A. W. Johnson
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780198117599
- eISBN:
- 9780191671005
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117599.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
D. J. Gordon claims that the central conceit of the masque is to build a complex emblem of Union which binds the theme of love as a harmonizing power within the body to a local event (marriage), a ...
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D. J. Gordon claims that the central conceit of the masque is to build a complex emblem of Union which binds the theme of love as a harmonizing power within the body to a local event (marriage), a national event (the unification of Scotland and England under James and Anne – who were both present at the masque), and to the larger Neoplatonic theme of love as a force holding the macrocosm together. Orrell is able to take the idea further by suggesting that Jonson's proportioning of line numbers enacts a ‘principle of consonance’ underlying the whole work. He does not, however, explore the aesthetic consequences of this newly found structural integrity or investigate the dynamic interplay of different number levels that may be discovered in the masque. This chapter first considers these matters in more detail and then examines the structural kinship that binds Hymenaei to The Haddington Masque, The Masque of Beauty, and The Masque of Blackness.Less
D. J. Gordon claims that the central conceit of the masque is to build a complex emblem of Union which binds the theme of love as a harmonizing power within the body to a local event (marriage), a national event (the unification of Scotland and England under James and Anne – who were both present at the masque), and to the larger Neoplatonic theme of love as a force holding the macrocosm together. Orrell is able to take the idea further by suggesting that Jonson's proportioning of line numbers enacts a ‘principle of consonance’ underlying the whole work. He does not, however, explore the aesthetic consequences of this newly found structural integrity or investigate the dynamic interplay of different number levels that may be discovered in the masque. This chapter first considers these matters in more detail and then examines the structural kinship that binds Hymenaei to The Haddington Masque, The Masque of Beauty, and The Masque of Blackness.
Laura Harris
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823279784
- eISBN:
- 9780823281480
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823279784.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, James and Oiticica, Harris chart a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, ...
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Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, James and Oiticica, Harris chart a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the “undocuments” that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, Harris argue that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica’s experiments recall the insurgent sociality of “the motley crew” historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James’s and Oiticica’s projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker’s inability to find evidence of that sociality’s persistence or futurity, Harris show how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew’s multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James’s and Oiticica’s undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.Less
Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, James and Oiticica, Harris chart a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the “undocuments” that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, Harris argue that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica’s experiments recall the insurgent sociality of “the motley crew” historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James’s and Oiticica’s projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker’s inability to find evidence of that sociality’s persistence or futurity, Harris show how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew’s multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James’s and Oiticica’s undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.
Ashon T. Crawley
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823274543
- eISBN:
- 9780823274598
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823274543.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Sociology of Religion
Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective, social intellectual practice. Engaging black studies, queer ...
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Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective, social intellectual practice. Engaging black studies, queer theory, sound studies, literary theory, theological studies, continental philosophy, and visual studies, Blackpentecostal Breath analyses the ways otherwise modes of existence are disruptions of marginalization and violence. The immediate objects of study Blackpentecostal Breath engages are the aesthetic practices—whooping, shouting, noise-making and speaking in tongues—found in Blackpentecostalism, a multiracial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect that has one strand of its modern genesis in 1906, Los Angeles, California. Blackpentecostal Breath argues that the aesthetic practices of Blackpentecostalism constitute a performative critique of normative theology and philosophy that precede the twentieth-century moment. These performances constitute an atheological-aphilosophical project, produced against the desires and aspirations for the liberal subject of modern theological-philosophical thought. In contradistinction to the desire for subjectivity, Blackpentecostal Breath theorizes the extra-subjective mode of being together that is the condition of emergence for otherwise worlds of possibility. These choreographic, sonic, and visual aesthetic practices and sensual experiences are not only important objects of study for those interested in alternative modes of social organization, but they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture.Less
Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective, social intellectual practice. Engaging black studies, queer theory, sound studies, literary theory, theological studies, continental philosophy, and visual studies, Blackpentecostal Breath analyses the ways otherwise modes of existence are disruptions of marginalization and violence. The immediate objects of study Blackpentecostal Breath engages are the aesthetic practices—whooping, shouting, noise-making and speaking in tongues—found in Blackpentecostalism, a multiracial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect that has one strand of its modern genesis in 1906, Los Angeles, California. Blackpentecostal Breath argues that the aesthetic practices of Blackpentecostalism constitute a performative critique of normative theology and philosophy that precede the twentieth-century moment. These performances constitute an atheological-aphilosophical project, produced against the desires and aspirations for the liberal subject of modern theological-philosophical thought. In contradistinction to the desire for subjectivity, Blackpentecostal Breath theorizes the extra-subjective mode of being together that is the condition of emergence for otherwise worlds of possibility. These choreographic, sonic, and visual aesthetic practices and sensual experiences are not only important objects of study for those interested in alternative modes of social organization, but they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture.
Terrence L. Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195383980
- eISBN:
- 9780199897469
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195383980.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religion
Contemporary debates on the role of religion in American public life ignore the overlap between religion and race in the formation of American democratic traditions and more often than not imagine ...
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Contemporary debates on the role of religion in American public life ignore the overlap between religion and race in the formation of American democratic traditions and more often than not imagine democracy within the terrain of John Rawls’s political liberalism. This kind of political liberalism, which focuses on political commitments at the expense of our religious beliefs, fosters the necessary conditions to open historically closed doors to black bodies, allows blacks to sit at the King’s table and creates the necessary safeguards for black protest against discrimination within a constitutional democracy. By implication of its emphasis on rights and inclusion, political liberalism assumes that the presence of black bodies signifies the materialization of a robust American democracy. However, political liberalism discounts the historical role of religion in forming and fashioning the nation’s construction of race. This book argues that the collision between religion and politics during U.S. slavery and segregation created the fragments from which emerged a firm but shifting moral disdain for blackness within the nation’s collective moral imagination. The very problem political liberals want to avoid, our comprehensive philosophy, is central to solving the moral crisis facing democracy.Less
Contemporary debates on the role of religion in American public life ignore the overlap between religion and race in the formation of American democratic traditions and more often than not imagine democracy within the terrain of John Rawls’s political liberalism. This kind of political liberalism, which focuses on political commitments at the expense of our religious beliefs, fosters the necessary conditions to open historically closed doors to black bodies, allows blacks to sit at the King’s table and creates the necessary safeguards for black protest against discrimination within a constitutional democracy. By implication of its emphasis on rights and inclusion, political liberalism assumes that the presence of black bodies signifies the materialization of a robust American democracy. However, political liberalism discounts the historical role of religion in forming and fashioning the nation’s construction of race. This book argues that the collision between religion and politics during U.S. slavery and segregation created the fragments from which emerged a firm but shifting moral disdain for blackness within the nation’s collective moral imagination. The very problem political liberals want to avoid, our comprehensive philosophy, is central to solving the moral crisis facing democracy.
Sharon Luk
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520296237
- eISBN:
- 9780520968820
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520296237.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This book explores the life-worlds sustained through letter correspondence within the evolution of racism and mass incarceration in California history. Across three cases, this investigation uncovers ...
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This book explores the life-worlds sustained through letter correspondence within the evolution of racism and mass incarceration in California history. Across three cases, this investigation uncovers how letter correspondence facilitates a form of communal life for groups targeted for racialized confinement in different phases of development in the U.S. West: “Detained” focuses on migrants from Southern China during peak years of U.S. Chinese Exclusion; “Interned” focuses on families of Japanese ancestry during the WWII period; and “Imprisoned” focuses on socialities of Blackness in the post-Civil Rights era. This study clarifies how mass incarceration functions as a process of systematic social dismantling, situating research on letters within global capitalist movements, multiple racial logics, and overlapping modes of social control that have taken distinctive form in California. Framing letters within this political violence that qualifies them, this book examines how the structural, physical, ideological, and affective labor internalized in the letter creates alternative conditions to reinvent people’s own ways of life: a “poetics” or art of becoming, mediated in and through the letter and the interaction of literature with history, that prioritizes the dynamics of creative essence to generate an other kind of social power bound to the unfathomable.Less
This book explores the life-worlds sustained through letter correspondence within the evolution of racism and mass incarceration in California history. Across three cases, this investigation uncovers how letter correspondence facilitates a form of communal life for groups targeted for racialized confinement in different phases of development in the U.S. West: “Detained” focuses on migrants from Southern China during peak years of U.S. Chinese Exclusion; “Interned” focuses on families of Japanese ancestry during the WWII period; and “Imprisoned” focuses on socialities of Blackness in the post-Civil Rights era. This study clarifies how mass incarceration functions as a process of systematic social dismantling, situating research on letters within global capitalist movements, multiple racial logics, and overlapping modes of social control that have taken distinctive form in California. Framing letters within this political violence that qualifies them, this book examines how the structural, physical, ideological, and affective labor internalized in the letter creates alternative conditions to reinvent people’s own ways of life: a “poetics” or art of becoming, mediated in and through the letter and the interaction of literature with history, that prioritizes the dynamics of creative essence to generate an other kind of social power bound to the unfathomable.
Andrea J. Queeley
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813061092
- eISBN:
- 9780813051376
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813061092.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
During Cuba’s Special Period, the children and grandchildren of early twentieth-century British West Indian immigrants spearheaded the revitalization of Anglo-Caribbean Cuban institutions and ...
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During Cuba’s Special Period, the children and grandchildren of early twentieth-century British West Indian immigrants spearheaded the revitalization of Anglo-Caribbean Cuban institutions and community. By turning an ethnographic lens on those black Cubans in Santiago and Guantánamo who were moved to “rescue their roots” nearly seventy years after the bulk of immigrants arrived in Cuba, this book provides insight into racial politics in revolutionary Cuba and, more importantly, into local and regional identity formations that can emerge from intra-Caribbean migration. Andrea Queeley argues that, in addition to seeking out transnational connections in the hope of getting material support through difficult times, Anglo-Caribbean Cubans drew upon a narrative of respectable Blackness in order to challenge the associations of Blackness, inferiority, and immorality that were compounded by racialized inequality resulting from economic reform. Engaging scholarship on diaspora and subject formation, Queeley’s examination of a diaspora within a diaspora provides a window onto strategies and modes of Black belonging that shift across time, space, and place.Less
During Cuba’s Special Period, the children and grandchildren of early twentieth-century British West Indian immigrants spearheaded the revitalization of Anglo-Caribbean Cuban institutions and community. By turning an ethnographic lens on those black Cubans in Santiago and Guantánamo who were moved to “rescue their roots” nearly seventy years after the bulk of immigrants arrived in Cuba, this book provides insight into racial politics in revolutionary Cuba and, more importantly, into local and regional identity formations that can emerge from intra-Caribbean migration. Andrea Queeley argues that, in addition to seeking out transnational connections in the hope of getting material support through difficult times, Anglo-Caribbean Cubans drew upon a narrative of respectable Blackness in order to challenge the associations of Blackness, inferiority, and immorality that were compounded by racialized inequality resulting from economic reform. Engaging scholarship on diaspora and subject formation, Queeley’s examination of a diaspora within a diaspora provides a window onto strategies and modes of Black belonging that shift across time, space, and place.
Andrea J. Queeley
John M. Kirk (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813061092
- eISBN:
- 9780813051376
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813061092.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
In chapter 4, Queeley proposes that the construction and maintenance of a respectable Blackness, rooted in civilizational discourse, is an alternative to ideologies of race mixture and whitening. Its ...
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In chapter 4, Queeley proposes that the construction and maintenance of a respectable Blackness, rooted in civilizational discourse, is an alternative to ideologies of race mixture and whitening. Its persistence in the contemporary period points to the local impact of globalized inequalities, as well as to the ways in which revolutionary society fell short of its objective to eliminate racism. The respectable Blackness construct also illustrates the asymmetries that characterize assertions of diasporic subjectivity. Narratives of Anglo-Caribbean Cuban cultural citizenship and experiences of racism open a window onto how and under what conditions these asymmetries are reproduced. Chapter 4 analyzes these narratives and, incorporating reflexive ethnography, concludes by envisioning more productive ways of affirming Blackness that do not fall prey to racial and cultural discourses of mixture, hybridity, or essentialism.Less
In chapter 4, Queeley proposes that the construction and maintenance of a respectable Blackness, rooted in civilizational discourse, is an alternative to ideologies of race mixture and whitening. Its persistence in the contemporary period points to the local impact of globalized inequalities, as well as to the ways in which revolutionary society fell short of its objective to eliminate racism. The respectable Blackness construct also illustrates the asymmetries that characterize assertions of diasporic subjectivity. Narratives of Anglo-Caribbean Cuban cultural citizenship and experiences of racism open a window onto how and under what conditions these asymmetries are reproduced. Chapter 4 analyzes these narratives and, incorporating reflexive ethnography, concludes by envisioning more productive ways of affirming Blackness that do not fall prey to racial and cultural discourses of mixture, hybridity, or essentialism.
Michelle M. Wright
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816687268
- eISBN:
- 9781452950624
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816687268.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
What does it mean to be Black? If Blackness is not biological in origin but socially and discursively constructed, does the meaning of Blackness change over time and space? In Physics of Blackness: ...
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What does it mean to be Black? If Blackness is not biological in origin but socially and discursively constructed, does the meaning of Blackness change over time and space? In Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Michelle M. Wright argues that although we often explicitly define Blackness as a “what,” it in fact always operates as a “when” and a “where.” By putting lay discourses on spacetime from physics into conversation with works on identity from the African Diaspora, Physics of Blackness explores how Middle Passage epistemology subverts racist assumptions about Blackness, yet its linear structure inhibits the kind of inclusive epistemology of Blackness needed in the twenty-first century. Wright then engages with bodies frequently excluded from contemporary mainstream consideration: Black feminists, Black queers, recent Black African immigrants to the West, and Blacks whose histories may weave in and out of the Middle Passage epistemology but do not cohere to it. Physics of Blackness takes the reader on a journey both known and unfamiliar—from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravity to the contemporary politics of diasporic Blackness in the academy, from James Baldwin’s postwar trope of the Eiffel Tower as the site for diasporic encounters to theoretical particle physics’ theory of multiverses and superpositioning, to the almost erased lives of Black African women during World War II. Accessible in its style, global in its perspective, and rigorous in its logic, Physics of Blackness will change the way you look at Blackness.Less
What does it mean to be Black? If Blackness is not biological in origin but socially and discursively constructed, does the meaning of Blackness change over time and space? In Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Michelle M. Wright argues that although we often explicitly define Blackness as a “what,” it in fact always operates as a “when” and a “where.” By putting lay discourses on spacetime from physics into conversation with works on identity from the African Diaspora, Physics of Blackness explores how Middle Passage epistemology subverts racist assumptions about Blackness, yet its linear structure inhibits the kind of inclusive epistemology of Blackness needed in the twenty-first century. Wright then engages with bodies frequently excluded from contemporary mainstream consideration: Black feminists, Black queers, recent Black African immigrants to the West, and Blacks whose histories may weave in and out of the Middle Passage epistemology but do not cohere to it. Physics of Blackness takes the reader on a journey both known and unfamiliar—from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravity to the contemporary politics of diasporic Blackness in the academy, from James Baldwin’s postwar trope of the Eiffel Tower as the site for diasporic encounters to theoretical particle physics’ theory of multiverses and superpositioning, to the almost erased lives of Black African women during World War II. Accessible in its style, global in its perspective, and rigorous in its logic, Physics of Blackness will change the way you look at Blackness.
Grace Kyungwon Hong
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816695263
- eISBN:
- 9781452952352
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816695263.003.0004
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
Because reproductive respectability is such an important mode by which political and social legibility and value becomes sutured to literal physical life, this chapter extends this analysis to ...
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Because reproductive respectability is such an important mode by which political and social legibility and value becomes sutured to literal physical life, this chapter extends this analysis to examine queer possibilities and futurities that might emerge from Black feminism’s theorization of reproduction and the queerness of what Orlando Patterson has called natal alienation. In particular, this chapter interrogates why a slew of texts from the 1980s and 1990s, including Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora, Isaac Julien’s film Looking for Langston, Inge Blackman’s B.D. Women, and Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother, look to the blues and jazz aesthetic of improvisation as a way of imagining a connection to foreclosed pasts and futures marked by contingency. Improvisation, which has been theorized as both invention and tradition, is an apt metaphor and method for describing the ways in which Blackness has been constituted through a simultaneously forced and foreclosed relationship to reproductive normativity. In this chapter, improvisation is the example of difference.Less
Because reproductive respectability is such an important mode by which political and social legibility and value becomes sutured to literal physical life, this chapter extends this analysis to examine queer possibilities and futurities that might emerge from Black feminism’s theorization of reproduction and the queerness of what Orlando Patterson has called natal alienation. In particular, this chapter interrogates why a slew of texts from the 1980s and 1990s, including Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora, Isaac Julien’s film Looking for Langston, Inge Blackman’s B.D. Women, and Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother, look to the blues and jazz aesthetic of improvisation as a way of imagining a connection to foreclosed pasts and futures marked by contingency. Improvisation, which has been theorized as both invention and tradition, is an apt metaphor and method for describing the ways in which Blackness has been constituted through a simultaneously forced and foreclosed relationship to reproductive normativity. In this chapter, improvisation is the example of difference.
K. Meira Goldberg
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190466916
- eISBN:
- 9780190466954
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190466916.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Dance, Ethnomusicology, World Music
How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? Sonidos Negros traces how, between ...
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How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? Sonidos Negros traces how, between 1492—when Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula coincided with Christopher Columbus’s landing on Hispaniola—and 1933—when Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca published his “Theory and Play of the Duende”—the vanquished Moor became Black; and how the imagined Gitano (“Gypsy,” or Roma) embodies the warring images and sounds of this process. By the nineteenth-century nadir of its colonial reach, Spanish identity was paradoxically enacted in terms of a minstrelized Gitano, a hybrid of Spanish and American representations of Blackness. Flamenco’s imagined Gypsy, teetering between ostentatious ignorance and the humility of epiphany, references an earlier trope: the pastor bobo (foolish shepherd), who, seeing an angelic apparition, must decide whether to accept the light of Christ—or remain in darkness. Spain’s symbolic linkage of this religious peril with the Blackness of abjection scripts the evangelical narrative which defeated the Moors and enslaved the Americas. The bobo’s confusion, appealingly comic but holding the pathos of the ultimate stakes of his decision—heaven or hell, safety or extermination—bares a teeming view of the embodied politics of colonial exploitation and creole identity formation. Flamenco’s Sonidos Negros live in this precarious balance, amid the purposeful ruckus cloaking danced resistance, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by slavery and colonization.Less
How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? Sonidos Negros traces how, between 1492—when Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula coincided with Christopher Columbus’s landing on Hispaniola—and 1933—when Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca published his “Theory and Play of the Duende”—the vanquished Moor became Black; and how the imagined Gitano (“Gypsy,” or Roma) embodies the warring images and sounds of this process. By the nineteenth-century nadir of its colonial reach, Spanish identity was paradoxically enacted in terms of a minstrelized Gitano, a hybrid of Spanish and American representations of Blackness. Flamenco’s imagined Gypsy, teetering between ostentatious ignorance and the humility of epiphany, references an earlier trope: the pastor bobo (foolish shepherd), who, seeing an angelic apparition, must decide whether to accept the light of Christ—or remain in darkness. Spain’s symbolic linkage of this religious peril with the Blackness of abjection scripts the evangelical narrative which defeated the Moors and enslaved the Americas. The bobo’s confusion, appealingly comic but holding the pathos of the ultimate stakes of his decision—heaven or hell, safety or extermination—bares a teeming view of the embodied politics of colonial exploitation and creole identity formation. Flamenco’s Sonidos Negros live in this precarious balance, amid the purposeful ruckus cloaking danced resistance, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by slavery and colonization.
Rone Shavers
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231169349
- eISBN:
- 9780231538503
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169349.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This chapter offers Afro-Futurism as a method of problematizing the idea that a progressive way ahead involves the dissolution of race and erasure of racial performativity. In Who’s Afraid of ...
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This chapter offers Afro-Futurism as a method of problematizing the idea that a progressive way ahead involves the dissolution of race and erasure of racial performativity. In Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, Touré argues that racism is very much alive today and that African Americans are still subjected to racist acts and activities, and that Black people need to stop performing race and simply be who or whatever they choose to be. This chapter critiques Touré’s representation of post-Blackness and argues that his call to transcend racial performativity is somewhat misguided, and that his calls for the abandonment of performing Blackness do little to combat racism and in fact, in some ways, unconsciously promote it through the negation of acts of racial solidarity and cultural specificity.Less
This chapter offers Afro-Futurism as a method of problematizing the idea that a progressive way ahead involves the dissolution of race and erasure of racial performativity. In Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, Touré argues that racism is very much alive today and that African Americans are still subjected to racist acts and activities, and that Black people need to stop performing race and simply be who or whatever they choose to be. This chapter critiques Touré’s representation of post-Blackness and argues that his call to transcend racial performativity is somewhat misguided, and that his calls for the abandonment of performing Blackness do little to combat racism and in fact, in some ways, unconsciously promote it through the negation of acts of racial solidarity and cultural specificity.
Karen M. Bowdre
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781496807045
- eISBN:
- 9781496807083
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496807045.003.0009
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Moving the conversation about Perry to a more meta-discursive level, Karen M. Bowdre’s chapter features an examination of the careers of Spike Lee and Tyler Perry.The way we discuss Black Hollywood ...
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Moving the conversation about Perry to a more meta-discursive level, Karen M. Bowdre’s chapter features an examination of the careers of Spike Lee and Tyler Perry.The way we discuss Black Hollywood and independent directors, argues Bowdre, reinforces a (Black) American exceptionalismthat materializes as a flawed tendency to evaluate and elevate one Black director at a time. Bowdre demonstrates that while at the onset Perry and Lee may seem worlds apart both artistically and ideologically, both directors have benefited from a similar system of exclusion.Less
Moving the conversation about Perry to a more meta-discursive level, Karen M. Bowdre’s chapter features an examination of the careers of Spike Lee and Tyler Perry.The way we discuss Black Hollywood and independent directors, argues Bowdre, reinforces a (Black) American exceptionalismthat materializes as a flawed tendency to evaluate and elevate one Black director at a time. Bowdre demonstrates that while at the onset Perry and Lee may seem worlds apart both artistically and ideologically, both directors have benefited from a similar system of exclusion.
Laura Harris
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823279784
- eISBN:
- 9780823281480
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823279784.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
In this chapter I examine James’s and Oiticica’s “discovery” of what I conceive of to be the active remains of the motley crew in the aesthetic sociality of blackness. I explore the claim they each ...
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In this chapter I examine James’s and Oiticica’s “discovery” of what I conceive of to be the active remains of the motley crew in the aesthetic sociality of blackness. I explore the claim they each make on it, on its modes of composition, arrangement and assembly, and the claim it makes on them, by way of some of their early experiments—James’s Minty Alley, the novel he wrote in Trinidad as an “exercise,” and Oiticica’s Parangolé, the banners, tents and capes whose activation would constitute what he would come to describe, through a phrase he adopts from Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa, as an “experimental exercise of freedom.” Both claim the aesthetic sociality of blackness by “appropriating” elements of the creative practices they encountered, the spectacular performance of cricket and samba and the more quotidian performances connected to them, the forms of assembly that James observed in conversations in the barrack-yards and that Oiticica observed in the architecture of the favelas. I look at the ways their claims take shape in these early works and the way the counterclaim of that sociality opens up those shapes, using it as a vehicle for its own expression, one that can’t quite be contained by the works themselves or the gesture of appropriation.Less
In this chapter I examine James’s and Oiticica’s “discovery” of what I conceive of to be the active remains of the motley crew in the aesthetic sociality of blackness. I explore the claim they each make on it, on its modes of composition, arrangement and assembly, and the claim it makes on them, by way of some of their early experiments—James’s Minty Alley, the novel he wrote in Trinidad as an “exercise,” and Oiticica’s Parangolé, the banners, tents and capes whose activation would constitute what he would come to describe, through a phrase he adopts from Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa, as an “experimental exercise of freedom.” Both claim the aesthetic sociality of blackness by “appropriating” elements of the creative practices they encountered, the spectacular performance of cricket and samba and the more quotidian performances connected to them, the forms of assembly that James observed in conversations in the barrack-yards and that Oiticica observed in the architecture of the favelas. I look at the ways their claims take shape in these early works and the way the counterclaim of that sociality opens up those shapes, using it as a vehicle for its own expression, one that can’t quite be contained by the works themselves or the gesture of appropriation.
Patricia de Santana Pinho
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469645322
- eISBN:
- 9781469645346
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645322.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
Brazil, like some countries in Africa, has become a major destination for African American tourists seeking the cultural roots of the black Atlantic diaspora. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic ...
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Brazil, like some countries in Africa, has become a major destination for African American tourists seeking the cultural roots of the black Atlantic diaspora. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research as well as textual, visual, and archival sources, Patricia de Santana Pinho investigates African American roots tourism, a complex, poignant kind of travel that provides profound personal and collective meaning for those searching for black identity and heritage. It also provides, as Pinho’s interviews with Brazilian tour guides, state officials, and Afro-Brazilian activists reveal, economic and political rewards that support a structured industry.
Pinho traces the origins of roots tourism to the late 1970s, when groups of black intellectuals, artists, and activists found themselves drawn especially to Bahia, the state that in previous centuries had absorbed the largest number of enslaved Africans. African Americans have become frequent travelers across what Pinho calls the "map of Africanness" that connects diasporic communities and stimulates transnational solidarities while simultaneously exposing the unevenness of the black diaspora. Roots tourism, Pinho finds, is a fertile site to examine the tensions between racial and national identities as well as the gendered dimensions of travel, particularly when women are the major roots-seekers.Less
Brazil, like some countries in Africa, has become a major destination for African American tourists seeking the cultural roots of the black Atlantic diaspora. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research as well as textual, visual, and archival sources, Patricia de Santana Pinho investigates African American roots tourism, a complex, poignant kind of travel that provides profound personal and collective meaning for those searching for black identity and heritage. It also provides, as Pinho’s interviews with Brazilian tour guides, state officials, and Afro-Brazilian activists reveal, economic and political rewards that support a structured industry.
Pinho traces the origins of roots tourism to the late 1970s, when groups of black intellectuals, artists, and activists found themselves drawn especially to Bahia, the state that in previous centuries had absorbed the largest number of enslaved Africans. African Americans have become frequent travelers across what Pinho calls the "map of Africanness" that connects diasporic communities and stimulates transnational solidarities while simultaneously exposing the unevenness of the black diaspora. Roots tourism, Pinho finds, is a fertile site to examine the tensions between racial and national identities as well as the gendered dimensions of travel, particularly when women are the major roots-seekers.
Bertram D. Ashe
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781617039973
- eISBN:
- 9781626740280
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039973.003.0007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter provides an analysis of Touré’s fiction in light of his later non-fiction Work that addresses racial authenticity. In Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, Touré explores the fluid ...
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This chapter provides an analysis of Touré’s fiction in light of his later non-fiction Work that addresses racial authenticity. In Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, Touré explores the fluid definitions of blackness in contemporary African American culture. These definitions are read against his earlier fiction, where he portrays the varieties of blackness through the character of the Black Widow, through which he explores notions of racial authenticity.Less
This chapter provides an analysis of Touré’s fiction in light of his later non-fiction Work that addresses racial authenticity. In Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, Touré explores the fluid definitions of blackness in contemporary African American culture. These definitions are read against his earlier fiction, where he portrays the varieties of blackness through the character of the Black Widow, through which he explores notions of racial authenticity.
Christian Schmidt
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781617039973
- eISBN:
- 9781626740280
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039973.003.0011
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter provides a reading of three novels – Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Slumberland and Percival Everett’s A History of the African American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as ...
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This chapter provides a reading of three novels – Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Slumberland and Percival Everett’s A History of the African American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid – that engage in degenerative satire, which complicates the mimetic representation of satiric texts. This chapter argues that these novels satirize not only clichéd tropes of blackness but also the presumption that blackness can or should be represented. Ultimately, this chapter shows how these novels destabilize the very notion of blackness.Less
This chapter provides a reading of three novels – Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Slumberland and Percival Everett’s A History of the African American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid – that engage in degenerative satire, which complicates the mimetic representation of satiric texts. This chapter argues that these novels satirize not only clichéd tropes of blackness but also the presumption that blackness can or should be represented. Ultimately, this chapter shows how these novels destabilize the very notion of blackness.
Sina Kramer
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190625986
- eISBN:
- 9780190626006
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190625986.003.0007
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics, Political Theory
Chapter 7 takes up the political unintelligibility of the 1992 Los Angeles (LA) Riot/Rebellion to understand—if not why the riots remain unintelligible to us as political contestation of political ...
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Chapter 7 takes up the political unintelligibility of the 1992 Los Angeles (LA) Riot/Rebellion to understand—if not why the riots remain unintelligible to us as political contestation of political conditions—how this unintelligibility is produced and what significance it bears for us now. While riots (and race riots in particular) might be politically intelligible under certain conditions, the consolidation of anti-Black racism with riots throughout the latter twentieth century rendered “America’s first multiracial riot” particularly unintelligible as a political contestation of constitutive exclusion. I discuss the interrelation of gender, class, and sexuality in the Rodney King beating, the murder of Latasha Harlins, and the multiracial geography of the riots to articulate how the continued unintelligibility of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot/Rebellion, as well as contemporary riots, constitute political agency now.Less
Chapter 7 takes up the political unintelligibility of the 1992 Los Angeles (LA) Riot/Rebellion to understand—if not why the riots remain unintelligible to us as political contestation of political conditions—how this unintelligibility is produced and what significance it bears for us now. While riots (and race riots in particular) might be politically intelligible under certain conditions, the consolidation of anti-Black racism with riots throughout the latter twentieth century rendered “America’s first multiracial riot” particularly unintelligible as a political contestation of constitutive exclusion. I discuss the interrelation of gender, class, and sexuality in the Rodney King beating, the murder of Latasha Harlins, and the multiracial geography of the riots to articulate how the continued unintelligibility of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot/Rebellion, as well as contemporary riots, constitute political agency now.
Sara Le Menestrel
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781628461459
- eISBN:
- 9781626740785
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628461459.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
This chapter seeks to demonstrate how music categories, tastes, and representations are ingrained in the racial imagination. It situates musical forms and conventions across the color line and ...
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This chapter seeks to demonstrate how music categories, tastes, and representations are ingrained in the racial imagination. It situates musical forms and conventions across the color line and reveals the ideological basis of ethnic and racial categories within French Louisiana music. The distinctions drawn between Cajun and Creole styles over the commonality of the label “French music” encapsulate the complex narrative of French Louisiana music. In fact, Louisiana actors know how to navigate between musical sameness and difference. Finally, the representations of zydeco show the ambivalence of blackness and the relationship between eroticism and the transgression of the color line.Less
This chapter seeks to demonstrate how music categories, tastes, and representations are ingrained in the racial imagination. It situates musical forms and conventions across the color line and reveals the ideological basis of ethnic and racial categories within French Louisiana music. The distinctions drawn between Cajun and Creole styles over the commonality of the label “French music” encapsulate the complex narrative of French Louisiana music. In fact, Louisiana actors know how to navigate between musical sameness and difference. Finally, the representations of zydeco show the ambivalence of blackness and the relationship between eroticism and the transgression of the color line.
Alejandro L. Madrid and Robin D. Moore
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199965809
- eISBN:
- 9780199369874
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199965809.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
This chapter explores how the danzón came to mediate questions about race and class in Cuba and Mexico at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth century. It explains the role ...
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This chapter explores how the danzón came to mediate questions about race and class in Cuba and Mexico at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth century. It explains the role of the danzón in the development of national discourses about race in a transnational setting.Less
This chapter explores how the danzón came to mediate questions about race and class in Cuba and Mexico at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth century. It explains the role of the danzón in the development of national discourses about race in a transnational setting.
Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781781380345
- eISBN:
- 9781781387184
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781380345.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
What does Afro-Europe signify? This volume explores the concept and possibility of a black European community by analysing the ways in which contemporary Francophone African writers articulate and ...
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What does Afro-Europe signify? This volume explores the concept and possibility of a black European community by analysing the ways in which contemporary Francophone African writers articulate and interrogate their complex relationships with European society, culture and history. Readers will discover the symbiotic ways in which Africa has transformed/been transformed (in/by) Europe and in turn how Africanness has (re)defined Europeanness. To this end, the volume places scholarly essays addressing the relationship between the francophone and Afro-European context alongside short stories and essays by some of the most critically-acclaimed and influential producers of Afropean writing today: Fatou Diome, Alain Mabanckou, Léonora Miano, Wilfried N'Sondé, Sami Tchak and Abdourahman Waberi. Works by these authors are discussed in and across the scholarly interventions, generating dialogue around what it means to be ‘Francophone’ and ‘Afropean’ in the twenty-first century. At a time when it is no longer easy to define what Europe really is, this book considers to what extent the category ‘Afropean’ may prove helpful in improving our understanding of the complex ways in which minority communities conceive of identity in Europe today and address the range of issues impacting them. The notion of ‘Afropeanism’ is of course relatively new, and this book does not claim to offer an exhaustive analysis of the term's usage and/or potential pertinence. Rather, the cultural, political, and social circumstances of Europe today are reflected in discussions surrounding the term and perhaps not surprisingly, in the diverse and diverging perspectives adopted by the scholars and creative writers.Less
What does Afro-Europe signify? This volume explores the concept and possibility of a black European community by analysing the ways in which contemporary Francophone African writers articulate and interrogate their complex relationships with European society, culture and history. Readers will discover the symbiotic ways in which Africa has transformed/been transformed (in/by) Europe and in turn how Africanness has (re)defined Europeanness. To this end, the volume places scholarly essays addressing the relationship between the francophone and Afro-European context alongside short stories and essays by some of the most critically-acclaimed and influential producers of Afropean writing today: Fatou Diome, Alain Mabanckou, Léonora Miano, Wilfried N'Sondé, Sami Tchak and Abdourahman Waberi. Works by these authors are discussed in and across the scholarly interventions, generating dialogue around what it means to be ‘Francophone’ and ‘Afropean’ in the twenty-first century. At a time when it is no longer easy to define what Europe really is, this book considers to what extent the category ‘Afropean’ may prove helpful in improving our understanding of the complex ways in which minority communities conceive of identity in Europe today and address the range of issues impacting them. The notion of ‘Afropeanism’ is of course relatively new, and this book does not claim to offer an exhaustive analysis of the term's usage and/or potential pertinence. Rather, the cultural, political, and social circumstances of Europe today are reflected in discussions surrounding the term and perhaps not surprisingly, in the diverse and diverging perspectives adopted by the scholars and creative writers.
