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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
"The Planet Is The Way It Is Because Of The Scheme Of Words": Sun Ra And The Performance Of Reckoning, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar
"The Planet Is The Way It Is Because Of The Scheme Of Words": Sun Ra And The Performance Of Reckoning, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This constellatory essay is a study of the African American sound experimentalist, thinker and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial Sun Ra (1914-1993) through samplings of his wide, interdisciplinary archive: photographs, film excerpts, selected recordings, and various interviews and anecdotes. In composing this essay, I particularly consider how these fragments resonate against each other, offering insight into how Ra radically subverts the restraints imposed upon him as a black man in the United States and thus transfigures his racial alienness into a liberatory, literally alien performance. This self-transfiguration allows Ra to transform such impossible restraints into a condition of possibility for reckoning. I …
The World Is Yours: The Radical And Deterritorializing Nature Of Hip-Hop, Ethan Pearce
The World Is Yours: The Radical And Deterritorializing Nature Of Hip-Hop, Ethan Pearce
Honors Theses
Since its inception in the early 1970s, Hip Hop has been defined as a cultural movement that is firmly grounded on the principles of socio-political radicalism, subversion, and change. Rap, which is often synonymous with Hip Hop, is the most recent example of the disenfranchised African-American community’s attempt to gain equality through musical stylings.1 Hip Hop has followed in the footsteps of the negro spiritual, the blues, jazz, and rock and roll. While each one of these musical genres has undeniably black roots, Hip Hop, in the words of the influential sociologist Michael Eric Dyson is, “emblematic of the glacial …
And I Heard 'Em Say: Listening To The Black Prophetic, Cameron J. Cook
And I Heard 'Em Say: Listening To The Black Prophetic, Cameron J. Cook
Pomona Senior Theses
This thesis aims to explore how conceptions of the black prophetic tradition, as discussed by thinkers Cornel West and George Shulman, might be expanded into the realm of African American musical traditions and genres. I argue that musical genres like the blues and hip-hop function as an affective discourse that aesthetically, politically and religiously function as sites of resistance to white supremacy and provide alternate pathways to liberation as compared to more canonical instantiations of the black prophetic. In particular I provide close readings of performances and art by Nina Simone and Kanye West.