6.6: Glossary

Key Terms

• Aesthetics is the viewpoint from which individuals decode and navigate social norms. It is often physically manifested through artistic/cultural creations.
• Black Respectability is a political strategy in which members of the Black community assimilate to the hegemonic ideals of the dominant culture in hopes of acquiring equal social status.
• Cultural Hybridity is the blending and adoption of different cultures that create a new distinct identity.
• Culture is a dialectical exchange of shared customs, heritage, and ideologies, which is often displayed through the prime example of artistic expression.
• Dandyism is a philosophical ideal that utilizes fashion to rethink societal norms while demonstrating one's maturation to full personhood.
• Dapper Dan (Daniel Day) is a Harlem fashion designer who reimagines and redesigns high-end European brands for Hip-Hop artists.
• Fugitivity is a theory in which freedom is found or expressed through one's escape from the bondage of antiblackness.
• Griot is an African tribal storyteller who was the vessel of historical information. These leaders were historians who utilized the oral tradition to pass down historical information through poetry, songs, and storytelling.
• Hip Hop is a Cultural and musical genre that originated in New York in the early 1970s that encompasses four distinct elements: DJing (Turntablism), B-boying (Dance), MCing (Spoken Word), and Graffiti (Written Word).
• Interpolations are the remixing or reimagining of new possibilities. This can be seen in Hip Hop music sampling of older songs that are remixed into new creations.
• Liminality is a “symbolic realm, creating possibilities for people to experiment with new cultural resources and invite different interpretations that hold potential for altering the cultural order.”[95]
• Maturity is the ability to think and reason freely.
• Modernity flows out of the Age of the Enlightenment; used as a term that often symbolizes the transitions into modern society, which were often marked by the rise of scientific thought and the industrial age, when superstition was replaced with reason.
• Negro Spirituals (Black Spirituals) are enslaved African folk songs that were sung during times of jubilee or intense moments of sorrow. These songs often held code messages of escape via the “Underground Railroad.”
• Slave Cloth is an inexpensive coarse cloth used in enslaved clothing. It often symbolized a distinction between field/domestic labor and freedmen in the Antebellum South.
• Utopia is a fictional creation of a perfect world that often solves or eliminates all societal problems.
• White Supremacy is an institutional system that supports and promotes privilege/power based on a believed natural superiority of light-skinned human races over other races. Historically, it is rooted in American chattel slavery, Indigenous genocide and removal, imperialism and war in Asia, and land dispossession of Mexico.

---

Endnotes

[95] Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Karen Golden-Biddle, Jennifer Irwin, and Jina Mao, “Liminality as Cultural Process for Cultural Change,” Organization Science 22, no. 2 (March-April 2011): 522. JSTOR.