Mako Fitts Ward

Arizona State University | ASU · School of Social Transformation

The Black Radical Tradition has always captured the fluidity of life, death, and the afterlife of sustained modes of repression that propel Black bodies into hypervisible spectacles of existence. Using what Viviane Saleh-Hanna calls a “Black Feminist Hauntology,” this article draws from work on the temporality of white terrorism, necropolitical soc...

This essay explores the contributions of Beyoncé to what I call “the New Niggerati,” a cadre of Black cultural producers engineering American popular culture. Their promotion of individual economic improvement is a discursive shift in Black music, a “dap” to advanced capitalism. Beyoncé's hegemonic power to move the culture places her at the apex o...

bell hooks is one of the seminal feminist theoreticians whose body of work not only provides discursive understandings of intersectional modes of oppression, but also a conceptual roadmap for creating the material conditions that lead to social transformation. In this essay, I posit the formulation of a theory of transformative revolutionary action...

This paper describes results from a qualitative study of the music video production industry and the creative process in rap music video production and artist marketing. Participant responses are presented in three areas: the music video production process, recent trends in rap music videos, and the music video set as a site of gender exploitation....

Ethnicity-specific differences in body aesthetic ideals and body satisfaction have been cited as a potential explanation for interethnic differences in the prevalence and presentation of eating disorders. It has been widely hypothesized that such ethnically based differences in aesthetic body ideals mitigate cultural pressures that contribute to bo...

This paper describes results from a qualitative study of the music video production industry and the creative process in rap music video production and artist marketing. Participant responses are presented in three areas: the music video production process, recent trends in rap music videos, and the music video set as a site of gender exploitatio...