Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: My paper will discuss the theoretical insights and possible cultural impact of a new off-Broadway musical, Passing Strange, an uproarious, irreverent, and insightful meditation on the predicaments of middle class black life and “post-black” culture. Mark Stewart, aka “STEW,” is the front man for the band “The Negro Problem,” and the narrator, bandleader, and co-creator of the new musical. The play is a semi-autobiographical song cycle dramatized by a cast of six young black actors surrounded by a rock band of four white, mostly-middle aged musicians. STEW takes his place on stage as a kind of ring master in the story of how a youth, called Youth, rebels at the spiritual vapidity of his bourgeois Los Angeles Baptist church, smokes pot with the closeted choir director, becomes a punk rocker and sets out to find the ever-elusive “real” in the pot-drenched fleshpots of 1980’s Amsterdam and the speed-fueled and surface-obsessed electronica of Berlin’s anarchist art-squats. Referencing the paths of black artists before him who went to Europe to find themselves and fulfill their desires, Passing Strange meditates on the strangeness of “black folks passing for black folks,” adding a novel twist to the much more common treatments of traditional racial passing. The play’s anti-essentialism is fresh, hilarious, and thought provoking, filled with wry and generous observations about human character and human life. Only time will tell if Passing Strange represents a watershed moment in American culture by humorously loosening the straightjacket of racial essentialism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper explores Tom Stoppard's literary invocation of the proper attitude of the individual to the state under various circumstances. While concentrating on Stoppard's invocation of totalitarian communism and the problems in poses for individuals within and without such states, the paper also explores the relevance of what he teaches us to a contempory problem in the regulatory state, using fiction as a tool.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: (to be uploaded)

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Micro-interactionist theories are often used in explaining the effects of status and class differences. However, the theorizing of ‘difference’ is not adequately explained by the basic theory. Herbert Blumer used a ‘sense of group position’ to identify racial and gender identification, but this more or less structural conception doesn’t connect to the more general aspects of his and George Herbert Mead’s basic theory. Thus, symbolic interactionist theory has significant gaps in two different ways: (1) in following through on the generalized other in actual symbolic interactionist studies, (2) integrating positive emotions in their theory, especially concerning motivation, and (3) in devising a model of interaction where significant differences in status occur between men and women, blacks and whites, and other groups. In the end, examples on emotion management among the African American and Caribbean professionals, and sentiment negotiation of men and women in an industrial setting are used to document the two missing links of the symbolic interactionist theories.