Race. .. and Other Four Letter Words: Eminem and the Cultural Politics of Authenticity

Rap superstar Eminem has become the new poster child for everything that's dangerous about contemporary popular culture. He's crude, juvenile, and foul-mouthed. His lyrics are violent, misogynistic, and homophobic. He's corrupting our youth, poisoning our culture, and laughing about it all the way to the bank. Or so the story goes. This essay argues that much of what underpins the moral panic surrounding Eminem is a set of largely unspoken questions about race, identity, authenticity, and performance. In particular, this paper examines the ways that Eminem's status as a White man who has achieved both critical and commercial success within a predominantly Black cultural idiom serves to challenge dominant social constructions of race in the United States by de- and reconstructing popular understandings of both Whiteness and Blackness.     

Elmo Is Black! Black Popular Communication and the Marking and Marketing of Black Identity

In this essay, I seek to thematize and examine the problems that emerge when Black popular communication, such as hip-hop, television programming, blues and jazz, graffiti art, toys, and film, meet national and global market forces. Specifically, I address how Black identity is marked within Black popular communication and how "authenticity" identity politics movements work to maintain Black identity. I also consider what problems emerge, such as cultural appropriations, when forms of Black popular communication are commodified and designed for mass consumption. Finally, I suggest how we can protect Black popular communication from appropriation and consumer culture threats through individual and collective action. I conclude that Black popular communication cannot witness a more democratic treatment of Black identity until we confront market forces that have as its primary goal the exploitation of Black identity for profit.     

Overcoming Cultural Racism: The Promise of Multicultural Education

The author argues that cultural racism undergirds both individual and institutional racism, and, thus, it is the driving force behind racist policies and practices in educational institutions and in society. Because both liberal and conservative agendas operate within an ideology of White supremacy, both have been inadequate in addressing cultural racism. A multicultural movement that explores the concept of "Whiteness" and that encourages educators and students to take an antiracist stance can provide an important response to cultural racism.     

Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney's Cartoon Heroines From The Little Mermaid to The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Because of the success of the first six animated feature films produced in the "new era" of Disney animation (The Little Mermaid, 1989; Beauty and the Beast, 1991; Aladdin, 1993; The Lion King, 1994; Pocahontas, 1995; The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1996) and their mass merchandising, Disney animated characters became ubiquitous for children of the 1990s. Although Bell, Haas, and Sells (1995) suggested that Disney films present a "sanitization of violence, sexuality, and political struggle concomitant with an erasure or repression of difference" (p. 7), an increasing emphasis on sexuality and the exotic is evident in the construction of the female heroines in these films, particularly in the female characters of color. This article analyzes what may be referred to in Said's (1978) terminology as the orientalization of women of color in five of these six Disney animated films and posits how these representations of gender and cultural difference operate within Disney's consumerist framework, which provides "dreams and products through forms of popular culture in which kids are willing to materially and emotionally invest" (Giroux, 1999, p. 89). Using a critical lens, I interrogate the unity of images regarding gender and race that these Disney texts offer and the ways in which these meanings operate within the larger socio-historical framework regarding women of color and the notion of Whiteness.     

Black History,Inc! Investigating the Production of Black History Through Walmart's Corporate Web Site

Social and public sites are becoming a popular medium for intellectual consumption of Black history. Given the educational climate in which many students’ exposure to Black history may come from outside of schools, the authors examine how Walmart's Black History Month Web site produced simplistic and safe narratives about African American history.     

Idealization,Inspiration, Irony: Popular Communication Tastes and Practices in the Individual Political Development of Generation X'ers

Using a theoretical frame of cultural studies and social constructivism, I analyze data collected from 15 Americans born between 1965 and 1978-"Generation X'ers"-about how they remember and understand the significance of their popular communication tastes and practices for their political socialization, or what I choose to call individual political development. This study finds that these tastes and practices have had quasi-intentional, functional importance for individual political development in this generation, importance best described as media "uses and effects." While also theorizing about the implications of the postmodern era in which "Generation X'ers" and others have lived, this work speaks to the importance of incorporating individual developmental processes and meaning-making into work on the political implications of mass media and popular communication.     

African healing and western psychotherapy: Meetings between professionalsGuérison Africaine et Psychothérapie Occidentale: Rencontres entre ProfessionnelsCuración Africana y Psicoterapia Occidental: Reuniones entre Profesionales

The institutions of traditional healing, as practiced in Black Africa, and psychotherapy, as practiced in Western culture, are compared in terms of their relative positions within the broader health care systems of the respective cultures, and in terms of their therapeutic techniques. Data is based on personal work experience in East Africa 10 years ago and on eight recent interviews with mental health professionals and healers in West Africa. (The author is an American-trained clinical psychologist.) It is concluded that these two institutions carry on the same function in their respective cultures, but differ in format according to the different dominant family configurations of the two cultures.     

Review Essay: Sex in Advertising: Perspectives on the Erotic Appeal and Measuring Up: How Advertising Affects Self-Image

This analysis argues that Grant Hill advances a critique of internal contradictions within Black communities; offers rival epistemologies of how to be Black, male, and an athlete; as well as connects concrete Black experience within an abstract museum setting. This examination grounds Hill's public statements of what he hopes to accomplish with the exhibition "Something All Our Own: The Grant Hill Collection of African American Art" within a rubric featuring theme, function, and quantity. Under examination are Hill's messages to understand the ways in which he seeks to demonstrate his multidimensionality and ability to transcend the one-dimensional identity position of Black male athlete.     

Pedagogies of Black Eldership: Exploring the Impact of Intergenerational Contact on Youth Research

This article examines the interactions between a collective of self-described “African American,” “multiracial,” and “African immigrant” high school youth researchers, and two African American community elders. Drawing from a year-long critical ethnographic study of the youth research collective, the author documents how pedagogies of Black eldership overlapped with youth participatory action research to open new possibilities for preparing youth as researchers. The study highlights how an out-of-school educational space afforded alternative pedagogical opportunities by specifically examining how pedagogies of Black eldership helped youth researchers historicize and politicize their research, pushing them to move from embodied knowledge to self-knowledge. Drawing from African-centered and critical theory, the study explicates aspects of the pedagogies of Black eldership. Without bounding these pedagogies, the author uses two narratives of teaching and learning to illustrate how intergenerational contact impacted the trajectory of the youth researchers. They transformed their research after meeting with the elders to be more introspective and examine how their worldviews were being constructed and influenced. The findings in this study serve as an impetus for further research examining the educational context of Black eldership and youth research.     

Black K-pop fan videos and polyculturalism

The reaction video is an understudied area in YouTube and other online scholarship. Despite its limited scholarly attention, it is an influential site of meaning making, particularly for global youth cultures. Understanding polyculturalism as the suturing of self into multiple lineages, this project argues that Black American fans self-represent their K-pop fan interests as being salient to their racial identities. The videos construct identities that are not confined to the Black–White paradigm. Instead, YouTubers engage in fan practices of production, represent conformity to values within the fan community, articulate racially specific fan participation, and express concern for racially specific marginalizing discourses. Thus, the YouTube response video becomes a complicated site with multiple negotiations that reveal the self-production of polycultural identities.     

Black Feminist Activism: Theory as Generating Collective Resistance

Black feminist scholars have theorized ways in which power permeates our everyday lived experiences. The authors of this article, a university faculty member and a grassroots community activist, share their collective Black feminist activist efforts to find spaces of resistance and empowerment within oppressive conditions in the city of New Orleans.     

A cultural map of the United Kingdom, 2003

This paper employs Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to map cultural participation and taste in the UK. It constructs what Bourdieu calls a space of lifestyles from evidence collected in a national random sample survey of the British population in 2003. MCA constructs the space relationally on the basis of similarities and differences in responses to questions about a large number of cultural items in several sub‐fields including music, reading, TV and recreational activity. These items are mapped along two axes and their clustering indicates affinities between tastes and practices across sub‐fields. The cultural patterns are described. We then superimpose socio‐demographic variables, including class, educational qualifications and age, the distribution of which indicates tendencies for certain categories of person to have shared tastes. The analysis reveals meaningful, socially differentiated patterns of taste. The space of lifestyles proves to be structured primarily by the total volume of capital (resources) held by respondents and by age. Strong oppositions are revealed. An older, educated middle class shares ‘legitimate’ established cultural preferences. The repertoire of a younger middle class group contains more contemporary and ‘popular’ items. Less well‐educated, working class groups are characterised often primarily by lack of cultural participation, but also, especially among the young, by an aversion to ‘legitimate’ culture.     

Autogenous culture as political form: explorations through participatory art in Singapore

This paper presents the concept of autogenous cultural practices as a political form that is neither a subject of state practices, nor a means of resistive anti-state force. Through a study of three participatory art projects carried out by the author, this paper examines how and if autogenous culture can be presented and more importantly effect societal change. These projects were carried out in a governmental disciplinary facility, a local non-governmental organization supporting sex workers and an independent art project with three young women who were graduates of the Normal Technical stream in Singapore respectively.     

The Troubled Life of an Habitual Offender in Colonial Greenland

This article investigates how law and order was handled in the Danish colonies in Greenland during the period ranging approximately from 1911 to 1953. The Greenlandic author Peter Gundel’s frequent episodes of conflict with the law provide the framework for the analysis. The article deals with how – and through what specific techniques – procedures related to law and order worked to establish, maintain, or reform identities in colonial Greenland. It is argued that social practices within the field of law and order were characterized by the colonial administration’s tactical deployment of a specific version of Greenlandic culture.     

Quiet Warriors: Black Teachers' Memories of Integration in Two Virginia Localities

In this article, the author examines the transition from segregation to full integration in two Virginia school districts, 1965–1970. He begins with short participant profiles and reveals how personal connections uncovered new voices in the school desegregation process. Next, the author gives an overview of political events in Virginia following Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The focus then shifts to the classroom experiences of ten Black teachers who integrated faculties in Powhatan County and the city of Charlottesville school districts. The author closes by predicting how the teachers in this study would react to the current school environments.     

Capturing the Cultural Olympiad in Scotland: the case for multi-criteria analysis

This article examines the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad through the lens of a devolved Scotland, exploring how the Scottish cultural programmes and projects are being evaluated, and what this approach might offer for the wider UK and international context. Structurally, the article begins with a discussion of the relationship between sporting mega-events and culture, focusing specifically (although not exclusively) on the sport and cultural nexus around the Olympic Games. The discussion then moves to consider conceptual, policy and practice debates around cultural value, examining the extent to which existing research tools and techniques satisfactorily capture the contribution of culture to major events, public and social policy. Methodologically, the article draws on elite interviews with strategic stakeholders directly involved in the design, delivery and evaluation of Scotland's London 2012 Cultural Programme. The authors conclude that, when taken alongside other cultural evaluations conducted nationally and internationally, there is a need to develop a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) that can more effectively capture cultural value around major sporting events in the UK. This study has demonstrated a level of dissatisfaction within the Scottish cultural community about the limitations of existing mechanisms for measuring the value of culture within the mega-event platform. A robust, but nuanced, impact assessment is required because, unlike the UK as a whole, Scotland has a unique opportunity to undertake a longitudinal study assessing the conditions for legacy put in place as a result of the London 2012 Olympic Games for the subsequent 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. However, further research is required into the efficacy of the MCA for assessing cultural value generally and within the framework of major sports events, in particular.     

Do managers and students share the same perceptions of societal culture?

This article explores the notions of convergence and divergence in respect of societal cultural practices and values within and across Austria and the Republic of Ireland, by comparing samples of middle managers and students on nine dimensions of culture. In the context of globalization, we consider whether there is evidence of cultural convergence across the Austrian and Irish samples or if the data of the two countries remain distinct (country effect). We also ask whether differences between managers and students can be attributed to cohort/age effects. Our findings suggest that there is some convergence, but also that the country effect is more dominant than the cohort/age effect for both practices and values. High within-country consistency exists in respect of practices between Irish students and managers and between Austrian students and managers. For values, there is evidence of convergence across all four sub-samples on four cultural dimensions, namely Power Distance, Gender Egalitarianism, Collectivism I and Future Orientation. We discuss whether the dynamics underlying such convergence can be attributed to cultural change, generational differences and/or an idealized worldview held by the younger generation.