scholarly journals If You're Woke You Dig It

2021 ◽  
pp. 90-95
Author(s):  
Brianna Perry
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Vernacular ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
Research Article

"If You're Woke You Dig It" is a research article and elegy for the popular AAVE term, "woke." I attempt to illustrate woke's early uses in the Black Atlantic in connection to its resurgence in the 21st century. I discuss it's usage among non-Black people and the absorption of Black Vernacular Englishes into popular consciousness and its usage by non-Black people. I argue that the "death" of woke is indicative of the lack of possession Black people have over cultural production and the importance of Black Vernacular English as a counter- hegemonic tactic. Black cultural production should be understood as key to global black liberation.

Black Consciousness as an Expression of Radical Responsibility: Biko an African Bonhoeffer

2008 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 28-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornel du Toit
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Black People ◽  
The Self ◽  
Black Consciousness ◽  
Black Liberation

AbstractThe article reflects on the ongoing relevance of Biko's thought 30 years after his death. It is not so much a comparison between Biko and Bonhoeffer's thinking as it is a focus on one aspect of Bonhoeffer's thinking, namely the insistence on independence and self-responsibility in your own situation, which is a premise of Biko's thinking. As the father of Black Consciousness in South Africa, Biko laid the foundation for black self-understanding and self-responsibility. The value of his thinking lies in a hermeneutics of consciousness, which he established and which is a presupposition of his ideals of self-responsibility and self-emancipation. Biko's hermeneutics of the self is considered with reference to the forces that kept black people captive. Although Black Consciousness is seen as a historically contingent phenomenon, the challenge of black liberation remains. Biko's legacy is vital for the establishment of a hermeneutics of poverty and freedom, which is presented as a condition for African liberation in the 21st century.

Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Black Art ◽  
And Gender

Through its analysis of film, drama, fiction, visual culture, poetry, and other cultural -artifacts, Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights offers a fresh examination of how the historical paradox by which unprecedented civil rights gains coexist with novel impediments to collectivist black liberation projects. At the beginning of the 1970s, the ethos animating the juridical achievements of the civil rights movement began to wane, and the rise of neoliberalism, a powerful conservative backlash, the co-optation of “race-blind” rhetoric, and the pathologization and criminalization of poverty helped to retrench black inequality in the post-civil rights era. This book uncovers the intricate ways that black cultural production kept imagining how black people could achieve their dreams for freedom, despite abject social and political conditions. While black writers, artists, historians, and critics have taken renewed interest in the historical roots of black un-freedom, Black Cultural Production insists that the 1970s anchors the philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates that animate contemporary debates in African American studies. Black cultural production and producers help us think about how black people might achieve freedom by centralizing the roles black art and artists have had in expanding notions of freedom, democracy, equity, and gender equality. Black cultural production continues to engage in social critique and transformation and remains an important site for the (re)making of black politics.

The limits of representation activism: analyzing Black celebrity politics in LeBron James’ The Shop

2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372199995
Author(s):  
Brandon Wallace ◽  
David L Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Basketball Player ◽  
Black Representation ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Black Vernacular ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
Positive Representation ◽  
Celebrity Politics ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

This discussion centers on a critical textual analysis of 10 episodes of The Shop: Uninterrupted, an HBO television series produced by and starring iconic Black American basketball player LeBron James. The aim is to provide a considered explication of representation activism: the anti-racist strategy keying on collapsing racial hierarchies through accenting positive Black representation, and so advancing greater Black inclusion, within mainstream media (Andrews, 2018; Gilroy, 2000; Godsil and Goodale, 2013). The politics and constructions of Blackness within The Shop exemplify the logical flaws, superficiality, and insipid practical outcomes of representation activism. Though The Shop proclaims to demonstrate Black liberatory representation, this analysis elucidates how The Shop’s centering of the Black celebrity elite as the agents of change falsely universalizes the experiences of everyday Black people; its pursuit of a mythological Black authenticity essentializes and romanticizes Black vernacular and identities; and its mediation through the White racial frame prohibits the articulation of an effective liberatory politics. The discussion concludes by challenging the possibilities of “positive” representation in capitalist media as a credible and sincere tactic of collective Black liberation (Hooks, 1992; Marable, 2015; Spence, 2015; West, 1994); instead, suggesting a grassroots-oriented approach prefigured on targeting the structural roots of racism.

The Golden Age of Stealing: An Analysis of Queer Appropriation and Exploitation in 21st Century Popular Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Deveau
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Queer Culture ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
Queer Art

Popular media is a series of appropriations and citations of cultural productions, refurbishing past ideas to fit the mold of the present. Representation of art works and cultural products influence the visibility of the groups who produce for popular culture. While social media and contemporary art allow for the rapid spread of ideas through the internet and advertisements, too often are ideas stolen for profit for large companies by exploiting the artistic integrity of uninitiated groups. Queer culture often appropriates historical methodologies for a reclamation of the past to create representation for the future. Queer artists produce landmark aesthetics in visual culture, shaping contemporary fashion trends and artistic movements in the 21st Century. While appropriation as a methodology is not inherently problematic, exploitation develops when artists are neglected credit for works which are exploited for capitalist gain.The research paper The Golden Age of Stealing: An Analysis of Queer Appropriation and Exploitation in 21st Century Popular Culture analyzes the relationship between the appropriation and exploitation of Queer art, using the 1980’s and 90’s club kids as a platform for queer aesthetic production. The paper outlines the dichotomy between representation of queer peoples in the 1990’s and the aesthetics produced to question popular representations and roles within a western consumer society. Using queer performative theories including utopianism, performativity, and disidentification, the paper distinguishes why the stealing of queer art for profit is inherently dangerous and regressive for the queer community, silencing queer voices and perpetrating a heteronormative narrative of cultural production.

scholarly journals The black church as the womb of black liberation theology?: Why the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa (URCSA) is not a genuine black church?

2015 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rothney S. Tshaka
Keyword(s):  
Southern Africa ◽  
Black Church ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Liberation Theology ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Critical Theology ◽  
Dutch Reformed Church

This article sets forth a controversial thesis which suggests that the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa, although considered a black church, is in fact not a black church in the sense in which a radical black church is traditionally understood. A black church, it is argued, is perceived to be one that is a self-determined church which supports initiatives of ameliorating the depressive situations in which black people find themselves. References are made to black theology as a critical theology which was never accepted in the black church due to the dependency syndrome which was brought about by the white benevolence of the Dutch Reformed Church. This, it is argued, had become innate in the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa which still considers itself as a so-called daughter church of the white Dutch Reformed Church.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Carolyn Jones Medine ◽  
Lucienne Loh
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Black Atlantic

Abstract The “Introduction” sets out the origin of the issue, its themes, and its strategy of pairing American and British scholars. It introduces the themes of the essays on literature, performance—particularly in New Orleans—and heritage and tourism. Suggesting that these essays take seriously Paul Gilroy’s “The Black Atlantic,” we also argue that we are extending his argument to look at new themes and forms of cultural production.

Twenty-First-Century Realism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulka Anjaria
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Indigenous Literature ◽  
Oral Storytelling ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
Literary Histories

Realism has a bad reputation in contemporary times. Generally thought to be an outdated mode that had its heyday in Victorian fiction, the French bourgeois novel, and pre-revolutionary Russian literature, literary histories tend to locate realism’s timely end in the ferment of interwar modernism and the rise of the avant-garde. Outside of the West, realism might be said to have met an even worse fate, as it was a mode explicitly presented to colonized societies as a vehicle of modernity, in opposition to what were deemed the poetic excesses, irrational temporalities, and/or oral-storytelling influences of indigenous literature. Yet despite this sense of realism’s outdatedness and political conservatism, the first decade-and-a-half of the 21st century has witnessed, across a wide range of literature and cultural production, what might be seen as a return to realism, not simply as a resistance to today’s new culture of heterogeneity and digitization but as a new way of imagining literary and political futures in a world increasingly lacking the clear-cut lines along which politics, history, and capitalism can be imagined. The arc of 21st-century realism can be seen through contemporary debates around the term, suggesting that considering 21st-century realism not as a residual mode or grouping of texts but as a particular perspective on literary futures—as the coming together, for instance, of unresolved and newer conflicts over relations of power and the politics of knowledge—offers a different story of global form making.

The Prospects and Challenges of Pan-Africanism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toyin Falola ◽  
Chukwuemeka Agbo
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Black People ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Western Education ◽  
New Class ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
World Development ◽  
At Home

In line with Thomas Hodgkin’s assertion, the search for Africa’s struggle for liberation, equality, self-determination and the dignity of the African is traceable to the result of the centuries of relationship between Africa and Europe dating at least since the 15th century. That association left Africa at the lowest ebb of the racial pyramid which Europeans had formed. As Africans at home and diaspora began to gain Western education, they began to question the racial and discriminatory ideas of whites against black people. They initiated the campaign for African equality with other races drawing inspiration from Africa’s culture and history to argue that Africa had contributed to world development just like any other race. At home in Africa, this new class of elites launched the struggle for the end of colonial domination in the continent. This movement to lift Africa out of the pit of subordination became known as Pan-Africanism. The movement has recorded tremendous successes, an outstanding example being the decolonization of the continent and the improved position of Africans in diaspora. Scholars have done a great deal of work on these movements and successes. Nevertheless, there is urgent need for a critical appraisal of 21st-century Pan-Africanism.

Black Spirituals: A Theological Interpretation

1972 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-69
Author(s):  
James H. Cone
Keyword(s):  
Black Power ◽  
Black People ◽  
New Age ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Theological Interpretation ◽  
Popular Opinion ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Freedom Songs

“Contrary to popular opinion, the spirituals are not evidence that black people reconciled themselves with human slavery. On the contrary, they are black freedom songs which emphasize black liberation as consistent with divine revelation. For this reason it is most appropriate for black people to sing them in this 'new' age of Black Power. And if some people still regard the spirituals as inconsistent with Black Power and Black Theology, that is because they have been misguided and the songs misinterpreted. There is little evidence that black slaves accepted their servitude because they believed God willed their slavery. The opposite is the case. The spirituals speak of God's liberation of black people, his will to set right the oppression of black slaves despite the overwhelming power of white masters. … And if 'de God dat lived in Moses' time is jus de same today,' then that God will vindicate the suffering of the righteous black and punish the unrighteous whites for their wrong doings.”

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