Browsing by Author "McLarney, E"

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    Beyoncé’s Soft Power
    (Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 2019-09-01) McLarney, E
    This article charts Beyoncé’s multimedia intervention into the politics of the Trump presidency as she draws on the work of black Muslim and Latinx artists to challenge white monopolies on representation in the Breitbart era. It specifically looks at the political interventions Beyoncé staged through collaborations with Warsan Shire, a British poet born in Kenya to Somali parents; Awol Erizku, an Ethiopian-born American artist raised in the Bronx; and Daniela Vesco, a Costa Rican photographer. This collective of artists forge a black aesthetics at a heightened level of visibility, using new performative technologies to intervene in the politics of #BlackLivesMatter, crackdowns on Muslim and Latinx refugees and immigrants, the proposed wall with Mexico, and neo-Nazi mobilization. Focusing on Beyoncé’s pregnancy announcement, the article explores the politics of representation of black bodies and black lives, as she transforms the trope of suffering black mothers and their martyred black youth into a celebration of black motherhood and the pregnant body. These images are consciously rooted in a genealogy of black women’s representations of black women’s bodies. Despite the political power of these interventions, accusations were leveled at Beyoncé of cultural appropriation and exploitation of suffering by the neoliberal entertainment machine. By mentoring these artists, Beyoncé sought to convey the fertility of creative foment across borders and power hierarchies, even if her star power ultimately eclipsed the message as well as the marginalized artist that she sought to highlight.
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    Black Muslims and the Angels of Afrofuturism
    (The Black Scholar, 2023-04-03) McLarney, E; Idris, S
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    "Empire of the Machine": Oil in the Arabic Novel
    (BOUNDARY 2-AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND CULTURE, 2009) McLarney, E
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    James Baldwin and the Power of Black Muslim Language
    (Social Text, 2019-03-01) McLarney, E
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    The private is political: Women and family in intellectual Islam
    (Feminist Theory, 2010-08-06) McLarney, E
    In Hiba Ra'uf's Woman and Political Work, she argues that the family is the basic political unit of the Islamic community or nation (the umma). Her thesis is both feminist and Islamist, as she argues that the 'private is political'. By drawing analogies between family and umma, family and caliphate, the personal and the political, the private and public, Ra'uf seeks to dismantle the oppositions of secular society, to challenge the division of society into discrete spheres. This entails an implicit challenge to the secular state, but effected through the politics of the family. An Islamic family, she argues, is a powerful site for the transformation of socio-political institutions; a politics of the microcosmic with macrocosmic ramifications, effected through the very embodiment and practice of an Islamic ethos at a grassroots, capillary level. However, though Ra'uf contests liberal secularism's division of spheres with feminist and Islamist critical methods, she reproduces some of its fundamental assumptions about the nature of the family: as the domain of religion, in opposition to the secular state; as rooting community, in opposition to the individualism of the citizen; as an ethics grounded in affect; and as an essentially feminine world. In making the family the sphere of Islamic politics, Ra'uf re-enacts secularism's division of spheres, sacralizing the affective bonds of intimate relations and making the family the domain of religion. Furthermore, by emphasizing the family as the domain of women's political work, she reinscribes the family as a feminine sphere, so that woman's vocation is familial, as is her ethical disposition. © The Author(s) 2010.