Visual Culture and Hip Hop/VCDM408 with Professor Tewodross Melchishua Williams: Books

“Dark Designs and Visual Culture is a remarkable compilation of images, self-reflexive essays, and other critical works. It demonstrates Michele Wallace’s mastery of cultural criticism and indicates her interaction with American and African American visual culture during the past thirty years. A writer of extraordinary talent, she wields an ever sharpened insight and wit.”—Deborah Willis

Worldwide history of graffiti -- The here and now -- The Americas -- Europe -- The rest of the world -- Information -- Crew names.

In this landmark work of critical theory, black studies, and visual culture studies, Alessandra Raengo boldly reads race as a theory of the image. By placing emphasis on the surface of the visual as the repository of its meaning, race presents the most enduring ontological approach to what images are, how they feel, and what they mean. Having established her theoretical concerns, the author’s eclectic readings of various artifacts of visual culture, fine arts, cinema, and rhetorical tropes provoke and destabilize readers’ visual comfort zone, forcing them to recognize the unstated racial aspects of viewing and the foundational role of race in informing the visual.

Looking at state violence : Lucy Parsons, José Martí, and Haymarket -- From Haymarket to the Mexican revolution : anarchists, socialists, wobblies, and magonistas -- Sensational socialism, the horrors of the porfiriato, and Mexico’s civil wars -- The end(s) of barbarous Mexico and the boundaries of revolutionary internationalism -- Sensational counter-sensationalisms : Black radicals struggle over mass culture -- Archiving Black transnational modernity : scrapbooks, stereopticons, and social movements -- "Wanted? a colored international" : Hubert H. Harrison, Marcus Garvey, and modern media -- Deportation scenes.

The Visual Culture Reader does justice to this exciting interdisciplinary field, bringing together key writings as well as specially commissioned articles by authors including Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and Kobena Mercer. In total, 63 essays cover photography, painting, sculpture, fashion, advertising, television, cinema and digital culture. The reader, now in a completely revised new edition, comprises articles grouped into thematic sections, each prefaced by an introduction by the editor, and including suggestions for further reading.

A significant contribution to knowledge about methods of recording and presenting visual culture of non-Western peoples in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen investigate the complex history of black minstrelsy, adopted in the mid-nineteenth century by African American performers who played the grinning blackface fool to entertain black and white audiences. We now consider minstrelsy an embarrassing relic, but once blacks and whites alike saw it as a black art form―and embraced it as such. And, as the authors reveal, black minstrelsy remains deeply relevant to popular black entertainment, particularly in the work of contemporary artists like Dave Chappelle, Flavor Flav, Spike Lee, and Lil Wayne. Darkest America explores the origins, heyday, and present-day manifestations of this tradition, exploding the myth that it was a form of entertainment that whites foisted on blacks, and shining a sure-to-be controversial light on how these incendiary performances can be not only demeaning but also, paradoxically, liberating. 12 illustrations

"The original essence of the dance" : history, community, and classic b-boy records -- "Getting your foundation" : pedagogy -- "We have to be exaggerated" : aesthetics -- "In the cypher" : b-boy spaces -- "I hate b-boys-- that’s why I break" : battling -- From rocking to b-boying : history and mystery.

This book’s remixes (as opposed to chapters) reveal that black popular music and black popular culture have always been more than merely “popular music” and “popular culture” in the conventional sense and reflect a broader social, political, and cultural movement. With this in mind, sociologist and musicologist Reiland Rabaka critically reinterprets rap and neo-soul as popular expressions of the politics, social visions, and cultural values of a contemporary multi-issue movement: the Hip Hop Movement.

"Reaching as well into the areas of punk rock, reggae, and finally hip-hop, Keep On Pushing admirably points out numerous key developments and connections throughout a vital, revolutionary element of popular music." —Under the Radar

Love : the 1970s, Peace : the 1980s, Soul : the 1990s
Music, dance, and style of a generation

The roots -- The score -- Word of mouth -- Asphalt chronicles : hip hop and the storytelling tradition -- Seven MCs.