African American Culture Research Articles

‘The Destiny of a Whole Race’: Identity, Race, and Politics in the Cold War Italian Performances of ‘Porgy and Bess’

Abstract In 1954–5, Porgy and Bess appeared for the first time in Italy in an all-Black production formally endorsed by the US State Department. Italian theatre administrators saw this production as an opportunity to sever any ideological connection with Fascism after decades of institutional support. At the same time, while Italian audiences and critics were often aware of the essentializing practices at the origins of Porgy and Bess, they relied on the stereotypical image of African American culture presented by the show to project their own experiences and political aspirations onto the opera’s subject and music. Drawing on primary sources, interviews, and the analysis of the earlier European reception of Porgy and Bess, this article argues that the success of the opera in Italy, rather than being determined by US diplomatic efforts, was a result of Italians’ need to redefine a sense of collective identity in a time of political transition.

Theorizing Black Power Movement in African American Literature: An Analysis of Morrison's Fiction

This paper analyzes the influence of the Black Power movement on the AfricanAmerican literary productions; especially in the fictional works of Toni Morrison. As an African-American author, Toni Morrison presents the idea of 'Africanness' in her novels. Morrison's fiction comments on the fluid bond amongst the African-American community, the Black Power and Black Aesthetics. The works of Morrison focus on various critical points in the history of African-Americans, her fiction recalls not only the memory of Africa but also contemplates the contemporary issues. Morrison situates the power politics within the framework of literature by presenting the history of the African-American cultures.

Reflections on Black Visual Artist Doug Redd

This essay was inspired by the death and devastation related to the pandemic of Covid-19 which intensified the ways that preexisting sociopolitical contradictions affected black people. Before the pandemic it was commonplace for thinkers to describe themselves as radicals. However, in the moment of crisis, their voices were often silent or they offered superficial commentaries. And the magnitude of their limitations—conflating moral protestations with political analyses, for instance—evoked memories of perceptive thinkers that I knew as a young man, such as visual artist Doug Redd whose worldview and aesthetics exemplify our need for alternative sensibilities, perspectives, and centers of thought in African American culture.

“Latter-Day Slavery”

My research highlights little-known aspects of African American participation in the mobilization on behalf of women’s suffrage in California, an issue of vital importance to African Americans. The history of suffrage in the United States is marked by varying degrees of denial of voting rights to African Americans. In California, African Americans were pivotal participants in three major suffrage campaigns. Based on black women’s support for the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted black men the right to vote, black men and women formed a critical political alliance, one in which black men almost universally supported black women’s suffrage. Black women began and continued their activism on behalf of male and female voting rights, not as an extension of white-led suffrage campaigns, but as an expression of African American political culture. African Americans—including black women suffragists—developed their own political culture, in part, to associate with those of similar culture and life experiences, but also because white-led suffrage organizations excluded black members. Black politics in California reflected African Americans’ confidence in black women as political actors and their faith in their own independent efforts to secure the franchise for both black men and women.

Into the Spotlight: Tracing the Role of the Black Figure in Art over Two Centuries

ABSTRACT Two revelatory exhibitions probed the vital topic of the representation of the black model in art: Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery in New York, and Le Modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse, at the Orsay Museum in Paris. A transatlantic venture unprecedented in scale, these shows enriched the public’s understanding of modern art and the significant role of the black figure therein. Playing on the dual meanings of the word model—both an artist’s model and an exemplary figure—these exhibitions revealed the identities of black models, previously unknown or understudied, while also celebrating the achievements of black artists, writers, and performers. Expanding on Denise Murrell’s groundbreaking research on Édouard Manet’s model Laure as well as Henri Matisse’s engagement with African American culture, the Wallach and the Orsay spotlighted the complex and pivotal role of the black model in Western art history.

Claire Parfait, Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (ed.), Writing History from the Margins: African Americans and the Quest for Freedom

This 174-page book is a collection of nine essays by French and Anglophone scholars specializing in African American history and culture. It covers United States history from the late eighteenth century to the present, with a focus on African Americans as subjects of, and contributors to, historical analysis. The volume serves several purposes as stated in the introduction: first, to provide visibility to the role of African Americans in national history and its writing; second, to present Af...

Colloquy: Shadow Culture Narratives: Race, Gender, and American Music Historiography

Colloquy: Shadow Culture Narratives: Race, Gender, and American Music Historiography

APPALACHIAN BLACK FIDDLING: HISTORY AND CREATIVITY

Discussions on Appalachian music in the United States most often evoke images of instruments such as the fiddle and banjo, and a musical heritage identified primarily with Europe and European Americans, as originators or creators, when in reality, many Europeans were influenced or taught by African-American fiddlers. Not only is Appalachian fiddling a confluence of features that are both African- and European-derived, but black fiddlers have created a distinct performance style using musical aesthetics identified with African and African-American culture. In addition to a history of black fiddling and African Americans in Appalachia, this article includes a discussion of the musicking of select Appalachian black fiddlers.

Philosophical-aesthetic foundations of African-American hip-hop music

This article is dedicated to the philosophical-aesthetic foundations of African-American hip-hop music of the late XX century. Developed by the African philosopher Leopold Senghor, the author of the theory of negritude, concept of Negro-African aesthetics laid the foundations for the formation of philosophical-political comprehension and development of the principles of African-American culture in the second half of the XX century in works of the founders of “Black Arts” movement. This research examines the main theses of the aesthetic theory of L. Senghor; traces his impact upon cultural-political movement “Black Art”; reveals which position of his aesthetic theory and cultural-political movement “Black Arts” affected hip-hop music. The author refers to the concept of “vibe” for understanding the influence of Negro-African aesthetics upon the development of hip-hop music. The impact of aesthetic theory of Leopold Senghor upon the theoretical positions of cultural-political movement “Black Arts” is demonstrated. The author also compares the characteristics of the Negro-African aesthetics and the concepts used to describe hip-hop music, and determines correlation between them. The conclusion is made that the research assessment of hip-hop music and comparative analysis of African-American hip-hop with the examples of global hip-hop should pay attention to the philosophical-aesthetic foundations of African-American hip-hop and their relation to Negro-African aesthetics, which differs fundamentally from the European aesthetic tradition.

Bridging the Health Disparity of African Americans Through Conversational Agents

African Americans have faced health disparities in terms of access to health care and treatment of illnesses. The novel coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic exacerbates those disparities caused by limited access to medical care and healthy lifestyles, vulnerability to misleading information, and mistrust of the medical profession, all of which disproportionately affect the African American population in terms of infection and mortality. Conversational agents (CAs) are a technological intervention with the potential to narrow the disparities because they make health care more accessible, are effective in disseminating health information among a population with low health literacy, and can increase users’ trust in health information. However, designing CAs for this population presents challenges with regard to embodying the African American culture into CAs and addressing privacy and security concerns. This commentary discusses some advantages and challenges of using CAs to help African Americans protect themselves against coronavirus disease 2019, and calls for more research in this area.

The New Edith Wharton Studies

The New Edith Wharton Studies

Seeing Black: Foote’s Afro-American Company and the Performance of Racial Uplift in Imperial Germany in 1891

Abstract By 1914 African American entertainers had become a regular part of variety show programmes across the German lands, but despite their evident popularity, they have received little scholarly attention except as part of the pre-history of jazz. But even before 1914 African American performers took an active part in transatlantic conversations about the meanings of race, challenging racialized understandings of nation, culture and modernity. To illustrate the challenge presented by African American performance and the range of German responses, this article takes up a little-known case study, the German tour of William Foote’s Afro-American Company in 1891. Led by a white impresario, the show brought together the broad range of black popular performance—minstrel song and dance, jubilee choirs, social dance and concert singing—to demonstrate the rapid progress of African American cultivation since emancipation. This message of racial uplift was framed in ethnographic terms, making a case that African Americans, like Germans, possessed distinctive folk forms that could be refined into cultivated forms with universal value. This framing made an uplifting case for an equivalence between African American and German cultures, but there were also ambivalences built into Foote’s project as organizers played to audiences’ racialized expectations. Analysing German commentators’ responses to performances of American blackness allows us to interrogate competing discourses of blackness in the German lands and the ways they could be used strategically. More broadly, those responses also illustrate how ideas about race were negotiated, produced and popularized in commercial entertainments.

Cultura y espiritualidad en la vivencia del cáncer de mama y la mastectomía

Introducción: Las cada vez más crecientes cifras de cáncer de mama, la alta supervivencia y la diversidad cultural y religioso-espiritual actual hacen que en la vivencia de esta patología confluyan una gran cantidad de factores que deben ser considerados. Objetivo: Conocer la influencia de los elementos culturales en la vivencia del cáncer de mama y la mastectomía. Metodología: Revisión integradora en bases de datos nacionales e internacionales de bibliografía científica publicada entre 2006 y 2018. Resultados: Los principales hallazgos identificados fueron los aspectos emocionales y sexuales, y su influencia en la vivencia del cáncer de mama/mastectomía , los factores sociales y culturales estresantes en la mujer con cáncer de mama/mastectomía y los mecanismos de adaptación al cáncer de mama en relación a su cultura Respecto a los dos primeros hallazgos, se evidencia pérdida de la feminidad, autoestima y percepción negativa de la imagen corporal así como un descenso de la satisfacción, la funcionalidad sexual y la libido. También temor a la recaída y al cambio de rol familiar en países como Jordania, Líbano y en la cultura afroamericana. En cuanto a los mecanismos de adaptación, la enfermedad es entendida desde lo espiritual como voluntad de Dios en culturas imperantes en Indonesia, Jordania y Hawái, aunque, por el contrario, mujeres en Bahréin conciben el cáncer como un castigo o un mal de ojo. Conclusión: Existe la necesidad de prestar una atención más especializada atendiendo aspectos emocionales y sobre la sexualidad, actuando sobre conciencia social para evitar el estigma que padecen y valorando el significado de la enfermedad y las estrategias espirituales de afrontamiento llevadas a cabo. Estudios futuros podrían profundizar en el abordaje culturalmente competente de esta patología.

From Datum to Databases: Digital Humanities, Slavery, and Archival Reparations

ABSTRACT This article examines several projects that apply digital technologies to the study of transatlantic slavery and assesses the potential benefits of these projects while also noting their limitations. It argues that despite the absence of race, and specifically African American history and culture, in much digital humanities scholarship, the study of slavery has been considerably enhanced and transformed by the work of archivists and digital humanities scholars who apply digital technologies to the study and representation of slavery and enslaved people. This subject must continue to be studied so that we understand not only the past but also slavery's impact on the present. Digital technologies such as databases and geographic information system mapping have been useful in helping us understand this chapter of human history more fully and in new ways. Digital applications to archival materials relating to transatlantic slavery not only increase access to these materials for students and researchers, but also offer ways of obtaining new insights into this topic. However, to enhance our understanding of the history of slavery and to be effective agents of progressive social change, such initiatives should be cognizant of how data analysis can be driven by false assumptions of neutrality and can unwittingly contribute to the reification and dehumanization of people of African descent that was characteristic of transatlantic slavery. Digital humanities as a field should both continue such digitizing initiatives and also use digital tools to create critical analyses of oppressive hierarchies to weaken or destroy them.

Zora Neale Hurston and Questions of Scholarship

Zora Neale Hurston and Questions of Scholarship

The Black Skyscraper [Book Review

A definition of perception as used in the above subtitle might be, “an awareness of the environment through physical sensation.” One becomes aware of something through all five senses. Yet it is “seeing” that is the most compelling when analyzing the relationship between architecture and race, especially, for example, when reexamined in literary works such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The author, Adrienne Brown, is a professor who specializes in American and African American cultural production at the University of Chicago. In her book, Brown takes her readers on a journey that recounts seeing racial characteristics in the early period of American skyscraper construction. This begins at the end of the nineteenth century, and essentially ends with the erection of the Empire State Building, circa 1931. The book is worthwhile, if mostly for the wealth of literary references — too many to list properly here — and rereading of classic texts. Interdisciplinary is the best way to describe Brown’s approach: She uses architectural treatises, well-known literary novels, and short stories to mark how urbanites visually contended with their changing environment. Although at times her thesis loses its coherency within the style of writing, Brown’s book is a welcome addition to a time in which scholars are examining how everyday objects have been historically written. In addition, Brown’s close readings of these texts are grounded in sociology, history, and legal precedents, providing the reader with context for why a certain author may have perceived skyscrapers in a certain way. This reading highlights the pervasiveness of our visual senses when coping with modern technology and a rapidly changing environment.

Museum Grants for African American History and Culture (IMLS)

Museum Grants for African American History and Culture (IMLS)

Dark-Skinned Servants Through the Eyes of a White Author: a case study of K. Stockett’s Novel “The Help”

If white authors speak on behalf of dark-skinned characters in their texts, African-American critics and writers often accuse them of attempting cultural appropriation. In this case, according to African-Americans, white people describe them only stereotypically and thus deprive them of a voice. Despite this, such attempts continue. In 2009, K. Stockett released her novel “The Help”, which is narrated by three women, including two dark-skinned maids (Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson). These characters tell about their experiences working for white masters in the early 1960s, in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, during a time of severe racial segregation. Newly arising after every release of such literary or film texts (just remember the recent film “Green book”), the ongoing controversy over cultural appropriation determines the relevance of addressing this topic. K. Stockett presents these characters as anti-racism fighters, with the word as their main weapon. Minny bluntly tells her employers what she thinks of them, which is in line with how African-American authors describe in their texts a way of speaking boldly to those you obey, called “to sass”. On the other hand, Aibileen tries not to show her attitude to white people and, in conversations with them, encodes the true content of her statements as much as possible, in fact using the practice of “signifying”, also characteristic of African-American culture: persuading other maids to tell a white girl about the relationship between masters and servants in their city, in order for it to be published. She deems the written preservation of an ethnic group history as a way to fight against racism. The author comes to the conclusion that K. Stockett follows, consciously or not, the traditions of African-American literature, in which many dark-skinned characters appear as tricksters.

Blackbird Fly: Paul McCartney's Legend, Billy Preston's Gospel, and Lead Belly's Blues

Abstract This article explores the historical context, inspirations, and legacy of Paul McCartney's 1968 White Album song, “Blackbird.” We discover heretofore unexplored connections to the 1926 pop standard, “Bye Bye Blackbird,” as well as the potential for the Beatles' song to house a civil rights message, the nest McCartney tries to build for “Blackbird” in this century. To appreciate the song's availability for civil rights solidarity, we consider Billy Preston, whose cover aligns “Blackbird” with African American culture during the decades in which McCartney was not telling his “Blackbird” legend. Preston's gospel-infused cover, along with his own bird imagery in “Will It Go Round in Circles,” point toward the theme of flight-as-liberation in African American arts. This bird-theme is also exemplified by the folk ballad “Grey Goose,” famously performed and recorded by Lead Belly, a formative influence on the so-called British Invasion rockers. These connections reveal a thematic and political depth to “Blackbird,” illustrating the song's indebtedness to African American music and other arts.

Flying Home: A Mode of Conversion in the African American Context

African American literature has been one of the chief purveyors of African American culture’s folklore tradition. Writers, through fiction and nonfiction accounts, keep alive the stories of such figures as Br’er Rabbit, High John the Conquerer, and John Henry. Other than these manifest folktales, there is also a canon of latent folktales that modern writers are attempting to bring back to African American consciousness. Such is the case with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, a novel that shares the informative and inspirational folktale of flying Africans. This article explores the role that flying plays not only in Morrison’s novel but also its continued relevance and effectiveness for African Americans, and other oppressed communities, seeking liberation. I propose that flying is a mode of religious conversion (i.e., an act of (re-)turning) that has enabled African Americans to come in touch with supernatural resources during times of sociopolitical, communal, and personal sorrow.