Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Simone C. Drake and Dwan K. Henderson (review)

Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century frames its broad conversation on Black popular culture through cultural theorist Stuart Hall's seminal 1992 essay, "What Is This 'Black' In Black Popular Culture?" (1). Black experiences occupy a peculiar space in American narratives on politics and culture, a longstanding fact brought into sharp focus by many events across 2020. These events and this collection reprise another question from Hall's essay: "What sort of moment is this in which to pose the question of black popular culture?" The fourteen essays and four interviews that comprise this collection simultaneously acknowledge and challenge instances of reinscribed hegemonic notions and representations of blackness in American popular culture, performance, radicalism, and quotidian practices in this current moment of Black expressive modalities. Separated into four categories—"Performing Blackness," "Politicizing Blackness," "Owning Blackness," and "Loving Blackness"—the essays included in this collection consider the possibilities for the explosion of preexisting confines of Black popular culture "through thinking about blackness in different realms," especially at this point in history (230).

Each chapter intervenes in Black political thought and expressive cultures through new approaches to existing archives that bridge the past and present and demonstrate access and technology as routes to liberatory possibilities. Each chapter, to varying degrees, attends to the ways blackness has been "commodified, consumed, appropriated, and … mass-produced" (1). Together, Drake and Henderson introduce what is Black and popular in Black popular culture through Hall's essay and through the work of contemporary Black celebrities, including Donald Glover, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, and Colin Kaepernick. The Introduction, "More Than Entertainment" begins with analyses of interviews with Glover and performances by Beyoncé to position their subject-making in a larger history of blackness, pleasure, and resistance, akin to characterizations of rapper Lamar and athlete/activist Kaepernick.. While Drake and Henderson recognize shifts in the stakes of Black popular culture as a result of new forms of cultural production, they also attempt to display the "changing same" within twenty-first-century productions that are both "disruptive and repetitive" (6). For example, singer Pearl Bailey's and cartoonist Jackie Ormes's mid-twentieth-century careers are positioned as revelatory models of resistance in Black popular culture that offer historical contexts to modern-day culture. Vincent Stephens recognizes Bailey and other Black performers from the 1920s through the 1950s, including Eartha Kitt and Mabel Mercer as pioneers in the genre of cabaret, effectively fusing blackness, sexuality, and camp. An undercurrent in Stephens's essay and in many of the other chapters about performance is a critique of the dominance of soul in canonical and popular images of Black expression (58, 59). Considered this way, Stephens's corrective to consider Black cabaret singers in discussions of Black popular music is a turn toward expanding Black aesthetic musical traditions beyond soul. Such a turn "broaden[s] understandings of African American popular music and performance toward an anti-essentialist definition" (59). Even though the prevalence of Black cabaret performers in Europe and Black popular culture's exceptionalism in America, in particular, is largely under-explored in this essay and the collection as a whole, the remedied absence of cabaret in the spectrum of Black expressive culture generates critical engagement with justifications for genre-based inclusion and exclusion in Black popular cultural studies. Similarly, Kelly Jo Fulkerson-Dikuua demonstrates how Ormes's comics from 1938 to 1958 center Black women's and girls' experiences in relation to mobility, fashion, and political commentary (103). Fulkerson-Dikuua concludes that Ormes's work is a projection of "Black womanhood that was often hidden" in mainstream narratives (114). Stephens and Fulkerson-Dikuua's twentieth-century archival interventions are exemplary of the collection's aim to expand the study of Black popular culture and challenge aesthetic and genre confines that overdetermine notions of Black identity.

In addition to expansion that...