Journal of global postcolonial studies最新文献

{"title":"Singing Blackness","authors":"Anastasia Valecce","doi":"10.5744/jgps.2023.1103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/jgps.2023.1103","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I propose the exploration of racial discourse in recent Black Caribbean rap and hip-hop productions. Rap and hip-hop are often used as a sociopolitical tool that—through writing and language—achieve to create activist movements. Specifically, I study the work of the Cuban hip-hop group Obsesión [Obsession] and of Cuban rapper Robe L Ninho and the work of Dominican rappers Circuito Negro and JNoa. I particularly focus on some of their songs that make of the genre an opportunity to approach the racial topic in their communities and a way to celebrate Blackness. This way, these hip-hop and rap songs break the most commercial, common, and expected pattern of lyrics that focus on topics that oversexualize the female (Black) body, that often objectify women, and that reproduce a patriarchal and heteronormative discourse. Instead, these songs, through the topics that they explore, aim to create community and craft a space for social activism. They do so, for example, by singing about hair (Obsesión and Robe L Ninho) and by singing about their Afro-Caribbean communities and their existence as Black people in their neighborhoods (Circuito Negro, JNoa). Among a variety of tracks, I mainly focus on songs that are connected in topic and that represent a continuumin the production of  approximately the last decade. So, for example I analyze the songs “Los pelos [Hair]” by Obsesión (2014) and “N.E.G.R.O. [N.E.G.R.O.]” by Robe L Ninho (2022) that focus on Afro hair, celebrate the beauty of it, and denounce the prejudices against it almost a decade apart from each other. Then, I focus on the song “Revolufunk” by Circuito Negro (2011) and the song “Qué fue[What Happened?]” (2022) by JNoa. In this case also there is a generational gap between the artists that symbolize both the evolution of the genre and the consistency of the topics that they cover and that are connected to Blackness. In addition to the racial discourse and the connection of topics across the last decade, these songs also create an inter-Caribbean discourse that transcends the concept of nation and nationality and instead identifies with and shapes a message for Black Spanish-speaking Caribbean people. These songs reveal a poetic that adds urban sounds to a spoken word tradition and that mixes writing, oral tradition, and language in lieu to create a sociopolitical activist movement for Afro-Caribbean people. Also, by focusing on race in countries where the Black communities are often made invisible, they shed light on minorities that usually are relegated to the lowest layers of society. Thus, through their music, these artists raise awareness on their Blackness and on their communities, but they also create a transversal Afro-Caribbean narrative that connects and creates a sense of community among Blacks in the Caribbean in their native Spanish language. This study, so, represents an opportunity to shift a US-centered discourse on Blackness and race and opens new ways of living ","PeriodicalId":500398,"journal":{"name":"Journal of global postcolonial studies","volume":"60 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141003118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Diaspora, Modernism, and Black Masculinities in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement","authors":"S. Kiang","doi":"10.5744/jgps.2023.1104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/jgps.2023.1104","url":null,"abstract":"Following the transnational turn in modernist studies, and building on Stuart Hall’s and Nadia Ellis’s concepts of diaspora as key to understanding Caribbean modernism, this essay examines Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) as the first wave of West Indian fiction that traces a black, male consciousness shaped by modernity and migration, one whose lived experiences and feelings of belonging in post-WWII London resist binarized understandings of colonizer and colonized. Selvon’s and Salkey’s fiction represents complex and conflicting senses of black masculinity as mediated by colonialism, bourgeois respectability, and whiteness. Migrant or middle-class, normative or queer, the various modes of black masculinity captured in the novels counter reductive attempts to ascribe one fixed identity, ideological position, or reality to Windrush flaneurs who might prefer walking the streets of London incognito.","PeriodicalId":500398,"journal":{"name":"Journal of global postcolonial studies","volume":"88 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141004237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ambivalence of Revolutionary Cleaning in Mona Prince's Revolution is My Name","authors":"Nada Ayad","doi":"10.5744/jgps.2024.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/jgps.2024.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Egyptian writer Mona Prince’s self-published 2012 memoir Revolution is My Name abounds with descriptions of transferring Tahrir Square into a domestic space during the 2011 Revolution: people nurturing fellow visitors and protestors; sharing of blankets, warm clothing and mattresses; cooking and eating; distributing Coca-Cola, endless cups of tea, cigarettes; and nursing the injured who clashed with the police. In one point in her chronicling of her political participation, she describes moving one of her friend’s mattresses out into the square and accepting food from whoever is offering it to her. She also details the square being cleaned by women of the elite class, heralding, in Prince’s imaginings, “a new people.” Focusing on descriptions of the cleaning of the square, this article argues that Prince expands domesticity’s political function while overlooking class and religious biases and blindness that undergird her theorizations of it. This blindness, I argue ultimately undermines the revolution’s attempt at total rupture from the unjust state regime of the past and extends insights into the entanglement of power, oppression and political resistance. Given that theorizations of cleanliness have been mobilized by the colonial project as an alibi for the gendered and racialized inequality of colonialism (and neocolonialism), cleaning here raises the specter of colonialism and highlights its mobility to function as a tool to measure complex class ambivalences.","PeriodicalId":500398,"journal":{"name":"Journal of global postcolonial studies","volume":"148 4‐6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140228519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}