- Edith Garland Dupré Library
- Research Guides
- A Map to Black Studies Collection
- Black Film, Performance, Media, and Music Criticism
A Map to Black Studies Collection
- Introduction
- Foundational Texts in Black Studies (19th C-2000)
- New Books in Black Studies (2015-2023)
- Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies
- Black Film, Performance, Media, and Music Criticism
- Black Gender and Sexuality Studies, Black Feminism and Black Trans Studies
- Black Critical Theory and Philosophy
- Black Geographies, Black Louisiana and U.S. South
- Black Education Studies
- Black Literary Criticism/Studies and Gaines Criticism
- Black Poetry, Short Stories, Comics, and Fiction
- Black History, Black Public History, and Historiography
- Black Diaspora, Afro-Latinx, and Caribbean Studies
- Black Politics, Political Science, and Sociology
- Black Civil Rights and Freedom Studies
- Black Visual Culture and Art History
- Black Religious Studies
- Questions? Ask Us!
Open Access Resources
- Looking (and Looking Again) at Black Film History -- Library of Congress Blogs
- Soul, Afrofuturism and the Timeliness of Contemporary Jazz Fusions -- JSTOR
- 2 Digital Humanities and/as White Supremacy: A Conversation about Reckonings -- JSTOR
- Biopower Is the New Black, Again. Queer Bodies "Behind Bars" -- JSTOR
- Leaving the South: Frantz Fanon, Modern Jazz and the Rejection of Negritude -- JSTOR
Student/Faculty Resources
- Passing Films and the Illusion of Racial Equality -- JSTOR
- The Perpetuation of Criminalization: The Appearance of Black Criminalization in Fictional Movies -- JSTOR
- Conversations with Ava DuVernay - "A Call to Action": Organizing Principles of an Activist Cinematic Practice -- JSTOR
- Introduction: Django Unchained - Disrupting Classical Hollywood Historical Realism? -- JSTOR
Black Film, Performance, Media, and Music Criticism
The "Black Film, Performance, Media, and Music Criticism" subsection refers to the study and critique of Black artists and their presence in popular media and entertainment. It analyzes the historical contexts of how Black people's contributions to mediums like film and music have been impacted by exclusion and representation. The materials in this subsection delve into the historical, political, and economic aspects of the relationship between Black people and popular culture.
Within this subsection, you may find historical discussions of representations alongside more modern conversations of popular artists. Explore everything from early television, hip-hop, Rihanna, Afrofuturism, and other topics relating to the depiction of Black people in media.
Search Dupré Library Catalog
Search the Dupré Library Catalog |
Books, eBooks, Journals, Magazines, Media, Government Documents, Microforms, and more. |
For best results, start with a Keyword search. |
Full Catalog Detailed Search | My Account | Library of Things | Louisiana Digital Library |
Browsing
The African American Theatrical Body by Soyica Diggs Colbert
Call Number: Gaines PS 153 .N5 C54 2011ISBN: 9781107014381Publication Date: 2011-10-06Presenting an innovative approach to performance studies and literary history, Soyica Colbert argues for the centrality of black performance traditions to African American literature, including preaching, dancing, blues and gospel, and theatre itself, showing how these performance traditions create the 'performative ground' of African American literary texts. Across a century of literary production using the physical space of the theatre and the discursive space of the page, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, August Wilson and others deploy performances to re-situate black people in time and space. The study examines African American plays past and present, including A Raisin in the Sun, Blues for Mister Charlie and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, demonstrating how African American dramatists stage black performances in their plays as acts of recuperation and restoration, creating sites that have the potential to repair the damage caused by slavery and its aftermath.Africa Speaks, America Answers by Robin D. G. Kelley
Call Number: Gaines ML 3508 .K44 2012ISBN: 9780674046245Publication Date: 2012-02-27In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950s and '60s who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world. Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa's struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents. In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.Afro-Latin@s in Movement by Petra R. Rivera-Rideau (Editor); Jennifer A. Jones (Editor); Tianna S. Paschel (Editor)
Call Number: Gaines F 1419 .B55 A45 2016ISBN: 9781349934799Publication Date: 2019-09-26Through a collection of theoretically engaging and empirically grounded texts, this book examines African-descended populations in Latin America and Afro-Latin@s in the United States in order to explore questions of black identity and representation, transnationalism, and diaspora in the Americas.Afrofuturism by Ytasha L. Womack
Call Number: Gaines PN 3433.5 .W66 2013ISBN: 9781613747964Publication Date: 2013-10-012014 Locus Awards Finalist, Nonfiction Category In this hip, accessible primer to the music, literature, and art of Afrofuturism, author Ytasha Womack introduces readers to the burgeoning community of artists creating Afrofuturist works, the innovators from the past, and the wide range of subjects they explore. From the sci-fi literature of Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and N. K. Jemisin to the musical cosmos of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am, to the visual and multimedia artists inspired by African Dogon myths and Egyptian deities, the book's topics range from the "alien" experience of blacks in America to the "wake up" cry that peppers sci-fi literature, sermons, and activism. With a twofold aim to entertain and enlighten, Afrofuturists strive to break down racial, ethnic, and social limitations to empower and free individuals to be themselves.Anthem by Shana L. Redmond
Call Number: Gaines ML 3917 .U6 R43 2013ISBN: 9780814770412Publication Date: 2013-12-06For people of African descent, music constitutes a unique domain of expression. From traditional West African drumming to South African kwaito, from spirituals to hip-hop, Black life and history has been dynamically displayed and contested through sound. Shana Redmond excavates the sonic histories of these communities through a genre emblematic of Black solidarity and citizenship: anthems. An interdisciplinary cultural history,Anthemreveals how this "sound franchise" contributed to the growth and mobilization of the modern, Black citizen. Providing new political frames and aesthetic articulations for protest organizations and activist-musicians, Redmond reveals the anthem as a crucial musical form following World War I. Beginning with the premise that an analysis of the composition, performance, and uses of Black anthems allows for a more complex reading of racial and political formations within the twentieth century, Redmond expands our understanding of how and why diaspora was a formative conceptual and political framework of modern Black identity. By tracing key compositions and performances around the world--from James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" that mobilized the NAACP to Nina Simone's "To Be Young, Gifted & Black" which became the Black National Anthem of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)--Anthemdevelops a robust recording of Black social movements in the twentieth century that will forever alter the way you hear race and nation.
Baby Girl: Better Known As Aaliyah by Kathy Iandoli
Call Number: Gaines ML 420 .A04 I26 2021ISBN: 9781982156848Publication Date: 2021-08-17In a definitive and "excellent homage to a star who left this planet too soon" (Questlove), the life, career, tragic death, and evolution of Aaliyah into a music legend are explored--featuring in-depth research and exclusive interviews. By twenty-two years old, Aaliyah had already accomplished a staggering amount: hit records, acclaimed acting roles, and fame that was just about to cross over into superstardom. Like her song, she was already "more than a woman" but her shocking death in a plane crash prevented her from fully growing into one. Now, two decades later, the full story of Aaliyah's life and cultural impact is finally and lovingly revealed. Baby Girl features never-before-told stories, including studio anecdotes, personal tales, and eyewitness accounts on the events leading up to her untimely passing. Her enduring influence on today's artists--such as Rihanna, Drake, Normani, and many more--is also celebrated, providing Aaliyah's discography a cultural critique that is long overdue. "There's no better way to pay your respect to R&B's true angel than to lose yourself in the pages" (Kim Osorio, journalist and author of Straight from the Source) of this "dazzling biography" (Publishers Weekly) that is as unforgettable as its subject. This book was written without the participation of Aaliyah's family/estate.Babylon Girls by Jayna Brown
Call Number: Gaines PN 2286 .B76 2008ISBN: 9780822341574Publication Date: 2008-09-19Babylon Girls is a groundbreaking cultural history of the African American women who performed in variety shows--chorus lines, burlesque revues, cabaret acts, and the like--between 1890 and 1945. Through a consideration of the gestures, costuming, vocal techniques, and stagecraft developed by African American singers and dancers, Jayna Brown explains how these women shaped the movement and style of an emerging urban popular culture. In an era of U.S. and British imperialism, these women challenged and played with constructions of race, gender, and the body as they moved across stages and geographic space. They pioneered dance movements including the cakewalk, the shimmy, and the Charleston--black dances by which the "New Woman" defined herself. These early-twentieth-century performers brought these dances with them as they toured across the United States and around the world, becoming cosmopolitan subjects more widely traveled than many of their audiences. Investigating both well-known performers such as Ada Overton Walker and Josephine Baker and lesser-known artists such as Belle Davis and Valaida Snow, Brown weaves the histories of specific singers and dancers together with incisive theoretical insights. She describes the strange phenomenon of blackface performances by women, both black and white, and she considers how black expressive artists navigated racial segregation. Fronting the "picaninny choruses" of African American child performers who toured Britain and the Continent in the early 1900s, and singing and dancing in The Creole Show (1890), Darktown Follies (1913), and Shuffle Along (1921), black women variety-show performers of the early twentieth century paved the way for later generations of African American performers. Brown shows not only how these artists influenced transnational ideas of the modern woman but also how their artistry was an essential element in the development of jazz.The Beyonce Effect by Adrienne Trier-Bieniek (Editor)
Call Number: Gaines ML 420 .K675 B39 2016ISBN: 9780786499748Publication Date: 2016-07-11Since her late-1990s debut as a member of the R&B trio Destiny's Child, Beyonce Knowles has garnered both praise and criticism. While some consider her an icon of female empowerment, others see her as detrimental to feminism and representing a negative image of women of color. Her music has a decidedly pop aesthetic, yet her power-house vocals and lyrics focused on issues like feminine independence, healthy sexuality and post-partum depression give her songs dimension and substance beyond typical pop fare. This collection of new essays presents a detailed study of the music and persona of Beyonce--arguably the world's biggest pop star. Topics include the body politics of respectability; feminism, empowerment and gender in Beyonce's lyrics; black female pleasure; and the changing face of celebrity motherhood. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.Beyond a Boundary by C. L. R. James
Call Number: Gaines GV 928 .W47 J35 2013ISBN: 9780822355632Publication Date: 2013-06-17This new edition of C. L. R. James's classic Beyond a Boundary celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of one of the greatest books on sport and culture ever written. Named one of the Top 50 Sports Books of All Time by Sports Illustrated "Beyond a Boundary . . . should find its place on the team with Izaak Walton, Ivan Turgenev, A. J. Liebling, and Ernest Hemingway."--Derek Walcott, The New York Times Book Review "As a player, James the writer was able to see in cricket a metaphor for art and politics, the collective experience providing a focus for group effort and individual performance. . . . [In] his scintillating memoir of his life in cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963), James devoted some of his finest pages to this theme."--Edward Said, The Washington Post "A work of double reverence--for the resilient, elegant ritualism of cricket and for the black people of the world."--Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker "Beyond a Boundary is a book of remarkable richness and force, which vastly expands our understanding of sports as an element of popular culture in the Western and colonial world."--Mark Naison, The Nation "Everything James has done has had the mark of originality, of his own flexible, sensitive, and deeply cultured intelligence. He conveys not a rigid doctrine but a delight and curiosity in all the manifestations of life, and the clue to everything lies in his proper appreciation of the game of cricket."--E. P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class "Beyond a Boundary is . . . first and foremost an autobiography of a living legend--probably the greatest social theorist of our times."--Manning Marable, Journal of Sport & Social Issues "The great triumph of Beyond a Boundary is its ability to rise above genre and in its very form explore the complex nature of colonial West Indian society."--Caryl Phillips, The New RepublicThe Black Body in Ecstasy by Jennifer C. Nash
Call Number: Gaines PN 1995.9 .N4 N37 2014ISBN: 9780822356202Publication Date: 2014-03-14In The Black Body in Ecstasy, Jennifer C. Nash rewrites black feminism's theory of representation. Her analysis moves beyond black feminism's preoccupation with injury and recovery to consider how racial fictions can create a space of agency and even pleasure for black female subjects. Nash's innovative readings of hardcore pornographic films from the 1970s and 1980s develop a new method of analyzing racialized pornography that focuses on black women's pleasures in blackness: delights in toying with and subverting blackness, moments of racialized excitement, deliberate enactments of hyperbolic blackness, and humorous performances of blackness that poke fun at the fantastical project of race. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Nash creates a new black feminist interpretative practice, one attentive to the messy contradictions--between delight and discomfort, between desire and degradation--at the heart of black pleasures.The Black Chicago Renaissance by Darlene Clark Hine (Editor, Contribution by); John McCluskey (Editor, Contribution by); Marshanda A. Smith (Other Primary Creator); Hilary Mac Austin (Contribution by); David T. Bailey (Contribution by); Murry N. DePillars (Contribution by); Samuel A. Floyd Jr (Contribution by); Erik S. Gellman (Contribution by); Jeffrey Helgeson (Contribution by); Christopher Robert Reed (Contribution by); Elizabeth Schlabach (Contribution by); Clovis E. Semmes (Contribution by); John McCluskey (Editor, Contribution by)
Call Number: Gaines NX 512.3 .A35 B595 2012ISBN: 9780252078583Publication Date: 2012-06-25Beginning in the 1930s, Black Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that lasted into the 1950s and rivaled the cultural outpouring in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The contributors to this volume analyze this prolific period of African American creativity in music, performance art, social science scholarship, and visual and literary artistic expression. Unlike Harlem, Chicago was an urban industrial center that gave a unique working class and internationalist perspective to the cultural work being done in Chicago. This collection's various essays discuss the forces that distinguished the Black Chicago Renaissance from the Harlem Renaissance and placed the development of black culture in a national and international context. Among the topics discussed in this volume are Chicago writers Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, The Chicago Defender and Tivoli Theater, African American music and visual arts, and the American Negro Exposition of 1940. Contributors are Hilary Mac Austin, David T. Bailey, Murry N. DePillars, Samuel A. Floyd Jr., Erik S. Gellman, Jeffrey Helgeson, Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey Jr., Christopher Robert Reed, Elizabeth Schlabach, and Clovis E. Semmes.Black Country Music by Francesca T. Royster
Call Number: Gaines ML 3524 .R697 2022ISBN: 9781477326497Publication Date: 2022-10-04After a century of racist whitewashing, country music is finally reckoning with its relationship to Black people. In this timely work--the first book on Black country music by a Black writer--Francesca Royster uncovers the Black performers and fans, including herself, who are exploring the pleasures and possibilities of the genre. Informed by queer theory and Black feminist scholarship, Royster's book elucidates the roots of the current moment found in records like Tina Turner's first solo album, Tina Turns the Country On! She reckons with Black "bros" Charley Pride and Darius Rucker, then chases ghosts into the future with Valerie June. Indeed, it is the imagination of Royster and her artists that make this music so exciting for a genre that has long been obsessed with the past. The futures conjured by June and others can be melancholy, and are not free of racism, but by centering Black folk Royster begins to understand what her daughter hears in the banjo music of Our Native Daughters and the trap beat of Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road." A Black person claiming country music may still feel a bit like a queer person coming out, but, collectively, Black artists and fans are changing what country music looks and sounds like--and who gets to love it.Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights by Robert J. Patterson (Editor); Jermaine Singleton (Contribution by); Terrion L. Williamson (Contribution by); Lisa Woolfork (Contribution by); Courtney R. Baker (Contribution by); Soyica Diggs Colbert (Contribution by); Madhu Dubey (Contribution by); Nadine Knight (Contribution by); Monica White Ndounou (Contribution by); Kinohi Nishikawa (Contribution by); Samantha Pinto (Contribution by)
Call Number: Gaines NX 512.3 .A35 B596 2019ISBN: 9780252084607Publication Date: 2019-08-06The post-civil rights era of the 1970s offered African Americans an all-too-familiar paradox. Material and symbolic gains contended with setbacks fueled by resentment and reaction. African American artists responded with black approaches to expression that made history in their own time and continue to exercise an enormous influence on contemporary culture and politics. This collection's fascinating spectrum of topics begins with the literary and cinematic representations of slavery from the 1970s to the present. Other authors delve into visual culture from Blaxploitation to the art of Betye Saar to stage works like A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White as well as groundbreaking literary works like Corregidora and Captain Blackman. A pair of concluding essays concentrate on institutional change by looking at the Seventies surge of black publishing and by analyzing Ntozake Shange's for colored girls. . . in the context of current controversies surrounding sexual violence. Throughout, the writers reveal how Seventies black cultural production anchors important contemporary debates in black feminism and other issues while spurring the black imagination to thrive amidst abject social and political conditions. Contributors: Courtney R. Baker, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Madhu Dubey, Nadine Knight, Monica White Ndounou, Kinohi Nishikawa, Samantha Pinto, Jermaine Singleton, Terrion L. Williamson, and Lisa WoolforkBlack Diamond Queens by Maureen Mahon
Call Number: Gaines ML 3534.3 .M346 2020ISBN: 9781478011224Publication Date: 2020-10-30African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll--from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.Black Ephemera by Mark Anthony Neal
Call Number: Gaines ML 3556 .N38 2022ISBN: 9781479806904Publication Date: 2022-03-08PROSE Award- Music and Performing Arts Category Winner A framework for understanding the deep archive of Black performance in the digital era In an era of Big Data and algorithms, our easy access to the archive of contemporary and historical Blackness is unprecedented. That iterations of Black visual art, such as Bert Williams's 1916 silent film short "A Natural Born Gambler" or the performances of Josephine Baker from the 1920s, are merely a quick YouTube search away has transformed how scholars teach and research Black performance. While Black Ephemera celebrates this new access, it also questions the crisis and the challenge of the Black musical archive in a moment when Black American culture has become a global export. Using music and sound as its primary texts, Black Ephemera argues that the cultural DNA of Black America has become obscured in the transformation from analog to digital. Through a cross-reading of the relationship between the digital era and culture produced in the pre-digital era, Neal argues that Black music has itself been reduced to ephemera, at best, and at worst to the background sounds of the continued exploitation and commodification of Black culture. The crisis and challenges of Black archives are not simply questions of knowledge, but of how knowledge moves and manifests itself within Blackness that is obscure, ephemeral, fugitive, precarious, fluid, and increasingly digital. Black Ephemera is a reminder that for every great leap forward there is a necessary return to the archive. Through this work, Neal offers a new framework for thinking about Black culture in the digital world.Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada by Rinaldo Walcott
Call Number: Gaines F 1035 .N3 W325 2018ISBN: 1554832071Publication Date: 2003Blackness in the White Nation by George Reid Andrews
Call Number: Gaines F 2799 .N3 A53 2010ISBN: 0807871583Publication Date: 2010-10-18Uruguay is not conventionally thought of as part of the African diaspora, yet during the period of Spanish colonial rule, thousands of enslaved Africans arrived in the country. Afro-Uruguayans played important roles in Uruguay's national life, creating the second-largest black press in Latin America, a racially defined political party, and numerous social and civic organizations. Afro-Uruguayans were also central participants in the creation of Uruguayan popular culture and the country's principal musical forms, tango and candombe. Candombe, a style of African-inflected music, is one of the defining features of the nation's culture, embraced equally by white and black citizens. In Blackness in the White Nation, George Reid Andrews offers a comprehensive history of Afro-Uruguayans from the colonial period to the present. Showing how social and political mobilization is intertwined with candombe, he traces the development of Afro-Uruguayan racial discourse and argues that candombe's evolution as a central part of the nation's culture has not fundamentally helped the cause of racial equality. Incorporating lively descriptions of his own experiences as a member of a candombe drumming and performance group, Andrews consistently connects the struggles of Afro-Uruguayans to the broader issues of race, culture, gender, and politics throughout Latin America and the African diaspora generally.Black Panther by Scott Bukatman
Call Number: Gaines PN 1997.2 .B5815 B85 2022ISBN: 9781477325353Publication Date: 2022-07-19Black Panther was the first Black superhero in mainstream American comics. Black Panther was a cultural phenomenon that broke box office records. Yet it wasn't just a movie led by and starring Black artists. It grappled with ideas and conflicts central to Black life in America and helped redress the racial dynamics of the Hollywood blockbuster. Scott Bukatman, one of the foremost scholars of superheroes and cinematic spectacle, brings his impeccable pedigree to this lively and accessible study, finding in the utopianism of Black Panther a way of re-envisioning what a superhero movie can and should be while centering the Black creators, performers, and issues behind it. He considers the superheroic Black body; the Pan-African fantasy, feminism, and Afrofuturism of Wakanda; the African American relationship to Africa; the political influence of director Ryan Coogler's earlier movies; and the entwined performances of Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa and Michael B. Jordan's Killmonger. Bukatman argues that Black Panther is escapism of the best kind, offering a fantasy of liberation and social justice while demonstrating the power of popular culture to articulate ideals and raise vital questions.Black Panther and Philosophy by Edwardo Pérez (Editor); Timothy E. Brown (Editor); William Irwin (Series edited by)
Call Number: Gaines PN 6728 .B519338 B55 2022ISBN: 9781119635840Publication Date: 2022-02-15Explore the fascinating historical and contemporary philosophical issues that arise in Black Panther In Black Panther and Philosophy: What Can Wakanda Offer The World, a diverse panel of experts delivers incisive critical reflections on the Oscar-winning 2018 film, Black Panther, and the comic book mythology that preceded it. The collection explores historical and contemporary issues--including colonialism, slavery, the Black Lives Matter movement, intersectionality, and identity--raised by the superhero tale. Beyond discussions of the influences of race and ethnicity on the most critically and culturally significant movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this book presents the moral, feminist, metaphysical, epistemological, existential, and Afrofuturistic issues framing Black Panther's narrative. The explorations of these issues shed light on our increasingly interconnected world and allow the reader to consider engaging questions like: Should Wakanda rule the world? Was Killmonger actually a victim? Do Wakanda's Black Lives Matter? Does hiding in the shadows make Wakanda guilty? What does Wakanda have to offer the world? Perfect for fans of the most culturally significant film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Black Panther and Philosophy will also earn a place in the libraries of students of philosophy and anyone with a personal or professional interest in the defining issues of our time.Black Pulp by Brooks E. Hefner
Call Number: Gaines PS 366 .A35 H44 2021ISBN: 9781517911577Publication Date: 2021-12-21A deep dive into mid-century African American newspapers, exploring how Black pulp fiction reassembled genre formulas in the service of racial justice In recent years, Jordan Peele's Get Out, Marvel's Black Panther, and HBO's Watchmen have been lauded for the innovative ways they repurpose genre conventions to criticize white supremacy, celebrate Black resistance, and imagine a more racially just world--important progressive messages widely spread precisely because they are packaged in popular genres. But it turns out, such generic retooling for antiracist purposes is nothing new. As Brooks E. Hefner's Black Pulp shows, this tradition of antiracist genre revision begins even earlier than recent studies of Black superhero comics of the 1960s have revealed. Hefner traces it back to a phenomenon that began in the 1920s, to serialized (and sometimes syndicated) genre stories written by Black authors in Black newspapers with large circulations among middle- and working-class Black readers. From the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American, Hefner recovers a rich archive of African American genre fiction from the 1920s through the mid-1950s--spanning everything from romance, hero-adventure, and crime stories to westerns and science fiction. Reading these stories, Hefner explores how their authors deployed, critiqued, and reassembled genre formulas--and the pleasures they offer to readers--in the service of racial justice: to criticize Jim Crow segregation, racial capitalism, and the sexual exploitation of Black women; to imagine successful interracial romance and collective sociopolitical progress; and to cheer Black agency, even retributive violence in the face of white supremacy. These popular stories differ significantly from contemporaneous, now-canonized African American protest novels that tend to represent Jim Crow America as a deterministic machine and its Black inhabitants as doomed victims. Widely consumed but since forgotten, these genre stories--and Hefner's incisive analysis of them--offer a more vibrant understanding of African American literary history.Bring That Beat Back by Nate Patrin
Call Number: Gaines ML 3531 .P4 2020ISBN: 9781517906283Publication Date: 2020-06-09How sampling remade hip-hop over forty years, from pioneering superstar Grandmaster Flash through crate-digging preservationist and innovator Madlib Sampling--incorporating found sound and manipulating it into another form entirely--has done more than any musical movement in the twentieth century to maintain a continuum of popular music as a living document and, in the process, has become one of the most successful (and commercial) strains of postmodern art. Bring That Beat Back traces the development of this transformative pop-cultural practice from its origins in the turntable-manning, record-spinning hip-hop DJs of 1970s New York through forty years of musical innovation and reinvention. Nate Patrin tells the story of how sampling built hip-hop through the lens of four pivotal artists: Grandmaster Flash as the popular face of the music's DJ-born beginnings; Prince Paul as an early champion of sampling's potential to elaborate on and rewrite music history; Dr. Dre as the superstar who personified the rise of a stylistically distinct regional sound while blurring the lines between sampling and composition; and Madlib as the underground experimentalist and record-collector antiquarian who constantly broke the rules of what the mainstream expected from hip-hop. From these four artists' histories, and the stories of the people who collaborated, competed, and evolved with them, Patrin crafts a deeply informed, eminently readable account of a facet of pop music as complex as it is commonly underestimated: the aesthetic and reconstructive power of one of the most revelatory forms of popular culture to emerge from postwar twentieth-century America. And you can nod your head to it.Broadcasting Freedom by Barbara D. Savage
Call Number: Gaines E 185.61 .S32 1999ISBN: 9780807848043Publication Date: 1999-05-31The World War II era represented the golden age of radio as a broadcast medium in the United States; it also witnessed a rise in African American activism against racial segregation and discrimination, especially as they were practiced by the federal government itself. In Broadcasting Freedom, Barbara Savage links these cultural and political forces by showing how African American activists, public officials, intellectuals, and artists sought to access and use radio to influence a national debate about racial inequality. Drawing on a rich and previously unexamined body of national public affairs programming about African Americans and race relations, Savage uses these radio shows to demonstrate the emergence of a new national discourse about race and ethnicity, racial hatred and injustice, and the contributions of racial and immigrant populations to the development of the United States. These programs, she says, challenged the nation to reconcile its professed egalitarian ideals with its unjust treatment of black Americans and other minorities. This examination of radio's treatment of race as a national political issue also provides important evidence that the campaigns for racial justice in the 1940s served as an essential, and still overlooked, precursor to the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, Savage argues. The next battleground would be in the South--and on television.The Butterfly Effect by Marcus J. Moore
Call Number: Gaines ML 420 .L2276 M66 2020ISBN: 9781982107598Publication Date: 2021-10-05This "smart, confident, and necessary" (Shea Serrano, New York Times bestselling author) first cultural biography of rap superstar and "master of storytelling" (The New Yorker) Kendrick Lamar explores his meteoric rise to fame and his profound impact on a racially fraught America--perfect for fans of Zack O'Malley Greenburg's Empire State of Mind. Kendrick Lamar is at the top of his game. The thirteen-time Grammy Award-winning rapper is just in his early thirties, but he's already won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, produced and curated the soundtrack of the megahit film Black Panther, and has been named one of Time's 100 Influential People. But what's even more striking about the Compton-born lyricist and performer is how he's established himself as a formidable adversary of oppression and force for change. Through his confessional poetics, his politically charged anthems, and his radical performances, Lamar has become a beacon of light for countless people. Written by veteran journalist and music critic Marcus J. Moore, this is much more than the first biography of Kendrick Lamar. "It's an analytical deep dive into the life of that good kid whose m.A.A.d city raised him, and how it sparked a fire within Kendrick Lamar to change history" (Kathy Iandoli, author of Baby Girl) for the better.
Colorization by Wil Haygood
Call Number: Gaines PN 1995.9 .N4 H39 2021ISBN: 9780525656876Publication Date: 2021-10-19A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR * BOOKLISTS' EDITOR'S CHOICE * ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR "At once a film book, a history book, and a civil rights book.... Without a doubt, not only the very best film book [but] also one of the best books of the year in any genre. An absolutely essential read." --Shondaland This unprecedented history of Black cinemaexamines 100 years ofBlack movies--from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther--using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America.From the acclaimedauthor of The Butler and Showdown. Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation--which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood's first blockbuster--Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes. He makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and on what was represented on the screen: from Jim Crow and segregation to white flight and interracial relationships, from the assassination of Malcolm X, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to the Black Lives Matter movement. He considers the films themselves--including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, Porgy and Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Panther. And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary figures: Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy, Alex Haley, Spike Lee, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, among many others. An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.The Color of Kink by Ariane Cruz
Call Number: Gaines HQ 79 .C78 2016ISBN: 9781479827466Publication Date: 2016-10-04Winner of the MLA's 2016 Alan Bray Prize for Best Book in GLBTQ Studies How BDSM can be used as a metaphor for black female sexuality. The Color of Kink explores black women's representations and performances within American pornography and BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadism and masochism) from the 1930s to the present, revealing the ways in which they illustrate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power for black women. Based on personal interviews conducted with pornography performers, producers, and professional dominatrices, visual and textual analysis, and extensive archival research, Ariane Cruz reveals BDSM and pornography as critical sites from which to rethink the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. She explores how violence becomes not just a vehicle of pleasure but also a mode of accessing and contesting power. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Cruz argues that BDSM is a productive space from which to consider the complexity and diverseness of black women's sexual practice and the mutability of black female sexuality. Illuminating the cross-pollination of black sexuality and BDSM, The Color of Kink makes a unique contribution to the growing scholarship on racialized sexuality.Come to My Garden by Brittnay L. Proctor
Call Number: Gaines ML 420 .R583 P76 2023ISBN: 9781501379154Publication Date: 2022-11-03Come to My Garden (1970) introduced the world to Minnie Riperton, the solo artist. Minnie captivated listeners with her earth-shattering voice's uncanny ability to evoke melancholy and exultance. Born out of Charles Stepney's masterful composition and Richard Rudolph's attentive songwriting, the album fused a plethora of music genres. A blip in the universe of fusion music that would come to dominate the 1970s, Come to My Garden also featured the work of young bandleaders like Ramsey Lewis and Maurice White, thus bridging the divide between jazz and R&B. Despite fairly positive reviews of the album, even in its many re-releases, it never garnered critical attention. Minnie Riperton's Come to My Garden by Brittnay L. Proctor uses rare archival ephemera, the multiple re-issues of the album, interviews, cultural history, and personal narrative to outline how the revolutionary album came to be and its lasting impact on popular music of the post-soul era (the late 20th to the early 21st century).
Destructive Desires by Robert J. Patterson
Call Number: Gaines ML 3917 .U6 P37 2019ISBN: 9781978803589Publication Date: 2019-04-05Despite rhythm and blues culture's undeniable role in molding, reflecting, and reshaping black cultural production, consciousness, and politics, it has yet to receive the serious scholarly examination it deserves. Destructive Desires corrects this omission by analyzing how post-Civil Rights era rhythm and blues culture articulates competing and conflicting political, social, familial, and economic desires within and for African American communities. As an important form of black cultural production, rhythm and blues music helps us to understand black political and cultural desires and longings in light of neo-liberalism's increased codification in America's racial politics and policies since the 1970s. Robert J. Patterson provides a thorough analysis of four artists--Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, Adina Howard, Whitney Houston, and Toni Braxton--to examine black cultural longings by demonstrating how our reading of specific moments in their lives, careers, and performances serve as metacommentaries for broader issues in black culture and politics.The Dirty South by Valerie Cassel Oliver
Call Number: Ref Gaines N 6538 .B53 C372 2021ISBN: 9781934351192Publication Date: 2021-09-14This exhibition catalog to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse chronicles the pervasive visual and sonic parallels in the work of Black artists from the southern United States. It looks to contemporary southern hip-hop as a portal into the roots and aesthetic legacies that have shaped contemporary art from the 1920s to the present. It features multiple generations of both academically trained and "outsider" artists working in a variety of genres and disciplines, including Thornton Dial, Allison Janae Hamilton, Arthur Jafa, Jason Moran, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Sun Ra, Kara Walker, and William Edmondson. Creating a capacious understanding of southern expression in visual art, material culture, and music, this richly illustrated volume documents the exhibition's artworks and includes critical essays, poems, artist biographies, and an extended bibliography. The Dirty South will be on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts from May 22, 2021 to September 6, 2021. Contributors. Regina N. Bradley, Charlie R. Braxton, Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, Kirsten Pai Buick, Jennifer Burris, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Rhea Combs, Park McArthur, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Fred Moten, Anthony B. Pinn, Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Roger Reeves Published by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Distributed by Duke University PressDJ Screw by Lance Scott Walker
Call Number: Gaines ML 429 .D548 W35 2022ISBN: 9781477325131Publication Date: 2022-05-17DJ Screw, a.k.a. Robert Earl Davis Jr., changed rap and hip-hop forever. In the 1990s, in a spare room of his Houston home, he developed a revolutionary mixing technique known as chopped and screwed. Spinning two copies of a record, Screw would "chop" in new rhythms, bring in local rappers to freestyle over the tracks, and slow the recording down on tape. Soon Houstonians were lining up to buy his cassettes--he could sell thousands in a single day. Fans drove around town blasting his music, a sound that came to define the city's burgeoning and innovative rap culture. June 27 has become an unofficial city holiday, inspired by a legendary mix Screw made on that date. Lance Scott Walker has interviewed nearly everyone who knew Screw, from childhood friends to collaborators to aficionados who evangelized Screw's tapes--millions of which made their way around the globe--as well as the New York rap moguls who honored him. Walker brings these voices together with captivating details of Screw's craft and his world. More than the story of one man, DJ Screw is a history of the Houston scene as it came of age, full of vibrant moments and characters. But none can top Screw himself, a pioneer whose mystique has only grown in the two decades since his death.
Embodied Avatars by Uri McMillan
Call Number: Gaines NX 512.3 .A35 M39 2015ISBN: 9781479852475Publication Date: 2015-11-04How black women have personified art,expression,identity, and freedom through performance Winner, 2016 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, presented by the Modern Language Association for an outstanding scholarly study of African American literature or culture Winner, 2016 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, presented by the American Society for Theatre Research Winner, 2016 Errol Hill Award for outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, presented by the American Society for Theatre Research Tracing a dynamic genealogy of performance from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Uri McMillan contends that black women artists practiced a purposeful self- objectification, transforming themselves into art objects. In doing so, these artists raised new ways to ponder the intersections of art, performance, and black female embodiment. McMillan reframes the concept of the avatar in the service of black performance art, describing black women performers' skillful manipulation of synthetic selves and adroit projection of their performances into other representational mediums. A bold rethinking of performance art, Embodied Avatars analyzes daring performances of alterity staged by "ancient negress" Joice Heth and fugitive slave Ellen Craft, seminal artists Adrian Piper and Howardena Pindell, and contemporary visual and music artists Simone Leigh and Nicki Minaj. Fusing performance studies with literary analysis and visual culture studies, McMillan offers astute readings of performances staged in theatrical and quotidian locales, from freak shows to the streets of 1970s New York; in literary texts, from artists' writings to slave narratives; and in visual and digital mediums, including engravings, photography, and video art. Throughout, McMillan reveals how these performers manipulated the dimensions of objecthood, black performance art, and avatars in a powerful re-scripting of their bodies while enacting artful forms of social misbehavior. The Critical Lede interview with Uri McMillanEmbodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture by Lisa Woolfork
Call Number: Gaines E 441 .W89 2009ISBN: 9780252033902Publication Date: 2008-11-14This study explores contemporary novels, films, performances, and reenactments that depict American slavery and its traumatic effects by invoking a time-travel paradigm to produce a representational strategy of "bodily epistemology." Disrupting the prevailing view of traumatic knowledge that claims that traumatic events are irretrievable and accessible only through oblique reference, these novels and films circumvent the notion of indirect reference by depicting a replaying of the past, forcing present-day protagonists to witness and participate in traumatic histories that for them are neither dead nor past. Further, live performances and reenactments of slavery also rely on the time-travel motif (and the requisite suspension of disbelief) as a strategy to confront contemporary audiences with such spectacles as slave ship captivity, slave auctions, or a slave's decision to escape to freedom. As Lisa Woolfork cogently reveals, these cultural expressions indicate a concern that the traumatic meanings and consequences of American slavery have been lost to those living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Woolfork analyzes how these works deploy a representational strategy that challenges the divide between past and present, imparting to their re-creations of American slavery a physical and emotional energy to counter America's apathetic or amnesiac attitude about the trauma of the slave past.Everything Man by Shana L. Redmond
Call Number: Gaines E 185.97 .R63 R436 2020ISBN: 9781478006619Publication Date: 2020-01-10From his cavernous voice and unparalleled artistry to his fearless struggle for human rights, Paul Robeson was one of the twentieth century's greatest icons and polymaths. In Everything Man Shana L. Redmond traces Robeson's continuing cultural resonances in popular culture and politics. She follows his appearance throughout the twentieth century in the forms of sonic and visual vibration and holography; theater, art, and play; and the physical environment. Redmond thereby creates an imaginative cartography in which Robeson remains present and accountable to all those he inspired and defended. With her bold and unique theorization of antiphonal life, Redmond charts the possibility of continued communication, care, and collectivity with those who are dead but never gone.
Haunted Life by David Marriott
Call Number: Gaines P 94.5 .B55 M37 2007ISBN: 9780813540283Publication Date: 2007-03-27In Haunted Life, David Marriott examines the complex interplay between racial fears and anxieties and the political-visual cultures of suspicion and state terror. He compels readers to consider how media technologies are "haunted" by the phantom of racial slavery. Through examples from film and television, modernist literature, and philosophy, he shows how the ideological image of a brutal African past is endlessly recycled and how this perpetuation of historical catastrophe stokes our nation's race-conscious paranoia. Drawing on a range of comparative readings by writers, theorists, and filmmakers, including John Edgar Wideman, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Issac Julien, Alain Locke, and Sidney Poitier, Haunted Life is a bold and original exploration of the legacies of black visual culture and the political, deeply sexualized violence that lies buried beneath it.Hip Hop Heresies by Shanté Paradigm Smalls
Call Number: Gaines BH 301 .B53 S63 2022ISBN: 9781479808205Publication Date: 2022-06-28Winner : 2022-2023 New York City Book Awards! Unearths the queer aesthetic origins of NYC hip hop Hip Hop Heresies centers New York City as a space where vibrant queer, Black, and hip hop worlds collide and bond in dance clubs, schools, roller rinks, basketball courts, subways, and movie houses. Using this cultural nexus as the stage, Shanté Paradigm Smalls attends to the ways that hip hop cultural production in New York City from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century produced film, visual art, and music that offer queer articulations of race, gender, and sexuality. To illustrate New York City as a place of experimental aesthetic collaboration, Smalls brings four cultural moments to the forefront: the life and work of the gay Chinese American visual and graffiti artist Martin Wong, who brokered the relationship between New York City graffiti artists and gallery and museum spaces; the Brooklyn-based rapper-singer-writer-producer Jean Grae, one of the most prolific and underrated emcees of the last two decades; the iconic 1980s film The Last Dragon, which exemplifies the experimental and queer Black masculinity possible in early formal hip hop culture; and finally queer- and trans-identified hip hop artists and groups like BQE, Deepdickollective, and Hanifah Walidah, and the documentary Pick Up the Mic. Hip Hop Heresies transforms the landscape of hip hop scholarship, Black studies, and queer studies by bringing together these fields through the hermeneutic of aesthetics. Providing a guidepost for future scholarship on queer, trans, and feminist hip hop studies, Hip Hop Heresies takes seriously the work that New York City hip hop cultural production has done and will do, and advocates a form of hip hop that eschews authenticity in favor of performativity, bricolage, and pastiche.Hollywood Be Thy Name by Judith Weisenfeld
Call Number: Gaines PN 1995.9 .N4 W45 2007ISBN: 9780520251007Publication Date: 2007-06-08From the earliest years of sound film in America, Hollywood studios and independent producers of "race films" for black audiences created stories featuring African American religious practices. In the first book to examine how the movies constructed images of African American religion, Judith Weisenfeld explores these cinematic representations and how they reflected and contributed to complicated discourses about race, the social and moral requirements of American citizenship, and the very nature of American identity. Drawing on such textual sources as studio production files, censorship records, and discussions and debates about religion and film in the black press, as well as providing close readings of films, this richly illustrated and meticulously researched book brings religious studies and film history together in innovative ways.Horrible White People by Taylor Nygaard; Jorie Lagerwey
Call Number: Gaines PN 1992.8 .W47 N95 2020ISBN: 9781479805358Publication Date: 2020-11-24Examines the bleak television comedies that illustrate the obsession of the white left with its own anxiety and suffering At the same time that right-wing political figures like Donald Trump were elected and reactionary socio-economic policies like Brexit were voted into law, representations of bleakly comic white fragility spread across television screens. American and British programming that featured the abjection of young, middle-class, liberal white people--such as Broad City, Casual, You're the Worst, Catastrophe, Fleabag, and Transparent--proliferated to wide popular acclaim in the 2010s. Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey track how these shows of the white left, obsessed with its own anxiety and suffering, are complicit in the rise and maintenance of the far right--particularly in the mobilization, representation, and sustenance of structural white supremacy on television. Nygaard and Lagerwey examine a cycle of dark television comedies, the focus of which are "horrible white people," by putting them in conversation with similar upmarket comedies from creators and casts of color like Insecure, Atlanta, Dear White People, and Master of None. Through their analysis, they demonstrate the ways these non-white-centric shows negotiate prestige TV's dominant aesthetics of whiteness and push back against the centering of white suffering in a time of cultural crisis. Through the lens of media analysis and feminist cultural studies, Nygaard and Lagerwey's book opens up new ways of looking at contemporary television consumption--and the political, cultural, and social repercussions of these "horrible white people" shows, both on- and off-screen.How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind by La Marr Jurelle Bruce
Call Number: Gaines NX 512.3 .A35 B78 2021ISBN: 9781478010876Publication Date: 2021-06-18"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as "rage," and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. With care and verve, he explores the mad in the literature of Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; in the jazz repertoires of Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, and Charles Mingus; in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, and beyond. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes a set of interpretive practices, affective dispositions, political principles, and existential orientations that he calls "mad methodology." Ultimately, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness.
In Search of the Black Fantastic by Richard Iton
Call Number: Gaines E 185.625 .I76 2010ISBN: 9780199733606Publication Date: 2010-09-09*Winner of the 2009 Ralph J. Bunche Award**Named one of CHOICE 's "Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009"*Prior to the 1960s, when African Americans had little access to formal political power, black popular culture was commonly seen as a means of forging community and effecting political change.But as Richard Iton shows in this provocative and insightful volume, despite the changes brought about by the civil rights movement, and contrary to the wishes of those committed to narrower conceptions of politics, black artists have continued to play a significant role in the making andmaintenance of critical social spaces. Iton offers an original portrait of the relationship between popular culture and institutionalized politics tracing the connections between artists such as Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Pryor, Bob Marley and Erykah Badu and those individuals workingin the protest, electoral, and policy making arenas. With an emphasis on questions of class, gender and sexuality-and diaspora and coloniality-the author also illustrates how creative artists destabilize modern notions of the proper location of politics, and politics itself.Ranging from theatre to film, and comedy to literature and contemporary music, In Search of the Black Fantastic is an engaging and sophisticated examination of how black popular culture has challenged our understandings of the aesthetic and its relationship to politics.In the Break by Fred Moten
Call Number: Gaines E 185 .M895 2003ISBN: 9780816641000Publication Date: 2003-04-09Investigates the connections between jazz, sexual identity, and radical black politics In his controversial essay on white jazz musician Burton Greene, Amiri Baraka asserted that jazz was exclusively an African American art form and explicitly fused the idea of a black aesthetic with radical political traditions of the African diaspora. In the Break is an extended riff on "The Burton Greene Affair," exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance--culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself--is improvisation. For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten's concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other. Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, Moten's wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplines--semiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysis--to understand the politicized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Moten's ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical traditionI Wonder U by Adilifu Nama
Call Number: Gaines ML 420 .P974 N36 2020ISBN: 9781978805163Publication Date: 2019-11-15Featured in the 2020 Association of University Presses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show In 1993, Prince infamously changed his name to a unique, unpronounceable symbol. Yet this was only one of a long string of self-reinventions orchestrated by Prince as he refused to be typecast by the music industry's limiting definitions of masculinity and femininity, of straightness and queerness, of authenticity and artifice, or of black music and white music. Revealing how he continually subverted cultural expectations, I Wonder U examines the entirety of Prince's diverse career as a singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, record label mogul, movie star, and director. It shows how, by blending elements of R&B, rock, and new wave into an extremely videogenic package, Prince was able to overcome the color barrier that kept black artists off of MTV. Yet even at his greatest crossover success, he still worked hard to retain his credibility among black music fans. In this way, Adilifu Nama suggests, Prince was able to assert a distinctly black political sensibility while still being perceived as a unique musical genius whose appeal transcended racial boundaries.
Jazz Places by Kimberly Hannon Teal
Call Number: Gaines ML 3508 .H35 2021ISBN: 9780520303713Publication Date: 2021-06-15The social connotation of jazz in American popular culture has shifted dramatically since its emergence in the early twentieth century. Once considered youthful and even rebellious, jazz music is now a firmly established American artistic tradition. As jazz in American life has shifted, so too has the kind of venue in which it is performed. In Jazz Places, Kimberly Hannon Teal traces the history of jazz performance from private jazz clubs to public, high-art venues often associated with charitable institutions. As live jazz performance has become more closely tied to nonprofit institutions, the music's heritage has become increasingly important, serving as a means of defining jazz as a social good worthy of charitable support. Though different jazz spaces present jazz and its heritage in various and sometimes conflicting terms, ties between the music and the past play an important role in defining the value of present-day music in a diverse range of jazz venues, from the Village Vanguard in New York to SFJazz on the West Coast to Preservation Hall in New Orleans.
Listening to the Lomax Archive by Jonathan W. Stone
Call Number: Gaines ML 3556 .S874 2021ISBN: 9780472038558Publication Date: 2021-11-29In 1933, John A. Lomax and his son Alan set out as emissaries for the Library of Congress to record the folksong of the "American Negro" in several southern African American prisons. Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s asks how the Lomaxes' field recordings--including their prison recordings and a long-form oral history of jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton--contributed to a new mythology of Americana for a nation in the midst of financial, social, and identity crises. Stone argues that folksongs communicate complex historical experiences in a seemingly simple package, and can thus be a key element--a sonic rhetoric--for interpreting the ebb and flow of cultural ideals within contemporary historical moments. He contends that the Lomaxes, aware of the power of folk music, used the folksongs they collected to increase national understanding of and agency for the subjects of their recordings even as they used the recordings to advance their own careers. Listening to the Lomax Archive gives readers the opportunity to listen in on these seemingly contradictory dualities, demonstrating that they are crucial to the ways that we remember and write about the subjects of the Lomaxes' archive and other repositories of historicized sound. Throughout Listening to the Lomax Archive, there are a number of audio resources for readers to listen to, including songs, oral histories, and radio program excerpts. Each resource is marked with a ♫ in the text. Visit https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9871097#resources to access this audio content.A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib
Call Number: Gaines PN 1590 .B53 A23 2022ISBN: 9781984801197Publication Date: 2021-03-30NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * A sweeping, genre-bending "masterpiece" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) exploring Black art, music, and culture in all their glory and complexity--from Soul Train, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Whitney Houston, and Beyoncé ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Dallas Morning News, Publishers Weekly "Gorgeous essays that reveal the resilience, heartbreak, and joy within Black performance."--Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half "I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too." Inspired by these few words, spoken by Josephine Baker at the 1963 March on Washington, MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellow and bestselling author Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines--whether it's the twenty-seven seconds in "Gimme Shelter" in which Merry Clayton wails the words "rape, murder," a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt--has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib's own personal history of love, grief, and performance. Touching on Michael Jackson, Patti LaBelle, Billy Dee Williams, the Wu-Tan Clan, Dave Chappelle, and more, Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space--from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio. WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL AND THE GORDON BURN PRIZE * FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, Rolling Stone, Esquire, BuzzFeed, Thrillist, She Reads, BookRiot, BookPage, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, LitHub, Library Journal, BooklistLooking for Leroy by Mark Anthony Neal
Call Number: Gaines E 185.86 .N394 2013ISBN: 9780814758366Publication Date: 2013-04-22Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. Neal argues that black men and boys are bound, in profound ways, to and by their legibility. The most "legible" black male bodies are often rendered as criminal, bodies in need of policing and containment. Ironically, Neal argues, this sort of legibility brings welcome relief to white America, providing easily identifiable images of black men in an era defined by shifts in racial, sexual, and gendered identities. Neal highlights the radical potential of rendering legible black male bodies--those bodies that are all too real for us--as illegible, while simultaneously rendering illegible black male bodies--those versions of black masculinity that we can't believe are real--as legible. In examining figures such as hip-hop entrepreneur and artist Jay-Z, R&B Svengali R. Kelly, the late vocalist Luther Vandross, and characters from the hit HBO series The Wire, among others, Neal demonstrates how distinct representations of black masculinity can break the links in the public imagination that create antagonism toward black men. Looking for Leroy features close readings of contemporary black masculinity and popular culture, highlighting both the complexity and accessibility of black men and boys through visual and sonic cues within American culture, media, and public policy. By rendering legible the illegible, Neal maps the range of identifications and anxieties that have marked the performance and reception of post-Civil Rights era African American masculinity.
May We Forever Stand by Imani Perry
Call Number: Gaines ML 3561 .L54 P37 2021ISBN: 9781469666099Publication Date: 2021-10-01The twin acts of singing and fighting for freedom have been inseparable in African American history. May We Forever Stand tells an essential part of that story. With lyrics penned by James Weldon Johnson and music composed by his brother Rosamond, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" was embraced almost immediately as an anthem that captured the story and the aspirations of black Americans. Since the song's creation, it has been adopted by the NAACP and performed by countless artists in times of both crisis and celebration, cementing its place in African American life up through the present day. In this rich, poignant, and readable work, Imani Perry tells the story of the Black National Anthem as it traveled from South to North, from civil rights to black power, and from countless family reunions to Carnegie Hall and the Oval Office. Drawing on a wide array of sources, Perry uses "Lift Every Voice and Sing" as a window on the powerful ways African Americans have used music and culture to organize, mourn, challenge, and celebrate for more than a century.The Meaning of Soul by Emily J. Lordi
Call Number: Gaines ML 5337 .L67 2020ISBN: 9781478009597Publication Date: 2020-08-14In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices--inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs, and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such as Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and Minnie Riperton performed virtuosic survivorship and thus helped to galvanize black communities in an era of peril and promise. Their soul legacies were later reanimated by such stars as Prince, Solange Knowles, and Flying Lotus. Breaking with prior understandings of soul as a vague masculinist political formation tethered to the Black Power movement, Lordi offers a vision of soul that foregrounds the intricacies of musical craft, the complex personal and social meanings of the music, the dynamic movement of soul across time, and the leading role played by black women in this musical-intellectual tradition.Media and the Affective Life of Slavery by Allison Page
Call Number: Gaines P 96 .R3152 U673 2022ISBN: 9781517910402Publication Date: 2022-03-08How media shapes our actions and feelings about race Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas about how our feelings about race are governed and normalized by our media landscape. Allison Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism. From the classic television miniseries Roots to the edutainment video game Mission 2: Flight to Freedom and the popular website slaveryfootprint.org, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery provides an in-depth look at the capitalist and cultural artifacts that teach the U.S. public about slavery. Page theorizes media not only as a system of representation but also as a technology of citizenship and subjectivity, wherein race is seen as a problem to be solved. Ultimately, she argues that visual culture works through emotion, a powerful lever for shaping and managing racialized subjectivity. Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers compelling, provocative material and includes a wealth of archival research into such realms as news, entertainment, television, curricula, video games, and digital apps, providing new and innovative scholarship where none currently exists.
Pleasure in the News by Kim Gallon
Call Number: Gaines PN 4882.5 .G35 2020ISBN: 9780252085093Publication Date: 2020-05-25Critics often chastised the twentieth-century black press for focusing on sex and scandal rather than African American achievements. In Pleasure in the News, Kim Gallon takes an opposing stance--arguing that African American newspapers fostered black sexual expression, agency, and identity. Gallon discusses how journalists and editors created black sexual publics that offered everyday African Americans opportunities to discuss sexual topics that exposed class and gender tensions. While black churches and black schools often encouraged sexual restraint, the black press printed stories that complicated notions about respectability. Sensational coverage also expanded African American women's sexual consciousness and demonstrated the tenuous position of female impersonators, black gay men, and black lesbians in early twentieth African American urban communities. Informative and empowering, Pleasure in the News redefines the significance of the black press in African American history and advancement while shedding light on the important cultural and social role that sexuality played in the power of the black press.
The Queer Limit of Black Memory by Matt Richardson
Call Number: Gaines PN 56 .L45 R53 2013ISBN: 9780814252901Publication Date: 2016-06-01The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution identifies a new archive of Black women's literature that has heretofore been on the margins of literary scholarship and African diaspora cultural criticism. It argues that Black lesbian texts celebrate both the strategies of resistance used by queer Black subjects and the spaces for grieving the loss of queer Black subjects that dominant histories of the African diasporas often forget. Matt Richardson has gathered an understudied archive of texts by LaShonda Barnett, S. Diane Adamz-Bogus, Dionne Brand, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurinda D. Brown, Jewelle Gomez, Jackie Kay, and Cherry Muhanji in order to relocate the queerness of Black diasporic vernacular traditions, including drag or gender performance, blues, jazz, and West African spiritual and religious practices. Richardson argues that the vernacular includes queer epistemologies, or methods for accessing and exploring the realities of Black queer experience that other alternative archives and spaces of commemoration do not explore. The Queer Limit of Black Memory brings together several theorists whose work is vital within Black studies--Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Orlando Patterson--in service of queer readings of Black subjectivity.
Race Men by Hazel V. Carby
Call Number: Gaines E 185.86 .C297 1998ISBN: 9780674004047Publication Date: 2000-11-15Who are the "race men" standing for black America? It is a question Hazel Carby rejects, along with its long-standing assumption: that a particular type of black male can represent the race. A searing critique of definitions of black masculinity at work in American culture, Race Men shows how these defining images play out socially, culturally, and politically for black and white society--and how they exclude women altogether. Carby begins by looking at images of black masculinity in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Her analysis of The Souls of Black Folk reveals the narrow and rigid code of masculinity that Du Bois applied to racial achievement and advancement--a code that remains implicitly but firmly in place today in the work of celebrated African American male intellectuals. The career of Paul Robeson, the music of Huddie Ledbetter, and the writings of C. L. R. James on cricket and on the Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint L'Ouverture, offer further evidence of the social and political uses of representations of black masculinity. In the music of Miles Davis and the novels of Samuel R. Delany, Carby finds two separate but related challenges to conventions of black masculinity. Examining Hollywood films, she traces through the career of Danny Glover the development of a cultural narrative that promises to resolve racial contradictions by pairing black and white men--still leaving women out of the picture. A powerful statement by a major voice among black feminists, Race Men holds out the hope that by understanding how society has relied upon affirmations of masculinity to resolve social and political crises, we can learn to transcend them.Radical Vision by Soyica Diggs Colbert
Call Number: Gaines PS 3515 .A515 Z653 2021ISBN: 9780300264784Publication Date: 2022-02-08A "loving, lavishly detailed" (New York Times) and captivating portrait of Lorraine Hansberry's life, art, and political activism--one of O Magazine's best books of April 2021 "A devoted and deeply felt account of the development of an artist's mind."--Dave Itzkoff, New York Times Book Review (2021 Summer Reading issue) In this acclaimed biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Soyica Diggs Colbert narrates a life at the intersection of art and politics, arguing that for Hansberry the theater operated as a rehearsal room for her political and intellectual work. Celebrated for her play A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry was also the author of innovative journalism and of plays touching on slavery, interracial communities, and Black freedom movements. Hansberry was deeply involved in the Black freedom struggle during the Cold War and in the early civil rights movement, and here Colbert shows us an artist's life with the background of the Greenwich Village art scene in the 1960s, the homophile movement, Black diasporic freedom movements, and third-wave feminism. Drawing from Hansberry's papers, speeches, and interviews, this book provides a new point of entry in the history of Black radicalism, and a new perspective on Black women in mid-twentieth-century political movements.Rhymes in the Flow by Macklin Smith; Aurko Joshi
Call Number: Gaines PN 1059 .R5 S66 2020ISBN: 9780472053896Publication Date: 2020-07-16Despite its global popularity, rap has received little scholarly attention in terms of its poetic features. Rhymes in the Flow systematically analyzes the poetics (rap beats, rhythms, rhymes, verse and song structures) of many notable rap songs to provide new insights on rap artistry and performance. Defining and describing the features of what rappers commonly call flow, the authors establish a theory of the rap line as they trace rap's deepest roots and stylistic evolution--from Anglo-Saxon poetry to Lil Wayne--and contextualize its complex poetics. Rhymes in the Flow helps explain rap's wide appeal by focusing primarily on its rhythmic and thematic power, while also claiming its historical, cultural, musical, and poetic importance.Rihanna by Hilary McD Beckles (Editor); Heather D. Russell (Editor)
Call Number: Gaines ML 3930 .R44 R45 2015ISBN: 9789766405021Publication Date: 2015-03-31Rihanna is arguably the most commercially successful Caribbean artist in history. She is Barbadian and has been unwavering in publicly articulating her national and regional belonging. Still, there have been varied responses to Rihanna?s ascendancy, among both Barbadians and the wider Caribbean community. The responses reveal as much about our own national and regional anxieties as they do about the artist herself. The boundary-transgressing, cultural icon Rihanna is subject to anxieties about her body language and latitude from her global audiences as well; however, the essays in this collection purposely seek to de-centre the dominance of the Euro-American gaze, focusing instead on considerations of the Caribbean artist and her oeuvre from a Caribbean postcolonial corpus of academic inquiry. This collection brings together US- and Caribbean-based scholars to discuss issues of class, gender, sexuality, race, culture and economy. Using the concept of diasporic citizenship as a theoretical frame, the authors intervene in current questions of national and transnational circuits of exchange as they pertain to the commoditization and movement of culture, knowledge, values and identity. The contributors approach the subjects of Rihanna, globalization, gender and sexuality, commerce, transnationalism, Caribbean regionalism, and Barbadian national identity and development from different disciplinary and at times radically divergent perspectives. At the same time, they collectively work through the limitations, possibilities and promise of our best Caribbean imaginings.Rude Citizenship by Larisa Kingston Mann
Call Number: Gaines ML 3486 .J3 M36 2022ISBN: 9781469667249Publication Date: 2022-03-29In this deep dive into the Jamaican music world filled with the voices of creators, producers, and consumers, Larisa Kingston Mann--DJ, media law expert, and ethnographer--identifies how a culture of collaboration lies at the heart of Jamaican creative practices and legal personhood. In street dances, recording sessions, and global genres such as the riddim, notions of originality include reliance on shared knowledge and authorship as an interactive practice. In this context, musicians, music producers, and audiences are often resistant to conventional copyright practices. And this resistance, Mann shows, goes beyond cultural concerns. Because many working-class and poor people are cut off from the full benefits of citizenship on the basis of race, class, and geography, Jamaican music spaces are an important site of social commentary and political action in the face of the state's limited reach and neglect of social services and infrastructure. Music makers organize performance and commerce in ways that defy, though not without danger, state ordinances and intellectual property law and provide poor Jamaicans avenues for self-expression and self-definition that are closed off to them in the wider society. In a world shaped by coloniality, how creators relate to copyright reveals how people will play outside, within, and through the limits of their marginalization.
Songs in the Key of Black Life by Mark Anthony Neal
Call Number: Gaines ML 3521 .N42 2003ISBN: 9780415965712Publication Date: 2003-05-16First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.Sounding Like a No-No by Francesca T. Royster
Call Number: Gaines ML 3918 .P67 R69 2013ISBN: 9780472051793Publication Date: 2012-12-26Sounding Like a No-No traces a rebellious spirit in post-civil rights black music by focusing on a range of offbeat, eccentric, queer, or slippery performances by leading musicians influenced by the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights, black nationalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, who through reinvention created a repertoire of performances that have left a lasting mark on popular music. The book's innovative readings of performers including Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, and Meshell Ndegeocello demonstrate how embodied sound and performance became a means for creativity, transgression, and social critique, a way to reclaim imaginative and corporeal freedom from the social death of slavery and its legacy of racism, to engender new sexualities and desires, to escape the sometimes constrictive codes of respectability and uplift from within the black community, and to make space for new futures for their listeners. The book's perspective on music as a form of black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.Soundtrack to a Movement by Richard Brent Turner
Call Number: Gaines ML 3918 .J39 T87 2021ISBN: 9781479806768Publication Date: 2021-04-27**FINALIST for the 2022 PROSE Award in Music & the Performing Arts** **Certificate of Merit, Best Historical Research on Recorded Jazz, given by the 2022 Association for Recorded Sounds Collection Awards for Excellence in Historical Sound Research** Explores how jazz helped propel the rise of African American Islam during the era of global Black liberation Amid the social change and liberation of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp recorded a tribute to Malcolm X's emancipatory political consciousness. Shepp saw similarities between his revolutionary hero and John Coltrane, one of the most influential jazz musicians of the era. Later, the esteemed trumpeter Miles Davis echoed Shepp's sentiment, recognizing that Coltrane's music represented the very passion, rage, rebellion, and love that Malcolm X preached. Soundtrack to a Movement examines the link between the revolutionary Black Islam of the post-WWII generation and jazz music. It argues that from the late 1940s and '50s though the 1970s, Islam rose in prominence among African Americans in part because of the embrace of the religion among jazz musicians. The book demonstrates that the values that Islam and jazz shared--Black affirmation, freedom, and self-determination--were key to the growth of African American Islamic communities, and that it was jazz musicians who led the way in shaping encounters with Islam as they developed a Black Atlantic "cool" that shaped both Black religion and jazz styles. Soundtrack to a Movement demonstrates how by expressing their values through the rejection of systemic racism, the construction of Black notions of masculinity and femininity, and the development of an African American religious internationalism, both jazz musicians and Black Muslims engaged with a global Black consciousness and interconnected resistance movements in the African diaspora and Africa.Southern Accent by Miranda Lash (Editor); Trevor Schoonmaker (Editor)
Call Number: Ref Gaines N 6520 .S64 2016ISBN: 9780938989387Publication Date: 2016-09-01Featuring the work of sixty artists and including 300 illustrations, the catalog Southern Accent accompanies a major contemporary art exhibition that questions and explores the complex and contested space of the American South. This unprecedented exhibition investigates the many realities, fantasies, and myths of the South that have long captured the public's imagination, while presenting a wide range of perspectives that create a composite portrait of southern identity through contemporary art. It looks at the South as an open-ended question and concept in itself by encompassing a broad spectrum of media and approaches, demonstrating that southernness is more of a shared sensibility than any one definable culture or style. While the exhibition includes artwork from the 1950s to the present, it primarily focuses on the past thirty-five years. With numerous contributions by artists, scholars, musicians, and poets, a music-listening library, and a timeline of scholarship on southern art, this catalog redefines the way we look at the South in contemporary art. Southern Accent will be on display at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from September 1, 2016 to January 8, 2017 and at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, from April 29, 2017, to August 20, 2017. Contributors. Diego Camposeco, Mel Chin, Brittney Cooper, John T. Edge, William Fagaly, Carter Foster, Brendan Greaves, Harrison Haynes, Patterson Hood, Miranda Lash, Ada Limón, Mark Anthony Neal, Catherine Opie, Fahamu Pecou, Richard J. Powell, Tom Rankin, Dario Robleto, Trevor Schoonmaker, Bradley Sumrall, Natasha Trethewey, Kara Walker, Jeff Whetstone Selected Artists: Walter Inglis Anderson, Benny Andrews, Radcliffe Bailey, Romare Bearden, Sanford Biggers, Mel Chin, William Christenberry, Robert Colescott, William Cordova, Thorton Dial, Sam Durant, William Eggleston, Minnie Evans, Howard Finster, Theaster Gates, Jeffrey Gibson, Deborah Grant, Barkley L. Hendricks, James Herbert with R.E.M., Birney Imes, George Jenne, Deborah Luster, Kerry James Marshall, Jing Niu, Tameka Norris, Catherine Opie, Gordon Parks, Ebony G. Patterson, Dario Robleto, Xaviera Simmons, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Carrie Mae Weems Publication of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke UniversitySpace Is the Place by John Szwed
Call Number: Gaines ML 410 .S978 S73 2020ISBN: 9781478008415Publication Date: 2020-05-15Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra--aka Herman Blount--was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn. He recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto-space costumes, played everything from boogie-woogie and swing to fusion and free jazz. John Szwed's Space is the Place is the definitive biography of this musical polymath, who was one of the twentieth century's greatest avant-garde artists and intellectuals. Charting the whole of Sun Ra's life and career, Szwed outlines how after years in Chicago as a blues and swing band pianist, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters by performing music with the Arkestra that was as vital and innovative as it was mercurial and confounding. Szwed's readers--whether they are just discovering Sun Ra or are among the legion of poets, artists, intellectuals, and musicians who consider him a spiritual godfather--will find that, indeed, space is the place.Sporting Blackness by Samantha N. Sheppard
Call Number: Gaines PN 1995.9 .S67 S54 2020ISBN: 9780520307797Publication Date: 2020-06-16Sporting Blackness examines issues of race and representation in sports films, exploring what it means to embody, perform, play out, and contest blackness by representations of Black athletes on screen. By presenting new critical terms, Sheppard analyzes not only "skin in the game," or how racial representation shapes the genre's imagery, but also "skin in the genre," or the formal consequences of blackness on the sport film genre's modes, codes, and conventions. Through a rich interdisciplinary approach, Sheppard argues that representations of Black sporting bodies contain "critical muscle memories": embodied, kinesthetic, and cinematic histories that go beyond a film's plot to index, circulate, and reproduce broader narratives about Black sporting and non-sporting experiences in American society.Stare in the Darkness by Lester K. Spence
Call Number: Gaines E 185.86 .S687 2011ISBN: 9780816669882Publication Date: 2011-06-01Rap's critique of police brutality in the 1980s. The Hip Hop Political Convention. The rise (and fall) of Kwame Kilpatrick, the "hip-hop mayor" of Detroit. Barack Obama echoing the body language of Jay-Z on the campaign trail. A growing number of black activists and artists claim that rap and hip-hop are the basis of an influential new urban social movement. Simultaneously, black citizens evince concern with the effect that rap and hip-hop culture exerts on African American communities. According to a recent Pew survey conducted on the opinions of Black Americans, 71 percent of blacks think that rap is a bad influence. To what extent are African American hopes and fears about hip-hop's potential political power justified? In Stare in the Darkness, Lester K. Spence answers this question using a blend of neoliberal analysis, survey data, experiments, and case studies. Spence finds that rap does in fact influence black political attitudes. However, rap also reproduces rather than critiques neoliberal ideology. Furthermore, black activists seeking to create an innovative model of hip-hop politics are hamstrung by their reliance on outmoded forms of organizing. By considering the possibilities inherent in the most prolific and prominent activities of hip-hop politics, Stare in the Darkness reveals, in a clear and practical manner, the political consequences of rap culture for black publics.Sun Ra's Chicago by William Sites
Call Number: Gaines ML 410 .S978 S58 2020ISBN: 9780226732107Publication Date: 2020-12-21Sun Ra (1914-93) was one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his Arkestra appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, the keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology that claimed the planet Saturn as his true home. In Sun Ra's Chicago, William Sites brings this visionary musician back to earth--specifically to the city's South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 he lived and relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold "dream-book bibles," and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources--from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica--to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra's Chicago shows that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city--and that by excavating the postwar black experience of Sun Ra's South Side milieu, we can come to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways.
A Taste for Brown Sugar by Mireille Miller-Young
Call Number: Gaines PN 1995.9 .S45 M55 2014ISBN: 9780822358282Publication Date: 2014-12-08A Taste for Brown Sugar boldly takes on representations of black women's sexuality in the porn industry. It is based on Mireille Miller-Young's extensive archival research and her interviews with dozens of women who have worked in the adult entertainment industry since the 1980s. The women share their thoughts about desire and eroticism, black women's sexuality and representation, and ambition and the need to make ends meet. Miller-Young documents their interventions into the complicated history of black women's sexuality, looking at individual choices, however small--a costume, a gesture, an improvised line--as small acts of resistance, of what she calls "illicit eroticism." Building on the work of other black feminist theorists, and contributing to the field of sex work studies, she seeks to expand discussion of black women's sexuality to include their eroticism and desires, as well as their participation and representation in the adult entertainment industry. Miller-Young wants the voices of black women sex workers heard, and the decisions they make, albeit often within material and industrial constraints, recognized as their own.Tear down the Walls by Patrick Burke
Call Number: Gaines ML 3917 .U6 B87 2021ISBN: 9780226768212Publication Date: 2021-05-10From the earliest days of rock and roll, white artists regularly achieved fame, wealth, and success that eluded the Black artists whose work had preceded and inspired them. This dynamic continued into the 1960s, even as the music and its fans grew to be more engaged with political issues regarding race. In Tear Down the Walls, Patrick Burke tells the story of white American and British rock musicians' engagement with Black Power politics and African American music during the volatile years of 1968 and 1969. The book sheds new light on a significant but overlooked facet of 1960s rock--white musicians and audiences casting themselves as political revolutionaries by enacting a romanticized vision of African American identity. These artists' attempts to cast themselves as revolutionary were often naïve, misguided, or arrogant, but they could also reflect genuine interest in African American music and culture and sincere investment in anti-racist politics. White musicians such as those in popular rock groups Jefferson Airplane, the Rolling Stones, and the MC5, fascinated with Black performance and rhetoric, simultaneously perpetuated a long history of racial appropriation and misrepresentation and made thoughtful, self-aware attempts to respectfully present African American music in forms that white leftists found politically relevant. In Tear Down the Walls Patrick Burke neither condemns white rock musicians as inauthentic nor elevates them as revolutionary. The result is a fresh look at 1960s rock that provides new insight into how popular music both reflects and informs our ideas about race and how white musicians and activists can engage meaningfully with Black political movements.Technicolored by Ann duCille
Call Number: Gaines PN 1992.8 .A34 D83 2018ISBN: 9781478000488Publication Date: 2018-09-14From early sitcoms such as I Love Lucy to contemporary prime-time dramas like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, African Americans on television have too often been asked to portray tired stereotypes of blacks as villains, vixens, victims, and disposable minorities. In Technicolored black feminist critic Ann duCille combines cultural critique with personal reflections on growing up with the new medium of TV to examine how televisual representations of African Americans have changed over the last sixty years. Whether explaining how watching Shirley Temple led her to question her own self-worth or how televisual representation functions as a form of racial profiling, duCille traces the real-life social and political repercussions of the portrayal and presence of African Americans on television. Neither a conventional memoir nor a traditional media study, Technicolored offers one lifelong television watcher's careful, personal, and timely analysis of how television continues to shape notions of race in the American imagination.Textures by Kent State University Museum; Tameka Ellington (Editor); Joseph L. Underwood (Editor)
Call Number: Ref Gaines NX 650 .H34 T39 2020ISBN: 9783777435541Publication Date: 2020-10-22TEXTURES synthesises research in history, fashion, art, and visual culture to reassess the "hair story" of peoples of African descent. A fraught topic for African-Americans and others in the Diaspora, artists, barbers, and activists address the topic of Black hair,both the historical perceptions and its ramifications for self and society today. TEXTURES explores the breadth of Black artists' perspectives on hair vis-à-vis beauty, pride, and politics. Barbers and activists address Black hair, from historical perceptions to its challenges today. Combs, products, and implements from the collection of hair pioneer Willie Morrow are paired with masterworks from artists like David Hammons, Sonya Clark, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, and Alison Saar. The exhibition & catalogue are inspired by Drs. Ellington and Underwood who research preferential treatment of straight hair, the social hierarchies of skin, and the power and politics of display.Thelonious Monk by Robin D. G. Kelley
Call Number: Gaines ML 417 .M846 K46 2010ISBN: 9781439190463Publication Date: 2010-11-02From the mind of brilliant historian Robin Kelley comes the first full biography of legendary jazz musician Thelonious Monk, including full access to the family's archives, dozens of interviews, and an afterword for Monk's 2017 centennial. Thelonious Monk is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist's struggle to "make it" without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers. Elegantly written and rich with humor and pathos, Thelonious Monk is the definitive work on modern jazz's most original composer.They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib; Eve L. Ewing (Foreword by)
Call Number: Gaines PS 3623 .I57748 A6 2017ISBN: 9781937512651Publication Date: 2017-11-07* 2018 "12 best books to give this holiday season" --TODAY (Elizabeth Acevedo) * A "Best Book of 2017" --Rolling Stone(2018), NPR, Buzzfeed,Paste Magazine,Esquire,Chicago Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, CBC,Stereogum, National Post,Entropy, Heavy, Book Riot,Chicago Review of Books,The Los Angeles Review,Michigan Daily * American Booksellers Association (ABA) 'December 2017 Indie Next List Great Reads' * Midwest Indie Bestseller In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly. In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls how he sought refuge as a teenager in music, at shows, and wonders whether the next generation of young Muslims will not be afforded that opportunity now. While discussing the everyday threat to the lives of Black Americans, Abdurraqib recounts the first time he was ordered to the ground by police officers: for attempting to enter his own car. In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others--along with original, previously unreleased essays--Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.Trash Talk by Patricia A. Turner
Call Number: Gaines P 96 .R862 U6 2022ISBN: 9780520389243Publication Date: 2022-09-06What racist rumors about Barack Obama tell us about the intractability of racism in American politics. Barack Obama and his family have been the objects of rumors, legends, and conspiracy theories unprecedented in US politics. Outbreaks of anti-Obama lore have occurred in every national election cycle since 2004 and continue to the present day--two elections after his presidency ended. In Trash Talk, folklorist Patricia A. Turner examines how these thought patterns have grown ever more vitriolic and persistent and what this means for American political culture. Through the lens of attacks on Obama, Trash Talk explores how racist tropes circulate and gain currency. As internet communications expand in reach, rumors and conspiracy theories have become powerful political tools, and new types of lore like the hoax and fake news have taken root. The mainstream press and political establishment dismissed anti-Obama mythology for years, registering concern only when it became difficult to deny how much power those who circulated it could command. Trash Talk demonstrates that the ascendancy of Barack Obama was never a signal of a postracial America.Trying to Get Over by Keith Corson
Call Number: Gaines PN 1995.9 .N4 C623 2016ISBN: 9781477309087Publication Date: 2016-03-22From 1972 to 1976, Hollywood made an unprecedented number of films targeted at black audiences. But following this era known as "blaxploitation," the momentum suddenly reversed for black filmmakers, and a large void separates the end of blaxploitation from the black film explosion that followed the arrival of Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It in 1986. Illuminating an overlooked era in African American film history, Trying to Get Over is the first in-depth study of black directors working during the decade between 1977 and 1986. Keith Corson provides a fresh definition of blaxploitation, lays out a concrete reason for its end, and explains the major gap in African American representation during the years that followed. He focuses primarily on the work of eight directors--Michael Schultz, Sidney Poitier, Jamaa Fanaka, Fred Williamson, Gilbert Moses, Stan Lathan, Richard Pryor, and Prince--who were the only black directors making commercially distributed films in the decade following the blaxploitation cycle. Using the careers of each director and the twenty-four films they produced during this time to tell a larger story about Hollywood and the shifting dialogue about race, power, and access, Corson shows how these directors are a key part of the continuum of African American cinema and how they have shaped popular culture over the past quarter century.
Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body by Cassandra Jackson
Call Number: Gaines NX 652 .A37 J33 2011ISBN: 9780415851978Publication Date: 2013-06-24From early photographs of disfigured slaves to contemporary representations of bullet-riddled rappers, images of wounded black men have long permeatedAmerican culture. While scholars have fittingly focused on the ever-present figure of the hypermasculine black male, little consideration has been paid to the wounded black man as a persistent cultural figure. This book considers images of wounded black men on various stages, including early photography, contemporary art, hip hop, and new media. Focusing primarily on photographic images, Jackson explores the wound as a specular moment that mediates power relations between seers and the seen. Historically, the representation of wounded black men has privileged the viewer in service of white supremacist thought. At the same time, contemporary artists have deployed the figure to expose and disrupt this very power paradigm.Jackson suggests that the relationship between the viewer and the viewed is not so much static as fluid, and that wounds serve as intricate negotiations of power structures that cannot always be simplified into the condensed narratives of victims and victimizers.Overall, Jacksonattempts to address both the ways in which the wound has been exploited to patrol and contain black masculinity, as well as the ways in which twentieth century artists have represented the wound to disrupt its oppressive implications
Why Labelle Matters by Adele Bertei
Call Number: Gaines ML 421 .L33 B23 2021ISBN: 9781477320402Publication Date: 2021-03-23Finalist, 2022 Lesbian Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Award for Arts and Culture Crafting a legacy all their own, the reinvented Labelle subverted the "girl group" aesthetic to invoke the act's Afrofuturist spirit and make manifest their vision of Black womanhood. Performing as the Bluebelles in the 1960s, Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash wore bouffant wigs and chiffon dresses, and they harmonized vocals like many other girl groups of the era. After a decade on the Chitlin Circuit, however, they were ready to write their own material, change their name, and deliver--as Labelle--an electrifyingly celestial sound and styling that reached a crescendo with a legendary performance at the Metropolitan Opera House to celebrate the release of Nightbirds and its most well-known track, "Lady Marmalade." In Why Labelle Matters, Adele Bertei tells the story of the group that sang the opening aria of Afrofuturism and proclaimed a new theology of musical liberation for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people across the globe. With sumptuous and galactic costumes, genre-bending lyrics, and stratospheric vocals, Labelle's out-of-this-world performances changed the course of pop music and made them the first Black group to grace the cover of Rolling Stone. Why Labelle Matters, informed by interviews with members of the group as well as Bertei's own experience as a groundbreaking musician, is the first cultural assessment of this transformative act.Why Solange Matters by Stephanie Phillips
Call Number: Gaines ML 420 .S67957 P55 2021ISBN: 9781477320082Publication Date: 2021-04-20Growing up in the shadow of her superstar sister, Solange Knowles became a pivotal musician in her own right. Defying an industry that attempted to bend her to its rigid image of a Black woman, Solange continually experimented with her sound and embarked on a metamorphosis in her art that continues to this day. In Why Solange Matters, Stephanie Phillips chronicles the creative journey of an artist who became a beloved voice for the Black Lives Matter generation. A Black feminist punk musician herself, Phillips addresses not only the unpredictable trajectory of Solange Knowles's career but also how she and other Black women see themselves through the musician's repertoire. First, she traces Solange's progress through an inflexible industry, charting the artist's development up to 2016, when the release of her third album, A Seat at the Table, redefined her career. Then, with A Seat at the Table and 2019's When I Get Home, Phillips describes how Solange embraced activism, anger, Black womanhood, and intergenerational trauma to inform her remarkable art. Why Solange Matters not only cements the place of its subject in the pantheon of world-changing twenty-first century musicians, it introduces its writer as an important new voice.