Black Studies Or African American Studies

Waking up Muslim on 9/11 by Jameelah Medina

by Feminism and Religion

Originally published on the Feminism and Religion project

I have often stated that I went to sleep as an African American woman on September 10, 2011 and woke up Muslim on... more I have often stated that I went to sleep as an African American woman on September 10, 2011 and woke up Muslim on 9/11. It may seem odd to say this since I am a third-generation Muslim; however, my reason for doing so is that my life as an American Muslim now has two main eras: 1) pre-9/11 and 2) post-9/11.

In the pre-9/11 era of my life, I felt more black than Muslim because my color was a point of conflict and controversy throughout my life. I grew up in two areas as a child—an urban area with majority Latinos/as and then in a very rural area with majority whites. In both areas, being black was not so popular. I was called “mayate,”which is a bug but also the Mexican term for “nigger.” I was also called, “tar baby,” “nigger,” “African booty scratcher,” and a host of other hurtful names as a young black child.

Global Conversations: Global Conversations

by Whitney Battle-Baptiste

Yuen, Nancy Wang. 2010. “Playing ‘Ghetto’: Embodiments of South Central in Popular Culture,” pp. 232-242 in Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities. Editors Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon. New York: NYU Press.

by Nancy Yuen

The Black Campus Movement at SUNY Cortland, 1965-1971 (please do not quote without permission; work in progress; 2011)

by Ethan Horgan

Senior Seminar Thesis at SUNY Oneonta. Under the direction of Professor Ibram H. Rogers. This is a version of the paper that was submitted for successful completion of a B.S. history degree at SUNY Oneonta. In many ways, it is still a work in progress.

Rihanna's Media Roulette

by nicholas brady

Published on the Cosmic Hoboes blog, a blog dedicated to afro-pessimist thought.

The Civil Rights Movement and American Television in the 1960s

by Nadeem Fayaz

Charlatans Chicanery

by Mohamed Eno

Thr poem is an excerpt from my forthcoming volume Guilt of Otherness

The volume is under review with a subject area expert and a literary critic. The volume is under review with a subject area expert and a literary critic.

"'The Way We Found Them to Be': Remembering E. Franklin Frazier and the Politics of Respectable Black Teachers"

by Hilton Kelly

Slavery and Colonialism: The Worst Terrorism on Africa

by Mohamed Eno

Co-authored with Omar A. Eno, Mohamed H. Ingiriis, and Jamal M. Haji; Published in African Renaissance, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2012.

Humans need not justify terrorism of any kind, regardless of whether one is Muslim, Christian or Jew, because it is... more Humans need not justify terrorism of any kind, regardless of whether one is Muslim, Christian or Jew, because it is the axis of evil and devastation of mankind. However, the deliberate use of the term terrorism in recent decades was carefully selected, mainly, against a certain religion (Islam). The idea was then globally politicized by the Western world. Leaving that scholarly view in its own right, we disagree with the opinion raising terrorism as the devil’s just-born child of evil, when in reality Africans had been terrorized for centuries as slaves and human chattel. Hence the basis for the concept of this thesis: conceptualizing the episode of ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ from the broader perspective of its practice from the Middle Passage or the Atlantic Slave Trade. To portray that argument and broaden the scope of the debate over this critically sensitive subject, we divided the discussion into three sections: an examination of what constitutes terrorism and terrorist; history of terrorism and terrorists from an Africa perspective; and the ideological constraints within the subject of terrorism as practiced by the US and its Western allies.

Economies of Racism: Grounding Education Policy Research in the Complex Dialectic of Race, Class, and Capital

by Noah De Lissovoy

Co-authored with Anthony Brown; published in the Journal of Education Policy

Review of ‘Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture,’ by Stefanie K. Dunning

by Benjamin Grimwood

‘Black Camera’ 3, no. 2 (2012): 217-219

Criminal lifestyles, sexuality and the martial arts Appropriating blaxploitation in hip-hop music videos

by Rachel Mizsei Ward

BAAS 2012 (Manchester University)
Cine Excess 2012

Hip-hop culture has been heavily influenced by blaxploitation. This cycle of films embodied excess through their... more Hip-hop culture has been heavily influenced by blaxploitation. This cycle of films embodied excess through their glamorous black heroes, with elaborate costumes and violent, sexualised stories. This is emulated in hip-hop and specifically gangsta rap which frequently use lyrics emphasising violence and sexual themes and performers engage in excessive displays of clothing and jewellery.  It therefore seems appropriate that hip-hop artists should also appropriate blaxploitation films in their music videos. Blaxploitation appears to feed into a shared global identity for black hip-hop stars who reference it in their work, as well as something that is still relevant for a wider black community. This runs counter to the expectations of the fans of cult texts and alternative music genres. It is suggested that both are ‘frequently marginalised, white, middle class, and well educated’ (Cherry 2010: 132).

There are several examples but this article will concentrate on two, the video for Who Cares (2006) by Gnarls Barkley which references Scream, Blacula, Scream (1973); and Beggin’ (2008) by Madcon which references several key blaxploitation films, including Coffy (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), Shaft (1971), and Superfly (1972). Cherry argues that ‘many music videos make references to other narratives in order to strengthen the otherwise "weak narrative chain" and these may well depend upon the shared cultural competencies of the viewer’ (Cherry 2010: 125). The paper will consider this and look at key elements including the concentration on criminality, black sexuality and the martial arts.


Reference:

Brigid Cherry, ‘From Cult to Subculture: Re imaginings of Cult Films in alternative Music Video’, in Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation ed. by Ian Robert Smith, (Scope e-book, 2009) pp. 124-137. <http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/cultborr/Cultural_Borrowings_Final.pdf>; [accessed 20 January 2010]

Popping and Other Dis/Appearing Acts

by Naomi Elizabeth Bragin

African Masks and the Arts of Passing in Gertrude Stein's "Melanctha" and Nella Larsen's" Passing"

by Corinne Blackmer

Stepping Up To White Culture

by Sydney Ware

This is a short analysis paper I wrote using Leslie Grinners framework of Sexuality, Christianity, Whiteness,... more This is a short analysis paper I wrote using Leslie Grinners framework of Sexuality, Christianity, Whiteness, Able-Bodies, Male, and Property Holders (SCWAMP) to analyze the 2006 film Step Up. Through my analysis I reveal hidden messages that are shown in the film, including black culture vs White culture, the problem with interracial couples, the repercussions of homosexuality, and the difference between light black people and dark black people.

What the Sands Remember

by Vanessa Agard Jones

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2012 Volume 18, Number 2-3: 325-346.

Saint-Pierre and Sainte-Anne sit on opposite shores—both territorially and symbolically—of Martinique, a French... more Saint-Pierre and Sainte-Anne sit on opposite shores—both territorially and symbolically—of Martinique, a French territory in the Caribbean Sea. During the nineteenth century, Saint-Pierre was known as the “Sodom” of the Antilles, as a cosmopolitan city where decadence and liberal sexual mores were at the heart of bourgeois and elite culture. In 1902 Mount Pelée, the volcano that sits just above the city, erupted—killing Saint-Pierre's population of over thirty thousand within five seconds. Today, the black, volcanic sand beaches that line the coast remind visitors to Saint-Pierre of the city that once was. Sainte-Anne is a town with a far different reputation. During the 1950s it was known as a refuge for rebels, for people who contested the continued dominance of white and mixed-race elites in the lives of ordinary (mostly black) Martinicans, and was the center of the island's small cultural nationalist movement. Nearly fifty years later, the town retains that reputation—but Sainte-Anne is known for another reason, too, for it is home to one of Martinique's few meeting spaces for men who have sex with men, a secluded section at the end of the commune's most popular beach, Les Salines.

This essay seeks to cross temporal, scalar, and disciplinary boundaries while revisiting tropes of queer invisibility that mark representations of same-sex desire in the Caribbean. Cycling from the world described in the 1901 erotic novel Une nuit d'orgie à Saint-Pierre, Martinique to field notes taken in 2010 among men who frequent Les Salines, this essay unites, in a provisional way, a scattered archive of same-sex desire on the island, while relating these desires critically to place. These archives ask us to reconsider a narrative that insists on movement—away from Martinique, away from the Caribbean, away from the global South—as the grounding force for a radical queer (of color) politics. Instead of privileging diasporic subjectivities, these markers of local presence and emplacement offer an alternative framing of what it means to stay put. They give us access to modes of queer relationality that resist documentation, but are indicative of the kinds of lives that certain subjects live: shot through with ambiguity and grounded in a refusal of fixed identity politics. Sand emerges as a compelling metaphor for this kind of theoretical and ethnographic intervention, as its ability to be diffuse yet still irreducibly material provides a model for one way to understand the memory of same-sex desire and gender transgression. Making use of fragments, then, this essay thinks simultaneously through the sexual politics of memory and landscape, linking queer presence to the sands of both Saint-Pierre and Sainte-Anne.

The Renaissance of the Bantu Languages in Literature

by Susanna Iacona Salafia

Expanding the History of the Black Studies Movement: Some Prefatory Notes

by Jonathan Fenderson

Co-authored with James Stewart (of Penn State University) and Kabria Baumgartner (of Wooster)

A Black Woman’s Choice- Depo-Provera and Reproductive Rights

by Journal of Research on Women and Gender

Nicole M. Jackson, The Ohio State University

African American and Black British women exhibited a complicated relationship with reproductive rights activism in the... more African American and Black British women exhibited a complicated relationship with reproductive rights activism in the 1970s and 1980s. As women’s health work developed in both countries to focus attention on abortion or expanding women’s access to birth control methods, Black women were often wary of these new “freedoms.” Much of this reticence centered on the ways in which “choice” had been defined by mainstream society. Black women’s participation in the women’s health movement attempted to develop a more complicated definition of choice to demonstrate that more contraceptive options for White women could also mean fewer choices for Black women. They provided a critique of reproductive abuses that centered race, class, and immigration status as significant arbiters of Black women’s health status. They demonstrated a deep-seated hostility toward and mistrust of medical professionals who they saw as working to systematically strip Black women of their reproductive freedom. Black women believed that the medical profession saw them as incapable of controlling their fertility and used this as a reason to rob them of their agency. Opposition to Depo-Provera provides one demonstration of the complexity of this issue and illustrates that Black women’s reproductive rights activism was about protecting Black women’s bodies while also safeguarding Black motherhood. And in this way they connected reproductive health with the general health of all Black women, and at times the Black community as a whole to make reproductive rights the distinct domain of women of color, poor women and, at times, Black people writ large.

Bah, Bah Black Sheep: Speak and Rise Subaltern

by James C. Vlisides