Public Scholarship
Kanye West's Sonic [Hip Hop] Cosmopolitanism
The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, ed. Julius D. Bailey
Palgrave McMillan: 2014: 97-108
“West utilizes music to tread the line between hip-hop identity politics and his own convictions, blurring discourses through which race and gender are presented to a (inter)national audience, it is important to note that hip-hop serves doubly as an intervention of American capitalism and of black agency. Hip-hop's attraction abroad remains attached to its roots as a voice for oppressed groups. Tropological overlaps of trauma and prejudices about bodies of color--that is, police brutality and poverty--speak to a broader audience than African Americans.”
Fear of a Black (In The) Suburb
Sounding Out!
“Hip hop reinforces conceptualizations of contemporary blackness as urban. In this context, sonic blackness collapses the absolute binaries in which blacks are frequently forced to exist, i.e. urban and rural, working class and middle class, silence and noise. Yet when it is situated in hip hop, sonic blackness can also be considered a disruption of suburbia, a dominant trope of white privilege at the end of the 20th century. Using examples from the contemporary cartoon show The Boondocks, I posit that the show’s use of hip hop underscores how the white suburban soundscape is constructed in contrast to black urban sounds.”
Close To Home: A Conversation About Beyoncé's 'Lemonade'
NPR Music
“I say Beyoncé made people uncomfortable because her performance in Lemonade wasn't just a curation of the blueswoman aesthetic but an active reckoning with it as it manifested in southern spaces. Pair the blueswoman tradition with the traditional memory of the south as traumatic and backwards and you get a ripe space for unpacking the multiple layers of black women's healing and existence that Beyoncé tackles in this project.”
Before Beyoncé made ‘Formation,’ Zora Neale Hurston laid out her roadmap
Washington Post
“Moving forward, Hurston’s art and writing were undeniably southern and black. Her work demonstrated her grappling with making a living while evoking the very southern black identities she sought to highlight. Whose memories and experiences was she trying to document? Who was her audience? Was her art for her (black) community, or for the profit of her white readers?
Perhaps Beyoncé has experienced a similar transformation.”
SOP IT DRY (Or, how to make country black girl magic)
Gravy
“The historical and cultural roots of cooking in our family were always on display. But they were not annotated like in a textbook. Our family recorded our history in practice. My people would say, “My mama taught me how to make this.” Our life in the country, adjacent to the cyclical fields that grew and died, offered a quiet resilience and strength that I learned to love.”