Black studies, or Africana studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field that primarily focuses on the study of the history, culture, and politics of the peoples of the African diaspora and Africa. The field includes scholars of African-American, Afro-Canadian, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino, Afro-European, Afro-Asian, African Australian, and African literature, history, politics, and religion as well as those from disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, psychology, education, and many other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. The field also uses various types of research methods.
Cornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, actor, and public intellectual. The grandson of a Baptist minister, West's primary philosophy focuses on the roles of race, gender, and class struggle in American society. A socialist, West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including Christianity, the black church, democratic socialism, left-wing populism, neopragmatism, and transcendentalism. Among his most influential books are Race Matters (1993) and Democracy Matters (2004).
Michael Eric Dyson is an American academic, author, ordained minister, and radio host. He is a professor in the College of Arts and Science and in the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University. Described by Michael A. Fletcher as "a Princeton Ph.D. and a child of the streets who takes pains never to separate the two", Dyson has authored or edited more than twenty books dealing with subjects such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Barack Obama, Nas's debut album Illmatic, Bill Cosby, Tupac Shakur and Hurricane Katrina.
Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and a past president of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Collins served in 2009 as the 100th president of the ASA – the first African-American woman to hold this position.
Ed Guerrero is an American film historian and associate professor of cinema studies and Africana studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. His writings explore black cinema, culture, and critical discourse. He has written extensively on black cinema, its movies, politics and culture for anthologies and journals such as Sight & Sound, FilmQuarterly, Cineaste, Journal of Popular Film & Television, and Discourse. Guerrero has served on editorial and professional boards including The Library of Congress' National Film Preservation Board.
A video vixen is a female model who appears in hip hop-oriented music videos. From the 1990s to the early 2010s, the video vixen image was a staple in popular music, particularly within the genre of hip hop. The video vixen first came around in the late 1980s when the hip-hop culture began to emerge into its own lifestyle, although was most popular in American popular culture during the 1990s and 2000s. Many video vixens are aspiring actors, singers, dancers, or professional models. Artists and vixens have been criticized for allegedly contributing to the social degradation of black women. Latinas are also degraded and hyper-sexualized in hip hop music videos because they are seen as objects of sexual desire in rap music videos.
Shawn A. Ginwright is Professor of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University and author. His research examines the ways in which youth in urban communities navigate through the constraints of poverty and struggle to create equality and justice in their schools. Ginwright has also been noted for his studies in hip hop academics.
Ewuare Xola Osayande is an American poet, political activist, author, and lecturer. He currently lives in Philadelphia, PA, US.
Elliott Wilson is an American journalist, television producer, and magazine editor. He is the founder and CEO of Rap Radar. In the past, he has worked as editor-in-chief of XXL Magazine. While there, he became known for his editorials under the nickname "YN".
Hip hop feminism is a sub-set of black feminism that centers on intersectional subject positions involving race and gender in a way that acknowledges the contradictions in being a black feminist, such as black women's enjoyment in hip hop music and culture, rather than simply focusing on the victimization of black women in hip hop culture due to interlocking systems of oppressions involving race, class, and gender.
Misogynoir is a term referring to misogyny directed towards black women where race and gender both play a role. The term was coined by black feminist writer Moya Bailey in 2008 to address misogyny directed toward black transgender and cisgender women in American visual and popular culture. The concept of misogynoir is grounded in the theory of intersectionality, which analyzes how various social identities such as race, gender, class, age, ability, and sexual orientation interrelate in systems of oppression.
Adam Bradley is an American literary critic, professor, and a writer on popular culture. He is the author or editor of six books. Bradley has written extensively on song lyrics as well as on the literature and legacy of the American novelist Ralph Ellison. His commentary has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and in numerous other publications. He is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles where he directs the Laboratory for Race & Popular Culture.
Hip hop studies is a multidisciplinary field of study that encompasses sociology, anthropology, communication and rhetoric studies, religious studies, cultural studies, critical race theory, missiological studies, art history, dance, musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, and gender studies. The term "hip hop studies" began circulating in the mid-2000s, and though it is not clear who first coined the term to label the field, the field of hip hop studies is often cited as having been crystallized by the publication of That's the Joint!: The Hip Hop Studies Reader in 2003. That's the Joint! includes approximately 25 years of scholarship, criticism, and journalism. The publication of this anthology was unprecedented, and highlights the evolving and continuous influence of "one of the most creative and contested elements of global popular culture since its advent in the late 1970s." The publication of the first edition of That's the Joint! marked a consolidating moment for the field of hip hop studies because it brought together key writings on hip hop from a diversity of hip hop authorities.
George Dewey Yancy is an American philosopher who is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. He is a distinguished Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, one of the college's highest honors. In 2019–20, he was the University of Pennsylvania's Inaugural Provost's Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow. He is the editor for Lexington Books' "Philosophy of Race" book series. He is known for his work in critical whiteness studies, critical philosophy of race, critical phenomenology, and African American philosophy, and has written, edited, or co-edited more than 20 books. In his capacity as an academic scholar and a public intellectual, he has published over 200 combined scholarly articles, chapters, and interviews that have appeared in professional journals, books, and at various news sites.
John L. Jackson Jr. is an American anthropologist, filmmaker, author, and university administrator. He is currently the Provost and Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Jackson is the author of Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (2001); Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (2005); Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (2008); Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (2013). He has also directed films that explore questions of race, diaspora, migration, and media.
Crystal Marie Fleming is an American sociologist and author. She is full professor of sociology and Africana studies at Stony Brook University. Fleming is the author/editor of four books about race and white supremacy.
Rebecca Futo Kennedy is Associate Professor of Classics, Women's and Gender Studies, and Environmental Studies at Denison University, and the Director of the Denison Museum. Her research focuses on the political, social, and cultural history of Classical Athens, Athenian tragedy, ancient immigration, ancient theories of race and ethnicity, and the reception of those theories in modern race science.
Dustin Hodge is an American television writer and producer. He is the founder of Hodge Productions, a Colorado media company. He is known for working on a variety of nonfiction content. His most notable works are as the showrunner for Little Britches Rodeo and a producer for The Tight Rope podcast. His work primarily focuses on under-served and under-represented communities and issues: the convergence of cultural and ethnic borders on indigenous peoples, the sustainability and resilience of impoverished areas, and the struggles of first-generation students.
Joy James is an American political philosopher, academic, and author. James is the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College. Her books include Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals, Shadowboxing, Imprisoned Intellectuals, The New Abolitionists, Resisting State Violence, and The Angela Y. Davis Reader. She was a Senior Research Fellow at the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin where she developed the Harriet Tubman Digital Repository.
The Tight Rope is a weekly podcast hosted by Cornel West and Tricia Rose. The episodes are generally one hour long, frequently feature guests, and are released every Thursday. Since June 2021, the podcast has been exclusively available on Patreon, with highlights uploaded on YouTube. The podcast covers issues of race, social affairs and culture. The show is produced by Ceyanna Dent and Dustin Hodge for SpkerBox Media. Several of the episodes were recorded in front of a live audience.
