Twerking and Cultural Appropriation: Miley Cyrus' Display of Racial Ignorance

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shereen Zink
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Miley Cyrus’ recent habit of twerking has sparked debate over whether the pop star is misappropriating African American culture; some even going so far as to accuse her of racism. This paper reviews the literature that exists in the public sphere on the topic, and delves into a scholarly analysis of Cyrus’ actions, statements, and the implications they have. My own post-analysis interpretation of the issue is addressed in the concluding paragraphs. Ultimately, twerking’s political context, and Cyrus’ lack of regard for said context, suggest that she is perpetuating harmful stereotypes about black women while her own white privilege allows her to maintain her integrity. Cyrus may not be intentionally exploiting black culture, but she is certainly communicating more than she may have bargained for.  

Fighting for Rights in the 1910s and 1920s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie A. Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter covers the dynamic period of the 1910s and 1920s in New York City. During these years black women from various backgrounds, native New Yorkers and new arrivals alike, including Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Irene Moorman Blackstone, and Ruth Whitehead Whaley, stepped into the public sphere to fight for economic, social, and political rights. The chapter explores how these and other African American women viewed and tried to use the various branches of government in their grassroots and their formal political efforts, and the implications of their work on their communities, on New York's political machinery, on black women's collective struggles for equality, and on themselves.

scholarly journals Making Whiteness Visible and Felt in Fairview

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Michael Pearce
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Political Context ◽  
White People ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Audience Responses ◽  
The Public Sphere

In this article I analyse how Jackie Sibblies Drury’s play Fairview makes white audience members feel white. As a play that exposes whiteness and calls white people to account for their racism, Fairview speaks to contemporary global antiracist activism efforts. Therefore, I begin by situating Fairview in the transatlantic cultural and political context of Black Lives Matter. I then discuss the theatrical devices Drury employs in Fairview in order to make whiteness felt before going on to analyse a range of white audience responses to the production at London’s Young Vic Theatre in 2019/2020. I reflect on these responses in relation to how white people react to accusations of white privilege and power in the public sphere and identify shared strategies for sustaining whiteness. In conclusion, I consider Fairview as a model of affective antiracist activism.

The ‘Chocolate Arabesques’ of Josephine Baker: Fitzgerald and Jazz Dance

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-84
Author(s):  
Jade Broughton Adams
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Short Story ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Popular Arts ◽  
Josephine Baker

This chapter shows how Fitzgerald often associates modern dance with the primitive. Fitzgerald’s engagement with African American culture is complex, and though the appropriation of African American culture for profit is punished in certain stories, Fitzgerald’s engagement with black culture is elsewhere more challenging. This chapter explores how performative identity (that is to say, the deliberate, theatrical presentation of inner traits) functions at the level of both form and content in the story ‘Babylon Revisited’, using the appearance of the dancer Josephine Baker’s ‘chocolate arabesques’ as a platform from which to explore how people perform identity. Fitzgerald prizes authenticity as the key attribute of any artist, dancer, or writer. In the story, Baker is berated for an inauthentic performance, merely delivering her routine without improvisation. This chapter argues that this sense of inauthentic artistry informed Fitzgerald’s self-conception as a popular short storyist. In Baker, Fitzgerald presents an artist who has bridged the ‘high’ and popular arts: ballet and cabaret. Fitzgerald sets up jazz dance as formulaic by satirising blind adherence to rules and fashions, and this chapter offers a reading of these rules as a metaphor for the short story conventions within which Fitzgerald toiled as a commercial short storyist.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Black Press ◽  
The Public ◽  
Introductory Section ◽  
African American Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere

This introductory section introduces the book’s major arguments and provides an overview of the history of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. The introduction also explores the theoretical conceptualization of the public sphere in relationship to African American life and the scholarship on pleasure and class in African American history. In laying out these terms, the introductory section of the book makes the case that they are useful categories of analysis for a deeper understanding of African American sexuality, pleasure, and the Black Press. Finally, the introduction features a discussion of the significance of the interwar period and its relationship to the history of African American sexuality in the Black Press.

scholarly journals Becoming-Black: Patterns and Politics of West-German ‘Afro-Americanophilia’ in the Late 1960s

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Moritz Ege
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Political Action ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Soul Music

In the late 1960s, African American culture and politics provided ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari) from outdated modes of subjectivity for many ‘white’ Germans; appropriating culture politics, and experimenting with forms of symbolically ‘becoming black’ represented a major cultural theme of the time. These tendencies resonated with: radical, anti-imperialist politics; countercultural sensibilities, where African American culture provided a radically contemporary critique of European modernity; the racialized, erotically charged logics of primitivism and romanticism in which ‘the repressed’ was to be brought back to the surface; and with a consumer-based economy and pop culture that supported the incorporation, domestication and aestheticisation of difference, desire and conflict.  This article sketches the patterns, forms and politics of the cultural theme of Afro-Americanophilia in Germany at the time, stressing the links between politics and corporeality.  In doing so, it illustrates that questions of race and racism were crucial for the 1968 conjuncture in Germany and it critically reviews the assumptions and implications of a specific form of hedonistic anti-racism in which ‘white’ European protagonists claimed ‘chains of equivalence’ (Laclau and Mouffe) between their position and that of people oppressed by racism and white supremacy.  Two case studies illustrate different forms and common patterns.  The first concerns a West Berlin network of radical-left groups that called itself ‘The Blues’ and combined militant political action (partly modelled on the activities of the Black Panther Party, according to some of its participants) with a countercultural sensibility. This included a felt connection to African American culture and stylistic practices. The second case study reviews the reception of soul music in the German music press and in countercultural circles, contrasting different readings of the supposedly ‘authentic.’  Overall, the article reconstructs practices of Afro-Americanophilia as ambiguous phenomena that foreshadow later forms of fetishistic cultural appropriation, but where, in some cases, the selective, erotically charged exoticism also led to tangible solidarity and strong connections. 

The Genteel Tradition and the Emergence of the African American Sonnet

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-38
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter traces the emergence of the sonnet in African American literature to the pervasive influence of genteel conventions. These conventions have widely been regarded as conservative or even stultifying, but they provided black poets with various opportunities for self-assertion in the public sphere. The sonnet was a favourite genre among the genteel establishment, and poets pushed the boundaries of black expression by appropriating the form to subvert racial stereotypes, develop a black poetic subjectivity, and participate in the debate over the memory of the Civil War. In tracing these developments, the chapter repositions the outstanding poets of the period, Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson, alongside their less-known contemporaries, Samuel Beadle, William Stanley Braithwaite, Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr., T. Thomas Fortune, and Henrietta Cordelia Ray.

The Ethical Bind of Sentimentalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Greyser
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
African American Woman ◽  
American Woman ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sojourner Truth ◽  
The Public ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter maps intimacy in the public sphere and the alternately ethical and exploitative cross-racial bonds sentimentalists have cultivated. The chapter focuses on the challenges Sojourner Truth faced as an African American woman to occupy the position of a civic emoter who channels the nation’s feelings. The chapter examines the writing and editing of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850, 1875, 1884), a process that involved deeply felt and vexed relations between Truth and her white editors that continued through the text’s publication, as well as white women’s sympathy and emotional impositions in the text’s reception into the twenty-first century. Truth models sentimentalism’s ethical capacities, refusing victimization as she expresses compassion toward her former master. Much of her white audience failed to recognize her rhetorical power, yet Truth insisted on taking up space without apology, living out much of her life in her home in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Printed Religion, the Public Sphere, and the Disordering of the Union

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas P. Volkman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Chapter 4 reveals that the evangelical schisms in Missouri spurred a radical escalation of theological and political disputation between pro- and antislavery evangelicals in religious newspapers and other printed publications. This verbal sparring played a heretofore unexamined central role in spawning a vicious conflict between northern and southern evangelicals and partisans on the border with Kansas after 1854. To the extent that sectarian strife over the morality of African American bondage spurred armed strife in Missouri from the spring of 1854 through 1860, it played an important role in generating the larger sectional tensions that led to secession and the Civil War.

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