2Pac's music was not merely rap songs. His music was and continues to be a platform for communicating important messages and concerns with his audiences. To relay these messages, he often used Hip ...Hop Nation Language (HHNL). In this research, I will conduct a linguistic analysis to illustrate how 2Pac's music communicated sociopolitical realities through his use of HHNL. To construct possible answers for the questions that guided this work, the researcher transcribed, coded, and analyzed a sample size of 2Pac's music. From the sample of songs used, the researcher was able to detect three common themes throughout, namely relaying, resisting, and remaining resilient. This paper will present how 2Pac's music (1) relays sociopolitical messages, (2) calls for resisting sociopolitical oppressions, and (3) urges strong resilience within the Black community.
The study examines the fiction of Black Women’s Renaissance. It focuses on the novels of the 1980s, which appreciated “culture-bearing” mothers as reproducers of the nation, to analyze the vexed ...relationship between cultural nationalism and feminism. It argues that the BWR created “matrifocal” nationalism that made black women principal agents of national identity, but also promoted gender essentialism at the expense of social and economic issues.
Pauulu’s Diaspora is a sweeping story of black internationalism across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean worlds, told through the life and work of twentieth-century environmental activist ...Pauulu Kamarakafego. Challenging U.S.-centered views of Black Power, Quito Swan offers a radically broader perspective, showing how Kamarakafego helped connect liberation efforts of the African diaspora throughout the Global South. Born in Bermuda and with formative experiences in Cuba, Kamarakafego was aware at an early age of the effects of colonialism and the international scope of racism and segregation. After pursuing graduate studies in ecological engineering, he traveled to Africa, where he was inspired by the continent’s independence struggles and contributed to various sustainable development movements. Swan explores Kamarakafego’s remarkable fusion of political agitation and scientific expertise and traces his emergence as a central coordinator of major black internationalist conferences. Despite government surveillance, Kamarakafego built a network of black organizers that reached from Kenya to the islands of Oceania and included such figures as C. L. R. James, Queen Mother Audley Moore, Kwame Nkrumah, Sonia Sanchez, Sylvia Hill, Malcolm X, Vanessa Griffen, and Stokely Carmichael. In a riveting narrative that runs through Caribbean sugarcane fields, Liberian rubber plantations, and Papua New Guinean rainforests, Pauulu’s Diaspora recognizes a global leader who has largely been absent from scholarship. In doing so, it brings to light little-known relationships among Black Power, pan-Africanism, and environmental justice.
This article explores the short-lived friendship between white Australian feminist Germaine Greer and Black Australian activist Roberta Sykes. From 1971–73, when both were engaged in transnational ...public work in Australia, Britain, and the United States, they bonded over their experiences of rape and sexism, their will to change their worlds, and the highs and lows of being activist women. The friendship fractured when Greer published an article about rape that disclosed Sykes’s story without her permission. Sykes articulated her feelings of betrayal in a germinal 1975 article about the violent colonization of Black women in Australia—including by white feminists. For Sykes, the women’s liberation movement’s concern with patriarchy and sexual liberation neglected the experiences of Indigenous women and women of color, ignored colonialism and racism, and bolstered white women’s power. Drawing influences from Indigenous, anticolonial, and Black Power visions of self-determination, Sykes repeatedly testified against the objectification and exploitation of Black women. Fifty years later, however, despite her intervention, and the subsequent contributions of postcolonial and intersectional theories, patriarchy is the hegemonic feminist theory for analyzing rape. By centering Sykes’s context of settler colonialism, this article argues that sovereignty is a more capacious concept than patriarchy for understanding different women’s experiences of rape and conceptualizations of freedom. Applicable for feminist praxis beyond the Australian context, the concept of sovereignty honors First Nations peoples and enables analysis that incorporates diverse perspectives. In doing so it recognizes and promotes rather than undermines women’s self-determination.
The history of the US Black Power movement and its constituent groups such as the Black Panther Party has recently gone through a process of historical reappraisal, which challenges the ...characterization of Black Power as the violent, misogynist and negative counterpart to the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, scholars have furthered interest in the global aspects of the movement, highlighting how Black Power was adopted in contexts as diverse as India, Israel and Polynesia. This article highlights that Britain also possessed its own distinctive form of Black Power movement, which whilst inspired and informed by its US counterpart, was also rooted in anti-colonial politics, New Commonwealth immigration and the onset of decolonization. Existing sociological narratives usually locate the prominence and visibility of British Black Power and its activism, which lasted through the 1960s to the early 1970s, within the broad history of UK race relations and the movement from anti-racism to multiculturalism. However, this characterization neglects how such Black activism conjoined explanations of domestic racism with issues of imperialism and global inequality. Through recovering this history, the article seeks to bring to the fore a forgotten part of British history and also examines how the history of British Black Power offers valuable lessons about how the politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism should be united in the 21st century.
Scholars in many disciplines have examined how social movements use the law to create social change. While the study of the law and social movements has largely relied on studies of the US civil ...rights movement to develop theoretical tools for understanding how movements target the state to create legal changes, none of these studies have examined the legal strategy of the Black Power movement. This article draws on data from a larger project on Black Power law and the National Conference of Black Lawyers to develop the idea of the courtroom as contested space and construct a concept of courtroom resistance. I argue that the courtroom, operating as hegemonic white space, was viewed as a site of contestation by Black Power activists who found creative ways to challenge the legal, ideological, and physical “space” of the courtroom. These conceptual tools open an important avenue for researchers interested in examining the relationship between social movements and the law and how race operates in the courts.
This study traces how Black lesbians in the San Francisco Bay Area made a place for themselves in the world at the end of the twentieth century, after the decline of the Black Power Movement and ...before the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Geocoding and analyzing the content of a Black lesbian journal in the San Francisco Bay Area that had global distribution, the author examines how the placemaking of Black lesbians remade them as cultural‐political subjects, expanded their networks, and inspired them to reimagine their relations with the earth. As they crafted cultural spaces across the African diaspora, they faced threats—most notably, street violence, harsh policing and ecological degradation—yet they also experienced joyful interactions with each other, with allies and with nature. The belief grew in their cultural spaces that their liberation required world transformation and that they could change the world. This research, providing a frame for studying the interaction between the making of cultural spaces and the formation of political solidarities, contributes to urban movements research, critical environmental justice studies, and Black feminist/LGBTQ+ research.
In 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon spoke to a crowd of black Chicagoans at the old Jack Johnson boxing ring, rallying their support for emigration to West Africa. In 1937, Celia Jane Allen traveled to ...Jim Crow Mississippi to organize rural black workers around black nationalist causes. In the late 1940s, from her home in Kingston, Jamaica, Amy Jacques Garvey launched an extensive letter-writing campaign to defend the Greater Liberia Bill, which would relocate 13 million black Americans to West Africa.Gordon, Allen, and Jacques Garvey—as well as Maymie De Mena, Ethel Collins, Amy Ashwood, and Ethel Waddell—are part of an overlooked and understudied group of black women who take center stage in Set the World on Fire, the first book to examine how black nationalist women engaged in national and global politics from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. Historians of the era generally portray the period between the Garvey movement of the 1920s and the Black Power movement of the 1960s as one of declining black nationalist activism, but Keisha N. Blain reframes the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War as significant eras of black nationalist—and particularly, black nationalist women's—ferment.In Chicago, Harlem, and the Mississippi Delta, from Britain to Jamaica, these women built alliances with people of color around the globe, agitating for the rights and liberation of black people in the United States and across the African diaspora. As pragmatic activists, they employed multiple protest strategies and tactics, combined numerous religious and political ideologies, and forged unlikely alliances in their struggles for freedom. Drawing on a variety of previously untapped sources, including newspapers, government records, songs, and poetry, Set the World on Fire highlights the flexibility, adaptability, and experimentation of black women leaders who demanded equal recognition and participation in global civil society.
This article considers the influence of Black nationalism on the idea of lesbianism as a distinct and separate identity through five influential US texts, which are Lesbian/Woman by Del Martin and ...Phyllis Lyon, Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism by Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, Lesbian Nation by Jill Johnston, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology edited by Barbara Smith. It argues that while the white authors embraced Black nationalism as an unproblematic model, the Black authors expressed a more nuanced understanding of its strengths and limitations based on their lived experience with the movement.
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