Dark skin, hourglass figure: The sexualisation of Black women in the Dutch sex industry

This article explores racial performance and the hypersexualisation of Black women in the Dutch sex industry. In the global sex trade, racialised women are constantly regarded as victims of sex trafficking without any agency, particularly migrant sex workers in European countries. While there is plenty of literature on how racial hierarchy affects Black women in the U.S. sex industry, such relevant research is lacking in Europe. In this explorative research, I deconstruct the images of Black women and set its narrative in the Netherlands. With semi-directive and in-depth interviews, I intend to highlight how Black sex workers perform images of Blackness and racial stereotypes when seducing male clients. My theoretical framework includes Patricia Hill Collins’s ‘controlling images’, Gloria Wekker’s ‘cultural archive’, Philomena Essed’s ‘everyday racism’, and Sunita Patel’s ‘racial performance’.

Diplomat

Chapter 2 explores how W. B. Yeats’s 1903–4 US lecture tour placed the poet in the role of diplomat. It demonstrates how this position required Yeats to engage in a kind of racial performance directed toward markedly political ends. In taking on this diplomatic function, Yeats was tasked with mediating the tensions of a changing imperial landscape. He became a representative for a country with a long history of anti-colonialism at the same time that America was awakening to its own imperial future. With these tensions in mind, this chapter attends to Yeats’s efforts to bring Ireland and America into productive contact with one another. In particular, it examines his early lectures at US colleges and universities, where he sought to establish an emotional connection with his audiences by channeling the voice of ancient Irish bards. It also shows how this was a project that sometimes backfired on the poet, as these bardic displays made it easy for Americans to exoticize Yeats when he moved into larger cultural arenas like Carnegie Hall and the St Louis World’s Fair. Yet, in the end, Yeats’s emotional diplomacy did prove highly successful when it came to connecting him with Irish American political groups, which suggests that the US lecture tour was instrumental in teaching the poet how to speak to his own countrymen.

Transmedia storytelling and transmediated bodies in Fullmetal Alchemist (2017)

Hagane no Renkinjutsushi (Fullmetal Alchemist) (2001, Hagaren in short) is a Japanese comic book franchise that not only expanded into a larger supersystem through its transmedia storytelling on multimedia platforms, but also through the global fandom of cosplay (the Japanese term for costume play), a form of popular culture that is heavily promoted by the Japanese government’s Cool Japan policy. Hagaren is set in an unidentifiable European landscape, a common depiction in many Japanese manga and anime, yet, in the 2017 live-action film that was globally distributed on Netflix, audiences witness a full Japanese cast performing European characters. This cross-racial performance, or yellow washing, challenges the border-crossing narrative and global viewership of the Hagaren’s manga and anime franchise. By examining how Hagaren’s supersystem developed out of the interplays of media industries, fan culture and broader governmental policies, this article aims to excavate the multifaceted politics of not only cross-border consumer identities, but also cross-racial performances propagated by the transmediation of Japanese popular culture on the global stage.

My Ambitionz az a Qualitative Ridah1: A 2PAC Analysis of the Black Male Baller in Amerikkka2

The purpose of this paper is to contextualize and analyze the lyrics of Tupac Shakur by using the research methodological approach of concatenation to merge hip-hop and sport so that the qualitative data from these songs might serve as a cultural map to constructs of identity, race, social class, and black masculinity in the context of sport and the black male athlete experience in America. Applying critical race theory and White’s framework of black masculinity and the politics of racial performance, a connection is made with themes of the artists’ (rapper) social commentary and the athlete (baller). The themes from Tupac Shakur’s lyrics are follows: (a) Trapped, (b) Against the World, (c) The Streetz R Death, and (d) Ambitionz. Synergy with the rapper and baller are articulated, as well as implications for scholars and practitioners that work with high school, collegiate, and professional black male athletes, along with other men of color.

Authenticity on “Black Twitter”: Reading Racial Performance and Social Networking

This article investigates the complex rhetorics of racial authenticity online, intermixing ethnography and critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) to understand African American users’ investments in enacting race in their social networks. The piece uncovers “acting white” as a significant discourse that shapes online identity and group performances. Examining rhetorics of racial authenticity including insider knowledges in relation to “acting white” and “acting black,” I map Twitter users’ negotiations with individual and collective notions of racial ingroup markers. I put forth the finding of “performance in the negative case,” as interviewees discuss their lack of participation in their ingroup based on diverse perceptions of racial authenticity. I argue that a full understanding of racial authenticity, performative participation, and nonresponsiveness opens up identity and race formulations to include complexities of what is and is not expressed via interaction and performance.

Apu’s Brown Voice

This chapter discusses the character Apu, exploring how his appearance on the television show The Simpsons in the 1990s was a departure from previous Hollywood and television representations of South Asians in the United States. Whereas South Asians were previously depicted as brief visitors or exotic foreigners, Apu symbolizes a permanent Indian immigrant presence in the United States. Yet, his brown-voice performance racializes and differentiates him from other Americans. The chapter theorizes the use of brown voice and discusses how animated characters, in particular, become a significant subject to study vocal accents and voiceovers. Animated characters are unique because one of their most important defining features is their voice, and, thus, animation emphasizes the voice as a site of interest in thinking about racial performance.

Introduction

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the representations and stereotypes of South Asian Americans in relation to immigrant narratives of assimilation in American film and television. It theorizes the performance of accent as a means of representing race and particularly national origin beyond visual identification. For South Asians, accent simultaneously connotes difference and privilege. To focus on an Indian vocal accent is to reconsider racialization predicated on visual recognition. The remainder of the chapter discusses vocal accents and racial hierarchies; South Asian American and Indian American identities; popular Culture, Orientalism, and racial performance; and comedy and racial performance. It concludes with an overview of the subsequent chapters.