Carnegie Mellon News - Carnegie Mellon University: African-American culture and identity are overwhelmingly associated with resistance to racial and national oppression. But award-winning author and former Carnegie Mellon University faculty member Stephanie L. Batiste will challenge this notion by arguing that early 20th century African-American artists, musicians, writers and other cultural producers were complicit with the United States' segregated and imperialistic power in order to feel included.
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I am really, really looking forward to this lecture. Batiste is making a challenge of something most of us take for granted, that "Black Performance Culture" strives for understanding and togetherness, suggesting rather that African-American artistic culture has furthered the cause of United States' segregational power. Batiste is now a professor at UCSB, the University of California in my hometown, so I look forward to seeing if any of my old teachers know her. At the end of the article, there's a slightly more specific detail of what will be discussed, that Batiste: "believes African-American concepts of national identity must be re-examined under the pretenses that they were created from an oppressed population." Sounds very exciting.
I am so interested in what Batiste has to say, because I feel like this subject is very rarely talked about in history classes and when it is it is skimmed over. I think that sometimes we get so caught up in how awesome it was for Black people, at that time to become apart of main stream media and represent Black culture on a larger scale that we forget to hold them accountable for helping to better society in any legal way. Some of my favorite artist like Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles stood out for publicly opposing segregation and taking real actions against it. I wonder what Batiste theory will be on why this was such a rare occurrence.
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