scholarly journals Queen Phiona and Princess Shuri—Alternative Africana “Royalty” in Disney’s Royal Realm: An Intersectional Analysis

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 206
Author(s):  
Heather Harris

This paper explores the representations of two of Disney’s Africana royals, Phiona from the Queen of Katwe and Princess Shuri from Black Panther. Taking into consideration the pedagogical impact of media to reinforce ideologies of White supremacy and privilege, the depictions of these alternative royals in Disney’s royal realm are analyzed using intersectionality theory. The girls’ intersecting identities are juxtaposed with Collins’ matrix of domination concept. The analysis revealed that, while both Phiona and Shuri are challenged by the legacy of colonialization, capitalism, and globalization that constitute the matrix of domination, their approaches to these challenges are different as a result of the unique ways that their identities intersect. The author stresses that while it is commendable of Disney, and Hollywood, to allow for the affirming portrayals of these Africana girls on screen, the gesture is baseless unless a tipping point is reached where such films, and those depicting other non-dominant groups, become the norm rather than the exceptions. In other words, the challenge for those in the industry is not to resist the matrix of domination that stymies the creation of films that reflect the spectrum of the lived and fantastical experiences of Africana, and people of color; rather, the challenge is to dismantle it.

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Danielle J. Lindemann ◽  
Teresa M. Boyer

Much recent labor research has highlighted the increasing reliance on contingent employment. We apply intersectionality theory and Collins’s concept of the “matrix of domination” to data from focus groups with immigrant Latina “perma-temp” warehouse workers ( n = 40), finding that the structural (dis-)organization of perma-temping serves as an instrument of domination and is crucial to our respondents’ experiences of work. However, the instability of these women’s contingent jobs entwines complexly with, and is compounded by, the subordination and decreased agency attached to their other minority statuses. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theory, future scholarship, and policy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-241
Author(s):  
Meredith D Clark

Abstract Between 2014 and 2017, the creation of hashtag syllabi—bricolage iterations of reading lists created by or circulated among educators on Twitter—emerged as a direct response for teaching about three highly publicized incidents of racial violence in the United States. Educators used hashtags as a means of sharing resources with their networks to provide non-normative literatures from marginalized scholars for teaching to transgress in the wake of Mike Brown’s slaying in Ferguson, Missouri; the massacre of nine congregants at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; and the fatal car attack on anti-fascist protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia. Acting on Chakravartty et al.’s provocation to center scholars of color in course syllabi as a pedagogical strategy to disrupt the reification of white supremacy in communication and media studies, I consider the creation of three hashtag syllabi related to these events as a form of critical resistance praxis in the emerging framework of digital intersectionality theory. I present a brief textual analysis of the aforementioned syllabi, triangulated with data from online conversations linked to them via their hashtags and derivative works produced by their creators and users to map two social media assisted strategies for doing critical public pedagogy.


2021 ◽  
pp. 233264922110184
Author(s):  
Pawan Dhingra

Discussions of white supremacy focus on patterns of whites’ stature over people of color across institutions. When a minority group achieves more than whites, it is not studied through the lens of white supremacy. For example, arguments of white supremacy in K-12 schools focus on the disfranchisement of African Americans and Latinxs. Discussions of high-achieving Asian American students have not been framed as such and, in fact, can be used to argue against the existence of white privilege. This article explains why this conception is false. White supremacy can be active even when people of color achieve more than whites. Drawing from interviews and observations of mostly white educators in Boston suburbs that have a significant presence of Asian American students, I demonstrate that even when Asian Americans outcompete whites in schools, white supremacy is active through two means. First, Asian Americans are applauded in ways that fit a model minority stereotype and frame other groups as not working hard enough. Second and more significantly, Asian Americans encounter anti-Asian stereotypes and are told to assimilate into the model of white educators. This treatment is institutionalized within the school system through educators’ practices and attitudes. These findings somewhat support but mostly contrast the notion of “honorary whiteness,” for they show that high-achieving minorities are not just tools of white supremacy toward other people of color but also targets of it themselves. Understanding how high-achieving minorities experience institutionalized racism demonstrates the far reach of white supremacy.


Author(s):  
Sean L. Malloy

This chapter argues that the key to the theory and practice of the Black Panther Party (BPP) during its early years was an understanding of urban black neighborhoods as colonized spaces that needed to be liberated before African Americans could truly be free. Drawing from Frantz Fanon, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, and pioneering black internationalists such as Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams, the Panthers embraced a form of revolutionary nationalism that posited the dire conditions facing black Oaklanders as part of a worldwide system of oppression linked to capitalism and white supremacy. In doing so, the BPP's founders built directly on their experiences with other organizations, particularly the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), as well as lessons drawn from the daily lives of people of color in the Bay Area.


Author(s):  
Fred Carroll

The United States' entry into World War II led the federal government to renew its surveillance and censorship of black journalists who struck at segregation in wartime. Simultaneously, the white press dismissed black reporters for failing to uphold the doctrine of objectivity. National black newspapers reconciled black protest and white scrutiny by forsaking explicit textual radicalism for a more coded militancy, as illustrated by the “Double V” campaign. Black war correspondents – including Edgar Rouzeau, Deton "Jack" Brooks, Roi Ottley, and George Padmore – praised black troops for their patriotism and sacrifice but also explained how white supremacy structured the lives of people of color elsewhere in the world. By the war's end, black journalists had achieved an uneasy détente with federal officials and white journalists.


2019 ◽  
pp. 239-264
Author(s):  
Shaeleya Miller

In lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social movement communities, members with varied sexual and gender identities work to pursue shared goals. While gender and sexual marginalization serve as common rallying points for members, intersectionality theory recognizes that each person has multiple, intersecting identities, which influence their experiences of oppression and empowerment (Crenshaw 1989). As a result, it is important to understand how LGBTQ activists navigate multiple identities and investments, while still maintaining group solidarity. Using 53 interviews with non-heterosexuals, I examine how multiple sexual, gender, and racial identities were subsumed within a broader "queer community" group engaged in identity-verification among their peers. Based on the findings, I suggest that inclusive ideologies, when deployed in diverse social movement communities, can reproduce inequalities from within. Furthermore, I argue that these inequalities are made visible through the processes by which members of social groups engage in struggles to verify group membership.


2019 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 122-144
Author(s):  
Karina L. Cespedes

AbstractThis article examines Cuba's long process of gradual emancipation (from 1868–1886) and the continual states of bondage that categorize the afterlife of Cuban slavery. The article addresses deferred freedom, re-enslavement, and maintenance of legal states of bondage in the midst of “freedom.” It contends with the legacy of the casta system, the contradictions within the Moret Law of 1870, which “half-freed” children but not their mothers, and it analyzes the struggle for full emancipation after US occupation, with the thwarted attempt of forming the Partido Independiente de Color to enfranchise populations of color. The article argues that the desire to control the labor of racialized populations, and in particular the labor of black and indigenous women and children, unified Cuban and US slaveholders determined to detain emancipation; and provides an analysis of the re-enslavement of US free people of color at the end of the nineteenth century, kidnapped and brought to the Cuba as a method of bolstering slavery. The article draws on the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman and Shona Jackson to provide an assessment of the afterlife of Cuban slavery, the invisibility of indigenous labor, the hypervisibility of African labor in the Caribbean deployed to maintain white supremacy, and it critiques the humanizing narrative of labor as a means for freedom in order to address the ways in which, for racialized populations in Cuba, wage labor would emerge as a tool of oppression. The article raises an inquiry into the historiography on Cuban slavery to provide a critique of the invisibility of indigenous and African women and children. It also considers the role and place of sexual exchanges/prostitution utilized to obtain freedom and to finance self-manumission, alongside the powerful narratives of the social and sexual deviancy of black women that circulated within nineteenth-century Cuba.


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