Article Database

Miley, What’s Good? Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda, Instagram Reproductions, and Viral Memetic Violence

Abstract:

Images on popular social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter that are the most entertaining are loaded with memetic power because their value is based on cultural attitudes that already constitute our lives in the everyday. Focusing on memes appropriating the artwork from Nicki Minaj’s single, Anaconda, I explore how popular memetic culture is fueled by Black women’s creativity yet positions Black women’s bodies as the fodder for potent viral images on social media platforms and in everyday experiences; Black girlhoods, at this level of representation and in lived experiences, are rarely awarded the distinction from womanhood that many other girlhoods enjoy. Thus, Black feminist discourses of desire which speak to both girlhoods and womanhoods inform my argument that social media has become a site of reproduction and consumption—a technological auction block where Black women’s bodies, aesthetics, and experiences are vilified for viral enjoyment.

Centering Black Women in the Black Chicago Renaissance: Katherine Williams-Irvin, Olive Diggs, and “New Negro Womanhood”

Abstract:

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

240 Centering Black Women in the Black Chicago Renaissance Katherine Williams-Irvin, Olive Diggs, and “New Negro Womanhood” Aria S. Halliday Chicago’s South Side was the site for the cultivation of a twentiethcentury renaissance for newly immigrated black people, or what many thinkers during the time considered the “New Negros.”1 The New Negro philosophy was a call for black people to participate more fully in the American push toward industrialization through migration—to urban centers such as New York, Chicago, and Detroit—and entrepreneurship. The black press facilitated this modern shift by penning editorials on racial uplift, disseminating “hometown” news, and advertising the rapid expansion of black businesses in the beauty, music, and banking industries. The black press in Chicago also pushed migrants to liken themselves to citified businesswomen and businessmen through consumerism. Together, migration, industrialization, black entrepreneurship, and consumerism formed the crux of New Negro philosophy that the black press disseminated to encourage black people to become full modern citizens in Chicago. As “new settlers,” black migrants in the 1920s and 1930s became consumers whose “consumer practices in cities like Chicago converted acts of desire into a political and intellectual life of distinction and defiance against traditional ways Halliday / Black Women in the Chicago Renaissance 241 of life.” Along with enlisting in both world wars, black people created new businesses and consumer practices that manifested a new “marketplace intellectual life,” becoming the “unintended conduit for the creation of black intellectual life and for the seeds of political dissent situated directly within the daily industrial realities of the New Negro era.” Davarian Baldwin points to Annie Turnbo Malone and Madame C. J. Walker as black women producers who revolutionized how black women created, bought, and sold beauty products.2 As race women, Malone and Walker utilized their commercial success to communicate the “proper” ways to migrate, live, dress, and succeed in Chicago; however, Malone and Walker were not the only black women who crafted identities for themselves and Chicago women of modernity, propriety, and respectability through their labor. This chapter explores how black women developed New Negro womanhood through the black press. Scholarly attention has been principally directed at the New Negro in masculine terms, focusing on the “public sphere” for evidence of men’s arts, business, and political engagement. Analyzing both secondary scholarship on women’s entrepreneurial endeavors during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, as well as recovered issues of the Half-Century Magazine (1916–25) and the Sunday Chicago Bee (1925–42), I trace the involvement of two influential black women in Chicago’s black press.3 I argue that black women’s work as loyal intellectual consumers and as laborers in the production and selling of products secured black men entrepreneurs’ notoriety, prestige, and economic stability.4 We know and hear the voices of prestigious New Negro men like Anthony Overton without ever knowing the names of the women I study here; Katherine E. Williams-Irvin and Olive Diggs are two of the women whose choices made those men great. Williams-Irvin and Diggs promoted the philosophical prerogatives of race women as intellectuals in their personas and editorial decisions. This essay, then, is an attempt to broaden our understanding of the scope of women’s work in the New Negro public sphere of Chicago, centering black women’s intellectual labor in the creation of modern self-definitions through the periodical press. Katherine Williams-Irvin and Olive Diggs created a social and political environment in the Half-Century Magazine and the Sunday Chicago Bee informed by black women’s interests, which in turn allowed Anthony Overton to catapult himself into economic wealth and social prestige. They navigated the pressure to become “modern” women themselves and used their experiences around Chicago to inform the black press and other black women in Chicago and elsewhere. The overall proliferation of black women’s interests in the press during the early twentieth century should be attributed to Williams-Irvin and 242 Section III. Formats Diggs, who controlled the publication of black women’s accomplishments and failures for over thirty years. Williams-Irvin and Diggs authored and affirmed others’ New Negro discourses of womanhood that resulted in black women’s consumption of Overton ’s periodicals and products. This essay is structured in the way I uncovered Williams-Irvin and Diggs in the archive: first through scholarship on Anthony Overton, and second by connecting smaller notes about their lives in editorials, scholarly work, and other newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and…

Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda Feminism and New Understandings of Black Girl Sexuality in Popular Culture

Abstract:

Black girlhood exists in a world that is constantly trying to negate it. Black vernacular traditions, too, allow girls to be considered “fast” or “womanish” based on their perceived desire or sexuality. However, Black girlhood studies presents a space where Black girls can claim their own experiences and futures. This essay engages how Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” is fertile ground to help demystify Black girls’ possibilities for finding sexual pleasure and self-determination. Using hip-hop feminism, I argue that “Anaconda” presents a Black feminist sexual politics that encourages agency for Black girls, providing a “pinkprint” for finding pleasure in their bodies.

The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas & Study

Abstract:

Between 1865-1930, Black Texans founded 540+ historic black settlements called freedom colonies. Freedom colony founders and their descendants owned 31% of all farmland in Texas by 1910, but settlements’ populations declined after World War II. While most freedom colonies are unmapped, some settlement location data us scattered across various archives and agencies. An interactive atlas of freedom colony maps and archival materials would make settlements and their challenges visible to other descendants, researchers, planners, and preservationists. The PI’s research in two counties has already revealed that knowledge of place locations is at risk, because aging descendants’ memories of freedom colonies are going unrecorded. PESCA funding would finance a research assistant responsible for cataloguing, analyzing, and mapping available data about freedom colony place locations in Hurricane Harvey-impacted counties. The research assistant’s work will enable the PI to efficiently record oral histories, conduct participatory mapping activities, and produce scholarship on settlement conditions.

Remixing as Praxis: Arnstein’s Ladder Through the Grassroots Preservationist’s Lens

Abstract:

Problem, research strategy, and findings: When Arnstein created the ladder of participation, local governments engaged predominately urban African-American neighborhoods through federally funded programs. Fifty years later, preservationists and heritage conservationists pursuing participatory engagement models in these communities find sustaining interest difficult. Absent from planning literature is guidance on how to ensure grassroots preservationists of color retain control during engagement. In this study we ask practitioners and scholars to consider the optimum approach to researching or preservation planning in this context. Through participatory action and ethnographic research, one of us (Roberts) helped design a hybrid forum-style symposium dedicated to preserving historic Black settlement heritage. As a researcher and symposium co-planner, I documented local preservation knowledge using questionnaires and performative storytelling while helping descendants of historic African-American settlements identify shared priorities and challenges. Findings suggest action researchers and preservationists must “remix” roles and the rungs of Arnstein’s ladder of participation to sustain and center stakeholder involvement when planning with marginalized communities. Remixing consists of strategically sampling, looping, and layering promising local knowledge with that of experts to support citizen-centered preservation planning. By centering culturally informed planning approaches and negotiating with stakeholders, professionals can create the conditions for participation that support sustained involvement. Symposium co-organizing and data collection catalyzed the ethical coproduction of knowledge and fostered ongoing research and collaborative projects after study completion.

Takeaway for practice: Remixing as praxis offers a framework for engaged preservation and heritage conservation that reinforces citizen empowerment through identification and application of innovative practices rooted in local knowledge. Identifying local practices that foster attachment and break down the hierarchy between expert and grassroots practitioners is essential to achieving praxis.

The End of Bootstraps and Good Masters: Fostering Social Inclusion by Creating Counternarratives

Abstract:

Contributing Chapter to Volume: The preservation enterprise helps fashion the physical contours of memory in public space, and thus has the power to curate a multidimensional and inclusive representation of societal values and narratives. Increasingly, the field of preservation is being challenged to consider questions of social inclusion, of how multiple publics are—or are not—represented in heritage decision-making, geographies, and governance structures. Community engagement is increasingly being integrated into project-based preservation practice, but the policy toolbox has been slower to evolve. Recognizing how preservation and other land use decisions can both empower and marginalize publics compels greater reflection on preservation’s past and future and collective action beyond the project level. This requires professionals and institutions to consider systemic policy change with integrity, sensitivity, and intentionality. Bringing together a broad range of academics, historians, and practitioners, this second volume in the Issues in Preservation Policy series documents historic preservation’s progress toward inclusivity and explores further steps to be taken.

The Farmers’ Improvement Society and the Women’s Barnyard Auxiliary of Texas: African American Community Building in the Progressive Era

Abstract:

Historians have brought attention to African-American women’s contributions to planning including housing and social service program delivery. This article builds upon that scholarship by adding the work of the Farmers’ Improvement Society and its Women’s Barnyard Auxiliary, both of which were Progressive-era African American mutual aid groups. This article explores the potential importance of these organizations to planning practice and scholarship; sheds light on the unique approach to planning employed by poor and rural people in mutual aid groups; and challenges popular assumptions about similar Progressive Era, “Uplift Movement” groups.

Interpretations & imaginaries: Toward an instrumental black planning history

Abstract:

“Interpretations & Imaginaries: Toward an Instrumental Black Planning History” From Planning Theory & Practice Interface Section: “Race and Spatial Imaginary: Planning Otherwise” Edited by Lisa K. Bates with, Sharita A. Towne, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kitso Lynn Lelliott.

The Power of Black Girl Magic Anthems: Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé, and “Feeling Myself” as Political Empowerment

Abstract:

Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé are two of the most successful Black women artists in today’s popular culture. They occupy a hypervisible and invisible position in Black and mainstream popular culture, and therefore exist as a crucial discursive site to understand Black girls’ self-articulation as “blackgirlmagic” at this moment. Faced with the rise of public feminist and postracial discourses presented in new digital media forms, Minaj and Beyoncé’s representations of sexualized Black femininity reimagined popular notions of race, gender, sexuality, and representation. Both women navigate sexuality and play, which allows them to promote claims to sexual autonomy, consent, and empowerment for girls. Together, they articulated blackness as arrogance, femininity as sexual confidence, and friendship as powerfully seductive in the song “Feeling Myself” (2015). We argue that the song became a #blackgirlma- gic anthem for Black girls and women because of the ways Black girls and women engaged with the song on social media. They created a visual language to articulate the political stakes of #blackgirlmagic in an age of police brutality, anti-blackness, and misogyny. Through the use of focus group data with young Black women, we assess how this particular brand of “blackgirlmagic” impacts the political behavior and empowerment of Black college aged women.
KEYWORDS Beyoncé, Black Girl Magic, Nicki Minaj, political empowerment, social media

Brokering Black Brazil or Fostering Global Citizenship? Global Engagement that Empowers Black Brazilian Communities

Abstract:

I waited somewhat impatiently in a perpetually long line to use the restroom at Sankofa African Bar & Restaurant in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, and when I glanced around, I saw two black women behind me whispering to each other and smiling. I later learned that one of the women was Brazilian and the other was African. Quite casually, one of them asked me (in Portuguese): “Where are you from? Are you from Brazil?” Before I could answer, the other smiled and chimed in: “See, I think she’s African, maybe from … Angola?” The other responded quickly: “Look, she has a long face, and that forehead.” The other interrupted: “But her lips (looked at my lips and frowned) are too … (shook her head no).” Curious about the interaction, I remained quiet and smiled coyly, refusing to speak in order not to reveal my accent and/or my identity. When the anticipation (and my discomfort with them deconstructing my facial features) was too much to bear, I revealed: “I’m from the United States.” To which one of the women said to the other: “See I told you! But, you (referring to me) look like you could be from here [Brazil].” This brief interaction alludes to what happens when diasporic groups meet: misidentifications may complicate coalition building, but expectations of solidarity and similarity are also suggestive of the possibilities of diasporic engagement.