Africana Studies Commons^™

The Cardi B–Beyoncé Complex: Ratchet Respectability And Black Adolescent Girlhood, Ashley N. Payne

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

The identity of Black girls is constantly subject to scrutiny in various spaces, particularly within Hip Hop and education. Previous scholarship has noted that, as Black girls are compelled to navigate the margins of respectability politics, the images and messages of Hip Hop culture have always created a complicated and complex space for Black girls’ identity development. The purpose of this article is to explore how Black adolescent girls construct their identities, particularly as it relates to ratchet-respectability identity politics, a concept called the Cardi B–Beyoncé́ complex. In examining the Cardi B–Beyoncé́ complex, I look at the intersection of …

It’S Complicated: Black Hip Hop Feminist Art Commentary On Us Democracy, Camea Davis

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Part narrative reflection, part artistic installation, this work contemplates the tensions and the possibilities of Hip Hop culture, Black womanhood, and American democracy in the United States. The significance of this work is twofold: (1) The authors use Hip Hop feminism to develop a framework for Hip Hop activism as a public pedagogy on US politics, and (2) they provide commentary on US democracy from a Black Hip Hop feminist perspective through art. This article contributes an argument for a creative ontological space from which Black women can reimagine a justice-centered US democracy.

Foreword, Travis T. Harris

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

No abstract provided.

Letter To Jatavia Johnson And Caresha Brownlee (The City Girls), Kyra March

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

This letter to Jatavia Johnson and Caresha Brownlee (the City Girls) argues that the rap duo’s brand, music, and videos are prime examples of Hip Hop and percussive feminism. It also explains how their contributions to the rap industry as Black womxn have inspired other Black womxn to embrace their sexuality, live freely, and disregard politics of respectability. Personal experiences from the author are incorporated to display how the City Girls are empowering and inspiring a new generation of Black womxn and girls. Additionally, critiques from the media and double standards between white and Black womxn in the entertainment industry …

Black Rural Feminist Trap: Stylized And Gendered Performativity In Trap Music, Corey Miles

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Hip Hop, particularly trap music, has been conceptualized as male-centered, despite Black women’s role in its inception. This paper engages with trap music as a structural template that is co-constructed and used as a site of articulation by Black women to engage in gendered performativity. Rather than engaging with trap lyrics as literal representations of artists’ desires and politics, I examine the types of gender constructions that are enabled when the aesthetic structure of trap music performativity is centered. I analyze this through ethnographic research in northeast North Carolina, situating trap music within a Hip Hop feminist framework. I contend …

“Yeah, I’M In My Bag, But I’M In His Too”: How Scamming Aesthetics Utilized By Black Women Rappers Undermine Existing Institutions Of Gender, Diana Khong

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

2018 was the year of the “scammer,” in which many Black women rappers took on “scamming” aesthetics in their lyrics and music video imagery. Typified by rappers such as City Girls and Cardi B, the scammer archetype is characterized by the desire for financial gain and material possessions and the emotional disregard of men. This paper investigates how Black women rappers, in employing these themes in their music, subvert existing expectations of gender by using the identity of the scammer as a restorative figure. The objectification of men in their music works in counterpoint to the dominant gender system and …

Twenty-First Century B.I.T.C.H. Frameworks: Hip Hop Feminism Comes Of Age, Aria S. Halliday, Ashley N. Payne

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

This special issue is dedicated to the bad bitches. The ratchet women. The classy women. The hood feminists. The “feminism isn’t for everybody” feminists. Those women, femmes, and girls who continuously (re)present and (re)construct Black girl/womanhood. The creatives, the innovators, the women that are “often imitated, but never duplicated.” This issue is dedicated to you and the ways in which you challenge us to (re)define what it means to be Black girls/women in this world and what it means to reclaim power over your own representation and images. This issue is for you, defined by you, and inspired by you.

Female Monarchs And Merchant Queens In Africa, Nwando Achebe

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

An unapologetically African-centered monograph that reveals physical and spiritual forms and systems of female power and leadership in African cultures.

Nwando Achebe’s unparalleled study documents elite females, female principles, and female spiritual entities across the African continent, from the ancient past to the present. Achebe breaks from Western perspectives, research methods, and their consequently incomplete, skewed accounts, to demonstrate the critical importance of distinctly African source materials and world views to any comprehensible African history. This means accounting for the two realities of African cosmology: the physical world of humans and the invisible realm of spiritual gods and forces. That …

Amjambo Africa! (July 2020), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue...

Publisher’s Editorial ....................p. 4

Translations French ...................................... p.5

Swahili...................................... p.6

Somali ....................................... p.7

Kinyarwanda ..........................p.18

Portuguese .............................p.19

News from Africa ........................p. 8

Business, Economics & Financial Literacy...................p. 10

World Market Basket ..........p. 12/13

Legislative Update ......p 17/20/21/9

Community News......................p. 16

Columns..............................................

About hair .................................p. 20

Hope House ..............................p. 19

Safe Healthcare .........................p. 21

Reproducing The New Negro: James Van Der Zee’S Photographic Vision In Newsprint, Emilie C. Boone

Publications and Research

In the summer of 1924, as a departure from his concentration on portraits in his Harlem studio, James Van Der Zee served as the official photographer for the Pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey and his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Many of the resulting photographs were published in the organization’s popular, internationally distributed newspaper, the Negro World. The newsprint medium in which the UNIA photographs appeared in reproduction, along with their editorial arrangement on the page, animated a different photographic vision from that of the gelatin silver print studio portraits often celebrated as Van Der Zee’s defining contribution …

Amjambo Africa! (June 2020), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue...

Ramadan 2020.............................p. 2

Introducing Africa News editor.p. 5

Pious Ali .......................................p. 6

Banyamulenge .............................p. 8

L/A Food needs ...........................p. 9

Stealin' The Meetin': Black Education History & The Black Panthers' Oakland Community School, Robert P. Robinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation frames the Black Panthers' Oakland Community School (OCS) as a convergence of Black self-determination/Black Power, Black education history, and curriculum studies. Drawing from widely-cited archives, rarely-cited archives, oral history, periodicals, and secondary source material, the proposed study extends the OCS narrative by tracing its curricular trajectory and highlighting the voices of students, parents, and staff. It considers how the school’s history provides examples of educational practices—such as restorative justice and culturally relevant pedagogy—that would not become named or popularized in mainstream education until much later, asserting that histories of this sort can inform educational endeavors in the present. …

The International Rise Of Afro-Brazilian Modernism In The Age Of African Decolonization And Black Power, Abigail Lapin Dardashti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two competing artistic representations of Brazilian blackness emerged from 1966 to 1988. The first began in 1966 when the Brazilian government positioned itself as a leading diplomatic partner for newly independent African nations by showcasing black Brazilian art in West Africa. Through exhibitions, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry aimed to highlight the country’s presumed homogeneous identity and absence of racism. The second definition arose through the work of artists inspired by U.S. social rights activism, who founded Brazil’s civil rights movement in 1975. Brazilian artist-activists combined symbolism from U.S. Black Power, African liberation movements, and Afro-Brazilian culture to denounce racism in …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

Audio Quality As Content: Everyday Criticism Of The Lo-Fi Format, Elizabeth Newton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the matter of authenticity with respect to audio recordings. In the early 1990s, the term “lo-fi” (“low-fidelity”) emerged as a label used to categorize many different types of popular music, indicating widespread fascination with what I call audio quality, the perceived character of an audio recording. I define audio quality as the relationship between content and mediation, which varies greatly by circumstance. My archival research of zines, press releases, and correspondence examines this relationship in three case studies: Wu-Tang Clan, Bratmobile, and Elliott Smith. I posit the lo-fi format as a critical structure that emerged in …

Black Skin, White Gaze: The Presence And Function Of The Linchpin Character In Biopics About Black American Protagonists, Nicole N. Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout its existence the American film industry has--through the stories it has chosen to tell as well as discriminatory practices such as whitewashing and the erasure of non-White people--enshrined whiteness as the default American racial identity. In multiracial films, Hollywood productions have historically employed racialized character tropes to further emphasize hegemonic American whiteness. This practice continues to the present day with the introduction of the linchpin, a White character who appears in films with majority non-White casts. Although billed and presented as a supporting character, the linchpin’s centrality to a film’s narrative or emotional arc elevates them to main character …

The Guinea-Bissau Constitutional Reform Debate, Watson Aila Gomes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The enactment of law is not to be confused with the rule of law, and simply having a constitution does not guarantee political order. In Guinea-Bissau there have been calls to write a new constitution, but whether that helps Guinea-Bissau become a more stable country is questionable. Currently, there is a gap in the research of social science, history and political science examining how the processes of instability have unfolded in Guinea-Bissau. Few studies attempt to examine the correlation between a country’s stability and its constitution. A paradoxical situation exists in many countries in Africa where the political system is …

Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation, explores how choreographers and theater artists in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City used time and space to involve their audiences experientially in the project of grieving and rebuilding in the midst of the temporal chaos of mass death and illness (crisis time). Refusing to portray HIV/AIDS as a discrete or singular phenomenon, these artists revealed how it intersected with every aspect of life, including artistic practice, thereby delinking their bodies from a singular association with pathology and death. Undertaking extensive archival research on the work …

Dear Black Child: A Discussion On The Formation Of Identity For African Diasporic Adolescents In The U.S., Sokhnagade B. Ndiaye

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this capstone project, I am using art, photography, and music to depict the experiences of African diasporic youth in the United States. I will explore the white supremacist systems that contribute to the anxiety that comes with being a black child in America. In this project, I plan to discuss the ways in which African diasporic adolescents develop their identity and consciousness and the ways in which living in American society helps and/or hinders the development of this identity and consciousness. I argue that living in the United States forces black youth to form double and triple consciousnesses, which …

Pilgrimage Circuit Of Osun Osogbo Sacred Grove And Shrine, Osun State, Nigeria, Emeka E. Okonkwo, Afamefuna P. Eyisi

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

One religious tourism destination site of note in Southwestern Nigeria is the Osun Osogbo Sacred Grove and Shrine, located along the banks of the Osun River in the city of Oshogbo, Osun State, Nigeria. The sacred grove and shrine was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2005. This paper examines the routes and trails people take to get to Osun Osogbo Sacred Grove and Shrine with a view to evaluating access to the destination site as well as the factors impacting on the sacred grove. The study uses ethnographic methods to elicit information from respondents and data collected …