A Place of Our Own: The National Museum of African American History and Culture

Freedom Comes in a BoxReflections on the National Museum of African American History and Culture Radiclani Clytus (bio) Blacks in one boxBlacks in two boxBlacks onBlacks stacked in boxes stacked on boxesBlacks in boxes stacked on shoresBlacks in boxes stacked on boats in darknessBlacks in boxes do not floatBlacks in boxes count their losses —Terrance Hayes, “The Blue Seuss” In August 2016 the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), which is located on the last available site of Pierre L’Enfant’s 1791 master plan for the US Capital, will open its doors in honor of the black experience in America. Since the museum’s initial proposal in 1915 by black Union Army veterans, African Americans have been relentless in their demands for a parcel of what is often described as our nation’s most symbolic, if not most important, tract of real estate. As early as 1929, the collective efforts of black soldiers and citizens were sufficient enough to compel President Herbert Hoover to establish a commission that was charged with developing a plan for a National Memorial Building where “the Negro’s contribution to the achievements of America” could be duly recognized (Wilkins). This committee included the likes of Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Paul Revere Williams, and John R. Hawkins; but hard luck in the form of the Great Depression obstructed their mission to secure comprehensive legislation and private fundraising. As a result, the appeal for a national black history museum subsided for several decades, only to reemerge during the latter half of the twentieth century. So it’s not surprising that when the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s enlivened discussions about how Americans should view the legacy of slavery, skirmishes over the proposed museum and reparations became the routine fodder of talk shows and nightly news programs. One might even argue that there is a correlation between how such debates persisted within the black public sphere (aka barber and beauty shops) and the tenacity with which Representatives such as the late Mickey Leland and John Lewis held forth as the museum’s sole congressional advocates. But [End Page 742] for all of Leland’s and Lewis’s legislative achievements, beginning with the appointment of Mary Schmidt Campbell as the chair of the Smithsonian advisory board in 1990, the National Museum of African American History and Culture Act (H.R. 3491) would not be ratified until December 16, 2003. Owing to the act’s countless compromises and delays, its realization has now come to feel like so many of our nation’s democratic struggles that turn out to be profoundly reasonable despite embattling a lifetime’s worth of opposition. Fortunately, this century’s long effort is complemented by an architectural structure that reflects the temerity of the museum’s supporters and their bold programmatic intentions. The museum’s design, which is the result of the collaboration between three internationally acclaimed architects, Philip Freelon, David Adjaye, and the late J. Max Bond, Jr. (all of whom are of African descent), marks a radical break from the neoclassical white marble monuments that dot the architectural landscape of the Capital’s centerpiece. The building itself has the appearance of an upside down ziggurat and consists of three bronze decoratively patterned inverted trapezoids that rest atop a massive plinth. According to Adjaye, a Ghanaian-British national with whom the museum’s design is closely associated, the inverted trapezoids directly reference those Yoruban shrines that were contemporaneous with the existence of the Transatlantic slave trade and thus honor the history of African craftsmanship through the visual effect of a shimmering bronze corona. By having the building’s silhouette reflect upon the foundry cultures of Nigeria and Benin, Adjaye hopes to call attention to the unacknowledged black artisans who developed much of the ornamental metal work that can be found in cities such as Savannah, GA; Charleston, SC; and New Orleans, LA. Arguably, there is very little in Adjaye’s structure and the surrounding landscape that brings to mind the agricultural labor that was essential to the accumulation of white wealth within the Americas. However, a case for this...

Manifest Wendel A. White (bio) Manifest is an ongoing project, a portfolio of nearly one hundred photographs of African American material culture held in public and private collections throughout the United States. These repositories have accumulated diaries, receipts for the purchase of humans, hair, a drum, a door, photographs, figurines, and other artifacts—some with great historical significance, some the commonplace, quotidian material of black life. This project is concerned with the physical remnants of the American concept and representation of race. The histories of slavery, abolition, the U.S. Civil War, segregation, oppression, accomplishment, and agency are among the narratives that emerge in these photographs. I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit material remains. The ability of objects to transcend lives, centuries, and millennia suggests a remarkable mechanism for folding time, bringing the past and the present into a shared space that is uniquely suited to artistic exploration. While the artifacts are remarkable as visual evidence of lives and events, I also intend the viewer to consider this informal reliquary as a survey of the impulse and motivation to preserve history and memory. Various projects have occupied my attention during the past two decades; in retrospect, each has been part of a singular effort to seek out the ghosts and resonant memories of the material world. I am drawn to the stories "dwelling within" a spoon, a cowbell, a book, a postcard, or a partially burned document. The photographs are made with a 4 × 5 view camera, using film or digital capture. The prints are pigment-based inkjet. [End Page 14] Click for larger view View full resolution Lunch Box, Larkin Franklin Sr., Eatonville Historic Preservation, Eatonville, Florida, 2012. [End Page 15] Click for larger view View full resolution Slave Bill of Sale, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York, 2009. [End Page 16] Click for larger view View full resolution Door Knob, Maye St. Julien, Eatonville Historic Preservation, Eatonville, Florida, 2012. [End Page 17] Click for larger view View full resolution Spoon, Harriet Tubman House, Auburn, New York, 2009. [End Page 18] Click for larger view View full resolution Iron, Great Plain Black History Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 19] Click for larger view View full resolution Tintype, Fenton History Center, Jamestown, New York, 2009. [End Page 20] Click for larger view View full resolution Zora Neale Hurston Sketch Book, Smathers Library Special Collections, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, 2012. [End Page 21] Click for larger view View full resolution James Baldwin Inkwell, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 22] Click for larger view View full resolution FBI Files on Malcolm X, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 23] Click for larger view View full resolution Poster of Angela Davis, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 24] Click for larger view View full resolution Drum, Dan Desdunes Band, Great Plains Black History Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 25] Click for larger view View full resolution Cab Calloway Home Movies: Haiti, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 26] Click for larger view View full resolution Radio Raheem's boombox from the movie Do the Right Thing, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 27] Click for larger view View full resolution New Orleans Door, Hurricane Katrina, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 28] Click for larger view View full resolution Quilt (W. Black), Great Plains Black History Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 29] Wendel A. White Wendel A. White was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. He earned a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MFA in photography from the University of Texas at Austin. His work has received various awards, including fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in...

An Interview with Kathryn Gustafson Charles Henry Rowell and Kathryn Gustafson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photograph courtesy of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol [End Page 777] This interview was conducted via email during August 2015. ROWELL: What distinguishes your landscape design for the new structure called the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) from others you have created for other public buildings? GUSTAFSON: All of our landscape designs are distinguished by their specificity. We strive as landscape architects to create designs for each unique place. So I would say that all of our landscapes are different. They look as much as possible, and feel as much as possible, as being of the place where they are located—with each design based on deep research of the site’s history and ecology. When we are designing, we consider what will be happening in each landscape once it’s built, so that we can better represent the program and the people that are to engage with the places we design. ROWELL: As you created a landscape design for NMAAHC, did you give consideration to the general landscaping surrounding other buildings on the National Mall, especially those structures adjacent to or not far from the location of the NMAAHC? If so, what were those considerations? How did you address those concerns? GUSTAFSON: The National Museum of African American History and Culture is set within an extremely historic and defined landscape: It is in Washington, DC, on the National Mall, adjacent to the Washington Monument, the White House, and the Oval Garden. This landscape has origins going back to the 1700s and has been formed over time as our country has grown. The different areas are overseen by the National Planning Commission, the Commission of Fine Arts, the Friends of the Washington Monument, and by other civic groups that are interested in the entire area. Our main goal with the Parks Department, with the architects, and with our client was to integrate this building into its context, while at the same time help to create an identity for this building. If you look at the Context Plan, it clarifies the way that the Museum is sited on the parcel of land. You will see clear connections to both the Mall—extending east from the Museum towards Union Square, the Grant Memorial, and the US Capitol—and the adjacent Washington Monument’s grounds. The Museum’s site is like a junction between these two landscapes, with the third part of that junction being the White House grounds. As a result of the location, you are dealing with three different historical eras of design: [Pierre Charles] L’Enfant designed the entire Mall with a rectilinear design that joins the Capitol; the Art Nouveau design influence introduces a completely different type of geometry to the Washington Monument; and the White House, which is more Palladian and neoclassical. When you walk the site you see that the visual approaches to the Museum are totally different from each of the four corners of the site, which is unlike any other museum site. All of the other museums are [End Page 778] approached from a major road or from the Mall. We are approached from the White House, from Constitution Avenue, from the Mall, and the Washington Monument. So we basically have four different influences that are all culminating into one very powerful site. I think the way in which David Adjaye, lead design architect, has designed this building to rise up from that site, and rise up with these different influences, is very poetic. Click for larger view View full resolution National Museum of African American History and Culture: Context Plan Courtesy of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Our site also has a nine-foot grade change stepping downhill from the height of the National Mall to Constitution Avenue. The original topography explains why we have a distinct low point on the site, and why we have a distinct high point. There was a stream called Tiber Creek along Constitution Avenue that later became a canal. That canal was an entryway for goods and services into the city, and it is believed that slaves and...

Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature

The African American influence on popular culture is among the most sweeping and lasting this country has seen. Despite a history of institutionalized racism, black artists, entertainers, and entrepreneurs have had enormous impact on American popular culture. Pioneers such as Oscar Michaeux, Paul Robeson, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Langston Hughes, Bill Bojangles Robinson, and Bessie Smith paved the way for Jackie Robinson, Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, Sidney Poitier, and Bill Cosby, who in turn opened the door for Spike Lee, Dave Chappelle, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan. Today, hip hop is the most powerful element of youth culture; white teenagers outnumber blacks as purchasers of rap music; black-themed movies are regularly successful at the box office, and black writers have been anthologized and canonized right alongside white ones. Though there are still many more miles to travel and much to overcome, this three-volume set considers the multifaceted influence of African Americans on popular culture, and sheds new light on the ways in which African American culture has come to be a fundamental and lasting part of America itself. To articulate the momentous impact African American popular culture has had upon the fabric of American society, these three volumes provide analyses from academics and experts across the country. They provide the most reliable, accurate, up-to-date, and comprehensive treatment of key topics, works, and themes in African American popular culture for a new generation of readers. The scope of the project is vast, including: popular historical movements like the Harlem Renaissance; the legacy of African American comedy; African Americans and the Olympics; African Americans and rock 'n roll; more contemporary articulations such as hip hop culture and black urban cinema; and much more. One goal of the project is to recuperate histories that have been perhaps forgotten or obscured to mainstream audiences and to demonstrate how African Americans are not only integral to American culture, but how they have always been purveyors of popular culture.

The African American influence on popular culture is among the most sweeping and lasting this country has seen. Despite a history of institutionalized racism, black artists, entertainers, and entrepreneurs have had enormous impact on American popular culture. Pioneers such as Oscar Michaeux, Paul Robeson, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Langston Hughes, Bill Bojangles Robinson, and Bessie Smith paved the way for Jackie Robinson, Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, Sidney Poitier, and Bill Cosby, who in turn opened the door for Spike Lee, Dave Chappelle, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan. Today, hip hop is the most powerful element of youth culture; white teenagers outnumber blacks as purchasers of rap music; black-themed movies are regularly successful at the box office, and black writers have been anthologized and canonized right alongside white ones. Though there are still many more miles to travel and much to overcome, this three-volume set considers the multifaceted influence of African Americans on popular culture, and sheds new light on the ways in which African American culture has come to be a fundamental and lasting part of America itself. To articulate the momentous impact African American popular culture has had upon the fabric of American society, these three volumes provide analyses from academics and experts across the country. They provide the most reliable, accurate, up-to-date, and comprehensive treatment of key topics, works, and themes in African American popular culture for a new generation of readers. The scope of the project is vast, including: popular historical movements like the Harlem Renaissance; the legacy of African American comedy; African Americans and the Olympics; African Americans and rock 'n roll; more contemporary articulations such as hip hop culture and black urban cinema; and much more. One goal of the project is to recuperate histories that have been perhaps forgotten or obscured to mainstream audiences and to demonstrate how African Americans are not only integral to American culture, but how they have always been purveyors of popular culture.

The African American influence on popular culture is among the most sweeping and lasting this country has seen. Despite a history of institutionalized racism, black artists, entertainers, and entrepreneurs have had enormous impact on American popular culture. Pioneers such as Oscar Michaeux, Paul Robeson, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Langston Hughes, Bill Bojangles Robinson, and Bessie Smith paved the way for Jackie Robinson, Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, Sidney Poitier, and Bill Cosby, who in turn opened the door for Spike Lee, Dave Chappelle, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan. Today, hip hop is the most powerful element of youth culture; white teenagers outnumber blacks as purchasers of rap music; black-themed movies are regularly successful at the box office, and black writers have been anthologized and canonized right alongside white ones. Though there are still many more miles to travel and much to overcome, this three-volume set considers the multifaceted influence of African Americans on popular culture, and sheds new light on the ways in which African American culture has come to be a fundamental and lasting part of America itself. To articulate the momentous impact African American popular culture has had upon the fabric of American society, these three volumes provide analyses from academics and experts across the country. They provide the most reliable, accurate, up-to-date, and comprehensive treatment of key topics, works, and themes in African American popular culture for a new generation of readers. The scope of the project is vast, including: popular historical movements like the Harlem Renaissance; the legacy of African American comedy; African Americans and the Olympics; African Americans and rock 'n roll; more contemporary articulations such as hip hop culture and black urban cinema; and much more. One goal of the project is to recuperate histories that have been perhaps forgotten or obscured to mainstream audiences and to demonstrate how African Americans are not only integral to American culture, but how they have always been purveyors of popular culture.

Book Review| May 01 2022 Review: Curating America’s Painful Past: Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination, by Tim Gruenewald Curating America’s Painful Past: Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination by Tim Gruenewald. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. 304 pp.; 42 b&w images, notes, references, index; clothbound, $34.95; eBook, $26.49. Samantha Blair Schwartz Samantha Blair Schwartz Samantha Blair Schwartz, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2022) 44 (2): 136–138. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2022.44.2.136 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Samantha Blair Schwartz; Review: Curating America’s Painful Past: Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination, by Tim Gruenewald. The Public Historian 1 May 2022; 44 (2): 136–138. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2022.44.2.136 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search On a road trip taken during a move from Atlanta to Seattle in 2001, Tim Gruenewald was struck by the brutal differences in the preservation and commemoration of two historic sites—the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre and Mount Rushmore, both in South Dakota and involving the Lakota. In 2015, Gruenewald released the film Sacred Ground, which “explores the contrasting memories and mythologies about the American past” (xi) concerning these two sites. He continues this exploration of memory and mythology in Curating America’s Painful Past: Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination in what he refers to as a “sequel” to the film (xii). In his book, Gruenewald examines four museums located on the National Mall in Washington, DC: the National Museum of American History (NMAH), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and the National Museum of the American... You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro Stacy Reardon (bio) Whalan, Mark. The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2008. 400,000 African American soldiers participated in World War I within a segregated military that in large part consigned them to service roles: building roads, digging trenches, and unloading cargo. Nevertheless, prominent African American intellectuals in the early-twentieth century pushed for African American inclusion in the military as an opportunity for social progress and a means for African American men to acquire the trappings of masculine honor and respect so long denied them. When the 369th regiment, "The Harlem Hellfighters," paraded up 5th Avenue into Harlem, 250,000 people came to greet them. Yet the prevalence in 1919 of race riots and lynching—including of African American veterans still in uniform—cut into the optimism. Meanwhile, white America went busily about memorializing the war as one fought exclusively by whites. Almost a century later, the memory of World War I remains a contested site in American culture, particularly in the arts, where the relationship of the Great War to African American literature and culture has gone virtually undiscussed. While many of the prominent histories of the Harlem Renaissance, including When Harlem Was in Vogue by David Levering Lewis (1989), The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White by George Hutchinson (1995), and Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance by Cary D. Wintz (1998), touch on World War I, Mark Whalan's The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro is the first full-length work to examine in detail how African American participation in World War I played out in the cultural sphere. Recognizing that a critical focus on battlefield narratives as the defining texts of war literature has failed to document the way the War interwove with the New Negro movement, Whalan expands his investigation to cover writings of the "talented tenth" not normally considered to be war literature. By examining texts ranging from fictive representations of African American soldiers, such as Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) and Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), to popular war poetry exhorting African American soldiers to victory, such as Roscoe Jamison's "Negro Soldiers," to the influential [End Page 1140] photography and soldier portraits of James VanDerZee, Whalan unveils the tensions generated within African American culture at the prospect of participating in an imperial war on behalf of a racist state in which racialization of the enemy was a dominant ideological strategy. Whalan persuasively theorizes that African American participation in the War, however oppressive, energized the New Negro movement and helped shape its models of manhood and resistance. Whalan opens with a thoroughly grounded history of the experiences of African Americans in the War and at home. He outlines the social debates framing race and the military, showing that a central question for African Americans was whether the possibility of social advancement through military service could offset the costs and contradictions of serving in a segregated military during a time of widespread racial violence and oppression. At the same time, white America "deplored the thought of militarily trained black men in their communities" and was conflicted as to whether the need for men was urgent enough to risk training and arming a group so long held in subjugation through violence (1). Whalan traces how these issues funneled into the practical but contentious disputes taking place on a national level about military segregation, black military roles, and officer training. The book's major project, however, is to offer a cultural thematics of African American engagement with the cultural implications and memory of the Great War, particularly adumbrating the internal debates within the New Negro movement about the role of African Americans in the military, its implications, and how that participation should be represented. In the second chapter, "'Civilization has met its Waterloo': The Great War, Race, and the Canon," Whalan brings into focus the way African American intellectuals negotiated a precarious position between demanding that African Americans be acknowledged as rightful participants in American culture on the one hand and celebrating African American culture as an attractive refuge...

Today well over two hundred museums focusing on African American history and culture can be found throughout the United States and Canada. Many of these institutions trace their roots to the 1960s and 1970s, when the struggle for racial equality inspired a movement within the black community to make the history and culture of African America more public. This book tells the story of four of these groundbreaking museums: the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago (founded in 1961); the International Afro-American Museum in Detroit (1965); the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, D.C. (1967); and the African American Museum of Philadelphia (1976). Andrea A. Burns shows how the founders of these institutions, many of whom had ties to the Black Power movement, sought to provide African Americans with a meaningful alternative to the misrepresentation or utter neglect of black history found in standard textbooks and most public history sites. Through the recovery and interpretation of artifacts, documents, and stories drawn from African American experience, they encouraged the embrace of a distinctly black identity and promoted new methods of interaction between the museum and the local community. Over time, the black museum movement induced mainstream institutions to integrate African American history and culture into their own exhibits and educational programmes. This often controversial process has culminated in the creation of a National Museum of African American History and Culture, now scheduled to open in the nation's capital in 2015.

In a review of Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel, Subterraneans, poet/ critic Kenneth Rexroth said. The story is all about jazz and Negroes. Now there are two things Jack knows nothing about -- jazz and Negroes (Nicosia 568). Whatever the source of Rexroth's disdain for Kerouac's novel, this criticism of Subterraneans hits close to the mark.(1) Kerouac's romanticized depictions of and references to African Americans (as well as racial minorities -- American Indians and Mexican-Americans) betray his essential lack of understanding of African American culture and the African American social experience. That is, Kerouac's novelistic attitude toward racial minorities in Subterraneans (and elsewhere) is similar to the stance of those of the 1840s and 1850s described by George M. Fredrickson, who, in African Americans, discovered redeeming virtues and even evidences of...superiority (Fredrickson 101). For Kerouac uses (as did the nineteenth-century romantic racialists) racial minorities as of those entities that he feels are tragically lacking in white American civilization (Fredrickson 108). American society, Kerouac says, desperately needs an infusion of the qualities embodied by her oppressed minorities: the existential joy, wisdom, and nobility that comes from suffering and victimization. It is an indication of how deeply racism is embedded in American discourse that the African American characters and art forms that are depicted in Kerouac's novel are not substantially different from the Negro symbols used by the romantic racialists over a century earlier to help eradicate slavery. Even on the dawn (and later, in the midst) of the Civil Rights Movement, white authors, such as Kerouac, who positioned themselves on the outside of the social and literary mainstream of America -- that is, contiguous with, if not intersecting those groups who had been forced outside -- were not any closer than writers of previous generations, such as Carl Van Vechten, to representing America's oppressed minorities in ways that respected those groups and their history and traditions. Not recognizing their own complicity in perpetuating racist ideology, Kerouac and others continued the tradition of primitivizing and romanticizing the experiences of racial minorities (particularly African Americans) and raiding their culture and contemporary experience for the purpose of enhancing their own position as white outsiders. While the attraction of white writers such as Kerouac to African American society and culture was not new to the 1950s,(2) the amount and vitality of both the white and black literary work with these materials during this decade combined with the proximity of this period to the succeeding boom in white and black cultural interaction has prompted many cultural historians to speculate about this decade's unique characteristics. favored explanation for the attraction of white people in general to African American society and culture during the 1950s has been their identification as victims of nuclear terror with the traditional victims of American governmental policy -- African Americans -- and their need to replace the cold logic and reason of this scientific terror with a strategy for living that is more spontaneous, emotional, and spiritual. Similarly, the conventional explanation for the white writers's interest in African American culture involves their use of these materials in reaction against the literary establishment; that is, jazz and a kind of African American oral poetry gave these writers forms for their expression that they believed were more alive, vital, and honest than what they perceived as the fake, impotent, and artificial forms of literature emanating from the establishment.(3) Both of these explanations (the general and the specific) fit very well with classic descriptions of cultural and artistic primitivism. That is, in times when people are discontented with the progress of their society, these so-called civilized people look to the other -- usually a Noble Savage -- as a remedy for their dissatisfaction. …

Reviewed by: Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture Ali Colleen Neff Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture. By Marcyliena Morgan. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 181, 4 black-and-white illustrations, 8 data tables, 4 maps of U.S. slave population expansions, notes on transcriptions, notes, references, index.) In recent years, the academic study of hip-hop culture has grown substantially and includes work from all corners of the social sciences, thus shining unprecedented light on African American linguistics. Marcyliena Morgan's Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture (hereafter Language) promises to add significantly to the discourse on hip-hop, while reexamining previous scholarship on African American English (AAE). While this review addresses Morgan's 2002 publication, she has extended her research into a more recent publication, The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground from Duke University Press in 2009, which will be reviewed in a future volume of this journal. Grounded primarily in socio-linguistics, Morgan employs a multidisciplinary approach in interpreting the performative speech of a number of AAE speech groups, linking each to the core features that define this rich dialectical style. Morgan's scholarship is a seminal force in the legitimatization and development of the study of hip-hop. As executive director of Harvard's Hiphop Archive, she has sought to facilitate academic and journalistic research on the genre. Morgan's work looks beyond the development of hip-hop as a popular commodity to examine how it operates within local African American communities. By viewing hip-hop's vernacular roots, rather than its pop-cultural front, Language connects with the wealth of ethnographic and folkloristic work on African American speech. In the book, Morgan works her way though generations of African American linguistic culture. She analyzes quantitative and qualitative data through the combined lenses of history, linguistics, folklore, political economy, and cultural studies. The first chapter deals with the synthesis of AAE in the antebellum era, African American styles of managing one's public face, and the phenomenon of what W. E. B. DuBois called "double consciousness." The book goes on to link subsequent generations of AAE speech back to its cultural genesis. It shows how a number of AAE subgroups—double consciousness intact—use tools of signification, indirection, circumlocution, intonation, and laughter to accomplish social goals while retaining a sovereign social space. Chapter 3 deals with the interactions between AAE and General English (GE), with a focus on the contextual complexity that accompanies the use of either style by African Americans. An important feature of Morgan's ethnographic research is her focus on women's speech. She unpacks a schoolgirl gossip chain, discusses the use of memorates by older women, and provides a detailed reading of a warm but complex conversation between adult family members in Chicago. In her fourth chapter, she details women's conversations concerning group traitors, race riots, and maternity practices. From these short excerpts, Morgan extracts both the mind-set of the speaker and coded references to the history, migration, and survival tactics of women of color in America. The result of this emphasis is twofold. Morgan expands the scope of African American linguistic scholarship, which has traditionally emphasized the speech of young urban males, by providing access to oft-overlooked members of the AAE community. Further, she unpacks hip-hop, a form practiced primarily by young men, by connecting it to AAE women's speech, children's games, and elder storytelling. The fifth chapter of Language reframes the hip-hop discourse in terms of these connections. In view of the compelling information offered in the body of the book, the final chapter calls for a redefinition of AAE on the part of education policymakers. Morgan's writing style is straightforward and accessible. She mixes personal anecdotes with qualitative and statistical data and illustrates each aspect of her study with compelling ethnographic information. This ethnography provides the common thread that runs through the whole of Morgan's body of research. Morgan [End Page 368] has done ethnographic work with a variety of groups: hip-hop artists in Los Angeles, her own family in Chicago, and members of...

The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) marks a milestone moment in American history; the project has taken almost a century to come to fruition. Beginning with the first glimpse of the new monumental building on the National Mall, a NMAAHC visitor encounters complex symbols and histories. This review explores NMAAHC's historical context alongside its symbolic capital and its inaugural exhibitions, focusing on the central topic of the museum's efforts to embody “a new integration,” a space wherein all Americans can see their country through the lens of the African American experience.

Covering everything from sports to art, religion, music, and entrepreneurship, this book documents the vast array of African American cultural expressions and discusses their impact on the culture of the United States. According to the latest census data, less than 13 percent of the U.S. population identifies as African American; African Americans are still very much a minority group. Yet African American cultural expression and strong influences from African American culture are common across mainstream American culture—in music, the arts, and entertainment; in education and religion; in sports; and in politics and business.African American Culture: An Encyclopedia of People, Traditions, and Customscovers virtually every aspect of African American cultural expression, addressing subject matter that ranges from how African culture was preserved during slavery hundreds of years ago to the richness and complexity of African American culture in the post-Obama era. The most comprehensive reference work on African American culture to date, the multivolume set covers such topics as black contributions to literature and the arts, music and entertainment, religion, and professional sports. It also provides coverage of less-commonly addressed subjects, such as African American fashion practices and beauty culture, the development of jazz music across different eras, and African American business.

Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes. 2020[2013]. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (African American Legacy Series co-produced with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture) SFW CD 40241. Poems by Langston Hughes. Produced by Leyla McCalla and Joseph Dejarnette. Performed by Leyla McCalla, Tom Proyor, Joseph Dejarmette, Luke Winslow King, Cassidy Holden, Rhiannon Giddens, Yah Supreme, Liz Hanley, Matt Rhody, Hubby Jenkins, and Don Vappie. Recorded and mixed by Joseph Dejarnette. Mastered by Bruce Barielle. Annotated by Leyla McCalla and Jean-Pierre Bruneau. 27–page booklet with lyrics and notes in English. Colour and B/W photographs. 1 CD, 15 tracks (44:32). - Volume 54 Issue 2