Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities

Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities PDF Author: Jean Rahier
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 0897896076
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This anthology offers a comparative approach for the study of performances of African diaspora identities in various locales of the "Black Atlantic." Articles discuss the spatial dimensions of blackness; the relations between blackness, gender constructs, and social classes; Native American views on blackness; and the use of "obscenity" as a tool of black resistance.

Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities

Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities PDF Author: Jean Rahier
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 0897896076
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This anthology offers a comparative approach for the study of performances of African diaspora identities in various locales of the "Black Atlantic." Articles discuss the spatial dimensions of blackness; the relations between blackness, gender constructs, and social classes; Native American views on blackness; and the use of "obscenity" as a tool of black resistance.

Darkening Mirrors

Darkening Mirrors PDF Author: Stephanie Leigh Batiste
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082234923X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
In an important contribution to African American film and performance history, Stephanie Batiste looks back at African American stage and screen productions of the 1930s.

Cultural Moves

Cultural Moves PDF Author: Herman Gray
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520241444
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
"Examines the importance of culture in the push for black political power and social recognition and argues the key black cultural practices have been notable in reconfiguring the shape and texture of social and cultural life in the U.S. Drawing on examples from jazz, television, and academia, Gray highlights cultural strategies for inclusion in the dominant culture as well as cultural tactics that move beyond the quest for mere recognition by challenging, disrupting, and unsettling dominant cultural representations and institutions. In the end, Gray challenges the conventional wisdom about the centrality of representation and politics in black cultural production"--Provided by publisher.

From Jim Crow to Jay-Z

From Jim Crow to Jay-Z PDF Author: Miles White
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025203662X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This multilayered study of the representation of black masculinity in musical and cultural performance takes aim at the reduction of African American male culture to stereotypes of deviance, misogyny, and excess. Broadening the significance of hip-hop culture by linking it to other expressive forms within popular culture, Miles White examines how these representations have both encouraged the demonization of young black males in the United States and abroad and contributed to the construction of their identities. From Jim Crow to Jay-Z traces black male representations to chattel slavery and American minstrelsy as early examples of fetishization and commodification of black male subjectivity. Continuing with diverse discussions including black action films, heavyweight prizefighting, Elvis Presley's performance of blackness, and white rappers such as Vanilla Ice and Eminem, White establishes a sophisticated framework for interpreting and critiquing black masculinity in hip-hop music and culture. Arguing that black music has undeniably shaped American popular culture and that hip-hop tropes have exerted a defining influence on young male aspirations and behavior, White draws a critical link between the body, musical sound, and the construction of identity.

Kings for Three Days

Kings for Three Days PDF Author: Jean Muteba Rahier
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252094727
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
With its rich mix of cultures, European influences, colonial tensions, and migration from bordering nations, Ecuador has long drawn the interest of ethnographers, historians, and political scientists. In this book, Jean Muteba Rahier delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the racial, sexual, and social complexities of Afro-Ecuadorian culture, as revealed through the annual Festival of the Kings. During the Festival, the people of various villages and towns of Esmeraldas--Ecuador's province most associated with blackness--engage in celebratory and parodic portrayals, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and disguising themselves as blacks, indigenous people, and whites, in an obvious critique of local, provincial, and national white, white-mestizo, and light-mulatto elites. Rahier shows that this festival, as performed in different locations, reveals each time a specific location's perspective on the larger struggles over identity, class, and gender relations in the racial-spacial order of Esmeraldas, and of the Ecuadorian nation in general.

Blackness in the Andes

Blackness in the Andes PDF Author: J. Rahier
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137272724
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
This book examines, in Andean national contexts, the impacts of the 'Latin American multicultural turn' of the past two decades on Afro Andean cultural politics, emphasizing both transformations and continuities.

Black Looks

Black Looks PDF Author: bell hooks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317588487
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
In the critical essays collected in Black Looks, bell hooks interrogates old narratives and argues for alternative ways to look at blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness. Her focus is on spectatorship—in particular, the way blackness and black people are experienced in literature, music, television, and especially film—and her aim is to create a radical intervention into the way we talk about race and representation. As she describes: "the essays in Black Looks are meant to challenge and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert." As students, scholars, activists, intellectuals, and any other readers who have engaged with the book since its original release in 1992 can attest, that's exactly what these pieces do.

Staging Habla de Negros

Staging Habla de Negros PDF Author: Nicholas R. Jones
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271083921
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
In this volume, Nicholas R. Jones analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s, when the performance of Africanized Castilian, commonly referred to as habla de negros (black speech), was in vogue. Focusing on Spanish Golden Age theater and performative poetry from authors such as Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Rueda, and Rodrigo de Reinosa, Jones makes a strong case for revising the belief, long held by literary critics and linguists, that white appropriations and representations of habla de negros language are “racist buffoonery” or stereotype. Instead, Jones shows black characters who laugh, sing, and shout, ultimately combating the violent desire of white supremacy. By placing early modern Iberia in conversation with discourses on African diaspora studies, Jones showcases how black Africans and their descendants who built communities in early modern Spain were rendered legible in performative literary texts. Accessibly written and theoretically sophisticated, Jones’s groundbreaking study elucidates the ways that habla de negros animated black Africans’ agency, empowered their resistance, and highlighted their African cultural retentions. This must-read book on identity building, performance, and race will captivate audiences across disciplines.

Understanding Blackness through Performance

Understanding Blackness through Performance PDF Author: Anne Cremieux
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137313803
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
How does the performance of blackness reframe issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Here, the contributors look into representational practices in film, literature, fashion, and theatre and explore how they have fleshed out political struggles, while recognizing that they have sometimes maintained the mechanisms of violence against blacks.

Styling Blackness in Chile

Styling Blackness in Chile PDF Author: Juan Eduardo Wolf
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253041171
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Chile had long forgotten about the existence of the country's Black population when, in 2003, the music and dance called the tumbe carnaval appeared on the streets of the city of Arica. Featuring turbaned dancers accompanied by a lively rhythm played on hide-head drums, the tumbe resonated with cosmopolitan images of what the African Diaspora looks like, and so helped bring attention to a community seeking legal recognition from the Chilean government which denied its existence. Tumbe carnaval, however, was not the only type of music and dance that Afro-Chileans have participated in and identified with over the years. In Styling Blackness in Chile, Juan Eduardo Wolf explores the multiple ways that Black individuals in Arica have performed music and dance to frame their Blackness in relationship to other groups of performers—a process he calls styling. Combining ethnography and semiotic analysis, Wolf illustrates how styling Blackness as Criollo, Moreno, and Indígena through genres like the baile de tierra, morenos de paso, and caporales simultaneously offered individuals alternative ways of identifying and contributed to the invisibility of Afro-descendants in Chilean society. While the styling of the tumbe as Afro-descendant helped make Chile's Black community visible once again, Wolf also notes that its success raises issues of representation as more people begin to perform the genre in ways that resonate less with local cultural memory and Afro-Chilean activists' goals. At a moment when Chile's government continues to discuss whether to recognize the Afro-Chilean population and Chilean society struggles to come to terms with an increase in Latin American Afro-descendant immigrants, Wolf's book raises awareness of Blackness in Chile and the variety of Black music-dance throughout the African Diaspora, while also providing tools that ethnomusicologists and other scholars of expressive culture can use to study the role of music-dance in other cultural contexts.