Black Online Discourse, Part 1

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-170
Author(s):  
André Brock
Keyword(s):  
Technological Literacy ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Online Discourse ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Ritual Drama

Black digital practice reveals a complicated mix of technological literacy, discursive identity, and cultural critique. Taken together, it offers glimpses of the multivalent Black communities’ political, technocultural, and historical commonplaces to the outside world. These can be understood as three topoi shaping Black digital practice—ratchetry, respectability, and racism. This chapter examines ratchetry and racism as interlocking libidinal frames powering Black digital practice. Black digital practice, which the author once characterized as ritual drama and catharsis, can also be understood as digital orality—an online space encoded by folk culture and racial ideology, and undergirded by a libidinal discursive economy, producing pungent, plaintive commentary on matters political.

Making Gullah

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa L. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Black Studies ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Land Loss ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Sapelo Island ◽  
The Social ◽  
Low Country ◽  
Black Land

During the 1920s and 1930s, anthropologists and folklorists became obsessed with uncovering connections between African Americans and their African roots. At the same time, popular print media and artistic productions tapped the new appeal of black folk life, highlighting African-styled voodoo as an essential element of black folk culture. A number of researchers converged on one site in particular, Sapelo Island, Georgia, to seek support for their theories about “African survivals,” bringing with them a curious mix of both influences. The legacy of that body of research is the area’s contemporary identification as a Gullah community. This wide-ranging history upends a long tradition of scrutinizing the Low Country blacks of Sapelo Island by refocusing the observational lens on those who studied them. Cooper uses a wide variety of sources to unmask the connections between the rise of the social sciences, the voodoo craze during the interwar years, the black studies movement, and black land loss and land struggles in coastal black communities in the Low Country. What emerges is a fascinating examination of Gullah people's heritage, and how it was reimagined and transformed to serve vastly divergent ends over the decades.

scholarly journals Black Memes Matter: #LivingWhileBlack With Becky and Karen

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630512098104
Author(s):  
Apryl Williams
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Racial Equity ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Strategic Positioning ◽  
Black Bodies

“BBQ Becky” and “Karen” memes reference real-world incidents in which Black individuals were harassed by White women in public spaces. In what I term the BBQ Becky meme genre, Black meme creators use humor, satire, and strategic positioning to perform a set of interrelated social commentaries on the behavior of White women. By conducting a visual Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) of BBQ Becky memes, I argue that Becky and Karen memes are a cultural critique of White surveillance and White racial dominance. I find that memes in the BBQ Becky meme genre call attention to, and reject, White women’s surveillance and regulation of Black bodies in public spaces—making an important connection between racialized surveillance of the past and contemporary acts of “casual” racism. This meme genre also disrupts White supremacist logics and performative racial ignorance by framing Karens and Beckys as racist—not just disgruntled or entitled. Finally, in a subversion and reversal of power dynamics, Karen and BBQ Becky memes police White supremacy and explicitly call for consequences, providing Black communities with a form of agency. Hence, I conclude that Black memes matter in the struggle for racial equity.

“Seeing” the Harlem Renaissance: Observations on the Position of Visual Art in Harlem Renaissance Studies

Prospects ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 427-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Ann Calo
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Intellectual Elite ◽  
Black Subjectivity ◽  
Renaissance Studies ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

The matrix of ideas and questions that inform scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance as remained fairly consistent across several generations. For example, among the more commonly asked questions over the years have been: Was the Harlem Renaissance modernist or even modern in worldview or artistic form? Did it signal in any real sense the rebirth of a people or was it simply the invention of an intellectual elite with a naive faith in the transformative power of art? What was the relation of the Harlem Renaissance to American cultural and racial ideology? To what extent can we think of it as chronologically or geographically determined, that is, did it begin and end in Harlem in he 1920s? What is the role in this renaissance of an enlightened consciousness about Africa, its people, its art, and its culture? To what degree can we regard the Harlem Renaissance as symptomatic of an emergent black nationalism or move toward cultural separatism within America or the African diaspora? What are we to make of the interracial dynamics within the Harlem Renaissance? How are we to understand the problematic fascination with primitivism and folk culture that preoccupied not only participants in the Harlem Renaissance but also many of its subsequent critics? How did the Harlem Renaissance expand our notions of black subjectivity and identity? What was its relation to the sociopolitical agendas of the early 20th century? And, finally, did it succeed or did it fail? This list is by no means exhaustive, but in the decades that

The Religious and Racial Meanings of The Green Pastures

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curtis J. Evans
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Black Religion ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Rural South ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Black Christians ◽  
A Site

AbstractMarc Connelly's The Green Pastures play was one of the longest running dramas in Broadway history. Responses to the play by blacks and whites demonstrate its contested nature. Whites generally lauded the drama for its simplicity and its childlike depiction of black religion in the rural South. African Americans, though hopeful that its allblack cast would lead to more opportunities for blacks on stage, were divided between a general appreciation of the extraordinary display of talent by its actors and worries about the implications of a play that seemed to idealize the rural South as the natural environment of carefree overly religious blacks. Connelly's widely popular drama became a site of cultural debates about the significance of black migration to the urban North, the nature and importance of religion in black communities, and the place of blacks in the nation. Precisely when black social scientists were urging rural black Christians to abandon an otherworldly and emotional religion, white dramatists and literary artists were making more widely available what they saw as a picturesque and deeply rooted aspect of black folk culture.

Correlates of Change in Color-Blind Racial Ideology Among College Students

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen A. Neville ◽  
Paul Poteat ◽  
Lisa B. Spanierman ◽  
Jioni A. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
Color Blind

Relations Among Color-Blind Racial Ideology and Social Justice Attitudes

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jioni A. Lewis ◽  
Helen A. Neville ◽  
Lisa B. Spanierman
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
Color Blind
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document