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Social and political change is impossible in the absence of gifted male charismatic leadership -- this is the fiction that shaped African American culture throughout the twentieth century. If we understand this, Erica R. Edwards tells us, we will better appreciate the dramatic variations within both the modern black freedom struggle and the black literary tradition

The reality television show Love and Hip Hop New York enjoyed immense popularity during its fourth season. The show, which profiles the love and relationship experiences of its Black and Latino cast, overwhelmingly perpetuates stereotypes of people of color through a narrow lens of Black masculinity and femininity. This article uses critical discourse analysis to unveil the ways in which the show invites its cast members to create hegemonic representations of themselves. It also argues against the effects model in hip-hop scholarship—which dogmatically asserts that these types of representations are inherently harmful to Black youth. Using audience analysis, the article works to add complexity to the findings of the critical discourse analysis by inviting young Black women to talk back to the representations transmitted by the show.

This essay works at the intersection of queer critique and black feminism to elaborate the problem that the incorporation of minority difference into the institutions and imaginaries of contemporary global power poses for our habits of thought in feminist studies. Attending to black women's sexuality in state narratives of black freedom and black freedom-to-secure against the backdrop of the racial makeovers of the late twentieth century, and at the same time turning to black women's expressive culture as a site that both reflects and troubles those racial makeovers, this essay argues that black women's sexuality functions at once as a lubricant for neoliberal governmentality and as a domain of collective preservation within this order. The author reads the queer force of black women's survival in the Museum of African American History's Changing America exhibit, along with Jesmyn Ward's 2011 novel Salvage the Bones, as a narrative modality that exposes the limits of queer antinormativity in contemporary queer and feminist theories. Given how black women's sexuality serves as a resource for both premature death and surplus life, attention to its complex and contradictory figurations in the contemporary era emphasizes how normativity functions as a complicated set of relations and movements, a systematicity in which even that which we have understood as nonnormative, other, deviant, or pathological is constitutive of the norm.

This article analyzes the impact of party strategies on the issue structure, and consequently the dimensional structure, of party systems across Europe. Conceptualizing political competition in two dimensions (economic left-right and social traditionalism versus liberalism), the authors demonstrate that political parties in both Eastern and Western Europe contest the issue composition of political space. The authors argue that large, mainstream parties are invested in the dimensional status quo, preferring to compete on the primary dimension by emphasizing economic issues. Systematically disadvantaged niche parties, conversely, prefer to compete along a secondary dimension by stressing social issues. Adopting such a strategy enables niche parties to divert voter attention and challenge the structure of conflict between the major partisan competitors. The authors test these propositions using the 2006 iteration of the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys on Party Positions. Findings indicate that while the structure of political conflict in Eastern versus Western Europe could not be more different, the logic with which parties compete in their respective systems is the same. The authors conclude that political competition is primarily a struggle over dimensionality; it does not merely occur along issue dimensions but also over their content.

This article analyzes the impact of party strategies on the issue structure, and consequently the dimensional structure, of party systems across Europe. Conceptualizing political competition in two dimensions (economic left-right and social traditionalism versus liberalism), the authors demonstrate that political parties in both Eastern and Western Europe contest the issue composition of political space. The authors argue that large, mainstream parties are invested in the dimensional status quo, preferring to compete on the primary dimension by emphasizing economic issues. Systematically disadvantaged niche parties, conversely, prefer to compete along a secondary dimension by stressing social issues. Adopting such a strategy enables niche parties to divert voter attention and challenge the structure of conflict between the major partisan competitors. The authors test these propositions using the 2006 iteration of the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys on Party Positions. Findings indicate that while the structure of political conflict in Eastern versus Western Europe could not be more different, the logic with which parties compete in their respective systems is the same. The authors conclude that political competition is primarily a struggle over dimensionality; it does not merely occur along issue dimensions but also over their content.

The insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 is distinct because of its deep ties to White supremacist rhetoric and mobilization. What is also significant is the undeniable role of popular media in establishing the discourse, leadership, and plans that made the event possible. This special issue uses intersectional analysis to interrogate why/how the uprising occurred, and to imagine education as a critical intervention toward countering the bigotry at the day's root. Together, the articles advance the argument that what the world witnessed that day was White privilege, real or imagined, fighting to preserve itself.

The recent death of Amy Joyner, a promising Wilmington, Delaware, high school sophomore demonstrates very clearly the ways in which Black girls are made vulnerable in urban schools. Joyner, an honor roll student, was jumped by a group of girls in the bathroom just before classes began. The alleged cause of the fight was jealousy over a boy. Black girls are bombarded with popular culture messages defining Black femininity along narrow notions of sex appeal, maintaining romantic relationships, and having the ability to fight. Black girls are neither invited in the process of critically examining their popular representation nor supported in thinking through its impact in their own lives. This aspect of the null curriculum, coupled with Black girls' persistent criminalization, makes schools risky places for Black girls. They are left to navigate a society which misunderstands their gender performance without the support or opportunities they need to develop authentic definitions of self, all the while being held subject to beliefs, policies, and practices which surveil and contain them. Despite the neoliberal assault urban educators face, this article argues that urban educators have an epistemic responsibility to critically examine the denigration of Black womanhood in society, incorporate critical media literacy lessons as one response, and pedagogically support Black girls in the creation of counternarratives as a matter of ethical import. Without such practices, urban schools remain complicit in the physical and civic deaths of Amy Joyner, the girls who attacked her, and all other Black girls caught in the web of risk many urban schools leave unexamined.

This article analyzes the impact of party strategies on the issue structure, and consequently the dimensional structure, of party systems across Europe. Conceptualizing political competition in two dimensions (economic left-right and social traditionalism versus liberalism), the authors demonstrate that political parties in both Eastern and Western Europe contest the issue composition of political space. The authors argue that large, mainstream parties are invested in the dimensional status quo, preferring to compete on the primary dimension by emphasizing economic issues. Systematically disadvantaged niche parties, conversely, prefer to compete along a secondary dimension by stressing social issues. Adopting such a strategy enables niche parties to divert voter attention and challenge the structure of conflict between the major partisan competitors. The authors test these propositions using the 2006 iteration of the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys on Party Positions. Findings indicate that while the structure of political conflict in Eastern versus Western Europe could not be more different, the logic with which parties compete in their respective systems is the same. The authors conclude that political competition is primarily a struggle over dimensionality; it does not merely occur along issue dimensions but also over their content.