Devair Jeffries-Lee

Considering how institutional punishment disproportionately and detrimentally effects Black men, we deem Moonlight a “performance of resistance devised to respond to the highly predictable and anticipated arrival of racial violence within a person’s lifetime” as described by Harvey Young in Embodying Black Experience. Textual and performance analysis form the crux of our filmic exploration which incorporates the intellectual influence of performance studies theorists Harvey Young and Harry Elam, black theatre scholars who consider the implications of Black male representation, particularly in postmodern productions like Moonlight. Essentially, we aim to utilize these theoretical frameworks to explore Moonlight’s form and content and highlight Tarell Alvin McCraney’s efforts to shift Black male representation through the character Chiron.

This study investigates the lives and dramatic works of Harlem Renaissance women who have not have enjoyed due appreciation. I juxtapose Angelina Grimke's Rachel (1916), Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck (1925), and Georgia Douglas Johnson's Safe (1929) with the ideologies of Black male intellectuals to assess the societal perspectives and aesthetics of the movement. Despite the Harlem Renaissance canon favoring Black men's text, this work considers the contributions of both sexes.

With the inclusion of her autobiographical experiences as a Black woman, Lydia Diamond unapologetically addresses race, class, and gender as reflected in the Black female characters of Stick Fly and Voyeurs de Venus. Both works tackle sexuality and interracial relationships while challenging typical stereotypes such as the mistress, mammy, and angry Black woman with roles like academic professional, author, domestic housekeeper, and enslaved exhibitionist. Ultimately, I combine textual analysis of Stick Fly and Voyeurs de Venus with a critique of popular culture to assess Black female representation in theatre and real life. By utilizing Black feminism from hooks (2002) and Collins (2004) with identity politics discourse of critical race theorist Crenshaw (2013), I determine how Diamond’s work complicates and elevates Black female representation to resemble her version of truth.

In Lemonade, Beyoncé uses her iconic visibility to introduce a powerful and unapologetic vision of Black womanhood to a culture that has historically demanded racial assimilation. As a definitive moment in contemporary culture, the hour-long visual album signals a three-fold reinvention of musical form, artistic evolution, and Black feminine identity. Lemonade transcends genre and blurs cultural boundaries by embracing a linear method of storytelling that elevates typical music video form and function. Further, the work infuses pertinent historical context and engages current social movements related to race and gender.

While stage and screen dramas need flawed characters, negative portrayals of Black women inform the way in which they are perceived in reality. Of the many negative Black female archetypes throughout history, Black feminist scholar, Lisa Anderson, describes the mistress as one of the most common. Critical literacy and critical race theory are additional scholarly structures that help deconstruct news and social media as well as the legal and political policies that enable institutional racism in the United States. I primarily analyze how characters in Voyeurs de Venus, 12 Years A Slave, and Scandal reveal the enduring qualities of the Black mistress stereotype in American culture so that women’s sexuality might evolve into more positive and authentic representation.

One Hundred Years of Hope is a documentary play of transcribed interviews from Black, White, and Latin@ individuals who were ages 18-25 in 1965 at the height of the Civil Rights movement and ages 18-25 in 2015 during the alleged post-racial era. Our primary motivation for the work was to talk about various recurring racial issues in the United States. This work starts the rare, but necessary conversation of openly addressing discrimination that results in tragic hate crimes and police brutality that has inspired the necessary movement and mantra, Black Lives Matter. This essay utilizes the collaborative storytelling in One Hundred Years of Hope to investigate the history of racism through symbolism in the southern United States. Ultimately, my research explores the significance of collecting and analyzing the nuanced experiences of individuals, as well as emphasizes the therapeutic value and social impact that results from sharing personal narrative.

Using Marxist and Critical Race Theory frameworks to call codified culture into question, this essay explores how diverse modes of expression are crushed by the restraint of the individual and through a lack of variance that prohibits progress for Black males in American society. This essay critiques the capitalist structure that insists on the illusion of uniformity when it clearly benefits and operates from emphasizing difference. The article compares the impact of a consumerist frame of reference on career, residence, and material possessions; media technologies' published messages and images that contribute to negative stereotypes; and the formation of style as an act of naming or resisting with regard to the proliferation of questionable and brutal treatment of Black males by law enforcement agents, in particular, and society, in general.

This paper examines the ways in which body, voice, and image are portrayed in contemporary media productions that persist in creating negative identity constructs for Black women. Much of what is consumed by mainstream culture is a skewed, caricatured perception of Black women created by those outside of their demographic. More recent and limited works by and about Black women attempt to dismantle this phenomenon and are moving in the right direction by offering images of empowerment; however these presentations of the Black fem ale experience are still distorted and conventionalized. This essay encourages additional portrayals that affirm and explore a wider array of Black female experiences.

This article, theoretically constructed on Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony, explores the use of Black female hair as a cultural signifier in two media texts, specifically Adrienne Kennedy’s play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, and Chris Rock’s documentary, Good Hair, in specific media texts. Analysis of the verbal and visual rhetoric regarding a Black female aesthetic revealed associated themes of generational family influences and identity formation.