In Search of the Black Fantastic

In the paper

“The major focus of debate in the 2002 primary contests in Alabama's Seventh District between incumbent Democrat Earl Hilliard and eventual victor Artur Davis, and in Georgia's Fourth District between incumbent Cynthia McKinney and eventual victor Denise Majette, was the Palestinian/Israeli conflict (although there were other issues in both races).”

In the paper

“In the two congressional races and the 2002 mayoral contest in Newark, funds for the challengers also apparently came from organizations such as the right-wing Bradley Foundation, which sought to generate appearances of conflict among black voters and specifically youth and middle-class dissatisfaction with existing black elected representatives.”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Glen Ford, 'Hip Hop and the Hard Right: Media-Made Illusions of Power,' ColorLines 5, no. 4 (winter 2003), pp. 4-7

In the paper

“For blacks in the United States and elsewhere, this outside/inside dynamic has often been experienced asymmetrically: as political disfranchisement on the one hand and overemployment in the arenas of popular culture on the other.”

In the paper

“If modernity is more than just a at trope representing the 'new' (in other words, a benign temporal marker), if it is in fact 'premised,' as Wendy Brown contends, 'on the notion of emergence from darker times and places,' and accordingly continues to reconstitute peoples of African descent as subaltern others-even demanding such an arrangement-then endorsing the term would not seem to allow much”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Wendy Brown

In the paper

“blacks can rightly claim co-ownership as stockholders in the projects of modernity (and copyright holders with regard to the deg7Fnition of many of these endeavors)”

In the paper

“These dynamics have also demanded sensibilities that recognize that solidarities are always contingent and essentialisms at best pragmatic, positional, and strategic.”

In the paper

“Finally, the ways the performative challenges the truth claims of the formally political and casts it as itself just another mode of performance explain many of the disjunctions between the two realms, and the characteristic disavowal of any intimate connection with the cultural on the part of the political narrowly understood.”

In the paper

“The inclination in formal politics toward the quantig7Fable and the bordered, the structured, ordered, policeable, and disciplined is in fundamental tension with popular culture's willingness to embrace disturbance, to engage the apparently mad and maddening, to sustain often slippery frameworks of intention that act subliminally, if not explicitly, on distinct and overlapping cognitive registers,”

In the paper

“Intentional silences also have signig7Fcance: to say nothing suggests acceptance of, or satisfaction with, existing arrangements, and implicitly represents the expression of a political preference.”

In the paper

“Opting out, then, is not a viable-or available-response.”

In the paper

“In other words, in the language game staked out by the modern, blacks are uniquely locked into a relationship that allows few possibilities for agency, autonomy, or substantive negotiation.”

In the paper

“These desires not to be excluded from the community of the 'normal,' often underwritten by a particular form of vindicationist spirit, can translate into an avoidance of struggle and the abandonment of transformative possibilities.”

In the paper

“We have come to realize that the exclusion and marginalization of the blacks in the United States illustrates a dynamic wherein this same group of people simultaneously experience the opposite - a dominant order and a privileged community as demonstrated by political deprivation and dominance in popular culture.”

In the paper

“Although many artists might claim that their work is not 'political'-'Nothing about politics,' asserted Luther Vandross, arguably the most gifted male vocalist of his generation, 'I don't write about politics'-that they are driven purely by aesthetic considerations, or that they seek to entertain and provide escape from 'reality' for their audiences, political intention adheres to every cultural”

In the paper

“There is a corresponding set of material institutions and practices that re ect the ambitions and horizons that the language envisions and demands: processes, mechanisms, and arenas that are viscerally addicted to ascriptive rankings, unavoidably colonial in their appetites, and immune to deep egalitarian reimagining and restructuring.”

In the paper

“Not surprisingly, the civil rights/labor/liberal coalition collapsed by the end of the decade, and Rustin's cong7Fdence regarding the progressive capacity of American democracy proved to be largely misplaced.”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Bayard Rustin

In the paper

“blackness is a constitutively modern albeit unstable formation (i.e., its commitments to possibilities in excess of and beyond modernity).”

In the paper

“Moreover, popular culture's willingness not to know, its frequent preference for experience over explanation, and its deployment of omission as method and silence as meaning, as in the work of Ahmad Jamal, Miles Davis, and Shirley Horn, mark its expressions and manifestations as distinct from the ambitions of the formally political.”

In the paper

“It is these dynamics that have trifurcated black sensibilities-among various invented, static and stigmatized pasts; unevenly across the centers and margins of contemporary life; and, in response to the multiple crises that mark the modernity/slavery nexus, into the unscripted but attractive-by-default postmodern and beyond.”

In the paper

“The aesthetic in blackface, otherwise unrecong7Fgured, would still leave in place the sanctity of the aesthetic and the aesthetic/ political boundary.”

In the paper

“If we agree that politics is, among other things, a contest about what matters and ought to be subject to consideration and debate, we will recognize both the assertion of the aesthetic and the suggestion that art is a self-contained realm 'above' politics as political arguments of a particular normative type (similar to the corresponding claims that are made with regard to science).”

In the paper

“In contrast, it can be argued that the 'art for art's sake' position depends on an arguably false and impossible dichotomy.”

In the paper

“Political communication is not divorced from the same kinds of considerations that determine our responses to artistic work: imagine Malcolm X, for instance, without his comic timing and his sense of humor.”

In the paper

“The apparent absence of a thickly transformative dialectic within modernity's matrix (e.g., the Hegelian blueprint); its seeming inability to shake itself free of its embedded sexism and racism; its primal tendency to read issues that make race salient as pointing toward either the premodern or antimodern; and the ways it makes, excludes, and yet exploits and contains black bodies, raise doubts”

In the paper

“While all three might share a certain bluesaic quality, the operations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have rarely been as amenable to the interests of African Americans, nor as re ective of their aspirations in practice, as the thing Ellison calls jazz.”

In the paper

“Love itself, the subversive gift, is an important public good, and loving is a signig7Fcant political act, particularly among those stigmatized and marked as unworthy of love and incapable of deep commitment.”

In the paper

“His argument, though, was predicated on a model of the routine that clearly overlooked-and, given his own strategic commitments at the time, deliberately chose to minimize-the limits of legal discourse, the racialized foundation and irrational character of American politics, and the extent to which protest politics, and informal politics in general, were hardly unique to black communities.”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Bayard Rustin

In the paper

“Although performances need not be insincere or merely calculating, and are sometimes simply a matter of amplig7Fcation (making one's intentions and message as clear as possible), popular culture thrives on, and indeed demands, nuance, dadaesque ambiguity, and contrapuntality as it resists g7Fxedness in its moves between the grounded and the fantastic.”

In the paper

“In other words, the suggestion that aesthetics cannot be divorced from politics does not imply that we cannot make aesthetic judgments regarding creative and political work; the point is that aesthetic judgments should not be cong7Fned to the artistic realm and cannot be detached from political considerations.”

In the paper

“The processes of exclusion that have deg7Fned the black experience of modernity have not allowed those of African descent to avoid the transg7Fguring and scarring aspects of the extended moment or complicity in its present conditions.”

In the paper

“At the most superg7Fcial level, this concern overlooks the reality that the realms of formal political activity and cultural expression are joined in a number of complicated and mundane ways, not just in the making of black politics but in the making of politics in general.”

In the paper

“As often, these kinds of assertions are meant to refer to the artist's disengagement from the issues driving formal political activity, although songs about romance and novels about family life, for example, certainly are political in the broadest sense.”

In the paper

“Although belatedly in some instances, inclusive movements of the sort Dawson describes have developed in response to cases of police brutality, reparations, racial prog7Fling, voting rights infractions, and other racerelated civil rights violations, and been accompanied by movements within black popular culture”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Michael Dawson

In the paper

“the way much of turn-of-the-century black pop (ranging from rapper Jay-Z's 'Hard Knock Life [Ghetto Anthem]' to gospel vocalist Donnie McClurkin's 'We Fall Down') naturalized economic hardship and specig7Fcally black poverty”

In the paper

“'[S]uch a public sphere did exist within the Black community as recently as the early 1970s,' observed Michael Dawson in the mid-1990s, 'if by that we mean a set of institutions, communication networks and practices which facilitate debate of causes and remedies to the current combination of political setbacks and economic devastation facing major segments of the Black community, and which facilit”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Michael Dawson

In the paper

“The blurring of the clear lines that demarcated black spaces is one of the legacies of the civil rights movement.”

In the paper

“cultural media and the actors involved in these arenas have played an increasingly crucial role in deg7Fning the aggregate black agenda and determining which issues will move from the internal arenas to the broader national stage (and possibly the international stage) with the perceived support of most African Americans.”

In the paper

“Actors in the cultural arenas, then, like early twentieth-century soapbox orators, have often been the primary public generators of black conventional wisdoms, and the main protagonists in the evolving battles concerning the negotiation of the boundaries of black community, and the deg7Fnition of the aggregate black agenda.”

In the paper

“To the extent that simple recognition is an important political goal for political actors, the different media of popular culture provide a means by which this need can be satisg7Fed.”

In the paper

“In those instances where recognition itself is the intended end point of political activity, cultural politics often might sufg7Fce.”

In the paper

“It is perhaps in the contemporary production and consumption of black cultural politics that the displacement of relatively procedural questions of location and orientation becomes most obvious.”

In the paper

“Hamilton's analysis speaks to a sensibility that assumes that public discourse among blacks is problematic and, with its cong7Fdent deployment of collective pronouns, assumes that race itself is a legitimate marker of community lines.”

In the paper

“It is extremely rare-though not impossible-for actions undertaken by creative artists alone to bring about specig7Fc substantive public policy reorientations on the part of state authorities.”

In the paper

“they-especially the members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)-have consistently been the most likely to promote liberal and democratic alternatives, and the most reliable defenders of black interests in congressional debates.”

In the paper

“'Few blacks,' suggests Gerald Early, 'accepted the song on its face, insisting that it was a metaphorical theme song for black unity and…revolution.'”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Gerald Early

In the paper

“the messages emanating from the arenas of popular culture can generate action and inaction, and encourage reactionary as well as progressive mindsets.”

In the paper

“Cultural work, then, must be understood as a result of the interactions of the creative process and its embedded intentions; the potentially quite distinct and even contrasting-but equally creative -use made of them by others; and the feedback mechanisms and interpolative possibilities linking these various stages (in both senses of the word).”

In the paper

“it has long been a common practice for black actors and movements to draw in varying degrees from both the integrationist and nationalist traditions, depending on the audience in question and the prevailing circumstances.”

In the paper

“political movements' and campaigns' effectiveness in achieving particular policy objectives is affected by the broader atmospheric and symbolic discourses taking place.”

In the paper

“Operating in deterritorialized arenas-for example, radio, television, and the internet-that confound the older understandings of the distinction between integrated and segregated spaces, artists in the post-civil rights era have been major contributors to the recalibration of the black discursive agenda.”

In the paper

“The silences and evasions, which have been at times encouraged by other blacks, have not been as audible or apparent in the formal political realms-nor for that matter in the original added content provided by what remains of the black press, black-oriented radio, or the newer black media-as they have been in the aggregated arenas of popular culture.”

In the paper

“the absorption with questions of segregation and assimilation has not dissipated completely; it lies just below the surface of almost every issue that attracts the interest of colored America (and the rest of the country as well).”

In the paper

“The concerns of certain black constituencies have not been responded to, and indeed been avoided, by black elected ofg7Fcials.”

In the paper

“pop culture's ability to render the invisible visible (in an Ellisonian sense perhaps) or the unheard audible-and possibly, to borrow from Ellison and Fred Moten, the invisible audible and the unheard visible-gives it a certain political legitimacy.”

In the paper

“The song does feature a certain post-King sensibility, and in its reclaiming of the streets, its references to (mostly) northern cities, and its propulsive, assertive rhythm, one can detect some sense of the changes that were taking place at the time”

In the paper

“he asserted, 'A Black public sphere does not exist in contemporary America,' although he would later modify this claim somewhat and refer to the black counterpublic as 'severely undermined' and being in a state of 'disintegration.'”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Michael Dawson

In the paper

“in choosing to say something , black artists can seek both to in uence outcomes and to redeg7Fne the terms of debate, within and outside their immediate communities, and to bring attention toand perhaps confer legitimacy on-the spaces in which they operate”

In the paper

“the agenda-setters controlling these black-oriented media outlets have been on the whole reluctant to reproduce ung7Fltered the intracommunity negotiations and con icts taking place within African American popular culture.”

In the paper

“'Precisely because African Americans historically have had more control over their own culture than many other aspects of their world,' historian Waldo Martin Jr. adds, 'culture has always been a critical battleground in their freedom struggle.'”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Waldo Martin Jr.

In the paper

“the fusion of the realms of politics and popular culture in mainstream American life does at one level present a unique array of dilemmas, problems, and opportunities for blacks.”

In the paper

“representations of blackness are always surreal, given the inevitably irregular and provocative qualities of these efforts and the 'source material' itself in a broader context in which the nonblack is thoroughly normalized.”

In the paper

“not engaging the cultural realm, whether defensively or assertively, would be, to some degree, to concede defeat in an important-and relatively accessible-arena.”

In the paper

“Hyperactivity on the cultural front usually occurs as a response to some sort of marginalization from the processes of decision-making or exercising control over one's own circumstances; what might appear to be an overinvestment in the cultural realm is rarely a freely chosen strategy.”

In the paper

“There is currently a limited ability for blacks to discuss issues in arenas not accessible to others.”

In the paper

“Black life has, in many respects, become intensely public, partly as a result of the dramas that unfolded in the early 1990s, featuring in quick and painful succession Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, Rodney King, and O. J. Simpson, among others.”

In the paper

“As a result of this paradigm shift, and the related reordering of the black counterpublic, the primacy and stridency of the integrationist/nationalist debate subsides, as other concerns related to class, gender, sexuality, generation, and blackness in the aggregate emerge and become predominant.”

In the paper

“If the aesthetic is understood as a science of beauty that forecloses substantive political engagement or challenge, it must be recognized as a key brick in the wall of modernity and one of the cornerstones of the racialized edig7Fce that has so effectively contained and restricted black life chances.”

In the paper

“generally popular culture is about the mobilization of broader and less coherent sentiments.”

In the paper

“I do not see modernity as a finished product (certainly not in the way he depicts it in his discussion of Toussaint L'Ouverture) or, as he seems to suggest at points, as an uncomplicated blessing”

In the paper

“It is important to note that Agamben cites Nazism and the Holocaust as crucial markers of modernity's 'hidden matrix' (Agamben, Homo Sacer , p. 166) while paying little attention to the broader phenomenon of colonialism.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Agamben, Homo Sacer , p. 166

In the paper

“Here, I propose that exchange in the cultural arena has the potential not only to upset the nation -in at least two senses-but also to counter the masculinist norms that often structure both state-centered and diasporic politics.”

In the paper

“It is important to note that Ellison's writing and his normative commitments shi over time”

In the paper

“Also worth considering is popular culture's ability to cross barriers and engender broader solidarities.”

In the paper

“and to suggest that greater attention to a fuller range of deliberative practices and spaces might compel a revision of our notions of the political.”

In the paper

“In Chapter 4, I suggest that the technological changes occurring in the 1980s-especially with regard to the visual arts-challenge intracommunity assumptions about the inheritability of black political traditions and indeed the sustainability of a coherent black politics.”

In the paper

“I do not see modernity as a finished product (certainly not in the way he depicts it in his discussion of Toussaint L'Ouverture)”

In the paper

“Chapter 5 follows chronologically and thematically from the previous chapter and examines the ways shifts in black discourse, situated in popular culture, might have affected, and not just re ected, the way blacks responded to the welfare reform debates of the mid-1990s (i.e., regarding the reform/abolition of Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC]).”

In the paper

“'Race,' as we commonly understand it, is in this perspective fundamentally part and parcel of the conjoined projects of modernity and colonialism.”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Barnor Hesse, 'Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies,' Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 4 (2007), pp. 64363

In the paper

“The apparent willingness of a number of black clergy (e.g., T. D. Jakes, Boston's Eugene Rivers) to consider supporting George W. Bush's 'faith-based initiative' and school voucher plans (e.g., New York's Floyd Flake and a number of Detroit's black clergy during a 2000 Michigan referendum on the issue) is consistent with this reading of the aggregate political inclinations of the black churches.”

In the paper

“public spheres, civil societies, popular culture, and modernity are not blank slates and are in fact in antagonism with prefixes such as 'black' and 'Afro,' a tension that needs to be acknowledged.”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Thomas C. Holt, 'Afterword: Mapping the Black Public Sphere,' in Black Public Sphere Collective, The Black Public Sphere , pp. 325-28; and Michael Warner, 'Publics and Counterpublics,' Public Culture 14, no. 1 (winter 2002), pp. 4990.

In the paper

“in this chapter I discuss more explicitly the transgressibility of the modernity/coloniality matrix and, specig7Fcally, diaspora's capacity through cultural exchange to challenge modern narratives that obscure their colonial underpinnings.”

In the paper

“The emergence of salsa music in the 1970s, as a reporter with Billboard recognized, 'helped give Latinos a sense of national identity and political unity [and specifically represented] a musical vehicle…[through which Puerto Ricans could make] a political statement to the world…[and] especially to the broad anglo community in the New York metropolitan area.'”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites David Medina, 'A View from New York: Salsa Is Also a Political Force,' Billboard , June 12, 1976, p. S-6

In the paper

“Regarding the black smile, as is well known, and still the case, black laughter and glee have always been symbolically loaded, especially in public spaces open to the gaze of others”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Ellison, Shadow and Act , pp. 225-26; and Toni Morrison, 'Introduction: Friday on the Potomac,' in Raceing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New York: Pantheon, 1992), pp. xii-xiii.

In the paper

“Three decades later, the reggaeton phenomenon would perform the same function, on a larger scale.”

In the paper

“In other words, Sembène's work suggests the possibility of a fuller, more informed history of the 'camp.'”

In the paper

“The goal is to highlight the possible ways a deep engagement with popular culture might enhance our understanding of developments in the formal political arena”

In the paper

“Sembène's film foregrounds the colonial factor and makes the connections between this history and the events that took place in Europe leading up to and during World War II.”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Ousmane Sembène's film Camp de Thiaroye (1985; New Yorker Films Video, 1992)

In the paper

“In this chapter, and the next, I also contend that the standard discourses of citizenship might be questioned in light of their dependence on the trope of the nigger.”

In the paper

“African Americans, deg7Fned broadly, European blacks, and continental Africans are all currently grappling with distinct but overlapping forms of demoralization, Afro-pessimism, and postcolonial melancholia, to borrow-out of context-a phrasing from Paul Gilroy, and with a hegemonic incentive structure that posits that black imaginations should neither trouble the aesthetic/politics boundary nor”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Paul Gilroy

In the paper

“the qualifier 'black' cannot be unthinkingly attached to the concept of the public sphere, given that nonwhites, like women, have lived much of their lives on the fault lines separating the public and private spheres as conventionally defined.”

In the paper

“The current moment is characterized much more by its acceptance of these dominant scripts of modernity than by a willingness to challenge the slippery and changing bases on which blacks have been excommunicated by the reig7Fcation and deig7Fcation of the modern.”

In the paper

“Even our references to alternative modernities suggest a primary template that might at best allow certain variations on a relatively g7Fxed score.”

In the paper

“Examples of popular culture's ability to focus attention on a specific issue would include, in the American context, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin , Stevie Wonder's 'Happy Birthday,' and Spike Lee's 4 Little Girls .”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Stevie Wonder's 'Happy Birthday'
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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Spike Lee's 4 Little Girls