Advanced Placement African American Studies as a Master’s Tool

Confluences looks at the prospects for and the potential rewards of breaking down theoretical and disciplinary barriers that have tended to separate African American and postcolonial studies. John Cullen Gruesser's study emphasizes the confluences among three major theories that have emerged in literary and cultural studies in the past twenty-five years: postcolonialism, Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Signifyin(g), and Paul Gilroy's black Atlantic. For readers who may not be well acquainted with one or more of the three theories, Gruesser provides concise introductions in the opening chapter. In addition, he urges those people working in postcolonial or African American literary studies to attempt to break down the boundaries that in recent years have come to isolate the two fields. Gruesser then devotes a chapter to each theory, examining one literary text that illustrates the value of the theoretical model, a second text that extends the model in a significant way, and a third text that raises one or more questions about the theory. His examples are drawn from the writings of Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Walter Mosley, Pauline Hopkins, Toni Morrison, Harry Dean, Harriet Jacobs, and Alice Walker. Cautious not to conflate postcolonial and African American studies, Gruesser encourages critics to embrace the black Atlantic's emphases on movement through space (routes rather than roots) and intercultural connections and to expand and where appropriate to emend Gilroy's efforts to bridge the two fields.

The renewed interest in diaspora studies, interdisciplinarity, and transnationalism has long been a feature of African American, Africana, and Black studies. African American studies combines two modalities of knowledge formation that have been common to Western academia throughout the 20th century; the disciplines (the categorization of the social and natural sciences as well as the humanities) and area or regional studies. It combines various methodologies, concepts, and theories of the social sciences and humanities to examine specific groups of people (African and African derived) from specific territories and regions of the world (Africa and the Americas). Its unusual intellectual foundations continue to be an advantage in relation to the conventional disciplines in terms of multi-method, multiperspectival approaches to African and African diaspora related topics. The debates about area studies and their relevance for social science research have not generated much commentary or debate within African American studies. Nevertheless, these debates have profound implications for the direction and future of African American studies as a discipline, its scholarly direction, and its relation to a world beyond the academy.

The Paralysis of Analysis in African American Studies provides a philosophical examination of Black popular culture for the first time. From extensive discussion of the philosophy and political economy of Hip-Hop music through to a developed exploration of the influence of the postmodernism-poststructuralist ideology on African American studies, Stephen C. Ferguson II argues how postmodernism ideology plays a seminal role in justifying the relationship between corporate capitalism and Black popular culture. Chapters cover topics such as cultural populism, capitalism and Black liberation, the philosophy of Hip-Hop music and Harold Cruse’s influence on the ‘cultural turn’ in African American studies. Ferguson combines case studies of past and contemporary Black cultural and intellectual productions with a Marxist ideological critique to provide a cutting edge reflection on the economic structure in which Black popular culture emerged. He highlights the contradictions that are central to the juxtaposition of Black cultural artists as political participants in socioeconomic struggle and the political participants who perform the rigorous task of social criticism. Adopting capitalism as an explanatory framework, Ferguson investigates the relationship between postmodernism as social theory, current manifestations of Black popular culture and the theoretical work of Black thinkers and scholars to demonstrate how African American studies have been shaped.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is an African American literary critic, cultural historian, television host and scriptwriter, and educator. He is currently the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is also professor of African and African American studies, professor of English, and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Gates is the most important critic, theorist, and editor of African American literature of his generation, and the central figure on whom the institutionalization of African American literary study rests. He was born on 16 September 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia, to a working-class family in a segregated part of town. A misdiagnosed hip injury in his teenage years left Gates with a disability that he was able to turn into an affectionate nickname, “Skip.” He received a degree in history from Yale University in 1973 and earned his PhD from Clare College, Cambridge, in 1979. One of his mentors at Cambridge was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who helped Gates understand black literary expression as a diasporic phenomenon. Upon completion of his dissertation, Gates was appointed an assistant professor of English and Afro-American studies at Yale. He moved to Cornell University, which granted him tenure, in 1985, and then went on to Duke University in 1989, staying there for two years. Harvard University recruited him in 1991, and he has been at the institution ever since. While a faculty member at Harvard, Gates has expanded the reach of his work, writing general nonfiction for nationally circulating publications and hosting and producing documentaries for public-television broadcasting. Through that work, Gates has made African American studies recognizable as a robust intellectual project and an integral part of higher education to the broader public. Although he is best known today for his television appearances, Gates maintains his interest in African American literary study, continuing to edit key works from the tradition and writing criticism based on his findings.

Sometime in 1975, I walked into the office of Arnold Rubin (1937–1988), an associate professor in the department of art at the University of California, Los Angeles, inquiring about graduate study in Africanist art history. Students of African art, he assured me, would be at the forefront of mighty changes in the academic world. He promised that we would blow the dust off the hidebound field of art history. Rather shaken by his passionate rhetoric, I left thinking I might be too conventional for such an avant-garde enterprise. So after a much more pragmatic conversation with Herbert M. ("Skip") Cole about the shrinking number of teaching positions in art history, I headed to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for my graduate work. There I was plunged into a program of instruction and research that was full of its own unexpected adventures and rewards. While I have always been immensely grateful that Skip Cole agreed to be my advisor and guide, I have never forgotten Rubin's vision, his assertion that Africanist art historians would overturn entrenched paradigms and revolutionize the study of art.This issue of African Arts celebrates a generation of scholars—the elders of our discipline—whose contributions shaped the journal when it was launched as african arts/arts d'afrique some fifty years ago. Arnold Rubin was one of these, as he had been appointed editor of "graphic and plastic arts" when the second issue of the fledgling magazine appeared in 1968. As a member of his students' generation, the cohort charged with bringing the study of African art into the twenty-first century, I would like to revisit my initial encounter with this influential scholar and teacher through the lens of African Arts. Has his vision indeed become a reality? Have Africanists reshaped the narrative of art history over the last fifty years and brought novel, interdisciplinary, Africa-centered approaches to a staid Eurocentric discipline?Clearly, I encountered Arnold Rubin during a time when his own views had been shaped by the theoretical and methodological debates swirling around the art department at UCLA, and by his awareness of the new and rather tenuous position of Africanists within the discipline of art history. After all, in the United States the first dissertation on an African topic presented for a PhD in art history (rather than anthropology or Egyptology) had been written less than twenty years earlier, in 1957, by Roy Sieber (1923–2001). While art historians such as Douglas Fraser (1930–1982) may have taught courses on African art as "Primitive Art" during the 1950s, it was not until the 1960s that Africanist scholars such as Sieber and Frank Willett (1925–2006) could draw on their own fieldwork when they offered classes in American art history departments. Rubin presented his thoughts on the development of the field at a conference on "African Art Studies in the 1980s" held at UCLA in 1979 and reviewed for African Arts by Marla Berns:1Although his ideas were disseminated in the classroom as well as through his many creative research projects, it is Rubin's association with African Arts in the first decade of its publication that allows us to examine how his goals for Africanist art history intersected with other impulses during a unique period. Fifty years ago, personal and professional relationships linking Americans and Africans promised to forge new ways of seeing and describing the world, and the excitement of this promise permeated the journal. I should note here that my own memories of that time were recently refreshed by a visit to an African country I had not seen in almost half a century. My brother arranged for me to join childhood friends and family members for a visit to Malawi, where our fathers had worked from 1964–1969, and where our mothers had volunteered in local colleges and hospitals. The church we had attended, constructed by members of the Church of Scotland congregation before 1891 (Briggs 2013:206), was still a vibrant place of worship in Blantyre (Fig. 1), its physical structure intact. I had only vague memories of an even earlier precolonial monument, the Mandala House, which had been the headquarters of the African Lakes Corporation in 1882 (Fig. 2). The interior is now a bright, sunny space managed by La Caverna, an art gallery specializing in paintings by Malawi's most influential modernists, while the upper floor houses the library and meeting rooms of the Malawi Historical Society. This venerable building thus enshrines the art history as well as the history of twentieth and twenty-first century Malawi, both pivoting around the nation's independence in 1964.Flipping through the first few years of african arts/arts d'afrique, the bilingual precursor of African Arts, also brought me back to the heady days of the 1960s. Just as my father and his American colleagues set up a technical college as a "contribution from the people of the United States of America to the people of Malawi" when that nation became independent from Britain,2 the very first issue proclaimed, in boldface print, that "The African Studies Center of the University of California Los Angeles presents a gift [of the magazine] to Africa." Since the journal and the technical school were offered to Africans at the height of the Cold War, when the continent and its resources were seen as vulnerable to influences from the Soviet Union, postcolonial theorists might characterize both as instruments wielded by the US government to ensure the loyalty of African allies.3 It was true that my father had been hired through an American university with funding from the Agency for International Development, while the growth of the African Studies Center at UCLA was nurtured by government grants and fellowships. Faculty and graduate students at UCLA were provided with funds for research on the African continent, allowing the African Studies Center to act as a "think tank" that was continually renewed by contacts with Africa. Former Peace Corps volunteers, sent by the US government to promote democracy and economic progress in Africa, enrolled in graduate programs after returning home, joining the ranks of scholars who studied the arts of the African continent. Yet despite their origins in hegemonic political policies, educational programs and initiatives such as african arts/arts d'afrique fostered a discourse that exposed Americans to African ways of knowing, to epistemologies which would lead researchers such as Arnold Rubin to challenge the assumptions of his own academic traditions.In the second issue, the editors wrote that the purpose of the new journal would be "to record the art of the African past, to provide an outlet for the contemporary African artist, and to stimulate the creative arts in Africa" (Povey 1967:2). Judging from other short entries, the publication was a highly experimental enterprise. According to a later reflection written by John Povey (1929–1992), the specialist in African literature who was one of its original editors, "the entire original concept of African Arts derived from a purely serendipitous seat proximity on an airline which brought Paul [law professor Paul Proehl (1921–1997)] and [Sudanese artist] el Salahi together. They communed and agreed that what was really wanted was a magazine that would display the manifold arts of Africa—hence the plural title—to the world" (1991:6).4Arnold Rubin had joined the editorial board quite soon after his arrival at UCLA. He was almost immediately joined by Skip Cole and by Eugene Grigsby, a professor of African and African American art history at Arizona State University. Other editors worked with them to assemble material celebrating a broad spectrum of African creativity. The first issues featured short essays on architecture, dance, theater, the cinema, music, literary criticism, and oral literature, in addition to an overview of the archaeology of Ife by Frank Willett, a reflective piece by Léopold Sédar Senghor, and reviews of contemporary art. Some of the discussions in these first volumes, such as a long essay by Bohumil Holas, were deeply primitivist, and John Povey himself could give way to paternalist pronouncements: "Somewhere between the inhibiting forms of the tradition and the too facile fashionable fads of contemporary art in the West, rests the legitimate area in which the African artist can create" (1968a:1). Yet in these years Dennis Duerden stated, "I am looking for an African kinetic artist, or one who uses a computer" (1967:30). Too few contributors would join him in expecting African artists of the 1970s and 1980s to engage with developments happening elsewhere in the world of contemporary art, and apparently neither video artists not digital arts would appear in the pages of African Arts prior to the twenty-first century. John Povey himself was startlingly prescient when he humbly acknowledged that "We hope that the possibilities supplied by the presence of this forum will encourage Africans to write their own account of their arts. Such essays will undoubtedly reveal to us areas of perception which are inevitably denied even to the most sympathetic of outside critics" (1968b:1). Unfortunately, the "presence" of the journal would diminish in African libraries and art centers during the following decades (Nettleton 2017, Okwuoso 2017), and as Simbao has clearly demonstrated (2017), scholars based on the African continent would be hindered from publishing their research in the journal by a variety of constraints. It is now clear that the laudable sentiments of Povey needed to have been accompanied by sustained action.Soon after its inception, the editors announced an annual competition, with monetary prizes for winning submissions of art (two- and three-dimensional work) and literature (plays, poetry, short stories, excerpts from novels) that would be published or reproduced in the magazine. Each issue would include reports by African "correspondents" providing "perceptive analyses of the underlying situation that confronts the African artist" (Povey 1968b:1). As a showcase for African literature, african arts/arts d'afrique was bilingual, offering essays in French and English. At the time, this was a sophisticated, European approach that addressed a wide, intercontinental readership, even if the possible incorporation of other languages commonly used in Africa (such as Arabic, Portuguese, or Swahili) was not mentioned. In many ways the magazine resembled creative modernist publication projects such as Minotaure, produced in Paris in the 1930s, or Black Orpheus, published in Ibadan after the 1950s, or Transition, launched in Kampala in the 1960s. What is striking, however, was the offer by the editors of african arts/arts d'afrique to distribute their color illustrations of African contemporary art to schools so that teachers could mount them on bulletin boards (Povey 1968a:38). This was a didactic effort to reach out to the American public, a program to dispel misconceptions about African cultures. In today's global art world, where critics value the transgressive, provocative stance of marginalized artists, few curators would attempt to place reproductions of contemporary African art in K-12 classrooms of the United States.As Doran Ross noted in his review of the first twenty-five years of African Arts (Ross 1992:1), submissions of literary works and coverage of contemporary art faded away after the annual competitions came to an end in 1975. Just as Arnold Rubin brought his experience with performance, ephemeral art, and ritual in African contexts to his exploration of American cultural practices, African Arts covered a broad range of urban and rural artistic creativity in Africa and its Diaspora during the 1980s. It became a leading outlet for fresh, new accounts of artists' practice based on fieldwork conducted in communities throughout Western and Central Africa, and studies of arts from Eastern and Southern Africa were featured as well. Given the variety and sophistication of the new studies appearing in African Arts, its readers may not have noticed how few contributors were still visiting the studios of artists working in African galleries, cultural centers, and institutions of higher education. In a "First Word" written as African Arts approached its twenty-fifth anniversary, Povey complained that at the 1989 Triennial conference of ACASA, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, "contemporary African art … was considered at best marginal, at worst a regrettable intrusion of a tiresome product outside the concerns of serious scholars" (1990:1). Other journals would eventually arise to cover arts identified as "contemporary," such as Revue Noire (in 1991) and Nka (in 1994), and in last decade of the twentieth century African Arts itself would once again turn its attention to artists who had studied in African universities or art institutes. I would argue, though, that by neglecting critical studies of these African artists during the 1980s, Africanists missed the opportunity to interact with art historians in other "non-Western" fields, who were extending their own research methods into the study of modern and contemporary "global" arts (Sullivan 1996, Farago and Pierce 2006, Hay 2008).Furthermore, because African Arts focused on community-based (rather than nationally based) art and architecture during the 1980s, it bypassed a pivotal period in the history of African modernisms. During my visit to Malawi, I was honored to meet Willie Nampeya, now professor emeritus in the art department at Chancellor College in Zomba, who had been a student of my mother, Barbara Blackmun (Fig. 3). After learning of the challenges faced by Prof. Nampeya and his younger colleagues, and realizing that they have worked for many years in relative isolation, I wish that I (and other faculty in American institutions) had been more aware of their need for international recognition and support (see Simbao 2017:6). Whatever the reasons, close contacts between art educators working in Africa and in the United States still tend to be the exception rather than the rule.The switch to a monolingual format in volume 4 (and the adoption of the name African Arts) may have contributed to the diminishing number of articles on modernist cinema, literature, and theater appearing in the journal. One immediate casualty was the coverage of francophone northern Africa. During the first few years, contributors had written about artists based in Tunis and Cairo, providing material that is useful now for researchers reviewing the history of African modernism. The original inclusion of arts from the entire continent had reflected political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, when newly independent African states sponsored arts festivals in Dakar, Algiers, and Lagos that were expressions of African solidarity. Of course biennials and other exhibition events today return to this model by soliciting artworks from across the continent, weaving economic and political networks as part of national cultural policies. And of course many art fairs are sponsored by francophone African nations and produce bilingual texts.The early articles on textiles, ceramics, and other artisanal traditions in the Maghreb were also responses to the work of historians and archaeologists, who were then mapping trade routes and the movements of people and ideas across the Sahara. But in the 1960s, art historians had often been introduced to African art by European modernists, who believed that only sub-Saharan Africa could produce art nègre, authentically "primitive" art. Even after abandoning the tenets of Primitivism, many art historians remained in thrall to the masterpieces of West Africa and Central Africa that had inspired early twentieth century French painters. It is not surprising that the pages of African Arts would be dominated by these regions, even though Africanists such as Rubin and Cole had moved far beyond formal analyses of sculpture to broader understandings of the totality of creative production on the continent in its very first issues.Perhaps the shift away from Egypt and the Maghreb was also a result of the critiques of the field of African Studies in the 1970s, when African Americans affirmed their own ancestral links to ancient cultures. Following the lead of Robert Farris Thompson, many Africanists extended their art historical analyses to the Americas, narrating art histories as creative expressions of the Black Atlantic world. As African Studies in several institutions was subsumed under "Black Studies" or appended to departments of African American and Africana Studies, the art historical relationships between West Africans classified as "black" and North Africans seen as "non-black" by outside observers became more difficult to place within an American academic framework. When Sidney Kasfir reviewed Jan Vansina's Art and History in Africa for African Arts, she underscored his inclusion of arts from the northern half of the continent, asserting that this was perhaps "the most alien part of the author's perspective for African art specialists" (Kasfir 1986:12).For the first decade or so, the journal had close relationship with commercial enterprises. In addition to receiving funding from the Kress Foundation to print images in color, african arts/arts d'afrique received advertising revenue from airlines, a mining company, and the Franklin Gallery in Los Angeles. Private collections as well as exhibitions at public institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum were reviewed. This context helps explain why Rubin wrote his influential essay "Accumulative Sculpture: Power and Display" (Rubin 1974) for the Pace Gallery in New York City before publishing it in the contemporary art journal Art Forum (Rubin 1975). It would be several years before a messy divorce would separate private galleries selling "primitive arts" (or "tribal arts") and the academic world. This divorce was finalized as postcolonial theory pushed art historians (and the editors of African Arts) towards new discussions of professional ethics, fieldwork methods, and collection practices.Arnold Rubin may have been instrumental in moving african arts/arts d'afrique in a direction that was quite different from that originally envisioned by Povey and Poehl. His own, detailed study of Kutep mud sculpture in the first volume contained the publication's first endnotes (Rubin 1968). For its second volume, the magazine featured an extended study of Chokwe arts by Marie-Louise Bastin that spanned three issues and whose overview from the of most early Skip essays on appeared that as a new for critical of fieldwork Rubin's and a in on in the of the literature on and Robert Farris wrote his of African Arts was as a forum for research in the arts by art and other submissions were to as they would be at other journals (Ross Povey when from his editorial that despite its African Arts had became an academic publication in with the of a It could thus could more of a to the discipline of art how has this years ago, Doran Ross wrote a "First Word" in which he complained that "the arts of Africa to be in the world, the art the or the classroom … Even the most courses on African arts a at colleges and the Africanist who to have had the in the field of art history as a wrote in the vision of an to position and the of to the rather than the product of artistic to have been Yet by the of African art history more "African art … has collections and What might we in 2017, a decade are many ways to the of Africanist art historians within the American academic world, from positions of Africanists in art history programs or the number of courses we to the number of on African art published by university or the number of articles and reviews we have in the most The number of Africanists who art exhibitions as or curators might also be in addition to the many gallery art independent and whose academic to their in African art. Yet as faculty members at American college or university such might not us what we really wish to our in the art historical they not us much about or even we have had an the field as a I a the art history When Doran Ross and wrote their African artworks to art as of "primitive" Some African again in the on twentieth century European where they were by the of the where they had been of both of the leading for art history Art the by and Art include on African art that are with on or the The that will provide at to African in an in art history. of artworks from the African also in the of American school students need to for an Art History these on the work of Africanists to working in the on African art history, written almost in the by Skip Cole for Art the and and Roy for Art History have been for later in to provide student readers with a historical Povey might have of these which African art was of when the arts of other As several scholars have serious studies of historical developments in African art forms are few and far and the review was launched in part out of the with the of attention to historical context in African Arts and In many has not been on African artistic of the immediate or to such as (see But that may as art historians and other scholars new research and produce more For in Barbara Blackmun had very to draw when a in to for the family on the following (Fig. The was a But when agreed to for at a in (Fig. we could a literature on that the in historical perspective if the history of African art is in and classrooms so that Africa can become in of its inclusion offer students the opportunity to African artistic practices, and that provide them with new ways of looking and is "African its place in the that african arts/arts d'afrique as "graphic and plastic arts" in a collection of identified by artist, and in the today's African artists can be in such as Art which them into the discourse of global modern and contemporary art and on the of are we Arnold Rubin's of as art within a cultural And if we write articles in Art that showcase African studies of art historical are we to Arnold Rubin's vision of Africanist art history as recently wrote that he Rubin would be to that contributors to African Arts still hope to the discipline of art history, even if we are of how this can be

The study of Africa and its peoples in the United States has a complex history. It has involved the study of both an external and internal other, of social realities in Africa and the condition of people of African descent in the United States. This paper traces and examines the complex intellectual, institutional, and ideological histories and intersections of African studies and African American studies. It argues that the two fields were founded by African American scholar activists as part of a Pan-African project before their divergence in the historically white universities after World War II in the maelstrom of decolonization in Africa and civil rights struggles in the United States. However, from the late 1980s and 1990s, the two elds began to converge, a process captured in the development of what has been called Africana studies. The factors behind this are attributed to both demographic shifts in American society and the academy including increased African migrations in general and of African academics in particular fleeing structural adjustment programs that devastated African universities, as well as the emergence of new scholarly paradigms especially the field of diaspora studies. The paper concludes with an examination of the likely impact of the Obama era on Africana studies. Key words: African studies, African American studies, African diaspora studies, Africana studies

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the process of building and developing ethnic studies courses, particularly the Mexican American and African American Studies Curriculum for Texas high schools. Dr. Lawrence Scott and the Honorable Marisa Perez-Diaz will discuss their contributions in the passage and implementation of Ethnic Studies courses, particularly as it relates to the African American Studies and Mexican American Studies Courses now offered for high schools around the State of Texas. This chapter explores the inception of both courses, the development, and the process of gaining consensus and concessions for both courses. Both courses were unanimously passed by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE), but did see some challenges throughout the process. Dr. Lawrence Scott and Texas State Board of Education Member Marisa Perez-Diaz will also discuss how they employed varying leadership styles, in collaboration with stakeholders from around Texas to help establish, pass, and implement the Mexican American and African American Studies Courses in Texas.

Performing the Caribbean in American Studies Frances R. Aparicio (bio) The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Second Edition. By Antonio Benítez Rojo. Translated by James E. Maraniss. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. 350 pages. Price $49.95 (cloth). $17.95 (paper). The American in American studies, now mediated by the forces of globalization, still carries the weight of colony and empire. The term has yet to be replaced by the plural, hemispheric and multicultural Americas, despite the scholarly incursions of comparative Americanists such as José David Saldívar and Suzanne Oboler, among others, and the institutional overtures of the American Studies Association (ASA) towards internationalism. 1 The ASA’s historical efforts to establish ties with Americanists on the international sphere, however laudatory, continue to reify the strong boundaries between the “domestic” and the “foreign.” This is most evident in the linguistic attitudes and practices of American Studies, which privilege English over the knowledge of other languages that are internal to the United States yet deemed “foreign” despite historical evidence to the contrary. 2 In addition, American studies has slowly incorporated ethnic studies partly because this field addresses cultural difference clearly within the geopolitical borders of the United States. While African American studies, Chicano studies and Latino studies emerged as domestic fields, focusing with social urgency on the populations and cultures from within, the fact is that migration always already destabilizes any preconceived, [End Page 636] modern notions of nation and identity. Today, American studies as a field constructs itself, epistemologically, linguistically, and socially, within the U.S. borders. It resists being transformed into Studies of the Americas. Yet the growing tensions and fruitful overlap between the American and the Americas are creating new intellectual possibilities for both Latin Americanists and U.S. scholars, as funding previously allocated to race and ethnicity studies is now being funneled into “international” and “global” studies. These brief comments may explain why I am reviewing here Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island, now a classic, foundational book in Caribbean studies, eight years after its original publication in Spanish. Its 1992 English translation by James Maraniss, published by Duke University Press, marked its entry into scholarship in English; having received the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize enhanced its visibility within the U.S. academe. To introduce The Repeating Island, now in its second edition in English (1996), to an American studies audience is not only a potentially fruitful, although tardy, gesture but a necessary one as well. Previous reviewers of the book have called it a masterpiece of Cuban studies and an impeccable instance of the Caribbean essay, delimiting the text to the traditional disciplinary boundaries of literary criticism and Caribbean studies. 3 Without failing to summarize Benítez Rojo’s central arguments, however, this review essay will reflect on the need for rethinking the U.S. as also Caribbean and the Caribbean as a major link between South and North Americas. The long, historical ties of the United States to the Caribbean region will be revisited in 1998 as scholars, cultural critics, anthropologists, and historians reflect on the power of imperialism during 1848 and 1898. Thus, it seems fitting to re-read The Repeating Island in 1998 within the context of American studies. The Caribbean, as a geocultural space and as a U.S. satellite for economic and military power, has been a repressed narrative in the construction of the U.S. nation-state. Likewise, Caribbeanists whose work has focused exclusively on the “islands” need to rethink what is “Caribbeanness” beyond geographical boundaries, as Benítez-Rojo exhorts his readers. They also need to relocate it within the U.S. borders, bringing together what have been the discrete spaces of African American and Latino studies, a route which Benítez-Rojo, unfortunately, chooses not to take. As a postmodern text, The Repeating Island is about the impossibility of definitions and, in particular, of defining the Caribbean. It proposes chaos [End Page 637] theory as an interdisciplinary approach, as an alternative to the dominant binary of unity versus diversity that has framed most Caribbean scholarship, an area of inquiry that, according to the author, needs more interlingual...

Reviewed by: Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African-American and West Indian Experience Michelle Stephens Robert Carr. Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African-American and West Indian Experience. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. xiv + 368 pp. Robert Carr's introduction to Black Nationalism in the New World opens with a quote from George Lamming: "How you come to think of where you are, and how you come to think of your relation to where you are: this is very dependent on the character and the location of power as it exists where you are." The epigraph is apt for it captures two of the central themes of Carr's work—how geographical relationships of power have shaped the politics and the history of the New World and how black subjects have located themselves within those geographies of power. In his unearthing of texts that cross both disciplinary and territorial boundaries—from African American Martin Delany's novel Blake to the dramatic performances of the Caribbean theatre collective Sistren—Carr's transnational, comparative study offers new models of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural analysis for both African American and Caribbean studies. The epistemological stakes of Black Nationalism in the New World run deeper than interdisciplinarity, however. Carr's scholarship can be located within an intellectual formation recently identified by the Latin Americanist theorist Walter Mignolo as the site of "an other thinking." In his description of the peculiar condition of the intellectual in the once-colonial world, Mignolo points out, "parallel to 'underdeveloped societies' there are 'silenced societies' . . . in which talking and writing take place but which are not heard in the planetary production of knowledge." This intellectual colonial world is limited by the lack of global recognition that it too has the capacity to "theorize" power, with insights unique to geographical location. Lamming's opening quote is doubly fitting, then, because it also provides a commentary on Carr's own subject position as a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. A scholar of black nationalisms located geographically and politically in (what was once [End Page 481] known as) the Caribbean "periphery," one of Carr's strongest interventions is to theorize and thereby place Caribbean and New World black nationalisms at the center of the global study of nationalism. In this respect, Black Nationalism can be seen as a response to two intellectual formations based very much in the "First World." One is the study of nationalism as shaped by Benedict Anderson's well-known formulation of the nation as an "imagined community." In his attempt to define Caribbean and black nationalisms in relationship to this scholarly discourse, Carr asks very different questions, for example, notonly how nationalism constructs the nation, but also how (black) nationalisms construct the world. His study traces the ways in which black subjects have been forced to construct and reconstruct their world, both locally and globally, in order to locate themselves as cultural and (geo)political actors. Carr's work suggests that by paying closer attention to these scarcely studied national formations, we may be forced to revise some of our most basic theoretical assumptions about the path, progress, and development of nationalism as a global phenomenon. Carr's work also responds to the even more recent turn in African American studies toward notions of diaspora. In this latter instance, a figure such as Paul Gilroy becomes Carr's central interlocutor, as he asserts, "I differ from Gilroy's project of offering a black Atlantic paradigm. . . . Before [the African diaspora] can begin to talk about our commonalities we first have to understand the nature of our differences." Here Carr adopts too polarized a stance in relationship to Gilroy's work, almost seeming to position Black Nationalism in opposition to a text such as The Black Atlantic, as its Caribbean shadow. Instead, the central value of Carr's text remains precisely in what is implied in his subtitle: that by "reading African American and West Indian experiences" together, we are listening to a dialogue among a new generation of Caribbean and African-descended intellectuals, who form part of a larger formation of New World black intellectuals. In spite of...

152 CLA JOURNAL Surviving the Pandemic: Necessary Lessons from Morrison’s Beloved Angelyn Mitchell “Won’t You Celebrate with Me” —Lucille Clifton won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. From Phillis Wheatley’s eighteenth-century historic witness to Jesmyn Ward’s twenty first-century southern witness, the gifts of Black women writers are legion. One of their many gifts in their cultural productions is their unapologetic proclamation that Black lives do indeed matter. By centering Black life as vital, Black women writers also offer survival strategies because, as Lucille Clifton writes, “everyday / something has tried to kill [us] / and has failed” (25). Embedded in her poem of origins is a poetic of survival. Clifton’s invitation to celebrate her survival may be read as generative as it posits joy as central to survival. This reminder is important, especially at this time; joy may be eschewed in the CLA JOURNAL 153 Surviving the Pandemic: Necessary Lessons from Morrison’s Beloved grip of survival. Clifton’s generous invitation to celebrate situates the Black self as capable of survival, which offers hope, and worthy of celebration, which invokes joy. The agency of both—survival and joy—is a daily choice, Clifton reminds. Reminding her reader that the celebration is as important as the survival, Clifton uses the word“celebrate” three times in this short poem. Clifton’s poem, like much of Black women’s writing, is just one of many examples of what Toni Morrison calls, in her Nobel lecture, the “life sustaining properties” of language: language that “arcs toward the places where meaning may lie” (20). In our present moment of life-threatening events, Black women writers and their gifts of “life sustaining properties” seem especially essential. Our classrooms are both sites of threat (because they challenge the status quo) and sites of sustenance. Historically, it is in our classrooms, as well as in our scholarship, that critical discussions of race and its significance in American life occur—we’ve been doing what is currently popularly termed “anti-racism” work in teaching African American literary and cultural studies. Quite frankly, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately ravaged Black and Brown communities in terms of all quality of life indices, including health, safety, education, employment, housing, and nutrition. Concomitantly, violently racist policing, especially its embrace of extralegal, state sanction executions, continue to terrorize Black and Brown communities. The intersection of these two clear and present dangers—one immediate, fueled by systemic inequities; the other systemic, demanding lifethreatening protests—highlights how precarious Black life is in racialized America. The dialectical conversation between these two traumas situates Black life today as existing in both Saidiya Hartman’s“afterlife of slavery”and Christina Sharpe’s“the wake,” simultaneously. As “subversive intellectuals,” to use Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s term, those of us who work in African American studies and return to our classrooms this fall might consider how Black women writers might help us navigate these twin crises (101). Their lessons of resilience, perseverance, and hope can guide us as these “something[s]” try to kill us” (Clifton, line 14). Unquestionably, there are many lessons of resilience, perseverance, and hope in the archive of African American literature, from Harriet Jacobs’s “loophole of retreat” (114) to Jesmyn Ward’s hurricane. And there is, of course, Toni Morrison, our most celebrated of writers, whose works, especially Beloved (1987), offer many sites of generative instruction for times like ours. To my mind, Morrison’s Beloved provides a unique opportunity to explore key examples of resilience, perseverance, and hope—all needed to advance possibilities for survival. At first glance, one might think surviving slavery is the lesson of Beloved, but Morrison expands our understanding of surviving horrific 154 CLA JOURNAL Angelyn Mitchell experiences emanating from slavery in its aftermath by revealing how trauma is cyclic and...

Dr. Mary Frances Berry, professor of history and Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of twelve books, including History Teaches Us to Resist (2018). From 1980 to 2004, she was a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and from 1993–2004 served as chair. Between 1977 and 1980, Dr. Berry served as the assistant secretary for education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. She has also served as provost of the University of Maryland and chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder. In recognition of her scholarship and public service, Professor Berry has received 35 honorary doctoral degrees and many awards.Brandon James Render is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include twentieth-century United States social and intellectual history, post-1945 social movements and “the culture wars,” and public policy. His dissertation, “Colorblind University,” traces the intellectual genealogy of race-neutral policies and practices in higher education through admissions policies, departmental structure, and curriculum design. In addition to service as a graduate research fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy in 2018–19, he is the 2021–22 Mitchem Dissertation Fellow at Marquette University.Lee Sartain is a senior lecturer in American history at the University of Portsmouth, England. His research focuses primarily on the NAACP and civil rights activism from the 1910s to the 1970s. His first book, Invisible Activists: Women of the Louisiana NAACP and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1915–1945 (2007) won the Landry Prize for best book on a southern topic. He has also published Borders of Equality: The NAACP and the Baltimore Civil Rights Struggle, 1914–1970 (2013) and coedited Long Is the Way: One Hundred Years of the NAACP (2009). Recent articles have focused on the NAACP and the Great War and on youth movements and the NAACP in New Mexico. He has also written various encyclopedia entries on the NAACP. He is a member of the Royal Historical Society.Matthew Shannon is associate professor of history at Emory & Henry College. He is the author of Losing Hearts and Minds: American–Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War (2017). Dr. Shannon's research has been published in Iranian Studies, Diplomatic History, International History Review, and The Sixties. He is the editor of American–Iranian Dialogues: From Constitution to White Revolution, c. 1890s–1960s (2021), and the coeditor of 9/11 and the Academy: Responses in the Liberal Arts and the 21st-Century World (2019).Quito Swan is professor of African American and African diaspora studies at Indiana University Bloomington. A historian of Black internationalism, he is the author of Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (2021), Black Power in Bermuda (2010), and the forthcoming Pasifika Black: Black Internationalism in Oceania. Swan has garnered several major awards for his research, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute, Australia's University of Queensland, and, most recently, Pennsylvania State's Humanities Institute.Dr. Rhonda Y. Williams, professor and John L. Seigenthaler Chair in American History at Vanderbilt University, is the author of the award-winning The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality (2004) and Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (2005). She is also the coeditor of the award-winning book series “Justice, Power, and Politics” from the University of North Carolina Press. During her tenure at Case Western Reserve University, she founded and directed the Social Justice Institute, as well as the postdoctoral fellowship in African American studies.

In Your Average Nigga, Vershawn Ashanti Young uses his own experiences to examine how masculinity is shaped by identity performances of racial authenticity, academic literacy, class mobility, and sexuality. Moving between autobiography, autoethnography, and scholarly analysis, Young critiques proponents of code-switching whose solution to the requires inner-city youth to adopt white English vernacular at school and to reserve English vernacular for home. Your Average Nigga exposes the factors that make racial identity incompatible with literacy for blacks, especially males. Drawing on scholarship in both performance theory and African American literary and cultural studies, Young argues that exaggerated perceptions of the gap between and white linguistic performances harm inner-city blacks by requiring them to choose between abandoning their customary ways of speaking and behaving at the risk of alienating themselves from their families and communities and retaining their speech and behavior as a marker of racial authenticity while isolating themselves from mainstream society. Young also shows that exaggerated perceptions of the gap between and white racial identities leave blacks in the impossible position of either trying to be white or forever struggling to prove that they are black For men, this also becomes an endless struggle to prove that they are masculine enough. Ultimately, Young argues that far from denaturalizing supposedly fixed identity categories, as many theorists have contended, racial performance only reinscribes the essentialism that it is believed to subvert. Scholars and teachers of rhetoric, performance studies, and African American studies will enjoy this insightful volume.

For decades, scholars have placed the “New Negro” and Harlem’s Literati movements and their participants under the Harlem Renaissance’s umbrella with these monikers used interchangeably in scholarship to describe a seemingly singular literary and cultural moment in history. InRewriting Literary Blackness in Harlem: The Intertextuality of Hubert Harrison, George S. Schuyler, and Wallace Thurman, Tammie Jenkins argues that these are distinct movements that share intertextually related ideological views that occurred on a literary continuum. Harrison’s, Schuyler’s, and Thurman’s contributions have rarely been viewed and analyzed through an isolation of their respective movements. Using works published by Harrison, Schuyler, and Thurman during the early twentieth century, Jenkins investigates how their works redefinedblacknessat the intersections of race, gender, class, and geography. This book provides new insight into the intertextual relationships between the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance and Harlem’s Literati to scholars and academic libraries interested in cultivating and expanding understandings in African American Literature, African American History, Black Studies, and African American Studies.

Reviewed by: Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era by Brian Russell Roberts Z. Hall Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era. By Brian Russell Roberts. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2013. “The ambassadorial tradition in African American writing has remained uninterrogated in relation to one of the New Negro era’s major arenas of political culture. This political culture operated on the planetary scale of official internationalism, and it became co-constitutive with the cultural politics of New Negro artistic ambassadorship” (14). American studies, and African American and black diasporan literature and culture scholar Brian Roberts probes U.S. international diplomacy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to illuminate the “strong and weak, formal and informal, connections between official internationalism and African American culture” (10). His work “offers critical access to previously unrecognized black internationalists tradition produced as African American and U.S. imperial cultures have met and shaped one another” (8). Roberts arranges dialogues among the fields of anti-imperialist critique, African American literary studies, and studies in black transnationalism to demonstrate how the literary and diplomatic performances of African American writers functioned rhetorically to, at some moments, undercut [End Page 216] U.S. diplomatic intentions yet, at other moments, operated as a means of promoting the imperial sway of the United States. Arranged in three parts, Artistic Ambassadors outlines the interlocking dimensions of race, aesthetic, and international representation, and “outlines the ways in which black work in diplomacy played previously unsuspected roles in shaping major African American representational concerns, including the capacity of New Negro race men to speak for the nation’s black masses, the methods of race representation under dispute in the Booker T. Washington/W. E. B. Du Bois debate, and the signifying status of women and the black diaspora within domestic and international African American cultures” (6). Roberts examines the aesthetic and political representations of famous figures such as Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and others and brings them into dialogue with the work of lesser-known black official and unofficial writer-diplomats of the New Negro era. Part one articulated the struggles faced by luminaries such as Frederick Douglass and lesser known African American diplomats in creating a narrative for the New Negro to supplant the myth of the Old Negro—ranging from Jim Crow to Zip Coon, Rastus to Sambo, Uncle Tom to Aunt Jemima—created by white Americans. Part two described a politics of immanence in which race becomes incidental to New Negro internationalism. Insider status becomes paramount though performances of immanence were inevitably imperfect and incomplete. Part three examined the “integration of hip knowingness of black vernacular culture into official diplomacy’s traditionally staid approach to internationalism” (118). It would have been informative if this work examined how the antecedent rhetoric of the Old Negro contained in U.S. cultural exports, predating and contemporary with the deployment of African American diplomats, weighed on the effectiveness of the representatives. Robert’s debut book is a challenging and enlightening interrogation of the international and literary projects of New Negro era figures. In addition to African American and American Studies scholars, this text is of interest to political science and international studies scholars, and literary critics. Z. Hall Independent Scholar, Kansas City, Missouri Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

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