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rachel re: ring tones, txt speak, & refurb'd nokia nat'lism
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73 pages of pen&pixel rap album covers (via noz)
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you can't make this stuff up, ppl
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nice rundown of 'nautilus'-sampling songs, including streams of most of the most notable
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'PG: For Du Bois, their culture is what allows African Americans to be a world-historic people, to sit at that table and offer the world a conception of freedom which is richer, more complex, more compelling, and more dynamic than any conception of freedom which has been articulated previously. … This is a different freedom. This is not the freedom of the ancient Greeks; this is not the freedom of the Prussians; this is a distinctive conception of freedom which is won from an experience of suffering—not the redemption of that suffering, but the product of it. And so, however pompous it may have sounded in Du Bois’s mouth, I actually think that it’s kind of right. I do think that if we’re looking at the globalization of African American culture, if we understand why everyone in the world is doing hip hop—and it’s not just because Coke and Nike tell them to—there’s something about this vernacular culture which does exactly what Du Bois imagined it would do.'
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'One day, while idly browsing the collection of a cultural studies institute in Bangalore, I found _Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making of an African Intellectual_, a slim pamphlet published by the Africa World Press. There was Rodney, a young, working-class activist, campaigning door-to-door for the PPP before falling out with it; years later, there he was again, reprimanding Stokely Carmichael for inciting Africans against Indians in Guyana. He tackled Soviet Communism and local Marxism, socialism and the state, the Pan-African world and his Guyanese location. The text was incredibly sophisticated, a vivid mix of theory and experience, every word of it ringing true—the sort of book that you read with a secret smile and trembling hands, since it seems to have been written especially for you. The French Marxist Louis Althusser might have called this “interpellation.” But then Althusser was criminally insane, and I was so awed by Rodney that I could only think of it as an invitation.'
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'One of the prevailing theses of the current election season is that Senator Barack Hussein Obama is not the round-way-brand of black man. Such a premise is palpable only to the extent that one chooses to read Obama against the image of marketplace confections of black masculinity, particularly those that legibly erect centuries' old tropes of danger, bestial behavior, and sinister eroticism.'
videyoga :: (h/t kevin)