This essay gauges the significance and legacy of Carolyn Cooper’s Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993). It discusses the book’s impact across and against the “Black Atlantic” paradigm, the rise and limits of global feminisms, and shifts in Black popular and academic cultures in the 1990s. Just past its thirtieth anniversary, the book’s critical methodologies enabled much of contemporary thinking about race, gender, and popular cultures in the African diaspora. However, it also establishes some aesthetic and political refusals that are still necessary in an intellectual climate where the Caribbean continues to struggle against the hegemonizing demands of elite Pan-African solidarities.
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July 01 2024
Blood and Noise: Carolyn Cooper and the Politics of Betrayal
Louis Chude-Sokei
Louis Chude-Sokei is the author of The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black on Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (2005), The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2015), and Floating in a Most Peculiar Way: A Memoir (2021). He is a professor of English, the George and Joyce Wein Chair, and the director of the African American and Black Diaspora Studies Program at Boston University. He is also the editor in chief of The Black Scholar and founder of the sonic art and archival project Echolocution.
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Small Axe (2024) 28 (2 (74)): 63–72.
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Louis Chude-Sokei; Blood and Noise: Carolyn Cooper and the Politics of Betrayal. Small Axe 1 July 2024; 28 (2 (74)): 63–72. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-11382465
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