Blue Funk

This chapter examines the development of funk as a distinct concept in black vernacular culture, and explains how blues artists, modern jazz musicians, and political attitudes during the civil rights movement combined to establish the foundation for the musical genre of funk as well as the non-conformist aesthetics and attitudes the music expressed. The central argument is therefore two-fold: that blues artists formulated the concept now known as funk, and that funk became the epistemic centerpiece of a broader cultural aesthetics in black working-class environments. As with the previous chapter, “Blue Funk: The Ugly Beauty of Stank ” foregrounds the central role of kinesthesia in blues-oriented approaches to music-making. Using insights and methods from multiple areas of scholarship, including musicology, ethnomusicology, philosophy, literary criticism, dance criticism, and art history, Bolden explains how the concept of funk and/or precepts associated with funk were not only exemplified in several black musical genres but also dancing, literature, and visual art as well. In this way, black artists working in several mediums contributed to the transformation of “funky” from a stigmatizing signification, that is, a negative, stereotypical expression into a metaphor of black cultural affirmation.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Philippine Village exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. Despite the supposedly comprehensive nature of the Philippine display, the exhibit was ultimately called upon to serve two sometimes divergent scientific and pedagogical functions. On the one hand, the Philippine Village was a self-contained exhibit, set apart as an inclusive continuum of indigenous types ranging from the “head-hunting,” “dog-eating,” savage Igorots to the highly civilized Philippine Scouts and Constabulary. By viewing these communities in quick successive comparison, onlookers could draw broad lessons from the “demotic” differences in dress, materials, cultural customs, and habits. The Philippine exhibit was also meant to be an interactive display promoting a sense of otherization and cultural affirmation. This book examines a particularly soft spot in the subjective and contested colonial discourse between colonizer and colonized at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition—that of the Philippine Muslims, also known as Moros. The chapter then describes the Moro Village, which was constructed to effectively commodify and exoticize the mundane aspects of Moro life.

Brazilian Art and the Dilemma of Globalization: Strategies of Internationalization and Cultural Affirmation in Two 1990s Biennials

This paper will address specifically the 24th edition of the São Paulo Biennial (1998), which took up Oswald de Andrade’s concept of anthropophagy as a guiding axis, but it will also bring to light the first edition of the Mercosul Biennial, which was held in 1997 in the city of Porto Alegre, situated in the south of Brazil, with the intention of establishing itself as a space for promotion of Latin American art. Both biennials are private entities, supported by autonomous foundations, but which require public funds to carry out their shows. It is noteworthy that those two shows were held a few years after the third edition of the Havana Biennial, which is widely recognized as a landmark in the history of the biennials based on South–South dialogue. I will point out the connections between the proposals of these exhibitions as well as relate them to the Brazilian economic situation at the time and the dilemma of globalization.

Toward a Muslim Ethics of Care: Leadership in American Islamic schools

In this empirical study, I describe how Muslim women leading American Islamic schools enact a critical ethics of care framework in their leadership work. As previous critical studies indicate, this research moves beyond caring as an expression of emotion to the work of caring that transforms a community into one that can challenge inequities by building a climate of cultural affirmation. Through an analysis of qualitative interviews of such women, I advance a concept of Muslim ethics of care that communicates the caring work of school leaders rooted in establishing equity. The following four themes form the foundation of this conceptual framework: (a) caring to lead with equitable school practices; (b) caring as resistance to oppression, (c) caring through nurturing often described as “other mothering,” (d) and caring as an Islamic obligation. This study places these leaders’ voices within the broader context of a critical ethics of care framework, thereby demonstrating the role of faith-marginalized community leaders as social justice advocates.

Exploring Reader-Generated Language to Describe Multicultural Literature

How do readers describe multicultural fiction works? While in library and information science (LIS) we have the language of appeal factorsand genre trendsto describe works of fiction, these linguistic choices may not be used by readers to describe their own responses and reactions to works that provide cultural affirmation of one’s own culture or exposure to learning different cultures. In this research, text mining processes are employed to harvest reader-generated book reviews and subsequently analyze the words readers use to describe award-winning multicultural fiction on the retailer site Amazon.com. Our goal with this study is to provide LIS professionals an insight into readers’ perspectives related to multicultural fiction. We describe our methodology of engaging in topic modeling as described by Jockers and Mimno (2013) as applied to multicultural fiction reviews. First, we explore the construction and processing of a corpus of reader reviews of multicultural fiction titles, then we model topics using a topic modeling toolkit to generate topics from these reviews. Through this analysis, we determine consistent terms used to describe multicultural fiction that can be used to indicate common reader experience and identify topics. Closing discussion reflects on whether librarians can use text mining of reader reviews to enhance their reader advisory services for readers seeking books that represent multiple and/or diverse cultures.

Folkloric Meta-Narratives In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Following Chinua Achebe’s claim that his Things Fall Apart is a counter-narrative to Joyce Cary’s distortion of the African image in Cary’s Mister Johnson, most critics of Things Fall Apart have approached the existence of folklore in the novel from the perspective of cultural affirmation. Others see it as part of the artistic ornament used to deck the work. Be that as it may, this paper does not intend to dispute these perspectives. It rather intends to prove that Achebe’s use of folklore in Things Fall Apart is not just to affirm the functionality of folk culture in the precolonial African society depicted in this novel but also to buttress several sequence of events of the novel. It argues that the folkloric narratives within the larger narrative that is Things Fall Apart function as specialized meta-narratives which play an interesting array of roles in the novel, namely: to run commentaries on the incidents that surround the hero’s life; to show how folkloric wisdom in the novel appears to warn against certain unethical actions of the hero and to comment on the significance of some executed actions in the novel; as well as to foreshadow impending tragic situations in the life of the hero just like the chorus in Greek tragic plays. The methodology for this study is a critical analysis of the text in the light of a recontextualised and re-imagined application of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s concept of metanarrative. Unlike Lyotard’s notion of a metanarrative as a grand narrative that helps to legitimize other little narratives, we elect to read folkloric meta-narratives as related miniature versions of different sequences of the story of the novel, Things Fall Apart.

MEDIATING MATONGE: RELOCATIONS OF BELGIAN POSTCOLONIALITY IN FOUR FILMS

In this paper I look at the Matonge neighbourhood of Brussels as a locus of postcolonial and diasporic imagination and activism by different groups and individuals most notably people who identify as Africans, Belgians with African roots, or ‘Black’ in Belgium. Within a longer historical narrative that starts in the late 19th century, I focus on the period beginning in the late 1980s when new migrational flows from Africa and other southern countries into Brussels make the Matonge quarter increasingly visible in an otherwise hesitantly globalizing Belgian/European metropolis. This issue is taken up by several filmmakers who, over the last thirty years, have situated their critiques of the Belgian postcolonial condition in ‘Matonge’. In this paper I briefly present four of these films in order to illustrate the ways in which ‘Matonge’ features in changing discourses concerning inequality, cultural affirmation, and diasporic activism. KEYWORDS: MATONGE, BRUSSELS, POSTCOLONIAL CONDITION, MEDIA AND MEDIATION

In Poetic Memory of Zumbi’s Palmares and Abdias do Nascimento’s Quilombismo. In Homage to Abdias do Nascimento (1914-2011)

Modern urban formations of the Arts (such as the literary published phenomenon known as Cadernos negros) and activism have roots in the Zumbi-Palmares legacy. Quilombismo, created by Abdias do Nascimento, serves to explain this experience. A contemporary philosophy of identity and nationhood, Quilombismo mirrors Negritude, embracing transformations that erode injustice and inequality. It emerged as a product of Nascimento’s commitment to politics, the Black Movement, literature, and theater. He envisioned his art, speeches, essays, and activism as part of the global anti-racist democratization; his writings reveal influences from Pan-Africanism and a deep commitment to Afro-Brazil. The elevation of quilombo from maroonage and black rural communities to the level of philosophy has provided impetus to date, as literature and activism maintain momentum in an era of diversity. Moving beyond fleeing black bodies in search of Palmares, an image frozen in time, this thinker has provoked dynamic perceptions of cultural affirmation, ensuring the survival of values associated with Zumbi’s Palmares.

Mediating Matonge: Relocations of Belgian Postcoloniality in Four Films

In this paper I look at the Matonge neighbourhood of Brussels as a locus of postcolonial and diasporic imagination and activism by different groups and individuals most notably people who identify as Africans, Belgians with African roots, or ‘Black’ in Belgium. Within a longer historical narrative that starts in the late 19th century, I focus on the period beginning in the late 1980s when new migrational flows from Africa and other southern countries into Brussels make the Matonge quarter increasingly visible in an otherwise hesitantly globalizing Belgian/European metropolis. This issue is taken up by several filmmakers who, over the last thirty years, have situated their critiques of the Belgian postcolonial condition in ‘Matonge’. In this paper I briefly present four of these films in order to illustrate the ways in which ‘Matonge’ features in changing discourses concerning inequality, cultural affirmation, and diasporic activism.

“A paradigm of possibility”: Community mentors and teacher preparation

In this paper, we investigate mentor perspectives of their roles as de facto “teacher educators.” Drawing upon three years of qualitative data, we argue that community voices and knowledge should be reflected in decisions regarding what and how children are taught. We assert that, by broadening the definition of “teacher educator” beyond university faculty to include community members, we create spaces through which the development of culturally responsive teaching can more authentically emerge. The larger study from which this paper is derived examines the innovative practices of a teacher preparation program at a Midwestern university in the United States of America, wherein majority White, female, middle-class candidates are paired with mentor families in a low-income African-American neighborhood. This program of cultural immersion builds relational ties between community members, and mentors facilitate candidates’ movement beyond deficit perspectives of communities of color and simplistic notions of celebration to see cultural affirmation and contextual knowledge of children’s lived experiences as critical to student success. In the present study, we challenge neoliberal “commonsense” in the preparation of teachers by privileging community voices and highlighting how mentors perceive their respective roles as teacher educators.