The Personas of Donald Glover: Black Minstrelsy and the Badman in the 21st Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, I argue that Donald Glover takes on the personas of the minstrel and the badman in order to fully encapsulate black personhood. By taking up these historical personas in new ways, Glover humanizes black personhood by commenting on the distinction between “artist” and “black artist” while embodying both ideals at the same time. In Community, Glover’s earliest work, his character Troy Barnes plays on the ideals of the minstrel, while in “This Is America,” Childish Gambino plays both with the ideas regarding the minstrel and the badman by both taking part in the tradition and signifying on it. However, in Glover’s recent show Atlanta, his character Earnest Marks enters new territory that moves beyond the tropes of either the minstrel or badman. In this way, Glover’s work not only embodies black entertainment but also provides a meta-commentary on both its past and its future by demonstrating the central paradox of this enterprise: that black entertainment relies on the very racist stereotypes that it aims to reverse. In this context, Glover subverts the racism of the white mainstream through his minstrel and badman personas while also pointing a way beyond these tropes. Through this subversion of the white mainstream, Glover shows that black artistry and artistry need not be mutually exclusive; instead, Glover’s performances as both black artist and an artist who is black show that black entertainers can inhabit and portray both identities simultaneously. By joining these portrayals, Glover creates mainstream media with a complexity that fully encompasses the personhood of Blackamericans, acknowledging the impacts of systemic racism while also representing them beyond the reductive tropes of the minstrel and the badman. Faculty Mentor: Jillian Skeffington Department: English (Honours)
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".