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An African City: Black Women's Creativity, Pleasure, Diasporic (Dis)Connections and Resistance Through Aesthetic and Media Practices and Scholarship
Abstract
How do Black women engulf themselves in the politics of being and becoming through everyday existence, aesthetics and media practices in creative, pleasurable, diasporic and resistant ways? How is the hegemony of North America, Eurocentrism, anti-Blackness and sexism implicated in this? We consider such questions in relation to Black women's media and aesthetic practices, and their related scholarship, by examining the Ghana-based web series An African City. Our work echoes calls for the decentering of media and communication studies rooted in white and Western perspectives but positioned as “universal.” We explore Black women's experiences (in Britain, the United States, Ghana, and Nigeria) as active producers in their communities; beyond the dominant epistemological hierarchy of whiteness in contrast with Blackness. Framing visual communication as a community-based source of self-expression, we emphasize the liberatory possibilities of aesthetics (fashion and screen depictions) for Black women, while tarrying with how capitalism constrains such radical potential.
... 78 In their analysis of the television show An African City, Francesca Sobande and Krys Osei describe the ways the show implicates the imperialistic trade underlying African fashion. 79 Similarly, Eric Karikari's study of neoliberalism demonstrates how the construct's contradictions and colonial bases were quite clear in a Ghanaian managerial context. 80 For Africans, global imperialism affects everyday life in more notable ways than the nation-state. ...
In this introductory essay to the first of two themed issues, “(Re)Theorizing Communication Studies from African Perspectives,” we explore the decolonial potential of African perspectives in communication studies. African knowledge systems have something to teach, regardless of whether the West is listening. And yet, in the discipline of communication studies, the vast continent and its knowledge systems barely hold a presence. African knowledge systems are easily denied because of the ways that neocolonialism, coloniality, and global anti-Blackness structure Western ontologies and epistemologies. Therefore, we ask: What kind of epistemological decolonization is required in communication studies for the discipline to take African knowledge systems seriously? This Introduction creates a groundwork for interventions by examining the array of work that has already been done in service of the decolonial African communication studies project and the future possibilities of African communication studies.
Red Table Talk, a web series exclusively aired on Facebook Watch, represents the narrative of intergenerational Black women who tackle critical conversations. The show, developed by Jada Pinkett-Smith and featuring her daughter and mother, brings in special guests for discussions on race, gender identity, sexual and mental health, co-parenting, and relationships. This paper relies on both qualitative and quantitative data from an audience survey, supplemented by thematic analysis to explore these themes. We show how the alternative media model of Facebook Watch and the series itself act as rebellions against institutionalized narratives that perpetuate stereotypes against people of color. We examine how Black women creators reclaim agency and resist generational forms of silencing by authoring a counter-narrative at the intersection of their lived cultural experiences.
In this introductory essay to the second of two themed issues,“ (Re)Theorizing Communication Studies from African Perspectives,”we examine the possibilities created by applying African perspectives in communication studies. We first overview the trajectories initiated by previous African communication scholarship before turning to the applications and interventions highlighted within this issue. Throughout this issue, we invite our readers to acknowledge the previous work that has allowed for African communication studies to be where it is now, and to join us in supporting the scholars yet to be recognized and the futures they labor to create.
Studies highlight institutional structures that hamper the recruitment, retention, and progression of Black university students and scholars in Britain. Yet, scarce research explores the nuanced encounters of Black women who are early career (Ph.D.) researchers (ECRs), facing entangled oppressions. Located in a Black feminist tradition and by drawing on two Black women's (our) accounts of co-reflexive identity work in academia, this article addresses calls for more sociological analysis of how intersecting antiblackness and sexism impacts academic experiences. By analyzing the identity work and spirit of Black sisterhood embedded in a longitudinal postal poetic exchange that we began as doctoral students, this research examines components of collaborative, co-reflexive, and counter-narrative coping mechanisms between Black women in Britain in predominantly white institutions (PWIs). We conceptualize dimensions of poetic co-reflexivity and identity work at the nexus of studentship and scholarship as Black women; through a praxis-based framework – Black women ‘becoming’ academics (BWBA).
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This chapter highlights issues to do with Black digital diasporic content and communication. It discusses how Black women’s digital activity can enable them to deal with experiences of oppression that are specific to their lives and in communal ways. This chapter explores resistant credentials of some of the digital experiences of Black women in Britain, while reckoning with potentially conflicting aspects of counter-cultural practices which exist in the context of digital consumerism. This discussion features analysis of how Black American popular and digital culture contributes to some of the digital encounters and lives of Black women in Britain in impactful ways. Overall, this chapter focuses on Black women’s experiences of knowledge-sharing online, including via natural hair video blogs (vlogs) on YouTube.
This chapter focuses on Black women’s contemporary digital, creative, and cultural industry experiences. It reflects on the overlap between tacit issues concerning racial, gender, and cultural identity in online spaces, and tensions between the emancipatory, enterprising, enjoyable and extractive dimensions of the digital experiences of Black women in Britain—which are inevitably impacted by capitalist infrastructures. This chapter addresses how labour is (un)defined and understood in society, in ways influenced by social hierarchies and structural exploitation linked to anti-Black racism, sexism, classism and different interlocking oppressions. Traumatic aspects of Black women’s digital experiences are discussed, as well as the endeavours of self-serving and institutionally racist arts organisations that attempt to ‘diversify’ their brand image by spectacularising Black people.
This chapter outlines questions that buttress this work, such as: How is digital media implicated in the lives of Black women in Britain? In what ways do such digital experiences involve forms of creativity and cultural production? How are the intersections of anti-Black racism, sexism, and capitalism connected to this? What is the ‘digital’ in the lives of Black women in Britain, and how can it be both a source of joy and pain? How and why are Black women often identified as digital ‘trendsetters’, while being both erased and hyper-visible as creators, knowledge-producers, and social movement builders? This chapter provides an overview of key themes in this book, including digital diasporic dynamics and transnational, national, and regional relations.
Purpose: This paper aims to explore how and why ideas regarding “intersectional” approaches to feminism and Black activism are drawn on in marketing content related to the concept of being “woke” (invested in addressing social injustices). It considers which subject positions are represented as part of this and what they reveal about contemporary issues concerning advertising, gender, race and activism. Design/methodology/approach:
This study involves an interpretive and critical discursive analysis of so-called feminist advertising (“femvertising”) and marketing examples that make use of Black social justice activist ideas. Findings:
Findings illuminate how marketing simultaneously enables the visibility and erasure of “intersectional”, feminist and Black social justice activist issues, with the use of key racialised and gendered subject positions: White Saviour, Black Excellence, Strong Black Woman (and Mother) and “Woke” Change Agent. Research limitations/implications:
This research signals how brands (mis)use issues concerning commercialised notions of feminism, equality and Black social justice activism as part of marketing that flattens and reframes liberationist politics while upholding the neoliberal idea that achievement and social change requires individual ambition and consumption rather than structural shifts and resistance. Practical implications:
This work can aid the development of advertising standards regulatory approaches which account for nuances of stereotypical representations and marketing’s connection to intersecting issues regarding racism and sexism. Originality/value: This research outlines a conceptualisation of the branding of “woke” bravery, which expands our understanding of the interdependency of issues related to race, gender, feminism, activism and marketing. It highlights marketing responses to recent socio-political times, which are influenced by public discourse concerning movements, including Black Lives Matter and Me Too.
[Open access article at: https://acmejournal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1683] How are Black food geographies, both geographies of emotional slow violence and resilience? Dominant directions in health-related food research emphasize how Black food choices cause (slow) death from diabetes, hypertension, and other medical conditions. Emphasis on individual behaviors can overlook how a felt sense of the food landscape matters (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes Conroy 2016). Through the frame of slow violence and racial trauma, I consider racial surveillance in the context of Black food geographies. Biomedical studies note the attritional effects of racial trauma on overall wellbeing, while other research and media continue to document racial profiling in food spaces. For this exploratory piece, I bear witness to testimonies of racial surveillance and food geographies using GIF-making, healing arts, and autoethnography. Testimonies drawn from interviews, media, and my personal experiences underscore how surveillance and its effects are very much visible and felt for African-American and Afro-Latinx testifiers as they navigate “food while Black.” Beyond countering the “invisibility” of slow violence (Nixon 2011), I explore affective and arts-based approaches to (re)presenting and feeling through Black food geographies. Building on Black geographies, I engage with Black life (not only death) by considering testifiers’ strategies for personal and collective resilience (White 2018).
This article explores the role of comfort as an affective encounter across bodies, objects (namely clothing) and spaces. I focus on how bodies that are marked as strange and a source of society’s discomfort negotiate this positioning through the presentation of one’s body. What does it mean for these bodies to be comfortable or uncomfortable? This question is answered through work done with Black Muslim women in Britain. By exploring how comfort is felt in relation to racially marked bodies, this article develops work on emotional geographies. Comfort is understood as both an emotional product and process that changes as bodies move across different spaces. In noting this movement, I also explore how boundaries around the body (enacted through e.g. the multi-dimensional hijab) presents a particular form of territorialisation that facilitates comfort as we present our bodies across different spaces. These boundaries can be both a source of comfort and discomfort through their positioning as deviant from social norms. In understanding the different roles of boundaries, I explore the social processes that construct comfort (or discomfort) as we move through different spaces. This is intertwined with furthering work on Muslim geographies by challenging the overwhelming focus placed on ‘public’ facing garments like the headscarf and abaya. Such a focus limits an understanding of the fluidity of Black Muslim women’s identities, and how these changes in our clothing practices affect and are affected by the relationships built across spaces.
In this article, we position ethnicity at the heart of the marketplace in contributing to a more complex and multifaceted understanding of identity formation and commodification. We approach the commodification of ethnicity on two, interconnected levels in a globalizing world of fashion.
We unravel the designs and discourses of the corporate company and textile producer Vlisco, based in the Netherlands, as well as the practices and ideas of fashion designers in Ghana who make abundant use of wax cloth fabrics. Of central concern in this article is how a corporate company and
fashion designers in their designs and narratives unite an understanding of (fashion) identity as both ‘African’ and cosmopolitan, as an individual and collective expression. It is clearly not our intention to applaud these processes of commodification uncritically, fuelled as
they are by global capitalism. Yet we do want to approach them as creative processes in all their complexity.
This paper explores adornment as a constitutive part of Jamaican dancehall culture. Practices of adornment speak as much of the world of the Jamaican ghetto, and of forms of socio-historical continuity and discontinuity, as they do of the explicit desire of women to communicate their own agency and lived experience. The sartorial excess prevalent in dancehall culture must therefore be understood as a creative response to the conditions of constraint, oppression and inequality that is a characteristic feature of lower class Jamaican urban experience. This response is part of an attempt to survive through alternative modes of being. I argue that survival is not based simply on physical need; rather, survival concerns desire and the imaginative world. By presenting the body as a site of spectacle, dancehall women push at the limits of survival to create a subversive world of corporeal imagination. Dancehall women thereby challenge the Eurocentric and patriarchal dichotomy between the sexual and the maternal body that operates in Jamaican society.
It is broadly recognized that black style had a clear and profound influence on the history of dress in the twentieth century, with black culture and fashion having long been defined as ‘cool’. Yet despite this high profile, in-depth explorations of the culture and history of style and dress in the African diaspora are a relatively recent area of enquiry. The Birth of Cool asserts that ‘cool’ is seen as an arbiter of presence, and relates how both iconic and ‘ordinary’ black individuals and groups have marked out their lives through the styling of their bodies.
Focusing on counter- and sub-cultural contexts, this book investigates the role of dress in the creation and assertion of black identity. From the gardenia corsage worn by Billie Holiday to the work-wear of female African-Jamaican market traders, through to the home-dressmaking of black Britons in the 1960s, and the meaning of a polo-neck jumper as depicted in a 1934 self-portrait by African-American artist Malvin Gray Johnson, this study looks at the ways in which the diaspora experience is expressed through self-image.
Spanning the late nineteenth century to the modern day, the book draws on ready-made and homemade fashion, photographs, paintings and films, published and unpublished biographies and letters from Britain, Jamaica, South Africa, and the United States to consider how personal style statements reflect issues of racial and cultural difference. The Birth of Cool is a powerful exploration of how style and dress both initiate and confirm change, and the ways in which they expresses identity and resistance in black culture.
Dress and fashion practices in Africa and the diaspora are dynamic and diverse, whether on the street or on the fashion runway.
Focusing on the dressed body as a performance site, African Dress explores how ideas and practices of dress contest or legitimize existing power structures through expressions of individual identity and the cultural and political order.
Drawing on innovative, interdisciplinary research by established and up and coming scholars, the book examines real life projects and social transformations that are deeply political, revolving around individual and public goals of dignity, respect, status, and morality.
With its remarkable scope, this book will attract students and scholars of fashion and dress, material culture and consumption, performance studies, and art history in relation to Africa and on a global scale.
Value added: Reconsidering women-centered media and viewership explores how contemporary women audiences negotiate and connect with media products developed for them. The cutting-edge scholarship in this special issue offers keen insights into how texts designed with women in mind appeal to them even as those appeals are undervalued by mainstream classed and gendered misconceptions of the content as deficient in quality and taste even when such appeals are successful.
Race and racism are defining characteristics of life in American society. Technology and other knowledge production tools are created within this racist context and generate information that, when (mis)used, worsen inequities for already marginalized people. Race after Technology takes readers on a provocative journey into technology’s role in perpetuating racism. In this book, Benjamin explores the myriad of ways in which technology reinforces systemic oppression in America, creating a digital dragnet which codes people by stigmatizing them for where they live, work, and play. Technology codifies discriminatory practices in a way that results in racist responses to social problems. It succeeds by excluding some groups from taking part in its design, intent, implementation, and results. While it strives to present with an “allure of objectivity,” the content of technology reflects the biases of its creators and the motivations of its sponsors. It twists society like a fun-house mirror where the principles of Jim Crow and the “illusion of [racial] progress” persist.
Through the lens of Black feminist autoethnography and (auto)biographical narrative, this article makes an impactful contribution to postcolonial feminist thought, fashion and cultural studies. I consider the significance of fashion and material culture as sociopolitical strategies of presence that offer an unparalleled understanding of my unique lived experience as a Ghanaian-Cameroonian-American Black woman. By exploring the intergenerational legacy of how my mother and I actively navigate the dichotomy of hyberivsible, yet unseen, this article further considers the emancipatory potential and underacknowledged legacy of Black women’s contributions to aesthetic and visual culture through embodied activism located within the practice of horticulture and gardening, alongside self-fashioned identity.
Using 50 interviews with black people about their fandoms (and anti-fandoms) of Tyler Perry’s media output, the blockbuster film Black Panther and the African American ballerina Misty Copeland, this article illuminates black fandom’s four interlocking discourses. First, must-see blackness describes black fans’ “civic duty” to see blackness in all of its forms. Second, economic consumption drives “must-see blackness” in the sense that black fans are cognizant of the precariousness of blackness’s existence in spaces that are either historically white and/or have been hostile to the presence of blackness. Third, black fandoms (and anti-fandoms) are driven by their pedagogical properties: how fit are fan objects for learning and role modeling? Finally, the pedagogical fitness of fan objects intersects with economic consumption and must-see blackness, which, in turn, illuminates black fans’ attentiveness to the machinations of the culture industries.
Postracial Resistance: Black Women and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity looks at how, in the first Black First Lady era, African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences subversively used the tools of postracial discourse—the media-propagated notion that race and race-based discrimination are over, and that race and racism no longer affect the everyday lives of both Whites and people of color—in order to resist its very tenets. Black women’s resistance to disenfranchisement has a long history in the U.S., including struggles for emancipation, suffrage, and de jure and de facto civil rights. In the Michelle Obama era, some minoritized subjects used a different, more individual form of resistance by negotiating through strategic ambiguity. Joseph listens to and watches Black women in three different places in media culture: she uses textual analysis to read the strategies of the Black women celebrities themselves; she uses production analysis to harvest insights from interviews with Black women writers, producers, and studio lawyers; and she uses audience ethnography to engage Black women viewers negotiating through the limited representations available to them. The book arcs from critiquing individual successes that strategic ambiguity enables and the limitations it creates for Black women celebrities, to documenting the way performing strategic ambiguity can (perhaps) unintentionally devolve into playing into racism from the perspective of Black women television professionals and younger viewers.
Existing research has affirmed that Black people historically mastered oral communication strategies to resist subjugation and oppression by dominant groups, and have emerged as leaders in technological innovation. This article takes seriously Black users’ social media engagement and focuses particularly on Black joy online. We analyze a rich collection of discourse spanning both Twitter and Vine through which Black users utilize the affordances of both platforms to challenge dominant narratives that demean and dehumanize Black people. We argue that Black users seize upon the interplay of the applications to not only express and foster joy, but to extend historic legacies of Black oral culture and further cultivate contemporary strategies that leverage – but also transcend – the affordances of each platform.
What constitutes a practice of refusal? This article engages the practice of refusal collaboratively articulated by the Practicing Refusal Collective, a group founded three years ago by myself and Saidiya Hartman. It does so by unpacking a series of keywords that, I argue, define the contours of an emergent black visuality that itself constitutes a practice of refusal as enacted by two contemporary artists who are creating radical modalities of witnessing that refuse authoritative forms of visuality which function to refuse blackness itself. Focusing on works by Arthur Jafa and Luke Willis Thompson, and viewing them through their use of critical optics of relationality and adjacency, the article explores the affective labor required by their respective cinematic practices and their capacity to engage negation as generative and radically transformative.
Based on analysis of 23 interviews, this paper examines how social media and online content is implicated in the collective, resistant and transnational media experiences of Black women in Britain. It contributes to scholarship concerning race and the virtual marketplace by examining tensions between the countercultural, communal and commercial qualities of Black women’s online experiences. Drawing upon theorising of the oppositional spectator gaze of Black women, and narratives of technology consumption, we unpack how Black women’s digital activity can enable them to navigate the hegemony of US content, their marginalisation in British mass-media, and situate them within a Black experience that transcends Britain’s borders. Our work illustrates how Black women’s online encounters can be a source of resistance, Black digital commentary and community, as well as being subject to corporate co-optation. We conceptualise such online experiences as being shaped by transnational dimensions of the relationship between race, media and markets.
As seen in Wired and Time
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms
Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.
An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.
Racial inequalities and the colonial legacies of White supremacy permeate scholarly and public discussions today. As part of an ongoing movement to decenter White masculinity as the normative core of scholarly inquiry, this paper is meant as a preliminary intervention. By coding and analyzing the racial composition of primary authors of both articles and citations in journals between 1990–2016, we find that non-White scholars continue to be underrepresented in publication rates, citation rates, and editorial positions in communication studies. We offer some analysis as to why these findings matter in our current political moment, and propose steps the field might take towards further documenting and rectifying race and representation in the production of disciplinary knowledge.
YouTube and video bloggers (vloggers) have been a source of academic interest, yet few studies explore the representation or experiences of Black women on YouTube. The video blogs (vlogs) of Black women yield symbolic digital resources which young Black women may engage with in self-exploratory, self-educating, resistant and collective ways. This article reflects on 21 in-depth interviews with young Black women in Britain, aged 19–33 years. It addresses how their engagement with Black women’s vlogs intersects with identity and ideological work, including participation in Black digital diasporic dynamics. Influenced by research about Black women and media culture, resistant YouTube activity, as well as race and everyday uses of celebrity, this article explores the YouTube usage of young Black women in Britain, while reflecting on what this reveals about their lives in the early 21st century. This article forms part of ‘On the Move’, a special issue marking the twentieth anniversary of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.
This article analyzes African American–oriented blogs for their potential to foster varying kinds of alternate publics while engaging in discourse that is outside what is commonly considered political communication. Bloggers and their communities use satellite and enclave spaces to explore black representation in art and media, black feminism, and class consciousness. I use critical technocultural discourse analysis to explore the affordances and constraints of blogs in creating alternate publics for African Americans online. Capitalizing on African American oral culture, black bloggers can use spaces technically accessible to the masses, yet keep discourse hidden, intentionally opting out of engagement with the dominant group. Expanding sites of inquiry and bringing a historical understanding of offline patterns of communication allow for more rich, useful, and culturally responsible research into the online communication African Americans and other marginalized communities.
While the idea of ‘Africa’ is sometimes a source of inspiration for brands and designers aimed at the western market, the colourful wax prints by the Dutch company Vlisco were historically made for West and Central African consumers. These fabrics, designed and produced in the Netherlands, have become interconnected with African culture and identity. Established in 1846, the company Vlisco focused on the Dutch East Indies and later West and Central Africa as its export markets. Yet today, Vlisco is playing an increasing role in western fashion, art and design. Moreover, Vlisco has recently collaborated with renowned Dutch designers such as Viktor&Rolf, actively (re)appropriating the wax printed fashion fabrics as Dutch. In this article I explore the multiple layers of cultural (re)appropriation, and the deep-rooted ‘cultural hybridity’, underlying Vlisco’s wax printed fashion fabrics. The most recent form of cultural (re)appropriation is the way in which Vlisco presents itself within the context of Dutch design. In this article I focus on the hybrid cultural dynamics underlying the performance of Africanity - and recent Dutchness - through the use of Vlisco’s fabrics in the context of today’s globalized fashion system.
The year 2015 ws a particularly violent one in the United States for Black women. Almost two dozen transgender women of color were killed, and a former police officer stood trial for raping 13 Black womenwhile on duty, including a 17-year old who was raped on her mother's porch. Top national newspapers and online news media outlets didn't publish many stories about the 13 women in Oklahoma City nor was the topic of transgender women's murders covered. These sstories of brutality had the perfect elements to become national stories. The violence was extreme. The victimization of vulnerable groups was apparent. There were multiple victims. But the women who suffered violence in therse instances were not perceived as legitmate victims. They were Black women who were outside the white norm, so their stories remained mostly invisible in the mainstream media. Language: en
The subject of this essay is the relative detachment of African media studies research from the discipline of media studies in North America. Although marginalization of African media studies is more commonly associated with scholarship produced outside North America and Europe, this essay argues for a recognition of its presence at the centers of global power. A number of institutionally configured firewalls perpetuate continuing marginalization of African media studies in North America and constrain the disciplinary horizons of expectations for African media studies scholars. These institutional firewalls are situated both in media studies journals and conferences as well as in area studies journals and conferences. The relative invisibility of African media studies within media studies forums in North America has consequences for African media studies worldwide since the marginality inflicted upon African media scholarship at the center is oft en exported to supposedly peripheral locations. For this reason, the effort to counter marginalization of African media studies must unfold concurrently at the center and in diverse peripheries. A variety of strategies for re-centering African media studies scholarship in North America are examined and discussed in this essay. Support for autonomous bodies advancing African media studies research and reengagement with an expanded spectrum of concerns in media studies are identified as important priorities for scholars seeking to redress the marginalization of African media studies in North America.
Shifting understandings and ongoing conversations about race, celebrity, and protest in the twenty-first century call for a closer examination of the evolution of dissent by black celebrities and their reception in the public sphere. This book focuses on the way the mainstream and black press have covered cases of controversial political dissent by African American celebrities from Paul Robeson to Kanye West. Jackson considers the following questions: 1) What unique agency is available to celebrities with racialized identities to present critiques of American culture? 2) How have journalists in both the mainstream and black press limited or facilitated this agency through framing? What does this say about the varying role of journalism in American racial politics? 3) How have framing trends regarding these figures shifted from the mid-twentieth century to the twenty-first century? Through a series of case studies that also includes Eartha Kitt, Sister Souljah, and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Jackson illustrates the shifting public narratives and historical moments that both limit and enable African American celebrities in the wake of making public politicized statements that critique the accepted racial, economic, and military systems in the United States.
Using the examples of the partially unclothed African woman in Senegal's controversial African Renaissance Monument (2009) and the 2008 proposed Anti-Nudity bill in Nigeria, this article probes postcolonial African engagements with the female body. The essay proposes that such postcolonial African preoccupations with how the female body is presented and seen should be contextualised in the fray of postcolonial African endeavours to resignify Africa, in response to colonial discourses. The essays bind these preoccupations to an ideologico-discursive continuum that has produced and sustained the African female body as a rhetorical element of colonialism then postcolonialism.
Written to initiate a dialogue about race in the academy, this narrative focuses on the experience of Black Ph.D. students in predominantly White academic institutions. Experimental in method and representation, this article poses important questions about race in academia. The author utilizes several qualitative opportunities, writing as autoethnography, poetry, and narrative. As a participant and researcher of the experience, the author is given the unique position of telling and listening, observing and explaining, strategizing and editing. The author takes your story (a construction developed to create a bridge between your world and mine) and combines it with her story, (the author’s motivations for writing about this experience), and folds it into their story (compiling the findings of the research based on an interview), to create our story (a collective narrative of the Black Ph.D. experience). Hence, the title, “E Pluribus Unum,” which translates “out of many, one.”
ELAINE SALO speaks to PROFESSOR AMINA MAMA, one of Africa's leading contemporary feminist activist scholars whose critical contribution to African feminism is drawn from her work across the academic-activist divide
I draw on 93 consumer interpretations of advertising images to suggest how North American consumer perceptions of Africa are linked to socio‐historical facilities that support ideological notions of inferior African “otherness.” I seek to make salient the unacknowledged denial of colonial discourses’ import into contemporary reproduction of African inferior otherness, toward revealing the durability of the racial divide rooted in colonial history and ideology. I find that discourses on Africa are attached to colonial tropes of savagery, exotica and rhetoric of benevolence. The related consumer tensions and ambiguities fund powerful ideological work that perpetuates colonialism in globalization. I conclude that although the physical instruments of brutality associated with imperialism are no longer in direct use, these colonial instruments live on in contemporary advertising and related discourses.
Young looks at the place of black feminists in today's academy in Britain, and poses some questions for contemporary self-identified black and white feminists based in that country. There is a new confidence among some black, professional Britons but infiltration into the academy remains problematic for many. Black British feminists and writers are largely absent in so-called postcolonial literary canons developed in the Anglo-American institutions, and by and large black British feminists are only offered fragile support by white feminists. Although African–American feminism offers intellectual sustenance and networks, the situation in the United States is very different, particularly as, there, black feminism has had much more impact and recognition. Discussions of the intersections of race, class and gender are rare in Britain outside black feminism, and there has been much less attention than in the States to black women's writing. Perhaps some kind of ‘provisional essentialism' is still needed, for it is difficult for black feminist academics ever to feel the question of race is optional. It can be argued that ‘blackness' is used to describe women of very different origins, and can obscure differential histories, but ‘blackness' is always a political concept, not a register of national belonging. Black women have transformed British culture, but white feminists have largely failed to understand their problems. Attention to the social history of black women in Britain, and particularly to the creative work of black women writers, filmmakers and other cultural workers, is the place at which a new analysis should begin.
The nearly $300 million a year Nollywood culture industry in Nigeria has become transnational in its access to African audiences all over the world. The films and the industry remain a credible site for cultural analysis because of their popularity and resonance with their audiences as well as their moralizing mission. It is an important industry to examine for its contributions to the struggles of African women for opportunities for equality, self-actualization, and self-determination. Although these movies do not hesitate to portray the progress African women have made in climbing the political and socioeconomic ladders of society, they are constantly reminded that everything they have worked hard to achieve is irrelevant without conforming to the cultural construct of a good woman in their domestic lives. Women are constantly portrayed as having power in these video-films, but the power of women is considered diabolical, particularly in social and domestic relations.
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Black women as cultural readers
- J Bobo
Bobo, J. (1995). Black women as cultural readers. New York: Columbia University.
Black feminist cultural criticism
- J Bobo
Bobo, J. (Ed.) (2001). Black feminist cultural criticism. Oxford, England: Blackwell.