Output details

Under a bad sign : criminal self-representation in African-American popular culture

Under a Bad Sign analyses how African American criminal self-representation works across different arts and media over an extended historical period. It interrogates the adequacy of existing arguments and intellectual frameworks on this controversial issue through a combination of new findings gleaned from extensive archival research and the interdisciplinary assembling of and rigorous engagement with established insights and knowledge. It advances a case for bringing together theories about racial stereotype often separated by disciplinary boundaries (in visual, music and literary arts) and high/low aesthetic distinctions in order to better understand how seemingly counter-productive responses to the legacy of white racism have formed a vital part of a now global multi-million dollar culture industry. The research conducted has significance in expanding the domain of contemporary arts intellectual enquiry (in terms of its interdisciplinary, multimedia and inclusive aesthetic range) and connecting academic arguments over the cultural trafficking in racial stereotype to wider debates about race prejudice in the civic sphere. Such a task has been grounded in research conducted at seminal archives, such as The Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; The New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University.