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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
"Hair Drama" On The Cover Of "Vibe" Magazine, Bertram D. Ashe
"Hair Drama" On The Cover Of "Vibe" Magazine, Bertram D. Ashe
English Faculty Publications
This study consists of a cultural reading of the cover photograph of the June-July 1999 issue of Vibe magazine. It explores the relationship between Mase, an African-American male rap star, and the three anonymous African-American female models that surround him. The study interprets the cover through the long, straightened hair of the models, locating the models' hair in a historically-informed context of black hair theory and practice. The study argues that the models' presence on the cover, particularly their "bone straight and long" hair, "enhances" Mase in much the same way breast-augmented "trophy women" "enhance" their mates. Ultimately, the study …
Epic, The Oral Community, And The Memory Of Emancipation In Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, Patrice Rankine
Epic, The Oral Community, And The Memory Of Emancipation In Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, Patrice Rankine
Classical Studies Faculty Publications
As the recently published epistolary collection reveals, Ralph Ellison was an unabashed Americanist, for better and for worse. Ellison's faith in American identity and the democratic process, which is evident at the end of Invisible Man in the protagonist's determination to "affirm the principle on which the country was built [and not the men who did the violence]" (574), is again manifest in the posthumous novel, Juneteenth. According to John F. Callahan, Ellison's litearary executor, the novel celebrates "the indivisibility of the American experience" (Juneteeth xvi). James Alan McPherson (the African-American writer to whom Ellison showed a portion …