Cultural misbehavior: Audience, agency and identity in black popular culture.

Abstract

This dissertation explores African American cultural products that pose competing narratives of black identities that work through the historical trauma of slavery and its legacy, manifested in systematic and institutional racism. Through the analysis and comparison of Alice Randall's novel, <italic> The Wind Done Gone</italic>, the visual art of Kara Walker, and the hip-hop magazine <italic>The Source: Magazine of Hip-Hop Music and Culture</italic>, this project highlights the ways in which some cultural producers, in the 1990s, redefine narratives of black identity and subjectivity. This project elaborates a conceptual framework, which helps one view and analyze the agency and resistance of marginalized voices actively engaged in the critique and continuous re-presentation of African American identities and subjectivities. Drawing upon Louis Althusser's theory of interpellation and Stuart Hall's theories of black identity, subjectivity and popular culture, this dissertation demonstrates that the representation of identity through culture is marked by the continuous presentation, interpretation, contestation, revision and reception of the narratives of identity articulated by the cultural product. It demonstrates that one should not view a particular cultural production as a finished product, but as a site or matrix where a multiplicity of subjects with various and often-competing identities engage in dialogue. Consequently, it poses and explores specific examples of black culture through which one may view this strategic contestation at work. While focusing on African American culture and identities, this framework also gives important insight into a general theory of identity formation through culture where one can analyze the ways in which social identities influence and are influenced by culture. This dissertation therefore demonstrates that voices with varying social identities along the lines of class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality interrupt and influence the creation and interpretation of narratives of identity.