To Pip A Butterfly Analysis

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“We Gon’ Be Alright”: Blackness, Controversy, and Hope in Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly On March 15, 2015, rapper Kendrick Lamar released his album To Pimp a Butterfly, which was met with wide critical acclaim for its complex exploration of blackness and African American identity in contemporary American culture. His album covers such themes as growing up poor in Compton, police brutality against African Americans, and the systemic racism and violence that African Americans face. Thus, To Pimp a Butterfly represents Lamar’s critique of the supposedly “post-racial” nature of the current American socio-political landscape; as Stephanie Li notes, the “post-racial” phenomenon “implies an escape from race and thus the end of racial oppression” (3). Lamar’s album positions itself directly against this line of thinking and works to show how blackness cannot and should…show more content…
There are, of course, risks associated with placing an entity in an “exemplary” position as a “case study,” as Lauren Berlant notes in her essay “On the Case,” to ask the question of what makes something a case, and not a merely gestural instance, illustration, or example, is to query the adequacy of an object to bear the weight of an explanation worthy of attending to and taking a lesson from; the case is actuarial. It raises questions of precedent and futurity, of canons and contextualization, of narrative elucidation. This is what’s disciplinary about the normativity of caseness. Its operations are ethical, referencing the vicissitudes of conventionality, of what kind of thing, event, or person has come to be associated with what kind of exemplarity

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