African American Characters Research Articles

Contextualizing African American Characters in Glasgow's The Battle-Ground

The Battle-Ground, published in 1902, was Ellen Glasgow's fourth novel, but only the second of her seven novels chronicling the social history of Virginia. It is novel that divides naturally into two parts, the first detailing the lives of two antebellum families of the planter aristocracy: the Lightfoots, owners of Chericoke plantation, and the Ambiers, owners of the nearby Uplands plantation. The second half of the work follows Dan Montjoy, grandson of the Lightfoots and heir Chericoke, through his experiences as an infantryman in the Civil War, but is punctuated by brief narrative returns Chericoke and Uplands focusing mostly on the character development of Betty Ambler, younger daughter of Peyton and Julia Ambler. At core, The Battle-Ground is bildungsroman: in the novel Betty Ambler and Dan Montjoy are both initiated into adulthood during crucial period in United States history, beginning with the late antebellum period, continuing through the Civil War, and ending immediately after the South's surrender. At the same time, Glasgow portrays the South itself, specifically Virginia, the battle-ground alluded in the novel's title, experiencing pronounced growing pains as it confronts pre- and post-Civil War contingencies, especially those implications of radically changing economy based on the South's being forced relinquish slave labor, the very core of its antebellum existence. The characterization of African Americans in the novel is, therefore, crucial integral the novel's theme, one that has not been fully explored in previous criticism of The Battle-Ground. (1) In plantation fiction, much of the propaganda about the pervasive attitudes among slaves is accomplished through particularization of characters, from whom the audience is expected generalize. Through such representations, readers might discover that slaves are comfortable in their bondage, that house slaves disdain field hands, that all slaves shun free blacks, and, of course, that slaves admire and are devoted their benevolent masters and mistresses, often mimicking their mannerisms and dress. The Battle-Ground is not devoid of such renderings. For example, Congo, Major Lightfoot's driver, is Simon Legree-like in his zeal hogtie runaway slave and deliver his brother into bondage (88). And prior the onset of the Federal invasion of the South, Congo suggests his master that if the Yankees descend on Virginia we'll des loose de dawgs on em (87). Further, Cupid, Lightfoot butler, relates Betty Ambler his sense of social hierarchy within the slave community with what the narrator describes as a social pride befitting the Major. In answer Betty Ambler's query about the health and welfare of the field workers, Cupid answers, [don't] mix wid no fiel' han's. Dar ain no use mixin' en I [don't] mix. Day stay in dere place en I stay in my place--en dere place hit's in de quarters, en my place hit's de dinin' 'oom (201). Recent historical and sociological studies, along with countless slave narratives published before and after the war, discount such general attitudes among slaves. William Julius Wilson describes the main lines of inquiry concerning slave development, based on the premise that slaves had enough autonomy develop mechanisms or strategies of survival, enabling them to preserve their humanity, resist complete personal degradation, prevent total identification with masters, and stave off infantilism (33). To her credit, Glasgow depicts blacks in variety of situations in The Battle-Ground, allowing several exhibit the qualities necessary for developing these strategies of self-actualization. The Lightfoots' cook, Aunt Rhody, depicts the characteristics necessary insure her own well-developed self-consciousness. Elizabeth FoxGenovese points out that cooks occupied positions of considerable prestige on plantations; they were respected by black as well as by the white folks (160). …

ANAYFOR ANAH: LANGUAGE OF SURVIVAL IN AFRICAN AMERICAN NARRATIVE COMEDY

In narratives prepared for primarily African American audiences, African American comedians highlight and exaggerate linguistic features that index traits they attribute to the African American community as well as to the white middle-class establishment. Most prominent among the segmental features that the comedians emphasize is the diphthongal variable/ai/. They produce a monophthongal [a] variant when constructing African American characters and a highly fronted [ai] when portraying the establishment middle class. Characters from both groups appear in situations where their attitudes and behavior highlight the traits attributed to them. African American characters are cast as humanly and culturally rich survivors whose common sense and resilience allow them to “make a way out of no way.” In contrast, establishment characters appear as narrowly logical, ethnically bland, and ineffectual. The positive portrayal of African Americans is itself a tool of survival that stems from a self-empowering community ideology that serves as a buffer against the effects of perceived racism.

Looking at the Big Picture: Percival Everett’s Western Fiction

L o o k i n g a t t h e B ig P i c t u r e : P e r c i v a l E v e r e t t ’s W e s t e r n F i c t i o n M i c h a e l K . J o h n s o n “Maybe,” [Pop] told Mother later, “we’d better take the boys to Dakota, like John says. They’re getting big now. Should be workin’, anyhow. ... Nothin’ for colored boys to get in this town but porter work, washin’ spittoons. They need to grow and develop, live where there’s less prejudice and more opportunity.” — Era Bell Thompson, American Daughter A ll I had when I came to the Coast was my height and weight and the fact that I believed that being bom in America gave everybody a certain importance. ... That’s all I’d ever wanted— just to be accepted as a man— without ambition, without distinction, either of race, creed, or colour; just a simple Joe walking down an American street, going my simple way, without any other identifying characteristics but weight, height, and gender. — Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go T h e African American characters in Percival Everett’sshort stories and novels set in the contemporary American West seem to have achieved what earlier generations of black Westerners have sought but seldom found— an existence not defined or limited by American narratives of race. As Madison Smartt Bell observes about Everett’s first western novel, Walk Me to the Distance (1985), “Its narrator is a black man in a landscape where there aren’t any others ... and because his color isn’t a consuming subject for him the reader doesn’t hear much about it either; in Walk Me to the Distance, race is not an issue” (vii— viii). In fact, the reader hears so little on the subject that the text contains no explicit references to David Larsen’srace, no textual indication that he is either white or black, and the primary implicit indication is the extratextual jacket photograph of the African American Everett. David’s central marker of identity is that of Vietnam veteran, one who, “though cer­ tainly affected by his tour, ... did not come home emotionally or men- — ■ W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e 4 2 .1 (S p r in g 2 0 0 7 ) : 2 6 - 5 3 . M i c h a e l k . J o h n s o n tally scarred” but rather “returned as unremarkable as he had been when he left” (3). His parents dead, his sister an antiwar activist, David leaves his home in Georgia to head west soon after his tour of duty ends, and, by accident— he shoots a hole in his radiator while firing his pistol at jackrabbits along the roadside— he is stranded in Slut’sHole, Wyoming, where he remains and finds a home. The primary outsiders in the book are the tourists that David encounters while working at a rest stop on Interstate 90: “He smiled with a confidence, a comfort, a knowledge that he belonged to this big, beautiful place and they didn’t” (80). If David is a black man, then race is indeed “not an issue” in determining who belongs in this landscape and who is accepted by this community. In Everett’s early short fiction set in the West, his protagonists are similarly either not identified by race or identified only in passing. In the story “A Good Home for Hachita,” the only reference to protagonist Evan Keeler’srace isthe narrator’scomment that Keeler’sestranged wife’s desire “to be a liberal had certainly supported a more favorable portrayal of her father” to their daughter, “lest her hatred of him be construed as racially rooted” (18). We only know that border agent Cole Dixson in the story “Esteban” is African American because his partner refers to him as the “black black sheep” of the family (65). Issues ofracial, ethnic...

Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (review)

Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in Indian and Slave Debates. By Alisse Portnoy. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 290. Cloth, $49.95.)Alisse Portnoy's Their Right to Speak examines debates about women's right to petition that arose during Indian removal and slavery controversies of 1830s. Some of Portnoy's ideas will be familiar to readers of this journal, since she published elements of this book here in 2003. Nevertheless, an overview of her findings is in order.Portnoy's story starts in January 1830, when sixty-one women in Hallowell, Maine, signed and sent to Congress a petition protesting government's removal of Cherokee nation from Georgia. Portnoy has found that some 1,500 other women sent similar petitions to Congress over next two years, in a campaign that, surprisingly, Catharine Beecher secretly helped to orchestrate. Beecher's role is especially noteworthy given her later public opposition to similar efforts by abolitionist women, especially her war of words with Angelina Grimke in 1837.Much of Portnoy's book attempts to explain contradiction between Beecher's early leadership of a women's petition drive and her condemnation only a few years later of abolitionist attempts to use same tactic. Looking for consistency in Beecher's arguments during 1830s, Portnoy dismisses usual argument that conservative Beecher condemned radical Grimke as a result of differences in their beliefs respecting gender roles. This seems like a solid start, especially as Beecher's intellect commands respect (if not agreement), and because antiremoval petitions unearthed by Portnoy prove that Beecher was open to some women's public involvement as early as 1830.Portnoy explains Beecher's change by examining differences between antiremoval and abolition, with particular attention to how much support each of causes enjoyed in Whig reform circles. Native Americans, she finds, enjoyed more favorable press than African Americans throughout this period, and this influenced degree to which Beecher and other middle-class reformers felt they could properly embark on petitioning activities. As Portnoy writes, the ways European Americans imagined African and Native Americans more significantly influenced women's early national, collective political activism than conventional gender constraints of period (9). After two chapters detailing how white society depicted Native and African Americans in novels and newspapers (particularly National Intelligencer), Portnoy concludes that reformers like Beecher regarded Cherokees as a sovereign nation with legitimate treaty rights. In addition, individual Native Americans could be bright, brave, honorable, and Christian. In contrast, African American characters in novels such as James Fennimore Cooper's were less than fully human, and nation's newspapers ran frequent advertisements that depicted African Americans as fugitive slaves and as merchandise to be bought and sold. Portnoy argues that in print culture of 1830s, term Negro was synonymous with enslavement, and that this made immediate abolition an undesirable goal for Beecher and other like-minded reformers. These racial assumptions underpinned American Colonization Society (ACS) and its work. …

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KVICW 'Vent Blog Kyle Kaufman Michael Joyce No event more amply demonstrates Small Press Traffic's value as a finetuned barometer ofexperimental writing than the annual Poets TheaterJamboree, a three-night offering ofinnovative performance work (see www.sptraffic.org). January 27, 2006, saw the finale of this three-day event. To begin, as you'll see, with last pieces first: In The Late Education ofSasha Wolff, or, The Son and Heiress Shonni Enelow calls out skeletal back-story and character names as the players mount the stage. The Late Education, flamboyant and highly confident, draws from the imagery of successive countercultures (beatnik to riot grrl), inserting the worldly-wise figure ofporn-star Jenna Jameson, presented as a manifestation of Sartre's Saint Genet. The play bursts its seams, insisting on a convention-shattering hyperkinesis and culminating in the hijacking (in a play concerned with hijacking) ofthe infamous D.A. Pennebraker scene of Dylan mutely dropping cue cards to the score of his "Subterranean Homesick Blues." Over Dylan's familiar voice, Taylor Brady, as Sasha, drops the cards and declares a Utopian world via "personal flying machines." The characters in Géraldine Kim's Donning Cheadle move into and tentatively out of identity crises, as the characters Kim, a Korean American writer (played by the blonde Caucasian Malia Jackson), and Don Cheadle, the African American character actor, explore their metafictional relationship. Is Don Korean American? Is Kim Don? Where does one go once one realizes one is a character? The anxiety of post-identity politics amid the intrusive stock-character realities of daily life remain unresolved, as the characters carry on, Waiting for Godot. But it's 2006, so the tramps are camcording the whole thing, arguing over who Pfilm and who holds the camera. Margaret Tedesco's "Short Dramatic Monologue" B-RoIl, the nee, not the performers, enacts doubt and anxiety. B-RoITs two rienting monologists (frequently sharing one character's "I") retell¡imple story of an unusual encounter: Out walking with friends, the ?" is hit on the back of the head by a faceless man with a prancing side-to-side gait. The monologists incessantly modify the story, repeating divergent versions, disavowing narrative mastery with a presentation alternately dynamic and all but mumbled. Each gesture opens speculation; the textures of the telling possess power equivalent to what's told. Utilizing dance, storytelling, audience intervention, film, livedrawing , and dialogue, B-RoIl sketches an emotionally detached iteration of its mystical—and never revealed—central figure. Its performance is most disturbing when, at what appears to be the end, the stage erupts with a montage of violently explosive and blindingly edited grainy blobs over a discordant electronic score. This segues into a heavenly vision of a woman (eerily familiar as an "early 80s" image) floating before us in some unknown bluescreen ether, staring intently, vacantly out. Between these playlets, Brent Cunningham offers a four-part tribute to the late aleatory great Jackson Mac Low, underscoring Mac Low's precise methodological discipline. While the above-mentioned contemporary pieces largely avoid offering the generative "how" of their making, Cunningham carefully presents a "how" for each Mac Low work, underscoring the formal discipline in Mac Low's use of chance and constraint. The pieces themselves provide a generous and surprisingly playful counterpoint to those of writers who could easily be Mac Low's grandchildren. To end, then, with first pieces last: The evening commences with several unannounced recordings of Mac Low's, ranging from quiet, off-kilter melodies to primal, mantric sound-surges. Nervous laughter attests to the persistence of their unsettling power. A live, four-poet performance of Piece for Recorder, One Hand Moving (1961) is followed by two other pieces that complete the full range ofMac Low's vision. Keyboardist David Buuck performs the challenging Gatha in Cfor Theresa Salomon (2001-02). Gatha requires the performer to translate a grid-score of words, composed entirely of letters from the seven-pitch classes of C major, into the musical notation ofthat pitch class. Buuck accomplishes the chore with virtuosity. Is That Wool Hat My Hat?, an extended pulse of four simultaneous voices intoning chance-determined variations of the title, locates an intriguing and overlooked...

Good, Bad, and Beautiful: Chester Himes's Femmes in Harlem

In his hard-boiled detective fiction series set in Harlem, Chester Himes created a wide variety of recurring African American female character types. In this essay, I focus on The Crazy Kill (1959/1989), assessing the extremely ambitious, sexually alluring, scheming, and manipulative outlaw female characters. Himes's novels suggest that viewing these female characters as merely immoral or unethical is too simplistic. Context, history, traditions, political, and socioeconomic imperatives count. However, because of genre expectations established for more than 100 years, an assertive female character may be overly determined as merely a femme fatale. Also, because of traditions established depicting African American female characters as wanton, overly sexualized beings, the expectation that a racialized female character is morally objectionable is rooted more in racism than in evidence of the character's conduct. I suggest Himes challenges traditional expectations established by the genre for female characters as well as time-honored popular culture depictions of racialized characters, by offering an affirming critical read of his ambitious Harlem female characters.

“A Strange Nigger”: Faulkner and the Minstrel Performance of Whiteness

Faulkner Journal John N. Duvall “A Strange Nigger”: Faulkner and the Minstrel Performance of Whiteness D espite the assertions of many racist characters in Yoknapatawpha County, William Faulkner’s fiction repeatedly illustrates that race is not a simple matter of essence or biology but is always mediated by performance. Faulkner particularly makes visible an opening between racial and cultural identity through certain reflections on the construct “nigger.” During his year at Harvard, Quentin Compson comes to realize that “a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior” (SF 86). In Go Down, Moses, we see a trickster Lucas Beauchamp who, when the need arises, can manipulate threats from the white world by becoming “not Negro but nigger, not secret so much as impenetrable,” who masks his intelligence “in [an] aura of timeless and stupid impassivity almost like a smell” (58). But if Faulkner opens a space between black performance and racial essence through the depiction of certain African American characters, he is equally aware that not all Caucasians are fully white in a South that wishes to absolutize all racial difference. What I wish to emphasize is the performativity of whiteness in Faulkner, deriving from his figurative use of two distinct but not unrelated theater traditions: not simply American blackface minstrelsy but an older European whiteface minstrelsy as well. The result is a fictional world in which one sees, by turns, a dizzying variety of masking: whites in blackface, blacks in blackface, whites in whiteface, and blacks in whiteface. Clearly, such multiple performative possibilities serve to unhinge the Southern binary that would oppose whiteness to “the Negro.” My thinking in this essay is indebted to Toni Morrison’s work on the Af­ ricanist presence (as well as the use of figurative blackness) in texts by canonical white American novelists and to Susan Gubar’s work on “racechange,” forms of racial metamorphosis in art, which she sees emerging in the twentieth century as a “crucial trope of high and low, elite and popular culture, one that allowed artists from widely divergent ideological backgrounds to meditate on racial privilege and privation as well as on the disequilibrium of race” (5). Despite drawing on Morrison and Gubar, I do see limitations to their projects inas­ much as they always identify white writers’ engagements with blackness as a problem or a failure. Morrison typically identifies a failure in aesthetic de­ sign, while Gubar sees the failure more in ethical terms. For Gubar, in the last instance, every white appropriation of blackness can only be a net loss in the 106 The Faulkner Journal Fall 2006/Spring 2007 107 search for a more ethical understanding of race.1 And of course Morrison and Gubar are correct: there are aesthetic and ethical shortcomings to be identified in a white writer’s appropriation of blackness. But they may be only half right, because there is also something potentially productive in such appropriations. In Faulkner’s case, there are in-between characters—Caucasians who instantiate blackness in ways that complicate the Southern racial binarism. These pre­ sumptively white characters come to embody black culture, where “black” is not exactly race any longer, but (because it is the South) it is not exactly not race either. I make this last assertion following E. Patrick Johnson’s interrogation of what is at stake in, to invoke his book’s title, “appropriating blackness.” Black­ ness, as Johnson casts it, is not a racial essence but always involves performance. The questions he asks are germane to this essay: What happens when “blackness” is embodied? What are the cultural, social, and po­ litical consequences ofthat embodiment in a racist society? What is at stake when race or blackness is theorized discursively, and the material reality of the “black” subject is occluded? Indeed, what happens in those moments when blackness takes on corpo­ reality? Or, alternatively, how are the stakes changed when a “white” body performs blackness? (2) For Johnson, “‘blackness’ does not belong to any one individual or group. Rather, individuals or groups appropriate this complex and nuanced racial sig­ nifier in order to circumscribe its boundaries or to exclude other individuals or groups” (2-3). Johnson is fully...

Cowboys, Cooks, and Comics: African American Characters in Westerns ofthe 1930s

Cowboys, Cooks, and Comics: African American Characters in Westerns ofthe 1930s

Monster's Ball

Abstract More African Americans appear on network and cable television than ever before. Yet there are few quality dramatic roles for black actresses. The critical attention and public controversy surrounding Marc Forster's Monster's Ball (2001) demonstrated the existence of an audience for independent, art-house cinema featuring serious African-American characters. It's unfortunate that when read against the identity categories of race, gender, class, and region, Halle Berry's Leticia Musgrove seems to be a conflation of stereotypes: the sexual siren and the welfare queen.

The City as Refuge: Constructing Urban Blackness in Paul Laurence Dunbar's "The Sport of the Gods" and James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"

Almost as soon as blacks write, it seems, they set out to redefine--against already received racist stereotypes--who and what a black person was. (Gates 131) This essay analyzes the narrative strategies Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson used to represent black characters in The Sport of the Gods and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as a means of examining the authors' construction of the city as an alternative space for depicting African Americans. In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fiction, the majority of African American images in popular fiction were confined to Southern-based pastoral depictions restricted black identity to stereotypically limited and historically regressive ideas, exemplified in such characters as Zip Coon, Sambo, Uncle Tom, Jim Crow, and Mammy Jane. The plantation tradition inherently connected blacks to the country by marking them as rustic, and blacks were seen as simple, primitive people who needed the protection of the benevolent whites they served. Positive depictions of African Americans in urban settings were neither prevalent nor acceptable to the literary establishment; as Dickson Bruce, Jr., states, African American writers could talk about themselves, their hopes, their aspirations, only in the language of mainstream America (37). With exceedingly few exceptions, (1) African American characters who were placed in urban spaces were portrayed using the pastoral identities had been defined by Southern, post-Reconstruction authors. These pastoral representations--I am thinking of the writings of such authors as Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, whose black characters were based on romanticized figures taken from a nostalgic and idealized past--positioned blacks as servile and dependent characters who were happy-go-lucky or surly and dangerous, or, at times, a combination of both. African Americans were presented as out of place in any location apart from their rural country homes, unable to deal with the complexities of normal life and requiring the help of their former masters to survive. Thus, characters like Harris's Uncle Remus and Page's Sam from Marse Chan came to be accepted by Northern readers as legitimate representations of African Americans. The growth of realism as a literary school during the late 1880s and early 1890s further exacerbated this problem. Led by William Dean Howells, who advocated that there is no greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth to your own knowledge of things (Criticism 145), realism uncritically accepted and internalized the South's pastoral depictions of African Americans. Once these types of characters had been established in the public's mind, they became a part of the formulaic structure through which realism's mimetic efficacy was measured. Fiction did not replicate acceptable literary types was dismissed for its lack of fidelity to the established codes of ethnic description, and the racist and stereotypical descriptions of blacks constructed by Southern authors moved into the mainstream. In the process, an author's personal knowledge, which had previously been one of the foundational tenets of realism as a literary practice, was no longer sufficient to validate the characters were presented in his or her text: An author's depictions also had to comply with the established parameters used to represent African Americans. This was the paradox authors like Dunbar and Johnson faced; their personal knowledge of African American life was acceptable only if it mirrored established conventions. Thus, while the city offered the space for a potentially new start for African American authors, a clean slate be used to challenge realism's reified pastoral caricaturizations of blacks, obtaining access to space was not simple. The ascendancy of realism in the 1890s conditioned how blacks were recognized in the public realm; African Americans were presented as out of place in the city, merely imitating white civility and refinement. …

Going for the Knockout: Confronting Whiteness in Gus Lee's "China Boy"

Would Ahab have been content merely to go the distance with the White whale? --A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science (1956) would not have written Boy had my stepmother been alive. --Gus Lee, qtd. in Sherwin In his semi-autobiographical first novel, Boy (1991), Gus Lee raises serious issues with the solemnity of a stand-up comedian. Reflecting on his childhood, the protagonist/narrator says, I was trying to become an accepted black male youth in the 1950s--a competitive, dangerous, and harshly won objective. This was all the more difficult because was (14). While the issues are assimilation, violence in America, and the construction of national, racial, ethnic, and gender identities, the tone of self deprecation and rendering of childhood experiences without sentimentality has echoes of comic monologues by Bill Cosby and Woody Allen. But Cosby and Allen never created a mother like Edna. Here the similarities end. For the Chinese experience of assimilation is different from those of Blacks and Jews just as their experiences of assimilation differ. (1) Although Edna does personify the wicked stepmother of legend and fairytale, her racial otherness as white complicates the stereotype and is integral to Lee's engagement with white America. (2) Given that she is seen solely through the eyes of her seven-year old Chinese American stepson Kai Ting, it is not surprising that she is first described in terms of her difference to his Chinese birth mother. But the absence of any other white characters in the novel, in particular the absence of any positive white characters, implies that his stepmother is meant to be a representative white figure and that whiteness, power, and oppression go together. (3) In contrast, the range of black characters makes it impossible to equate Blackness solely with either good or evil. (4) As this essay will demonstrate, the conflict between the novel's Chinese American protagonist and his White Anglo-Saxon Protestant stepmother is racialized in ways that the conflict between Kai Ting and his African American antagonist Big Willie is not. This makes confronting whiteness a significant, though not immediately obvious, theme of the novel. Boy is packaged by its publishers (in its cover design and in its inclusion of the protagonist's family-tree, for example) to suggest that it will meet an American audience's expectations of Oriental exoticism. However, from the novel's first paragraphs, in which Kai Ting recalls being soundly beaten and called China Boy shitferbrains by a black rival on the streets of San Francisco, Lee's concerns are with violence, race, and gender in a specifically American context. While studies of Lee's text have up to now focused on the motif of violence and its status as a marker of differences between Chinese American and African American characters, whiteness and the protagonist's attitude toward it have not received any substantial attention. (5) As a result, Boy can be mistaken for much contemporary writing which, according to bell hooks, makes race always an issue of Otherness that is not white; it is black, brown, yellow, red, purple even (hooks 54). Undeniably, there is much in the novel that might suggest this (for example, the fight scenes between Kai Ting and Big Willie); however, an examination of the role of Kai Ting's stepmother within the text indicates that Lee has a broader agenda. The novel is one of resistance. In Boy Kai Ting confronts American whiteness in the person of his stepmother. He acquires strength to defeat her by association with other non-white characters and through boxing. Like most Chinese American novels, Lee's text is about the complexities and tensions of assimilation within US society and culture. Kai Ting's father clearly wishes his Chinese son to adopt what he sees as American ways. Kai Ting describes himself as having understood calligraphy and valued food as a result, but physical games and sports . …

Representations of Race in Television Commercials: A Content Analysis of Prime-Time Advertising

Given the paucity of contemporary examinations of racial/ethnic minority portrayals in television advertisements, this study analyzed the frequency, context, and quality of 2,3 15 speaking characters in a one-week sample of prime-time television commercials. Results reveal different patterns of portrayals when African American, Asian American, Latino, Native American, and White characters are featured in television advertisements. The implications of these images are examined from the perspective of social cognitive theory to provide insights into their possible impact on audience members' self-perceptions.

Coming Out of the Ethnic Closet: Jewishness in the Films of Barry Levinson

A study of director and writer Barry Levinson's Baltimore films, Diner, Tin Men, Avalon, and Liberty Heights, demonstrates how his Jewish identity, repressed in films designed to reach larger audiences, like Good Morning, Vietnam and Rainman, slowly emerges in these more personal vehicles. The cultural moment of the late 1990s allowed Levinson to move from universalizing Jewishness, as in Avalon (1990), where the central family, never identified as Jewish, represents the American immigrant experience in general, to Liberty Heights (1999), where a particularized Jewish experience is depicted. Yet the turn to "Jewishness" in the latter film is fueled by conflicting images of Jewish masculinity that problematically intersect with the African American characters in the film. Levinson sets his film in 1950s Baltimore, raising questions about the kind of cultural work the film was intended to accomplish in 1999.

Playing in the Dark with Welty: The Symbolic Role of African Americans in Delta Wedding

Using theories of Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison, this essay explores the symbolic role that African American characters play for white characters in Eudora Welty's early novel, Delta Wedding. Entzminger's main intent is not to explicate Welty's political message about southern racism but to uncover the black character's positions in the white characters' perceptions of their own identities. According to Ellison, "for the Southern artist, the Negro becomes a symbol of his personal rebellion, his guilt and his repression of it" (Ellison 1953, 42). By revisiting in Delta Wedding Welty's often explored theme of the individual versus the community, the reader will see that moments of conflict between what the individual wants and what the community expects are often accompanied by enigmatic black character, a character that embodies the white protagonist's, and perhaps indirectly the author's, personal feelings of rebellion.

"What Else Could a Southern Gentleman Do?": Quentin Compson, Rhett Butler, and Miscegenation

Nineteen thirty-six was a banner year for both historical and southern novel. It witnessed publication of Gone with Wind, most successful novel ever written in either genre in America, and Absalom, Absalom!, most complex and important work of historical fiction of South's most enduring and talented novelist. The coincidental timing of these two novels, (1) while not necessary to ensure importance of either, does provide an ideal starting point for a comparison between two. And such a comparison goes far deeper than merely timing or genre, (2) as two novels, and particularly development of two of their central figures, epitomize two key strains of southern thought about past and about issue of race in that past, two interpretations of history which were coming into conflict at precisely moment of this coincidental joint publication. Quentin Compson's development, from obedient southern boy to questioning Harvard student to tormented old soul, is paralleled by development of his understanding of central role of miscegenation in southern culture and of guilt of South in denying its existence. Similarly, Rhett Buffer's growth from cynical, self-absorbed critic of Old South to nostalgic southern gentleman is directly caused by his deepened sense of possibility and consequently dangers of miscegenation in Reconstruction South. Mitchell's view reflected--or, more exactly, projected to millions of Americans--the standard historical interpretation of Reconstruction in first three decades of twentieth century, while Faulkner's analysis resembled revisionist interpretations of contemporary historians such as W. E. B. DuBois and W.J. Cash. In this essay, I will give most of my attention to two novels, and particularly to development of those two characters; however, in conclusion I will examine way in which novels fit into, critique, and interact with broader context of southern historical thought in mid-1930s. The use of African American characters and themes to develop and enrich characterizations of whites is hardly unique to these two novels, of course. As novelist and critic Toni Morrison persuasively argues in her short but brilliant work, Playing in Dark, American novelists have used African Americans for that purpose for as long as there has been an America. However, Morrison is most interested in whiteness to which those novelists turn as a response to blackness they portray, what she calls the impenetrable whiteness that surfaces in American literature whenever an Africanist presence is engaged (32). Because of that focus, and because she sees African American characters as allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked (17), Morrison does not delve deeply enough into statements--conscious or subconscious--about interracial relations that can be found in many of those novels. A similar focus can be found in a very different recent work, Grace Elizabeth Hale's Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in South, 1890-1940. Like Morrison, Hale sees southern construction of whiteness as largely based on a parallel construction of blackness. Her striking first sentence, To be American is to be both black and white (3), suggests that her analysis, unlike Morrison's, will focus on interconnectedness of two races, and thus give equal time to each. Yet this is not case, and Hale's largely one-sided focus is most evident in her misreading of importance of race in Gone with Wind. Writing about that novel's Ku Klux Klan ride, Hale argues that it serves no racial role in novel because Mitchell constructs no racial (263). It is, however, precisely a racial drama that drives much of action of novel's second half, a drama that leads to drastic changes in Rhett Butler's character and opinions, which I will discuss later. …

Food messages on African American television shows.

African American households watch more television than the average American household—75 hours per week versus 52 hours per week—and are more likely to watch shows with predominantly African American characters.1 African Americans also have a higher prevalence of obesity than the general American population (27% vs 19%).2 Television watching has been previously linked to the development of obesity.3–6 Televised images of products such as alcohol7 and tobacco8 have increased the use of these items, despite their adverse health effects. Despite advertisers’ and network executives’ advance knowledge of television content, no public studies have examined the healthrelated content of television aimed at specific racial/ethnic segments of the population. Therefore, we compared portrayals of food during popular African American television shows with those during general programming.

"We's the Leftovers": Whiteness as Economic Power and Exploitation in August Wilson's Twentieth-Century Cycle of Plays

The widespread critical attention August Wilson's work has enjoyed has helped establish his stature as the African American playwright of the late twentieth century. In particular, scholars have focused almost exclusively on Wilson's black portraits, concurring with the dramatist who, both in his plays and in his interviews, accentuates the struggles of his black characters. Consequently, whites have only been regarded as secondary actors in Wilson's drama, despite Wilson's observation that white society is the main antagonist in his plays (Grant 114). Wilson's white characters have appeared time and again in Wilson scholarship; however, they have been treated as peripheral, rather than central, to his plays. (1) Because the lives of Wilson's black characters are inseparable from those of white Americans, we need to pay more deliberate attention to images of whiteness in Wilson's work. For these reasons, in this essay I would like to reconsider his plays through the lens of whiteness. My goal in doing so is not to further privilege the already-prevalent concept of whiteness in American society and literature but to disclose its focal position in African American art and to initiate a better understanding of its connotations in Wilson's drama. Admittedly, there are few on-stage white characters in Wilson's plays: Irvin, Sturdyvant, and the policeman in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom; Rutherford Selig in Joe Turner's Came and Gone; and the unseen yet present ghost of James Sutter in The Piano Lesson. (2) Wilson's fictive black world, however, is peopled with many whites; if they do not appear on stage, they materialize in the lives, stories, and conversations of his black characters. As early as in Ma Rainey, the playwright began reflecting on the external white world bearing down upon African Americans by employing off-stage characters. Wilson's tendency seemingly to marginalize whiteness by restricting it, for the most part, to an off-stage presence serves an important purpose: The dramatic focus can thus remain on the black characters while also implying that whites, even in their absence, are very much present, since they clearly circumscribe and govern the lives and potentialities of the black characters. Thus, Wilson's dramatic work, whose emotional center lies with his African American characters, also consistently draws attention to the pervasive and negative impact of Euro-Americans in the black community. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., makes the same point: ... one of Wilson's accomplishments is to register the ambiguous presence of white folks in a segregated black world--the way you see them nowhere and feel them everywhere (55). Considered as a whole, Wilson's twentieth-century cycle of plays underscores the economic, social, and judicial dominance of white Americans. (3) In this essay, I will address the first and foremost part of this equation: Wilson's emphasis on how property or capital bestows power on whites in American society so that they can make decisions which determine the course of other people's lives and, in so doing, often disrupt and destroy those lives for their own economic survival. (4) Although Wilson's cycle of plays proposes to rewrite the white version of American history in the twentieth century (with a play dedicated to each decade), it also looks back in time to slavery, the era when whiteness became associated with the most abominable ownership imaginable: that of human flesh. Wilson first began to inspect the nature and source of Euro-Americans' economic power in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984). Set in Chicago in 1927, the play exposes the exploitation of blues musicians by the white moguls of the recording industry. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom opens with Sturdyvant and Irvin, white characters modeled after these businessmen. Preoccupied with money, according to Wilson's character notes, Sturdyvantis insensitive to black performers and prefers to deal with them at ann's length (17). …

An Exploration of the Relationship between Racial Identity Attitudes and the Perception of Racial Bias

This study explored the relationship between specific theories of racial identity attitudes and the asymmetry hypothesis—which states that discriminatory acts perpetrated by the strong against the weak will be seen as more biased than similar acts perpetrated by the weak against the strong. Participants consisted of 92 African American undergraduate students who completed the Racial Identity Attitude Scale (RIAS), the African Self-Consciousness Scale (ASC), and the Discriminatory Scenarios Questionnaire. Pro-Black attitudes were positively correlated with the attribution of more racial bias to White as compared to African American characters who were described as discriminating against individuals not of their racial group. No significant relationship was found between anti-Black attitudes and the attribution of racial bias. This study also investigated the relationship between the RIAS and the ASC.

Rivka's Way

Teri Kanefield. Chicago' Front Street/Cricket, 2001.137 pages. $15.95 cloth. Dave At Night. Gail Carson Levine. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. 288 pages. $15.95 cloth; $5.95 paper. Stolen Words. Amy Goldman Koss. Middleton, WI: American Girl, 2001. 145 pages. $14.95 cloth; $5.95 paper. Jewish children's literature is not a well-known or easily identifiable genre. Unlike African American children's literature, which includes many highly accomplished and celebrated authors, such as Virginia Hamilton, Angela Johnson, Walter Dean Myers, Jacqueline Woodson, Mildred Taylor, and Christopher Paul Curtis, Jewish children's literature has not remained a notable form since its heyday in the 1950s through 1970s, when a handful of widely-read books, beginning with Sydney Taylor's groundbreaking All-of-A-Kind Family series, featured Jewish characters and dealt with Jewish themes. Well-known examples of such books are Judy Blume's Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret?, and E. L. Konisburg's About the B'nai Bagels. Since the 1970s, Jane Yolen' s time-slip narrative, The Devil's Arithmetic, and Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, two novels that concern the Holocaust, have achieved canonical status. Currently, books about the Holocaust dominate Jewish children's literature. What we don't find today are many well-known books, if any, that feature the contemporary Jewish American child without also being about the Holocaust. This absence of the contemporary American Jewish child extends a pattern found in Jewish children's picture books. While African American authors not only write about African American characters but make black identity an ongoing issue in their books, contemporary American Jewish children, when represented in children's literature, would seem to have no identity issues, or perhaps no ethnic identity. One might argue that today, Jewishness is not a problem that needs to be represented; I would counter-argue that the lack of representation is the problem, or at least the question. Certainly, there are many books that feature Jewish children. These cover a wide range of periods and issues, from Julius Lester's Pharoah's Daughter, which tells the story of Moses' sister, to Danielle Carmi's very contemporary Samir and Jonatan, which details the relationship between an Israeli boy and a Palestinian boy, both patients in a hospital. Categorizing these books, one discovers that certain types predominate. One is the historical novel, stories that feature Jewish children and that are set before the twentieth century, such as Miriam Pressler's Shylock's Daughter, which imagines the life of Jessica. A second category is the immigrant narrative, stories that focus on children who immigrate themselves or who are the children of immigrants; often these books are set in New York City in the early twentieth century. A recent example is Dreams in the Golden Country: The Diary of Zipporah Feldman, a Jewish Immigrant Girl, New York City, 1903, by Kathryn Lasky. The third category, by far the biggest, is the Holocaust narrative. Myriad books set either immediately before, during, or just after WWII have been published, including the titles by Yolen and Lowry. What we don't find is the late twentieth, early twenty-first-century American Jewish kid or teenager, experiencing both Jewish and non-Jewish issues. Where is this child? I focus on three lesser-known novels in this review, two fitting the categories of historical narratives and immigrant narratives. The third is one of the rare books that features the contemporary American Jewish child. Although they are set far apart in time and place, these three books share interesting patterns. Teri Kanefield's Rivka's Way is set in eighteenth-century Prague, Gail Carson Levine's Dave At Night is set in New York City in the 1920s, and Amy Goldman Koss's Stolen Words is a contemporary novel set in Austria, but all three feature protagonists with strong personality traits who undergo similar experiences. …

Expanding Southern Whiteness: Reconceptualizing Ethnic Difference in the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers

In Carson McCullers' 1936 collection of short stories, The Ballad of Sad Cafe and Other Stories, issues of ethnic difference, racialization, and negotiation of identifies play a central role. This is not surprising, considering that loosely imagined body of texts known as the Southern Renaissance has a strong preoccupation with these themes. Southern writers, both Anglo- and African American, have long fore-grounded question in representing and imagining New South following Civil War, and McCullers is no exception. Her characters grapple with what it means to be in South, what it means not to be white, and what it means to challenge or comply with standards of whiteness. However, what differentiates The Ballad of Sad Cafe and Other Stories from most other pieces of southern literature is relative absence of African American characters. If, as many theorists of race in United States have pointed out, notions of and notions of white are mutually constitutive and exist in a hierarchical binary, can whiteness ever be reconceptualized in a way that does not define it against and above blackness? In other words, can white exist apart from black? I argue that McCullers attempts to answer yes to such questions by introducing European immigrant characters into southern fiction. This gesture interrogates southern identity through means other than comparisons to black southern identity. It is important to note that absence of African American characters in this collection of stories is not an oversight that resulted from presenting some new form of ethnic difference. Rather, this absence is functional. It serves to isolate and explore in some depth a new valance of race emerging in New South without having to revert to well-trodden path of imagining racialization within black-white binary. McCullers' conceptual replacement of African American with European immigrant in her examination of racial and ethnic difference has its counterpart in southern labor history. During late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, many southern states launched campaigns to attract European immigrants in response to labor shortages caused by black migration to West and Southwest immediately after Civil War and to North during Great Migration. For a South struggling to rebuild itself both economically and ideologically, European immigrant labor seemed a viable and even more favorable replacement for black labor. An avid recruiter of European immigrant labor in years immediately following Civil War, Richard Hathaway Edmonds founded a white-supremacist newsletter called Manufacturers' Record to provide coverage on southern industry and capitalism. Edmonds launched aggressive campaign to recruit laborers from Europe as a way to compensate for declining black laborer population in South. However, he intended for only immigrants of Anglo- and northern European stock to fulfill his goals. By 1880s, wave of immigrants from these areas gave way to those from eastern and southern Europe. This new influx of immigrants, Edmonds believed, did not assimilate properly and threatened Anglo-European racial integrity of South. By 1920s, Manufacturers' Record reversed its stance toward immigration, embracing nativist sentiments along with rest of United States and becoming one of most vocal anti-immigrant publications. Even if South's desire for immigrant labor had not been conflicted from start, region's attractiveness to European newcomers paled in comparison to that of North. Southern historian Martha G. Synott argues that South's attempt to lure and retain immigrants was doomed from beginning because it lacked high wages and inexpensive land that could be found in North. And from point of view of employers, southern landowners were more willing to exploit black labor because of their impression that Jim Crow laws regulated autonomy of blacks, making them more docile and reliable than immigrants. …