Soul Thieves: The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African American Popular Culture PDF
Preview Soul Thieves: The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African American Popular Culture
CONTEMPORARY BLACK HISTORY Manning Marable, Founding Series Editor Peniel Joseph (Tufts University) and Yohuru Williams (Fairfield University), Series Editors This series features cutting-edge scholarship in Contemporary Black History, underlining the importance of the study of history as a form of public advocacy and political activism. It focuses on postwar African-American history, from 1945 to the early 1990s, but it also includes international black history, bringing in high-quality interdisciplinary scholarship from around the globe. It is the series editors’ firm belief that outstanding critical research can also be accessible and well written. To this end, books in the series incorporate different methodologies that lend themselves to narrative richness, such as oral history and ethnography, and combine disciplines such as African American Studies, Political Science, Sociology, Ethnic and Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Biko Lives!: The Contested Legacies of Steve Biko Edited by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: “Another Side of the Story” Edited by Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang Africana Cultures and Policy Studies: Scholarship and the Transformation of Public Policy Edited by Zachery Williams Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Obama By Duchess Harris Mau Mau in Harlem?: The U.S. and the Liberation of Kenya By Gerald Horne Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization By Quito Swan Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level Edited by Peniel E. Joseph Living Fanon: Global Perspectives Edited by Nigel C. Gibson From Black Power to Prison Power: The Making of Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union By Donald F. Tibbs The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972 By Ibram H. Rogers Black Power beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement Edited by Nico Slate Birmingham and the Long Black Freedom Struggle By Robert W. Widell, Jr. Soul Thieves: The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African American Popular Culture Edited by Tamara Lizette Brown and Baruti N. Kopano Black Power Principals By Matthew Whitaker (forthcoming) The Congress of African People: History, Memory, and an Ideological Journey By Michael Simanga (forthcoming) Soul Thieves The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African American Popular Culture Edited by Tamara Lizette Brown and Baruti N. Kopano SOUL THIEVES Copyright © Tamara Lizette Brown and Baruti N. Kopano, 2014. All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10891–2 (hc) ISBN: 978–0–230–10897–4 (pbk) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface Acknowledgments 1 Soul Thieves: White America and the Appropriation of Hip Hop and Black Culture Baruti N. Kopano 2 The Appropriation of Blackness in Ego Trip’s The (White) Rapper Show Carlos D. Morrison and Ronald L. Jackson, II 3 Cash Rules Everything around Me: Appropriation, Commodification, and the Politics of Contemporary Protest Music and Hip Hop Diarra Osei Robertson 4 I’m Hip: An Exploration of Rap Music’s Creative Guise Kawachi Clemmons 5 Foraging Fashion: African American Influences on Cultural Aesthetics Abena Lewis-Mhoon 6 In the Eye of the Beholder: Definitions of Beauty in Popular Black Magazines Kimberly Brown 7 Neutering the Black Power Movement: The Hijacking of Protest Symbolism James B. Stewart 8 A Silent Protest: The 1968 Olympiad and the Appropriation of Black Athletic Power Jamal Ratchford 9 Imagining a Strange New World: Racial Integration and Social Justice Advocacy in Marvel Comics, 1966–1980 David Taft Terry 10 So You Think You Can Dance: Black Dance and American Popular Culture Tamara Lizette Brown List of Contributors Index Preface Culture is the beliefs, values, norms, traditions, and artifacts shared among the inhabitants of a common society. Harold Cruse in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual validates culture in the African American tradition by directly linking and interlinking it with politics and economics.1 Popular culture is that culture literally of the people. It is distinguished from high culture or that which is of, or reflective of, the elite. Its value for mass consumption and entertainment purposes distinguishes it from the more “legitimate” artistic pursuits. Music, movies, television, fashion fads, slang, magazines, and the like are examples of popular culture. Today’s popular culture will be tomorrow’s cultural history and a means by which to analyze society at a given moment. Popular culture as a general term is “used to distinguish the mass of the people—not ‘people’ in general— from the titled, wealthy or educated classes of people.”2 It can include both folk and mass objects, as well as traditions and beliefs. Such material culture manifests itself as readable objects—open for evaluation and interpretation.3 Soul Thieves: The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African American Popular Culture is an analysis of the misuse and, in some cases, outright abuse of African American popular culture through various genres. Hip hop is, and has been, one of the most dominant African American popular culture creations and is denoted in many of the offerings in this volume; however, Soul Thieves is a historically inclusive documentation of the misappropriation of black popular culture, thus spanning other areas and genres besides the contemporary and current craze. This book documents that historically African Americans have been in the forefront in the creation of American popular culture. As scholar Harry Shaw demonstrated in Perspectives of Black Popular Culture, black popular culture traditionally has been synonymous with American popular culture, but not credited with the innovation. “To look at Black popular culture . . . through any medium is to get a glimpse of the essential Blackness. It is the DNA that affects all Black—and, to a great extent American—artistic achievements.” Such shared experiences and artistic pursuits form the foundation of African American culture and identify, explain, and retain Africanisms (cultural traits that can be traced to an African foundation) and the intrinsic essence of that blackness that emanates from the everyday lives of African American people. Moreover, emerging from this base, “[o]nly Black culture has retained identifiable Africanisms and Black culture traits in a culturally competitive environment while making innumerable significant contributions to American and Western Culture [sic].”4 In the use of the term African American, the editors acknowledge the African diaspora and its inherent cultural implications, but pay particular attention to the African American impact on American popular culture. Nearing the end of the twentieth century, historians Robin D. G. Kelley and Lawrence Levine debated the interpretations of popular culture in the pages of the American Historical Review. Levine lamented that in its current state scholars were not adequately assessing this mass medium that he pitted as a battle, at times, between consumers and producers over the construed meaning and intent, and suggested a varied approach to studying the field, since scholars tended to focus on the intent of
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