Search Results for: black studies
Afroperuvian feminisms
Black women’s cultural activism in Lima, Perú, enacts a vibrant geohistory of respatializations of raced and gendered embodiment, advancing deprovincialized manifestations of the historical continuities, transnational ties, and internationalist impulses that connect otherwise localized and specific stories of diasporic … Continue reading
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Filed under Popular music, South America, Women's studies
Bill Robinson taps past Jim Crow
During the Great Depression Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Shirley Temple made a number of films together in which narratives depict an America where black people are happy slaves or docile servants, Civil War (even southern) soldiers are noble Americans, and … Continue reading
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Filed under Dance, Performers
Afro-sonic feminist funk
Since it emerged as a distinct genre in the late 1960s and early 1970s funk has played an important role in American music and culture, in its foregrounding of polyrhythmic interplay, improvisation, and community formation, and in addressing issues of … Continue reading
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Filed under Popular music
Mose Allison and “Parchman Farm”
In November 1957 Mose Allison recorded what would became his most celebrated and requested piece: Parchman Farm, a wickedly clever blues written from the viewpoint of an inmate at the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary. But by the mid-1960s Allison had … Continue reading
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Filed under Jazz and blues
Celia Cruz’s (trans)nationalism
Celia Cruz’s diverse musical repertoire served as a performative locus for the negotiations of both her Cubanness and her broader Latin American identity. Likewise, her construction of blackness as an Afro-Cuban woman transformed and was transformed by her collaborations with … Continue reading
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Filed under Popular music
Air guitar and gender
Like real rock guitar playing, air guitar—miming electric guitar playing without an instrument—is heavily informed by gendered practices in rock, where the electric guitar functions as a signifier of masculine power and implied sexual prowess, and performing on it involves … Continue reading
Filed under Instruments, Popular music
