Download or read book From Bourgeois to Boojie written by Vershawn Ashanti Young and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vershawn Ashanti Young and Bridget Harris Tsemo collect a diverse assortment of pieces that examine the generational shift in the perception of the black middle class, from the serious moniker of "bourgeois" to the more playful, sardonic "boojie." Including such senior cultural workers as Amiri Baraka and Houston Baker, as well as younger scholars like Damion Waymer and Candice Jenkins, this significant collection contains essays, poems, visual art, and short stories that examine the complex web of representations that define the contemporary black middle class.
Download or read book From Bourgeois to Boojie written by Vershawn Ashanti Young and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how generations of African Americans perceive, proclaim, and name the combined performance of race and class across genres.
Download or read book Black Bourgeois written by Candice M. Jenkins and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the forces that keep black people vulnerable even amid economically privileged lives At a moment in U.S. history with repeated reminders of the vulnerability of African Americans to state and extralegal violence, Black Bourgeois is the first book to consider the contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that nonetheless remain racially vulnerable. Examining disruptions around race and class status in literary texts, Candice M. Jenkins reminds us that the conflicted relation of the black subject to privilege is not, solely, a recent phenomenon. Focusing on works by Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Danzy Senna, Rebecca Walker, Reginald McKnight, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Michael Thomas, Jenkins shows that the seemingly abrupt discursive shift from post–Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, from an emphasis on privilege and progress to an emphasis on vulnerability and precariousness, suggests a pendulum swing between two interrelated positions still in tension. By analyzing how these narratives stage the fraught interaction between the black and the bourgeois, Jenkins offers renewed attention to class as a framework for the study of black life—a necessary shift in an age of rapidly increasing income inequality and societal stratification. Black Bourgeois thus challenges the assumed link between blackness and poverty that has become so ingrained in the United States, reminding us that privileged subjects, too, are “classed.” This book offers, finally, a rigorous and nuanced grasp of how African Americans live within complex, intersecting identities.
Download or read book The Black Queer Work of Ratchet written by Nikki Lane and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-27 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book enters as a corrective to the tendency to trivialize and (mis)appropriate African American language practices. The word ratchet has entered into a wider (whiter) American discourse the same way that many words in African American English have—through hip-hop and social media. Generally, ratchet refers to behaviors and cultural expressions of Black people that sit outside of normative, middle-class respectable codes of conduct. Ratchet can function both as a tool for critiquing bad Black behavior, and as a tool for resisting the notion that there are such things as “good” and “bad” behavior in the first place. This book takes seriously the way ratchet operates in the everyday lives of middle-class and upwardly mobile Black Queer women in Washington, DC who, because of their sexuality, are situated outside of the norms of (Black) respectability. The book introduces the concept of “ratchet/boojie cultural politics” which draws from a rich body of Black intellectual traditions which interrogate the debates concerning what is and is not “acceptable” Black (middle-class) behavior. Placing issues of non-normative sexuality at the center of the conversation about notions of propriety within normative modes of Black middle-class behavior, this book discusses what it means for Black Queer women’s bodies to be present within ratchet/boojie cultural projects, asking what Black Queer women’s increasing visibility does for the everyday experiences of Black queer people more broadly.
Download or read book Your Average Nigga written by Vershawn Ashanti Young and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engrossing autobiographical exploration of black masculinity as a mode of racial and verbal performance. In Your Average Nigga, Vershawn Ashanti Young disputes the belief that speaking Standard English and giving up Black English Vernacular helps black students succeed academically. Young argues that this assumption not only exaggerates the differences between two compatible varieties of English but forces black males to choose between an education and their masculinity, by choosing to act either white or black. As one would expect from a scholar who is subject to the very circumstances he studies, Young shares his own experiences as he exposes the factors that make black racial identity irreconcilable with literacy for blacks, especially black males. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary scholarship in performance theory and African American literary and cultural studies, Young shows that the linguistic conflict that exists between black and white language styles harms black students from the inner city the most. If these students choose to speak Standard English they risk alienating themselves from their families and communities, and if they choose to retain their customary speech and behavior they may isolate themselves from mainstream society. Young argues that this conflict leaves blacks in the impossible position of either trying to be white or forever struggling to prove that they are black enough. For men, this also becomes an endless struggle to prove that they are masculine enough. Young calls this constant effort to display proper masculine and racial identity the burden of racial performance. Ultimately, Young argues that racial and verbal performances are a burden because they cannot reduce the causes or effects of racism, nor can they denaturalize supposedly fixed identity categories, as many theorists contend. On the contrary, racial and verbal performances only reinscribe the essentialism that they are believed to subvert. Scholars and teachers of rhetoric, performance studies, and African American studies will enjoy this insightful volume.
Download or read book Dividing Lines written by Andreá N. Williams and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most extensive studies of class in nineteenth-century African American literature to date, Dividing Lines unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities. By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled notions that black Americans were uniformly poor or uncivilized. The book argues that the signs of class anxiety are embedded in postbellum fiction: from the verbal stammer or prim speech of class-conscious characters to fissures in the fiction's form. Andreá N. Williams delves into the familiar and lesser-known works of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, showing how these texts mediate class through discussions of labor, moral respectability, ancestry, spatial boundaries, and skin complexion. Dividing Lines also draws on reader responses—from book reviews, editorials, and letters—to show how the class anxiety expressed in African American fiction directly sparked reader concerns over the status of black Americans in the U.S. social order. Weaving literary history with compelling textual analyses, this study yields new insights about the intersection of race and class in black novels and short stories from the 1880s to 1900s.
Download or read book Choreographing Dirt written by Angenette Spalink and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an innovative study that places performance and dance studies in conversation with ecology by exploring the significance of dirt in performance. Focusing on a range of 20th- and 21st-century performances that include modern dance, dance-theatre, Butoh, and everyday life, this book demonstrates how the choreography of dirt makes biological, geographical, and cultural meaning, what the author terms "biogeocultography". Whether it’s the Foundling Father digging into the earth’s strata in Suzan-Lori Park’s The America Play (1994), peat hurling through the air in Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975), dancers frantically shovelling out fistfuls of dirt in Eveoke Dance Theatre’s Las Mariposas (2010), or Butoh performers dancing with fungi in Iván-Daniel Espinosa’s Messengers Divinos (2018), each example shows how the incorporation of dirt can reveal micro-level interactions between species – like the interplay between microscopic skin bacteria and soil protozoa – and macro-level interactions – like the transformation of peat to a greenhouse gas. By demonstrating the stakes of moving dirt, this book posits that performance can operate as a space to grapple with the multifaceted ecological dilemmas of the Anthropocene. This book will be of broad interest to both practitioners and researchers in theatre, performance studies, dance, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities.
Download or read book New Essays on Eudora Welty Class and Race written by Harriet Pollack and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Jacob Agner, Susan V. Donaldson, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Stephen M. Fuller, Jean C. Griffith, Ebony Lumumba, Rebecca Mark, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Christin Marie Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Adrienne Akins Warfield The year 2013 saw the publication of Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race, a collection in which twelve critics changed the conversation on Welty’s fiction and photography by mining and deciphering the complexity of her responses to the Jim Crow South. The thirteen diverse voices in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race deepen, reflect on, and respond to those seminal discussions. These essays freshly consider such topics as Welty’s uses of African American signifying in her short stories and her attention to public street performances interacting with Jim Crow rules in her unpublished photographs. Contributors discuss her adaptations of gothic plots, haunted houses, Civil War stories, and film noir. And they frame Welty’s work with such subjects as Bob Dylan’s songwriting, the idea and history of the orphan in America, and standup comedy. They compare her handling of whiteness and race to other works by such contemporary writers as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, and Alice Walker. Discussions of race and class here also bring her masterwork The Golden Apples and her novel Losing Battles, underrepresented in earlier conversations, into new focus. Moreover, as a group these essays provide insight into Welty as an innovative craftswoman and modernist technician, busily altering literary form with her frequent, pointed makeovers of familiar story patterns, plots, and genres.
Download or read book Talkin and Testifyin written by Geneva Smitherman and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Smitherman makes a substantial contribution to an understanding of Black English by setting it in the larger context of Black culture and life style. In her book, Geneva Smitherman makes a substantial contribution to an understanding of Black English by setting it in the larger context of Black culture and life style. In addition to defining Black English, by its distinctive structure and special lexicon, Smitherman argues that the Black dialect is set apart from traditional English by a rhetorical style which reflects its African origins. Smitherman also tackles the issue of Black and White attitudes toward Black English, particularly as they affect educational policy. Documenting her insights with quotes from notable Black historical, literary and popular figures, Smitherman makes clear that Black English is as legitimate a form of speech as British, American, or Australian English.
Download or read book America in the Round written by Donatella Galella and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award, honorable mention Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage was the first professional regional theatre in the nation’s capital to welcome a racially integrated audience; the first to perform behind the Iron Curtain; and the first to win the Tony Award for best regional theatre. This behind-the-scenes look at one of the leading theatres in the United States shows how key financial and artistic decisions were made, using a range of archival materials such as letters and photographs as well as interviews with artists and administrators. Close-ups of major productions from The Great White Hope to Oklahoma! illustrate how Arena Stage navigated cultural trends. More than a chronicle, America in the Round is a critical history that reveals how far the theatre could go with its budget and racially liberal politics, and how Arena both disputed and duplicated systems of power. With an innovative “in the round” approach, the narrative simulates sitting in different parts of the arena space to see the theatre through different lenses—economics, racial dynamics, and American identity.
Download or read book Slang and Sociability written by Connie Eble and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slang is often seen as a lesser form of language, one that is simply not as meaningful or important as its 'regular' counterpart. Connie Eble refutes this notion as she reveals the sources, poetry, symbolism, and subtlety of informal slang expressions. In Slang and Sociability, Eble explores the words and phrases that American college students use casually among themselves. Based on more than 10,000 examples submitted by Eble's students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over the last twenty years, the book shows that slang is dynamic vocabulary that cannot be dismissed as deviant or marginal. Like more formal words and phrases, slang is created, modified, and transmitted by its users to serve their own purposes. In the case of college students, these purposes include cementing group identity and opposing authority. The book includes a glossary of the more than 1,000 slang words and phrases discussed in the text, as well as a list of the 40 most enduring terms since 1972. Examples from the glossary: group gropes -- encounter groups squirrel kisser -- environmentalist Goth -- student who dresses in black and listens to avant-garde music bad bongos -- situation in which things do not go well triangle -- person who is stupid or not up on the latest za -- pizza smoke -- to perform well dead soldier -- empty beer container toast -- in big trouble, the victim of misfortune parental units -- parents
Download or read book Walkin over Medicine written by Loudell F. Snow and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1998-02-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cultural look at the traditional health beliefs and practices of African Americans. Representing more than twenty years of anthropological research, Walkin' over Medicine, originally published by Westview Press in 1993, presents the results of Loudell F. Snow's community-based studies in Arizona and Michigan, work in two urban prenatal clinics, conversations and correspondence with traditional healers, and experience as a behavioral scientist in a pediatrics clinic. Snow also visited numerous pharmacies, grocery stores, and specialty shops in several major cities, accompanied families to church services, and attended weddings, baptisms, graduations, and funerals.
Download or read book Henry James s Europe written by Dennis Tredy and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2011 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an American author who chose to live in Europe, Henry James frequentlywrote about cultural differences between the Old and New World. Theplight of bewildered Americans adrift on a sea of European sophisticationbecame a regular theme in his fiction.This collection of twenty-four papers from some of the world's leadingJames scholars offers a comprehensive picture of the author's crossculturalaesthetics. It provides detailed analyses of James's perception ofEurope - of its people and places, its history and culture, its artists andthinkers, its aesthetics and its ethics - which ultimately lead to a profoundreevaluation of his writing.With in-depth analysis of his works of fiction, his autobiographical andpersonal writings, and his critical works, the collection is a major contribution to current thinking about James, transtextuality and cultural appropriation.
Download or read book Art Labour and American Life written by Ben Hickman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-10-21 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines labour in the age of US hegemony through the art that has grappled with it; and, vice versa, developments in American culture as they have been shaped by work’s transformations over the last century. Describing the complex relations between cultural forms and the work practices, Art, Labour and American Life explores everything from Fordism to feminization, from white-collar ascendency to zero hours precarity, as these things have manifested in painting, performance art, poetry, fiction, philosophy and music. Labour, all but invisible in cultural histories of the period, despite the fact most Americans have spent most of their lives doing it, here receives an urgent re-emphasis, as we witness work’s radical redefinition across the world.
Download or read book Ishtyle written by Kareem Khubchandani and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ishtyle follows queer South Asian men across borders into gay neighborhoods, nightclubs, bars, and house parties in Bangalore and Chicago. Bringing the cultural practices they are most familiar with into these spaces, these men accent the aesthetics of nightlife cultures through performance. Kareem Khubchandani develops the notion of “ishtyle” to name this accented style, while also showing how brown bodies inadvertently become accents themselves, ornamental inclusions in the racialized grammar of desire. Ishtyle allows us to reimagine a global class perpetually represented as docile and desexualized workers caught in the web of global capitalism. The book highlights a different kind of labor, the embodied work these men do to feel queer and sexy together. Engaging major themes in queer studies, Khubchandani explains how his interlocutors’ performances stage relationships between: colonial law and public sexuality; film divas and queer fans; and race, caste, and desire. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that the unlikely site of nightlife can be a productive venue for the study of global politics and its institutional hierarchies.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Communication written by Marnel Niles Goins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 878 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides an extensive overview of current research on the complex relationships between gender and communication. Featuring a broad variety of chapters written by leading and upcoming scholars, this edited collection uses diverse theoretical frameworks to provide insight into recent concerns regarding changing gender roles, representations, and resources in communication studies. Established research and new perspectives address vital themes in this comprehensive text, including the shifting politics of gender, ethical and technological trends in gendered media, and gender in daily life. Comprising 39 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into six thematic sections: • Gendered lives and identities • Visualizing gender • The politics of gender • Gendered contexts and strategies • Gendered violence and communication • Gender advocacy in action These sections examine central issues, debates, and problems, including the ethics and politics of gender as identity, impacts of media and technology, legal and legislative battlegrounds for gender inequality and LGBTQ+ human rights, changing institutional contexts, and recent research on gender violence and communication. The final section links academic research on gender and communication to activism and advocacy beyond the academy. The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Communication will be an invaluable reference work for students and researchers working at the intersections of gender studies and communication studies. Its international perspectives and the range of themes it covers make it an essential and pragmatic pedagogical resource.
Download or read book Scandalize My Name written by Terrion L. Williamson and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From sapphire, mammy, and jezebel, to the angry black woman, baby mama, and nappy-headed ho, black female iconography has had a long and tortured history in public culture. The telling of this history has long occupied the work of black female theorists—much of which has been foundational in situating black women within the matrix of sociopolitical thought and practice in the United States. Scandalize My Name builds upon the rich tradition of this work while approaching the study of black female representation as an opening onto a critical contemplation of the vagaries of black social life. It makes a case for a radical black subject-position that structures and is structured by an intramural social order that revels in the underside of the stereotype and ultimately destabilizes the very notion of “civil society.” At turns memoir, sociological inquiry, literary analysis, and cultural critique, Scandalize My Name explores topics as varied as serial murder, reality television, Christian evangelism, teenage pregnancy, and the work of Toni Morrison to advance black feminist practice as a mode through which black sociality is both theorized and made material.
