“I Just Wanted a World That Looked Like the One I Know”

2018 ◽  
pp. 83-107
Author(s):  
Ralina L. Joseph

Chapter 3 examines showrunner Shonda Rhimes’ twenty-first century Black respectability politics through the form of strategic ambiguity. Joseph traces Rhimes’ performance of strategic ambiguity first in the pre-Obama era when she stuck to a script of colorblindness, and a second in the #BlackLivesMatter moment when she called out racialized sexism and redefined Black female respectability. In the shift from the pre-Obama era to the #BlackLivesMatter era, this chapter asks: how did Rhimes’ careful negotiation of the press demonstrate that, in the former moment, to be a respectable Black woman was to perform strategic ambiguity, or not speak frankly about race, while in the latter, respectable Black women could and must engage in racialized self-expression, and redefine the bounds of respectability?

2018 ◽  
pp. 161-194
Author(s):  
Ralina L. Joseph

Chapter 6 focuses on television production economies and relies upon interview data in order to illustrate how Black female television writers, studios’ in-house legal counsel, and producers skirt and tease notions of postrace in constructing their own brands of resistance. This chapter investigates how a coded, more polite, and postracial form of racialized sexism affects those who work in the industry as much as infiltrates the entertainment products that make their way to audiences. This chapter draws upon interview data with prolific Black women television professionals in Hollywood in order to understand the ways in which twenty-first century representations of African Americans on television are shaped by segregated spaces.


Humanities ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Marlena Tronicke

This article reads William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016) through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to explore the film’s ambivalent gender and racial politics. The country house that Katherine Lester is locked away in forms a quasi-heterotopia, mediated through a disorienting cinematography of incarceration. Although she manages to transgress the ideological boundaries surrounding her, she simultaneously contributes to the oppression of her Black housemaid, Anna. On the one hand, the film suggests that the coercive space of the colony—another Foucauldian heterotopia—may threaten white hegemony: While Mr Lester’s Black, illegitimate son Teddy almost manages to claim his inheritance and, hence, contest the racialised master/servant relationship of the country house, Anna’s voice threatens to cause Katherine’s downfall. On the other hand, through eventually denying Anna’s and Teddy’s agency, Lady Macbeth exposes the pervasiveness of intersectional forms of oppression that are at play in both Victorian and twenty-first-century Britain. The constant spatial disorientation that the film produces, this article suggests, not only identifies blind spots in Foucault’s writings on heterotopian space as far as intersectionality is concerned, but also speaks to white privilege as a vital concern of both twenty-first-century feminism and neo-Victorian criticism.


1970 ◽  
Vol 41 (116) ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Dennis Meyhoff Brink

DANTE’S LITERARY ATMOSPHEROLOGY | The article argues that recent theories on affect and atmosphere by, for instance, Teresa Brennan, Lauren Berlant, and Peter Sloterdijk, can enter into an extraordinarily fruitful interchange with Dante’s Divine Comedy. On the one hand, these theories can direct our attention to the hitherto overlooked atmospheric phenomena that occur ubiquitously in Dante’s Comedy and provide us with concepts that render them legible as products of human emissions. On the other hand, the numerous descriptions of different atmospheres in Dante’s Comedy can contribute to overcoming the lack of linguistic specifications and distinctions which – according to theorists such as Brian Massumi and Peter Sloterdijk – characterizes today’s Western understanding of affective atmospheres and impedes its ongoing theorization. Based on readings of a selected number of atmospheres in Dante’s Comedy, the article argues that the Comedy not only anticipated insights that were not articulated theoretically until the twentieth and twenty-first century, butalso makes up an exceptional encyclopedia of affective atmospheres that have not yet been examined, neither by Dante researchers, nor by theorists of affects and atmospheres. Therefore, both camps have much to learn from Dante’s literary atmospherology, which the article aims to make explicit.


2017 ◽  
pp. 19-37
Author(s):  
Piotr Madajczyk

The commonly held truth is that the attitude of German society and the German elite to Russia is different to the attitude of Poland. This is not entirely true because due to Russian policy, the Germans have become more critical of Russia in the twenty-first century than before. Germany, however, pursues a more global policy than Poland. As Russia and Germany are of great significance in Polish politics, it is important to question the German vision of Russia’s place in today’s multipolar world. This is all the more important given that Germany, as the strongest country in Europe and the one that stabilized the euro zone, has difficulty in defining its role in the international arena. It is only as a result of the recent debate about the hybrid war, that Germany has overcome its unilateral geo-economic perception of the world. It is clear that the Germans are facing a new challenge, which they have not been prepared for.


2017 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-267
Author(s):  
William H. U. Anderson

The thesis of this article is that Amos 2:1–3 teaches religious and cultural tolerance in a pluralistic context. Amos 2:1–3 is a bizarre text which deals with an act of desecration: the king of Moab burning the king of Edom’s bones. The shocking question this text raises is: why would YHWH the one true God and savior of Israel care about how one pagan king treated another dead pagan king? The juxtaposition of exclusivism and pluralism is the precise mechanism that generates a theology of religious and cultural tolerance from Amos 2:1–3. The second installment of this study makes a practical application of this theology entitled ‘From Marilyn Manson to Amos: Navigating Pluralism in the Twenty-first Century West’.


Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (S1) ◽  
pp. 255-278
Author(s):  
Daphne A. Brooks

Abstract As numerous scholars have shown, Hurricane Katrina exacerbated the already-ongoing precarity of African American communities in New Orleans. The crisis demanded a reckoning with the afterlives of slavery at the national and global level. This article focuses on the work of Black women popular music artists whose early twenty-first century recordings and stirring performances addressed the traumas, the challenges, and the spectacular subjugation of Black women who fell victim to brutal disenfranchisement in the midst of the disaster. Beyonce’s B-Day album and Mary J. Blige’s history-making Katrina telethon performance are central to this discussion. The original title of this article was “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe.”


Author(s):  
Barbara Ransby

In this chapter the author reflects on what it means to be a black female historian in the twenty-first century. She challenges those who argue that it should simply mean being a good scholar and that notions of race and gender are anachronisms. She draws from her personal experiences in graduate school and in the academy as well as those of many other female historians of African descent to reflect on the slow and erratic progress but also persistent, intractable prejudice augmented by decades of institutional racism. She also elaborates on the significance of political activism, parenting, and mentors to her work and her life.


Author(s):  
Chris Myers Asch ◽  
George Derek Musgrove

The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow. —LANGSTON HUGHES, “History,” 1934 The original Busboys and Poets sits at the corner of Fourteenth and V Streets NW, just a block north of the epicenter of the 1968 riots. A combination restaurant, bookstore, lounge, and theater, Busboys took its name from Langston Hughes, the one-time busboy at D.C.’s Wardman Hotel who gained international renown as a poet (albeit one who denounced the snobbery of D.C.’s black upper class). After it opened in 2005, it became an immediate commercial and cultural success, attracting young, hip Washingtonians who swarmed the surrounding Shaw neighborhood in the twenty-first century....


Author(s):  
Margaret Somerville ◽  
Sarah Powell

This chapter takes the age of Anthropocene as the time of human entanglement in the fate of the planet, dated by some from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We propose, however, that the full awareness of the consequences of this entanglement will only be felt by children born in the twenty-first century into an entirely different world than the one we know and understand. Interestingly, in the light of this contention, early childhood leads the field of educational research in posthuman scholarship, which we associate with the rise of scholarly work galvanised around the notion of the Anthropocene. These approaches draw variously on Haraway's common worlds, Barad's new materialism, and Deleuze and Guatarri's nomadic philosophies.


Author(s):  
Tyrone McKinley Freeman

The conclusion brings together the lessons and insights provided by examining Walker’s philanthropic life. After summarizing the origins, evolution, and character of Madam Walker’s gospel of giving, it underscores the historical importance of black women’s philanthropy in undermining and resisting Jim Crow and its enduring role in ultimately dismantling the institution. Further, it suggests an approach to theorizing black women’s generosity as being based on five characteristics: proximity, “resourcefull-ness,” collaboration, incrementalism, and joy. It also affirms philanthropy as a powerful interpretive and analytical lens through which to examine African American life in general and black women in particular. It urges collaboration between scholars interested in philanthropy and black women to mutually strengthen intellectual inquiry and understanding of who counts as a philanthropist and what counts as philanthropic giving. It contends that Walker’s gospel of giving is more accessible as a model of generosity than the prevailing examples offered by today’s wealthiest 1 percent. It is certainly the direct inheritance of African Americans today, but relevant to all Americans, regardless of race, class or gender, interested in taking voluntary action in the twenty-first century.


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