• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
• /
• v.19 no.2
• /
• pp.402-415
• /
• 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 English Language & Literature
• /
• v.55 no.5
• /
• pp.907-936
• /
• 2009

Quite arguably, W. E. B. Du Bois is the first figure in the history of black nationalism who engaged most persistently and systematically with the dominant ideology of racism and white supremacy. It is not too much to say that, by contending with the Eurocentric but taken-for-granted concept of the 'Negro' in the turn of the century, Du bois has laid the theoretical and ideological cornerstone of postcolonialism today. But his concept of race varied over time and was even contradictory in the same writings. The early Du Bois defined race as something historically made rather than biologically given and determined. Yet he didn't utterly deny the significance of physical traits and skin color in constructing racial identity. His notion of the 'Negro' was not unambiguous, either. While drawing on the 'soul' of 'black folk' to undermine the Eurocentric dichotomy of white/mind and black/body, Du Bois argued that there is some kind of 'spiritual' differences between whites and blacks, differences that are essentially inherent and hereditary in the 'Negro.' Such essentialist notion of race and the 'Negro' was on the wane in the later Du Bois, especially after his encounter with Marxism. He came to think of race merely as a discourse of racism that can be subverted and even appropriated for anti-racist practices. Following the Marxist assumption that 'the color line' is a class conflict on the international level, Du Bois contended that the 'Negro' is an outcome of slavery which is in turn a subsystem of Western capitalism. He also argued that, since the 'Negro' is not a biological essence but a sociocultural formation, the identity of the 'Negro' can and must be reconstructed according to historical change. For Du Bois, therefore, the resistance against colonialism and capitalism became a resistance against racism. This is why his Pan-African movement shifted its gear from the American program in the initial phase to a truly 'Afrocentric' and socialist one.

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

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

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

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.39
• /
• pp.153-176
• /
• 2015

Poet, painter and publisher, Roland $Gigu{\grave{e}}re$ is one of Quebec's outstanding figures, inspired by both Surrealism and Quebec nationalism. He participated in contemporary artistic movement 'Phases' and influenced collective self-awareness and political ferment, 'Quiet Revolution'. In La Main au feu(1973), his poetry represent a landscape dominated by darkness in contrast with red color of fire from the volcanic crater. The world is immersed in darkness of despair which allude to the Great Darkness of Quebec society. Acts of violence assume many different forms: crows, black rain, dark flow, frenzy of knife blows. Both things and humans are in the state of absence or lack. Life falls into opacity of death. In the background of dark landscape, we discover Miror, a singular character. Similar to chain of mountains and to bare forest, he is a creature that shape the tragic inner world of poet. He is as like as seismograph that record the tremble of being. Finally, in order to fight the darkness of environment, the poet attempt to use the power of fire of volcanoes. The flow of magma become paintings of his dream and the flame of eruption, poetry of cry toward the sky. 'La main au feu' means the will to resist injustice and repression in the world. The tragic reality is replaced by a dream that become second reality out of reach of the force of hostile external circumstances.

• Asia-pacific Journal of Multimedia Services Convergent with Art, Humanities, and Sociology
• /
• v.6 no.3
• /
• pp.191-202
• /
• 2016

Social distance can indicate cognitive and behavioral attitudes toward a social group, and is useful for investigating people situated in a socially vulnerable position. When the children from multicultural family aware negative attitudes from peer Korean children, self-confidence and social competence can be disturbed. This study intended to examine influential factors on children's social distance towards children from multicultural families including multicultural contact experience, stereotype, ethnically homogeneous nationalism, thereby providing empirical evidence on social distance regarding multicultural families and their children. The results of this study are as follows. First, when the Korean children felt closeness with a multicultural child, when the ethnicity of the foreigner resided in the neighbor is White or Black, when they contact multicultural children through the media and a multicultural education, the level of social distance was higher, while the neighbor's ethnicity is Abrab, social distance was lower. Second, there was a significant association between the higher level of Korean children's positive cognition and emotion and the lower level of social distance. Third, hierarchial regression analyses demonstrated that positive emotion and cognition decreased the level of social distance, while both closeness with a multicultural child and taking the multicultural education increased the level of social distance. Finally, based on these results, this study suggested implications for social work practice and research to better understand and reduce children's social distance towards children from multicultural families.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
• /
• v.16 no.5
• /
• pp.706-718
• /
• 2014

Ideology which symbolizes the belief system about the order of human society represents itself in a concrete form through dress which reflects material and conceptual world. In the early 1960s Korea, where a civil revolution and a military coup took place, good examples of dress representing ideology could be found. This study investigates the dress representing ideology of the period, and examines its manifestation and aspect of transition. Literature survey and case study were conducted. The following results were obtained: First, dress representing ideology was symbolically verifying its differences and was changing with the course of time. There were the flow going down from the government, and the flow going up from the movement of the civilian. Through this process, design elements of ideological dress were combined in a dialectic way to form a new representational dress such as Jaegunbok. Second, costly and luxurious clothes meant a tool to rule over people, and the opposition was uniform meaning equality. In 1960 Korea, black waves of school uniforms appeared to lead the social change. A year later, the military government seized power in a 5.16 coup and it enforced uniform upon every people to achieve equal austerity and modernized spirit. Lastly, cotton, which was originated from Gandhi's movement in India, was symbolizing nationalism till the early 1960s in Korea meaning the funding own development with own resources.

• Lingua Humanitatis
• /
• v.2 no.2
• /
• pp.51-84
• /
• 2002

The 1990s have seen the publication of many books devoted to Language and Ideology (cf. Joseph & Taylor 1990. for one of the early ones) even though the term 'ideology' itself has remained ill-defined (Woolard 1998). The focus of attention has usually been placed on the particular use of language and often for some kind of 'political' ends, not on linguistic or other scholarship which might have been driven by some sort of ideology, i.e., a bundle of assumptions which themselves were taken as given. At least since Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism, it has been clear to everyone that scholars construct their conceptualization of things in line with their understanding of the cultural, social, and political world in which they live, and that this often unreflected 'pre-understanding' effects their view of cultures that are different from theirs and more often than not geographically and temporally distant from theirs. This recognition has had a sobering effect no doubt, and Said's book has long since become 'mainstream.' Much more disturbing to the scholarly profession has been the publication of Martin Bernal's Black Athena in 1987, since it went much further, going beyond accusations of colonialism and cultural bias, in suggesting that the Western representation of Classical Greece over the past two hundred years was false and that what had been accepted until now about occidental antiquity must now be seen derived from African-Asiatic cultures of the Near East, notably that of the Ancient Egyptians, and that no other than Socrates should be seen as black man. While we may understand the intellectual climate in the United States that led academics to present 'myth as history' (Lefkowitz 1996), it is obvious that lines of regular scholarly principles of investigation have been crossed (cf Lefkowitz & Rogers 1996). The present paper investigates what may be seen as the ideological underpinnings of such work. After reviewing some recent scholarship in the area of linguistic historiography that have shown that academic work has never been 'value-neutral' (as may have been assumed or has been claimed by some practitioners), it is argued that in effect one must be aware of what Clemens Knobloch has recently termed Resonanzbedarf, i.e., the desire, whether conscious or not, of scholars-and probably scientists, too-to have their work recognized by the educated public and that, in so doing, their discourses tend to pick up on contemporary popular notions. These efforts may be harmless if everyone was to recognize these allusions and adoption of certain lexical. items(buzz words) as props or what Germans call Versatzstiicke, but history tells us that this has not always been the case. Still, as Hutton (1999) has shown, not all scholarship during the Third Reich for example can simply be dismissed as worthless because it was conducted in under a prevailing political ideology. Indeed, in seemingly innocent times, linguists can be shown to frame their argument in a way that makes them appear so utterly superior to their predecessors (cf. Lawson 2001). Upon closer inspection, those discourses turn out to be much like those of scholars in nationalistic environments that have tended to select their 'facts' to prove a particular hypothesis (cf., e.g., Koerner 2001). The article argues for scholars to take a more active role in exploding myths, scientifically unfounded claims, and ideologically driven distortions, especially those that are socially and politically harmful.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
• /
• v.43 no.1
• /
• pp.1-15
• /
• 2015

The purpose of this study was to analyze the commemoration characteristics of Vietnam War Memorials(VWM) in the United States(VWMUS). Through site survey and internet research, the researcher selected 87 VWMUS except monuments simply with markers, and analyzed 5 analysis items: design concepts, spatial characteristics, landscape details, sculptures, and interpretive texts and symbols. The results are as follows: 1. The analysis revealed that the main concepts of VWMUS were to cherish victims of the Vietnam War(85 sites (97.7%)), show veteran's dedication for country(85 sites(97.7%)), and publicize the contribution of groups by troop, regional, and membership(84 sites(96.6%)). 2. Most VWMUS were located in memorial parks and plazas. 59 memorials(67.8%) were designed to pursue the completion of each memorial assuming the form of symmetry and circles. On the other hand, 12 memorials(13.8%) were typed memorial walls and 11 memorials(12.6%) were formed by spatial sequence including various landscape details and grading. 3. Stone walls were mainly used to cherish victims of the War at 65 memorials(74.7%), and also, Flags like the Stars and Stripes, POW MIA flags, and state flags were hoisted to symbolize memorial's identity at all memorials. Additionally, Benches, monuments, markers, posts and columns, ponds and channels, Helicopters were partially introduced some memorials. 4. Sculptures were used 21 memorials(24.1%) which were smaller in numbers than other War Memorial in the U.S.A., for black stonewall were used for the main element of VWMUS. Except for a few sculptures that aimed to represent the Vietnam War symbolically and narratively, 16 memorials(18.4%) were formed to realistically express the image of wounded soldiers and their hardship in the Vietnam War. 5. KIA, MIA, Veteran's name were written and their images depicted on walls, Also, the symbolic phrase, 'ALL GAVE SOME, SOME GAVE ALL' and 'DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY' were written on the memorials walls, and the POW MIA symbols were printed on the flags and engraved on walls. 6. In the United States of America, Democratic patriotism was considered a main ideological value in VWMUS by engraving KIA MIA's names on the walls, hoisting flags Stars and Stripes and POW MIA, and writing symbolic phrases 'ALL GAVE SOME, SOME GAVE ALL' and 'DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY'. On the contrary, in Vietnam, nationalism, patriotism, and socialism were emphasized as main ideologies through raising war victory and resistance to foreign power as well as writing the symbolic phrase 'TO-QUOC-GUI-CONG' meaning 'our country remember your achievement' on memorial towers. Further study will be required to comparatively analyze VWM in order to understand national characteristics in Korea, Australia, U.S.A, and Vietnam.