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In her essay "The Body In Question," author Lisa Kennedy highlights the uniqueness of writing about identity in a society with ever increasing visual representations. For an essay with the theme of the identity of the black community can blur the lines between cultural critique and film critique signifies the "uniquely American moment," in which questions of media activism and identity are tied up by questions of Identity.

Jacquie Jones writes in her essay "The Accusatory Space," that the roles of Tracy Camila Jones in Spike Lee's, She's Gotta Have It, and Mario Van Peebles New Jack City, represent the narrow variety of spaces black women get to occupy in mainstream cinema, that is the role of the bitch, or the 'ho.

In her essay, "Getting Down to Get Over: Romare Bearden's Use of Pornography and the Problem of the Black Female Body in Afro-U.S. Art," Judith Wilson explains the word choices in her title. She explains "getting down" as a descending of the hierarchical scale of popular culture, or to "get down" with physical activity, namely sexual intercourse.

In her piece, Boyz N the Hood and Jungle Fever, author Michele Wallace claims that before films like Boyz N the Hood, the whore and the good girl were the only possible representations for black girls in film.

Black popular culture contains elements that are deeply rooted in historical and regional traditions, while maintaining a focus on what the future will look like. Afrofuturism, for example, is a subset of black popular culture that connects the pas and present. Author Ytasha Womack writes in her book "Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture", "It is a way of bridging the future and the past and essentially helping to reimagine the experience of people of colour."

Womack, Ytasha L. Afrofuturism the World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2013. Print.