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2. Disney's Tia Dalma: A Critical Interrogation of an 'Imagineered' Priestess
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Samuel,Kameelah Martin (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 2012 /Spring
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black Women, Gender & Families
- Journal Title Details:
- 6(1)
- Notes:
- The conjure woman has long lived as a popular American cultural icon, so much so that it seemed destined that multimedia conglomerate the Walt Disney Company would eventually adopt and embrace her. The conjure woman's likeness is reflected in the Disney feature films Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007). This essay investigates just what happens to black women and spirit work when placed in the hands of Disney, a corporation with a sordid history of pirating in another context. The work is particularly invested in complicating black female body politics by addressing the additional stigma against female spiritual autonomy. How is an association with African spiritual cosmologies inscribed on the physicality of black women in popular culture? I focus my attention on Tia Dalma, the minor black female character engaged in Vodou in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, applying a close reading of the spiritual iconography and other cinematic coding surrounding her performance of African-based spirituality. I assess Disney's appropriation of black cultural forms in the construction of fantasy and fairytale.
3. From Otello to Porgy: Blackness, masculinity, and morality in opera
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- André,Naomi, (Author)
- Format:
- Book, Section
- Publication Date:
- 01/01; 2012
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Collected Work: Blackness in opera: How race and blackness play out in opera.Pages: 11-31.(AN: 2012-00965).
- Notes:
- Around the beginning of the 20th century the codes for representing masculinity in opera began to change. This essay focuses on how the changing codes of masculinity in leading male roles are calibrated differently for white European characters and nonwhite characters with non-European ancestry (for example, African American, Caribbean, Moorish, or African) and shows how masculinity and heroism are brought together differently for black and non-black characters. The first section examines Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (1887) and focuses on a critical moment near the end of the opera that links orchestral developments in Italy at the end of the 19th century with the way Verdi dramatizes Otello's vicious murder of Desdemona. A broader overview considers four operas written in the first half of the 20th century: Berg's Wozzeck (1925), Krenek's Jonny spielt auf (1927), Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935), and Britten's Peter Grimes (1945). Two of these operas (Wozzeck and Peter Grimes) feature white European title characters, while the other two feature African American protagonists.
4. Orpheus in Babylon: Music, myth and realism in the films of Rio de Janeiro
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Treece,David, (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 01/01; 2012
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Collected Work: Screening songs in Hispanic and Lusophone cinema.Pages: 298-314.(AN: 2012-16999).
- Notes:
- Considers the role of music, both symbolic and material, in screen representations of Rio de Janeiro since the 1950s. The music of Rio's streets and hillsides has played more than a mere supporting role in the cinematic representations of the city across the last half-century. Embracing samba, bossa nova, MPB, soul, funk, funk carioca (a local variant of Miami bass), and rap, the heterogeneous voices of Rio's soundscape have arguably shaped audiences' understanding and imagination of its cultural geography and social dynamic as much as the films' visual narratives and dramas. The author discusses some key examples spanning the last 50 years, from Nelson Pereira dos Santos's Rio, Zona Norte (Rio, North Zone, 1957) and Marcel Camus's Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus, 1959), to Carlos Diegues's remake Orfeu (Orpheus, 1999) and Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002). Taking as his point of departure the mythical narrative of Orpheus, he explores the representation of popular music as a force for social redemption, regeneration, and reconciliation. He interrogates the interplay of different musical styles and idioms, such as samba and bossa nova, on screen, and challenges one of the common assumptions about shifts in style and sound: the idea that the harder soundtracks of most recent films (centering on rap and funk carioca) correspond to a necessarily more realistic and truthful representation of the city, as opposed to the allegedly sentimentalized depictions associated with the bossa nova-influenced scores of Orfeu negro and Rio, Zona Norte. In cinematic representations of the city, Rio's musical identity continues to be performed in a dialogue between tradition and innovation, the local and the diasporic, with no song style being more real than any other.
5. Playmates of the Caribbean: Taking Hollywood, Making Hard-Core
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Hines,Claire (Author), Hines,Claire (Editor), and Kerr,Darren (Editor)
- Format:
- Book, Section
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- London, England: Wallflower
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Hard to Swallow: Hard-Core Pornography On Screen
- Journal Title Details:
- pp. 126-144
6. Re-Framing the Colonial Caribbean: Joscelyn Gardner's White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Simpson,Hyacinth M. (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 2012-03
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Postcolonial Studies
- Journal Title Details:
- 15(1) : 87-104
- Notes:
- The article discusses the role that the visual arts and museums—through the way their framing and selection choices shape viewers’ perception—play in the construction and deconstruction of post/colonial Caribbean identities. The locus of the analysis is a multimedia installation titled White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece, which was mounted at the Barbados Museum by Barbadian Canadian visual artist Joscelyn Gardner in 2004. The artist's aim in the installation was to expose the telling gaps, silences, and omissions in regard to black and white kinship and inter-racial relations in artistic productions of the colonial period. One such production was the sub-genre of portraiture known as the conversation piece, which was fashionable among an emerging middle class that included colonial landowners and merchants eager to use that visual medium to simultaneously document the wealth their colonial connections brought them and disavow their use and abuse of black bodies to create that wealth. In challenging the conventions of the conversation piece, Gardner recovers unspoken and suppressed stories from the colonial Caribbean past in order to re-present black and white Creole females identities; and in her use of the installation to ‘intervene’ into items displayed in permanent exhibits, she demonstrates how the Museum can become a site of active contestation of received knowledge.