Contextualizing Race and Gender in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess

Black Opera ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 85-119
Author(s):  
Naomi André
Keyword(s):  
James Baldwin ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
First Century ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Porgy And Bess ◽  
Alain Locke ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender

This chapter addresses Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess story as it was told in 1935 awash in minstrel characterizations and then adapted in 2011 on Broadway to rethink how the depth inherent in the original characters could be made more visible. This analysis fleshes out the larger view of black womanhood in the 1930s and the first decades of the twenty-first century. This chapter also explores the opera in terms of constructions of the folk, the Harlem Renaissance, and the efforts of black writers (Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Harold Cruse, and James Baldwin) to come to grips with its negative stereotypes and celebrated opportunities for black performers in virtuosic roles.

Sissy Insurgencies

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlon B. Ross
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Professional Sports ◽  
Black Nationalism ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Physical Manifestation

In Sissy Insurgencies Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington’s practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin’s self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.

Autochthonomous Transfigurations of Race and Gender in Twenty-First-Century Transnational Genocide Testimonial Narratives

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-106
Author(s):  
Myriam J. A. Chancy
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
And Gender

This chapter explores depictions and representations of the genocide of Rwanda in order to examine how “autochthonomy” and “lakou consciousness” make themselves manifest in global/transnational contexts. What each of the representations reveals is a partial exposure of a silence that appears to be symptomatic of trauma. The chapter relies on Pierre Bourdieu’s twin-concepts of the “unthinkable” and “unnameable” and how these concepts might be of further use in understanding the representation of the implicit “silence” of trauma. The chapter ultimately argues that artists who consciously emulate African Diasporic aesthetics in their representations of genocide also engage counter-hegemonic modes of representation that are explicitly and increasingly feminist regardless of the producer’s gender identity.

Dancing on the Edges of History, but Never Dancing Alone

2018 ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Barbara Ransby
Keyword(s):  
Graduate School ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
And Gender

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.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 205-210
Author(s):  
Simon Wendt
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
First Century ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
American Women ◽  
American Conservatism ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender

The conclusion provides a brief discussion of the DAR’s significance vis-à-vis the historiography of American conservatism and gender. While it remains to be seen how recent developments will affect the DAR’s commemorative, educational, and patriotic activism in the years to come, its history reminds us that the Daughters played a vital role in shaping and disseminating conservative notions of nationalism that continue to reverberate in the new millennium. This chapter examines the organization’s activities in the twenty-first century; in particular, it tries to explain why so many American women, including numerous African Americans, continue to join the organization and what it means to be a Daughter of the American Revolution during the era of Donald Trump.

The Post-Millennial Gangster Film

2014 ◽  
pp. 33-52
Author(s):  
Paul Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Youth Violence ◽  
Small Time ◽  
Youth Gangs ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Big City ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
To Come ◽  
Gangster Film ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Time Operators

This chapter examines the post-millennial gangster film. It begins by differentiating between Gangster Heavy and Gangster Light. The chapter then describes how the protagonist of the post-millennial gangster film (with a few notable exceptions) comes not from the ranks of the Mafioso or the well-organised criminal fraternity but from the door of the nightclub or the big city back street. They are small-time operators or part of a close-knit street crew and unlike their more ethical forebears, their main source of income is drugs. Moreover, their on-screen violence is often more graphic and detailed. The post-millennial gangster film has in more recent years begun to examine street and knife crime, and the gangsters themselves have become ever younger, as the surrounding society seeks to come to terms with widely disseminated images of youth gangs and rioting. Thus, the chapter looks at the sons, daughters, and even grandchildren of gangsters and asks how they fit in with the story of British cinema. What emerges is a depiction of gang culture that is tinged with issues of class, race, and gender as British cinema seeks to represent a society shaped by changes in Government, socio-economics, and, as the first decade of the new millennium progressed, increasing anxieties over issues such as knife crime, immigration, and youth violence.

Black on Red: Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century New World Black Interpretative Uses of Native American Political Experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 324-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Anna Gordon ◽  
Keisha Lindsay
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New World ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
The Political ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
And Gender

AbstractIn an effort to address the dearth of literature regarding how African American political theorists have historically interpreted the meaning of Native political experience to make sense of their own, we chart what four influential New World Black writers, from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, say about Native Americans. While there is some diversity among the particular interpretive foci of these historical works, each generally invokes Native Americans as having a shared experience of oppression with Blacks that warrants resistance; being crushed by circumstances in which African-descended people have survived and thrived; exemplifying oppression that has no redemptive power; providing evidence of the ongoing possibility of Black extinction; and as racially inferior to Blacks and thus in need of Black ladies’ supposedly civilizing qualities. This paper uses these historical Africana perspectives on Indigenous and Black relations to explore the political implications of forging individual and shared identities at the intersection of race and gender.

¿Soy Emo, Y Qué? Sad Kids, Punkera Dykes and the Latin@ Public Sphere

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 895-918
Author(s):  
MARISSA LÓPEZ
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
And Gender

In March and April of 2008, emo youth in Mexican and Latin American metropoles were vulnerable to violent, physical attacks, which the world witnessed, aghast, via YouTube. Journalists, pundits, and cultural commentators around the globe wondered, first, how to define “emo”; second, how to explain its presence in Mexico and Latin America; and third, whence such a violent reaction? This essay tackles those questions, and tries to think through emo to something more than the post-NAFTA angst to which it has been commonly ascribed in the US and Mexican media. Tracing a route from US Chicano punk and new wave, to Mexico's self-proclaimed emo youth, to Myriam Gurba's short fiction featuring southern California's Chicana dyke-punk communities, I ask how emo travels, and how these highly self-conscious and very public performances of affect speak to the intersections of race and gender in twenty-first-century Latin@ and Latin American youth culture.

Lana and Lilly Wachowski

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cáel M. Keegan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Queer Cinema ◽  
Trans Studies ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
And Gender

This book analyzes the filmmaking careers of Lana and Lilly Wachowski as the world’s most influential transgender media producers. Situated at the intersection of trans* studies and black feminist film studies, it argues that the Wachowskis’ cinema has been co-constitutive with the historical appearance of transgender, tracing how their work invents a trans* aesthetics of sensation that has disrupted conventional schemas of race, gender, space, and time. Offering new readings of the Wachowskis’ films and television, it illustrates the previously unsensed presence of transgender in the subtext of queer cinema, in the design of digital video, and in the emergence of a twenty-first-century global cinematic imaginary. It is in the Wachowskis’ art, the author argues, that transgender cultural production most centrally confronts cinema’s construction of reality, and in which white, Western transgender subjectivity most directly impacts global visual culture. Thus, the Wachowskis’ cinema is an inescapable archive for sensing the politics of race and gender in the present moment.

Invisible Visits

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina K. Sacks
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
The United States ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Healthcare Settings ◽  
Exam Room ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

Although the United States spends almost one-fifth of all its resources on funding healthcare, the American system is dogged by persistent inequities in the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities and women. Invisible Visits analyzes how Black women navigate the complexities of dealing with doctors in this environment. It challenges the idea that race and gender discrimination, particularly in healthcare settings, is a thing of the past. In telling the stories of Black women who are middle class, Invisible Visits also questions the persistent myth that discrimination only affects racial minorities who are poor. In so doing, Invisible Visits expands our understanding of how Black middle-class women are treated when they go to the doctor and why they continue to face inequities in securing proper medical care. The book also analyzes the strategies Black women use to fight for the best treatment and the toll that these adaptations take on their health. Invisible Visits shines a light on how women perceive the persistently negative stereotypes that follow them into the exam room and makes the bold claim that simply providing more cultural competency or anti-bias training to doctors is insufficient to overcome the problem. For Americans to really address these challenges, we must first reckon with how deeply embedded discrimination is in our prized institutions, including healthcare. Invisible Visits tells the story of Black women in their own words and forces us to consider their experiences in the context of America’s fraught history of structural discrimination.

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