African American Cultural Criticism Research Articles

Grey or Nothing: Blackness and the Perils of Ontology Without Ethics

ABSTRACT This article examines the enduring relevance of Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay in Religious and Cultural Criticism. Anderson rightly senses a close connection between the practice of African American cultural criticism and the ethical sensitivity required to do it well. He also recognizes the historical limits of ontological inquiry. I argue that these metaphilosophical assumptions afford more generative encounters with Black political and cultural life, especially its discursive ambiguities and practical incongruities. By engaging the writings of two contemporary critics, Tamura Lomax and Calvin Warren, I show the benefits of thinking alongside Anderson’s important text and the dangers of not doing so. Scholars of religion, African American studies, and cultural studies ignore Anderson’s work and the discourses it enjoins at their own peril.

Carceral Lives Matter

Carceral Lives Matter Jeannine Marie DeLombard (bio) Jen Manion. Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Figures, appendices, notes, and index. $45.00. Austin Reed. The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict. Ed. Caleb Smith. New York: Random House, 2016. Figures, appendices, notes, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper). Ava DuVernay’s 2016 Netflix documentary 13th, on the U.S. criminal justice system in the wake of the Thirteenth Amendment, is only the most recent example of the intensifying critical scrutiny of race and penality in both mainstream news sources and alternative media. In 2010, civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The 2012 New York Times bestseller recounts how the Reagan-era War on Drugs has gradually been institutionalized into “a new system of racialized social control.”1 The New Jim Crow may well have inspired black millennials to break ranks with their elders, as evidenced by protests holding 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton answerable for the devastating impact on communities of color of President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. (Both Clintons have issued apologies.) These protests attracted national attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, founded in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of unarmed African American teenager, Trayvon Martin. As the news of Zimmerman’s acquittal spread in the summer of 2013, U.S. movie theaters were screening Fruitvale Station (2013). The Sundance- and Cannes Award-winning film opens and closes with smartphone footage of the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant—also unarmed, also African American—by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer. Over the next three years, the tragic scene would be restaged over and over again in a seemingly endless string of viral videos documenting brutal police attacks on Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and other black and brown citizens. Noting the widespread tendency to focus on male victims of racial profiling, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) [End Page 33] launched the #SayHerName campaign in February 2015 to promote intersectional social justice by exposing violence by officials against women of color. With all of these events unfolding under what sociologist and minister Michael Eric Dyson in a new book calls The Black Presidency (2016), African American cultural criticism has again become mainstream. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ New York Times bestseller, Between the World and Me (2015), won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for General Non-Fiction. As the examples of Dyson and the AAPF suggest, those in the academy have not confined their voices to classrooms and peer-reviewed publications; with Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (2016), Princeton Department of Religion Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., may represent a new cohort of post-Ferguson black public intellectuals. As Liberty’s Prisoners and The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict remind us, however, incarceration as racialized social control has been constitutive of American politics and culture from the very beginning. Aptly, Jen Manion locates her study of early American carceral culture in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Manion’s welcome contribution is an intersectional analysis that considers the interplay of race, condition, class, gender, national origin, and sexuality in the development of the penitentiary system. In the process, however, she covers ground that has already been well trodden by prison historians David Rothman, Billy G. Smith, Thomas Dumm, Michael Meranze, Rebecca McLennan, Leslie Patrick-Stamp, Jack D. Marrietta and G. S. Rowe, as well as literary scholars like Peter Okun, Jodi Schorb, Caleb Smith, and myself. As the familiar images adorning and illustrating the book indicate, Liberty’s Prisoners once again takes us from Walnut Street Gaol (1776) and Walnut Street Prison (1790), to Eastern State Penitentiary (1829) and Philadelphia’s House of Refuge (1828). U.S. prison history is typically structured by the tandem development of Pennsylvania’s “separate system” of solitary confinement at Eastern State and New York’s “congregate” system of silent group incarceration. Appropriately, then, Caleb Smith provides an insider view of the alternate “congregate” worlds...

African American acafandom and other strangers: New genealogies of fan studies

Because scholars have paid insufficient attention to race in fan studies, a new genealogy of fan studies is needed, one that includes different kinds of primary and secondary texts that have explored responses of black fans. There is a rich history of black fan criticism and acafandom that has never been seen as such but that both complements and complicates current definitions and paradigms in fan studies. Discussions of fan otherness, antifandom, and fan ambivalence explore the difference that the inclusion of African American cultural criticism would make to both canonical scholarship and more recently published work in the field.

Looking at the Overexposed: Visuality and Race in Harnett’s Attention Company!

Looking at the OverexposedVisuality and Race in Harnett’s Attention Company! Christopher J. Lukasik (bio) The last twenty years has seen a number of cultural critics investigating the relationship between race and visuality.1 Michelle Wallace, for example, closed the 1992 Black Popular Culture collection by addressing “the problem of visuality in African American culture” (335). Wallace attributes this problem—what she calls “the history of a mostly invisible black visuality” (335)—to the institutional limitations of a white-dominated art world that restrict or prohibit both the production of and discourse on black visuality. She finds it difficult, for instance, to imagine an African American’s relation to visual practice either as an artist or as a critic, if nearly all the depictions are negative. The historical legacy of negative images (African Americans as objects) plus the historical absence of positive images (African Americans as subjects), contributes to an absence of visual producers which, in turn, produces an absence of critical discourse on the visual.2 Thus, the existence of a mostly invisible black visuality, ironically enough, has little to do with a lack of exposure. In fact, Wallace finds the negative image of the black to be thoroughly overexposed.3 Consequently, she believes that one of the goals of contemporary cultural criticism should be to “begin to understand how regimes of visuality enforce racism, how they literally hold it in place” (Wallace, “Afterword” 344). Like Wallace, Henry Louis Gates also discusses the problem of African American visuality in his introductions to two recent museum exhibition catalogues (“The Face” 11–14). But for Gates, the problem of African American visuality is more about the past than the present. Gates contends that “the hegemony of racist images that dominated the popular arts and infiltrated the fine arts” during the nineteenth century prompted the New Negro movement to use words, and “not the tactics of visual representation, as the tools … used to assert their self-image” (“The Face” xliv). Here, the negative visual representations of African Americans have not only stifled visual production, but they have literally generated textual bodies to take their place. In his introduction to the Black Male catalogue, Gates maintains that “tragically, every African American male who walks down any street in America carries with him the hidden heritage of this negative cultural and psychological legacy, the burden of being perceived through what … Barbara Johnson calls a stereotype—’an already-read text’—the already read text of debasedness and animality” (Preface 13). Like Wallace, Gates draws virtually the same conclusion: African American visuality is problematic largely because of the historical legacy of centuries of negative images. Where Wallace locates “the problem” in the cultural institutions that regulate and maintain the production of visual practice, Gates locates “the problem” in [End Page 723] the historical effects of a cultural conflation between the stereotyped images and the actual people they seek to reductively display. Yet, as both Wallace and Gates discuss the enduring legacy of the production of negative images, and the vexed status that it has subsequently created for the relationship between African American discourse and visuality, there is scarcely any attention paid to how these images themselves might actually participate in the problem outside of their status as an already-read text. In fact, it remains unclear if the representational modalities of images have any bearing whatsoever on what Wallace claims as a “vital” problem for African American discourse. While Wallace hopes to address this problem, her notion of visuality seems confined to “who produces and reproduces vision,” and oddly leaves out interrogating the very material condition for the production of vision in the first place: the image. Similarly, Gates reduces almost the entire history of the relationship between race and representation in American art (1710–1940) to the steady production of images that by and large always exist as “already-read” texts. Although the iconoclasm implicit within such criticism is understandable given the vast corpus of stereotypical images of African Americans within American culture, the implications and limitations of this iconoclasm on African American cultural criticism’s relationship to the problem it seeks to understand warrants further thought as to how African American visuality might...

Politics and aesthetics, race and gender: Georgia Douglas Johnson's lynching dramas as black feminist cultural performance

This essay identifies Georgia Douglas Johnson's use of Spirituals and choral configurations as key strategies in a black feminist cultural performance that negotiates debates surrounding the development of black theatre, provides new perspectives of gender roles, and performs important ideological work on race and racial violence in the New Negro era. Drawing on contemporary black feminist theory and African American cultural criticism, this essay considers the texts of A Sunday Morning in the South (c. 1925) and the newly recovered “A Bill to be Passed” (1938) as performance and reveals Johnson's plays as sites of cultural convergence in which race and gender intersect not only with each other but also with politics, aesthetics, and opposing theories of theatre. The recognition of Johnson's significance as a dramatist of the New Negro Era, and specifically as the most prolific playwright of lynching drama, is long overdue.

Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism

Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism

Reflecting Black: African American Cultural Criticism

Reflecting Black: African American Cultural Criticism

Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism.

Part 1 What's going on? Black popular culture: The culture of hip-hop Rap music and Black culture - an interview Spike Lee's neonationalist vision Michael Jackson's postmodern spirituality Be like Mike? - Michael Jordan and the pedagogy of desire Bill Cosby and the politics of race Between apocalypse and redemption - John Singleton's Boys n the Hood. Part 2 Beyond the Mantra - reflections on race, gender, and class: Probing a divided metaphor - Malcolm X and his readers The liberal theory of race Racism and race theory in the nineties Leonard Jeffries and the struggle for the Black mind Sex, race, and class: two cases The plight of Black men Black grass-roots leaders Reflections on the 1988 presidential campaign. Part 3 This far by faith - Black religion: Mixed blessings - Martin Luther King Jr, and the lessons of an ambiguous heroism Martin and Malcolm For Jonathan's sake - the morality of memory - a sermon Rap culture, the church, and American society God almighty has spoken from Washington DC - American society and Christian faith The promise and perils of contemporary gospel music.