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TRICIA ROSE Foreword The traf‹c in black culture to which this volume is dedicated is tethered to the traf‹c in black bodies on which these cultural exchanges are based. They share several disheartening characteristics: similar trade routes, unequal forms of exchange, and, often, a soulless focus on capital gain. These respective black traf‹cs also share powerful traditions of possibility, such as strategies of refusal, revision, generative exchanges across policed boundaries, style and innovation as life-saving devices and unexpected alternative routes (a paved road isn’t always the most traveled one). Despite the troubled ground on which these traf‹c patterns are set, a good deal of black culture emphasizes sacri‹ce for the larger good and a steadfast commitment to af‹rmation and con‹rmation against relentlessly long odds. Racial ideologies undergirding the historical trade of bodies on which black cultural traf‹cs are based have ensnared interpreters of black cultures in an endless paradox: black culture has been both an enduring symbol of unchanging purity, in full and complete opposition to white, western normalcy and yet a highly celebrated example of cutting-edge change, dynamism, and innovation. Forever “new,” “exotic,” and yet “always black,” black culture must always be recognized as black for its daily bread (as in familiar in its blackness) and yet must also be newly black (as in pure and untainted by “outside forces”) for the same ration. Always a key player in the world of racialized cultural exchange in the modern world, black cultures are playing an increasingly visible and complex role in this latest stage of globalization, a stage fueled primarily by the export of cultural products as Trojan horses of neo-imperialism. This collection is part of a productive direction in the ‹eld, an effort that has found a way to move beyond the paralyzing nature of this inherited paradox. Previous efforts to explore black cultures sometimes unwit- tingly adopted the binary oppositional thinking about race that produced this ‹xed/always new black paradox in the ‹rst place. Much ink has been spilled in the service of defending both the presumed ‹xity of blackness and the immovable parameters of black cultural boundaries. Others have countered that blackness itself didn’t exist because it could not be de‹nitively identi‹ed and did not represent all black people. This volume adopts a fruitful both/and position: sustaining the category “black culture” does not require the denial of incorporation, hybridity , transformation and exchange. One need not adopt the ‹ction of “absolute difference” under which black people have had to labor in order to recognize blackness as a reality. Alternately, to acknowledge incorporation , transformation, change and hybridity in black culture does not bring an end to the category “black culture” or black people, for that matter. We do not invest in cultures randomly; cultural exchanges, desires, appropriations, and af‹nities always speak to already existing relationships , conscious and otherwise—those we want to reinforce, transform, deny, embrace. The cultural traf‹c in blackness is part and parcel of a legacy of race, even as myriad, dynamic, and hopeful new paths are being forged. No matter how lightly we hope to travel, we’ve always got baggage of some sort or another, from trips past. Sorting through the meanings of black cultural expressions and traf‹cs in light of this lingering paradox and in our vastly interconnected and complexly mediated world is more dif‹cult and also more promising than ever before. Market forces, myriad forms of hybrid invention and reappropriation , performances of blackness as a means of survival, cynical uses of black cultural symbols for pro‹t, generational con›icts, new community formations and sympathetic exchanges all conspire to turn black cultural traf‹c into the proverbial parking lot. This dynamic and generative collection breaks through this intellectual gridlock. Rather than steering away from these complexities, these scholars and artists embrace the details, the multiple locations, contradictions, exclusions, contexts, forms and styles themselves. The seemingly impossible juxtapositions produced by these trade routes and traf‹cs are not what happens when you get lost—they constitute the journey itself. FOREWORD viii ...

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