HANDMADE HUSTLE: ETSY, WHITENESS, AND GENDERED PRECARITY

Since the e-commerce site’s launch in 2005, Etsy has branded itself as a platform for individuals to buy and sell unique, handmade, and vintage items. This project is interested in questions about gender, race, labor, and platforms and seeks to examine how Etsy articulates new formations of raced and gendered labor directly tied to The Great Recession. While scholars have analyzed Etsy’s relationship to historic craft movements (Krugh 2014; Luckman 2013) and to fan handicrafting (Cherry 2016), there is still relatively little published research on the platform. Situating Etsy within the literature on postfeminism and media culture (Gill 2007; McRobbie 2004), gender and passionate work (Duffy 2016; Duffy 2017; McRobbie 2018), and race and digital hustle economies (McMillan Cottom 2020), I analyze products sold on Etsy that rhetorically engage gendered labor dynamics and precarity through the language of hustling or entrepreneurship in ways that center white femininities. Utilizing a cultural studies framing and critical discourse and textual analysis, I identify three main threads: 1) White women on the platform have co-opted Black vernacular to address how economic insecurity has pushed them into gig labor 2) These products romanticize precarity by positioning feminized grit and individualized solutions to macro economic hurdles as female empowerment 3) The products discursively frame entrepreneurship as aspirational, liberatory, and, most centrally, compatible with white, domestic femininities. While hustling, and its new, white appearance, is celebrated on Etsy, we must be mindful of how hustling is always raced, gendered, and precarious.

Born into Jazz

This chapter presents a historiography of jazz music and dance in the first two decades of the twentieth century as the musical-cultural foundation from which the Nicholas Brothers emerged: Fayard Nicholas, born in Mobile, Alabama, on October 20, 1914, twelve weeks before the declarations of war by European countries that exploded into World War I; Harold Nicholas, born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on March 17, 1921, in the wake of the Great War. In the span of time between the Nicholas brothers’ births, with its mixed moods of anxiety and optimism over what the future would bring, a new form of music emerged—jazz—that reshaped American culture and influenced European culture, with its sudden turns, shocks, and swift changes of pace. Fayard and Harold Nicholas were instrumental in bringing the black vernacular form of jazz tap dancing to its penultimate expression.

If You're Woke You Dig It

"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.

“A Fine Art in Danger”

During the 1950s and 1960s, jazz music became solidly entrenched in America’s institutions of high art patronage as the music’s most prestigious venues shifted from popular clubs and ballrooms to concert halls and upscale summer festivals, most notably the Newport Jazz Festival. While for most professional jazz dancers, this period marked a time when the work “dried up,” there were several lindy hop and rhythm tap dancers who managed to access these spaces through their relationships with jazz historian Marshall Stearns. Stearns was a key player in the adoption of jazz history as an academic subject and an advocate for the serious study of Black vernacular dance. This chapter asks why Stearns’s efforts to “legitimize” and institutionalize jazz dance largely failed, given that his similar advocacy for jazz music clearly succeeded. It argues that Stearns’s folkloric conceptualization of “vernacular jazz dance” fell short of the successful “consensus narrative” he built for jazz music in that concertized adaptations of Black vernacular dance practices by choreographers such as Katherine Dunham and Alvin Ailey were not legible to Stearns as contiguous extensions of the traditional folk and popular dance forms he problematically fetishized as dying folk art in need of preservation. The discursive barrier Stearns built between the worlds of vernacular and concert dance, while intended to safeguard from cultural appropriation so-called authentic or vernacular jazz dance forms, ultimately reinforced primitivist narratives that discursively foreclosed many possibilities for dance as a vital creative partner in jazz music’s present or future.

Between Beats

Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance explores the complex intersections between jazz music and popular dance over the last hundred-plus years. It aims to show how popular entertainment and cultures of social dancing were crucial to jazz music’s formation and development, but it also investigates the processes through which jazz music came to earn a reputation as a “legitimate” art form better suited for still, seated listening. Through the concept of “choreographies of listening,” the book explores amateur and professional jazz dancers’ relationships with jazz music and musicians as jazz’s soundscapes and choreoscapes were forged through close contact and mutual creative exchange. The book’s later chapters also critically unpack the aesthetic and political negotiations through which jazz music supposedly distanced itself from dancing bodies. As musicians and critics sought to secure institutional space for jazz within America’s body-averse academic and high-art cultures, an intentional severance from the dancing body proved crucial to jazz’s re-positioning as a form of autonomous, elite art. Fusing little-discussed material from diverse historical and contemporary sources with the author’s own years of experience as a social jazz dancer, this book seeks to advance participatory dance and embodied practice as central topics of analysis in jazz studies. As it explores the fascinating history of jazz as popular dance music, this book also exposes how American anxieties about bodies and a broad cultural privileging of the cerebral over the corporeal have shaped efforts to “elevate” expressive forms such as jazz to elite status.

The Brewing Storm

A small number of US-based composers began experimenting with the use of African American vernacular music as the basis for instrumental works around 1880, arguing that this music formed a truly American folk repertoire. Their works found public favor in the United States and, more importantly, in several European cities in the months leading up to Dvořák’s arrival as director of the National Conservatory. Dvořák’s own position in the debate about American national style was an open question until May 1893, when he revealed his belief in the authentic American identity of Black vernacular music, thus affirming the approach of earlier American composers.

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

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.