“My People all over the World”: Hip Hop, Gender, and Black Nationalism

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (2007) and Charise L. Cheney’s Brothers Gonna Work It Out: Sexual Politics in the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism (2005) both offer committed and informed analyses of the gender politics of a cultural movement with which their authors identify. Sharpley-Whiting’s personal story prefaces her investigation into how, why, and at what cost hip hop’s representations of young black women are perpetuated by these women. Cheney’s investment emerges most strongly at the end of her fascinating historical foray into the form of black nationalism that she finds emerging at a particular point in the development of rap music. She calls black nationalism’s true emancipatory potential into question, charging that it has failed even to ‘‘conceive [... of] a politics of liberation that is not dependent upon a masculinist discourse that incorporates a subordination of the feminine’’ (169). Both authors identify themselves as members of the hip hop nation they write about. What is at stake in their intellectual inquiries, then, is brought powerfully home, as each author engages with a tradition of which she is at once part, and by which she is interpolated

Complicities

This Open Access book offers a model of the human subject as complicit in the systems that structure human society and the human psyche which draws together clinical research with theory from both psychology and the humanities to advance a more social just theory and practice. Beginning from the premise that we cannot separate ourselves from the systems that precede and formulate us as subjects, the author argues that, in reckoning with this complicity, a model of subjectivity can be created that moves beyond binaries and identity politics. In doing so, the book examines how we might develop a more socially just psychological theory and practice, which is both systems work and intra-psychological work. In bringing together ways of thinking developed in the humanities with clinical psychotherapeutic practice, this book offers one interdisciplinary take on key questions of social and emotional efficacy in action-oriented psychotherapy work

"This stage of woe" : the petrarchanism of Mary Wroth

Bibliography: pages 197-201.Mary Wroth, the first Englishwoman to write a Petrarchan sonnet sequence, creates a counterdiscourse which comments on and contributes to English love poetry. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is addressed from a female lover to a male beloved, and this thesis discusses the implications of this unusual Petrarchan gender configuration .It explores the ways in which Wroth's Pamphilia encounters, is affected by, and alters, the poetics of English Petrarchanism, showing how English Petrarchanism had developed into a discourse that assumed a male poet and a female addressee. By paying attention to Wroth's socio-historical context, as well as her genre, I discuss how and why Pamphilia encounters elements of English Petrarchanism that do not easily allow for a female speaker. Illustrating that gendered subjectivities form the basis of English Petrarchan poetics, I show how this is relevant in terms of the gender climate of the Renaissance. By paying attention to common-sense assumptions about 'appropriate' female behaviour, and the dynamics of the public performance that (especially Petrarchan) writing entailed, I explore the implications for Pamphilia, and her responses. I show that a female poet had different access to many of the poetic and social assumptions of Petrarchanism and of Renaissance society, which affects what she can say, and how she can say it. I look at Pamphilia's interactions with the relentlessly public world of a courtly love poet, and explore how her gender complicates her position as a Petrarchan subject. I am concerned with poetic and political aspects typical of Petrarchanism. These include the role of the beloved; the lover's emotional isolation; the multifaceted nature of Petrarchan desire, both erotic and socio-political; the importance of the gaze and the symbol of the eye; and the drive within Petrachanism for the poet's of constitution selfhood

Shakespeare in South Africa : literary theory and practice

Bibliography: leaves 237-256.This thesis explores the development of a "South African Shakespeare". Relying on post-colonial theory as primary framework, it views colonised culture not as secondary and responsive, but as primary and creative. The main work of the thesis is to trace the role played by "Shakespeare", as a set of texts and as an icon, in a particular trajectory of writing in English in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century

Complicities

This Open Access book offers a model of the human subject as complicit in the systems that structure human society and the human psyche which draws together clinical research with theory from both psychology and the humanities to advance a more social just theory and practice. Beginning from the premise that we cannot separate ourselves from the systems that precede and formulate us as subjects, the author argues that, in reckoning with this complicity, a model of subjectivity can be created that moves beyond binaries and identity politics. In doing so, the book examines how we might develop a more socially just psychological theory and practice, which is both systems work and intra-psychological work. In bringing together ways of thinking developed in the humanities with clinical psychotherapeutic practice, this book offers one interdisciplinary take on key questions of social and emotional efficacy in action-oriented psychotherapy work