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A Piece of the Action
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 278

A Piece of the Action

Hollywood is often thought of—and certainly by Hollywood itself—as a progressive haven. However, in the decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the film industry grew deeply conservative when it came to conflicts over racial justice. Amid black self-assertion and white backlash, many of the most heated struggles in film were fought over employment. In A Piece of the Action, Eithne Quinn reveals how Hollywood catalyzed wider racial politics, through representation on screen as well as in battles over jobs and resources behind the scenes. Based on extensive archival research and detailed discussions of films like In the Heat of the Night, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Supe...

Nuthin' but a
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 269

Nuthin' but a "G" Thang

In the late 1980s, gangsta rap music emerged in urban America, giving voice to—and making money for—a social group widely considered to be in crisis: young, poor, black men. From its local origins, gangsta rap went on to flood the mainstream, generating enormous popularity and profits. Yet the highly charged lyrics, public battles, and hard, fast lifestyles that characterize the genre have incited the anger of many public figures and proponents of "family values." Constantly engaging questions of black identity and race relations, poverty and wealth, gangsta rap represents one of the most profound influences on pop culture in the last thirty years. Focusing on the artists Ice Cube, Dr. D...

Under a Bad Sign
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 227

Under a Bad Sign

What accounts for the persistence of the figure of the black criminal in popular culture created by African Americans? Unearthing the overlooked history of art that has often seemed at odds with the politics of civil rights and racial advancement, Under a Bad Sign explores the rationale behind this tradition of criminal self-representation from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary gangsta culture. In this lively exploration, Jonathan Munby takes a uniquely broad view, laying bare the way the criminal appears within and moves among literary, musical, and visual arts. Munby traces the legacy of badness in Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes’s detective fiction and in Claude McKay, Julian Mayf...

Rapper, Writer, Pop-Cultural Player
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 331

Rapper, Writer, Pop-Cultural Player

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2016-04-08
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  • Publisher: Routledge

This collection of essays critically engages with factors relating to black urban life and cultural representation in the post-civil rights era, using Ice-T and his myriad roles as musician, actor, writer, celebrity, and industrialist as a vehicle through which to interpret and understand the African American experience. Over the past three decades, African Americans have faced a number of new challenges brought about by changes in the political, economic and social structure of America. Furthermore, this vastly changed social landscape has produced a number of resonant pop-cultural trends that have proved to be both innovative and admired on the one hand, and contentious and divisive on the...

Prostitution, Harm and Gender Inequality
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 222

Prostitution, Harm and Gender Inequality

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2016-04-08
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  • Publisher: Routledge

Prostitution, Harm and Gender Inequality brings together international research exploring the range of gendered harms to women involved in prostitution and the consequences of growth of the sex industry for global gender relations. While there is an increasing amount of research and academic output on prostitution, the current focus is often on discussion and critique of policy frameworks, and contemporary debates over harm are largely limited to sex trafficking and sexual exploitation of children. Less attention is paid to questions of how the sex industry perpetuates notions of objectification and male entitlement with respect to sexual access to women's bodies, despite being key feminist ...

Top 40 Democracy
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 336

Top 40 Democracy

A capacious and stimulating tour de force of the mainstream music industry that reveals the cultural import of even the most deliberately banal performers and songs. Weisbard finds depths in our culture s shallows as he investigates and articulates the cultural construction of such phenomena as Dolly Parton, Elton John, the Isley Brothers, A&M Records, and the rise of radio populism. He further sheds new light on the upheavals in the music industry over the last fifteen years and the implications of them for the audiences the industry has shaped. Each chapter brings us to see afresh precisely that music and those musicians that have become the most familiar and overexposed, by delving into the minutiae of how pop stars and their music were made and framed for repeated consumption in the era dominated by radio."

Religion of Fear
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 519

Religion of Fear

Conservative evangelicalism has transformed American politics, disseminating a sometimes fearful message not just through conventional channels, but through subcultures and alternate modes of communication. Within this world is a "Religion of Fear," a critical impulse that dramatizes cultural and political conflicts and issues in frightening ways that serve to contrast "orthodox" behaviors and beliefs with those linked to darkness, fear, and demonology. Jason Bivins offers close examinations of several popular evangelical cultural creations including the Left Behind novels, church-sponsored Halloween "Hell Houses," sensational comic books, especially those disseminated by Jack Chick, and ant...

Close to the Edge
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 217

Close to the Edge

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2011
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  • Publisher: UNSW Press

At its rhythmic, beating heart, Close to the Edge asks whether hip hop can change the world. Hip hop -- rapping, beat-making, b-boying, deejaying, graffiti -- captured the imagination of the teenage Sujatha Fernandes in the 1980s, inspiring her and politicizing her along the way. Years later, armed with mc-ing skills and an urge to immerse herself in global hip hop, she embarks on a journey into street culture around the world. From the south side of Chicago to the barrios of Caracas and Havana and the sprawling periphery of Sydney, she grapples with questions of global voices and local critiques, and the rage that underlies both. An engrossing read and an exhilarating travelogue, this punchy book also asks hard questions about dispossession, racism, poverty and the quest for change through a microphone. -- Back cover.

The Specter and the Speculative
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 309

The Specter and the Speculative

The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora engages in a critical conversation about how historical subjects and historical texts within the African Diaspora are re-fashioned, re-animated, and re-articulated, as well as parodied, nostalgized, and defamiliarized, to establish an “afterlife” for African Atlantic identities and narratives. These essays focus on transnational, transdisciplinary, and transhistorical sites of memory and haunting—textual, visual, and embodied performances—in order to examine how these “living” archives circulate and imagine anew the meanings of prior narratives liberated from their original context. Individual essays examine how historical and literary performances—in addition to film, drama, music, dance, and material culture—thus revitalized, transcend and speak across temporal and spatial boundaries not only to reinstate traditional meanings, but also to motivate fresh commentary and critique. Emergent and established scholars representing diverse disciplines and fields of interest specifically engage under explored themes related to afterlives, archives, and haunting.

Death of a Suburban Dream
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 328

Death of a Suburban Dream

Compton, California, is often associated in the public mind with urban America's toughest problems, including economic disinvestment, gang violence, and failing public schools. Before it became synonymous with inner-city decay, however, Compton's affordability, proximity to manufacturing jobs, and location ten miles outside downtown Los Angeles made it attractive to aspiring suburbanites seeking single-family homes and quality schools. As Compton faced challenges in the twentieth century, and as the majority population shifted from white to African American and then to Latino, the battle for control over the school district became symbolic of Compton's economic, social, and political crises....