On Blackness, Liveliness, and What It Means to Be Human PDF Download

Author: Wilson Kwamogi Okello
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438499663
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
In "No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues," Jamaican writer and theorist Sylvia Wynter critiques the social and human sciences for perpetuating social hierarchies, particularly through the Western humanist framing of "Man" as the universal representation of humanity. Human development theories revolve around this concept, necessitating acquiescence to the category Man to claim humanity. But Blackness complicates and unsettles these terms in ways the fields of higher education and educational research are in many ways just beginning to confront. On Blackness, Liveliness, and What It Means to Be Human extends Wynter's critique to human development and academic knowledge production, arguing that Black specificity can create new possibilities for Black being. Wilson Kwamogi Okello closely examines holistic development theory, aiming not to reform but to reimagine the "self" it presupposes. Taking what he describes as a multimodal and multisensory approach, Okello engages a chorus of writers, thinkers, and cultural workers—Baldwin, Bambara, Brand, Hartman, Lorde, Sharpe, Spillers, Wilderson, and more—to reframe Blackness as a social, political, and historical matrix, going beyond the study of Black experiences, biology, or culture. Punctuated throughout by stunning images from artist Mikael Owunna's "Infinite Essence" series, the book proposes and enacts a methodological attunement to Blackness that can guide theory, policy, and practice toward an alternative praxis for the benefit of Black living.

Author: Sabine Broeck
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143847041X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
In Gender and the Abjection of Blackness, Sabine Broeck argues that gender studies as a mostly white field has taken insufficient account of Black contributions, and that more than being an ethnocentric limitation or blind spot, this has represented a structural anti-Blackness in the field. Engaging with the work of Black feminist authors Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, Broeck critiques a selection of canonical white gender studies texts to make this case. The book discusses this problem at the core of gender theory as a practice which Broeck terms enslavism—the ongoing abjection of Black life which Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery. This has become manifest in the repetitive employment of the "woman as slave" metaphor so central to gender theory, as well as in recent theoretical mutations of these anti-Black politics of analogy. It is the structural separation of Blackness from gender that has functioned over and again as the scaffold enabling white women's struggles for successful recognition of equality and subjectivity in the human world as we know it. This book challenges white readers to rethink their own untroubled identification with gender theory, and it provides all readers with a white feminist theorist's sophisticated theoretical and self-critical scholarly account of her own reckoning with and learning in dialogue from Black feminism's critique.

Author: rosalind hampton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003827543
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
Conceptualizations of Blackness in Education engages the specific junction of educational research and multiple theorizations of Blackness. In this volume, authors narrate how they have come to conceptualize Blackness through reading, writing, research, training, and practice. The contributors reflect a range of personal and political perspectives and experiences, disciplinary roots, and career stages. The stories in each chapter are intended to encourage more theoretically reflexive and vulnerable conversations among scholars of Black Studies in Education committed to reducing inequality in the lives of Black youth. They are not merely stories about theory; the stories are theories themselves.

Author: Michael Boyce Gillespie
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373882
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.

Author: Kevin Quashie
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813553113
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
African American culture is often considered expressive, dramatic, and even defiant. In The Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores quiet as a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears. Quiet is a metaphor for the inner life, and as such, enables a more nuanced understanding of black culture. The book revisits such iconic moments as Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Elizabeth Alexander’s reading at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Quashie also examines such landmark texts as Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Toni Morrison’s Sula to move beyond the emphasis on resistance, and to suggest that concepts like surrender, dreaming, and waiting can remind us of the wealth of black humanity.

Author: Jayna Brown
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478021233
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
In Black Utopias Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as a way of exploring alternative states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. Musical, literary, and mystic practices become utopian enclaves in which Black people engage in modes of creative worldmaking. Brown explores the lives and work of Black women mystics Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, musicians Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, and the work of speculative fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler as they decenter and destabilize the human, radically refusing liberal humanist ideas of subjectivity and species. Brown demonstrates that engaging in utopian practices Black subjects imagine and manifest new genres of existence and forms of collectivity. For Brown, utopia consists of those moments in the here and now when those excluded from the category human jump into other onto-epistemological realms. Black people—untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress—celebrate themselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium.

Author: Robert Prus
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791427026
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Examines a series of theoretical and methodological issues faced by social scientists in interpretive and ethnographic studies of human group life.

Author: Wilson Kwamogi Okello
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781438499659
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Develops a theoretical and methodological focus on Blackness to rethink ideas about humanity underpinning the field of student development.

Author: Michael Datcher
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438473397
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Offers a new framework for reading American literatures that critically links African American and Latinx traditions and struggles for liberation. Animating Black and Brown Liberation introduces a vital new tool for reading American literatures. Rooted in both ancient Egyptian ideas about life and cutting-edge theories of animacy, or levels of aliveness, this tool—ankhing—enables Michael Datcher to examine the ways African American and Latinx literatures respond to and ultimately work to resist hegemonic forces of neoliberalism and state-sponsored oppression. Weaving together close readings and politically informed philosophical reflection, Datcher considers the work of writer-activists Toni Cade Bambara, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, June Jordan, Salvador Plascencia, and Ishmael Reed, in light of theoretical interventions by Jane Bennett, Mel Y. Chen, Bruno Latour, Michel Foucault, Paulo Freire, and Erica R. Edwards. How, he asks, can cultural production positively influence Black and Brown material conditions and mobilize collective action “off the page”? How can art-based counterpublics provide a foundation for Black and Brown community organizing? What emerges from Datcher’s innovative analysis is a frank assessment of the links between embodied experiences of racialization, as well as a distinctive vision of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature as a repository of emancipatory strategies with real-world applications. “In Animating Black and Brown Liberation, Michael Datcher posits a bold new way of approaching a variety of important texts, including those authored by Toni Cade Bambara, Ishmael Reed, Salvador Plascencia, Gloria Anzaldúa, and June Jordan, among others. Drawing on ideas by theorists such as Foucault, Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and Alexander Weheliye, Datcher offers a fresh and original way of valuing these works. This volume is a thought-provoking addition to the world of literary criticism.” — Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University “This book offers a much-needed perspective on what is generally regarded in the field of American literary studies as ‘Black and Brown’ comparative ethnic literature. Few projects have endeavored to bridge African American and Latinx literatures, and Animating Black and Brown Liberation does so with a clarity and brilliance not seen in a long time.” — Ellie D. Hernández, author of Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture

Author: Dennis R. Cutchins
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476649278
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Science fiction cinema, once relegated to the undervalued "B" movie slot, has become one of the dominant film genres of the 21st century, with Hollywood alone producing more than 400 science fiction films annually. Many of these owe a great deal of their success to the films of one defining decade: the 1950s. Essays in this book explore how classic '50s science fiction films have been recycled, repurposed, and reused in the decades since their release. Tropes from Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), for instance, have found surprising new life in Netflix's wildly popular Stranger Things. Interstellar (2014) and Arrival (2016) have clear, though indirect roots in the iconic 1950s science fictions films Rocketship X-M (1950) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and The Shape of Water (2017) openly recalls and reworks the major premises of The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954). Essays also cover 1950's sci-fi influences on video game franchises like Fallout, Bioshock and Wolfenstein.