AFS - Midterm (Scholars to Titles 1-24, Other Stuff 25-42)

What Is This “Black” in Popular Culture? (Argues that Black popular culture is a dynamic and shifting field of representation rather than a fixed)

Stuart Hall

Soul Babies: The Black Popular Culture and the Post Soul Aesthetic (Analyzes Black popular culture post-Civil Rights, defining a "post-soul aesthetic")

Mark Anthony Neal

Black Popular Culture (Text)

Gina Dent

The Documentary Impulse in Contemporary African American Film (Focuses on capturing authentic, everyday experiences of Black life, often highlighting overlooked communities)

Valerie Smith

The Politics of Interpretation: Black Critics, Filmmakers, Audiences (Examines how Black cultural producers and spectators navigate, resist, and redefine cinematic representations traditionally controlled by white standards)

Jacqueline BoBo

Seizing the Moving Image: Reflections of a Black Independent Producer (Highlights the necessity for Black women to take control of their own narratives, challenging the underrepresentation and stereotypical portrayals of Black lives in mainstream media.

Ada Gray Griffin

Black is, Black Ain’t (Challenges monolithic definitions of "Blackness" by confronting homophobia, sexism, colorism, and classism within the community.)

Marlon Riggs

Black Nationalism: The Sixties and Nineties (Driven by figures like Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, centered on revolutionary self-defense and nationalist pride)

Angela Y. Davis

Getting Down to Get Over: Romare Bearden’s Use of P****graphy and the Problem of the Black Female Body in Afro US Art (Analyzes how Romare Bearden incorporated imagery from adult magazines into his collages)

Judith Wilson

Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance (Argues that Black viewers often resist the subject positions offered by mainstream Hollywood, which frequently relies on racist stereotypes)

Manthia Diawara

The Problem of Visuality in African-American Culture (Refers to the historical struggle with being hyper-visible as dehumanized objects (via stereotypes), yet invisible as subjects with agency)

Michelle Wallace

Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (Analyzes how blues singers Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday pioneered a working-class Black feminist consciousness)

Angela Davis

Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke: The Zen of Bennett Miller (Explores black visual aesthetic and complexity of black music)

Greg Tate

Jazz Consciousness (Explores jazz as a transnational, African-based art form deeply intertwined with American identity and social change)

Paul Austerlitz

Ain’t We Still Got Soul? (Discussion regarding themes of: definition and evolution, cultural and religious connection, political context)

Roundtable discussion with Greg Tate, Portia Maultsby, Thulani Davis, Cylde Taylor and Ishmael Reed

Faking the Funk? Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, and (Hybrid) Black Celebrity (Examines Mariah Carey and Alicia Keys as examples of "hybrid" Black celebrities)

Caroline A. Streeter

Funk Aesthetics (Refers to a theoretical framework that defines funk as a "kinetic epistemology.")

Tony Bolden

Hip Hop and Black Noise (Foundational text analyzing hip hop as a cultural, social, and technological response to post-industrial urban decline)

Tricia Rose

Boyz N the Hood and the Post-Soul Intelligentsia (Highlights the importance of fatherhood, education, and community)

Houston A. Baker Jr.

Global Hip-Hop and the African Diaspora (Global hip-hop acts as a transformative, transnational medium for the African diaspora, allowing youth in locations like Brazil, Cuba, and Africa to merge local struggles with African American cultural narratives)

Halifu Osumare

Post-Soul Intelligentsia

a generation of Black intellectuals, artists, and critics emerging after the Civil Rights/Black Power era (post-1970s), who analyze Black popular culture, media, and social politics through a critical, often "post-soul" aesthetic lens

Figures of the Post-Soul Intelligentsia Movement

Aaron Magruder  

Sheree Rene Thomas  

Kanye West  

Janelle Monae

Kendrick Lamarr  

Eddie Murphy  

Chris Rock

Tracee Ellis Ross  

Jada Pinkett Smith 

Queen Latifah 

Martin Lawrence

Stuart Hall’s essay qualifications

1) America’s ethnic hierarchies

2) Shift to a focus on popular culture)

3) Fascination with difference (s*xual, cultural, racial, and ethnic)

4) Backlash

Cornel West’s “Three Coordinates of The New Cultural Politics of Difference”

1) Displacement of European Models of High Culture

2) Emergence of the US as a World Power and consequently

  as the center of global cultural production and circulation

3) Decolonization of the Third World

What is Black Popular Culture?

A globally influential set of creative expressions rooted in the experiences, history, and aesthetics of people of African descent

The post-soul imagination has been fueled by three desires:

1. Reconstitution of community

2. Self-critique

3. Willingness to deconstruct negative stereotypes of black life

Genealogy of Creative Intellectuals

W.E.B. Dubois  

Lorraine Hansberry  

Haki Madhibuti  

Angela Davis

Ida B. Wells Barnett  

Richard Wright  

Sonia Sanchez 

Henry Louis Gates  

Bell Hooks

Margaret Walker  

Ralph Ellison 

Gwendolyn Brooks 

Nikki Giovanni

Michael Eric Dyson

Melissa Harris-Perry 

Hall’s Three Repertoires

1. Music

2. Style

3. The Body as Canvas

Julie Dash

“A Black Woman’s Perspective”

“Daughters of the Dust”

Michelle Wallace

Critique of Spike Lee and John Singleton (Misrepresentation/underrepresentation of black women)

Who Directed “Looking for Langston”?

Isaac Julien

Looking for Langston/Young Soul Rebels

• Queerness as identity too

• Black Gay struggle for representation

• Could be read as the antidote to Jungle Fever (Spike Lee) in terms of its presentation of non-pathological interracial relationships

What is Blues?

A vocal and instrumental form of music based on the use of a repetitive pattern that follows a twelve-bar structure

5 Characteristics of African Music

1.Dominance of percussion

2. Polymeter

3. Off-beat phrasing of melodic accent

4. Overlap of call and response

5. Voice used as metronome

Three Main West African Musical Roots

1. Sacred traditions

2. Secular-traditions (non-jazz)

3. Secular-traditions (jazz)

Blues Themes

1. Love lost and won or stolen

2. Police and prison

3. Crime

4. Magic/hoodoo

5. Alcohol and drugs

What is Jazz?

A type of music of black American origin characterized by improvisation, syncopation, and a forceful rhythm

Maultsby’s Characteristics of Soul Music

1. nationalism

2. self-awareness

3. black empowerment

4. black identity

5. black style

6. black traditions

Maultsby’s Characteristics of Funk Music

1. humor

2. party

3. social commentary

Description of your presentation topic, including title with the scholar’s full name and contribution

1. Topic: The Grammys decision to split the Country category AFTER Beyoncé’s win for Cowboy Carter. My topic will explore how genre categories function as tools of racial gatekeeping within the music industry and what happens when Black artists succeed in white spaces.

2. Title: When a Black Woman Wins

3. Scholar’s full name: Nardine Saad, contributed background knowledge of black country artists and their struggles in the industry.