Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Unit 1: Another Partial Review - Key Terms

from www.as.uky.edu
Greetings, Students.


We are also exploring some concepts and terms that we think impact the discussions and research in African American Studies. 

Biological Determinism/Essentialism
Biopolitics (Foucault)
Capitalism
Commodification
Demystification
Double Consciousness

Think about how these terms help us discuss African American tradition.   Please post your comments below.

32 comments:

  1. I believe capitalism is good, but only to the extent of everyone not being able to have capital because of poverty and such.

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  2. I feel as if Biological Determinism/Essentialism and Double Consciousness are two good ones, that many people have faced.

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  3. I believe normatively is also a good key term because throughout African American History there are many instances where things that are far from normal are pushed as normal as a form of oppression.

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  5. Please add a key term and try not to duplicate. Thank you.

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  6. Manumission- The act of a slave owner freeing his or her slave.

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  7. Borderlands is an important term to understand while discussing the colonization of Africa, as White spaces were separated from that of the indigenous through ideological boundaries.

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  8. I believe Sexual Acts and Sexual Identities is a good key term because throughout the history of slavery we've learned about the different punishments issued to men and woman slaves. Men were castrated, restricting them from impregnating any woman. When woman were punished there was no harm to their sexual organs.

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  9. Built environment because spaces were built around slaves and slaves ownership

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  10. Commodity – any object or service that can be bought and sold in the marketplace. Much contemporary criticism argues that capitalism reduces all aspects of life – including the expression of emotions – to commodities.

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  11. Term that I want to focus on is a Built environment (created space based on gender , race , nationality and class)

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  12. Black feminism : refers to both a social movement that argues for women's equality and to an analysis of the arrangements of power between women , men , and transgendered community

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  13. Masquerade – “The unconscious assumption of a role” (Fuss, 146). The performative effect of masquerade is to reiterate certain normative power structures.

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  14. Eugenics was the term I chose because it is the science of the improvement of the human race. I thought that it is was a great term due to the fact that owners use to think that they could make their "ideal slave" by pairing the parents of the child themselves.

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  15. Stereotypes -- stereotypes are characteristics that are assigned to people in the various identity categories. They are often "reductive and much repeated" social images (Dines and Humez). Stereotypes can be positive or negative portrayals, but all stereotypes can play a part in reproducing the hegemonic order or racial ideologies. In fact, even when stereotypes are positive, they still produce a basis for ideas of difference.

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  16. Privatization- transfer of resources owned by national bodies to private, often foreign owned corporations.

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  17. Inter-group Difference vs. Intra-group Difference -- Inter-group differences occur between groups, while intra-group differences happen within groups. As regards scientific racism, the groupings were racialized. Failure to measure difference both between groups and within groups skewed the findings because the intra-group differences were more significant than the inter-group differences.

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  18. Ideology- images, concepts and premises which provide the frameworks through which we represent, interpret, understand and "make sense" of some aspect of social existence.

    Ideology i feel is important because it explains why we act the way we do and place importance on certain things within our culture.

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  19. Gerrymandering- manipulating the boundaries in order to favor one class or party over another

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  20. Social Death -- When people are treated as though they are already dead or that their death is to be expected. These conditions are engineered through various institutions that value the lives of some over the lives of other. These differences are often written through identity categories and the uneven application of law and social services. This causes some to live their life with a horizon of death.

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  21. Biological determinism- the belief that somebody is going to be a certain way simply based on their genetics.

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  22. Sexual division of labor – a social arrangement in which the reproductive, child-rearing, and domestic labor almost always associated with women is unpaid while men labor for wages in the public sphere. This arrangement of labor has consequences for women when they do not enter wage work, since it works ideologically to consign them to domestic related service work (such as secretarial labor, paid domestic labor, childcare, nursing, teaching, etc.). Such work is further understood to be ‘unskilled’ because it draws on the kinds of activities that women are thought to do naturally in the home. This means, then, that the sexual division of labor contributes to the sex segregation of jobs, which in turn creates an economic structure in which women perform the lowest paid labor (Wiegman).

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  23. Racialization of culture: where the concept of culture functions as race

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  24. Redlining- That is the denying of loans for houses when people want to live in racialized areas.

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  25. Radical Social Construction- In this view, identity categories, themselves, such as biological sex and race are seen as being culturally constructed, "since it is always from the position of culture and not nature that we 'read' and interpret the human body. Thus biology is not the science of the human body in a state of nature but the study of the body permeated by the very ideologies of sex and gender found elsewhere in U.S. society."

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  26. chose imperialism which is the idea that individuals determine their own destiny and I agree 100%

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  27. Slave Acculturation was a process designed to ensure that the slaves would become totally dependent upon the dictations of their owners. Also, the process planned to destroy the cultural links the slaves had with their former homelands.

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  28. Muslims - pertaining to the religion, law, or civilization of Islam.

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  29. blou – being sad as in the English language feeling blue

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  30. Liberal feminism is an individualistic form of feminist theory, which primarily focuses on women’s ability to show and maintain their equality through their own actions and choices.

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  31. Inter-group Difference vs. Intra-group Difference -- Inter-group differences occur between groups, while intra-group differences happen within groups.

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  32. Belief - a connection

    If you don't listen, you aren't connected, and you don't believe.

    The absence of belief was what enabled white colonists to commodify African bodies.

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