African American Cultural History Research Articles

Michael Ra-Shon Hall, Freedom Beyond Confinement: Travel and the Imagination in African American Cultural History and Letters

Michael Ra-Shon Hall, <i>Freedom Beyond Confinement: Travel and the Imagination in African American Cultural History and Letters</i>

Book Review: Freedom Beyond Confinement: Travel and Imagination in African American Cultural History and Letters by Michael Ra-Shon Hall

Book Review: <i>Freedom Beyond Confinement: Travel and Imagination in African American Cultural History and Letters</i> by Michael Ra-Shon Hall

"You Just Never Can Know What's Up the Road": An Interview with Cecil Brown

"You Just Never Can Know What's Up the Road":An Interview with Cecil Brown Zachary Manditch-Prottas (bio) and Cecil Brown In 1969, Cecil Brown's provocatively titled debut novel The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger made quite a splash on the literary scene. From legend of hardboiled letters Chester Himes, to liberal outlet The New Leader, reviewers noted that Brown's prose was as knowing as his subject matter was titillating; the mixture of the erotic and uproarious made for a novel of uniquely sophisticated parody. Jiveass relates the satiric odyssey of a classic trickster figure named George Washington (one of several aliases) who, fed up with American bigotry, lands in Denmark on a quest of self-discovery. Washington, in the midst of the many entangled social revolutions of the 1960s, traverses the streets and sheets of Copenhagen finding his shrewd sexual allure to be his greatest asset—but also his greatest impediment—during his curious journey. Insofar as the many women he beds are permissive blondes among the well-to-do, the story negotiates the underbelly of white America's greatest anxiety: interracial sex. Indeed, the novel can be read as a sardonic rejoinder to the phallocentrism of a certain strand of Black Power and to a much longer legacy of white phallic anxiety.1 Thus, the thematic imperatives that pushed the novel's evocative wit were both timely and timeless, making it all the funnier, all the more biting, and its author all the more difficult to peg. Undoubtedly, a new voice had arrived in African American literature, but reviewers were unsure if that voice was jocular or scathing. Fellow satirist of Black life Charles Wright christened Brown the "literary superman of the year." The New York Times dubbed him a "born pornographer gone straight."2 As we settle into our chairs to begin our interview, I mention this particular Times review; Brown knowingly grins. He later explains that he did actually begin with the provocative title and then, his grin widening into his eyes, "went about filling in the rest from there." Brown has a skill for leading with allure, drawing readers close with a story so compelling that it may be some time before they realize they have wandered into something more serious. Brown tells me that while living in Copenhagen himself, he wrote the novel so that he "could laugh at himself." On the other hand, his story's hero, Washington, says toward the conclusion of his riotous adventure that he would like to write a "serious book." Jiveass is, in the blues tradition, both. Indeed, for Brown, laughter and seriousness are longtime traveling companions of African American expression. Across Brown's forty-year writing career, in novels like the hilarious, although often tragic story of Black comedians in Hollywood, Days Without Weather (1983), his moving autobiography of his rural coming-of-age, Coming Up Down Home (1995), and his thorough folk history Stagolee Shot Billy (2003), he has always maintained a particular interest in "the trickster." He tells me that he "revels" in those who have the ability to "get out of situations using their wit." He has known more than his fair share of (in)famous tricksters. He is a folklorist whose life, by his own account, is somewhat folkloric. Behind his writing is a tapestry of tales featuring a Who's Who of mid-twentieth-century African American cultural history. Brown may refer nostalgically to Eldridge Cleaver as his Berkeley "running buddy" in one breath and taking "Jimmy's" [James Baldwin's] car out for late-night joyrides in the South of [End Page 275] France in the next. He relates his encyclopedic knowledge of the legend of Stagolee to a passing gesture Miles Davis made backstage that had him, Paul Mooney, and Richard Pryor in stitches. The stories keep coming, each full of that liveliness that only legends contain, and, as you wait for the next punchline, storyteller Cecil Brown knows that he's got you, right there where amusement and seriousness meet. Zachary Manditch-Prottas: How did you get started writing? Cecil Brown: Well, I grew up in North Carolina, by Cape Fear River. In the...

African American cultural history and reflections on Jung in the African Diaspora.

Racism is defined as a psychopathology and the ground in which the covenant of whiteness is rooted and mirrored in the system of apartheid structured by American Constitutional Jurisprudence between 1857 and 1954. This historical period overshadowed Carl Jung's visit to America between 1909 and 1937. The spirit of the times and practices of racism coloured Jung's views, attitudes, and theories about African Americans, just as colonialism coloured his attitudes toward Africa and Africans. Consequently Jung failed to see the African Diaspora and the extraordinary intellectual and artistic period of the Harlem Renaissance (1919-1929). Its introduction here foregrounds the exceptionalism of African Americans and the cultural continuity of African ancestry. This exceptionalism was not seen by Jung and there have been no attempts to redress its omission from analytical psychology and other sub-disciplines of Western psychology. Jung's theories of personality and psychoanalysis and his negative projections about primitivism among Africans and African American 'Negroes' would have been mediated by knowledge of a legislated American apartheid and the Harlem Renaissance which occurred within the barriers of apartheid. In this paper I posit that culture, kinship libido, and the African principle of Ubuntu are healing modalities that play a critical role in instinct and the relational ground of human psychology and biology, from which culture as an environmental expression constellates around common goals of the human species. Cultural equivalencies and expressions within the wisdom traditions and mythologies of the Africa Diaspora are considered. Specifically, the Bantu principle of Ubuntu or 'humanity' is identified as the relational ground in African cultures, while the Kemetic-Egyptian deity Maat, as an archetypal anima figure and the religio-mythology offer a transcendent position from which to critique the inequities and constitutional jurisprudence that structured American apartheid. Maat is the personification of truth, justice, balance and weighing of the heart in orderly judicial processes. In her we find the alignment of the spirit and matter in the law and judgement. The paper concludes with reflections on pathways toward healing the psychopathology of racism and recommendations to enhance clinical training and practice.

ПОЕТ ЯК КРИТИК: ЕЛІЗАБЕТ АЛЕКСАНДЕР ПРО КЛАСИКІВ АФРО-АМЕРИКАНСЬКОЇ ЛІТЕРАТУРИ

У статті розглядається есеїстичний доробок сучасної афро-американ-ської поетеси Елізабет Александер, яка у 2000-х роках виступила як лі-тературний критик, видавши збірки «The Black Interior» (2004) та «The Power and Possibility» (2007), і як редактор книги «The Essential Gwendo-lyn Brooks» (2005). Наукова новизна розвідки полягає у тому, що вперше у вітчизняній американістиці розглядається есеїстика Елізабет Александер у світлі «чорних»/афро-американських студій. Досліджуються кл`v bnmbvczючові проблеми нехудожнього доробку письменниці: своєрідність мистецтва та літератури афро-американців, «чорного» фемінізму, расизму, афро-амери-канської ідентичності. У збірці «The Power and Possibility» письменниця представляє свій погляд на сучасну афро-американську культуру, зосеред-жуючи аналіз на сферах літератури, кінематографу, малярства та музики. Іконічними фігурами, про творчість яких розмірковує Елізабет Александер, стають Пол Лоренс Данбар, Гвендолін Брукс, Ленгстон Хьюз, Ріта Дав, Джун Джордан, Люсіль Кліфтон тощо. Зроблено висновок про новаторство літературно-критичного доробку письменниці, що полягає не лише у ви-вченні творчості митців афро-американців, але й їх діяльності з популяри-зації «чорної» естетики, в дослідженні тематики, літературних технік «чор-ного» мистецтва (Black Arts aesthetics) та аналізі ідей «чорного» фемінізму.

The Spooky Politics of Dark Truths

Abstract As social theory garners cache in departments of Religious Studies, scholars find themselves unclear about how to address the notion of truth. This paper approaches truth as an opportunity to explain the role of truth-claims in erecting and razing social boundaries. It begins by reframing or “signifying on” Alan Race’s typology of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism in order to register social formations rather than soteriological criteria. Then it reviews moments in African American cultural history in order to explain the ways people mediate identity politics though truth-claims. Readers will visit three, race-centered debates over memorials on college campuses in the United States of America as case studies for demonstrating this perspectival shift. In so doing, the paper presents an alternative model for the kind of analytical social commentary Religious Studies scholars may provide their publics.

The Grapevine Telegraph "Jes Grew": Sonic Materialism, Afrofuturism and Information Theory in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo situates the history of African American culture in the language of genetics, information theory, biocultural evolutionism and sonic/vibrant materialism. Reed's motif of “Jes Grew,” as an evolving acoustic entity vibrant through radio technology, signifies a codified medium of information storage and transfer; it stores and transfers black cultural information in a viral form, articulating it to the physicality and orality of the antebellum grapevine telegraph. Such a biosonic construction of African American experience provides fertile terrain to explore the marginalization and rehabilitation of black ontological forces. By dramatizing the production and transmission of black tonality, Reed's trope of “Jes Grew” signals vibrational forces that counteract Western, white cultural norms. Thus Mumbo Jumbo's trope of the Jes Grew virus participates in, and advances, the aesthetic politics of Afrofuturism, in which Jes Grew's bio-sonic effects enable us to contest the narrow humanism of Eurocentric biopolitics with an Afrofuturist sonic materialism. By the same token, the novel's description of 1920s Harlem revolves around an epistemological framework of modern technoculture in which biological research becomes a textualization of nature and DNA becomes an information storage and transfer system. Mumbo Jumbo perceives the biological human body as an outcome of dynamic interactions in which information networks and social, cultural and biological relations are scripted in textual and coded platforms of sonic materialism.

Contemplating the Void: How Narrative Overcomes Anonymity in Toni Morrison'sSula

AbstractAn analysis of Toni Morrison's novel Sula and her use of the classic etymological and narrative styles and tropes evident in the major epics of the Greek, Mesopotamian, and Indian regions of the world to recover the disenfranchised aspects of African-American cultural history that have traditionally been subsumed in modern times in discussions of the classic epics. Further, this paper examines the use of the character, Sula as a divine and heroic figure and the Bottom as a modern interpretation of the holy spot of redemption in the material world to invigorate the novel, and connect it to the cultural lineage that has resulted in this work from one point of view. Focusing on the novel and using Morrison's own interpretations of the purpose of Sula and the style in which it was written this paper attempts also to address the criticisms that define this work as an ethnic and political text purposed specifically to overwrite the importance of previous epic texts in terms of defining the spiritual and collective view of the morays and faith of the African American identity.

Is Quentin Tarantino Calvin Candie?: The Essence of Exploitation in Django Unchained

This essay argues that Quentin Tarantino’s use of African American cultural history as a cinematic tool is similar in exploitation to the actions of his own slave-owning villain Calvin Candie in Django Unchained. Through the close examination of two key scenes, it will be shown that Tarantino’s stylistic use of slavery and African American characters is deeply problematic in its white savior arrogance to revise black cultural history through the cultural production of a film. Tarantino’s postmodern pastiche exploits signifiers from many areas of popular culture for entertainment, but it is his use of slavery, hip-hop, and representations of black masculinity as tools for audience manipulation that are particularly troubling. Tarantino’s cultural appropriation is an inherently derogatory creative choice that warrants examination by film scholars.

Is Quentin Tarantino Calvin Candie?: The Essence of Exploitation in &lt;em&gt;Django Unchained&lt;/em&gt;

This essay argues that Quentin Tarantino’s use of African American cultural history as a cinematic tool is similar in exploitation to the actions of his own slave-owning villain Calvin Candie in Django Unchained . Through the close examination of two key scenes, it will be shown that Tarantino’s stylistic use of slavery and African American characters is deeply problematic in its white savior arrogance to revise black cultural history through the cultural production of a film. Tarantino’s postmodern pastiche exploits signifiers from many areas of popular culture for entertainment, but it is his use of slavery, hip-hop, and representations of black masculinity as tools for audience manipulation that are particularly troubling. Tarantino’s cultural appropriation is an inherently derogatory creative choice that warrants examination by film scholars.

Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective by Anissa Janine Wardi

Reviewed by: Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective by Anissa Janine Wardi Tayana L. Hardin (bio) Wardi, Anissa Janine. Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2011. Author Anissa Janine Wardi’s Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective is an ambitious and well-researched study that investigates the confluence of water, cultural memory, and African American historical experience. Wardi undertakes this investigation through an examination of several twentieth-century cultural texts by writers Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Henry Dumas, and Richard Wright; filmmakers Julie Dash and Kasi Lemmons; and blues singers Muddy Waters and Bessie Smith. Despite differences in genre and style, these texts variously depict encounters between human bodies, living and dead, and the water bodies that sustain and entomb them—encounters that, by Wardi’s account, reveal the aqueous frontier between the natural, human, and ancestral worlds. The association of the natural world with ancestral and diasporic memory is not new to critics of African American literature and cultural production, and has been the topic of conversation in academic journals, edited collections, book manuscripts, and university classrooms. Collectively, these conversations disclose an abiding interest in the way African American writers, musicians, and visual artists rely upon the natural world to structure their texts and even critique the injustices of the human world. In the three chapters and conclusion that follow the introduction, Wardi both draws from and hones the conversation by privileging water as a site of inquiry, even asserting that scholars “must return to watercourses to gain insight into African American cultural history” (10). Wardi executes this return to watercourses through engagement with what she calls “African American Ecocriticism,” a method of interpretation that builds upon ecocriticism, variously known as ecological literary criticism, green criticism, or literary-environmental studies. Wardi argues that ecocriticism, which took root as a field of critical literary study within the past two decades, has largely been limited and applied to the nature writing of Anglo writers (10). However, she posits, the premise of ecocriticism—that the human and nonhuman worlds are interconnected and mutually informed and sustained—”finds an earlier analogue in the work of African American writers, who have persistently attended to their physical environments” (11). Citing the writing of former slaves, Wardi explains how the natural world marked the boundaries between enslavement and freedom, and, furthermore, how such engagement with place and environment continues to characterize the African American literary and cultural tradition. Wardi thus conceptualizes African American Ecocriticism as a means to fulfill two different but related objectives: first, to uncover how the interdependence of the natural, human, and ancestral worlds in African American literature meaningfully expands the ecocritical canon (15); and second, to address how African American writers “evoke a transatlantic history in which language, and by extension their literary works, are given life force through water” (10). To support her mission, Wardi calls forth critical insights by writers, natural scientists, historians, and cultural critics. She then augments this theoretical discussion with close readings of Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) and August Wilson’s play Gem of the Ocean (2006). Hughes’s and Wilson’s texts befit Wardi’s theoretical discussion, given that each revolves around the very idea that structures this project—namely, the interrelationship between water, ancestral, and human bodies. Wardi further nuances this idea by demonstrating how characters’ [End Page 457] encounters with water sometimes trigger traumatic memory of the Middle Passage, or, conversely, serve as sites of healing and restoration. Additionally, she demonstrates how disparate waterways—such as Hughes’s rivers and Wilson’s ocean—are each carriers of memory that are perpetually channelled into and out of one another, and, consequently, always already bear the imprint of the Middle Passage. Wardi’s close reading of Hughes and Wilson leads her to a simple albeit powerful conclusion: water manifests history (29). She expounds upon this idea in subsequent chapters, which are organized around distinct water bodies. By organizing the book in this way, Wardi calls attention to the material composition of water bodies and, equally important, to the ways this materiality informs symbolism, narrative composition, and critical interpretation. Wardi’s...

Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era (review)

Reviewed by: Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era Jeff Allred Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff. Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009. 328 pp. $35.00. Lauren Sklaroff ’s book examines a period in African American cultural history that often falls between the stools of the 1920s New Negro movement and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Her study of struggles over the cultural representation of African Americans in the New Deal era differs markedly from much recent work in African American studies (and ethnic studies more broadly): one searches in vain for accounts of radical experiments in aesthetic form, the articulation of heretofore silenced voices from the militant margins, the refunctioning of mainstream cultural forms for counterhegemonic goals, and the like. Instead, one finds the more sober yet strikingly fresh story of how the middling strata of cultural workers—primarily bureaucrats serving New Deal cultural programs, but also advocacy groups like the NAACP, performers working in the cultural industries, etc.— struggled to liberalize representations of African Americans within the cultural mainstream. Stories about cultural middle ranks tend to lack the punch of accounts of avant-gardes and movements from the margins, and Sklaroff ’s book does become somewhat repetitive in its account of the various straddles and compromises one associates with liberal politics. But the breadth of her account, spanning a wide range of genres, media, and cultural agents, as well as the intensity with which she analyzes the internal tensions within each site, lend the book an unexpected dynamism. Sklaroff ’s book argues that the cultural programs of the New Deal—including the familiar federal projects for theater, art, music, and writing, but also, especially during war mobilization, offices dedicated to film and radio—promoted progressive representations of African Americans. White liberals and leftists within the New Deal cultural apparatus collaborated with African American leaders, bureaucrats, and artists in a broad-based effort to dispel minstrel-tinged performance traditions and usher in new, more progressive roles for black performers. In doing so, Sklaroff emphasizes, they “worked within the tightest of spaces,” hemmed in by inadequate budgets, racist resistance at the state level, the enforced “unity” of war mobilization, and the rising tide of intolerance of “un-American activities” that lead to HUAC [End Page 544] and McCarthyism (2). The book thus offers an ironic narrative in which grand plans for new cultural forms, forums, and styles are diverted, diminished, and frustrated at many points while nonetheless improving the cultural climate for African Americans in heretofore underappreciated ways. Sklaroff ’s methodological focus throughout is not on cultural products but on processes: rather than the more traditional ideological reading of texts, she offers a peek behind the curtain covering the messy collaborations that produce culture. In this way her work diverges from past studies of similar terrain—Nicholas Natanson’s The Black Image in the New Deal (1992), for example—that emphasize the inadequate or falsifying white-authored representations of African Americans in the period. Rather, she reveals the agency (albeit highly constrained) of African Americans as filterers, shapers, and co-producers of the images of blackness consumed by the masses. Her well-chosen case studies recall the wide net cast by the New Deal’s antiracist efforts: on the stage (the Theater Project’s “swingcopated” take on Gilbert and Sullivan, Swing Mikado); in the arena (Joe Louis’s boxing demonstrations for fellow GIs); on the airwaves (the African American variety show Jubilee); and on the screen (the Bureau of Motion Pictures’ promotion of antiracist imagery in Hollywood films). In each case, she underscores the modest victories notched by cultural workers amid political pressure from conservative legislators, hostile elements within the American public, and unimaginative government officials. Sklaroff ’s account of the African American poet and critic Sterling Brown’s role in the production of the Federal Writers’ Project’s American Guide vividly illustrates the payoff of her approach. Brown was appointed head of Negro Affairs within the FWP in 1936, the highest post held by an African American within the entire Works Progress...

Carrion

Carrion Janice N. Harrington (bio) Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry undermines the misconception that African American poets are not engaged with or inspired by the natural world, do not find cultural as well as personal meaning in nature, are not witnesses against the destruction of natural environments, or do not champion expanding the boundaries of social justice to include access to clean air and water. Black Nature provides proof of the engagement of African American poets through poems concerned with topics as far ranging as urbanization, pollution, the destruction of natural resources, the natural world in the context of African American cultural history, and nature as a medium for aesthetic enrichment. Anthony Walton’s “Carrion” reprinted in Black Nature spotlights the impact of urbanization and the destruction of natural habitats. “Carrion” begins with the image of a mutilated deer. The bodies of dead animals increase mile on mile. Highway numbers and subdivisions mark the roadkills with their abstract names. The losses pile up—wildlife, forests, farmland, and, paradoxically, connections between people. Highways and urbanscapes connect us, but Walton’s poem reveals our separation—urban centers disconnected from the natural world but linked by roads, the “clearcuts” of devastation. In Walton’s poem, roads, suburbs, and urban grids are trimmed with carrion. Nature is reduced to the “smashed meat and bone beyond recognition” at the on ramps of consumerism. The land is, metaphorically at least, “denuded,” a stripped body suffering the violence of human attempts to connect, to eliminate distance, and to conquer time. But the poem’s speaker seems uninvolved. He or she only observes, records the damage, and passes by. A dead raccoon, the poem tells us, “lies blankly.” The raccoon’s body and its death are null sets. But the poem’s description of a destroyed porcupine and the “labyrinthine mess” of its intestines implies the myriad ways the natural world is maimed. Destruction is a labyrinth—a maze where we lose our way. But what of the labyrinth’s monster? Who would that be? The passersby? The comfortable suburbanites? The city dwellers? The real estate developers who name the newest suburb, Beaver Ridge, after an endangered animal? Or the poem’s readers. The poem doesn’t overtly blame anyone, doesn’t overtly make anyone its monster. As Walton’s “Carrion” drives its readers forward it allows no more than a cursory connection to the landscape: highway numbers, the names of subdivisions, and brief views of dead animals. In the same way, Walton shows a modern imagination disconnected from the natural world. When looking at a carcass, the speaker can say only “it is something like a beaver.” Readers never learn what has been killed or who killed it. Nevertheless, Walton reveals that the way we name our suburbs and subdivisions shows a human craving for [End Page 789] nature and natural spaces, a craving that goes un-sated and manifests itself in language, as in the names of suburban towns. The suburbs in “Carrion” are totemic: “Beaver Ridge,” “Fox Hills,” and “Deer Park.” Surrounded by devastation—by nature’s dead and maimed body—we memorialize through naming what we destroy through urbanization. Every road, subdivision, and urban corner is a grave, a tombstone bearing the names of what we’ve lost: Woodland Acres, Apple Valley, Forest Glen. In “Carrion,” fantasy natural spaces replace the real. Isn’t it, Walton shows, the cruelest irony that we name suburbs after the habitat that suburbs destroy? Do we memorialize what we destroy to deny the destruction or to ameliorate the loss? Or is it, as the poem also suggests, that language itself is yet another denuded space? The words we speak, live in, and navigate by are as artificially manicured as any other suburban space. Only the sign for deer and not the deer itself, Walton suggests, can survive. Deer Park but not the deer. We no longer connect with nature and wild spaces through the body’s physical senses—but only through the simulacrum of language. Perhaps, then, a “nature poetry” is only another withered carcass, “something like a beaver,” roadkill, something like the personal-subjective response of romanticism. The romantic poem is always already...

Intangible Cultural Property, Semiotic Ideology, and the Vagaries of Ethnoculinary Recognition

Stephan Palmie My contribution to this special issue takes its origins in a footnote to an article on culinary metaphors in the modeling of African American cultural history that I published a few years ago (Palmie 2005). It was a long footnote on (what I think is) a fascinating instance of gastrographic revisionism very much apropos our common theme of “hybrid heritage” and even more interesting in light of current discussions about intangible cultural property. What I am concerned with in the following is, in principle at least, a well-known theme in the anthropology of food and cuisine, viz. the treatment of specific foods and preparations as emblematic markers of collective identities. Ever since Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1894), we have known that culinary practices can (and often do) serve as powerful vehicles for collective projections of a common history and future. Yet while much attention has been paid to the socializing function of commensality or patterned food avoidance, little attention (or so it seems to me) has been paid to the way in which culinary knowledge—shall we say “recipes”?— function to demarcate social boundaries, especially if and when they become objectified as intellectual property or intangible cultural heritage. This, however, is exactly what African American cookbook-writing advocates of conceptions of “culinary Pan-Africanism,” or even more radically, Afrocentric proponents of the idea of the willful denial of the African origins of much of the world’s high cuisines, have been arguing for some two decades. But let me establish a bit of context first. At least since the 1960s, US African American foodways—especially the culinary complex known as “soul food”—have been subject to explicit and often highly self-conscious politicization. As both the black writer and activist Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1966) and the founder of the Nation of Islam, the honorable Elijah Muhammad (1967) clearly recognized in their own very different ways, there is a vexing arbitrariness to the culinary signifier: eating corn bread, collard greens, ham hocks, or chitterlings by itself does not constitute an assertion or rejection of certain identities, subject positions, or visions of collective history. What does is the symbolic act of situating these same foods within narratives about their significance for patterns of commensal affinity among the oppressed and excluded (in Baraka’s case), or about hybrid heritage

The man who adores the Negro: race and American folklore

Drawing on over thirty-five years of fieldwork, Patrick B. Mullen considers how African American cultural representations in folklore relate to racial dynamics in the United States. Providing insight into white folklorists’ relationships with black consultants, The Man Who Adores the Negro describes the personal experiences of both fieldworkers and ethnographic subjects. Mullen explores how folklorists such as John Lomax, Newbell Niles Puckett, Alan Lomax, and Roger Abrahams have been implicated in creating the popular concept of African Americans as folk and how this depiction has created notions of blackness and whiteness. Illuminating central aspects of African American cultural history, the author discusses a wide range of folklore that includes work songs, hymns, voodoo rituals, animal tales, jokes, toasts, and children's games and rhymes. In relating folkloric research to white mimicry of black style in such expressions as blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop culture, Mullen contends that both folk performers and folklorists participate in ongoing cultural change when they mix received values and attitudes in producing new interpretations.

&lt;i&gt;Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins Janet Gabler-Hover Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins. Edited and with an introduction by Ira Dworkin. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 406 pp. $70.00 cloth/$34.95 paper. Ira Dworkin has given us a useful compilation of the prolific prose of late nineteenth-century black literary artist and political activist Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, most often recognized as the author of Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South and for her publications within and relationships with the Colored American Magazine. Successful in its broad circulation and wide-ranging scope but besieged by money troubles, the Colored American Magazine ultimately was destroyed by political forces, Dworkin explains. In his substantive introduction to Hopkins's nonfiction, he provides an unequivocal and transparent account of the political intrigue involved in Booker T. Washington's firing of Hopkins from the periodical. The stealth and determination of Washington's strategies reveal just how politically powerful he thought Hopkins was or might possibly be. According to Dworkin, Washington was driven by his animus for Hopkins's political activism, her cautionary view of his program for industrial education, and her conviction that women should figure more broadly in the workings of society. Once Hopkins was dismissed, the periodical became a tool of Washington's propaganda, and it never recovered its popularity. Some of Hopkins's most overt political convictions can be seen, Dworkin argues, in the neglected prose she wrote for the magazine. By compiling Hopkins's nonfictional prose works, he shows how methodically Hopkins used nonfiction to express such convictions. Dworkin's collation of "Famous Men of the Negro Race" and "Famous Women of the Negro Race," for example, draws our attention to the coherence and thematic continuities within the series. Most of the volume's ten parts are organized around the series, although several are grouped otherwise (such as "Juvenilia" and "The Colored American Magazine Controversy"). [End Page 339] Dworkin points out that his collation lacks the materialist aspects of periodical publication. In particular, he discusses what he convincingly argues is the ideological significance of the visual apparatus in the Colored American Magazine. While Hopkins edited the magazine, it exhibited cover portraits of successful African American women, cameos of Philis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, and lush borders of elegant flowers and leaves. All disappeared after Hopkins's dismissal. As a concession to the lack of material features in his reprints, Dworkin provides his reader with facsimiles, including a handwritten copy of Hopkins's youthful, award-winning essay on temperance and covers from the Colored American Magazine and the New Era, another periodical to which Hopkins contributed. Dworkin's volume allows readers insight into the rich history of African American culture, since Hopkins's words and references reveal the vital social fabric and extensive network of African American intellectuals, philanthropists, and other notables who have been erased from, or were never made present in, American cultural memory. Central to Dworkin's volume are bounteous identifications of Hopkins's allusions. Taking on the multitude of historical, political, literary, and philosophical sources she references was quite a task, since Hopkins's attributions are often sketchy or nonexistent. Dworkin reveals himself to be an ingenious sleuth and a formidable scholar, providing readers with a vision of the depth and breadth of Hopkins's reading. Scholars will also find ample sources for their continuing work on Hopkins. For example, Dworkin's references show that Hopkins found an organizing principle and guiding argument for her race politics in Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. In the volume, Carlyle argues that heroes sculpt great civilizations—Rome, Egypt, or Ethiopia—that fall into oblivion when heroes are killed or oppressed. Hopkins's apparent influences include her documentations of African American heroes. She argues that black American civilization should be judged by these standards, pointing out that white racists have barred most blacks from the simple privileges that constitute self-development and have perpetuated race hatred and race oppression by judging blacks by unfair standards, comparing them to those with many privileges...

Chapter 8: Rural African American Older Adults and the Black Helping Tradition

SUMMARY By the year 2050, 21 percent of all Americans over 65 will be members of a minority group with African Americans being the largest subgroup. What is critical is that there are great disparities in the physical and mental health status, service availability, service access, and socioeconomic factors between elderly African Americans and elderly whites. These disparities are even more evident with older African Americans in rural communities. Along with these disparities, coupled with the “helping tradition” in the African American community, there has been a great reliance on community-based informal care systems for elderly African Americans. This chapter will examine the informal care systems in rural African American communities within the context of the helping tradition found within the African American cultural history. In this examination there will be a discussion of how the gaps in the social services delivery system in rural communities reinforce this helping tradition.

Fashioning the Body [as] Politic in Julie Dash's "Daughters of the Dust"

Set at turn of twentieth century in a mythical port village on a sea island off South Carolina and Georgia coasts, Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters of Dust features four generations of Peazant women. On surface, film's plot is quite simple: characters struggle to reconcile their history of enslavement and their geographical and cultural isolation with potential freedom and socioeconomic progress that their immigration from island to mainland promises. As Viola Peazant explains to Mr. Snead, photographer she has hired to document crossing over, migration represents family's steps toward progress, an engraved invitation to culture and wealth of mainland. (1) Among first uttered in film, these words direct attention to historicity of family's movement. Indeed, critics of film focus almost exclusively on record Dash revises, arguing that film repositions African American cultural history from margin to center. (2) Such readings also position film within a matrix of representations that describe blackwomanhood as a tension between raced and gendered subjectivities. Intellectual and practical consensus on blackwomen's marginalization within discursive systems of both race and gender characterize blackwomen by intersectionality, a false center of two. (3) Teaching and discussing film has shown me that some audiences have internalized this conventional notion of intersectionality to such a degree that film's rejection of conservative representations of blackwomen becomes confusing and problematic for them. Common academic assumptions about race and gender as disparate categories, as well as blackwomen's representations of distinct standards relative to each of these categories, provide immediate but defective lenses for film's spectators. However, because Daughters does not conform to established standards, or because it mutes them, viewers' most basic identification with characters and plot is either generally inhibited or deferred. (4) When I taught film in an undergraduate course for English majors at Louisiana State University in 1998, for example, male students of all ethnic backgrounds found film difficult to comprehend, and white students male and female expressed an inability to grasp meaning, follow story, or see point. (5) Dash seems to anticipate such responses to her text, reasoning that when a work is so densely seeded within black culture, a lot of people who are not from culture will say they find film inaccessible or they will say they find it not engaging. What they are saying is that they do not feel privileged by film, so they choose not to engage or allow themselves to become engaged. (qtd. in Bobo, 1995, 133) Whereas Dash focuses on cultural and sensibilities, however, I want to argue here that her film narrates political sensibilities as it consciously refuses to enter entanglements of market and visual economies that have made sociopolitical sense of blackwoman's (Collins 103). As Greg Tate indicates, Daughters offers historical subtext for blackwomen's surface emotions (70). Daughters challenges commonplace notions of blackwomen's place in and its relationship to it, and it engages their place in the marketplace of flesh (Spillers 76). I use body politic here simultaneously to connote social, political, and public sphere of nation state, represented in film as North, and to juxtapose that political with natural bodies of blackwomen, always sexually and/or economically politicized. This essay reads Daughters as a visual and verbal narrative that challenges very concept of intersectionality and illusory division between race and gender that sustains it. The film challenges muted that woman itself names a subject that inherently excludes film's subjects. …

Martha Brae's two histories: European expansion and Caribbean culture-building in Jamaica

Based on historical research and more than 30 years of anthropological fieldwork, this wide-ranging study underlines the importance of Caribbean cultures for anthropology, which has generally marginalized Europe's oldest colonial sphere. Located at the gateway to the New World in the plantation heartlands of the Americas, the settlement of Martha Brae, Jamaica, has witnessed the unfolding of two distinct yet interrelated histories. Exploring the significance of Martha Brae as a European Caribbean slaving port in the 18th century, Jean Besson simultaneously uncovers the neglected tale of Martha Brae's gradual appropriation by ex-slaves and its transformation into an African-Caribbean free village, bringing the story right up to the beginning of the 21st century. Central to this transformation is the system of family land, which interrelates with kinship, community, economy, cosmology, gender, oral tradition and state law. Besson shows that this customary land tenure is not a passive legacy for either Africa or Europe, as conventional theories contend, but a dynamic creole institution created by Caribbean people in response to European-American land monopoly and cultural dominance. This perspective advances debates on African-American cultural history and the anthropological study of culture.

History Telling at the Kitchen Table: Private Joseph Shields, World War II, and Mother-Centered Memory in the Late Twentieth Century

This essay adds to the discourses of African American history, military history, and autobiography that focus on the process of collective memory telling in black families in the latter half of the twentieth century. By exploring an African American family's postwar recollection of the homicide of a black soldier during the SecondWorldWar, this essay examines the relationship between memory and history. It reconstructs how the parameters ofWorldWar II shaped the wartime experiences of African American servicemen and their families'memory of the “Good War” in a period of national forgetting. By exploring the episodes of memory telling among black family members of those who stood in the ranks of America's armed forces during World War II, the importance of investigating aspects of the tension between memory and history in African American culture in the twentieth century can be discerned.