• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.402-415
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• 2011

The purpose of this study is to research the ideologies of African-American hair-styles according to cultural phenomena. This is a qualitative research using the books and theses about society, culture, hair and beauty, and materials of internet. The results are; Firstly, African-Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have origins in any of the black populations of Africa. About 75 percent of the dark-skinned people on this continent have hair labeled "kinky". Secondly, African hair-styles expressed Supernaturalism and Traditionalism in the formative period of African culture. African-American hair-styles reflected Colonialism in the period of slaves. African-American citizen's hair-styles showed Nationalism after 1960s' Black Pride Movement in the period of settlement in America, and expressed De-territorialism since the boom of 1970s' Reggae. Today, the wearing of dreadlocks, cornrows, and afros has transcended racial and religious barriers. No longer necessarily reflections of ancient traditions and cultural identification, they are just as often fashion items.

• 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.

• 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.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.

• 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.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.241-267
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• 2014

Media representations of race have attempted to contain blackness by packaging and commodifying it to reflect and affect preconceptions and prejudices of dominant culture. From the early beginnings of blackface minstrelsy as entertainment form in the $19^{th}$ century, representations of African Americans in popular culture and mainstream media have been closely associated with the notion of performance. The performative nature of racial representations is situated within the discursive struggle over what it meant to be Black, or what it meant to be labeled and portrayed as Black in American culture. This essay discusses four films that contain performances of "blackness" that assemble race and gender in complex configurations: Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000), Girl 6 (Spike Lee, 1996), Big Momma's House (Raja Gosnell, 2000), and White Chicks (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2004). I explore how the performative nature of "blackness" is emphasized, thematized, and problematized in these films through the physicality of corporeal figures that embody the close link between race and gender identities. Once we are cognizant of the fact that race and gender are fabricated cultural constructs and performative acts, we can recognize that notions of "blackness" and "femininity" are not naturalized or essentialist, but open to recontextualization and revision.

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.223-265
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• 2002

In United States black mothers have consistently been treated as national outsiders, as women whose children, although ostensibly entitled to full citizenship, are in practice rarely provided with equal protection within the nation′s borders or under its laws. From the time he began writing in the aftermath of the failures of national Reconstruction, the African American public intellectual and political activist W. E. B. Du Bois realized that a truly effective anti-racist politics would also have to contend with the particular ways in which U.S. racism targeted black mothers. In short, he understood that an effective anti-racism would necessarily have to be a form of anti-sexism. This article examines the myriad ways in which Du Bois attempted to reconstruct the relationship between race and reproduction in the interest of producing anti-racist, anti-nationalist, as well as internationalist thinking. In so doing it treats the various representations of black maternity and child birth that Du Bois created, and elaborates on the rhetorical and political function of these representations in combating the racialization of national belonging on the one hand, and in articulating universal black citizenship, or what this article theorizes as racial globality on the other. The article begins by considering Du Bois′s attempts to transcend ideas about the racialized reproductive body as a source of national belonging within the United States, particularly his efforts to contest the idea of the reconstructing nation as a white nation reproduced exclusively by white women. Through analysis of Du Bois′s depiction of the birth and death of his son in his monumental work The Souls of Black Folk (1903) it demonstrates his reluctance to build an anti-racist politics founded on the idea that belonging within the nation is something that can be bestowed by one′s mother. The article proceeds by turning to Du Bois less well-known romantic novel, Dark Princess (1928) in which, by contrast, he depicts the birth of a "golden chi1d" who belongs not only within the United States, but within the world. This child, the son of an African American man and an Indian Princess, is cast as a messenger and messiah of a utopian alliance between pan-Asia and pan-Africa. In exploring the relationship between these two reproductive portraits, the article moves from a discussion of Du Bois′s critique of the ideological construction of the U.S. as a white nation reproduced by white progenitors, to an examination the literary figuration of a b1aek mother out of whose womb a black diasporic anti-imperialist alliance springs. In contrast to previous scholarship, which has tended to focus on the critique of U.S. racial nationalism that Du Bois expressed in his early work, or on the internationalism that he later embraced, this article pays close attention to how Du Bois′s anti-nationalist and internationalist politics together subtended by subtle, but constitutive, sexual politics.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.42
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• pp.107-129
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• 2016

In modern history, there have been several kinds of continental unions or supranational politico-economic unions in the world, such as the United Nations, the European Union, the Union of South American Nations, the African Union, etc. Modern thinkers proposed many pan-isms on their continental base, for example, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Latin Americanism, Pan-Asianism, Pan-Celtism, etc. What is the most common in these pan-isms is that a continental union would be a politico-economic system to overcome the limits of the modern state-nation and to realize a long and happy relationship between member nations and continents. However, the concept of a supranational union differs from that of cosmopolitanism, in that the former presupposes the common cultural and historical heritage in the concerned region or continent. Ngugi wa Thinog'o' Pan-Africanism implies two keywords that are connected to his concepts such as 'decentralization' and 'African languages.' Pan-Africanism supposes that Africa may gain benefits from the union of African nations under the umbrella of anti-colonial efforts to down size the Euro-American influences. Moreover, using African languages enhances self-reliance and self-imagination among the African people. For in the former colonial regimes, the European colonial languages, such as English, French, or Portuguese, were central to the dissemination of European culture and modernity. Ngugi asserts that the African peripheralized languages could reinstate the African cultural heritage and propose an alternative to the Western modernity.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.287-310
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• 2014

While Janis Joplin is generally known as a hippie rock star of an untimely death to Korean audience, she is more strongly evoked in the image of blues mama in American context. Blues, definitely based on African-American vernacular tradition, is defined as a matrix, which is "a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses always in productive transit," to borrow Houston A. Baker's expression. This article explores how her life and music can be understood in blues tradition, especially in terms of personal and social transgression for which she was criticized, focusing on her blues performance. First of all, born and growing up in southern Texas between 1940s and 1960s, she expressed her innate suspicion against segregation and white supremacy, actively embracing rich black musical heritage of the area. Second, against the normative social and moral expectation of a middle class white woman to be a suburban housewife, she sought her own desire, whether it was professional ambition or sexual possibility. Third, beyond the selling image of a heterosexually lascivious blues mama, she dared to be a homosexual and bisexual, while it was not publically acknowledged. Along with her alcohol and drug dependence, such transgressions against normative social expectation were not made without her inner conflict, leaving a trace of trauma, hesitation, and the blues. While she was "buried alive in the blues," as a sacrifice at the altar of the 1960s, she still remains "alive" provoking "fire inside of everyone of us."

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.439-445
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• 2017

Summary. Most of American pop music, which are dominating the hegemony of the global pop music market, have been derived from the culture of African Americans, most of whom were slaves of European immigrants. The music of black slaves must be the one of the greatest undisputed achievements that have most influenced the American history. Indeed, All of the mainstream pop music works around the world, including those in America, are the descendants of the black music with the gene of the black people. We can say, therefore, the music born through the Afro-American culture has become the music that every person around the world enjoys in the present. Accordingly, K-Pop music culture, centered in idol group, is also based on the black music. This fact suggests that the K-Pop culture can be spread into people in different customs or traditions with little resistance. The success factor of Motown, at the very center of the black music, which integrated the whole global music, is not only their incredibly outstanding music works, but also the self-consciousness the musicians have that they are strongly reluctant to settle down to present reality. This shall lead to the necessity of self-reflection for the Korean music market, which are obsessed with present popularity and only taking advantage of teenager market, and for those engaged in music business in Korea, who are lack of the artistic value and the consciousness as artist.