Oppositional Designs: Examining How Racial Identity Informs the Critical Design of Art and Space

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-109
Author(s):  
Krishnan Vasudevan
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Critical Design ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Communal Healing ◽  
Visual Discourses ◽  
Study Offer

AbstractThis study develops upon recent scholarship about subversive design that emerged in response to hegemonic structures such as capitalism, by introducing how racial identity informs disruptive design practices. Based upon a two-year ethnography with nine black artists during a period of racial unrest, this study presents how their experiences as black Americans informed distinctive, critical design dispositions. The participants’ deeply personal and labor-intensive design processes were both technical and political processes that involved intense prototyping, research and self-reflection. Their designs resulted in oppositional films, photography exhibits and paintings that contested racial metonymy through visceral and visual discourses that present black identities and histories within a more complex racial language. The participants also designed empathic spaces where oppositional discourses could take root and that supported communal healing, mourning and celebration. The ethnographic accounts of this study offer a meaningful way to engage and bridge scholarship about race, design and oppositional art.

A Provocation of The Modes of Black Indigeneity

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-50
Author(s):  
Kyle Mays
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Indigenous Land

This essay explores the meaning of the term Black Indigeneity (BI). Afro-Indigenous Studies scholar Kyle T. Mays asks, what is Black Indigeneity? How do scholars talk about it? What are its possibilities? Relying on a survey of recent scholarship, Mays argues that BI is largely understood as a form of Black Americans participating in settler colonial processes meant to erase and displace Indigenous peoples. He argues that we should look at BI as an analytic that African Americans have used to create belonging and continue to express cultures practiced throughout the African diaspora, adapted and transformed into a modern iteration of cultural expression. In this way, we should rethink how we view blackness and indigeneity as two separate entities, and explore how people of African descent create belonging on dispossessed Indigenous land.

Response to Howard and Walters

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 413-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Lust
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Regime Type ◽  
Mass Mobilization ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Critical Problems ◽  
State Relations

This response points to three critical problems in Explaining the Unexpected. First, the authors' contention that scholars ignored “everyday contestation,” including changing citizen-state relations, emerging venues of political participation, and the potential for mobilization, is based on a selective reading of the literature on politics in the Arab world before 2011. Second, their assertion that existing paradigms hindered scholars' ability to understand change mischaracterizes the literature on enduring authoritarianism. Scholars did not argue that regime breakdown was impossible before 2011 but rather sought to understand why authoritarian regimes were sustained. Long before the uprisings, they recognized the factors that could make breakdown possible. Third, Howard and Walters' conclusion that Middle East scholars' fundamental paradigms and their focus on regime type will lead them to treat “utterly remarkable waves of mass mobilization as politically inconsequential” is misplaced. The literature has and continues to explore a wide range of issues that extend far beyond democratization, and recent scholarship has examined varied aspects of the diverse political processes and outcomes witnessed since 2011. Explaining the Unexpected misses the mark on many points, but it does provide a useful platform for scholars to reflect on problems facing comparative politics. These include the blinders resulting from the normative biases underpinning the discipline and the need for a nuanced discussion about how, and to what extent, scholars facing rapid, regional transformations can learn from the study of similar experiences in other regions.

Black and More than Black

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Individual

This book analyzes twenty-first century African American fiction through the proliferation of post categories that arose in the new millennium. These post categories—post-black, post-racialism, post-Soul—articulate a shift away from the racial aesthetics associated with the Black Arts Movement and argue for the individual agency of Black artists over the meaning of racial identity in their work. Analyzing key works by Colson Whitehead, Alice Randall, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paul Beatty, Jesmyn Ward, and Kiese Laymon, this book argues that twenty-first century African American fiction highlights the push and pull between claims of post-civil rights progress and the recognition of the entrenchment of structural racism. The book contextualizes this shift through the rise of, and presidency of, Barack Obama and the revision of Du Boisian double consciousness. It examines Obama through an analysis of the discourse surrounding his rise, Obama’s own writings, and his appearance as a character. The book concludes that while the claims of progress associated with Barack Obama’s presidency and the post era categories to which it was connected were overly optimistic, they represent a major shift towards an individualistic conception of racial identity that continues to resist claims of responsibility imposed on Black artists.

HAYDN’S MELANCHOLY VOICE: LOST DIALECTICS IN HIS LATE CHAMBER MUSIC AND ENGLISH SONGS

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANCY NOVEMBER
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Chamber Music ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Chamber Works ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Francisco Goya

AbstractFrom the nineteenth century onwards the stereotype of Haydn as cheerful and jesting has dominated the reception of his music. This study contributes to the recent scholarship that broadens this view, with a new approach: I set works by Haydn in the context of eighteenth-century ideas about melancholy, those of Edmund Burke, Francisco Goya, Henry Home (Lord Kames), Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Zimmermann. Their conceptions of melancholy were dialectical, involving the interplay of such elements as pleasure and pain, freedom and fettering, and self-reflection and absorption. I consider the relevance of these dialectics to Haydn’s English songs, his dramatic cantata Arianna a Naxos and two late chamber works. Musical melancholy arises, I argue, when the protagonist of a work – be it the vocal character in a song or the ‘composer’s voice’ in an instrumental work – exhibits an ironic distance from his or her own pain. The musical dialectics in these works prompt listeners, for their part, to take a step back to contemplate the borders and limits of emotional experience and communication.

Socialization and Racial Identity Among Black Americans

1990 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 364 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. Demo ◽  
Michael Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Black Americans

scholarly journals Figures on the Threshold: Refugees and the Politics of Hospitality, 1930–51

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-204
Author(s):  
Katherine Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Active Agent ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Second World

If, as Peter Gatrell has suggested, the figure of the refugee was defined and even constructed during the twentieth century, then the Second World War was a crucial period in this process (Gatrell, 2013). This article looks at three representations of refugee figures from this period, Graham Greene's novel The Name of Action (1930), Rebecca West's short story ‘Around Us the Wail of Sirens’ (1941) and Storm Jameson's novel The Black Laurel (1947), evaluating them in light of recent scholarship around hospitality and asylum to suggest that these refugee characters subvert the norms and customs of British hospitality. It argues that in these three texts, refugees act as ‘threshold figures’, exposing the realities of war and the inadequacy of British social processes to contain them. In doing so, they point towards a different way of representing the refugee as an active agent, rather than a passive recipient in both political processes and social interactions.

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