Voicing sentiments of resilience: A corpus approach to 1980s conscious rappers in South Africa

The study of people’s response to adversity acquires substantially different connotations in the South African context because of the heavy legacy of apartheid. This article explores the construction of the notion of resilience through the oral narrative production of the most prominent conscious rappers that emerged in the 1980s in South Africa, namely Prophets of Da City and Black Noise. By means of a corpus approach, our analysis with AntConc revealed that resilience is intrinsically connected to the historical sociopolitical struggle of the black group. In building this notion, results show how the parallel emergence of an oppressive other, the white group, plays a fundamental role. Relevant to our study, the affirmation of their black identity appears to act as an effective way of underpinning their possibility of resurgence. Furthermore, the objective analysis of rappers’ linguistic choices in their lyrics underlines their strategic use of personal pronouns, ethnic labels and other contextual-loaded terms whilst conveying their messages and communicating with their audience. These results both demonstrate the contribution of rap music in construction of a specific notion of resilience and highlight the effectiveness of this methodological approach, opening the floor to comparative studies.

Blackfishing on Instagram: Influencing and the Commodification of Black Urban Aesthetics

This article examines blackfishing, a practice in which cultural and economic agents appropriate Black culture and urban aesthetics in an effort to capitalize on Black markets. Specifically, this study analyzes the Instagram accounts of four influencers (Instagram models) who were accused of blackfishing in late 2018 and is supplemented with a critical analysis of 27 news and popular press articles which comprise the media discourse surrounding the controversy. Situated within the literature on cultural appropriation and urban redevelopment policies, this study explores how Black identity is mined for its cultural and economic value in the context of digital labor. I assert that Instagram’s unique platform affordances (including its racial affordances) and the neoliberal logics which undergird cultural notions of labor facilitate the mechanisms by which Black identity is rendered a lucrative commodity vis-à-vis influencing.

Eco-graphy and the Performative Long Poem: C. S. Giscombe’s Giscome Road and Nikky Finney’s Rice

C. S. Giscombe’s Giscombe Road and Nikky Finney’s Rice are arguably book-length poems that construct an environmental consciousness through the lens of Black identity. Of importance in each is the use of material culture—maps, encyclopedia entries, schematic illustrations, and photographs—to construct the texts. Finney’s work tends to use photographs as supplements to her work, that is as illustrations which are intended to humanize against the grain of anti-Blackness; however, the materials in Giscombe’s collection are parts of a whole, not supplements, but quoted texts albeit utilizing a different visual modality. While there is a distinction between their use of material culture, Finney and Giscombe nonetheless create ecographies— autobiographies that situate and map oneself in a history of ecologies.

Em busca da "redenção de Cam": racialidade e interseccionalidade numa prisão de mulheres

<p>O artigo tem como objetivo discutir os atravessamentos do constructo racial no Brasil e sua configuração em espaços intramuros, reconhecendo a prisão como um dos lócus que permanece pouco permeável ao processo de construção da identidade negra vivenciado nas últimas décadas no país. Discute-se os elementos formadores do racismo moderno, levando em conta as especificidades do contexto brasileiro frente à experiência fundante do sequestro e da escravização africana no período colonial e seus prolongamentos, através dos conceitos branqueamento, contrato racial e dispositivo da racialidade, como categorias de inteligibilidade do racismo contemporâneo e suas reinvenções em sociedades que vivenciaram a escravidão moderna. Tais categorias são analisadas a partir dos relatos sobre relações inter-raciais elaborados por uma mulher cisgênero e um homem transgênero, reclusas (os) numa prisão em São Paulo, e revelam como as opressões vividas de modo interseccional, pelas presas racializadas, lhes impõem dificuldades adicionais ao processo de reconhecimento da identidade negra.</p><p> </p><p>Looking for the “Redemption of Cam”: Raciality and Intersectionality in a Women’s Prison</p><p>This article discusses the overlap between racial constructs in Brazil and their configuration in intramural environments, recognizing the prison as a relatively impermeable locus in the process of Black identity construction in Brazil during recent decades. The paper discusses the formative elements of modern racism, taking into account specificities of the Brazilian context in the face of foundational experiences of African kidnapping and enslavement in the colonial period and their legacies, the concepts of whitening, racial contract and raciality device, as intelligibility categories of contemporary racism and its reinventions in societies that have experienced modern slavery. These categories are analyzed based on the reports on interracial relations elaborated by a cisgender woman and a transgender man, inmates in a female penitentiary in São Paulo, and show how the oppression experienced in an intersectional way, by racialized prisoners, imposes additional difficulties on them in their process of recognizing a Black identity.</p><p>Interracial relations | Intersectionality | Whitening ideology | Gender | Prison</p>

Second generation Somali origin children's understanding and organization of their multiple identities

The younger generation of the Somali community has faced certain hardships, in part, as a result the contradiction between their identities at home and their identities in public. The focus of this research was on the saliency of second generation Somali origin children's multiple identities. The 10 children between the ages of 5-10 that were interviewed indicated that they considered their Muslim identity their strongest identity, followed by their Somali identity, then their Black identity and lastly their Canadian identity. Their reasons for choosing the Muslim identity first were due to culture and religion. Their reasons for choosing the Somali identity second was due to the fact that Somalia is their parent's birth place. As for the black identity some of the participants stated reasons related to skin colour as to why they chose this identity while others considered this an identity that did not apply to them. Lastly, they chose the Canadian identity because Canada is their birth place and place of residence. The implications of this study are that both parents and teachers need to be actively encouraging the formation of children's racial and national identity.

Second generation Somali origin children's understanding and organization of their multiple identities

The younger generation of the Somali community has faced certain hardships, in part, as a result the contradiction between their identities at home and their identities in public. The focus of this research was on the saliency of second generation Somali origin children's multiple identities. The 10 children between the ages of 5-10 that were interviewed indicated that they considered their Muslim identity their strongest identity, followed by their Somali identity, then their Black identity and lastly their Canadian identity. Their reasons for choosing the Muslim identity first were due to culture and religion. Their reasons for choosing the Somali identity second was due to the fact that Somalia is their parent's birth place. As for the black identity some of the participants stated reasons related to skin colour as to why they chose this identity while others considered this an identity that did not apply to them. Lastly, they chose the Canadian identity because Canada is their birth place and place of residence. The implications of this study are that both parents and teachers need to be actively encouraging the formation of children's racial and national identity.