Black Culture, Inc.

Black Culture, Inc. PDF Author: Patricia A. Banks
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503631257
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
A surprising and fascinating look at how Black culture has been leveraged by corporate America. Open the brochure for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and you'll see logos for corporations like American Express. Visit the website for the Apollo Theater, and you'll notice acknowledgments to corporations like Coca Cola and Citibank. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, owe their very existence to large corporate donations from companies like General Motors. And while we can easily make sense of the need for such funding to keep cultural spaces afloat, less obvious are the reasons that corporations give to them. In Black Culture, Inc., Patricia A. Banks interrogates the notion that such giving is completely altruistic, and argues for a deeper understanding of the hidden transactions being conducted that render corporate America dependent on Black culture. Drawing on a range of sources, such as public relations and advertising texts on corporate cultural patronage and observations at sponsored cultural events, Banks argues that Black cultural patronage profits firms by signaling that they value diversity, equity, and inclusion. By functioning in this manner, support of Black cultural initiatives affords these companies something called "diversity capital," an increasingly valuable commodity in today's business landscape. While this does not necessarily detract from the social good that cultural patronage does, it reveals its secret cost: ethnic community support may serve to obscure an otherwise poor track record with social justice. Banks deftly weaves innovative theory with detailed observations and a discerning critical gaze at the various agendas infiltrating memorials, museums, and music festivals meant to celebrate Black culture. At a time when accusations of discriminatory practices are met with immediate legal and social condemnation, the insights offered here are urgent and necessary.

Black Culture, Inc.

Black Culture, Inc. PDF Author: Patricia A. Banks
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503631257
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
A surprising and fascinating look at how Black culture has been leveraged by corporate America. Open the brochure for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and you'll see logos for corporations like American Express. Visit the website for the Apollo Theater, and you'll notice acknowledgments to corporations like Coca Cola and Citibank. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, owe their very existence to large corporate donations from companies like General Motors. And while we can easily make sense of the need for such funding to keep cultural spaces afloat, less obvious are the reasons that corporations give to them. In Black Culture, Inc., Patricia A. Banks interrogates the notion that such giving is completely altruistic, and argues for a deeper understanding of the hidden transactions being conducted that render corporate America dependent on Black culture. Drawing on a range of sources, such as public relations and advertising texts on corporate cultural patronage and observations at sponsored cultural events, Banks argues that Black cultural patronage profits firms by signaling that they value diversity, equity, and inclusion. By functioning in this manner, support of Black cultural initiatives affords these companies something called "diversity capital," an increasingly valuable commodity in today's business landscape. While this does not necessarily detract from the social good that cultural patronage does, it reveals its secret cost: ethnic community support may serve to obscure an otherwise poor track record with social justice. Banks deftly weaves innovative theory with detailed observations and a discerning critical gaze at the various agendas infiltrating memorials, museums, and music festivals meant to celebrate Black culture. At a time when accusations of discriminatory practices are met with immediate legal and social condemnation, the insights offered here are urgent and necessary.

Black Culture in Bloom

Black Culture in Bloom PDF Author: Richard Worth
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
ISBN: 1725342014
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
The Harlem Renaissance was like a magnificent fireworks display; it was colorful, brilliant, and in a few moments, it was over. This was the first time African Americans had led a cultural movement and the first time that white Americans had paid attention to their achievements. Through striking images and fascinating details, this book examines the origins of the Harlem Renaissance, especially the key roles played by W.E.B. Du Bois and other prominent figures such as Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, and Josephine Baker. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the literature, music, dance, and art that depicted the triumphs and sorrows of black Americans during the age of speakeasies and rent parties.

Represent

Represent PDF Author: Patricia A. Banks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135177953
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Patricia A. Banks traverses the New York and Atlanta art worlds to uncover how black identities are cultivated through black art patronage. Drawing on over 100 in-depth interviews, observations at arts events, and photographs of art displayed in homes, Banks elaborates a racial identity theory of consumption that highlights how upper-middle class blacks forge black identities for themselves and their children through the consumption of black visual art. She not only challenges common assumptions about elite cultural participation, but also contributes to the heated debate about the significance of race for elite blacks, and illuminates recent art world developments. In doing so, Banks documents how the salience of race extends into the cultural life of even the most socioeconomically successful blacks.

Black Noise

Black Noise PDF Author: Tricia Rose
Publisher: Wesleyan
ISBN: 9780819562753
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
From its beginnings in hip hop culture, the dense rhythms and aggressive lyrics of rap music have made it a provocative fixture on the American cultural landscape. In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a "hip hop theorist," takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it. Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men. But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains a vibrant force with its own aesthetic, "a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself."

Visualizing Equality

Visualizing Equality PDF Author: Aston Gonzalez
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469659972
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in visual technologies--daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes de visite, and steam printing presses--enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for black rights. In this book, Aston Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they helped build the world they envisioned. Understudied artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James Presley Ball, and Augustus Washington produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for racial equality, black political leadership, and freedom from slavery. Moreover, these activist artists' networks of transatlantic patronage and travels to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa reveal their extensive involvement in the most pressing concerns for black people in the Atlantic world. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics during the nineteenth century.

Black Privilege

Black Privilege PDF Author: Cassi Pittman Claytor
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503613186
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
“[A] compelling ethnographic account of middle class Blacks in New York City. . . . A major contribution to race, consumption, class, and urban studies.” —Juliet Schor, author of After the Gig In their own words, the subjects of this book present a rich portrait of the modern black middle-class, examining how cultural consumption is a critical tool for enjoying material comforts as well as challenging racism. New York City has the largest population of black Americans out of any metropolitan area in the United States. It is home to a steadily rising number of socio-economically privileged blacks. In Black Privilege, Cassi Pittman Claytor examines how this economically advantaged group experiences privilege, having credentials that grant them access to elite spaces and resources with which they can purchase luxuries, while still confronting persistent anti-black bias and racial stigma. Drawing on the everyday experiences of black middle-class individuals, Pittman Claytor offers vivid accounts of their consumer experiences and cultural flexibility in the places where they live, work, and play. Whether it is the majority-white Wall Street firm where they’re employed, or the majority-black Baptist church where they worship, questions of class and racial identity are equally on their minds. They navigate divergent social worlds that demand, at times, middle-class sensibilities, pedigree, and cultural acumen, and at other times pride in and connection with other blacks. Rich qualitative data and original analysis help account for this special kind of privilege and the entitlements it affords—materially in terms of the things they consume, as well as symbolically, as they strive to be unapologetically black in a society where a racial consumer hierarchy prevails.

Skimmed

Skimmed PDF Author: Andrea Freeman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503610810
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Born into a tenant farming family in North Carolina in 1946, Mary Louise, Mary Ann, Mary Alice, and Mary Catherine were medical miracles. Annie Mae Fultz, a Black-Cherokee woman who lost her ability to hear and speak in childhood, became the mother of America's first surviving set of identical quadruplets. They were instant celebrities. Their White doctor named them after his own family members. He sold the rights to use the sisters for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company. The girls lived in poverty, while Pet Milk's profits from a previously untapped market of Black families skyrocketed. Over half a century later, baby formula is a seventy-billion-dollar industry and Black mothers have the lowest breastfeeding rates in the country. Since slavery, legal, political, and societal factors have routinely denied Black women the ability to choose how to feed their babies. In Skimmed, Andrea Freeman tells the riveting story of the Fultz quadruplets while uncovering how feeding America's youngest citizens is awash in social, legal, and cultural inequalities. This book highlights the making of a modern public health crisis, the four extraordinary girls whose stories encapsulate a nationwide injustice, and how we can fight for a healthier future.

Black Children

Black Children PDF Author: Janice E. Hale
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801833830
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Argues that since black children grow up in a distinct culture, they require 'an educational system that recognizes their strengths, their abilities, and their culture, and that incorporates them into the learning process'. -- Washington Post

All Bound Up Together

All Bound Up Together PDF Author: Martha S. Jones
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807888907
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The place of women's rights in African American public culture has been an enduring question, one that has long engaged activists, commentators, and scholars. All Bound Up Together explores the roles black women played in their communities' social movements and the consequences of elevating women into positions of visibility and leadership. Martha Jones reveals how, through the nineteenth century, the "woman question" was at the core of movements against slavery and for civil rights. Unlike white women activists, who often created their own institutions separate from men, black women, Jones explains, often organized within already existing institutions--churches, political organizations, mutual aid societies, and schools. Covering three generations of black women activists, Jones demonstrates that their approach was not unanimous or monolithic but changed over time and took a variety of forms, from a woman's right to control her body to her right to vote. Through a far-ranging look at politics, church, and social life, Jones demonstrates how women have helped shape the course of black public culture.

Ethnicity, Inc.

Ethnicity, Inc. PDF Author: John L. Comaroff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226114732
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
In Ethnicity, Inc. anthropologists John L. and Jean Comaroff analyze a new moment in the history of human identity: its rampant commodification. Through a wide-ranging exploration of the changing relationship between culture and the market, they address a pressing question: Wherein lies the future of ethnicity? Their account begins in South Africa, with the incorporation of an ethno-business in venture capital by a group of traditional African chiefs. But their horizons are global: Native American casinos; Scotland’s efforts to brand itself; a Zulu ethno-theme park named Shakaland; a world religion declared to be intellectual property; a chiefdom made into a global business by means of its platinum holdings; San “Bushmen” with patent rights potentially worth millions of dollars; nations acting as commercial enterprises; and the rapid growth of marketing firms that target specific ethnic populations are just some of the diverse examples that fall under the Comaroffs’ incisive scrutiny. These phenomena range from the disturbing through the intriguing to the absurd. Through them, the Comaroffs trace the contradictory effects of neoliberalism as it transforms identities and social being across the globe. Ethnicity, Inc. is a penetrating account of the ways in which ethnic populations are remaking themselves in the image of the corporation—while corporations coopt ethnic practices to open up new markets and regimes of consumption. Intellectually rigorous but leavened with wit, this is a powerful, highly original portrayal of a new world being born in a tectonic collision of culture, capitalism, and identity.