Mixed Race Studies

The Hip Hop & Obama Reader

Oxford University Press
2015-10-14
336 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199341801
Paperback ISBN: 9780199341818

Edited by:

Travis L. Gosa, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Erik Nielson, Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts
University of Richmond

• Offers a comprehensive, scholarly analysis of the relationship between hip hop and politics in the era of Obama.
• The first hip hop anthology to center on contemporary politics, activism, and social change.
• Features contributions from distinguished scholars, award-winning journalists, and public intellectuals.

Barack Obama flipped the script on more than three decades of conventional wisdom when he openly embraced hip hop–often regarded as politically radioactive–in his presidential campaigns. Just as important was the extent to which hip hop artists and activists embraced him in return. This new relationship fundamentally altered the dynamics between popular culture, race, youth, and national politics. But what does this relationship look like now, and what will it look like in the decades to come?

The Hip Hop & Obama Reader attempts to answer these questions by offering the first systematic analysis of hip hop and politics in the Obama era and beyond. Over the course of 14 chapters, leading scholars and activists offer new perspectives on hip hop’s role in political mobilization, grassroots organizing, campaign branding, and voter turnout, as well as the ever-changing linguistic, cultural, racial, and gendered dimensions of hip hop in the U.S. and abroad. Inviting readers to reassess how Obama’s presidency continues to be shaped by the voice of hip hop and, conversely, how hip hop music and politics have been shaped by Obama, The Hip Hop & Obama Reader critically examines hip hop’s potential to effect social change in the 21st century. This volume is essential reading for scholars and fans of hip hop, as well as those interested in the shifting relationship between democracy and popular culture.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• About the Contributors
• Foreword Tricia Rose, Brown University
• Introduction: The State of Hip Hop in the Age of Obama / Erik Nielson, University of Richmond; Travis L. Gosa, Cornell University
• PART I: MOVE THE CROWD: HIP HOP POLITICS IN THE U.S. AND ABROAD
  • 1. Message from the Grassroots: Hip Hop Activism, Millennials, and the Race for the White House / Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, University of Connecticut
  • 2. It’s Bigger Than Barack: Hip Hop Political Organizing, 2004-2013 / Elizabeth Méndez Berry, New York University; Bakari Kitwana, Author and CEO, Rap Sessions
  • 3. “There Are No Saviors”: Hip Hop and Community Activism in the Obama Era / Kevin Powell, Author and Activist
  • 4. “Obama Nation”: Hip Hop and Global Protest / Sujatha Fernandes, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
  • 5. “Record! I am Arab”: Paranoid Arab Boys, Global Cyphers, and Hip Hop Nationalism / Torie Rose DeGhett, Columbia University
• PART II: CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN? THE CONTESTED DISCOURSE OF OBAMA & HIP HOP
  • 6. Obama, Hip Hop, African American History, and “Historical Revivalism” / Pero G. Dagbovie, Michigan State University
  • 7. “Change That Wouldn’t Fill a Homeless Man’s Cup Up”: Filipino-American Political Hip Hop and Community Organizing in the Age of Obama / Anthony Kwame Harrison, Virginia Tech
  • 8. Obama/Time: The President in the Hip-Hop Nation / Murray Forman, Northeastern University
  • 9. One Day It Will All Make Sense: Obama, Politics and Common Sense / Charlie Braxton, Author and Activist
  • 10. “New Slaves”: The Soul of Hip-Hop Sold to Da Massah in the Age of Obama / Raphael Heaggans, Niagara University
• PART III: REPRESENT: GENDER AND LANGUAGE IN THE OBAMA ERA
  • 11. YouTube and Bad Bitches: Hip Hop’s Seduction Of Girls and The Distortion Of Participatory Culture / Kyra D. Gaunt, City University of New York
  • 12. A Performative Account of Black Girlhood / Ruth Nicole Brown, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • 13. The King’s English: Obama, Jay Z, and the Science of Code Switching / Michael P. Jeffries, Wellesley College
  • 14. My President is Black: Speech Act Theory and Presidential Allusions in the Lyrics of Rap Music / James Peterson and Cynthia Estremera, Lehigh University
  • Afterword: When Will Black Lives Matter? Neoliberalism, Democracy, and the Queering of American Activism in the Post-Obama Era / Cathy J. Cohen, University of Chicago
• Subject Index

African Heritage and Memories of Slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic World

Cambria Press
428 pages
2015-02-06
6 x 9 in or 229 x 152 mm Case Laminate
ISBN: 9781604978926

Edited by:

Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor of History
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

This book explores the history of African tangible and intangible heritages and its links with the public memory of slavery in Brazil and Angola. The two countries are deeply connected, given how most enslaved Africans, forcibly brought to Brazil during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, were from West Central Africa. Brazil imported the largest number of enslaved Africans during the Atlantic slave trade and was the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888. Today, other than Nigeria, the largest population of African descent is in Brazil. Yet it was only in the last twenty years that Brazil’s African heritage and its slave past have gained greater visibility. Prior to this, Brazil’s African heritage and its slave past were completely neglected.

Even after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, African culture continued to be marginalized. Carnival, religious festivals, as well as Candomblé ceremonies, and capoeira (an Afro-Brazilian martial art) created important spaces of black assertion and insurgency. These cultural traditions were contested by white elites and public authorities, but starting in the 1930s, capoeira became a national symbol and Candomblé temples were gradually officially added to Brazil’s list of heritage sites.

In spite of these developments, the Atlantic slave past has remained absent from the public landscape of Brazilian and Angolan former slave ports, suggesting how difficult it is for these countries to address the painful legacies of slavery. African art and material culture also continued to be excluded from museums and other official institutions. In the rare instances that African artifacts were shown, they would be confined to only certain places dedicated to popular culture and associated with the religious sphere.

Even though public attention on slavery was growing internationally through national and international initiatives (e.g., The Slave Route Project by UNESCO), Brazil and Angola developed very few initiatives for the memorialization of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. This has started to change slowly in the last decade as Brazil has begun engaging in more initiatives to memorialize slavery and underscore the importance of its African heritage.

Brazil’s slave past and African heritage are emerging gradually in urban and rural areas through different kinds of initiatives led not only by activists but also by scholars in association with black communities. Although in their early stages, most of these projects are permanent programs supported by official agencies. This new configuration suggests that––unlike the case in Angola––in Brazil, slavery and the Atlantic the slave trade are becoming recognized as foundational chapters of the country’s history.

This is the first book in English to focus on African heritage and public memory of slavery in Brazil and Angola. This interdisciplinary study examines visual images, dance, music, oral accounts, museum exhibitions, artifacts, monuments, festivals, and others forms of commemoration to illuminate the social and cultural dynamics that over the last twenty years have propelled––or prevented––the visibility of African heritage (and its Atlantic slave trade legacy) in the South Atlantic region.

The book makes a very important contribution to the understanding of the place of African heritage and slavery in the official history and public memory of Brazil and Angola, topics that remain understudied. The study’s focus on the South Atlantic world, a zone which is sparsely covered in the scholarly corpus on Atlantic history, will further research on other post-slave societies.

African Heritage and Memories of Slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic World is an important book for African studies and Latin American studies. It is especially valuable for African Diaspora studies, African history, Atlantic history, history of Brazil, history of slavery, and Caribbean history.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• Introduction: Wounded Pasts: Memory of Slavery and African Heritage in Brazil (Ana Lucia Araujo)
• Chapter 1: Collectionism and Colonialism: The Africana Collection at Brazil’s National Museum (Rio de Janeiro) (Mariza de Carvalho Soares)
• Chapter 2: Race and Visual Representation: Louis Agassiz and Hermann Burmeister (Maria Helena Machado)
• Chapter 3: Counter-Witnessing the Visual Culture of Brazilian Slavery (Matthew Francis Rarey)
• Chapter 4: Angola in Brazil: The Formation of Angoleiro identity in Bahia (Matthias Röhrig Assunção)
• Chapter 5: Memories of Captivity and Freedom in São José da Serra Jongo Festivals: Cultural Heritage and Black Identity (1888–2011) (Martha Abreu and Hebe Mattos)
• Chapter 6: From Public Amnesia to Public Memory: Re-Discovering Slavery Heritage in Rio de Janeiro (André Cicalo)
• Chapter 7: Uncomfortable Pasts: Talking About Slavery in Angola (Marcia C. Schenck and Mariana P. Candido)
• Chapter 8: “Bahia is a Closer Africa”: Brazilian Slavery and Heritage in African American Roots Tourism (Patricia de Santana Pinho)
• Chapter 9: Preserving African Art, History, and Memory: The AfroBrazil Museum (Kimberly Cleveland)
• Chapter 10: The Legacy of Slavery in Contemporary Brazil (Myrian Sepúlveda dos Santos)
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors

Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991

Talonbooks
2015
640 pages
6 W x 9 H inches
Hardcover ISBN 13: 9780889229471; ISBN 10: 0889229473

Fred Wah

Edited and Introduction by:

Jeff Derksen, Associate Professor of English
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Fred Wah’s career has spanned six decades and a range of formal styles and preoccupations. Scree collects Wah’s concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s, his landscape-centric work of the 1970s, and his ethnicity-oriented poems of the 1980s. Fred was a founding member of the avant-garde TISH group, which helped turn Canadian poetry, in the West in particular, to a focus on language. He has said that his “writing has been sustained, primarily, by two interests: racial hybridity and the local.”

Most of Wah’s early work is out of print. This collection allows readers to (re)discover this groundbreaking work. The volume contains:

Lardeau (1965)
Mountain (1967)
Among (1972)
Tree (1972)
Earth (1974)
Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975)
Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek (1980)
Owner’s Manual (1981)
Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh (1981)
Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail (1982)
Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985)
Rooftops (1988)
So Far (1991)

The collection has been organized according to a chronology of composition (rather than a chronology of original publication): this reveals new connections and thematic trajectories in the body of work as a whole, and makes the book an eminently “teachable” volume. The book includes full-colour facsimiles of two early books, Earth and Tree, reproduced to show the “hands-on” object-based aspect of chapbook publishing.

Poitier Revisited: Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age

Bloomsbury Publishing
2015-01-15
288 pages
25 bw illus
229 x 152 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781623564919

Edited by:

Ian Gregory Strachan, Associate Professor of English
College of The Bahamas

Mia Mask, Associate Professor of Film
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Sidney Poitier remains one of the most recognizable black men in the world. Widely celebrated but at times criticized for the roles he played during a career that spanned 60 years, there can be no comprehensive discussion of black men in American film, and no serious analysis of 20th century American film history that excludes him. Poitier Revisited offers a fresh interrogation of the social, cultural and political significance of the Poitier oeuvre. The contributions explore the broad spectrum of critical issues summoned up by Poitier’s iconic work as actor, director and filmmaker. Despite his stature, Poitier has actually been under-examined in film criticism generally. This work reconsiders his pivotal role in film and American race relations, by arguing persuasively, that even in this supposedly ‘post-racial’ moment of Barack Obama, the struggles, aspirations, anxieties, and tensions Poitier’s films explored are every bit as relevant today as when they were first made.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Walking with Kings: Poitier, King, and Obama / Aram Goudsouzian, University of Memphis, USA
• 2. Historicizing the Shadows and Acts: No Way Out and the Imagining of Black Activist Communities / Ryan De Rosa, Los Angeles Public Schools, USA
• 3. Caribbean All-Stars: Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and the Rise of the African-American Leading Man / Belinda Edmondson, Professor of English and African-American & African Studies, USA
• 4. “Draggin’ the Chain”: Linking Civil Rights and African American Representation in The Defiant Ones and In the Heat of the Night / Emma Hamilton and Troy Saxby, University of Newcastle, Australia
• 5. Whisper Campaign on Catfish Row: Sidney Poitier and Porgy and Bess / Jeff Smith, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
• 6. To Sir, With Love: A Black British Perspective / Mark Christian, Lehman College, USA
• 7. Transgression or Legal Union?: The Meaning of Interracial Marriage in 1967 Film and Law / Kim Warren, University of Kansas, USA
• 8. A Blues the Tom: Sidney Poitier’s Filmic Sexual Identities / Ian Gregory Strachan, College of The Bahamas, Bahamas
• 9. Black Masculinity on Horseback: From Duel at Diablo to Buck and the Preacher and beyond / Mia Mask, Vassar College, USA
• 10. Stepping Behind the Camera: Sidney Poitier’s Directorial Career / Keith Corson, Rhodes College and Memphis College of Art, USA
• 11. No Shafts, Super Flys, or Foxy Browns: Sidney Poitier’s Uptown Saturday Night as Alternative to Blaxploitation Cinema” / Novotny Lawrence, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, USA
• 12. Transcending Paul Poitier: Six Degrees of Separation and the Construction of Will Smith / Willie Tolliver, Jr., Agnes Scott College, USA

Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature

University Press of Mississippi
2015-07-10
234 pages
1 b&w illustration, 3 maps, introduction, epilogue, index
6 x 9 inches
Hardcover ISBN:9781628464757

Edited by:

Dillon Brown, Associate Professor of English and African and African American
Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri

Leah Reade Rosenberg, Associate Professor of English
University of Florida

A challenge to the primacy of the Windrush generation as the sole founders of Caribbean literature

Contributors: Edward Baugh, Michael Bucknor, Raphael Dalleo, Alison Donnell, Nadia Ellis, Donette Francis, Glyne Griffith, Kate Houlden, Evelyn O’Callaghan, Lisa Outar, Atreyee Phukan, Kim Robinson-Walcott, Faith Smith, and Michelle Stephens

This edited collection challenges a long sacrosanct paradigm. Since the establishment of Caribbean literary studies, scholars have exalted an elite cohort of émigré novelists based in postwar London, a group often referred to as “the Windrush writers” in tribute to the SS Empire Windrush, whose 1948 voyage from Jamaica inaugurated large-scale Caribbean migration to London. In critical accounts this group is typically reduced to the canonical troika of V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and Sam Selvon, effectively treating these three authors as the tradition’s founding fathers. These “founders” have been properly celebrated for producing a complex, anticolonial, nationalist literature. However, their canonization has obscured the great diversity of postwar Caribbean writers, producing an enduring but narrow definition of West Indian literature.

Beyond Windrush stands out as the first book to reexamine and redefine the writing of this crucial era. Its fourteen original essays make clear that in the 1950s there was already a wide spectrum of West Indian men and women—Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean, and white-creole—who were writing, publishing, and even painting. Many lived in the Caribbean and North America, rather than London. Moreover, these writers addressed subjects overlooked in the more conventionally conceived canon, including topics such as queer sexuality and the environment. This collection offers new readings of canonical authors (Lamming, Roger Mais, and Andrew Salkey); hitherto marginalized authors (Ismith Khan, Elma Napier, and John Hearne); and commonly ignored genres (memoir, short stories, and journalism).

Hybrid Identities: Theoretical and Empirical Examinations

Haymarket Books
2009
412 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781608460359

Edited by:

Keri E. Iyall Smith, Associate Professor of Sociology
Suffolk University, Boston

Patricia Leavy

Combining theoretical and empirical pieces, this book explores the emerging theoretical work seeking to describe hybrid identities while also illustrating the application of these theories in empirical research.The sociological perspective of this volume sets it apart. Hybrid identities continue to be predominant in minority or immigrant communities, but these are not the only sites of hybridity in the globalized world. Given a compressed world and a constrained state, identities for all individuals and collective selves are becoming more complex. The hybrid identity allows for the perpetuation of the local, in the context of the global. This book presents studies of types of hybrid identities: transnational, double consciousness, gender, diaspora, the third space, and the internal colony.

Multicultural Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity

NASW Press
2015
224 pages
ISBN: 978-0-87101-460-3

Edited by:

Elizabeth Pathy Salett, MSW

Diane R. Koslow, PhD

In the past 30 years, the United States has undergone an unprecedented and accelerated growth in the diversity of its population. These changes affect all elements of our society, underscoring the need for an informed and knowledgeable public that can understand, respect, and communicate with people of diverse backgrounds. Multicultural Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity discusses the relationship between race, ethnicity, sense of self and the development of individual and group identity. It further explores the question of who we are and who we are becoming from the perspective of our multicultural, multilingual, and globally interconnected world. This book offers readers the opportunity to examine the importance of ecological and environmental factors in defining how we experience our lives and the world around us.

The authors introduce and review numerous frameworks and models for understanding racial and ethnic identity development. Each chapter reviews the social, economic, and political processes related to building and preserving racial and ethnic identities and perceptions of self. Multicultural Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity is a great resource for all social workers.

Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Elsie Achugbue
• Chapter 1: Identity, Self, and Individualism in a Multicultural Perspective / Alan Roland
• Chapter 2: African American Identity and Its Social Context / Lee Jenkins
• Chapter 3: Children of Undocumented Immigrants: Imperiled Developmental Trajectories / Luis H. Zayas and Mollie Bradlee
• Chapter 4: Racial and Ethnic Identities of Asian Americans: Understanding Unique and Common Experiences / Greg M. Kim-Ju and Phillip D. Akutsu
• Chapter 5: Indigenous Peoples and Identity in the 21st Century: Remembering, Reclaiming, and Regenerating / Sandy Grande, Timothy San Pedro, and Sweeney Windchief
• Chapter 6: White Racial Identity Development: Looking Back and Considering What Is Ahead / Lisa B. Spanierman
• Chapter 7: Growing Up Multiracial in the United States / Robin Lin Miller and NiCole T. Buchanan
• Chapter 8: What It Means to Be American / Jennie Park-Taylor, Joshua Henderson, and Michael Stoyer
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index

Mestizaje and Globalization: Transformations of Identity and Power

University of Arizona Press
2014
264 pages
10 photos, 3 illlustrations, 5 tables
6.00 x 9.00
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8165-3090-8

Stefanie Wickstrom, Senior Lecturer of Political Science
Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington

Philip D. Young (1936-2013), Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
University of Oregon

The Spanish word mestizaje does not easily translate into English. Its meaning and significance have been debated for centuries since colonization by European powers began. Its simplest definition is “mixing.” As long as the term has been employed, norms and ideas about racial and cultural relations in the Americas have been imagined, imposed, questioned, rejected, and given new meaning.

Mestizaje and Globalization presents perspectives on the underlying transformation of identity and power associated with the term during times of great change in the Americas. The volume offers a comprehensive and empirically diverse collection of insights concerning mestizaje’s complex relationship with indigeneity, the politics of ethnic identity, transnational social movements, the aesthetic of cultural production, development policies, and capitalist globalization, with particular attention to cases in Latin America and the United States.

Beyond the narrow and often inadequate meaning of mestizaje as biological and racial mixing, the concept deserves an innovative theoretical consideration due to its multidimensional, multifaceted character and its resilience as an ideological construct. The contributors argue that historical analyses of mestizaje do not sufficiently understand contemporary ways that racism, ethnic discrimination, and social injustice intermingle with current discourse and practice of cultural recognition and multiculturalism in the Americas.

Mestizaje and Globalization contributes to an emerging multidisciplinary effort to explore how identities are imposed, negotiated, and reconstructed. The chapter authors clearly set forth the issues and obstacles that indigenous peoples and subjugated minorities face, as well as the strategies they have employed to gain empowerment in the face of globalization.

Two Worlds Walking: Short Stories, Essays, and Poetry by Writers of Mixed Heritages

New Rivers Press
January 1996
256 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0898231496

Edited by Diane Glaney & C. W. Truesdale

In this landmark collection, 42 writers — including Diane Glancy, Siv Cedering, and Lewis Turco — go beyond a simple idea of diversity to explore what it means to “walk in two worlds.” While many of the poems, short stories, essays, and memoirs in this anthology explore the tensions of being “mixed blood,” all of the pieces offer a surprising and resilient perspective on what it means to be “American” today.

Mixed Race 3.0: Risk and Reward in the Digital Age

USC Annenberg Press
2015-01-30
113 pages
ISBN: 9781625175564

Edited by:

Ulli K. Ryder
Department of Gender and Women’s Studies
University of Rhode Island

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor
Annenberg School for Communication and Jounalism
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California

Have you been asked, “what nationality are you” or “what country are you from”?
Have you been puzzled when forms tell you to “select only one ethnicity”?
Have you been disturbed to hear that you’re the “face of a colorblind future”?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, this book is for you.

Mixed Race 3.0: Risk and Reward in the Digital Age is an e-book that contains 17 contributions (many with exclusive photos) from award-winning writers, researchers and artists who embody a “mixed mindset.” Audacious and razor-sharp, Mixed Race 3.0 exposes the many monochromatic portrayals of multiracial people’s richness, variety and struggles in history, politics, mass-media and technology. Fans of Loving Day, Race Remixed, Mixed Chicks Chat, The Mixed Experience Podcast, Mixed Girl Problems and Critical Mixed Race Studies will be captivated, incensed and inspired by the powerful discussions of risks and rewards of being multiracial today.

Beyond memoir or case study, this book offers three versions of what it means to be mixed from a variety of voices. Version 1 is “Mixed Race 1.0: A Monologue.” Or, how did multiracial identities emerge in the U.S. and what challenges did they face? Version 2 is “Mixed Race 2.0: A Dialogue.” Or, what are some core differences between how multiracials think and talk about themselves and how U.S. and global cultures think and talk about them? Version 3 is “Mixed Race 3.0: A Megalogue.” Or, where in the world is this entire thing going as technology plays more of a role?

With honest storytelling and up-to-date critical inquiry, Mixed Race 3.0 plots a path not just to being mixed in the 21st century, but one open to anyone interested in simply “how to be.” The result is a poignant, intelligent, and daring journey that dissects the controversial label—multiracial—and challenges any politician, pundit or provocateur that purports to speak for or about all multiracial people.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
  • Herman S. Gray
• Introduction
• Section 1 Mixed Race 1.0: A Monologue
  • Gary B. Nash
  • Peggy Pascoe
  • Jordan Clarke
• Section 2 Mixed Race 2.0: A Dialouge
  • Ken Tanabe
  • Lori L. Tharps
  • Andrew K. Jolivette
  • Ulli K. Ryder
  • Marcia Alesan Dawkins
  • Stephanie Sparling
• Section 3 Mixed Race 3.0: A Megalogue
  • Rainier Spencer
  • Velina Hasu Houston
  • Lindsay A. Dawkins
  • Amanda Mardon
  • Shoshana Sarah
  • Mary Beltrán
  • Lisa Rueckert
• The Authors and Artists