Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers

Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers

Author: Assistant Professor Critical Dance Studies Imani Kai Johnson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-10-07

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0190856696

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The dance circle (called the cypher) is a common signifier of breaking culture, known more for its spectacular moves than as a ritual practice with foundations in Africanist aesthetics. Yet those foundations--evident in expressive qualities like call and response, the aural kinesthetic, the imperative to be original, and more--are essential to cyphering's enduring presence on the global stage. What can cyphers activate beyond the spectacle? What lessons do cyphers offer about moving through and navigating the social world? And what possibilities for the future do they animate? With an interdisciplinary reach and a riff on physics, author Imani Kai Johnson centers the voices of practitioners in a study of breaking events in cities across the US, Canada, and parts of Europe. Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: the Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop draws on over a decade of research and provides a detailed look into the vitality of Africanist aesthetics and the epistemological possibilities of the ritual circle.


Sampling, Biting, and the Postmodern Subversion of Hip Hop

Sampling, Biting, and the Postmodern Subversion of Hip Hop

Author: Jim Vernon

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-06-21

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 3030749037

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Drawing on the culture’s history before and after the birth of rap music, this book argues that the values attributed to Hip Hop by ‘postmodern’ scholars stand in stark contrast with those that not only implicitly guided its aesthetic elements, but are explicitly voiced by Hip Hop’s pioneers and rap music’s most consequential artists. It argues that the structural evacuation of the voices of its founders and organic intellectuals in the postmodern theorization of Hip Hop has foreclosed the culture’s ethical values and political goals from scholarly view, undermining its unity and progress. Through a historically informed critique of the hegemonic theoretical framework in Hip Hop Studies, and a re-centering of the culture’s fundamental proscription against ‘biting,' this book articulates and defends the aesthetic and ethical values of Hip Hop against their concealment and subversion by an academic discourse that merely ‘samples’ the culture for its own reactionary ends.


Irish and African American Cinema

Irish and African American Cinema

Author: Maria Pramaggiore

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0791480070

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Focusing on two film traditions not normally studied together, Maria Pramaggiore examines more than two dozen Irish and African American films, including Do the Right Thing, In the Name of the Father, The Crying Game, Boyz N the Hood, The Snapper, and He Got Game, arguing that these films foreground practices of character identification that complicate essentialist notions of national and racial identity. The porous sense of self associated with moments of identification in these films offers a cinematic counterpart to W. E. B. Du Bois's potent concept of double consciousness, an epistemological standpoint derived from experiences of colonization, racialization, and cultural disruption. Characters in these films, Pramaggiore suggests, reject the national paradigm of insider and outsider in favor of diasporic both/and notions of self, thereby endorsing the postmodern concept of identity as performance.


Blues, Funk, Rhythm and Blues, Soul, Hip Hop, and Rap

Blues, Funk, Rhythm and Blues, Soul, Hip Hop, and Rap

Author: Eddie S. Meadows

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-06-10

Total Pages: 916

ISBN-13: 1136992561

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Despite the influence of African American music and study as a worldwide phenomenon, no comprehensive and fully annotated reference tool currently exists that covers the wide range of genres. This much needed bibliography fills an important gap in this research area and will prove an indispensable resource for librarians and scholars studying African American music and culture.


Black Atlantic Hybrids: Samples of Brazilian Music of the 1960s and 1970s in U.S. American Hip Hop

Black Atlantic Hybrids: Samples of Brazilian Music of the 1960s and 1970s in U.S. American Hip Hop

Author: Stephan Kreher

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2022-12-06

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 3946507298

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This monograph examines how sampling in U.S. Hip Hop transgresses national and regional boundaries. By contextualizing and comparing the Brazilian source material from the 1960s and 1970s with U.S. Hip Hop from the 1990s onwards, it traces flows of musicians, music, and ideology along the Interamerican U.S.-Brazil axis. The fusion and recontextualization of music styles through sampling shed light on aspects of the African American struggle and result in transcultural musical hybrids that encompass the African diaspora in the Americas, activism, cultural resistance, and 'double consciousness'. Building on postmodern intertextuality, these hybrids become products of a 'sonic cosmopolitanism' for a world shaped by the heritage of the black Atlantic.


Suzan-Lori Parks

Suzan-Lori Parks

Author: Philip C. Kolin

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0786457546

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The first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, Suzan-Lori Parks has received international recognition for her provocative and influential works. Her plays capture the nightmares of African Americans endangered by a white establishment determined to erase their history and eradicate their dreams. A dozen essays address Parks's plays, screenplays and novel. Additionally, this book includes two original interviews (one with Parks and another with her long-time director Liz Diamond) and a production chronology of her plays.


Beyond the White Negro

Beyond the White Negro

Author: Kimberly Chabot Davis

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0252096312

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Critics often characterize white consumption of African American culture as a form of theft that echoes the fantasies of 1950s-era bohemians, or "White Negroes," who romanticized black culture as anarchic and sexually potent. In Beyond the White Negro, Kimberly Chabot Davis claims such a view fails to describe the varied politics of racial crossover in the past fifteen years. Davis analyzes how white engagement with African American novels, film narratives, and hip-hop can help form anti-racist attitudes that may catalyze social change and racial justice. Though acknowledging past failures to establish cross-racial empathy, she focuses on examples that show avenues for future progress and change. Her study of ethnographic data from book clubs and college classrooms shows how engagement with African American culture and pedagogical support can lead to the kinds of white self-examination that make empathy possible. The result is a groundbreaking text that challenges the trend of focusing on society's failures in achieving cross-racial empathy and instead explores possible avenues for change.


The End of Blackness

The End of Blackness

Author: Debra J. Dickerson

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2008-12-10

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0307484289

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Debra Dickerson pulls no punches in this electrifying manifesto. Outspoken journalist and author of the critically acclaimed memoir An American Story, she challenges black Americans to stop obsessing about racism and start focusing on problems they can fix. The way out of the ghetto, she asserts, is to take a good, hard look in the mirror. Get angry, Dickerson says, but use that anger to fuel excellence and civic participation rather than crime or drug addiction. Drawing richly on black history and thought, as well as her own hard-won wisdom, she urges blacks to let go of the past and claim their full freedom. It’s only by shaping their own future, she argues, that blacks will finally abolish the myth of white superiority.


The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies

The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies

Author: Eduardo Navas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-11-27

Total Pages: 557

ISBN-13: 1134748744

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The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies comprises contemporary texts by key authors and artists who are active in the emerging field of remix studies. As an organic international movement, remix culture originated in the popular music culture of the 1970s, and has since grown into a rich cultural activity encompassing numerous forms of media. The act of recombining pre-existing material brings up pressing questions of authenticity, reception, authorship, copyright, and the techno-politics of media activism. This book approaches remix studies from various angles, including sections on history, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and practice, and presents theoretical chapters alongside case studies of remix projects. The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies is a valuable resource for both researchers and remix practitioners, as well as a teaching tool for instructors using remix practices in the classroom.