Briana Barner

The Surviving R. Kelly documentary, which premiered in 2019, chronicled the decades of abuse at the hands of Kelly, with appearances from survivors, their supporters and those closest to Kelly. Although what was presented in Surviving R. Kelly is not necessarily new information, the cultural shift that stemmed from #MuteRKelly and #MeToo helped to catapult the experiences of the primarily Black women and girls into mainstream media and ultimately led to Kelly being convicted of the crimes. Days after the documentary initially premiered in 2019, several Black podcasts reviewed the series – Tea with Queen and J, The Clubhouse with Mouse Jones and Marsha’s Plate. This article will provide a textual analysis of these episodes, as the episodes present a reflection on Black media, community and accountability. This article will explore how podcasts grappled with Black media’s complicity in the tangled web of abuse, while also providing survivor-centred content. Why are podcasts important spaces to grapple with difficult conversations among Black communities? What can podcast episodes show us about survivor-centred content and accountability?

Dr. Briana Barner, a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Communication, shares about her experience. 

I applied for a postdoc at the height of the pandemic, while recovering from giving birth and helping my then five-year-old navigate “Zoom school,” all while writing a dissertation. I was beyond exhausted. I was defeated and questioned whether pursuing an academic career during so much uncertainty made any sense at all. The postdoc ended up being exactly what I needed to recover, reflect, and grow. 

Read More on Publish Not Perish, a newsletter for academic writers. 

In this edition of Entrepreneurial Appetite's Black Book discussions, we feature a conversation with Aria S. Halliday, author of Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed U.S. Pop Culture. About the author: Aria S. Halliday, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies and program in African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Halliday specializes in cultural constructions of black girlhood and womanhood in material, visual, and digital culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her interdisciplinary interests include sexuality, Black feminism, and radicalism in Black popular culture in the United States and the Caribbean. She is the editor of The Black Girlhood Studies Collection (Women's Press, 2019) and co-editor of a special issue on hip-hop feminism in the Journal of Hip-Hop Studies (2020). Her articles are featured in Cultural Studies, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Girlhood Studies, Palimpsest, and SOULS. Her book, Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed U.S. Pop Culture, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. Dr. Halliday served as co-chair of the Girls' and Girls' Studies Caucus at the National Women's Studies Association 2016-2019; she is currently Chair of the Girls' and Girls' Studies Caucus. She is also co-founder of Digital Black Girls, a digital humanities archive celebrating Black girls' cultural production and innovation.

About the Book: Buy Black examines American Black women's role in Black consumption in the U.S. and worldwide, focusing on their pivotal role in packaging Black feminine identity since the 1960s. Through an exploration of the dolls, princesses, and rags-to-riches stories that represent Black girlhood and womanhood in everything from haircare to Nicki Minaj's hip-hop, Aria S. Halliday spotlights how the products created by Black women have furthered Black women's position as the moral compass and arbiter of Black racial progress. Far-ranging and bold, Buy Black reveals what attitudes inform a contemporary Black sensibility based on representation and consumerism. It also traces the parameters of Black symbolic power, mapping the sites where intraracial ideals of blackness, womanhood, beauty, play, and sexuality meet and mix in consumer and popular culture.

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