African American Identity Research Articles

TONY MORRISON AND ALICE WALKER’S LINGUISTIC IDENTITY AND SEMANTIC TRIGGERS (IN THE CONTEXT OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN IDENTITY)

The article is devoted to linguistic identity and semantic triggers, a rather interesting aspect of the linguistic identity of Tony Morrison and Alice Walker. The main purpose of of the research of linguistic identity by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker is to analyze of semantic trigger lexical units and expressions in their ideolect. Scientific novelty of the research is determined by studying the semantic trigger lexical units. Our analysis suggests that for T. Morrison and E. Walker, semantic triggers such as blue eyes, nigger, and coon provide a “transition” to scripts that are relevant to their African-American identity. Thus, both writers are carriers of individual linguistic identities, as well as symphonic (social, ethnic, social) linguistic identities, specifically African-American linguistic identities.

Meaning, Encounter, and Reclamation: Relistening to the Appalachian Oral History Project

Abstract The Appalachian Oral History Project (AOHP) is an archive of oral histories collected in the early 1970s from thousands of residents of the Appalachian region. The project created a trove of data for scholars in multiple disciplines who were interested in studying and researching the region and its history and culture. Interviewers conducted a significant portion of the oral histories with African American residents of the region. However, in the intervening decades, researchers have done little with these histories or the larger project that they make up. What do these oral histories have to say today about African American identities in Central Appalachia and the use of oral history to confront questions of place and identity? A pilot project made use of ethnographic methods to explore these questions. Through a unique utilization of the Appalachian Oral History Project archives, the project was designed to be a conversation across time between a current resident of the region and those who long ago told their own stories of what it meant to make a life as a black American in Central Appalachia. Such a method offers a model for a more expansive project and provides direction for both a reconsideration of the uses of oral history collections and for future critical archival scholarship.

\u201cThey Made us into a Race. We Made Ourselves into a People\u201d: A Corpus Study of Contemporary Black American Group Identity in the Non-Fictional Writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates

This article examines representations of contemporary Black American identity in the non-fictional writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates. The dataset is a self-compiled specialized corpus of Coates’s non-fictional writings from 1996 until 2018 (350 texts; 468,899 words). The study utilizes an interdisciplinary approach combining corpus linguistics and corpus pragmatics. Frequencies of five identity-related terms in the corpus (African(–)Americans, blacks, black people, black America/Americans and black community/communities) are compared diachronically; then the pragmatic prosody of the terms is analyzed via the notion of control. The findings suggest that Coates’s representation of Black American group identity has shifted over time. Specifically, the terms African Americans and black America are replaced by the terms blacks and black people. The study’s empirical findings, considered through the theoretical framework on Black solidarity, suggest a shift in representation of group identity in Coates’s writings from an identity based on cultural and ethnic commonalities to an identity based on the shared experiences of anti-Black racism.

Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Stars and American Identity by Cat M. Ariail

Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Stars and American Identity by Cat M. Ariail

Suicide, Race, and Social Work: A Systematic Review of Protective Factors among African Americans

ABSTRACT Purpose: Suicide among African Americans has increased significantly in the past 15 years, yet it remains a neglected topic in social work research. This systematic review examines social work’s contribution to suicide research while focusing on the social context in which African Americans live. Method: Using a critical race theory, we examine protective factors specific to African Americans that may mitigate suicide risks. Results reveal that the social work profession has produced 20 suicide-related studies between 1980 and 2018. Results: Identify three types of protective factors against suicide among African Americans. These are: micro-level factors (private regard / strong African American identity and impulsive response to discrimination), mezzo-level factors (family support and the role of women), and macro-level factors (social support, poverty and lack of awareness, religion, access to care, and internal response to community violence). Conclusion: Finding demonstrate evidence of the relationship between protective factors and suicide among African Americans. Implications for the use of Critical Race Theory in Social Work research and practice are provided along with implications to advance suicide training in social work education programs.

Postmemory and Race: Thylias Moss and the African-Americanization of the Holocaust

ABSTRACT Throughout her work, contemporary African-American poet Thylias Moss performs feats of poetic reimagining that challenge the assumed connection of collective memory and group history to racial identity—a connection that has recently received rigorous critique, particularly in Holocaust and trauma studies. Proposing what I call Moss’s “African-Americanization” of the Holocaust, and by contextualizing Moss’s work in the early 1990s phase of the “Americanization” of the Holocaust and drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, this article focuses on Moss’s Holocaust poems in order to grapple with her poetry’s disjunctive themes and collective histories. Exploding the logic of competitive victimhood, Moss’s poems show how African-American experience does not compete with but rather works as a mnemonic device for other traumatic histories and other genocides. Her unusual upbringing leads Moss to multiply connections across traumatic histories, collective memories, and African-American identity in her Holocaust poems, even playfully so through her grotesque and darkly comic figuration of events. Moss’s poems extend the reach of collective memory and racial identity, multiplying their possible relations against the backdrop of the Americanization of the Holocaust.

Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery by Yogita Goyal, and: Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination ed. by Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal

Reviewed by: Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery by Yogita Goyal, and: Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination ed. by Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal Gwen Bergner Yogita Goyal. Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery. New York: New York UP, 2019. 271 pp. $30.00. Eds. Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal. Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2020. 248 pp. $30.00. If Stephen Best wrote "the epitaph of the Beloved moment" to free Black identity from a melancholic relation to slavery and disrupt the assumed continuity between slavery's past and racial inequalities today, then these two books examine how the next generation makes use of slavery's history. Both acknowledge the neo-slave narrative, emblematized by Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), reigned for several decades as the "paradigmatic mode for thinking about African American identity and history" (Goyal 1), but hail new ways of reckoning with slavery's meaning today. Goyal sticks with the slave narrative form, but asks what happens when it goes global. Current human rights abuses, from trafficking to undocumented immigration, from conscription of child soldiers to forced marriage, from debt bondage to domestic servitude, now use the neo-slave narrative as an analogic template. Goyal asks how this analogy functions, "what histories does it summon, what hidden relations between power and knowledge make visible?" (10). Ashe and Saal recognize its globalization, but declare a radical break with the neo-slave narrative paradigm by post-Black artists in the United States. Branching beyond the literary, the essays explore how Black cultural productions since 1987 "refigure canonical, popular, and sacrosanct narratives, motifs, memes, and iconographies" to stage new encounters with slavery (Ashe and Saal 17). Together, these books explore how new aesthetic forms "counter[] the hegemony of any single genealogy of blackness" (Goyal 15). Arguing the slave narrative is now a "world literary genre" (4-5), Goyal examines this global proliferation through a variety of literary contexts, from narratives of conscripted African child soldiers to the new African diaspora in the United States. With chapters organized by genre, including the sentimental, the gothic, satire, surrogation, and revisionism, she asks how the analogy between transatlantic slavery and contemporary phenomena of migration, trauma, and global racial formations functions. In two chapters on narratives of African child soldiers, Goyal is critical of sentimental narratives, such as a memoir by Francis Bok and a novel by Dave Eggers that let Western readers imagine themselves as global citizens "via their humanitarian empathy for the African victim of atrocity" (13), but in the process dehistoricize and universalize the particular causes of the traumas they narrate. By contrast, Goyal appreciates the "gothic" narratives by Chris Abani and Ahmadou Lourouma that "refus[e] closure or redemption" (13). These versions depart from the classic slave narrative's sympathetic appeal by uncovering silenced histories and "challeng[ing] the absolute innocence demanded by human rights advocates" (13). Like the gothic narratives, Goyal appreciates recent African American post-Black satires of slavery by Mat Johnson, Paul Beatty, and Colson Whitehead that use "absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures" (14) to expose the contradiction inherent in the previous generation's neo-slave narratives, which claimed that slavery persists while narrating escape from its regime. Succeeding [End Page 341] chapters include an exploration of texts Goyal sees as challenging Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s tradition-founding premise that literacy delivered Black freedom by allowing the objectified slave to write him or herself into Enlightenment subjectivity. Rather than accepting the Western equation of literacy with subjectivity, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, Robin Coste Lewis, and M. NourbeSe Philip "refigure the relations among liberal Enlightenment ideas of humanity, the black presence in the West, and the expansion of the African American literary tradition to a more global one across time and space" (145) by "ventriloquizing" the words, language, and texts of the Western tradition to unsettle their racial epistemologies. The final chapter considers how writers of "the new African Diaspora," such as Chris Abani, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Teju Cole, and Dinaw Mengetsu provide narratives of migration, postcolonial Africa, and the vicissitudes of globalization. These texts indicate that the Black Atlantic diasporic...

African-American Identity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)

This paper aims to examine the African-American identity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). The novel emphasizes the painful aspects of slavery such as sexual abuse and violence and explores the effects of the institution of slavery on the African-American character’s identity. The paper also addresses what it means to have a name and be free. The slavery institution does not believe in individuality. Naming is significant since it identifies the character. An analysis of the character’s identity and name will be studied since the characters have written their own stories and they are historically deprived of their humanity and language, a major constituent of the character’s personal and fellow slaves’ history. Therefore, the African-American character looks at the past as he/she longs for the sense of self. Moreover, the African slave is prohibited from being himself/herself or from belonging to a family. In this kind of institution, the African-American doubts the essential aspects of his identity, such as his value as an individual and the source of his manhood. Even after emancipation, the character feels that he has no identity, alienated and has no sense of self. After being freed, the characters try to reclaim their identities. The characters rename themselves in a way that they can now become ‘definer’ not ‘defined’: specific examples and references will be drawn from the narrative. The white founders of the institution of slavery commit acts of raping, an attack on one’s freedom, stealing and stripping the slave’s belongings and possessions, including his name.

Streetscapes and stereotyping: streets named after Martin Luther King, Jr., and the geographies of racial identity

In addition to recognizing a commemorative space and geography that serve to legitimize a particular racial identity, streetscapes in the U.S. named after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., (MLK) are also a stereotyped space that is presupposed as marginalized. The main objective of this paper is to investigate whether stereotyped MLK neighborhoods differ from the lived spaces. To achieve this objective, the paper relies on two indexes of segregation: namely dissimilarity and interaction indices, the racial composition, and the socioeconomic characteristics of MLK neighborhoods in the 48 contiguous states. Both dissimilarity and interaction indices implied higher segregation in the South and Midwest. The higher proportion of the African American population relative to Whites and other races in the MLK neighborhoods, except in California, confirms that the MLK streetscapes are racially concentrated spaces. Further, analysis of socioeconomic variables does resonate with the stereotype of MLK neighborhoods as marginalized spaces. To demystify the stereotype and to reconstruct the identity of African Americans and their lived and experienced spaces, this paper draws upon studies of the broader process of racialization, critical toponymy, and stereotype theories. Based on this exploratory approach, the paper concludes that though the characteristics of MLK neighborhoods reflect their marginalized status, this status is itself the result of a broader process of racialization. This process has distributed resources unequally among racial groups, forming and buttressing negative stereotypes about African Americans while also stigmatizing their living spaces, which are all too often susceptible to a policy of benign (or not-so-benign) neglect, property devaluation, and industrial pollution.

“You can Talk in Espagñol!”: An Ethnographic case Study of an African-American Emergent Bilingual and Biliterate Identity

This ethnographic case study explores the dynamic and fluid development of one African-American student’s bilingual/biliterate identity through her enrollment in a Spanish-English Dual Language Education program. We integrate the frameworks of identity in interaction and monoglossic and raciolinguistic language ideologies to understand how this student approaches her Spanish language and literacy development from kindergarten to grade 5. The study documents the fluid nature of the focal student, Tamara’s, identity as she journeyed from a Spanish enthusiast in kindergarten who embraced her emerging bilingualism/biliteracy to a student who seemed to question her identity as Spanish literate person. Specifically, we examine her affective response to developing bilingualism and biliteracy. We identify three paradoxical influences, or double-binds, in how she was differently positioned across multiple interactions as a bilingual African-American student.

Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Applications of Psychology: William E. Cross.

This award recognizes a distinguished career and enduring contribution to advancing the application of psychology through methods, research, and/or application of psychological techniques to important practical problems. William E. Cross is recognized as a leading contributor to the discourse on African American identity development; his identity model has found application across a number of ethnic-racial identity communities. The same can be said of the way he investigates how members of stigmatized groups enact identity in everyday life. In his new text, Black Identity Viewed From a Barber's Chair (in press with Temple University Press), he combines historical and psychological sources to show that during slavery, Blacks developed a positive ecology for infant and child development that helps to account for the extraordinary interpersonal competence many freed men and women exhibited after Emancipation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

CULTURAL IDENTITY IN BELOVED

This study aims to analyse the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison in terms of
 cultural identity through post-colonial perspective. In Beloved which deals with
 slavery in America in nineteenth century, by portraying a true history of a Black
 slave mother, Morrison reflects the voice of voiceless, sufferers, and others who are
 shut from any contentment in life. She represents bluntly the unpleasant experiences
 of constructing identity in the shadow of racism. The novel illustrates the hardships
 and pressure grieved by the slaves of a farm called Sweet Home in the period of the
 Civil War focusing on the misery of Sethe's poor, depressed family. In this study, the
 factors affecting African American identity and the process of constructing the cultural identity of African Americans are discussed through viewing the period`s
 deep-seated developments.

THE SMASHED SELFHOOD: TONI MORRISON’S SULA AS AN ABANDONED BLACK LADY

Toni Morrison set forth in her novels to retrieve the African-American women’s lost identity which is wrecked, shattered or wiped out. The search for identity is the predominant theme in her novels. Each of her novels stresses the need for self-discovery and self-identity leading to self –actualization. White women at least get support from their men, but that is not the case with African-American women. Selfhood is consistently provisional in the fiction of Morrison. This study examines the image of the female protagonist in her quest for identity. The parallel theme of search for selfhood in the female protagonist is discerned. The study also emphasizes Sula’s need to define herself within her own culture that is threatened by the community’s inability to acknowledge Sula’s individuality that culminates in her isolation and death. Morrison actuates Sula’s independent search for selfhood by her outright rejection of the black community’s definition of a woman. Blackness is used consciously as a symbol of radical identity that her female protagonists must rename and reown by reclaiming their cultural history for an integrated black American identity. Morrison, has beautifully fused, western literary models with her black oral traditions, to argue for evolving an African-American consciousness in her female protagonists.

The (Ever)Lasting Significance of Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon

ABSTRACT Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon teaches us distinct lessons about African American literary studies and its relation to the memory of Africa. In this text, Kossula helps us better understand a transatlantic black identity, the tension that exist between those who remember Africa and those who have adopted a black American identity, and the failures of supposed victories and African emigration. This traversing also reminds us that there can be no agreed upon or stable method for charting literary history. Instead, it encourages us to follow a model of historiography that looks for continuity and is more cross-directional than vertical. The archive, of course, requires such a model. Thus, Barracoon's publication, as an archival artifact especially, is also instructive as evidence of the primacy of the archive in relation to canon formation and literary traditions.

George S. Schuyler's “Shafts and Darts”: The Messenger Years, 1923-1924

George S. Schuyler's “Shafts and Darts”: The <i>Messenger</i> Years, 1923-1924

African Americans and Africa: A New History by Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden

Reviewed by: African Americans and Africa: A New History by Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden R. Joseph Parrott African Americans and Africa: A New History. By Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 266. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-300-19866-9.) Africa looms large in the imagination of many black Americans. Yet from 1619 to the present, the ways African diasporic identities have coexisted with American ones have been fluid and contested. Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden's expansive and readable African Americans and Africa: A New History explores the varied ideas, perceptions, and attitudes about Africa that have influenced African Americans and how these concepts shaped "what they called themselves historically" (p. 11). The result is a concise volume that serves as an introduction to the complex history of black identity in the United States and as a survey of the broad scholarship that opens doors for future research. Blyden is an ideal guide for this journey. As the child of an African immigrant and a black American, her family story frames her interrogation of the hyphenated African American identity. Blyden finds, rather than a narrative of rising or declining identification with Africa, that attraction to an oft-idealized ancestral homeland ebbed and flowed in response to domestic race relations. Survival and improvement were the primary goals, with African heritage providing a communal rallying cry. Dreams of returning to an Africa free of prejudice provided refuge during periods of fraught race relations, as evidenced in nineteenth-century colonizationism and Garveyism. Yet as these frequently debated examples demonstrate, rarely did black communities cohere around a single identity or mission. Blyden's strength lies in her ability to capture the diverse ways African Americans sought to "(re)connect with Africa" while negotiating their positions within United States society (p. 81). [End Page 681] This duality shaped African American perceptions of the African continent and its peoples. Enslaved persons adapted inherited traditions, and intellectuals from George Washington Williams to W. E. B. Du Bois drew on black heritage to inspire pride. Nonetheless, African American visions of Africa were filtered through the prism of the white-dominated media. Metropolitan, educated Africans who lived in the United States challenged negative stereotypes of a backward continent but could not overturn them. As a result, uplift and civilization remained components of African American internationalism until decolonization reversed the power dynamics of the black diaspora. Blyden thus highlights ideas of Africa as inspiration for both pride and projects in the United States, while illustrating the discrete cultural perspectives that have historically separated black Americans and Africans. Blyden provides a valuable synthesis using the latest scholarship to expand on her earlier work on transatlantic black identity in the nineteenth century. She is an excellent writer with an eye for the telling story or quotation, making the book ideal for classroom use. Experts on African American engagement with Africa will recognize much of the information, but Blyden does yeoman's work in unifying discrete historiographies to highlight comparisons and lasting trends across five hundred years of history. For example, the "mix of pride and hesitation" produced by African identification within the dominant white American culture becomes a repeating theme, which links the post-Revolution decades of the eighteenth century to the post–civil rights era of the 1970s and 1980s (p. 196). Yet Blyden is careful to avoid emphasizing a singular perspective, capturing both historical and scholarly debates on African American identity. My major critique is that this approach occasionally mentions historical and historiographical contradictions—inconsistent settlement patterns of recent African immigrants or Carol Anderson's reassessment of the NAACP during the Cold War—without exploring them in detail. Blyden could have more effectively intervened in these debates by analyzing or disentangling these seeming dichotomies within the longue durée of transnational identity politics and ambiguous diasporic relations, potentially pushing scholarship in new directions as a result. These quibbles aside, African Americans and Africa is an important book, which provides a much-needed and accessible primer on African American identity in a global context. R. Joseph Parrott Ohio State University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

My Narrative is Not What You Think It Is: Experiences of African Americans in a Doctor of Education Program

Aim/Purpose: This paper examines the experiences of African American students in a doctor of education program at a comprehensive university in Southern California. Background: Qualitative case study methodology and critical race theory is used to highlight asset rather than deficit narratives of the participants, illuminating another aspect of commonly understood experiences for underrepresented students in education. Methodology: Qualitative case study methodology was used for a sample of 14 African American doctoral students in the Southern California area. Critical race theory provided a framework through which to support data analysis and subsequent findings. Contribution: The original contribution of this paper is the asset-narrative of African American doctoral students at an institution that is not research-driven. Findings: Findings assert that (1) asset narratives of African American students need to be highlighted, (2) action-research as an option for dissertation completion is important for Ed.D. programs, and (3) racial identity of African Americans is complex, therefore broader understandings of black identity are needed, and must be coupled with anti-deficit ideology. Recommendations for Practitioners: Recommendations for practitioners include expanding understandings of African American identity coupled with anti-deficit ideology to enhance student interactions with both faculty and peers throughout doctoral education. Recommendation for Researchers: It is suggested that future research continue to focus on doctoral student experiences in institutions that are not research intensive. Impact on Society: This research provides an original contribution by furthering understandings of the complexity of the African American experience with identity, research, and doctoral education experiences. Future Research: Future research should focus on other underrepresented populations in doctoral education at universities that are not research-intensive.

Black African and Latino/a identity correlates with increased plasmablasts in MS.

ObjectiveTo determine the influence of self-reported Black African and Latin American identity on peripheral blood antibody-secreting cell (ASC) frequency in the context of relapsing-remitting MS.MethodsIn this cross-sectional study, we recruited 74 subjects with relapsing-remitting MS and 24 age-, and self-reported ethno-ancestral identity-matched healthy donors (HDs) to provide peripheral blood study samples. Subjects with MS were either off therapy at the time of study draw or on monthly natalizumab therapy infusions. Using flow cytometry, we assessed peripheral blood mononuclear cells for antibody-secreting B-cell subsets.ResultsWhen stratified by self-reported ethno-ancestry, we identified significantly elevated frequencies of circulating plasmablasts among individuals with MS identifying as Black African or Latin American relative to those of Caucasian ancestry. Ethno-ancestry–specific differences in ASC frequency were observed only among individuals with MS. By contrast, this differential was not observed among HDs. ASCs linked with poorer MS prognosis and active disease, including IgM+- and class-switched CD138+ subsets, were among those significantly increased.ConclusionThe enhanced peripheral blood plasmablast signature revealed among Black African or Latin American subjects with MS points to distinct underlying mechanisms associated with MS immunopathogenesis. This dysregulation may contribute to the disease disparity experienced by patient populations of Black African or Latin American ethno-ancestry.

Evaluating Africentric Violence Prevention for Adolescent Black Males in an Urban Public School: An Idiothetic Approach

Overrepresentation of Black male students among suspensions and expulsions from public schools contribute to negative psychosocial functioning. The Imani Rites of Passage program (IROP), sponsored by Family Renaissance Inc., is a time-limited Africentric intervention, designed to enhance Black male students’ life coping skills to respond more appropriately to negative situations. The study seeks to evaluate an idiothetic approach to behavior change from implementation of the IROP program in a low-income public school, comparing intervention and no-intervention groups on measures informed by the cognitive-cultural model of Black identity. After informed consent and assent, IROP participants completed online measures of Africentric socialization, individual and cultural identity, social competence, and violence risk using school lab computers, followed by 15 weekly sessions of two hours each of intervention. The hypothesis was that intervention participants (N = 20, mean age = 16.04) at posttest will exhibit greater cultural socialization, stronger racial and individual identity, greater social competence, and reduction in violence risk than no-intervention participants (N = 20, mean age = 15.42). The findings of the evaluation indicated an Africentrric socialization effect on some predictor variables associated with posttest reductions in violence risk for the intervention group. They provide partial support for hypotheses derived from the cognitive-cultural model. We conclude that (1) the IROP can be successfully implemented in a public-school setting; (2) intervention effects are partially consistent with the cognitive-cultural model of African American identity: and (3) idiographic and idiothetic approaches are more sensitive to behavior change than the normative type of data analysis.

Antiessentialist Form: The Bebop Effect of Percival Everett's Erasure

Reading Percival Everett's novel Erasure through the musical techniques of 1940s bebop jazz shows how experimental and improvisational musical performances structure and animate this literary work. By mixing genres, and by creating a sensibility of what I call disharmonious harmony—a dissonance that deconstructs notions of paradigmatic identities—Erasure destabilizes the idea of literary category and prompts critical inquiry into the legitimacy of racial representation, provoking the reader to confront the racial discourse that supplements processes of reading and interpretation. Everett's bebop sensibility is a device of radical blackness because it incites the reader to question the viability of categorization in all its forms, but particularly in the groupings through which the racial episteme of the modern period makes legible the idea of African American identity and experience.