Media Contact: Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383, mleventhal@.colum.edu
Chicago, November 2003--Now that mainstream America has discovered that Black is beautiful, everyone wants a piece of it. When elements of Black culture are borrowed--or bought--by the mainstream, what changes?
With music, video, her personal adornment and some surprises, Columbia College Professor Lisa Brock will explore the metaphorical reverberations of Black popular culture in her presentation, This Ain't No Side Show: Popular Culture as Black World Metaphor.
The program will take place at 6 pm Thursday, December 4, in the Fifth Floor East Meeting Room of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. Admission is free. For more information, call 312-744-6630 or visit www.intersections.colum.edu.
Brock theorizes that hip-hop and street fashion become attractive to mainstream culture partly for what Black style signifies of creative authenticity. Black style carries subtexts of emotional richness, pain, truth-speaking, eroticism, sexuality and cultural resistance. "The mainstream seeks creative empowerment via black culture," observes Brock.
Brock believes the springs of Black cultural creativity are in desire. "Black young people want to be different so as to be visible," she says. "They express their desire to be empowered through their creativity--and this has happened!" Brock sees the dynamic evolution of Black culture as embodying a spectrum of desires: desire for recognition, equality, justice and connection to roots, as well as a place in the modern world, and sometimes even transcendence of the world, as in gospel songs.
Outsiders appropriate and commodify styles, such as the "high-five," but they may reject and even nullify their significance. "The mainstream absorbs Black culture but maintains racialized power structures" says Brock.
A transnational Black cultural historian, Brock has a story to clarify every point. To illustrate the power of dress, for example, she points out that Nelson and Winnie Mandela shocked the world by wearing African dress to Mandela's trial. "Instead of his customary white shirt, dress suit and tie, he wore the traditional khosa leopard skin kaross, for what it signified politically about his identity, culture and heritage. It so disrupted the power relations in the courtroom that they tried to make him change clothes."
Scanning the contributions of Black artists to mainstream culture, Brock finds connections among hip-hop, jazz, Cuban dance, Black style in baseball and singer India.Arie. Nowadays Black culture suffuses the mainstream. "What would mainstream culture be without Black culture?" she asks. "Yet, this creative energy, when centered at its point of origin, is viewed as deviant and threatening."
Chair of the liberal education department and Professor of history and cultural studies at Columbia College Chicago, Brock teaches and writes on such topics as transnational Black studies; Cuban music, dance and baseball; the African Diaspora, and the life and thought of Nelson Mandela. After attending Oberlin for two years, she earned her BA magna cum laude from Howard University and then her M.A. and Ph.D. from Northwestern. She was a Fulbright scholar in England, Portugal and Mozambique. She has published broadly on transnational black culture. Forthcoming is a new book, Black in Two Americas: Comparative Identity, History and Struggle in Cuba and the United States.
This Ain't No Side Show: Popular Culture as Black World Metaphor is part of the adult education series, Intersections: A Meeting Place for Diverse Ideas on Contemporary Culture and the Arts. Intersections, which is a collaboration between the Cultural Studies Program of Columbia College Chicago and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, presents monthly lectures and discussions that investigate and celebrate the complexity of contemporary culture and the arts in which scholars and educators from Columbia College Chicago explore a broad range of compelling topics in a format designed to be informative, invigorating and accessible.
Intersections lectures offer Continuing Education Credit for Illinois Public School Teachers. For information on CE credit, contact Paul Camic, Ph.D. at pcamic@colum.edu.