Signifyin' Cinema: Rudy Ray Moore and the Quality of Badness.

This article engages the limits of both film and race studies in their approach to heterogeneous and "low" forms of African American cultural production through an analysis of the films of Rudy Ray Moore. While Moore's films have been almost entirely overlooked in both film studies and black studies, they were extremely popular among black youth of the 1970s and have exerted a powerful influence on today's hardcore hip hop artists (and their understanding of how to turn black market entrepreneurship into global enterprise). The theory of "signifying", advanced most rigorously by black literary theorist Henry Louis Gates Jr, helps explain how and why Moore has slipped through various critical nets - and grounds a claim for why we should take "bad" black film seriously. Close film and context analysis illustrates how Moore's low-budget films "signify" on Hollywood and the system of expectancies that go with putatively "good" filmmaking and reveals the extent to which they constitute a hybrid cultural and multimedia practice. As vehicles designed to elaborate on the badman of black folklore, Moore's films contribute to the long history and rich language of "toasting" in African American oral culture and music. As such, far from being emblematic of black filmmaking's impoverished relationship to mainstream cinema (as a cinema manqué), these films constitute vital precursors to the hip hop music video

Everyday Racism in Integrated Spaces: Mapping the Experiences of Students of Color at a Diversifying Predominantly White Institution

Many college campuses promote themselves as integrated multicultural spaces where students from diverse backgrounds live, study, and play together in unity. Drawing from eleven focus groups and an online survey with more than 4,800 students of color, this study reveals that many students of color experience racial hostility and exclusion in their daily routines. Using the concept of racial microaggressions, we expand the definition of racism to identify three representational spaces that reflect the lived experiences of students of color at a predominantly white institution: (1) fortified, a space of white dominance where students of color often experience explicit racism; (2) contradictory, a space of covert racial dominance where students of color regularly experience being treated as second-class citizens; and (3) counter, a space created as an act of resistance or survival for students of color but one that also faces opposition. This study demonstrates that the inclusive, racially harmonious multicultural campus is an imaginary geography

Carceral circuitry: New directions in carceral geography

Despite the popular impression of prisons and other carceral spaces as disconnected from broader social systems, they are traversed by various circulations that reach within and beyond their boundaries. This article opens a new analytical window onto this reality, developing the concept of ‘circuits’ to critically enquire into the carceral. Drawing inspiration from Harvey (1982; 1985), the article makes circuits do fresh work, teasing apart the emerging carceral landscape to provide a new critical epistemology for carceral geographies. In so doing, a meta-institutional agenda for critical carceral geography is derived, and possible ways to short-circuit carceral systems are revealed