Black Popular Culture and Social Justice: Beyond the Culture

Black Popular Culture and Social Justice: Beyond the Culture, an interdisciplinary work bringing together research findings from a team of authors from different disciplines and professions, critically examines the use of various genres and mediums of Black popular culture such as television, film, music, radio shows, novels, comic books, and visual art to engage diverse concerns across political, economic, and social dimensions by analyzing the relationship between Black popular culture and social justice. In this volume, more than merely a form of entertainment, Black popular culture is a tool for “engendering empathy” (5) and empowering those fighting for social justice. Against the backdrop of an increase in the creation and utilization of culture to address, engage, and support social justice, this volume makes a compelling and grounded argument for connecting social justice and perspectives of Black popular culture, showing why the connection is essential and how it can be developed.

This volume regards the utilization of Black popular culture as “an agent for change” (3) in people’s hearts needed to create a more equitable society and a part of the fight for social justice through three sections grouped by different genres and mediums. In Section 1, “Black Television, Movies and Social Justice,” the authors probe into racism, feminism, politics, and so on. Chapter 1 examines the way Michaela Cole uses the HBO series I May Destroy You to discuss numerous injustice experienced by survivors of sexual assaults. Chapter 2, through in-depth character analysis, explores representation, intersectionality, counterspaces, and counternarratives (31) in the Netfix series Dear White People as a form of “edutainment” and highlights the significance of counterspaces and counterstories for the Black community in higher education to process racial and social justice issues in predominantly White spaces. By exemplifying the conflict between White and Black feminism, Chapter 3 discusses the ways that Black womanhood and power were realized and emphasized by toppling “the sanctity and centrality of White womanhood”(see Mace 2014) through the female characters in the HBO TV series Lovecraft Country. By analyzing the interracial relations and intergenerational struggle (48), the final chapter of this section directs attention to Black youth who struggle to eradicate racism from their society in the film adaptation of the novel The Hate U Give.

Section 2, “Black Music and Social Justice,” includes chapters examining the manner in which Black music and radio shows across genres and eras intersect with the fight for social justice. Specifically, Chapter 5 and 6 provide a historical to contemporary discussion of protest anthems and political commentary on social media the central role they have played and continue to play throughout Black political and social movements. Then Chapter 7 explores Hip-Hop as a counterpublic, which is significant in humanizing the victims and detailing horrific traumas Blacks experienced (111). Chapter 8 observes the Black power themes and nationalistic messages such as incorporation and dissemination of Black Nationalist ideology present within Wu-Tang Clan’s music. Closing out this section, the author engages in analysis of the music and poetry of the Watts Prophets and reveals how Watts Prophets resisted respectability politics and conformity while providing commentary on racism, sexism, and other topics.

The final section of this volume, “Black Speculative Fiction, Comics, Protest Art and Social Justice,” observes Black science fiction, comic books, and comic book characters as well as artists. Chapter 10 recognizes the importance of Black girls superheroes in comics who are typically ignored and marginalized. Staying within the comic book theme, Chapter 11 details how race was addressed and discussed within the television adaptation of two of Marvel’s iconic comic book characters. Chapter 12 presents famed novelist Frank Yerby and his work to dismantle stereotypes in the Foxes of Harrow: Yerby focuses on subverting the ideals of a happy, loyal, docile, and Christian mammy and constructing Yerby’s Mammy not bound or limited to servitude. Chapter 13 uncovers the motivations, intentions, and aspirations of three local artists for their “protest art” (205). This final chapter solidifies the book as an inclusive exploration of the many media of Black popular culture utilized in the fight for social justice.

This volume brings Black popular culture into the engagement, reflection, and construction of social justice and proposes a more capacious scope for the value of Black popular culture as manifested in two aspects. Firstly, from the time dimension, this volume defines popular culture domain and connects this expression to the historical, current, and emerging realities of White supremacy and anti-Black racism. In this sense, Black popular culture is past, present, and future (222), expressing not only a current “lived experience,” but also the hopes, dreams and desires for “lived experience” – if not for themselves, for “future generations” (see Mills and Desmond 2023). Second, from the spatial perspective, Black popular culture is defined as a voice for the voiceless, bringing to the limelight the problems such as racism not only in America but also in the world and calling attention to real-world issues. With the merits mentioned, this volume may be of interest to more readers if more multi-modal analysis had been conducted because this dynamic collection examines various discourses, modes, and media in circulation. The multi-modal analysis approach proves to be useful in that it also considers the interaction between text, image, video, and sound, and is thus an apt tool for examining how Black popular culture were represented across different spheres. Overall, this volume provides an enlightening and systematic overview on the role of Black popular culture and will inspire future examinations of the intersections between Black popular culture and social justice.