black culture | Pandaemonium

RHAPSODY IN BLUE AND BLACK AND WHITE

February 21, 2024 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the centenary of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, was published in the Observer on 18 February 2024 under the headline “A century on from Rhapsody in Blue, debates about cultural ‘theft’ rage still”. “The future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.” So wrote the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, in […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: albert murray, amiri baraka, black culture, black music, classical music, cultural appropriation, george gershwin, harlem renaissance, high art, james baldwin, jazz, leonard bernstein, music, racism, ralph ellison, rhapsody in blue

GILROY AND REED ON RACE, CLASS & CULTURE

July 6, 2017 by Kenan Malik

I have written much recently on questions of race and culture, as reflected through issues ranging from adoption to cultural appropriation to patriotism to diversity to identity. The common theme has been the way that those who call themselves ‘progressive’ or ‘anti-racist’ often draw upon ideas that are deeply regressive and rooted in racial ways of thinking; and that the consequences of identity politics and of concepts such as cultural appropriation is to bring about not social justice but the empowerment […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: adolph reed, anti-racism, black culture, black identity, class politics, cultural appropriation, hip hop, identity politics, paul gilroy, race, racism

JACOB LAWRENCE AND THE GREAT MIGRATION

December 21, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Beginning in 1915, some six million black African Americans from the South joined an exodus to the northern cities – Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York and many others. This was the Great Migration. It was the result both of the conditions in which African Americans found themselves in the South and the labour needs of Northern employers. After post-Civil War Reconstruction, white supremacy had largely been restored across the South, enforced though the Jim Crow laws. It was a segregated […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Race & Immigration • Tags: african americans, art, black culture, black identity, harlem renaissance, jacob lawrence, modernism, robert hughes, the great migration, usa

‘CONFLICTING CREDOS BUT THE SAME VISION OF THE WORLD’

May 21, 2012 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of the first part of the talk I gave last week as part of the Criticise This! seminar in Ulcinj, Montenegro on ‘Rethinking the Question of Difference’. (The second part of the talk overlaps with the Milton K Wong lecture that I am giving in Vancouver next week; I will publish that in full.) The audience comprised mainly of artists, writers and critics, and the aim was to explore more deeply the philosophical and political underpinnings […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Multiculturalism • Tags: alain benoist, alain finkielkraut, black culture, charles taylor, cultural diversity, enlightenment, france, herder, identity politics, isaiah berlin, multiculturalism, native son, nouvelle droite, racism, richard wright, romanticism, tariq modood, walter benn michaels, will kymlicka, yugoslavia