• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.412-424
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• 2015

The purpose of this study was to analyze the meaning of soul fashion in American pop culture. This study was conducted using a literature research method based on the prior theses, journals and relevant books. Soul as a concept, originated in African-American communities and evolved from the ideology of Black Power, which prompted Black Nationalism. Soul fashion, which took on two styles in African American culture began to embody black resistance and community pride in the late 20th century. One of these, hip-hop style represented the message of resistance and a sense of beauty outside the mainstream. The other, African-inspired fashion, which utilized a look inspired by African tradition, rejected white supremacy by expressing a proud dignity. As a result, the meaning of "soul" in soul fashion represented by American pop culture resulted in contrasting appearance due to different elements. First, one of its meanings is ironic and sarcastic, and it expressed historical trauma, cultural stereotypes, self-hatred, and self-degradation and, the self-mutilation of African-American by cynically distorting their silhouettes and, using modified materials and patterns, fantastic colors, and extraordinary accessories. Second, the other meanings is the pride and dignity of Black Power, which visualized the concentration of ideas implied by the tradition of African-American, through soul fashion by using fierce traditional of African costumes, unique patterns and accessories.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.129-147
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• 2008

Since the beginning of her dramatic career, Suzan-Lori Parks has considered digging up and restoring African-American history buried under the dominant white Anglo-Saxon history as her mission as a playwright. In Red Letter Plays, she attempts what Deborah Geis called "canon-critique" by taking canonical work by Nathaniel Hawthorne and casting an African-American character as the main character and describing her oppression as an African-American female. This paper argues that Suzan-Lori Parks accuses the oppressive social system by restoring and representing the history of sexual, economic, and racial exploitation that African-American females had to suffer through the dominant image of body and blood. Parks had to rewrite the history of black female characters on their bodies and in the blood because their bodies have been the ultimate object of revulsion and attraction in the perspective of white male. While abhorring and despising Hester La Negrita's abject body, male characters in In the Blood nonetheless not only exploit her sexually and economically but also impregnate her. Hester resorts to her only means of revolting against this oppressive system; she kills her most beloved son and writes "A" on the floor with his blood. Likewise, Hester Smith in Fucking A, who wears "A" on her bosom like Hester Prynne, which in this case means "abortionist," "saves" her son from the hunters by slitting his throat. Abundant graphic and sensational images written on black female body and in the blood are Parks's dramatic strategy to rewrite the forgotten and hidden history of black women's history.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.1
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• pp.61-76
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• 2018

This essay examines Toni Morrison's African-American characters' struggle in The Bluest Eye (1970) and Home (2012) through the lens of heteronormativity, arguing that they suffer double victimization due to both their race and gender. The Bluest Eye portrays a family tragedy caused by an African-American husband and wife's failure to live up to images of gender as represented in white, middle-class media. Written forty-two years later, Home describes an African-American man and woman who establish their own lives away from gendered standards after striving to meet social expectations and becoming traumatized in the process. Their adversities stem not only from the deeply rooted racial discrimination in American society but also from subtle gendered norms implanted by heteronormativity. Morrison's characters in her earlier narrative face a tragic denouement, ultimately destroying their children's lives. By contrast, Morrison's later characters explore more utopian ways of life unfettered by heteronormativity, overcoming hardships imposed by white-centered heteronormal society. By portraying socially victimized characters, Toni Morrison problematizes the power behind the discriminatory nature of heteronormativity and suggests a more gender-neutral, egalitarian way of organizing society, free from the constraints of heterosexuality and from violence created by normalized gender rules.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.433-451
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• 2018

In Jesmyn Ward's 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward places herself within the modern African American literary tradition and lays out the unending "historical traumas" of blacks and cultural haunting in her narrative. She brings to the fore the story of a young black boy and demonstrates the difficulty of living while a black man in the American rural South. Living or dead, black males remain spectral as their frustrated black bodies are endlessly rejected and disembodied. It's through Ward's close attention to the notions of black masculinity and retrieval of (black) humanity that the black South is remembered, recuperated, and historicized. Shrewdly enough, Ward expands it further into the tradition of American literature. Instead of singularizing African American identity and its historical traumas, she renders them the part of American history and universalizing the single black story as the story of the American South. Filling in the gaps that Faulkner and other white writers have left in their novels, Ward writes stories about the unspeakable, the invisible, the excluded to deconstruct white narratives and rebuild the American history; and reasserts African roots and history, spirituality, black raciality and locality within the American tradition. I examine the symbolic significance of Jojo's claim of black masculinity within the socio-political contexts of contemporary America. I also look closely at Ward's portrayal of Jojo's black family genealogy on account of its traumatic experiences of incarceration in notorious Parchman Farm. Locating Jojo as the inspiration of linking the past and the present, the unburied and the living, I contend that Ward creates "home" for blacks in an atemporal oceanic space where the past and the present are able to meet simultaneously. I argue that the oceanic space is an alternative space of affect that functions against the space of white rationality.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.315-332
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• 2009

The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize how Parks recalling, deconstructing and reconstructing African-American memories of the absences in American history through a black Lincoln impersonator named, The Foundling Father or The Lesser Known. Parks unearths and reconstitutes a significance for the historical event of Lincoln's assassination by repetitive mimicry and verbal puns. As a pun of the Founding Father, the Foundling Father reminds us of Abraham Lincoln, one of the most venerated figures in American history. In the first act, the black Foundling Father performs as The Great Man. This inverted minstrel show of the black Foundling Father performing a white Lincoln exposes the desire of the Foundling Father to insert his narrative within the history of America. With a series of assassinations, the African-American performers figuratively murder the power and control of the American myth. In the second act, his wife Lucy and his son Brazil dig relics from the past out of 'The great hole of history' instead of the Foundling Father. Digging and burial for African-Americans are their livelihood and their calling as well. As Parks pointed out, they should locate the ancestral buried ground, dig for bones and find bones because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered and washed out. Parks leaves the possibilities of digging and burying on the black history through Lucy and Brazil.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.107-127
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• 2008

Critics are inclined to interpret J.M. Coetzee's novels in South African contexts, which Coetzee's own background seems to support. One has to bear in mind, however, that Coetzee tends to "see the South African situation as only one manifestation of a wider historical situation to do with colonialism, late colonialism, neo-colonialism." In other words, putting too much emphasis on South African contexts may diminish or undermine significance of Coetzee's multi-layered novels. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to highlight what Coetzee has to say about American colonialism/imperialism and to emphasize importance of "postcolonial rhetoric of simultaneity" which is repeatedly shown in his fictional works. It gives a meticulous attention to and analyzes "Vietnam Project," the first novella of Dusklands, Coetzee's very first novel, which depicts and characterizes "what Chomsky in the context of Vietnam [War] called 'the backroom boys.'" "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," "When a Woman Grows Older," and Diary of a Bad Year are occasionally brought into discussion as well. This kind of study seems timely and pertinent especially when we take into account the rampant American imperialism which has devastated and almost traumatized the world.

• Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.21-30
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• 2024

Purpose: The purpose of this systematic review is to explore end-of-life (EOL) care planning and the impact of socioeconomic status (SES) among people who identify as Black or African American. Methods: The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) were used to guide and inform this systematic review process. The following academic electronic databases with publications that reflected the interdisciplinary fields related to the research objective were searched: APA PsycINFO, CINHAL, PubMed, Scopus, and Social Work Abstracts. Results: After the authors conducted the search, 14 articles (from 13 studies) ultimately met the criteria for inclusion. The results substantiated significant concerns highlighted in previous literature regarding SES and its relation to EOL planning, but also revealed an absence of original work and interventions to increase engagement in EOL planning among Black and African American populations. Conclusion: Black individuals deserve an equitable EOL experience. Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers need to move towards advocacy and action to meet this important need.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.301-322
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• 2008

Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self was published in the Colored American Magazine during 1902-03. As a literary experimentalist and a political protester, Hopkins uses her fiction as a medium to overcome and ameliorate the violently racialized surroundings of the turn-of-the-century America. Having been faced with racist rhetorics and theories growing on biological differences between races, Hopkins must have felt an overwhelming urgency to challenge the heritage of slavery in American history. In order to speak out her political agenda in such a milieu, she needed a new setting as well as new narrative materials for the new era. She had to move the setting from America to Africa, the ancient utopian Ethiopia; her interest in the ancient African civilization reflects both a popular African-American vision of Africa and the movement of "black nationalism" of the time. She also needed materials from nineteenthcentury sciences, the newly evolving theories of psychology and mysticism (spiritualism/mesmerism), to explore the meaning of "the hidden self" which unfolds the complex nature of Hopkin's position on race, "blood," and African-American racial subjectivity. Hopkins in the novel explores not the color line but the bloodline. Tracing the horrific legacy of incest in the history of slavery, she attempts to redefine the true racial identity of African-Americans in America and to reconstruct their past, both family and race history. At the very center of her major tropes in the novel-such as "of one blood," "the hidden self," and incest-exists female body. Black female body, though it represents the violent site of sexual body (rape and incest) in slavery, ultimately becomes a vehicle to convey and preserve the truth of racial memory/past/history for African-Americans. As a conveyor of the past, black women not just connect the past and the present but also reawaken AfricanAmericans with the legacy of the African 'pure' bloodline. Hopkins's vision here necessitates the reevaluation of black women's role in family and history, heralding the 20th-century black feminine writing. With the major tropes, Hopkins clearly suggests that the blood of (African-)Americans is unrecognizably intermixed. Although the novel ends with ambivalence and without resolution on what Africa signifies, those tropes certainly offer her a vehicle for criticizing as well as for challenging the racial reality of America.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.61 no.8
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• pp.45-56
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• 2011

This study is about the features of hybridization of ethnic-cultural elements in Korean fashion magazines. Its purpose was to embody more creative and newer images in fashion by promoting better mutual understanding of foreign cultures and addressing the issues of fashion design from multicultural perspectives. In doing so, the present study conducted a literature review and analyzed a total of 130 photographic images with any hybrid ethic element from two Korean fashion magazines, Vogue Korea and Harper's Bazaar Korea, issued between 2005 and 2009. The analysis revealed that there were 66 images(50.8%) with a mixture of two different cultures and 64 images(49.2%) with a mixture of three or more different cultures. As seen from the results, the two categories had a similar number of cases. In regional terms, the use of two different cultural elements included a mixture of Asian and Western cultures in 32 images(24.6%), a mixture of Western and African, Middle Eastern or Latin American cultures in 23(17.7%), and a mixture of Western and Russian or European folk cultures in 11(8.5%). In the use of three or more different cultural/national elements, the present study found a mixture of Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Latin American and Western costume items in 20 photo images(15.4%), a mixture of African, Middle Eastern and Latin American elements plus Western costume items in 19 images( 14.6%), a mixture of all regional cultures in 13 photos(10%), and a mixture of Asian ethic cultures plus Western costume items in 12 cases(9.2%). The results of this analysis indicated that the hybridization of ethnic-culture elements in Korean fashion magazines consisted of diverse clothing and accessories from various ethnic groups. The expression of these multi-cultural hybrid images that consists background images and models from different cultures well-portrayed the multi-cultural elements based on total coordination and broke the stereotypical aspects of styling.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.29-48
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• 2010

This paper is a kind of interdisciplinary studies which connect a Western film criticism with a criticism of minority literature in America. My purpose in this paper is to put on the table such a sensitive issue as racial representation and representativeness in Clint Eastwood's revisionist Western, Unforgiven. We admit generally that Western films have contributed to the white American myth-making of how the West was won. Yet, since the mid-1960s, a growing number of revisionist Westerns were produced so as to raise a question about the conventional way of looking at what happened in the American West. In order to analyze the problem inherent in the way of seeing, I pay attention to how the director Eastwood (re)presents a character named W. W. Beauchamp in the film. Presumably, what the character Beauchamp misses in the West can be overlapped with what ordinary film viewers miss in the genre of Westerns. Given this, interrogating both what Beauchamp sees and what he misses within the movie, I attempt to disclose how much of the West has been unseen from his biased viewpoint. By doing so, I argue why it is important to focus on some passing scenes that touch on the irony of a Native American train passenger, the gaze of the mute Native American housewife, the abrupt disappearance of Asian American men, the lynching of African-American ex-cowboy, and the self-determination of the saloon prostitutes. Then I hope that, conservative and mainstream though the director is, his way of revising the Western is not quite far from my minority-conscious critical position.