The Artist's Hand

This paper explores the power of portraits and their ability to redefine race and identity in time. In times of exploitation and disregard, black culture has been defined by the lends and hands of others. However, the emergence of black artists is now bringing light to a more personal perspective of their identity and culture. Artists such as Gayl Jones in her book Corregidora, Oneika Russell's new Olympia 7, and John B. Martin's Portrait of James Armistead Lafayette create and redefine a people who tried to be erased. Through these self-portraits, the importance of art and its creator are brought to life.

Hollywood Forever: Exploring The Digital African Diaspora In Poetry

<div>Abstract from First Paragraph:</div><div><br></div><div>This essay exclusively examines Holiday’s ebook Hollywood Forever. The e-book is non-traditional and includes a variety of media and performative elements that might otherwise be experienced in art exhibits or installations. The e-book is uniquely crafted to display a blend of visual and auditory features like posters, news reports, and podcasts. Moreover, the multimedia production adds layers of meaning, complexity, and emotion to the text. Holiday’s inclusion of historical materials from American Black culture is a recreation of the Black diaspora archives. Through the unity of old and new media, Holiday weaves together a complex narrative that combines past historical oppression, racial injustice, and intergenerational trauma to recontextualized contemporary social issues. The e-book embodies afropresentism, the combination of digital archival materials, to empower the Black voice. By reshaping history to create space for Black identities, digital texts can participate in the making of their own social and archival construction. The process of rememory uses archival material to reconstruct the narrative of a previously marginalized group. Holiday’s text uses rememory to investigate cultural biases and rearticulate the reader’s approach to racial injustices. </div>

Hollywood Forever: Exploring The Digital African Diaspora In Poetry

<div>Abstract from First Paragraph:</div><div><br></div><div>This essay exclusively examines Holiday’s ebook Hollywood Forever. The e-book is non-traditional and includes a variety of media and performative elements that might otherwise be experienced in art exhibits or installations. The e-book is uniquely crafted to display a blend of visual and auditory features like posters, news reports, and podcasts. Moreover, the multimedia production adds layers of meaning, complexity, and emotion to the text. Holiday’s inclusion of historical materials from American Black culture is a recreation of the Black diaspora archives. Through the unity of old and new media, Holiday weaves together a complex narrative that combines past historical oppression, racial injustice, and intergenerational trauma to recontextualized contemporary social issues. The e-book embodies afropresentism, the combination of digital archival materials, to empower the Black voice. By reshaping history to create space for Black identities, digital texts can participate in the making of their own social and archival construction. The process of rememory uses archival material to reconstruct the narrative of a previously marginalized group. Holiday’s text uses rememory to investigate cultural biases and rearticulate the reader’s approach to racial injustices. </div>

“His Master’s Voice” and (R)evolutionary Signifyin’

Chapter 6 turns to sampling as it is usually understood: integral to Hip-Hop culture. The track in point is “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by Gil Scott-Heron, a track that others have sampled, or alluded to, countless times since its release in 1970. The chapter analyses this well-known track for its other, equally formative sonic dimensions. Lyrics do matter here for they are part of African and African American practices of “signifyin’.” Through her “sampling back,” namely, a form of answer rap, Sarah Jones inverts this iconic track thirty years later to launch a blistering critique of sexism in not only the Rap/Hip-Hop business but also the music business in general. The chapter considers the ways in which Jones’s signifyin’ on “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” literally and sonically, illustrates how musico-cultural borrowing and or as sampling are part of a broader repertoire of African American signifyin’ practices, as these are, in turn, understood as Black culture and, thereby, Black American politics.

“Ain’t Got Enough Money to Pay Me Respect”: Blackfishing, Cultural Appropriation, and the Commodification of Blackness

The term blackfishing, which takes a twist on the concept of catfishing, that is, tricking people online into thinking you are someone else, refers to the practice of (mostly) White women pretending to be Black by using makeup, hairstyles, and fashion that originate in Black Culture to gain financial benefits. This article aims to contextualize the concept of blackfishing through a critical literary review that will cover the following elements: cultural appropriation, the commodification of Black culture, the representation of Black women in North America, and the operationalization of blackfishing.

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.

Language and Colour of Skin: A Frantz Fanonian Cultural Study

This study is an extraction from the cultural theory of Frantz Fanon, who is regarded as the father of the theory of violence. In the Frantz Fanonian cultural study, discrimination is noticed on the basis of the colour of skin and the exercise of languages and literature, and these are the proposed areas and explained in this article. In the cultural study, for the indigenous background, the black people lead an absurd life in the white cultural society and as well as in the black cultural community in the presence of their white masters. The present study attempts to find out Fanon’s ideologies on the roles of languages, literature, and colour to explain the relation between black and white people and the cultural subjectivity and objectivity. It attempts to fill the gap of the neglected areas in the Frantz Fanonian study in the Manichean society. These neglected areas are the roles of language, literature, and skin colour for the cultural discrimination in the postcolonial cultural study. It also finds out the reasons behind abolishing the black culture at the presence of the white culture and recognising the issues for the black cultural revival after its abolishment in newly liberated countries. Submitted: 26 January 2021; Revised: 28 February 2021; Accepted: 9 April 2021