Afro-Samurai: techno-Orientalism and contemporary hip hop

Popular Music ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken McLeod
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
American Identity ◽  
High Tech ◽  
African American Identity

AbstractThis article examines the practice and recent rise in the use of various aspects of Japanese popular culture in hip hop, particularly as manifest in the work of RZA, Kanye West and Nicki Minaj. Often these references highlight the high-tech, futuristic aesthetic of much Japanese popular culture and thus resonate with concepts and practices surrounding Afro-futurism. Drawing on various theories of hybridity, this article analyses how Japanese popular culture has informed constructions of African American identity. In contrast to the often sensational media coverage of racial tensions between African American and Asian communities, the nexus of Japanese popular culture and African American hip hop evinces a sympathetic connection based on shared notions of Afro-Asian liberation and empowerment achieved, in part, through a common aesthetic of technological mastery and appropriation. The synthesis of Asian popular culture and African American hip hop represents a globally hybridised experience of identity and racial formation in the 21st century.

The Reel and Surreal of Race in America: Michel Gondry and the African–American Identity Crisis of Dave Chappelle

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-166
Author(s):  
Monique Taylor
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
American Identity ◽  
African American Identity ◽  
Real Community

In this chapter Monique Taylor analyses the concert documentary DaveChappelle’s Block Party (2005), directed by French filmmaker Michel Gondry, which depicts the organization and performances of a “block party” hosted by African-American comedian Dave Chappelle in Brooklyn, New York. Chappelle’s Block Party featured performances by some of the biggest names in hip hop, rap, and R & B music, including ?uestlove, Erykah Badu, Mos Def, the Fugees reunited with Lauryn Hill, and Kanye West. The chapter argues that Gondry plays the role of outsider-looking-in as both a participant in as well as an observer of aspects of American cultural conversations on memory, identity and language. Taylor’s chapter draws attention to Dave Chappelle’sBlock Party’s construction of a hybrid and hyper-real community through the use of strategies such as movements back and forth in time between the entertainers’ performances and the preparations leading up to the concert which highlight the production of the event, surreal visual embellishments, and prominent allusion to symbols of African–American identity. The chapter also places the film within the context of Chappelle’s own exploration of his identity and struggle to “keep it real.”

scholarly journals Mind games: A temporal sentiment analysis of the political messages of the Internet Research Agency on Facebook and Twitter

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110143
Author(s):  
Soyoung Park ◽  
Sharon Strover ◽  
Jaewon Choi ◽  
MacKenzie Schnell
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Temporal Dynamics ◽  
Negative Emotion ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Internet Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Message Content ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
African American Identity ◽  
2016 Election

This study examines the temporal dynamics of emotional appeals in Russian campaign messages used in the 2016 election. Communications on two giant social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, are analyzed to assess emotion in message content and targeting that may have contributed to influencing people. The current study conducts both computational and qualitative investigations of the Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) emotion-based strategies across three different dimensions of message propagation: the platforms themselves, partisan identity as targeted by the source, and social identity in politics, using African American identity as a case. We examine (1) the emotional flows along the campaign timeline, (2) emotion-based strategies of the Russian trolls that masked left- and right-leaning identities, and (3) emotion in messages projecting to or about African American identity and representation. Our findings show sentiment strategies that differ between Facebook and Twitter, with strong evidence of negative emotion targeting Black identity.

Obama and Race in America

The Forum ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Morton Keller
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
American Identity ◽  
African American Identity

AbstractThis examination of Obama and race in America has three themes. The first is his African-American identity, and concludes that it has marked and useful resemblances to John F. Kennedy’s Irish Catholicism. It then examines Obama’s record affecting race relations in America: what he has done and, as revealing, what he has not done. Finally, it seeks to set Obama’s approach to race relations in the context of its rich and diverse history in this nation.

The Postblack Ethos in “Texts Out of Time”: Rosa Parks and the African American Freedom Struggle in Cultural Memory

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Bunch Davis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
African American Identity ◽  
The 1960S

This book challenges the cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle era that hinges on a master narrative focused on the “heroic period” of the Civil Rights Movement. It argues that this narrative limits the representation of African American identity within the Civil Rights Movement to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest leadership in the segregated South and casts Malcolm X's advocacy of black nationalism and the ensuing Black Power/Arts Movement as undermining civil rights advances. Through an analysis of five case studies of African American identity staged in plays between 1959 and 1969, the book instead offers representations that engage, critique, and revise racial uplift ideology and reimagine the Black Arts Movement's sometimes proscriptive notions of black authenticity as a condition of black identity and cultural production. It also posits a postblack ethos as the means by which these representations construct their counternarratives to cultural memory and broadens narrow constructions of African American identity shaping racial discourse in the U.S. public sphere of the 1960s.

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