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There are no simple answers, only oversimplified ones. But the cure to all social ills lies in uncovering the truth. In this unflinching, timely, wide-ranging collection of essays, professor William Cobb lays bare the black experience of the past decade using cinema, music, literature, politics, and pop culture. "On the Stroll: The Pimping of Three 6 Mafia" is a fascinating take on the first hip-hop group ever to win an Oscar. Cobb lambastes the group for flaunting onstage every stereotype that the movie they performed in (Hustle and Flow) so carefully and brilliantly avoided. In "The Trouble with Harry," Cobb argues that Harry Belafonte's absence from the funeral of forty-year friend Coretta Scott King is a tragedy, and Martin Luther King's children should be ashamed of themselves. In "The Devil and Dave Chappelle" Cobb discusses Chappelle's decision to walk away from a $50 million contract as not just a comedic choice but also as a social and political choice. Chappelle's humor was largely an "inside joke" shared among blacks. When his audience grew, he felt that a line had been crossed. This new audience was laughing at him. Not with him. Chappelle realized that one wrong laugh could put him on the wrong side of the line between genius and Uncle Tom. From the "too smart" irony of Dave Chappelle to the cultural relocation of Bessemer, Alabama; from the gift and curse of the first generation of black prosperity to the failure of history to act as a guide for the present; Cobb reflects on the post--civil rights era with fondness and hope, concern and caution.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A sweeping, genre-bending “masterpiece” (Minneapolis Star Tribune) exploring Black art, music, and culture in all their glory and complexity—from Soul Train, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Whitney Houston, and Beyoncé ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Dallas Morning News, Publishers Weekly “Gorgeous essays that reveal the resilience, heartbreak, and joy within Black performance.”—Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.” Inspired by these few words, spoken by Josephine Baker at the 1963 March on Washington, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow and bestselling author Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines—whether it’s the twenty-seven seconds in “Gimme Shelter” in which Merry Clayton wails the words “rape, murder,” a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt—has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib’s own personal history of love, grief, and performance. Touching on Michael Jackson, Patti LaBelle, Billy Dee Williams, the Wu-Tan Clan, Dave Chappelle, and more, Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space—from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio. WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL AND THE GORDON BURN PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, Rolling Stone, Esquire, BuzzFeed, Thrillist, She Reads, BookRiot, BookPage, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, LitHub, Library Journal, Booklist
For acclaimed historian William Jelani Cobb, the historic election of Barack Obama to the presidency is not the most remarkable development of the 2008 election; even more so is the fact that Obama won some 90 percent of the black vote in the primaries across America despite the fact that the established black leadership since the civil rights era-men like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Andrew Young, who paved the way for his candidacy-all openly supported Hillary Clinton. Clearly a sea change has occurred among black voters, ironically pushing the architects of the civil rights movement toward the periphery at the moment when their political dreams were most fully realized. How this has happened, and the powerful implications it holds for America's politics and social landscape, is the focus of The Substance of Hope, a deeply insightful, paradigm-shifting examination of a new generation of voters that has not been shaped by the raw memory of Jim Crow and has a different range of imperatives. Cobb sees Obama's ascendancy as "a reality that has been taking shape in tiny increments for the past four decades," and examines thorny issues such as the paradox and contradictions embodied in race and patriotism, identity and citizenship; how the civil rights leadership became a political machine; why the term "postracial" is as iniquitous as it is inaccurate; and whether our society has really changed with Obama's election. Elegantly written and powerfully argued, The Substance of Hope challenges conventional wisdom as it offers original insight into America's future.
Perhaps best known for his highly acclaimed, short-lived Comedy Central program Chappelle's Show, Dave Chappelle is widely regarded as one of today's most culturally significant comedians. Through the sketch comedy show and his stand-up act, Chappelle has offered truly memorable commentary on racial and ethnic tensions in American society. This book assembles 13 essays that examine motifs common in Chappelle's comedy, including technology and digital culture; race, gender, and ethnicity; economics and politics; music, television, film, and performance; and memory, language, and identity.
In this information overloaded twenty-first century, it seems impossible to fully discern or explain how we know about the past. But two things are certain. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we all think historically on a routine basis. And our perceptions of history, including African American history, have not necessarily been shaped by professional historians. In this wide-reaching and timely book, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie argues that public knowledge and understanding of black history, including its historical icons, has been shaped by institutions and individuals outside academic ivory towers. Drawing on a range of compelling examples, Dagbovie explores how, in the twenty-first century, African American history is regarded, depicted, and juggled by diverse and contesting interpreters-from museum curators to film-makers, entertainers, politicians, journalists, and bloggers. Underscoring the ubiquitous nature of African American history in contemporary American thought and culture, each chapter unpacks how black history has been represented and remembered primarily during the "Age of Obama," the so-called era of "post-racial" American society. Reclaiming the Black Past: The Use and Misuse of African American History in the 21st Century is Dagbovie's contribution to expanding how we understand African American history during the new millennium.
This book examines the ways in which contemporary works of black satire make black racial madness legible in ways that allow us to see the connections between suffering from racism and suffering from mental illness. Showing how an understanding of racism as a root cause of mental and emotional instability complicates the ways in which we think about racialized identity formation and the limits of socially accepted definitions of (in)sanity, it concentrates on the unique ability of the genre of black satire to make knowable not only general qualities of mental illness that are so often feared or ignored, but also how structures of racism contribute a specific dimension to how we understand the different ways in which people of color, especially black people, experience and integrate mental instability into their own understandings of subjecthood. Drawing on theories from ethnic studies, popular culture studies, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and trauma theory to offer critical textual analyses of five different instances of new millennial black satire in television, film, and literature – the television show Chappelle’s Show, the Spike Lee film Bamboozled, the novel The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty, the novels Erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett, and the television show Key & Peele – Crazy Funny presents an account of the ways in which contemporary black satire rejects the boundaries between sanity and insanity as a way to animate the varied dimensions of being a racialized subject in a racist society.
The experiment was dreamed up by two fathers, one white, one black. What would happen, they wondered, if they mixed white players from an elite Seattle private school - famous for alums such as Microsoft's Bill Gates - and black kids from the inner city on a basketball team? Wouldn't exposure to privilege give the black kids a chance at better opportunities? Wouldn't it open the eyes of the white kids to a different side of life? The 1986 season would be the laboratory. Out in the real world, hip-hop was going mainstream, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson ruled the NBA, and Ronald Reagan was president. In Seattle, the team's season unfolded like a perfectly scripted sports movie: the ragtag group of boys became friends and gelled together to win the league championship. The experiment was deemed a success. But was it? How did crossing lines of class, race, and wealth affect the lives of these ten boys? Two decades later, Doug Merlino, who played on the team, returned to find his teammates. His search ranges from a prison cell to a hedge fund office, street corners to a shack in rural Oregon, a Pentecostal church to the records of a brutal murder. The result is a complex, gripping, and, at times, unsettling story. An instant classic in the vein of Michael Apted's Up series, The Hustle tells the stories of ten teammates set before a background of sweeping social and economic change, capturing the ways race, money, and opportunity shape our lives. A tale both personal and public, The Hustle is the story a disparate group of men finding - or not finding - a place in America
"Since slavery, African and African American humor has baffled, intrigued, angered, and entertained the masses. Rolling is a collection centering Blackness in comedy, especially on television, and observing that Blackness is often relegated to biopics, slave narratives, and the comedic. But like W.E.B. DuBois' ideas about double consciousness, and Racquel Gates' extension of his theories, we know that Blackness resonates for Black viewers in ways often entirely different for white viewers. Contributors to this volume cover a range of cases representing African American humor across film, television, digital media, and stand-up as Black comic personas try to work within, outside, and around the culture industries tilling for content. Essays engage with the complex industrial interplay of Blackness, white audiences, and comedy, satire and humor on streaming platforms, television networks, or digital media, and the production of Blackness within comedy through personal stories and interviews of Black folks working on crews and writing for television comedy. Rolling truly illuminates the innerworkings of Blackness and comedy in media discourse"--
To Create is a collection of illuminating interviews with an eclectic set of black artists—including Harry Belafonte, Method Man, Nikki Giovanni, Edwidge Danticat, Edward P. Jones, Booker T. Mattison, and more—as conducted by the writer, entrepreneur, educator, and consultant Felicia Pride. This is an honest, inspiring series of conversations in which Pride and her fellow artists talk openly about the challenges and rewards of working creatively across a multitude of platforms. Over the course of dozens of frank discussions with writers, activists, and media creators, Pride elicits sincere firsthand perspectives on the struggle to find—or to create, if it's not there—a niche for one's voice in the media landscape. The personable and fluid interview style allows the artists to follow their threads of dialogue to unique, intimate revelations. The interviews transition smoothly between similar themes, touching on the do-it-yourself mentality of creating; practical musings on media careers; as well as theoretical discussions on art, legacy, and community. Additionally, many of the artists, musicians, and authors discuss finding career longevity through a multi-platform approach, the connection between the personal and political in art, and the ongoing conflict between art and commerce. This is one of the most candid and diversified interview collections within the African-American community, but it is also a stirring look into what it means to be a creator.
Revealing how he continually subverted cultural expectations, this book examines the entirety of Prince's diverse career as a singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, record label mogul, movie star, and director. "For the academically inclined Prince fan, it is a must read."ÐMatthew Oware, author of I Got Something to Say: Gender, Race, and Social Consciousness in Rap Musicic