The Post-Racial Mystique

The Post-Racial Mystique
Author: Catherine Squires
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2014-04-04
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0814762891

Despite claims from pundits and politicians that we now live in a post-racial America, people seem to keep finding ways to talk about race—from celebrations of the inauguration of the first Black president to resurgent debates about police profiling, race and racism remain salient features of our world. When faced with fervent anti-immigration sentiments, record incarceration rates of Blacks and Latinos, and deepening socio-economic disparities, a new question has erupted in the last decade: What does being post-racial mean? The Post-Racial Mystique explores how a variety of media—the news, network television, and online, independent media—debate, define and deploy the term “post-racial” in their representations of American politics and society. Using examples from both mainstream and niche media—from prime-time television series to specialty Christian media and audience interactions on social media—Catherine Squires draws upon a variety of disciplines including communication studies, sociology, political science, and cultural studies in order to understand emergent strategies for framing post-racial America. She reveals the ways in which media texts cast U.S. history, re-imagine interpersonal relationships, employ statistics, and inventively redeploy other identity categories in a quest to formulate different ways of responding to race.

The Post-Racial Mystique

The Post-Racial Mystique
Author: Catherine Squires
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2014-04-04
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0814764606

Despite claims from pundits and politicians that we now live in a post-racial America, people seem to keep finding ways to talk about race—from celebrations of the inauguration of the first Black president to resurgent debates about police profiling, race and racism remain salient features of our world. When faced with fervent anti-immigration sentiments, record incarceration rates of Blacks and Latinos, and deepening socio-economic disparities, a new question has erupted in the last decade: What does being post-racial mean? The Post-Racial Mystique explores how a variety of media—the news, network television, and online, independent media—debate, define and deploy the term “post-racial” in their representations of American politics and society. Using examples from both mainstream and niche media—from prime-time television series to specialty Christian media and audience interactions on social media—Catherine Squires draws upon a variety of disciplines including communication studies, sociology, political science, and cultural studies in order to understand emergent strategies for framing post-racial America. She reveals the ways in which media texts cast U.S. history, re-imagine interpersonal relationships, employ statistics, and inventively redeploy other identity categories in a quest to formulate different ways of responding to race.

Not Even Past

Not Even Past
Author: Thomas J. Sugrue
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2010-04-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1400834198

The paradox of racial inequality in Barack Obama's America Barack Obama, in his acclaimed campaign speech discussing the troubling complexities of race in America today, quoted William Faulkner's famous remark "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." In Not Even Past, award-winning historian Thomas Sugrue examines the paradox of race in Obama's America and how President Obama intends to deal with it. Obama's journey to the White House undoubtedly marks a watershed in the history of race in America. Yet even in what is being hailed as the post-civil rights era, racial divisions—particularly between blacks and whites—remain deeply entrenched in American life. Sugrue traces Obama's evolving understanding of race and racial inequality throughout his career, from his early days as a community organizer in Chicago, to his time as an attorney and scholar, to his spectacular rise to power as a charismatic and savvy politician, to his dramatic presidential campaign. Sugrue looks at Obama's place in the contested history of the civil rights struggle; his views about the root causes of black poverty in America; and the incredible challenges confronting his historic presidency. Does Obama's presidency signal the end of race in American life? In Not Even Past, a leading historian of civil rights, race, and urban America offers a revealing and unflinchingly honest assessment of the culture and politics of race in the age of Obama, and of our prospects for a postracial America.

The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique
Author: Betty Friedan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 366
Release: 1992
Genre: Feminism
ISBN: 9780140136555

This novel was the major inspiration for the Women's Movement and continues to be a powerful and illuminating analysis of the position of women in Western society___

London is the Place for Me

London is the Place for Me
Author: Kennetta Hammond Perry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190240202

In London Is The Place for Me, Kennetta Hammond Perry explores how Afro-Caribbean migrants navigated the politics of race and citizenship in Britain and reconfigured the boundaries of what it meant to be both Black and British at a critical juncture in the history of Empire and twentieth century transnational race politics.

Are You Entertained?

Are You Entertained?
Author: Simone C. Drake
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2020-02-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478009004

The advent of the internet and the availability of social media and digital downloads have expanded the creation, distribution, and consumption of Black cultural production as never before. At the same time, a new generation of Black public intellectuals who speak to the relationship between race, politics, and popular culture has come into national prominence. The contributors to Are You Entertained? address these trends to consider what culture and blackness mean in the twenty-first century's digital consumer economy. In this collection of essays, interviews, visual art, and an artist statement the contributors examine a range of topics and issues, from music, white consumerism, cartoons, and the rise of Black Twitter to the NBA's dress code, dance, and Moonlight. Analyzing the myriad ways in which people perform, avow, politicize, own, and love blackness, this volume charts the shifting debates in Black popular culture scholarship over the past quarter century while offering new avenues for future scholarship. Contributors. Takiyah Nur Amin, Patricia Hill Collins, Kelly Jo Fulkerson-Dikuua, Simone C. Drake, Dwan K. Henderson, Imani Kai Johnson, Ralina L. Joseph, David J. Leonard, Emily J. Lordi, Nina Angela Mercer, Mark Anthony Neal, H. Ike Okafor-Newsum, Kinohi Nishikawa, Eric Darnell Pritchard, Richard Schur, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, Vincent Stephens, Lisa B. Thompson, Sheneese Thompson

Black and More than Black

Black and More than Black
Author: Cameron Leader-Picone
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2019-08-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496824539

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020 Post-Blackness. Post-Soul. Post-Black Art. New Blackness. How has the meaning of blackness changed in the twenty-first century? Cameron Leader-Picone suggests that this proliferation of terms, along with the renewed focus on questioning the relationship between individual black artists and the larger black community, indicates the arrival of novel forms of black identity and black art. Leader-Picone defines these terms as significant facets of a larger post era, linking them with the social and political context of Barack Obama’s presidency. Analyzing claims of progress associated with Obama’s election and post-era thinking, he examines the contours of black aesthetics in the new century. To do so, he sifts through post-era African American fiction, considering both celebrations and rejections of an early twenty-first-century rhetoric of progress. In addition, he maps the subsequent implications of these concepts for rearticulating racial identities. Through the works of Colson Whitehead, Alice Randall, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paul Beatty, Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn Ward, Leader-Picone tracks how recent fiction manifests the tension between the embrace of post–civil rights era gains and the recognition of persistent structural racism. Ultimately far less triumphal than the prefix post would imply, these authors address the Black Arts Movement and revise double consciousness and other key themes from the African American literary tradition. They interrogate their relevance in an era encompassing not only the election of the nation’s first black president, but also the government’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina, the expansion of class divisions within the black community, mass incarceration, and ongoing police violence.

Rupturing Rhetoric

Rupturing Rhetoric
Author: Byron B Craig
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2024-06-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496852311

Contributions by Maksim Bugrov, Byron B Craig, Patricia G. Davis, Peter Ehrenhaus, Whitney Gent, Christopher Gilbert, Oscar Giner, J. Scott Jordan, Euni Kim, Melanie Loehwing, Jaclyn S. Olson, A. Susan Owen, Stephen E. Rahko, Nick J. Sciullo, Arthur D. Soto-Vásquez, and Erika M. Thomas The events surrounding the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, marked a watershed moment in US history. Though this instance of police brutality represented only the latest amid decades of similar unjust patterns, it came to symbolize state complicity in the deployment of violence to maintain racial order. Rupturing Rhetoric: The Politics of Race and Popular Culture since Ferguson responds to the racial rhetoric of American popular culture in the years since Brown's death. Through close readings of popular media produced during the late Obama and Trump eras, this volume details the influence of historical and contemporary representations of race on public discourse in America. Using Brown’s death and the ensuing protests as a focal point, contributors argue that Ferguson marks the rupture of America’s postracial fantasy. An ideology premised on colorblindness, the notion of the “postracial” suggests that the United States has largely achieved racial equality and that race is no longer a central organizing category in American society. Postracialism is partly responsible for ahistorical, romanticized narratives of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and American exceptionalism. The legitimacy of this fantasy, the editors contend, was the first casualty of the tanks, tear gas, and rubber bullets wielded against protesters during the summer of 2014. From these protests emerged a new political narrative organized around #BlackLivesMatter, which directly challenged the fantasy of a postracial American society. Essays in Rupturing Rhetoric cover such texts as Fresh Off the Boat; Hamilton; Green Book; NPR’s American Anthem; Lovecraft Country; Disney remakes of Dumbo, The Lion King, and Lady and the Tramp; BlacKkKlansman; Crazy Rich Asians; The Hateful Eight; and Fences. As a unified body of work, the collection interrogates the ways contemporary media in American popular culture respond to and subvert the postracial fantasy underlying the politics of our time.

Diana and Beyond

Diana and Beyond
Author: Raka Shome
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2014-10-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252096681

The death of Princess Diana unleashed an international outpouring of grief, love, and press attention virtually unprecedented in history. Yet the exhaustive effort to link an upper class white British woman with "the people" raises questions. What narrative of white femininity transformed Diana into a simultaneous signifier of a national and global popular? What ideologies did the narrative tap into to transform her into an idealized woman of the millennium? Why would a similar idealization not have appeared around a non-white, non-Western, or immigrant woman? Raka Shome investigates the factors that led to this defining cultural/political moment and unravels just what the Diana phenomenon represented for comprehending the relation between white femininity and the nation in postcolonial Britain and its connection to other white female celebrity figures in the millennium. Digging into the media and cultural artifacts that circulated in the wake of Diana's death, Shome investigates a range of theoretical issues surrounding motherhood and the production of national masculinities, global humanitarianism, transnational masculinities, the intersection of fashion and white femininity, and spirituality and national modernity. Her analysis explores how images of white femininity in popular culture intersect with issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and transnationality in the performance of Anglo national modernities. Moving from ideas on the positioning of privileged white women in global neoliberalism to the emergence of new formations of white femininity in the millennium , Diana and Beyond fearlessly explains the late princess's never-ending renaissance and ongoing cultural relevance.

Postracial Resistance

Postracial Resistance
Author: Ralina L. Joseph
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-10-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 147984036X

Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, International Communication Association How Black women in the spotlight negotiate the post-racial gaze of Hollywood and beyond From Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Shonda Rhimes to their audiences and the industry workers behind the scenes, Ralina L. Joseph considers the way that Black women are required to walk a tightrope. Do they call out racism only to face accusations of being called “racists”? Or respond to racism in code only to face accusations of selling out? Postracial Resistance explores how African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences employ postracial discourse—the notion that race and race-based discrimination are over and no longer affect people’s everyday lives—to refute postracialism itself. In a world where they’re often written off as stereotypical “Angry Black Women,” Joseph offers that some Black women in media use “strategic ambiguity,” deploying the failures of post-racial discourse to name racism and thus resist it. In Postracial Resistance, Joseph listens to and observes Black women as they perform and negotiate race in strategic ambiguity. Using three methods of media analysis—textual readings of the media's representation of these women; interviews with writers, producers, and studio executives; and audience ethnographies of young women viewers—Joseph maps the tensions and strategies that all Black women must engage to challenge the racialized sexism of everyday life, on- and off-screen.