Unmaking Race Remaking Soul

Explores the theme of aesthetic agency and its potential for social and political progress.

Examining a wide range of source material including popular culture, literature, photography, television, and visual art, this collection of essays sheds light on the misrepresentations of Latina/os in the mass media.

Both theoretically informed and empirically rich, Youth Urban Worlds explores how urban cultures affect political action amongst youth. Argues that urban cultures challenge the very meaning and contours of the political process Includes ethnographies, delving into the perspectives and knowledges of racialized youth, urban farmers, and “voluntary risk takers,” like dumpster divers, building climbers, and student protestors Theorizes that aesthetics are an increasingly crucial form of political action in the contemporary urban setting and explains the impact of aesthetics on the political Examines the centrality of fun, warmth, aesthetics, and embodiment to these youth’s experience of being in the world Explains how youth are able to practically and concretely impact the political process through the performance of risky and disruptive behavior

Bringing together criticism on both African American and Native American women writers, this book offers fresh perspectives on art and beauty, truth, justice, community, and the making of a good and happy life. The essays draw on interdisciplinary, feminist, and comparative methods in the works of writers such as Toni Morrison, Leslie Silko, Alice Walker, Linda Hogan, Paula Gunn Allen, Luci Tapahonso, Phillis Wheatley, and Sherley Anne Williams, making them more accessible for critical consideration in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and critical theory. The contributors formulate unique frameworks for interpreting the multiple levels of complex, cultural play between Native American and African American women writers in America, and pave the way for innovative hermeneutic possibilities for reassessing writers of both traditions.

Whether in schoolrooms or kitchens, state houses or church pulpits, women have always been historians. Although few participated in the academic study of history until the mid-twentieth century, women labored as teachers of history and historical interpreters. Within African-American communities, women began to write histories in the years after the American Revolution. Distributed through churches, seminaries, public schools, and auxiliary societies, their stories of the past translated ancient Africa, religion, slavery, and ongoing American social reform as historical subjects to popular audiences North and South. This book surveys the creative ways in which African-American women harnessed the power of print to share their historical revisions with a broader public. Their speeches, textbooks, poems, and polemics did more than just recount the past. They also protested their present status in the United States through their reclamation of that past. Bringing together work by more familiar writers in black America-such as Maria Stewart, Francis E. W. Harper, and Anna Julia Cooper-as well as lesser-known mothers and teachers who educated their families and their communities, this documentary collection gathers a variety of primary texts from the antebellum era to the Harlem Renaissance, some of which have never been anthologized. Together with a substantial introduction to black women's historical writings, this volume presents a unique perspective on the past and imagined future of the race in the United States.

Sounding Like a No-No traces a rebellious spirit in post–civil rights black music by focusing on a range of offbeat, eccentric, queer, or slippery performances by leading musicians influenced by the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights, black nationalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, who through reinvention created a repertoire of performances that have left a lasting mark on popular music. The book's innovative readings of performers including Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, and Meshell Ndegeocello demonstrate how embodied sound and performance became a means for creativity, transgression, and social critique, a way to reclaim imaginative and corporeal freedom from the social death of slavery and its legacy of racism, to engender new sexualities and desires, to escape the sometimes constrictive codes of respectability and uplift from within the black community, and to make space for new futures for their listeners. The book's perspective on music as a form of black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.

Attracted to the rich ceremonial life and unique architecture of the New Mexico pueblos, many early-twentieth-century artists depicted Pueblo peoples, places, and culture in paintings. These artists’ encounters with Pueblo Indians fostered their awareness of Native political struggles and led them to join with Pueblo communities to champion Indian rights. In this book, art historian Sascha T. Scott examines the ways in which non-Pueblo and Pueblo artists advocated for American Indian cultures by confronting some of the cultural, legal, and political issues of the day. Scott closely examines the work of five diverse artists, exploring how their art was shaped by and helped to shape Indian politics. She places the art within the context of the interwar period, 1915–30, a time when federal Indian policy shifted away from forced assimilation and toward preservation of Native cultures. Through careful analysis of paintings by Ernest L. Blumenschein, John Sloan, Marsden Hartley, and Awa Tsireh (Alfonso Roybal), Scott shows how their depictions of thriving Pueblo life and rituals promoted cultural preservation and challenged the pervasive romanticizing theme of the “vanishing Indian.” Georgia O’Keeffe’s images of Pueblo dances, which connect abstraction with lived experience, testify to the legacy of these political and aesthetic transformations. Scott makes use of anthropology, history, and indigenous studies in her art historical narrative. She is one of the first scholars to address varied responses to issues of cultural preservation by aesthetically and culturally diverse artists, including Pueblo painters. Beautifully designed, this book features nearly sixty artworks reproduced in full color.

Hip Hop’s Amnesia is a study about aesthetics and politics, music and social movements, as well as the ways in which African Americans' unique history and culture has consistently led them to create musics that have served as the soundtracks for their socio-political aspirations and frustrations, their socio-political organizations and nationally-networked movements. The musics of the major African American social and political movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were based and ultimately built on earlier forms of "African American movement music." Therefore, in order to really and truly understand rap music and hip hop culture we must critically examine both classical African American musics and the classical African American movements that these musics served as soundtracks for.