London Calling: Paul Gilroy, Dick Hebdige, and British Multiculturalism

Black man gotta lot a problems But they don't mind throwing a brick White people go to school Where they teach you how to be thick White riot - I wanna riot White riot - a riot of my own White riot - I wanna riot White riot - a riot of my own - “White Riot” by the Clash The winds of imperialism blow two ways. While we often focus on the impact of the colonizer on the colonized, in recent years, more and more writers have begun to also consider what colonialism has meant for imperialists on the domestic front.   Few places provide a window into this reciprocity than 1970s London.  Postwar immigration from former colonies to Britain resulted in an increasingly diverse …

David Greenberg Doesn’t Hate Howard Zinn Because He Was a Bad Scholar, but Because He Was a Radical

Rutgers historian David Greenberg has written a hit piece on Howard Zinn that would be hilarious if it weren’t so cringe-inducing.  Actually, it is hilarious.  Greenberg has taken to the pages of The New Republic to remind the world that the late, great Zinn was a puffed-up piece of nothing, whose work ranks at about the level of a coloring book in scholarly terms.  Why?  Because Greenberg is far more sophisticated than all that. Dumping on Zinn is, unfortunately, a bit of a cottage industry, and the celebrated Boston University historian and activist makes an easy target.  His books are widely read, yet he has a good deal more street cred than the airport-reader-and-civil-war-buff …

9/11 and Its Aftermath in Hip-hop Culture: The Hip-hop Critique of 9/11 and the Bush Administration

They wasn't aimin' at us not at my house They hit The World Trade, The Pentagon And almost got the White House. - Dead Prez The people that's most affected by this war are the so-called hip-hop generation. - Paris September 11, 2001 is a day that will forever live in infamy. Representing the largest attack on American soil in United States history, images of the towers falling reverberated around the world, imbedding themselves in the memories of millions. As Americans searched for answers, their government took bold and decisive action. President George W. Bush declared a war on terror, and began a worldwide manhunt for the perpetrators. The Patriot Act, sanctioned torture and two …

A Day Spent Listening to Talk Radio

On a drive around the great state of Georgia, I got to indulge in one of my favorite pastimes: taking the temperature of conservative talk radio.  Tuning into the AM dial is like checking into an alternate reality version of America: the commercials endlessly promote end-of-the-world survivalism; the hosts fixate on political issues and grievances that most of the rest of the country has given little, if any, thought to; and the world as these stations portray it is stuffed to the gills with robbers, rapists, child molesters, terrorists, con artists, malevolent conspiracies, and venal politicians of the most incomprehensible kind.  Talk radio is like an overweight white man stuffed into …

Inauthentic Authenticity: Ian Svenonius and the Challenge of Indie Rock Satire in an MP3 World

Saturday night, Washington D.C., a stone’s throw from one of D.C. hardcore’s central nodes and the playground of Nation of Ulysses (NOU) front man Ian Svenonius: the Embassy in Mt. Pleasant.  In the late 1980s and 1990s, Svenonius, NOU, and other D.C. punks used to gather at the Embassy to discuss music, politics, and agit prop, even serving as an ally to the Riot Grrrl movement when Kathleen Hanna and others left Washington for a sojourn to the capital in what for many, became a transformative experience.   Tonight, though, sitting in independent book store Politics and Prose and waiting for Svenonius to appear from on high to assault us with his latest philosophical tract, the shop …

The Modern Paul Gilroy: Modernity, Transnationalism, and the Impact of The Black Atlantic on History

Events in Egypt over the past year—its apparent revolution that upended strongman Hosni Mubarak—have been hailed as a victory for democracy.  However, in recent weeks, critics decried the actions of democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi, who adopted dictatorial tactics in pushing through constitutional reforms that would ultimately strengthen his power.  Though he relented, many accused Egypt’s President of betraying the revolution by his apparent return to the heavy-handed nature of his authoritarian predecessor.  While today no one would debate the accuracy of such sentiments in regard to revolution’s meaning, as philosopher Hannah Arendt illustrated in her 1963 work On …

“A Citizen, Not an American”: Obama, Santa Claus, and the Language of Identity

I like to tune in to talk radio from time to time to see what Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Neal Boortz have to say about the issues of the day.  This was of particular interest in the aftermath of the election, as liberals were jubilant and the mainstream media was consumed with chatter about demographics and a new Democratic coalition: the left won with minorities, women, and white professionals (aka yuppies, because obviously these are three discrete groups), and the coalition on the right (which still made up nearly half the vote) was “too old, too white, too male.”  Limbaugh was bound to have a field day with this. When I checked in with Boortz, though, he seemed to be …

Dog Days Classics: A Look Back at Barbara Fields’s “Ideology and Race in American History”

Thirty years after its original publication, Barbara Fields’s essay, “Ideology and Race in American History,” remains one of the preeminent academic investigations into the development of race and racial ideology within American history. I was first exposed to Barbara Fields’s work during a graduate seminar at Columbia University on the post-Reconstruction American South. Fields’s analysis of the roots of racial ideology in American society had a profound impact on my own intellectual outlook. In this post, I aim to reexamine Fields’s classic essay, “Ideology and Race in American History,” along with a later piece, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of …

Electoral Heshers: The Politics of Hardcore and Thrash Metal in the Age of Paul Ryan

Appropriated by rockers, this voice of rebellion, alienation and entitlement has become the national paradigm.  It is the narrative of the culture.   Everyone is an outsider (even the President), and everyone is proud of it. -- Ian Svenonius, The Psychic Soviet, 72 Ian Svenonius knows something about rebellion. As frontman for D.C. punk/hardcore stalwarts Nation of Ulysses (NOU), Svenonius believed NOU to be as much a “political party” as a band.   When describing the purpose of their second release Play Pretty for Me Baby, Svenonius told a reviewer rock ‘n roll had been infiltrated by Pig Parent Culture and the PTA.  “These are the three Ps that stand against power.”  …

Hearting Hamas So Hard Right Now

It says something about where we are that a play called I Heart Hamas can be staged in America without the actors, writers, and producers being run out of town on a rail.  Ten years ago it did not seem like someone could even say “I Heart Palestine” without being hooted down with howls of derision.  I recall the sorry spectacle of a UNCC anthropology professor who wrote to the Charlotte Observer to rebut a virulently racist op-ed piece in the early 2000s; to claim that Palestinians are not, in fact, innately bloodthirsty and fixated on nothing but revenge made Gregory Starrett a lonely voice indeed. Academics such as Edward Said, Joseph Massad, and Nadia Abu el Haj have been hounded …