Welcome to the jungle new positions in Black cultural studies Kobena Mercer

Object Details

Contents: Introduction: Black Britain and the Cultural Politics of Diaspora -- 1. Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson's Thriller -- 2. Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination: The Aesthetics of Black Independent Film in Britain -- 3. Recoding Narratives of Race and Nation -- 4. Black Hair/Style Politics -- 5. Black Masculinity and the Sexual Politics of Race. True Confessions / Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien. Racism and the Politics of Masculinity. AIDS, Racism and Homophobia. Engendered Species -- 6. Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Imaging The Black Man's Sex (1986). Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary (1989) -- 7. Dark and Lovely: Black Gay Image-Making -- 8. Black Art and the Burden of Representation -- 9. Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics -- 10. "1968": Periodizing Politics and Identity
Summary: Welcome to the Jungle brings a black British perspective to the critical reading of a wide range of cultural texts, events and experiences arising from volatile transformations in the politics of ethnicity, sexuality and "race" during the 1980s. The ten essays collected here examine forms of cultural expression in black film, photography and visual art exerging with a new generation of black British artists, and interprets this prolific creativity within a sociological framework that reveals fresh perspectives on the bewildering complexity of identity and diversity in an era of postmodernity. Kobena Mercer documents a wealth of insights opened up by the overlapping of Asian, African and Caribbean cultures that constitute Black Britain as a unique domain of diaspora. As a result of the turbulent displacements of the 1980s, new forms of hybrid identity came out of the margins while others were progressively de-centered. Looking at the United States and Britain as societies of the black diaspora, ambiguous manifestations of this dynamic are critically examined across a variety of surfaces from Michael Jackson's ethnic androgyny to the cut and mix profusion of post-essentialist sensibility expressed in the medium of black hairstyles

Data Source: Smithsonian Libraries

Date: 1994; 20th century; 20e siècle

author: Mercer, Kobena 1960-,-

Type: Books

Physical description: viii, 339 pages illustrations 23 cm

Place: Great Britain; Grande-Bretagne; Großbritannien; USA; United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; United States; Schwarze

Topic: African American arts; African Americans--Race identity; Arts, Black; Arts, British; Black people--Race identity; Arts noirs américains; Noirs américains--Identité ethnique; Arts noirs; Arts britanniques; 20.05 art in relation with other areas of culture: general; Kultur; Schwarze; Blacks; Cultural identity; Arts, American; Arts, Modern; Blacks--Race identity; Great Britain

Record ID: siris_sil_477793

Usage: CC0