scholarly journals Nobody Knows My Name: The Masquerade of Mourning in the Early 1980s Artistic Productions of Michael Jackson and Prince

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 628-645 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Pochmara ◽  
Justyna Wierzchowska
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
Cultural Scripts ◽  
Flexible Approach ◽  
Cultural Displacement

AbstractThe article analyses Michael Jackson’s album Thriller and Prince’s movie Purple Rain. We explore their camp aesthetics and their recasting of the cultural representations of the black male. Jackson’s and Prince’s performative personas are both liberatory and burdened with the received cultural scripts of black masculinity. We claim that their employment of camp is political rather than escapist and depoliticized. Camp serves them as a platform to mourn the cultural displacement of the black male body in a postslavery America. In particular, the two artists distance themselves from the extensive ideological and physical pressures exerted on the black male body in the early 1980s. As a result, their performances are complexly de-Oedipalized. Prince in Purple Rain refuses to assume the patriarchal position of the Father. Analogously, Jackson fashions himself as a Peter Pan-like eternal adolescent who never makes his final identification as either heterosexual or LGBTQ desiring agent. In the coda to the article, we reach beyond the 1980s to explore a more flexible approach to camp in the artistic output of twenty-first-century African American performers of Queercore and Afrofuturist scenes, which were partially enabled by Jackson’s and Prince’s performances.

The 7th Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award Winning Essay

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Katelyn Knox
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Young Black Male ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
African American Communities ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Memorial Award ◽  
Musical Elements

Popular music abounds in Afropean literature, yet to date scholars have primarily read novels’ musical elements through author biography. In this article, I focus narrowly on the rich musical peritexts and musico-literary intermediality of two novels by Insa Sané: Du plomb dans le crâne (2008) and Daddy est mort…: Retour à Sarcelles (2010). In addition to the abundant diegetic musical references, both novels also feature two structural musical layers. I argue that these three musical elements constitute critical sites through which the novels’ narratives, which center around young, black, male protagonists who seek to escape vicious circles of violence through recognition, emerge. Ultimately, these novels’ musical elements situate the narratives’ discussions of black masculinity within much broader conversations transpiring between French and African American communities, thereby providing a much larger cultural genealogy to supplement the characters’ fraught literal ones.

Men Walk in Parallel!

2019 ◽  
pp. 249-262
Author(s):  
C. Kemal Nance
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Male ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Male Body ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Historical Representations

C. Kemal Nance reflects on the ways in which African American men utilize dance vocabularies in artistic and academic work. He reveals his findings through his own experiences as an African dance performer, as well as through a series of interviews with Baba Chuck Davis. Centering an analysis of gender and sexuality, Nance explores the scripted nature of these discourses while addressing the ideological implications of historical representations of the black male body, masculinity, and heteronormativity in the field of African dance in the United States.

The Violent Weight of Whiteness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Yancy
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
A Site ◽  
White Hegemony

What is the lived experience of the black male body within the context of white America in the twenty-first century? How can we describe the deep existential and psychic dimensions of black male bodies as they negotiate their lives within the context of white hegemony? How do their bodies continue to be truncated according to a distorted and racist imago in the white imaginary? The black male body, within the context of this white imaginary, constitutes a site of “contamination.” As such, then, within the white body politic, black male bodies are thereby always already targets of the state, deemed “criminals,” “monsters,” and “thugs.” Textual testimony, coupled with social, political, and existential phenomenological analyses, demonstrates the sheer gravity of being black and male in a mythical postrace America.

The Fire This Time

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miles White
Keyword(s):  
Black Male ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Cultural Complex ◽  
Racial Perceptions ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
Geographical Locations

This chapter focuses on comparisons between minstrelsy and constructions of black masculinity in hip-hop music and culture, particularly the context of hard and hardcore styles of rap performance. Since minstrelsy, blackness has been one of America's primary cultural exports. Furthermore, hip-hop music and culture have been integral in the construction of a new cultural complex of racial perceptions about black masculinity and the black male body. In addition, the chapter shows how black masculinity can be relocated and transposed not simply to other geographical locations, but onto other kinds of bodies in representations that reproduce and perpetuate pejorative understandings of black subjectivities.

INCARCERATION, TRANSFORMATION AND AWARENESS IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN NOVEL

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-78
Author(s):  
Mariam Youssef
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Novel ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Ernest Gaines ◽  
Male Incarceration

 This article examines the theme of black male incarceration in the African American novel. Black male incarcerated characters are frequently presented as the most socially aware characters in the novel, in spite of their isolation. In different African American novels, black male incarcerated characters experience a transformation as a result of their incarceration that leads to a heightened awareness of their marginalisation as black men. Because of their compromised agency in incarceration, these characters are not able to express black masculinity in traditional ways. Using novels by Richard Wright, James Baldwin, John A. Williams and Ernest Gaines, I argue that black male incarcerated characters use their heightened awareness as an alternative method of expressing black masculinity.

scholarly journals Representations of Black Masculinity in Oscar Micheaux’s Silent Film Within Our Gates

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-37
Author(s):  
Fatma Chenini
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Oscar Micheaux ◽  
Do So

AbstractMy paper focuses on studying the representations of black masculinity in the Harlem Renaissance’s discourse, and investigates how these representations challenged the limited, reductive and one-dimensional stereotypes which were adopted and further disseminated by the popular culture of the time. To do so, I will analyze a number of black male characters depicted in the silent film, Within Our Gates (1920), of the African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux.

scholarly journals “Obligations to Negroes who would be kin if they were not Negro”

Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-153
Author(s):  
Werner Sollors
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
First Century ◽  
Half Century ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
American Authors

The 1965/1966 Dcedalus issues on “The Negro American” reveal how America's racial future was imagined nearly a half-century ago, and at least one of the prophecies - voiced by sociologist Everett C. Hughes - found its fulfillment in an unexpected way at President Obama's inauguration in 2009. Short stories by Amina Gautier (“Been Meaning to Say” and “Pan is Dead”), Heidi Durrow's novel The Girl WhoFellfrom the Sky, plays by Thomas Bradshaw (Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist and Cleansed), and poems by Terrance Hayes (“For Brothers and the Dragon” and “The Avocado”) suggest trends in recent works by African American authors who began their publishing careers in the twenty-first century.

Eyes at the Back of His Head: Precarious Masculinity and the Modern Tracking Shot

Paragraph ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Barker ◽  
Adam Cottrel
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Male Character ◽  
Mobile Cameras ◽  
Twenty First Century

This paper examines masculinity in relation to the modern tracking shot in Daren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008) and Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines (2012). These films make prominent use of a particular tracking shot in which the camera floats behind a male character, his head neatly centred in the frame. The camera in these ‘follow-shots’ seems unmistakably but loosely tethered to the character's body. This paper attempts to ascertain the phenomenological nature and critical significance of that relationship, which in recent films expresses the intimate distance and dissonance between mobile cameras, masculinity and the male body in the twenty-first century.

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