration of the transmuted substance-from the seen, or the more-or-less ready-at-hand implement, to the unseen "building" not made by human hands, though it was. Culture, on this analogy, instantiates a paradox: that an ensemble of subjects, for example, in a coordinated banging on a flat surface, or a rhythmic scratching on one, or, yet a precisely choreographed leap across it, might effect alterations in another's coronary patterns, or caloric count, or even induce a confirmed bachelor to change his mind. 3) An "imagined community," which is inhabited by a grammar of attitudes and feelings, black culture is profoundly personal; in this light, it would not be wrong to say that its grammars properly belong to the psychoanalytic sphere; thinkers about the culture have been trying to name this dimension of it for quite a while now, but without exhausting the possibilities. In his study of the U.S. poetry movement of the black sixties, Stephen Henderson redirected the meaning of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's "mascon" to explain this marked saturation of elements that break over the cultural participants in a wash of recognition. Henderson argued that these cultural signatures, benchmarks, if you will, could be captured by the poet and that his doing so formalized an instance of black cultural protocol. Whatever we might nominate this "something within," we would have to acknowledge that "it" belongs to the imaginary, or that ensemble of objects of desire that appear only in symbolic displacement and significant misrecognition. Right away, one sees the problem: To talk about "black culture" as a community of belonging that transcends particularities of time, generation, space/place, is to slip quietly onto psychoanalytic ground, in which event we are talking about a composite person on the model of the "one." But can we speak about the culture without this "one"? This perfectly shaped, ideal actor/actant who is the same for my parents' generation of the great nonegenarians as for my own of the quintegenarians and my nieces and nephews of the quartegenarians? Not finding her/him/it is the equivalent of waiting for God/ot, whose failure to turn up (often enough) is translated as the disappointed revolutionary change; it is the lament that black folk ought to do some things better because they are "black" and "know" by dint of the suffering that their culture opens a special window onto. But what is it that "we" agelessly "know"? The third chapter here will be devoted to a reading of the fictional character of Langston Hughes's ageless "Jesse B. Simple" as a way to approach the undecidable "it's a black thang." Running across the decades as a feature of the old "Pittsburgh Courier," where I first encountered this priceless treasure as a beribboned school girl, the tales of "Simple" offer a perspective on black culture as a system of values and beliefs that are imagined to make up its bed-rock. 4) As one of the sites of creolization, black culture, like the West, establishes itself as an autochthonous regime, an unassimilable, an undivided alternative. But by way of that very logic, it shows itself everywhere porous to intervention. Processes of creolization most often refer to linguistic systems evolved in the Atlantic Slave Trade and to the genetic ensemble of elements parented by African-European conjunction; but if we could slide the scale of reference just a bit, we might be able to apply the concept to varied artistic phenomena, as in the impact of certain modernisms and post-modernisms on black cultural production, i.e., Elizabeth Catlett's sculptures, Romare Bearden's paintings, Keith Jarrett's exquisite noises, poised somewhere between J. S. Bach and A. Copland, but somehow neither, or even the influence of classical flamenco guitar on middle Miles Davis; in the fourth chapter, then, we will examine traffic in the "contact zone," firstly by rereading one of its most salient theoretical formulations, mounted in Ralph Ellison's "Little Man at Chehaw Station," then in an attempt to scrutinizing elements of a ritualistic syncretism as displayed in the public profile of the Nation of Islam, especially its 1996 "Million Man March." That this well publicized event was "mediated" by the "devil's" technological means shows the boomerang effect: That in its most strident oppositional stances, instances of black culture display must conjure with its putative Other. Whether or not, a million black men actually marched on the nation's capital became , predictably, a matter of dispute , and in a certain sense, the only thing that mattered was the powerful symbolic import of such a number, but for sure, thousands upon thousands were captured by cameras at the Washington Monument, as, moreover, thousands of others quite likely monitored U.S. television outlets that were, at least for a day, "all Farakhan." Narrated as the nation's latest avatar of the "Apostle of Hate," Minister Farakhan knows very well how media play the mythemes, those bits and bytes of image-message, interstitial with the commercial break, that rivet the public imagination. The "imagined community" never actually "sees" itself as its own empirical evidence, but the massive sociability of television enables the idea of the gathering. Precisely imitative of the "perceptual apparatus," the televisual means in this case metaphorized the notion in one's mind of what the "imagined community" might actually look like if it were possible to convoke it in a single unbroken sequence The picture that the subject carries in his brain experiences little moments of the realization of a massive ensemble that never appears when his eye pierces the surface of a well attended rally, or mass meeting. In that moment, "everyone" is present and accounted for, as television here gives the effect of a proliferating "presence" that throws an ideal image. 5) Because it is not possible to contemplate black culture without placing it squarely within the development narratives of the West, the fifth chapter will take up the question of the role of money-specifically its modern appearance-in the advancement of the African slave trade. The question here is how the progressive displacements of meaning and value, captured in the notion of the fetish, so dissembled the human and social desecration of African humanity in this case that the logic of property was made to prevail at all costs. How two key thinkers of the late nineteenth century-Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud-converged on the same object is a profoundly puzzling intellectual detail, but read in tandem on the fetish, this pairing might well show the psychoanalytic dimension of "home economics." But in any case, the problem is to "speak" this semiosis across the body of prototypical black culture formation. 6) The Black Studies Movement in the United States was never actually called a "movement," but in hindsight those earliest formations, arising, in part, by accident and contingency, seem to have been inducing movement, insofar as they appeared on predominantly white campuses like falling dominoes, or in tune with a spate of popular lyrics of the times, like a rolling stone. By the early to mid nineteen-seventies, what had been stumbled upon in a continuation of black political struggle by other means was becoming increasingly instaurated as a curricular object, a bureaucratic unit in a radically revisionist setting for the new Humanities, a thorn in the side of the Faculties, and the heaviest arm?r in the arsenal of the new University subject. The sixth and final chapter of Discriminations is devoted to an analysis of that moment which awaits theorization: when a political mandate, ordained by history, translates its objectives into its object. To this day, "Black Studies," mostly under other names-"African-American Studies" (from "Afro-American Studies"), "Africana Studies," "Pan-African Studies," and perhaps in the near future, African Diasporic Studies-shows the ambivalence of its historical moment. I believe that it is possible to situate the idea of "black culture" within this epistemological engagement and to suggest that as a cluster of critical inquiries, "black culture" now belongs to the academy in the West. This quite remarkable eventuality, for all its unevenness of development and for all the misfortune that might attend it in certain of its settings and manifestations, gives us the unusual occasion to witness the university itself as a living organism rather than a museum piece.

Download or read book The Idea of Black Culture written by Hortense J. Spillers and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2005 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Main blurb (for internal use only - CHECK BEFORE USING IN PRINTED PUBLICITY): Hortense Spillers's THE IDEA OF BLACK CULTURE will consist of six chapters, described below, in some detail (she has supplied more detail than I give here). Her book exploits Eagleton's successful title, and like Eagleton's book, grounds its subject (but more thoroughly) in its history. The engagement here - the controversy, as to what can be meant by the term 'Black Culture' and the necessity to bear witness to history - will run through her several strands of argument. More obviously in her sights, in her concluding chapter, are those people (treasonable clerks), like Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Cornel West, who, in her view - have used African-American/Black Studies to their own financial ends, usurping and exploiting their history in a cult of personality. Spillers is an eminent and adversarial figure, acquainted personally with many of the greats of African-American culture. Her work bears steady witness to the plight of African-Americans, to the full history of slavery, North (she has written in her latest book on the horrific breeding farms in Massachusetts) and South. 1) Black culture as a d

Download or read book Black Culture and Black Consciousness written by Lawrence W. Levine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-27 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When this book first appeared in 1977, it marked a revolution in the understanding of African American history. Contrary to prevailing ideas at the time, which held that African culture disappeared quickly under slavery and that black Americans had little group pride, history, or cohesiveness, the author uncovered a rich and complex African American oral tradition, including songs, proverbs, jokes, folktales, and long narrative poems called toasts--work that dated from before and after emancipation. The fact that these ideas and sources seem so commonplace now is in large part due this book and the scholarship that followed in its wake. A landmark work that was part of the "cultural turn" in American history, this book profoundly influenced an entire generation of historians.

Download or read book Black Culture and Black Consciousness written by Lawrence W. Levine and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1978 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveys the oral cultural heritage of black Americans as manifested in music, folk tales and heroes, and humor.

Download or read book Black Culture written by Amuzie Chimezie and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Melville and the Idea of Blackness written by Christopher Freeburg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By examining the unique problems that 'blackness' signifies in Moby-Dick, Pierre, 'Benito Cereno' and 'The Encantadas', Christopher Freeburg analyzes how Herman Melville grapples with the social realities of racial difference in nineteenth-century America. Where Melville's critics typically read blackness as either a metaphor for the haunting power of slavery or an allegory of moral evil, Freeburg asserts that blackness functions as the site where Melville correlates the sociopolitical challenges of transatlantic slavery and US colonial expansion with philosophical concerns about mastery. By focusing on Melville's iconic interracial encounters, Freeburg reveals the important role blackness plays in Melville's portrayal of characters' arduous attempts to seize their own destiny, amass scientific knowledge and perfect themselves. A valuable resource for scholars and graduate students in American literature, this text will also appeal to those working in American, African American and postcolonial studies.

Download or read book The Black Atlantic written by Paul Gilroy and published by Verso. This book was released on 1993 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the location of black intellectuals in the modern world following the end of racial slavery. The lives and writings of key African Americans such as Martin Delany, W.E.B. Dubois, Frederick Douglas and Richard Wright are examined in the light of their experiences in Europe and Africa.

Download or read book Black Culture Traditions written by Imelda Hunt and published by . This book was released on 2020-06-12 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Culture Traditions: Visible and Invisible helps students better understand the bedrock beliefs of black culture in America. Through carefully selected articles, students read valuable and foundational theory, critically analyze popular and lesser known forms of black culture, and learn how appropriation and performance has rendered certain aspects of black culture invisible. The text underscores how the omission of relevant teachings about African Americans continues the injustices and racial inequality experienced in America. The anthology features four distinct parts. In Part I, selected articles by Molefe Asante, Melville Herskovits, and Amos Wilson discuss theories of Afrocentrism, culture, and psychology, and shed light on many of the misnomers, misconceptions, and misunderstandings in black culture. Part II focuses on the values that are part of the everyday lives and experiences of African Americans, including religious beliefs, ideas of right and wrong, spending practices, and class ideology. In Part III, students read about black culture traditions with emphasis on the family. The final part discusses ideas related to beauty, black creativity, and the expression of values, beliefs, and traditions as aesthetics of black culture. A powerful and enlightening collection, Black Culture Traditions is an ideal text for courses in African American studies and cultural and ethnic studies. Dr. Imelda Guyton Hunt, Ph.D. has taught African American studies courses for more than 25 years. She is a lecturer of Africology and African American studies at Eastern Michigan University. Dr. Hunt holds a Ph.D. in American culture from Bowling Green State University with specialization in African American culture and black popular culture. She is the founder of New Works Writers Series, a black theater and arts organization in Ohio.

Download or read book Black Africans in Renaissance Europe written by Thomas Foster Earle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-26 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly original book opens up the almost entirely neglected area of the black African presence in Western Europe during the Renaissance. Covering history, literature, art history and anthropology, it investigates a whole range of black African experience and representation across Renaissance Europe, from various types of slavery to black musicians and dancers, from real and symbolic Africans at court to the views of the Catholic Church, and from writers of African descent to Black African criminality. Their findings demonstrate the variety and complexity of black African life in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europe, and how it was affected by firmly held preconceptions relating to the African continent and its inhabitants, reinforced by Renaissance ideas and conditions. Of enormous importance both for European and American history, this book mixes empirical material and theoretical approaches, and addresses such issues as stereotypes, changing black African identity, and cultural representation in art and literature.

Download or read book Uplifting the Race written by Kevin K. Gaines and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amidst the violent racism prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century, African American cultural elites, struggling to articulate a positive black identity, developed a middle-class ideology of racial uplift. Insisting that they were truly representative of the race's potential, black elites espoused an ethos of self-help and service to the black masses and distinguished themselves from the black majority as agents of civilization; hence the phrase 'uplifting the race.' A central assumption of racial uplift ideology was that African Americans' material and moral progress would diminish white racism. But Kevin Gaines argues that, in its emphasis on class distinctions and patriarchal authority, racial uplift ideology was tied to pejorative notions of racial pathology and thus was limited as a force against white prejudice. Drawing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Hubert H. Harrison, and others, Gaines focuses on the intersections between race and gender in both racial uplift ideology and black nationalist thought, showing that the meaning of uplift was intensely contested even among those who shared its aims. Ultimately, elite conceptions of the ideology retreated from more democratic visions of uplift as social advancement, leaving a legacy that narrows our conceptions of rights, citizenship, and social justice.

Download or read book Black Utopia written by Alex Zamalin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the history of African American struggle against racist oppression that often verges on dystopia, a hidden tradition has depicted a transfigured world. Daring to speculate on a future beyond white supremacy, black utopian artists and thinkers offer powerful visions of ways of being that are built on radical concepts of justice and freedom. They imagine a new black citizen who would inhabit a world that soars above all existing notions of the possible. In Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin offers a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of social transformation and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures associated with racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture. Black Utopia spans black nationalist visions of an ideal Africa, the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sun Ra’s cosmic mythology of alien abduction. Zamalin casts Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler as political theorists and reflects on the antiutopian challenges of George S. Schuyler and Richard Wright. Their thought proves that utopianism, rather than being politically immature or dangerous, can invigorate political imagination. Both an inspiring intellectual history and a critique of present power relations, this book suggests that, with democracy under siege across the globe, the black utopian tradition may be our best hope for combating injustice.

Download or read book Film Blackness written by Michael Boyce Gillespie and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-19 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.

Download or read book How to Be a Young Antiracist written by Ibram X. Kendi and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestseller that sparked international dialogue is now a book for young adults! Based on the adult bestseller by Ibram X. Kendi, and co-authored by bestselling author Nic Stone, How to be a (Young) Antiracist will serve as a guide for teens seeking a way forward in acknowledging, identifying, and dismantling racism and injustice. The New York Times bestseller How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi is shaping the way a generation thinks about race and racism. How to be a (Young) Antiracist is a dynamic reframing of the concepts shared in the adult book, with young adulthood front and center. Aimed at readers 12 and up, and co-authored by award-winning children's book author Nic Stone, How to be a (Young) Antiracist empowers teen readers to help create a more just society. Antiracism is a journey--and now young adults will have a map to carve their own path. Kendi and Stone have revised this work to provide anecdotes and data that speaks directly to the experiences and concerns of younger readers, encouraging them to think critically and build a more equitable world in doing so.

Download or read book The Black Aesthetic written by Addison Gayle and published by Doubleday Books. This book was released on 1971 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Black Rednecks and White Liberals written by Thomas Sowell and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-09-17 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This explosive new book challenges many of the long-prevailing assumptions about blacks, about Jews, about Germans, about slavery, and about education. Plainly written, powerfully reasoned, and backed with a startling array of documented facts, Black Rednecks and White Liberals takes on not only the trendy intellectuals of our times but also suc...

Download or read book Entertaining Race written by Michael Eric Dyson and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop "Entertaining Race is a splendid way to spend quality time reading one of the most remarkable thinkers in America today." —Speaker Nancy Pelosi "To read Entertaining Race is to encounter the life-long vocation of a teacher who preaches, a preacher who teaches and an activist who cannot rest until all are set free." —Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock For more than thirty years, Michael Eric Dyson has played a prominent role in the nation as a public intellectual, university professor, cultural critic, social activist and ordained Baptist minister. He has presented a rich and resourceful set of ideas about American history and culture. Now for the first time he brings together the various components of his multihued identity and eclectic pursuits. Entertaining Race is a testament to Dyson’s consistent celebration of the outsized impact of African American culture and politics on this country. Black people were forced to entertain white people in slavery, have been forced to entertain the idea of race from the start, and must find entertaining ways to make race an object of national conversation. Dyson’s career embodies these and other ways of performing Blackness, and in these pages, ranging from 1991 to the present, he entertains race with his pen, voice and body, and occasionally, alongside luminaries like Cornel West, David Blight, Ibram X. Kendi, Master P, MC Lyte, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alicia Garza, John McWhorter, and Jordan Peterson. Most of this work will be new to readers, a fresh light for many of his long-time fans and an inspiring introduction for newcomers. Entertaining Race offers a compelling vision from the mind and heart of one of America’s most important and enduring voices.

Download or read book Why I m No Longer Talking to White People About Race written by Reni Eddo-Lodge and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent. This book is an attempt to speak' The book that sparked a national conversation. Exploring everything from eradicated black history to the inextricable link between class and race, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is the essential handbook for anyone who wants to understand race relations in Britain today. THE NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS NON-FICTION NARRATIVE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018 FOYLES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR BLACKWELL'S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE JHALAK PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR A BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD