Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture by Robert G. O’Meally (review)

Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture by Robert G. O'Meally (review)

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.

African American folklore dates back 240 years and has had a significant impact on American culture from the slavery period to the modern day. This encyclopedia provides accessible entries on key elements of this long history, including folklore originally derived from African cultures that have survived here and those that originated in the United States. Inspired by the author's passion for African American culture and vernacular traditions, African American Folklore: An Encyclopedia for Students thoroughly addresses key elements and motifs in black American folklore—especially those that have influenced American culture. With its alphabetically organized entries that cover a wide range of subjects from the word "conjure" to the dance style of "twerking," this book provides readers with a deeper comprehension of American culture through a greater understanding of the contributions of African American culture and black folk traditions. This book will be useful to general readers as well as students or researchers whose interests include African American culture and folklore or American culture. It offers insight into the histories of African American folklore motifs, their importance within African American groups, and their relevance to the evolution of American culture. The work also provides original materials, such as excepts from folktales and folksongs, and a comprehensive compilation of sources for further research that includes bibliographical citations as well as lists of websites and cultural centers.

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 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.

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...

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. …

FROM THE WRITINGS OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND TONI MORRISON IN North America to those of José Martí and Carlos Moore in Cuba, intellectuals and writers in the Americas have played a role in creating political and social identities for the descendants of Africans in this hemisphere. From the 1920s through the 1940s, parallel intellectual movements took place in New York and Havana that attempted to find voice and identity for the descendants of Africans in the United States and Cuba. The Afrocubano movement in Havana not only found a voice for Africans in Cuba but also redefined the definition of what it meant to be Cuban, making it difficult for Cubans to assert Cuban national identity without embracing both European and African cultures. In contrast, New York’s Harlem Renaissance embarked on a different intellectual project. Rather than redefining American national identity, the movement constructed an African American identity within American and European culture so that African American culture would become admirable and comparable to Anglo American culture. In the process Harlem Renaissance writers created a culture that was ennobled but also one that would parallel Anglo-American culture rather than fundamentally change the dominant discourse in the decades to come. Writers of the Negritude movement (Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor, principally) did the same for Africans in Europe

FLY AWAY: The Great African American Migrations. By PETER M. RUTKOFF and WILLIAM B. SCOTT. xv and 408 pp.; maps, ills., notes, index. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780801894770. John Lee Hooker, a blues musician from the Mississippi Delta, played guitar and sang in a manner eerily similar to that of All Farka Toure a traditional guitarist from Mali. Restaurants in Chicago serve succulent, southern-style collard greens, cooked with just the right amount of pork fat. Mardi Gras Indian tribes in New Orleans wear fabulously ornate handmade costumes that are nearly identical to those worn by certain groups of carnival revelers in Trinidad and Tobago. Each of these mysterious spatial patterns results from the movements and cultural creations of the African Diaspora. These kinds of cultural journeys and exchanges are the subject of Fly Away: The Great African American Cultural Migrations, a compelling book by Peter Rutkoff and William Scott. Rutkoff and Scott analyze and trace these dynamic cultural processes across the American landscape. They focus on several locations to support their argument that West African traditions survive in the African American community in places as different as the South Carolina Sea Islands and South Central Los Angeles. Throughout their book the authors combine cultural observations with historical narrative. At the core of the text is a (perhaps overly) concentrated analysis of Atlantic Coast Gullah culture. The Gullah people, who have lived for more than 300 years in the Low Country of South Carolina--as well as on the Barrier Islands of both North Carolina and Georgia--are, according to Rutkoff and Scott, the taproot of African American culture throughout the Lower South, a claim I find to be overstated. White Americans have long been interested in African American culture. Early in American history, this interest became manifest in ways that were usually racist and generally trivial. Joel Chandler Harris's tales of Uncle Remus (which recent anthropologists have found to contain elements of academic insight) were wildly popular in the nineteenth century. These tales eventually became the basis for a popular Disney film, Song of the South, in 1946. In the 1840s, blackface minstrelsy became immensely popular in the Northeast, as many Americans gawked at the ludicrously racist portrayal of plantation life in the U.S. South. In more staid quarters, such as the shaded walkways of Harvard and Yale universities, scholars became increasingly interested in documenting black culture in the U.S. South, yet most clung to the flawed notion that slavery on southern plantations was so oppressive and violent that no vestige of African culture survived. A national myth emerged stating that black southerners were empty cultural vessels who simply drew from white culture, adapting the new manners in their own ways. Beginning in the first half of the twentieth century, and gaining full validation in the 1970s, was the notion that African culture survived the Middle Passage and remained alive in such places as the marshes of South Carolina, the juke joints of the Mississippi Delta, and in the soul-food restaurants of Chicago's South Side. This is the area in which Fly Away seeks to make a contribution. The Sea Island Gullah culture emerges in their narrative (the book begins and ends with chapters set in coastal South Carolina) as the most significant of all such American repositories of African culture. This, I believe, is where Fly Away seems to be rather unbalanced in its historical geography. To be sure, no scholar of American studies should deny the uniqueness of Gullah culture. This culture is perhaps the most striking example of African cultural retention in North America. The numbers of slaves who arrived in the U.S. South were very large. This fact, combined with the geographical isolation of coastal South Carolina, helped establish a truly African American space in which African slaves and their descendants created a performative, place-based culture of powerful, self-conscious identity. …

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...

African Americans can experience a double consciousness-the two-ness of being an American and an African American. The present research hypothesized that: (a) double consciousness can function as 2 self-schemas-an independent self-schema tied to mainstream American culture and an interdependent self-schema tied to African American culture, and (b) U.S. educational settings can leverage an interdependent self-schema associated with African American culture through inclusive multicultural practices to facilitate positive academic consequences. First, a pilot experiment and Studies 1 and 2 provided evidence that double consciousness can be conceptualized as 2 self-schemas. That is, African Americans shifted their behavior (e.g., cooperation) in schema-relevant ways from more independent when primed with mainstream American culture to more interdependent when primed with African American culture. Then, Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that incorporating African American culture within a university setting enhanced African Americans' persistence and performance on academic-relevant tasks. Finally, using the Gates Millennium Scholars dataset (Cohort 1), Study 5 conceptually replicated Studies 3 and 4 and provided support for one process that underlies the observed positive academic consequences. Specifically, Study 5 provided evidence that engagement with African American culture (e.g., involvement with cultural events/groups) on college campuses makes an interdependent self-schema more salient that increases African American students' sense of academic fit and identification, and, in turn, enhances academic performance (self-reported grades) and persistence (advanced degree enrollment in a long-term follow-up). The discussion examines double consciousness as a basic psychological phenomenon and suggests the intra- and intergroup benefits of inclusive multicultural settings.

Reviewed by: Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture Emily J. Lordi (bio) Parham, Marisa. Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2009. What is there to say about the fact that African Americans generally assumed that Raynard Johnson, an African American teenager found hanging from a tree at his Mississippi home in 2000, had been lynched, while white townspeople generally assumed he had committed suicide? What to say about the nameless anxiety a black American may experience when driving past a cotton field or, for that matter, a police car? Depending on one’s subject position and experience, these phenomena may seem either too obvious or, alternately, too irrational to linger over. Yet the premise of Marisa Parham’s brilliant study, Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture, is that such matters demand careful attention and deserve a conceptual framework. Building on Avery Gordon’s path-breaking work on social haunting, Parham theorizes haunting as an intensely personal and public phenomenon. While people tend to speak of being haunted by their own disturbing memories, in Parham’s formulation, to be haunted is to experience someone else’s memory. Through close readings of literary texts, Parham offers several ways of thinking about how that “someone else” might bleed, without ever blending, into one’s self. The promiscuous memories she traces are often painful, many of them reflecting what Karla Holloway has identified as a black cultural sensibility shaped by the prevalence of early death. Haunting therefore describes how “the pain of others shades our own subjectivities” (7)—and, more specifically, how one may experience life as a reminder of many thousands gone whom one has never known. The point is not just that people are often viscerally affected by the past’s reverberations, but that they may be fundamentally constituted by them. The experience of being touched by the afterlife of the past in the present has shaped African American cultural expression in significant ways. As Parham writes, the “subject position [African American] . . . has historically required that one understand at least a small part of oneself as beholden to the memory of others who share that position, as remembering often works in places of absence, for instance in lieu of homeland—or political power” (6). While she theorizes “displacement” less fully than “haunting,” the phrase “places of absence” reflects Parham’s concern with the spatial dimension of memory—with the ways in which memories are experienced as visions of place. By weaving together Toni Morrison’s account of “rememory” and Nora’s notion of milieux de mémoire (the “real environments of memory” whose loss makes sites of memory necessary), Parham articulates a concept of memory based more on “what it felt like to be somewhere” than “to be back in sometime” (29). This is an affective experience that travels. People who do not share lived experiences may nonetheless be seized by a shared vision of the past as present; collective identities are made and remade in such moments. Haunting and Displacement takes surprising correspondences as its subject and also makes them its method. Structuring the book thematically rather than chronologically, Parham forges connections between works of twentieth-century African American literature that are seldom if ever considered together: the poetry of Bob Kaufman and Jean Toomer, the fiction of Richard Wright and Ann Petry. While she analyzes various texts with equal facility—Notorious B.I.G. album art, trauma theory, the televised Essence awards—she focuses on the literary. Perhaps this is because, as she suggests, “reading may be understood as the [End Page 967] best metaphor for haunting . . . a transmutation of history into an experience of reading, into a memory over which one can now claim ownership . . .” (84). That her readings are themselves haunted is a point Parham demonstrates through her periodic shifts to first person narrative, which intimate how texts “work us over, make us remainders of them” (5). Finally, Parham’s writing itself destabilizes another boundary, since many passages in this work of literary criticism are as affecting as the primary texts themselves. Chapter one, “Like Water,” moves from the enslavement narratives of Olaudah Equiano...

The cultural context in the United States is racialized and influences Black Caribbean immigrants' acculturation processes, but what role it plays in Black Caribbean immigrants' acculturation into specific facets of American society (e.g., African American culture) has been understudied in the field of psychology. The present study extends research on Black Caribbean immigrants' acculturative process by assessing how this group's experience of the racial context (racial public regard, ethnic public regard, and cultural race-related stress) influences its engagement in African American culture (i.e., adoption of values and behavioral involvement). Data were collected from 93 Black participants of Caribbean descent, ranging in age from 13 to 45 and analyzed using a stepwise hierarchical regression. The findings highlighted that when Black Caribbean-descended participants perceived that the public held a favorable view of their racial group they were more likely to engage in African American culture. In contrast, when participants perceived that the public held a favorable view of their ethnic group (e.g., Haitian) they were less likely to engage in African American culture. Furthermore, among participants experiencing low levels of cultural race-related stress, the associations between racial public regard and engagement with African American culture were amplified. However, for participants experiencing high cultural race-related stress, their engagement in African American culture did not change as a function of racial public regard. These findings may suggest that, for Black Caribbean immigrants, the experience of the racial context influences strategies that serve to preserve or bolster their overall social status and psychological well-being in the United States.