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In the American world, the presence of African culture is sometimes fully embodied and sometimes leaves only a trace. This book explores this presence, examining Mattel’s world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and Disney World, each of which repackages African visual culture for consumers. Because these cultural icons permeate American life, they represent the broader U.S. culture and its relationship to African culture. This study integrates approaches from art history and visual culture studies with those from culture, race, and popular culture studies to analyze this interchange. Two major threads weave throughout. One analyzes how the presentation of African visual culture in these popular culture forms conceptualizes Africa for the American public. The other investigates the way the uses of African visual culture focuses America’s own self-awareness, particularly around black and white racialized identities. In exploring the multiple meanings that “Africa” has in American popular culture, the book argues that these cultural products embody multiple perspectives and speak to various sociopolitical contexts: the Cold War, Civil Rights, and contemporary eras of the United States; the apartheid and post apartheid eras of South Africa; the colonial and postcolonial eras of Ghana; and the European era of African colonization.

Images of upraised fists, afros, and dashikis have long dominated the collective memory of Black Power and its proponents. The “guerilla” figure—taking the form of the black-leather-clad revolutionary within the Black Panther Party—has become an iconic trope in American popular culture. That politically radical figure, however, has been shaped as much by Asian American cultural discourse as by African American political ideology. From the Asian-African Conference held in April of 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, onward to the present, Afro-Asian political collaboration has been active and influential. This book uses the guerilla figure as a point of departure, and shows how the trope’s rhetoric animates discourses of representation and identity in African American and Asian American literature and culture. In doing so, it examines the notion of “Power” in terms of ethnic political identity, and explores collaborating—and sometimes competing—ethnic interests that have drawn ideas from the concept. The project brings together a range of texts—editorial cartoons, newspaper articles, novels, visual propaganda, and essays—that illustrate the emergence of this subjectivity in Asian American and African American cultural productions during the Power period, roughly 1966 through 1981. After a case study of the cultural politics of academic anthologies and the cooperation between Frank Chin and Ishmael Reed, the book culminates with analyses of this trope in Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Alice Walker’s Meridian, and John Okada’s No No Boy.

To visiting geologists, Black Rock, New Mexico, is a basaltic escarpment and an ideal natural laboratory. To hospital workers, it is a picturesque place to earn a living. To the Zuni, the mesas, arroyos, and the rock itself are a stage on which the passion of their elders is relived. This book explores how a shared sense of place evolves over time and through multiple cultures that claim the landscape. Through stories told over many generations, this landscape has given the Zuni an understanding of how they came to be in this world. More recently, paleogeographers have studied the rocks and landforms to better understand the world as it once was. Archaeologists have conducted research on ancestral Zuni sites in the vicinity of Black Rock to explore the cultural history of the region. In addition, the Anglo-American employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs came to Black Rock to advance the federal Indian policy of assimilation and brought with them their own sense of place. Black Rock has been an educational complex, an agency town, and an Anglo community. Today it is a health care center, commercial zone, and multi-ethnic subdivision. By describing the dramatic changes that took place at Black Rock during the twentieth century, the book weaves a story of how the cultural landscape of this community reflected changes in government policy and how the Zunis themselves, through the policy of Indian self-determination, eventually gave new meanings to this ancient landscape.

In 1966, a year after the Voting Rights Act began liberating millions of southern blacks, New Yorkers challenged a political system that weakened their voting power. Andrew W. Cooper (1927–2002), a beer company employee, sued state officials in a case called Cooper vs. Power. In 1968, the courts agreed that black citizens were denied the right to elect an authentic representative of their community. The 12th Congressional District was redrawn. Shirley Chisholm, a member of Cooper’s political club, ran for the new seat and made history as the first black woman elected to Congress. Cooper became a journalist, a political columnist, then founder of the Trans Urban News Service and the City Sun, a feisty Brooklyn-based weekly that published from 1984 to 1996. Whether the stories were about Mayor Koch or Rev. Al Sharpton, Howard Beach or Crown Heights, Tawana Brawley’s dubious rape allegations, the Daily News Four trial, or Spike Lee’s filmmaking career, his City Sun commanded attention, and moved officials and readers to action. Cooper’s leadership also gave Brooklyn—particularly predominantly black central Brooklyn—an identity. It is no accident that in the twenty-first century the borough crackles with energy. Cooper fought tirelessly for the community’s vitality when it was virtually abandoned by the civic and business establishments in the mid-to-late twentieth century. In addition, scores of journalists trained by Cooper are keeping his spirit alive.

Many Southerners enjoy conversations about food, quickly jumping in with likes and dislikes, regional preferences, and food-related stories. The subject of food often crosses lines of race, class, gender, and region, and provides an opportunity for a common discussion point. This book explores the types of identities, allegiances, and bonds that are made possible and are strengthened through Southern foods and foodways. It adds to the growing list examining Southern food, but its focus on the cuisine’s rhetorical nature and the communicative effect that the food can have on Southern culture makes a significant contribution to that important conversation. The book tells the stories of Southern food that speak to the identity of the region, explaining how food helps to build individual identities, and exploring the possibilities of how food opens up dialogue. The authors show how food acts rhetorically, with the kinds of food that we choose to eat and serve sending messages about how we view ourselves and others. Food serves an identity-building function, factoring heavily into the understanding of who we are. The stories surrounding food are so important to Southern culture, they provide a significant and meaningful way to open up dialogue in the region. By sharing and celebrating the stories and actual food of Southern foodways, Southerners are able to focus on similar histories and traditions, despite the division that has plagued and continues to plague the South. Taken together, the book shows how Southern food provides a significant starting point for understanding food’s rhetorical potential.

This book probes the difficult relationship between the press and organized labor in the South from the past to the present day. Written by a veteran journalist and first-hand observer of the labor movement and its treatment in the region’s newspapers and other media, the text focuses on the modern South that has evolved since World War II. In gathering materials for this book, the author crisscrossed the region, interviewing workers, managers, labor organizers, immigrants, activists, and journalists, and canvassing labor archives. Using individual events to reveal the broad picture, the book is a personal journey by a textile worker’s son who grew up in North Carolina, worked on tobacco farms and in textile plants as a young man, and went on to cover as a reporter many of the developments described in this book. The author details the fall of the once-dominant textile industry and the region’s emergence as the “Sunbelt South.” He explores the advent of “Detroit South” with the arrival of foreign automakers from Japan, Germany, and South Korea. And finally he relates the effects of the influx of millions of workers from Mexico and elsewhere. The book shows how, with few exceptions, the press has been a key partner in the powerful alliance of business and political interests that keep the South the nation’s least-unionized region.

Global in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, this book explores the expressive forms and performances that come into being when cultures encounter one another. Creolization is presented as a powerful marker of identity in the postcolonial creole societies of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the southwest Indian Ocean region, as well as a universal process that can occur anywhere cultures come into contact. An extraordinary number of cultures from Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, the southern United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Réunion, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Suriname, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone are discussed in these essays. Drawing from the disciplines of folklore, anthropology, ethnomusicology, literary studies, history, and material culture studies, essayists address theoretical dimensions of creolization and present in-depth field studies. Topics include adaptations of the Gombe drum over the course of its migration from Jamaica to West Africa; uses of “ritual piracy” involved in the appropriation of Catholic symbols by Puerto Rican brujos; the subversion of official culture and authority through playful and combative use of “creole talk” in Argentine literature and verbal arts; the mislabeling and trivialization (“toy blindness”) of objects appropriated by African Americans in the American South; the strategic use of creole techniques among storytellers within the islands of the Indian Ocean; and the creolized character of New Orleans and its music. In the introductory essay, the editors address both local and universal dimensions of creolization, and argue for the centrality of its expressive manifestations for creolization scholarship.

Rebuilding in Louisiana and Mississippi after hurricanes Katrina and Rita presented some very thorny issues. Certain cultural projects benefited from immediate attention and funding while others, with equal cases for assistance but with less attractiveness to future tourist dollars, languished. New Orleans and its surroundings contain a diverse mixture of Native Americans, African Americans, Creoles, Cajuns, Isleños with roots in the Canary Islands, and the descendants of Italian, Irish, English, Croatian, and German immigrants, among others. After 2005, much is now different for the people of the Gulf Coast, and much more stands to change as governments, national and international nonprofit organizations, churches, and community groups determine how and even where life will continue. This collection elucidates how this process occurs and seeks to understand the cultures that may be saved through assistance or which may be allowed to fade away through neglect. It examines the ways in which a wide variety of stakeholders — community activists, elected officials, artists, and policy administrators — describe, quantify, and understand the unique assets of the region. Contributors question the process of cultural planning by analyzing the language employed in decision making. They attempt to navigate between rhetoric and the actual experience of ordinary citizens, examining the long-term implications for those who call the Gulf Coast home.

The publication in 1993 of Sanyika Shakur’s Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member generated a huge amount of excitement in literary circles — New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani deemed it a “shocking and galvanic book” — and set off a new publishing trend of gang memoirs in the 1990s. The memoirs showcased tales of violent confrontation and territorial belonging but also offered many of the first journalistic and autobiographical accounts of the much-mythologized gang subculture. This book focuses on three of these memoirs — Shakur’s; Luis J. Rodriguez’s Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.; and Stanley “Tookie” Williams’s Rage, Black Redemption — as key representatives of the gang autobiography. It examines the conflict among violence, thrilling sensationalism, and the authorial desire to instruct and warn competing within these works. The narrative arcs of the memoirs themselves rest on the process of conversion from brutal, young gang bangers to nonviolent, enlightened citizens. The author analyzes the emergence, production, marketing, and reception of gang memoirs. Through interviews with Rodriguez, Shakur, and Barbara Cottman Becnel (Williams’s editor), she reveals both the writing and publishing processes. This book analyzes key narrative conventions, specifically how diction, dialogue, and narrative arcs shape the works. It also explores how the memoirs are consumed. This interdisciplinary study — fusing literary criticism, sociology, ethnography, reader-response study, and editorial theory — brings scholarly attention to a popular, much-discussed, but understudied modern expression.

Since its origins in 1967, The Smithsonian Folklife Festival has gained national and international recognition as a model for the research and public presentation of living cultural heritage and the advocacy of cultural democracy. Festival curators play a major role in interpreting Festival principles and shaping its practices. Curatorial Conversations brings together for the first time in one volume the combined expertise of Festival curatorial staff—past and present—in examining the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s cultural heritage representation practices and their critical implications for issues of intangible cultural heritage policy, cultural pluralism, and identity. This volume represents the first concerted project by Festival staff curators to systematically examine institutional principles and philosophical underpinnings and claims as they have evolved over time, and to address broader debates on cultural representation from their own experiences at the Festival.

This book is the product of five years of field research with progressive activists associated with the School for Indian Languages and Cultures (SILC), South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), the feminist dance collective Post Natyam, and the grassroots feminist political organization South Asian Sisters. It explores how traditional cultural forms may be critically appropriated by marginalized groups and used as rhetorical tools to promote deliberation and debate, spur understanding and connection, broaden political engagement, and advance particular social identities. Within this framework, the author examines how these performance activists advocate a political commitment to both justice and care, and to both deliberative discussion and deeper understanding. To consider how this might happen in diasporic performance contexts, she weaves together two lines of thinking. One grows from feminist theory and draws upon a core literature concerning the ethics of care. The other comes from rhetoric, philosophy, and political science literature on recognition and acknowledgment. This dual approach is used to reflect upon South Asian American women’s performances that address pressing social problems related to gender inequality, immigration rights, ethnic stereotyping, hate crimes, and religious violence. Case study chapters address the relatively unknown history of South Asian American rhetorical performances from the early 1800s to the present. Avant-garde feminist performances by the Post Natyam dance collective appropriate women’s folk practices, and Hindu goddess figures make rhetorical claims about hate crimes against South Asian Americans after 9/11.

This book reveals how Mississippi journalists both expressed and shaped public opinion in the aftermath of the 1955 Emmett Till murder. Combing small-circulation weeklies as well as large-circulation dailies, the authors analyze the rhetoric at work as the state attempted to grapple with a brutal, small-town slaying. Initially coverage tended to be sympathetic to Till, but when the case became a clarion call for civil rights and racial justice in Mississippi, journalists reacted. Newspapers both reported on the Till investigation and editorialized on its protagonists. Within days, the Till case transcended the specifics of a murder in the Delta. Coverage wrestled with such complex cultural matters as the role of the press, class, gender, and geography in the determination of guilt and innocence. The book provides an examination of the courtroom testimony given in Sumner, Mississippi, and the trial’s conclusion as reported by the state’s newspapers. It closes with an analysis of how Mississippi has attempted to come to terms with its racially troubled past by, in part, memorializing Emmett Till in and around the Delta.

Travel with La Guiannée in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri and Prairie du Rocher, Illinois to glimpse the Franco-American cultural identity in these two Midwestern communities that have continued for over 250 years and even have survived language loss due in part to socio-political pressures. Cultural identity presents itself in many forms, not just language, and appears as festivals and traditional celebrations, which take on a more profound and visible role when language loss occurs. On New Year’s Eve, the guionneurs, those who participate in the celebration, disguise themselves in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century costume and travel throughout their community, singing and wishing New Year’s greetings to other members of the community. This celebration, like others, such as the Cajun Mardi Gras in Louisiana, Mumming in Ireland and Newfoundland, and the Carnaval de Binche, belong to a category of begging quest festivals that have existed since the Medieval Age. These festivals may also be adaptations or evolutions of pre-Christian pagan rituals. Part one creates an historical context of the development of the French mentality and cultural identity as well as an historical context of La Guiannée in order to compare and understand the contemporary identity and celebration. Part two analyzes the celebration to create an affirmation of community by using liminal theories proposed by Victor Turner, who states that during such rites or rituals, individuals undergo a transformation to reveal cultural information to others. Part three discusses cultural continuity and its relationship to language to reveal contemporary expressions of the Franco-American identity.

This book examines the transmission of the ideals and myths of playing Indian in American popular culture. In the nineteenth century, American art and literature developed and nurtured images of the Indian and the frontiersman that exemplified ideals of heroism, bravery, and manhood, as well as embodying fears of treason, loss of civilization, and weakness. During this time, Daniel Boone emerged as an exemplary figure of crossing the white-Native line. In the twentieth century, comic books, among other popular forms of media, would inherit these images. The Western genre of comic books participated fully in that genre’s conventions, replicating and perpetuating the myths and ideals long associated with the frontier in the United States. A fascination with Native Americans was also present in comic books devoted to depicting the Indian past of the U.S. In such stories, the Indian is always a figure of the past, romanticized as a lost segment of U.S. history, ignoring contemporary and actual Native peoples. Playing Indian occupies a definite subgenre of the Western comics, especially during the postwar period when a host of comics featuring a “white Indian” as the hero were being published. Playing Indian migrates into superhero comics, a phenomenon that heightens and amplifies the notions of heroism, bravery, and manhood already attached to the white Indian trope. Instances of superheroes, such as Batman and Superman, playing Indian corroborate with the depictions found in the strictly Western comics. The superhero as Indian is revived in the twenty-first century via Captain America, attesting to the continuing power of this ideal and image.

From Madea to Media Mogul examines multi-hyphenate media mogul Tyler Perry’s unique role in contemporary media culture. Unlike the discordant, popular, and limited range of academic responses to Perry’s work, the essays here are engaged with neither celebrating nor condemning Tyler Perry. This collection demonstrates that there is something inherently political about the intersection between understanding the pleasure as well as displeasure surrounding black popular cultural expression. This intersection is crucial not only to understanding Tyler Perry but also to how we think about race and identity in the 21st Century. The collection is organized around a core set of key concepts, because Perry’s image and productions are an invitation to interrogate and transform some of our most familiar disciplinary terms, such as affect, cinephilia, platforms, mogul, rebrand, and niche. Other concepts that Perry prompts us to reconsider, like the politics of respectability, centrality, exceptionalism, and disguise are informed by cultural studies traditions, while new perspective on terms like chitlin and gospel broaden our grasp on thematic concerns from black cultural traditions. Above all, what this collection aims for in offering this rubric for reading Perry are paradigm-shifting approaches that embrace the unexpected. This is a collection that deliberately brings these diverse approaches and disciplinary traditions together by arguing that Tyler Perry’s productions are unintelligible without them and that these critical perspectives reveal Tyler Perry as perhaps one of the most important figures in American media history.

During the civil rights era, Mississippi was cloaked in the hateful embrace of the Closed Society, historian James Silver’s description of the white caste system that enforced segregation and promoted the subservient treatment of blacks. Surprisingly, challenges from Mississippi’s college basketball courts brought into question the validity of the Closed Society and its unwritten law, a gentleman’s agreement that prevented college teams in the Magnolia State from playing against integrated foes. Mississippi State University was at the forefront of the battle for equality in the state with the school’s successful college basketball program. From 1959 through 1963, the Maroons won four Southeastern Conference basketball championships and created a championship dynasty in the South’s preeminent college athletic conference. However, in all four title-winning seasons, the press feverishly debated the merits of an NCAA appearance for the Maroons, culminating in Mississippi State University’s participation in the integrated 1963 National Collegiate Athletic Association’s National Championship basketball tournament. Full Court Press examines news articles, editorials, and columns published in Mississippi’s newspapers during the eight-year existence of the gentleman’s agreement, the challenges posed by Mississippi State University, and the subsequent integration of college basketball within the state. While the majority of reporters opposed any effort to integrate athletics, a segment of sports journalists, led by the charismatic Jimmie McDowell of the Jackson State Times, emerged as bold and progressive advocates for equality. Full Court Press highlights an ideological metamorphosis within the press during the Civil Rights Movement, slowly transforming from an organ that minimized the rights of blacks to an industry that weighted the plight of blacks on equal footing with their white brethren.

According to this book, you smell Gilroy, California, before you see it. The book examines the role of food and festivals in creating a place brand or marketable identity. The author scrutinizes how Gilroy successfully transformed a negative association with the pungent garlic bulb into a highly successful tourism and marketing campaign, and explores how local initiatives led to the iconization of the humble product there. The city, a well-established agricultural center and bedroom community south of San Francisco, rapidly built a place-brand identity based on its now-famous moniker, “Garlic Capital of the World.” To understand Gilroy’s success in transforming a local crop into a tourist draw, the book contrasts the development of this now-thriving festival with events surrounding the launch and demise of the PigFest in Coppell, Texas. Indeed, the Garlic Festival is so successful that the event is all that many people know about Gilroy. The author explores the creation and subsequent selling of foodscapes or food-themed place identities. This seemingly ubiquitous practice is readily visible across the country at festivals celebrating edibles such as tomatoes, peaches, spinach, and even cauliflower. Food, the author contends, is an attractive focus for image makers charged with community building and place differentiation. Not only is it good to eat; food can be a palatable and marketable symbol for a town or region.

Intimate Partner Violence in New Orleans: Gender, Race, and Reform, 1840–1900 examines the shifting nature of gender, race, and intimate partner violence in New Orleans—a place dramatically affected by countless social and cultural changes during six decades that encompassed the end of American slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the new and oppressive racial order that ushered in the twentieth century. The work utilizes documentation contained in local and state court cases to make new arguments about gender representation, legal reform, and the changing ways in which intimate partner violence was practiced and controlled and sanctioned and prohibited. It offers new insight to regional distinctiveness the South and race played into cultural and legal practices.

George Benjamin Luks (1867-1933) is renowned for the oil paintings, watercolors, and pastel drawings he created as an acclaimed member of the artists’ collective known as the Ashcan School. His professional development came, however, from his apprenticeship as a newspaper and magazine artist. Luks spent his early career drawing cartoons, spot illustrations, political caricatures, and comic strips for the New York World and other papers. These early portraits and stories of street urchins, peddlers, shopkeepers, and other ordinary New Yorkers would all be revisited in his later painting. He achieved fame when he took over drawing Hogan’s Alley for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World after the strip’s originator Richard F. Outcault defected to William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. This book explores the roots of the artist’s career drawing turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York City. The city’s vital popular press served as a crucible in which a number of American artists honed their talents and learned how to communicate ideas to a broad popular audience. The resultant work, both popular and controversial, challenged notions of good art and proper subject matter. This study brings Luks’s early work to light and reveals the funny, often edgy, and sometimes prejudicial creations that formed the base upon which Luks built his later career.

This book explores the media experiences of the dual disasters to hit the Gulf Coast within five years, Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster. The disaster journalism is compared and contrasted as the authors explore the media-fed experiences, visuals, and narratives. The Katrina journalists have reluctantly grown into Oil Spill journalists. The book will look at this process of growth from the viewpoints of not only the journalists, but the public, the science community, and through an analysis of the journalists’ own content. This book explores the quality of journalism within these two events and the effects it may have on the public. Crisis media coverage affects the interpretation and the experience of an event. The premise is that it all leads back to the fundamentals of solid journalism and the importance of following these tenets consistently in an enduring crises atmosphere – especially when the crises are just years apart.