Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia

Memories of an Imperial City: Race, Gender, and Birmingham, Alabama

“…Not far from the exhibit hall—but perhaps beyond the purview of an official Afropolitan sensibility (Adeniyi Ogunyankin )—one can observe another kind of pan‐African art on display: graffiti etched under a highway overpass approximating a Black Power‐era Angela Davis (see Figure ). Painted in red, the rendering of Davis with her mouth open defiantly attests to the durability and desirability of her image as a global symbol of protest politics (Davis ; James ; Raiford ). The Davis graffiti is accompanied by the words “ France Dégage ” [“France get out”] and “ La France tue le Sénégal ” [“France is killing Senegal”], an invective against the (former) colonial power’s continued presence in Senegal and West Africa, more broadly.…”

La comète Piu Piu

“…Certains auteurs comme Angela Davis (1994) et Paul Gilroy (2010) se désolent de la rupture du lien exclusif entre hip hop et politique. Pour certains, l'industrialisation et la popularisation du hip hop en ont fait un produit culturel apolitique.…”

Imagining Communities in Dave Chappelle's Block Party

“…Granted, Davis's perturbation with the fetishistic fascination with her “hairdo” is warranted, yet the flip side of such attentiveness is that embedded within the image of her afro lies a deeper significance, specifically the idea that blackness in its “natural,” unadulterated state possesses its own sense of aesthetic and political value. Given the current crises of black community, Angela Davis's afro image creates an affective geography that cuts across spatial time to reinspire communal sentiments of self‐love and racial pride that characterized the Black Power/Black Arts moment . For Mitchell, images “refunction our memories and imaginations, bringing new criteria and new desires into the world” (92).…”