Authentic Blackness – «Real» Blackness explores and explains the idea of authenticity, of «keeping it real,» as it relates to the multi-faceted meanings of blackness in the United States and the world. Including reflections on hip-hop, comedy, literature, intellectual history, and autobiography, the collection gives both a broad overview of and intervenes in the debates concerning blackness. A comprehensive introductory essay outlines the history of the idea of «authentic blackness,» while other chapters examine the contours of blackness in Canada and Jamaica; the relationship between middle-class status and «real» blackness; the link between «blackness» and hip-hop culture; Dave Chappelle’s comedy; and the work of James Baldwin, Countee Cullen, Clarence Major, and John Edgar Wideman as it comments on authenticity in relation to race.
Contents: Martin Japtok/Rafiki Jenkins: What Does It Mean to Be «Really» Black? A Selective History of Authentic Blackness – Dara N. Byrne/Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The «Defining» Problem of Black Authenticity in Canada: Real Slang and the Grammar of Cultural Hybridity – David M. Jones: Privileging the Popular at What Price? A Discussion of Joan Morgan, Hip Hop, Feminism, and Radical Politics – Antonio T. Tiongson Jr.: Claiming Hip Hop: Authenticity Debates, Filipino DJs, and Contemporary U.S. Racial Formations – Wendy Alexia Rountree: «Faking the Funk»: A Journey Towards Authentic Blackness – Gregory Stephens: Brown Boy Blues…inna Jamaica – Joy Viveros: Black Authenticity, Racial Drag, and the Case of Dave Chappelle – Jonathan Shandell: How Black Do You Want It? Countee Cullen and the Contest for Racial Authenticity on Page and Stage – Monika Gehlawat: Peculiar Irresolution: James Baldwin and Flânerie – Benjamin D. Carson: «Many forces at work»: Clarence Major’s Early Fiction and the Critique of Racial Economy – Ian Reilly: «Isn’t the whole point of writing to escape what people not me think of me»: The Failure of Language and the Search for Authenticity in Philadelphia Fire and God’s Gym.
Martin Japtok, Associate Professor of English and Multicultural Studies at Palomar College, is the author of Growing Up Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African American and Jewish American Fiction and the editor of Postcolonial Perspectives on Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the U.S. Jerry Rafiki Jenkins is Associate Professor of English and Multicultural Studies at Palomar College. He has published essays on African American speculative fiction and is completing a book-length study on African American vampire novels.
