Crate Digging Begins at Home

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lynn Stoever
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Rhetorical Analysis ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Global Art ◽  
At Home

Many scholars, music journalists, and hip hop heads have discounted the diversity of ways women helped create the now global art-form known as hip hop. One of these overlooked labors involves the cultivation and passing on of a black and Latina feminist listening praxis through record collecting and selecting. This chapter contributes to black feminist scholarship dedicated to moving hip hop historiography from the critical but critically well-worn streets into the more woman-centric and therefore often marginalized spaces of the South Bronx—those living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, hallways, stores, and stoops, where black women and Latinas not only participated in early hip hop, but helped to bring it into sonic being. Through archival evidence, rhetorical analysis, and an oral history, “Crate Digging Begins at Home” moves toward the interconnected goals of reconceiving gender in hip hop historiography, rethinking the figure of the “mother” in popular music studies and record collecting culture, and documenting the selecting practices of Black and Latinx women.

Young, Shifting, and Black

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karla D. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Black Feminist Thought ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Communicative Practice ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Racial Solidarity

This is the story of a Black woman Baby Boomer who, inspired by the 1969 song Young, Gifted and Black, experienced cultural border crossings early in life. It includes reflections from Black women of the Hip Hop Generation who, decades later, also pursued the “world waiting” for them promised in that song. In our lived experiences across generations, we found strategic language use is part of the “gift” and critical to crossings. We also discovered identity implications as we “shift” across borders into predominantly White environments and back into our Black communities where language is perceived as a marker of racial solidarity. Black feminist thought is used to examine the implications of a communicative practice that has been done for so long and so well it appears effortless. But we know it is not—for both generations, there are benefits, yes, but also detriments, frustration, and fatigue.

‘Creating justice between us’: Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic as coalitional politics in the Women’s Movement

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
SaraEllen Strongman
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Intimate Relationships ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
White Women ◽  
Sexual Attraction ◽  
Audre Lorde ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Political Alliances ◽  
Coalitional Politics

This article asks how interracial sex and/or sexual attraction might be an integral part of cross-racial feminist work. Focusing on the work of black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde, I argue that for some black women sex and intimate relationships with white women during the Women’s Movement were an important part of their survival and their feminist and anti-racist praxis. Drawing on recent black feminist scholarship, I read Lorde’s work against the grain of the anti-pornography feminist movement contemporaneous with her career and suggest that sex with white women was often a productive, enriching and necessary experience for her as she worked to build cross-racial political alliances.

Break Beats in the Bronx

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph C., Jr. Ewoodzie
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Symbolic Boundaries ◽  
The South ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
New Evidence

The origin story of hip-hop—one that involves Kool Herc DJing a house party on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx—has become received wisdom. But Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. argues that the full story remains to be told. In vibrant prose, he combines never-before-used archival material with searching questions about the symbolic boundaries that have divided our understanding of the music. In Break Beats in the Bronx, Ewoodzie portrays the creative process that brought about what we now know as hip-hop and shows that the art form was a result of serendipitous events, accidents, calculated successes, and failures that, almost magically, came together. In doing so, he questions the unexamined assumptions about hip-hop's beginnings, including why there are just four traditional elements—DJing, MCing, breaking, and graffiti writing—and not others, why the South Bronx and not any other borough or city is considered the cradle of the form, and which artists besides Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash founded the genre. Ewoodzie answers these and many other questions about hip-hop's beginnings. Unearthing new evidence, he shows what occurred during the crucial but surprisingly underexamined years between 1975 and 1979 and argues that it was during this period that the internal logic and conventions of the scene were formed.

Flow

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell Ohriner
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Voice Flow ◽  
Computational Music Analysis

Originating in dance parties in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, hip hop and rap music have become a dominant style of popular music in the United States and a force for activism all over the world. So, too, has scholarship on this music grown, yet much of this scholarship, employing methods drawn from sociology and literature, leaves unaddressed the expressive musical choices made by hip-hop artists. This book addresses flow, the rhythm of the rapping voice. Flow presents theoretical and analytical challenges not encountered elsewhere. It is rhythmic as other music is rhythmic. But it is also rhythmic as speech and poetry are rhythmic. Key concepts related to rhythm, such as meter, periodicity, patterning, and accent, are treated independently in scholarship of music, poetry, and speech. This book reconciles those approaches, theorizing flow by integrating the methods of computational music analysis and humanistic close reading. Through the analysis of large collections of verses, it addresses questions in the theories of rhythm, meter, and groove in the unique ecology of rap music. Specifically, the work of Eminem clarifies how flow relates to text, the work of Black Thought clarifies how flow relates to other instrumental streams, and the work of Talib Kweli clarifies how flow relates to rap’s persistent meter. Although the focus throughout is rap music, the methods introduced are appropriate for other genres mix voices and more rigid metric frameworks and further extends the valuable work on hip hop from other perspectives in recent years.

Romantic (In)Justice: Criminal-Legal System-Impacted Black Women’s Romantic Relationship Status and Quality

2021 ◽  
pp. 155708512110194
Author(s):  
Allison E. Monterrosa
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Romantic Relationship ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Relationship Status ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Psychological Strain ◽  
System Data ◽  
Criminal Legal System

This study of working class, heterosexual, criminal-legal system-impacted Black women described the women’s romantic histories and current romantic relationship statuses in terms of commitment, exclusivity, and perceived quality. Using intersectional research methods, qualitative interviews were conducted with 31 Black women between the ages of 18 and 65 years who were working class, resided in Southern California, and were impacted by the criminal-legal system. Data were analyzed using an intersectional Black feminist criminological framework and findings revealed six types of relationship statuses. These relationship statuses did not live up to the women’s aspirations and yielded disparate levels of emotional and psychological strain across relationship statuses.

scholarly journals Black feminist intersectionality is vital to group analysis: Can group analysis allow outsider ideas in?

2021 ◽  
pp. 053331642199776
Author(s):  
Suryia Nayak
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Group Analysis ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Online Platform ◽  
Large Group ◽  
Diversity And Inclusion ◽  
Analytical Structure ◽  
The Relationship

This is the transcript of a speech I gave at an Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) event on the 28th November 2020 about intersectionality and groups analysis. This was momentous for group analysis because it was the first IGA event to focus on black feminist intersectionality. Noteworthy, because it is so rare, the large group was convened by two black women, qualified members of the IGA—a deliberate intervention in keeping with my questioning of the relationship between group analysis and power, privilege, and position. This event took place during the Covid-19 pandemic via an online platform called ‘Zoom’. Whilst holding the event online had implications for the embodied visceral experience of the audience, it enabled an international attendance, including members of Group Analysis India. Invitation to the event: ‘Why the black feminist idea of intersectionality is vital to group analysis’ Using black feminist intersectionality, this workshop explores two interconnected issues: • Group analysis is about integration of parts, but how do we do this across difference in power, privilege, and position? • Can group analysis allow outsider ideas in? This question goes to the heart of who/ what we include in group analytic practice—what about black feminism? If there ‘cannot possibly be one single version of the truth so we need to hear as many different versions of it as we can’ (Blackwell, 2003: 462), we need to include as many different situated standpoints as possible. Here is where and why the black feminist idea of intersectionality is vital to group analysis. On equality, diversity and inclusion, intersectionality says that the ‘problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including black [people] within an already established analytical structure’ (Crenshaw, 1989: 140). Can group analysis allow the outsider idea of intersectionality in?

On self-extraction

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nevarez Encinias
Keyword(s):  
Live Performance ◽  
Art Form ◽  
And Performance ◽  
At Home

Written under a pandemic stay-at-home order, this article conceives of flamenco choreography and performance as an artisanal craft, likening several of the tradition’s practices to the act of making a coffee. Drawing upon historical descriptions of the art form, theoretical debates from the postmodern shift in dance-making and personal anecdote, the article scrutinizes the notion of ‘self-expression’ and confronts flamenco’s enduring reputation as a dance of extravagant emotion, passion, spontaneity and authenticity. The article experiments with experiential and poetic modes of address to ruminate broadly on artisanship as a creative model for dance-makers, and proposes an interdisciplinary frame-of-mind for choreographers, from a time when traditional live performance was on pause.

Customer Service Representatives

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-571
Author(s):  
Julian Kevon Glover
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Transgender Women ◽  
Average Life Expectancy ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Murder Rate ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Customer Service Representatives

This article investigates sex work among Black transgender women in Chicago’s ballroom scene, drawing on ethnographic data to argue that Black transwomen engage in sex work as a practice of self-investment undergirded by an epistemological shift regarding the centrality of affective labor to their work. In so doing, interlocutors reap the benefits of deploying embodied knowledge—the harnessing and transformation of insight derived from lived experiences of racial, gender, and sexual subjection into useful strategies, tactics, and tools—to secure material and human resources necessary for survival. A focus on how Black transwomen live, despite continued physical, spiritual, socioeconomic, political, and cultural annihilation, remains critically important given the myriad indicators (low average life expectancy, low annual income, disproportionally high murder rate, etc.) that expose the world’s indifference to the plight of this community and Black bodies writ large. Further, the author places interlocutors in conversation with Black feminist historians’ and theorists’ discussions of sex work among Black women to expose points of convergence between Black cis- and transgender women. The author also complicates narratives that link sex work to “survival” and subsequently obfuscate explorations of limited and situated agency among Black women that have significant historical precedent.

scholarly journals Memeification of Black Women’s Trauma

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Stravens
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The People ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
History Of

This piece discusses the online and offline discourses on the lives and bodies of Black femme and nonbinary individuals and the harm that is so casually inflicted upon us. Through popular stories of harm performed around famous Black women, such as with rapper Megan Thee Stallion, I connect the history of Black women in popular culture to current online spaces that continue to minimize and trivialize our trauma. I seek to highlight that these stories are not an anomaly, but rather sentiments rooted in the misogynoir that is so entrenched in western culture and have been expanded and weaponized within the online sphere. In addition, the piece challenges the universality of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in its implementation, criticizing its propensity to forget its feminine victims. It is important to emphasize where it has failed and where it needs to be intentional about the people it has overlooked, as this is a movement that began online, where this harm is currently taking place, and at the hands and energies of Black femmes, the very people getting hurt. This piece has manifested from many conversations already occurring in online Black feminist spaces about our treatment and our needs. It invites others into the fold and seeks to encourage individuals to critically reflect on how Black femme and non-binary individuals are presented on their timeline in-between the numerous BLM posts that claim to protect them.

Writing Ourselves into Existence

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-27
Author(s):  
Shardé M. Davis ◽  
Frances Ashun ◽  
Alleyha Dannett ◽  
Kayla Edwards ◽  
Victoria Nwaohuocha
Keyword(s):  
Women Students ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Research Team ◽  
Black Feminist Thought ◽  
Feminist Research ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Critical Autoethnography ◽  
Research Praxis

Academia can be a hostile environment for Black women. Our research team leveraged Black feminist research praxis to produce new knowledge countering conceptions of Black women students and faculty as people who are unintelligent, produce superfluous work, and worthy of being ignored. In order to locate spaces for healing, mentorship, and validation, we engaged in a collaborative autoethnography to co-narrate our experiences while conducting a study for, by, and about Black women. Re-purposing tools from Black feminist thought, critical autoethnography, and collaborative autoethnography enabled us to write ourselves into existence, countering damaging narratives and subverting the harm inflicted by the institution.

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