The Impact of Social Movements on the Development of African American Museums

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 44-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Fleming
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Black People ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Black Museums ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

The effort to preserve African American history is firmly grounded in the struggle for freedom and equality. Black people understood the relationship between heritage and the freedom struggle. Such struggles in the pre and post Civil War eras spurred the preservation of African and African American culture first in libraries and archives and later museums. The civil rights, Black Power, Black Arts and Black Studies movements helped advance social and political change, which in turn spurred the development of Black museums as formal institutions for preserving African American culture.

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.

Vocal Self-Identification Singing Style, and Singing Range in Relationship to a Measure of Cultural Mistrust in African-American Adolescent Females

1997 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 636-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverly Johnson Chinn
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Adolescent Females ◽  
Cultural Mistrust ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
African American Adolescent ◽  
Singing Style ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Chest Voice ◽  
African American Adolescent Females

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between high or low cultural mistrust and the vocal characteristics of African-American adolescent females (N = 44). The vocal characteristics were vocal self identification, singing style, and singing range. The subjects were assigned to high or low cultural mistrust groups based on scores on the Cultural Mistrust Inventory. A researcher-devised vocal self-identification survey provided information about the subjects' vocal self-concepts and acceptance of vocal models. Subjects sang “America” in a key and style of choice for the singing-style measurement. The performances were analyzed for eight style characteristics: bends, glides, breathiness, hoarseness, raspiness, dips, hard attacks, and emphasis of chest voice. Results indicated statistically significant differences between two groups on each vocal characteristic. The high-mistrust group demonstrated more characteristics associated with the African-American culture than did the low-mistrust group.

Prefiguring Postblackness

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Bunch Davis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Arts

This book explores the tensions between cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle and representations of African American identity staged in five plays between 1959 and 1969 during the civil rights era. Through close readings of the plays, their popular and African American print media reviews, and the cultural context in which they were produced, the book shows how these representations complicate narrow ideas of blackness, which often limit the freedom struggle era to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest and cast Malcolm X's black nationalism as undermining the Civil Rights Movement's advances. These five plays strategically revise the rhetoric, representations, ideologies, and iconography of the African American freedom struggle, subverting its dominant narrative. This revision critiques racial uplift ideology's tenets of civic and moral virtue as a condition of African American full citizenship. The dramas also reimagine the Black Arts Movement's restrictive notions of black authenticity as a condition of racial identity, and their staged representations construct a counter-narrative to cultural memory of the freedom struggle during that very era. In their use of a “postblack ethos” to enact African American subjectivity, the plays envision black identity beyond the quest for freedom, anticipating what blackness might look like when it moves beyond the struggle. Finally, the book discusses recent revivals, showing how these 1960s plays shape dimensions of modern drama well beyond the decade of their creation.

An Unseen Light

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

In An Unseen Light, eminent and rising scholars offer a multidisciplinary examination of Memphis’s role in African American history during the twentieth century. The city was at the epicenter of the civil rights movement on April 4, 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. But the essays in this book broaden the scholarly understanding of the black freedom struggle in Memphis. In chronicling the significant events that took place in the city and its citizens’ many contributions to the black freedom struggle, they show how Memphis has been largely overlooked by historians of the civil rights movement. In this volume, the authors investigate episodes such as black political resistance to the 1917 lynching of Ell Persons and the 1940 “Reign of Terror,” when black Memphians experienced a prolonged campaign of harassment, mass arrests, and violence at the hands of police. They also examine topics including the relationship between the labor and civil rights movements, the fight for economic advancement in black communities, and the impact of music on the city’s culture. Covering subjects as diverse as politics, sports, music, activism, and religion, An Unseen Light illuminates Memphis’s place in the long history of the struggle for African American freedom

Out on the floor: the politics of dancing on the Northern Soul scene

Popular Music ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 431-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIM WALL
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Physical Movement ◽  
Full Analysis ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The Northern Soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and Midlands in the early 1970s. It still thrives today with a mix of forty-year-olds and new converts, and its celebration of 1960s' soul has an international following. Centred on the detail of the dance techniques, and musical and cultural context, the analysis presented here is developed from an ethnographic study. It uses a concept of competence and the example of a classic record to explore the meanings of dance for the scene's participants. The importance of solidarity, senses of identity through gender, place and ethnicity, and the relationship of the scene with African–American culture are explored. The study draws conclusions about the way that dance can be theorised and analysed, and argues that a full analysis requires an exploration of the relationship of physical movement to space, music and senses of identity.

Conclusion

Soul in Seoul ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 147-160
Author(s):  
Crystal S. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
American Culture ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
Music Aesthetics ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
The Impact

This chapter uses Korean indie groups to reveal the diversity of music under the K-pop umbrella and the ramifications of such diversity for music aesthetics, authenticity, and globalization. Placing K-pop within a global R&B tradition highlights K-pop as a diverse style of music largely informed by African American popular music. It reveals the extent to which Black popular music has informed K-pop. Technology enables fans to access a wide array of K-pop, foster fan communities, and act as critics and arbiters of taste. K-pop’s place in a global R&B tradition also reveals the diversity of global influences, challenging the focus on a generalized West and United States that obscures the impact of African American culture.

scholarly journals Philosophical-aesthetic foundations of African-American hip-hop music

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-62
Author(s):  
Tatiana Leonidovna Pyrova
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Research Assessment ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Impact

This article is dedicated to the philosophical-aesthetic foundations of African-American hip-hop music of the late XX century. Developed by the African philosopher Leopold Senghor, the author of the theory of negritude, concept of Negro-African aesthetics laid the foundations for the formation of philosophical-political comprehension and development of the principles of African-American culture in the second half of the XX century in works of the founders of “Black Arts” movement. This research examines the main theses of the aesthetic theory of L. Senghor; traces his impact upon cultural-political movement “Black Art”; reveals which position of his aesthetic theory and cultural-political movement “Black Arts” affected hip-hop music. The author refers to the concept of “vibe” for understanding the influence of Negro-African aesthetics upon the development of hip-hop music. The impact of aesthetic theory of Leopold Senghor upon the theoretical positions of cultural-political movement “Black Arts” is demonstrated. The author also compares the characteristics of the Negro-African aesthetics and the concepts used to describe hip-hop music, and determines correlation between them. The conclusion is made that the research assessment of hip-hop music and comparative analysis of African-American hip-hop with the examples of global hip-hop should pay attention to the philosophical-aesthetic foundations of African-American hip-hop and their relation to Negro-African aesthetics, which differs fundamentally from the European aesthetic tradition.

But Some of Us Are Strong Believers in the Samson Myth

Black Samson ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 84-93
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior ◽  
Jeremy Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
American Culture ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
American Women ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Jack Johnson ◽  
And Gender

The African American women discussed in this chapter use the Black Samson tradition to focus on the complex intersections of race and gender. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts movement, the major artistic and literary movements that helped shape African American culture throughout the twentieth century involved women who found something in Samson’s story that resonated with them deeply. One might think that the story of a hyper-masculine biblical hero would not provide much material for reflections upon the intersections of race and gender in America. Yet, from the playful audacity of Christina Moody’s claim that she could defeat Jack Johnson to the painful predictions from Gaza in Lucille Clifton’s poem dedicated to Ramona Africa, the twentieth century witnessed African American women claiming a place within the Black Samson tradition.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-32
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The chapter length introduction, “The Post Era,” historicizes both popular cultural (i.e. colorblindness and post-racialism) and scholarly attempts to periodize contemporary African American culture and literary aesthetics (i.e. post-soul, post-black, and postrace). It connects these conceptualizations with the revision of Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness. The introduction locates these shifts in the new millennium in the context of Black politics and the rise of Barack Obama. It also addresses the relationship of the current moment in African American literature with past movements, focusing especially on the post era’s repudiation of the Black Arts Movement.

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