Post-Soul Satire

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Internet Culture ◽  
African American Artists

This volume collects essays that explore the variety of satiric productions in contemporary African American culture. Often dubbed “Post-Soul,” the artists of this period mark a change in political and aesthetic concerns from those embraced by artists of the Civil Rights period. Building off of Bertram Ashe’s notion of “blaxploration” – or the troubling of African American identity – this volume investigates the variety of means that African American artists have used to trouble the understanding of what it means to be black in contemporary America. The chapters in this collection offers the first interdisciplinary approach to the study of satire in contemporary African American literature, film, television, theatre, music, visual arts, and internet culture. The essays in this collection work to discern the means by which “Post-Soul Satire” addresses both in-group and external satiric critique of many aspects of contemporary African American cultural production.

Cosmologies of Black Cultural Production: A Conversation with Afrosurrealist Filmmaker Christopher Harris

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-56
Author(s):  
Terri Francis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Experimental Poetics ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists

FQ Contributing Editor Terri Francis interviews filmmaker Christopher Harris, situating Afrosurrealist filmmaking within a constellation of African American artists and writers that includes the painter Kerry James Marshall, novelist Toni Morrison, poet Elizabeth Alexander, and composer Roscoe Mitchell. The discussion revolves around the experimental poetics of African American literature that provide Harris with flares of revelation that light the path for his diverse projects. Harris's oeuvre is in dialogue with the nature of the film medium and with what it means to work, observe, and think, as an artist, living between the ideals of American happiness and the realities of American inequality.

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: AN INTRODUCTION

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Kocić Stanković
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
American Studies ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
African American Studies ◽  
Integrative Approach ◽  
Topic Area ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Academic Courses ◽  
The U.S

My purpose in compiling this book was to produce a “student-friendly” course book in African American Studies, the elective course I designed and introduced into the English Department curriculum at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš. The book is meant to provide a brief introduction into the history and culture of African Americans in the U.S., but could also be of interest to the general public, and, hopefully, may add to the practice of teaching African American literature and history already established at Serbian universities. The main purpose of the book is to get the readers/students acquainted with the key events in African American history, the most important political and cultural figures and the most prominent themes in African American culture. One of the goals would also be to spark further interest in this topic area and open possibilities for similar postgraduate academic courses. As most available books in African American studies deal either with history or literature, I have made an attempt to consider the subject from the perspective of cultural studies, integrating historical data with sociological, political and cultural commentary. I have deemed that such an integrative approach would provide the best insight into the study area and give the fullest picture of the African American contribution to the U.S. and world history and culture. The book is divided into eight chapters covering the period from the origins of the Atlantic slave trade to the contemporary period. The concept of individual chapters is as follows: an outline of the most important events, developments and historical figures of a particular period is followed by two or three brief excerpts from some of the most important works by major African American writers which illustrate the most important theme(s) covered in the chapter, accompanied by a brief commentary with topics and questions for further study.

“Katrina is the Mother We Will Remember Until the Next Mother”

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-90
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Social ◽  
Long Division

This chapter analyzes representations of Hurricane Katrina in African American literature to argue that the storm served to illustrate the entrenchment of structural racism and the importance of a specifically racialized tradition in African American literature. Adopting the theoretical framework of “slow violence,” the chapter analyzes two novels which depict both the storm and its aftermath: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and Kiese Laymon’sLong Division (2013). In the context of the early twenty-first century, these representations of Katrina do not displace the social advancements of African Americans but instead force recognition of the incompleteness not only of specific political battles but also of ongoing race, gender, and class-based narratives, thereby questioning the optimism of a rhetoric of post-Blackness. In particular, the novels establish continuity between Civil Rights Era traumas and struggles and Hurricane Katrina to push against a rhetoric focused on the transcendence of the past.

From Absence to Flight

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Black Power Movement

This chapter explores radicalization of comic rage in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. Emerging in the middle of the transition from the integrationist period of the civil rights movement to the nationalism of the Black Power movement, both works openly challenge fundamental concepts about race. In addition to targeting fundamental assumptions of Western superiority, these works also question simplistic counter-representations that African Americans present to combat racist stereotypes. Using forms increasingly important in African American literature, like drama and neo-slave narratives, these works enact comic rage as way to depict unique and powerful forms of resistance.

Aunt Hagar

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-100
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Cultural Icon

Chapter 3 explains how a Black Aunt Hagar figure develops as an African American cultural icon unrelated to biblical Hagar. This chapter discusses how different understandings of Hagar appear within naming traditions as well as within visual arts, music, and literature. It details how various Black Hagar figures within African American literature and culture do not necessarily refer to biblical Hagar despite the use of the biblical name Hagar. It contends that as scholars, writers, and other artists link a Black Aunt Hagar figure with biblical Hagar, the resulting association between these figures contributes to the notion of biblical Hagar as a Black woman.

Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
GerShun Avilez
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Black Nationalist ◽  
Experimental Works

This book explores the long-overlooked links between Black Nationalist activism and the renaissance of artistic experimentation emerging from recent African American literature, visual art, and film. The book charts a new genealogy of contemporary African American artistic production that illuminates how questions of gender and sexuality guided artistic experimentation in the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. As the book shows, the artistic production of the Black Arts era provides a set of critical methodologies and paradigms rooted in the disidentification with Black Nationalist discourses. The book studies how this emerging subjectivity, termed aesthetic radicalism, critiqued nationalist rhetoric in the past. It also continues to offer novel means for expressing black intimacy and embodiment via experimental works of art and innovative artistic methods. A bold addition to an advancing field, this book rewrites recent black cultural production even as it uncovers unexpected ways of locating black radicalism.

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