One genre in which explicit or aggressive sexual language seems to serve a clear purpose or seems necessary to the content of the song is in contemporary female rap. Artists like CityGirls and Megan Thee Stallion flip the script on pervasive images in hip hop of men describing sexual dominance over and sexual favors performed…
Author: leahdacosta
Blackness as Magic Ignored
In the scene where Miz Fitzhugh drops by on Christmas, Indigo blows Miz Fitzhugh out the door after becoming angry with her comments. Miz Fitzhugh has made another attempt to take a sort of patronizing ownership of the accomplishments and the personhood of the family when she says, “Why Hilda, you know I feel like…
Prophets and Pets
Zora Neale Hurston uses a sarcastic authorial voice to mock contemporary convictions about race and race reform in her essay “The ‘Pet Negro’ System”. Specifically, she uses a biblical voice to inform readers of the “truth” about relations between blacks and whites in the American South as if she herself is a prophet. The introduction…
Blackness as Out of This World
Science fiction encourages us to accept the fantastic while making us look more critically at the real or material. In the Space Traders story and short film, the science fiction “alien” element allowed the author to generally suspend disbelief and to convince the reader to accept his portrait of blackness in America without questioning if…
Passing, No Science Required
Earlier this summer I saw an article about the actress Tessa Thompson that announced that she would be starring in an upcoming movie adaptation of the book Passing, by Nella Larsen. I had read the book Passing for summer reading in high school. The plotline of the book centers around two childhood friends, both light-skinned…
A Bureau for the Soul
On page 39, Du Bois uses a simile to compare the “passing of a great human institution before its work is done” (referencing the Freedman’s bureau) to the “passing of a single soul”. Considering the thematic reference to the collective soul of black people in America and how it has been and continues to be…
Religion as Ethos in Henry Box Brown’s Narrative
Multiple times in the text Brown points out the hypocrisy of the idea of slaveholding Christians and that the Christian religion and slavery can not exist, or can only exist hypocritically and paradoxically. Brown’s uses examples of the cruel overseer Allen, teaching Sunday school and abusing slaves, and the master who begged and pleaded for…
Deformation of the Southern Lady
The scene at 0:33 in which Beyoncé twirls a parasol and sits dressed in in all white garb and a manner that would be associated with the traditional antebellum South was, for me, a tangible example of Baker’s discourse on mastery of form and deformation. Beyoncé is mastering form in the luxurious clothes and poise,…
Black Matter 