I love that this response brings attention to the dichotomy of gender while being black in a nonblack, racially homogenous country. Intersectionality needs to be brought at the forefront of any conversation regrading the othering of people based on social constructs such as race and gender. I especially like how Jenny states how it is “hard to situate Black womanhood because it is beyond the Japanese definition of women”. With that I ask, at what point does cultural normativity become exclusionary and/or oppressive, if ever?
Link to Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6giKIu5jUvA
Solange is known her for use of non-contemporary themes in her music videos. Solange’s “Almeda”, in particular, is piece for the empowerment of the black identity and sensuality. While reading Poetry is Not A Luxury (1985), I immediately thought of black female artists who use poetry to express freedom of thought and feeling. I felt that the eros discussed in The Uses of the Erotic as Power was expressed in the music video, exemplified by images of Solange and other black individuals pole dancing, posing, and being present in spaces of power (such as the high stories of office buildings).
I just loved listening to this poem, where the body is the house, where countries are lines you can draw as is pleases you, and love never an alternative to basic and in the same time major needs and rights.
The author repeats several times that other people spend their time telling her she has an accent in every language, meaning she’s always a stranger, an alien, and that her language, like her body, never completely “suit” people’s expectations.
So I think this Alien Suite could also be seen as an Alien Suit.
No matter where she is from on the surface, she goes deep in the inside.
I chose Gold Link’s New Black because I felt like it was heavily related to the DuBois reading in which he talks about stunting the growth of black people will be the death of a nation. Also, it relates to Audre Lorde’s passage on how Poetry isn’t a luxury. Gold Link poetically frames the situation of black rap music –
“Hip-hop will die, I promise that
If we keep the lies in our raps, uh
Bibbity bibbity bop bop
New Black, the scat, dat beat box
Hip-hop will die, I promise that
If we keep talkin’ guns and gats in our raps”
This song really brings everyone into the conversation of what media // poetry we should bring to the people.
Being a black man interested in Tokyo myself, I was drawn to this post. It was particularly interesting because the student talked about the division of experiences between black women and black men. It seemed that black women had more barriers to overcome when it comes to assimilating. As it says in the blog post, this is most likely due to the gender bias in Japan. It was very interesting to see this all play out within the documentary because it seems like, at times, there are two very disparate minds / ways of thinking when it comes to life in Tokyo. Both have issues of race when it comes to the portrayal of black people in media but women have the intersection of race and gender that gives them even more problems than black men. Even though there are problems, it’s really cool to see that black culture is accepted and respected there
Hi everybody.
I chose this song because I think it’s perfectly related to Lorde’s perspective saying the Erotic is everywhere and moves us in every action we perform, within intimacy or political (and since private is political…)
I particularly love this passage, which I think can also apply to the first vision Matthew sees has of the Dark Princess in DuBois’ novel :
“My, I wanna drink the sweat of your intellect,
reflect, and watch your light passion walk my neck.”
“I’m My #1” is from the Netflix series The Get Down, which is a fictional show set in the South Bronx in the late 1970s. It follows a group of teenagers as they pursue hip hop, disco, and graffiti. I feel that this song relates to the pieces by Audre Lorde. Herizen Guardiola’s character, Mylene Cruz, is trying to pursue her dream of being a singer, but her father is a pastor who deeply opposes her dream because her musical career in disco is–to borrow from Audre Lorde–too erotic. For Mylene, her singing is empowering, and if I remember correctly, the strength, independence, and power she gains from passionately expressing herself in this way causes tension not only with her family but also with her producer in terms of her public image and her boyfriend.
The Get Down also has themes of social change, which aren’t fully expressed in just this one song. I feel that the social change that the characters in The Get Down are creating and pursuing through their art connects well with this quote from page 1 of the excerpt from Lorde’s Poetry is Not a Luxury:
“And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions our dreams imply and some of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only our poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.”
Janelle Monáe’s album, Dirty Computer, is a visually stunning piece that boldly reaches for the deepest desire of love. In “Make Me Feel,” she exemplifies erotic empowerment by singing “I’m powerful with a little bit of tender/…/Mess me up, yeah, but no one does it better.” Her confidence in the erotic chaos resonates with Audre Lorde’s advocacy for the erotic agency. Her music career as a queer Black woman, who challenges music spaces dominated by white narratives, also parallels with Lorde’s advice to separate Black women themselves from the European-American frameworks. In “Pynk,” Janelle Monáe’s lyrics “I wanna fall through the stars / Getting lost in the dark is my favorite part” could be another example of Audre Lorde’s call on the exploration of the dark, ancient and deeply spiritual root of Black women. Ultimately in her album, the importance of feelings overcomes the suppression of the self.
Since Spike Lee is visiting Cornell on Sept. 2oth, I think it would be interesting to discuss the relationship between the 1992 L.A. riots and his film, “Do the Right Thing (1989).”
Aree Worawongwasu’s post on the 25th anniversary of the L.A. riots provides links to excellent articles on the racial tension between the Korean and the Black community. In “Black Pain and Korean Empathy,” Chin beautifully unravels why minority communities lack connections between each other. The Asian-American community fails to empathize with how African American people suffer from police brutality and institutionalized racism, whereas the Black community expresses anti-Asian and anti-immigration sentiments because first-generation Asian immigrants lack the English language skills and they usually take up jobs in the Black neighborhood. Although it’s very interesting to learn about the anti-Racism in hip-hop lyrics, I’m more interested in how this structural tension still perpetuates today.
Released three years before the L.A. riots, “Do the Right Thing” features a Korean grocery store owner, Sonny, who yells at a mob of black people: “I no white! I black! You, me, same! We same!” Lee was trying to convey the message that both Korean American people and African American people are victims of white supremacy. Later, Lee also commented that “history repeats itself” in a 1992 interview with Los Angeles Times (Matthews). As of the 21st century, racial violence in Black neighborhoods escalated in cities like Baltimore, while many Asian Americans are still proud of their model minority image, for example, “Chinese people for Trump.” Even though it seems like we are in a loop of repeating racial segregations, I still hope for a future where minority communities build bridges and challenge the criminal system (or the nation’s foundation of democracy) as imagined by Du Bois’ words:
“Thus we appeal with boldness and confidence to the Great Powers of the civilized world, trusting in the wide spirit of humanity, and the deep sense of justice and of our age, for a generous recognition of the righteousness of our cause.”
