African American Presence Research Articles

Introduction

ABSTRACT Pennsylvania has always had a significant African American presence. From its earliest settlement under Dutch and Swedish colonialists, and later the auspices of William Penn, people of African descent have witnessed the Commonwealth’s growth and development into one of the most significant states in the Union. The eighteenth-century battle of free and unfree and the nineteenth-century quest for freedom and civil rights laid the foundation for twentieth- and twenty-first-century urbanization. Pennsylvania would eventually have African Americans in the highest levels of politics, education, enterprise, medicine, social services, and other endeavors of society. The articles in this special issue of Pennsylvania History illustrate how African American urbanization transformed Pennsylvania into an effective society for African American advancement, freedom, and equality.

From Side Street to Ghetto: Understanding the Rising Levels and Changing Spatial Pattern of Segregation, 1900–1940

A standard interpretation of the intensification of segregation in the early twentieth century is that residents of Northern cities reacted against a growing African American presence, using segregation as a tool of social control that was less needed in the South. Evidence from newly available data for 134 cities in 1900–1940 puts this interpretation in question in several ways. We find that segregation was already high in 1900 at the neighborhood scale. Not only was it rising, but it was changing its spatial scale as clusters of Black settlement in side streets and alleys disappeared from White districts while expanding into large Black zones. Finally, multivariate analyses show that trends were similar in the North and South, and in neither region was Black population size (i.e., “Black threat”) a significant predictor of increasing segregation. The general trends of rising segregation and increasing spatial scale became a nationwide pattern.

Blackness and Belonging: Shirley Graham’s “Negro Adaptation” of The Hairy Ape

ABSTRACT While working for the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago in 1937, leftist playwright Shirley Graham created a “Negro adaptation” of The Hairy Ape that altered O’Neill’s script and inserted an entirely new scene. The play was never produced because O’Neill denied Graham’s request to perform it and disparaged the work as an example of “freak theatre where white plays are faked into black plays.” This article looks closely at Graham’s adaptation in order to consider its significance, arguing that the race-determined changes Graham made to O’Neill’s script do not distort the play but elicit a layered African American presence. As a tool for understanding this presence, this article adopts a critical approach practiced in lectures delivered in 1990 by Toni Morrison, which restore legitimacy to Graham’s play and offer a model for fresh interpretation of O’Neill’s oeuvre.

Core issues, case studies, and the need for expanded Legacy African American genomics.

Introduction: Genomic studies of Legacy African Americans have a tangled and convoluted history in western science. In this review paper, core issues affecting African American genomic studies are addressed and two case studies, the New York African Burial Ground and the Gullah Geechee peoples, are presented to highlight the current status of genomic research among Africa Americans. Methods: To investigate our target population's core issues, a metadatabase derived from 22 publicly accessible databases were reviewed, evaluated, and synthesized to identify the core bioethical issues prevalent during the centuries of the African American presence in North America. The sequence of metadatabase development included 5 steps: identification of information, record screening and retention of topic relevant information, identification of eligibility via synthesis for concept identifications, and inclusion of studies used for conceptual summaries and studies used for genetic and genomic summaries. To these data we added our emic perspectives and specific insights from our case studies. Results: Overall, there is a paucity of existing research on underrepresent African American genomic diversity. In every category of genomic testing (i.e., diagnostic, clinical predictive, pharmacogenomic, direct-to-consumer, and tumor testing), African Americans are disproportionately underrepresented compared to European Americans. The first of our case studies is from the New York African Burial Ground Project where genomic studies of grave soil derived aDNA yields insights into the causes of death of 17th and 18th Century African Americans. In the second of our case studies, research among the Gullah Geechee people of the Carolina Lowcountry reveals a connection between genomic studies and health disparities. Discussion: African Americans have historically borne the brunt of the earliest biomedical studies used to generate and refine primitive concepts in genetics. As exploited victims these investigations, African American men, women, and children were subjected to an ethics-free western science. Now that bioethical safeguards have been added, underrepresented and marginalized people who were once the convenient targets of western science, are now excluded from its health-related benefits. Recommendations to enhance the inclusion of African Americans in global genomic databases and clinical trials should include the following: emphasis on the connection of inclusion to advances in precision medicine, emphasis on the relevance of inclusion to fundamental questions in human evolutionary biology, emphasis on the historical relevance of inclusion for Legacy African Americans, emphasis on the ability of inclusion to foster expanded scientific expertise in the target population, ethical engagement with their descendants, and increase the number of science researchers from these communities.

Letter from the Editor

Editorial| November 01 2022 Letter from the Editor Mary Ann Irwin Mary Ann Irwin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2022) 99 (4): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.4.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mary Ann Irwin; Letter from the Editor. California History 1 November 2022; 99 (4): 1–2. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.4.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search In 1996, California History published its first special issue on the history of African Americans in the state, presented by consulting editor Shirley Ann Wilson Moore. In her introduction to the issue, she wrote that her goal was to examine “the nature, scope, and significance of the African American presence in California.” To her, “the African Americans who helped shape California’s history were not passive, helpless victims, but active, determined men and women” who insisted on and achieved “self-determination and self-definition in California.” The current issue, long overdue, offers another glimpse into the history of Black California. We release this issue in a moment of profound reckoning on racial injustice broadly, from police violence to institutionalized poverty to the free-form bigotry that is still alive and well in America. Surveying these articles, we see that themes present in Wilson’s issue remain open wounds in California and the nation. Severe inequality... You do not currently have access to this content.

“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era

“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era

WHITENESS IN SHAKESPERE’S SONNETS

Now a day the racial theorem is being used to study Shakespeare's works. The problem of whiteness is explored in his sonnets. He cherishes whiteness more than blackness. Elizabethan policies included the idea that being white was a sign of supremacy, and the sonnets served as a cover for contemporary racial views. Racism and racial injustice are inextricably linked to whiteness. Though invisible, it is a universal phenomenon. Whiteness allows people with fair skin to economically and culturally oppress people of color. According to Hall, an important aspect of early modern writings that contributes to the creation of the white subject is the "Africanist" presence. Whiteness is a potent, covertly hegemonic discourse that oppresses people of color. Whiteness and blackness are in binary antagonism. This African-American presence ultimately fosters a sense of white superiority. This conflicting mindset rekindles the debate over whiteness. The research demonstrates how Shakespeare's portrayals of a young man and a dark lady privilege whiteness and shape white identity. The young guy has been presented in charming terms, whereas Dark Lady has been regarded negatively in terms of culture, morality, and sexuality. The black lady is condemned for acting immorally. She is not considered one of the chaste women. Shakespeare creates a triple-turned-whore character for her. The young, fair, and intelligent person is glorified, and his generational continuation is taken into consideration. The study helps to dismantle the stereotype that exempts Shakespeare from racism.

Inter-Party Competition, Public Electoral Pressure, and Democratic Strength: Refining Political Explanations of Incarceration Trends in the U.S., 1980 – 2010

The purpose of this research is to advance the politics of mass imprisonment literature by testing and specifying the macro-explanations of the state-level incarceration change in the United States (U.S.) between 1980 and 2010. Specifically, I account for mechanisms of inter-party competition and public electoral pressure neglected in prior research. To accomplish this goal, I utilize random coefficient models designed to control for repeated annual measures of state-level data that overwhelm traditional analytic techniques. Findings suggest that violent crime, partisan affiliation of state legislators and governors, probation rates, citizen ideology, marijuana decriminalization, and recidivist-focused laws are associated with incarceration as hypothesized, as well as the African American presence net of crime and socioeconomic disadvantage. Contributing to the theoretical debates on democracy and punishment, this paper demonstrates that inter-party competition and public electoral pressure amplify incarceration in the context of Democratic Party dominance, where no liberalizing effects of competition were found. I conclude that legal and extralegal factors are associated with incarceration and suggest that the public did not oppose criminal justice expansion via democratic feedback mechanisms, so both penal populism (Pratt, 2008) and popular punitivism (Campbell et al., 2017) are valid interpretations of imprisonment politics during the analyzed period.

If These Stones Could Talk: African American Presence in the Hopewell Valley, Sourland Mountain, and Surrounding Regions of New Jersey

If these Stones Could Talk: African American Presence in the Hopewell Valley, Sourland Mountain, and Surrounding Regions of New Jersey, reviewed by Sue Kozel

Where Slavery Died Hard: The Forgotten History of Ulster County and the Shawangunk Mountain Region

Reviewed by: Where Slavery Died Hard: The Forgotten History of Ulster County and the Shawangunk Mountain Region Oscar Williams (bio) Where Slavery Died Hard: The Forgotten History of Ulster County and the Shawangunk Mountain Region By Cragsmoor Historical Society, 2018. 54 minutes running time. Wendy Harris and Arnold Pickman, writer/directors; Walter Alvarez, producer; Maureen Radl, associate producer In recent years, historians, archeologists, and other scholars have begun to examine the extent of American slavery in the North. Once believed to be exclusively a Southern institution, new scholarship has revealed that it was prevalent in the Northeast from the early seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries. In New York, the Hudson Valley served as the epicenter, as estates and manors from New York City to Albany relied heavily on enslaved African labor to raise livestock, till fields, serve as domestics, clear land, run mills, construct buildings, and tend to the needs and demands of the slaveholding family. Among the scholarship is a fifty-four-minute documentary produced by the Cragsmoor Historical Society. Titled Where Slavery Died Hard: The Forgotten History of Ulster County and the Shawangunk Mountain Region, the film is based on a scholarly article published in 2016 by archeologists Wendy E. Harris and Arnold Pickman. Using primary documents such as letters, wills, maps, manuscripts, contemporary accounts, census records, and newspapers, the film reveals the nature of slavery in Ulster County and how the enslaved were treated. The documentary's goal is to provide a detailed view of slavery by examining the lives of the enslaved. This is achieved by following author A. J. Williams's assertion in his 1994 book, Long Hammering: Essays on the Forging of an African American Presence in the Hudson River Valley, that the enslaved were highly skilled individuals who played a pivotal role in adding to the history and culture of the region. Abundant detail is provided throughout the documentary that reveals a life of difficulty for the enslaved. The most vivid account is the recollections of legendary abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who was enslaved in Ulster County in the 1790s. Sold as a child several times, she bore five children during her enslavement, one of whom was separated from her via sale and sent to Alabama, commenting [End Page 446] that the institution robbed her of children.1 Wills also revealed the vulnerability of slave families, as demonstrated by the Jansen family in 1798 and 1802, when several family members received enslaved individuals as an inheritance, including children.2 The documentary reveals that enslaved Africans strove to have a life for themselves when given the opportunity. One example is the story of two enslaved individuals who belonged to the DeWitt family. Caesar and Jane DeWitt, when freed in the 1820s, lived nearby their former slave home on a three-acre patch of land they purchased from the DeWitt family and continued to work for them. When the patriarch, John DeWitt, passed in 1845, the family were given ten acres of land and $9,000 due to Jane's devotion to care for his son, who passed at the age of nineteen.3 As with other slave societies, the threat of violence was always present in Ulster County. In 1741, the same year of the New York Slave Conspiracy, a New York City newspaper reported that an enslaved boy, fifteen or sixteen years of age, set fire to hay barracks, resulting in the destruction of the farm and the harvest. As punishment, he was executed. Another newspaper account from 1775 highlights a group of enslaved males who, to attain their freedom, planned to set fire to homes and kill people when they fled. The plan was discovered, and the men were killed.4 Labor of the enslaved is highlighted in the film as a crucial component of Ulster County, particularly in the case of a Dutch Reformed Church of Warwarsing, where an enslaved man by the name of Jet contributed three shillings to the construction of the church. It is believed that he was able to do so because of earnings as a skilled worker. It is also asserted that despite lack of evidence, enslaved Africans were employed at grist mills and used their skills...

Abstract P272: Associations of an Epigenetic Biomarker of Aging and Healthspan With BMI Status and Metabolic Health in Adult African Americans: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study

Introduction: Individuals with obesity are thought to be protected against some chronic disease as long as they do not incur metabolic health (MH) conditions. A new epigenetic biomarker of accelerated biological aging and health span, PhenoAge, was developed using DNA methylation (DNAm) markers. We hypothesized that obesity would be associated with higher PhenoAge than normal weight and overweight individuals only in the presence of MH conditions. Methods: DNAm was measured in leukocyte DNA for 2,454 African American participants (mean age=56.4 years) and used to calculate PhenoAge. BMI status was categorized as normal weight, overweight, and obese and MH was categorized by 0, 1, or at least 2 of the following: coronary heart disease, stroke, hypertension, type-2 diabetes, and hyperlipidemia. Linear regression tested the cross-sectional association of PhenoAge with BMI and MH, adjusting for sociodemographic variables, smoking, and technical variables. Stratified analyses by MH status were conducted to illustrate the statistical effects of BMI status in adults with and without MH conditions. Results: Participants with obesity had approximately 8 months higher PhenoAge compared to normal weight (β=0.68, 95% CI=0.21, 1.14, p=4.1E-3), and those with one (β=0.55, 95% CI=0.15, 0.94, p=6.4E-3) or at least 2 (β=0.81, 95% CI=0.38, 1.25, p=2E-4) MH conditions also had higher PhenoAge compared to those with 0 conditions. Figure 1 shows increments in PhenoAge with increments in number of MH conditions regardless of BMI. PhenoAge was significantly higher for obese compared to overweight for 0 and 1 MH conditions, but not compared to normal weight. Conclusions: In African American adults, both obesity status and presence of MH conditions were associated with a higher PhenoAge, suggesting metabolically healthy obesity is not entirely benign. Further phenotyping of the “metabolic health” obese condition is warranted to understand its relevance for healthspan.

Diversity in Party Leadership in State Legislatures

AbstractMembers of historically underrepresented groups—women, African Americans, Latinos, and workers—are serving in American legislatures in increasing numbers. However, legislators wield substantially greater power in the lawmaking process when they hold leadership positions. Incorporation of these groups into leadership positions could indicate fuller political representation, but scholars to date have not assessed how well these groups are represented in leadership. We analyze original data describing the backgrounds of approximately 2,200 leaders in 30 states between 2003 and 2014. The data show that, on average across states, members of these groups are as well represented in state legislative leadership positions as they are in rank-and-file membership, but there is substantial variation across states and across parties. We then ask what factors might explain this variation and explore institutional characteristics, like the number of leadership positions or leader selection methods. The results show that legislative chambers with a higher number of leadership posts tend to have more women in leadership, and that selection through elections is associated with decreased African American presence in leadership. The findings have implications for minority incorporation and influence in American politics.

Media in Postapartheid South Africa: postcolonial politics in the age of globalization by Sean Jacobs

Reviewed by: Media in Postapartheid South Africa: postcolonial politics in the age of globalization by Sean Jacobs Keyan G Tomaselli (bio) Sean Jacobs (2019) Media in Postapartheid South Africa: postcolonial politics in the age of globalization. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press Jacobs provides a panoptic view of the South African media and how in its broadest sense such media negotiated, shaped and debated the political transition (chapter 1). He starts from the multiracial TV adverts flighted on SABC-TV for Castle Lager that anticipated – and/or pushed – for impending social change after 1976 (chapter 2). New kinds of socially-referenced sitcoms, soap operas and the forging of a national identity through appealing to the notion of the 'aspirational viewer' contextualises these shifts (chapter 3). These were driven by the emergence of black urban class-mobile consumers, identified by the international advertising agency, J Walter Thompson, a firm that responded most alertly to the conditions that were developing from the smoky aftermath of Soweto '76. Discussion follows on the idiosyncratic Africa-wide public sphere enabled by Big Brother. On a broader scale were MultiChoice's forays into Africa on the back of the PAS4 satellite that enabled Big Brother's appeal as an alternative pan-African public sphere (chapter 4). The way that the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) mobilised as a civil society organisation to defeat the liberation government's bizarre and genocidal denialist policy on HIV/AIDS, is the case study comprising chapter 5. Chapter 6 moves in a different direction, exploring the relationship between media and especially white Afrikaner political identities after apartheid. New media technologies will have shaped these on the one hand, while appropriation by Afrikaners of the global human rights discourses [End Page 134] of 'minority rights' and 'victimhood' after ceding political power in 1994, were imported into public discussion. The book's conclusion offers some insights into the demise of mass parties, mass media, the rise of new mediascapes and associated identities that centre on mobile technologies. Jacobs evokes national allegories that decentre media as the direct focus, while examining broader issues read through the media in general. As mentioned, the new allegory actually starts with the rebranding of Castle Lager, based on a longitudinal study of the beer's TV adverts conducted by Alex Holt during the 1980s period of apartheid reform. Holt's benchmark study underpins Jacobs' analysis of the wider trends buffeting the late apartheid political economy, and the ensuing contradictions that would contribute to its demise. Holt's analysis of advertising practices and new consumption patterns brought about by the growing black urbanisation, and the need for single advertising campaigns aimed at identifying new and growing multiracial class-based markets that no longer responded to 'separate' messages, underpin Jacobs's analysis. The idea of 'nation' thus emerged from the advertising industry as their most effective marketing strategy (41). Similar trends were evident in SABC-TV programming with a growing African-American presence prior to 1994 and in commissioned sitcoms like Suburban Bliss and Going Up, as analysed elsewhere by Dorothy Roome. The strength of chapter 2 (Branding South Africa in Prime Time) is that it extends Holt's until now neglected but visually and sonically rich approach in constructing a narrative on South African emergent national branding. Allied to these advertising messages, was their multiracialisation of characters and notable Castle's anthemic unifier. Chapter 3 (The Aspirational Viewer) on locally made dramas and soap operas draws links between early 'whites' or 'blacks'-only examples (ie after 1976 when TV was first introduced). The programmes made during the transition aimed at promoting the idea of a kind of unified but classless multiracial nation adopting free market capitalism. The entertainment education imperatives that influenced the SABC commissioning editors is mentioned, but not developed, though such a methodology was very strongly at work via national public health communication programmes and programming, which also involved very intensive audience response and behaviour-change analysis. This corpus of research led by Soul City and Johns Hopkins Health and Education in South Africa and its university affiliates might have been highlighted. [End Page 135] Chapter 4 (Big Brother MultiChoice) examines how reality TV challenged entrenched cultural values and sexual...

Black faces, black spaces: Rethinking African American underrepresentation in wildland spaces and outdoor recreation

The Wilderness Act of 1964 defines wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”. It goes on to limit acceptable activities in designated wilderness areas to those associated with leisure, scenic viewing, education, and scientific inquiry. These precepts are the basis for federal wilderness management in national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, and lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management. They are derived from the interests and values held by the early environmental movement's predominantly white middle and upper class patrons, and imposed on diverse groups who may not hold the same views. This study examined how the imposition of wilderness management at Congaree National Park greatly restricted local African Americans' traditional fishing practices and how fishers made meaning of their displacement. Participants' experience of alienation is a result of their perceptions of racial discrimination in the park's preferential treatment of white visitors. This study argues that African American presence in the Great Outdoors is erased both materially and symbolically by racial bias in the Wilderness Act, a general lack of attention to black outdoor spaces, and the use of white outdoor values and pursuits as the criterion for which to assess African American outdoor ethos.

Breaking Down the “Walls of Whiteness”: Strategies for Teaching about Race and Social Justice in a “Very Black Year”

Breaking Down the “Walls of Whiteness”: Strategies for Teaching about Race and Social Justice in a “Very Black Year” La Donna L. Forsgren (bio) “Defined by feel-good highs . . . devastating lows . . . and reasons to believe in a better day . . ., 2015 was beautifully, painfully and undeniably impactful for African Americans.” —Jamilah Lemieux and Rembert Browne Introduction How does one teach an African American theatre and performance survey course to predominately white students during a particularly painful year of social injustice? While extrajudicial killings of black men and women have long been a critical topic within black nationalist discourse, African American dramatic literature, and everyday conversations among African Americans, this concern has only recently resurfaced within mainstream American media. Journalists Jamilah Lemieux and Rembert Browne mark 2015 as a “very black year” due to the efforts of African Americans to use social media to challenge white hegemony in US politics, culture, and entertainment (27). Indeed, social media provides an unprecedented platform for African Americans to upload videos, discuss issues pertinent to their lives, and respond to the world around them. The rise of social media has created an important ontological space for the next generation of African Americans activists and their allies; social media also breaks down spatial walls, allowing those who have little-to-no contact with nonwhites to actually view footage—from a safe distance—of extralegal killings of African Americans. While often intended to provide concrete “proof” of racial injustice, these videos also desensitize viewers to racial violence and are quickly co-opted to justify the assault on black bodies.1 Considering this current state of affairs, how can instructors put reluctant white students at ease so that they feel comfortable engaging with issues of race and social justice, yet also use race-based stress to challenge dangerous ideologies and behaviors? I taught the survey course at the University of Oregon, a historically white university and college (HWCU), during this firestorm of racial tension.2 The term HWCU refers to “an institution of higher education whose histories, traditions, symbols, stories, icons, curriculum, and processes were all designed by whites, for whites, to reproduce whiteness via a white experience at the exclusion of others who, since the 1950s and 1960s, have been allowed in such spaces” (Brunsma et al. 719). As a HWCU, the University of Oregon continues to lack substantial black or African American presence among the administration, faculty, and student population. With a total enrollment of 24,125 during the 2015–16 academic year, only 472 black students and less than five black theatre majors enrolled at the university (Office of the Registrar). Before the class even began I knew that statistically, the majority, if not all, of my students would be white. Furthermore, as one of only twelve black or African American tenure-related faculty members, I also knew that few students had the opportunity to engage with a black woman intellectual (Office of Institutional Research). These factors alone compelled me to thoughtfully consider the impact of my own presence in the classroom, strategize [End Page 151] effective ways to teach sensitive subject matter, and find ways to engage students from a variety of standpoints about race and social justice. Despite these challenges, teaching African American Theatre and Performance to predominately white students in a very black year became one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. I know that I am not alone in my efforts, as teachers of all races engage students of all races in conversations about the complexities of race and social injustice in the United States. While I draw from my own positionality as an African American instructor teaching white students, this essay is intended to serve as a resource for any instructor who wants to engage reluctant students (of various backgrounds) about the importance of race and social justice within the African American performance tradition. This essay incorporates the sociological findings of David Brunsma, Eric Brown, and Peggy Placier; Robin DiAngelo’s concept of “white fragility”; and the pedagogical theories of black feminist scholar bell hooks to offer strategies for teaching about race and social justice from within African American theatre and performance traditions. In keeping with hooks’s theories...

“Your Wilderness:” The White Possession of Detroit in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive

ABSTRACTAfter a decade of accelerated disinvestment and depopulation, Detroit (re)appeared in the national imaginary as an “urban frontier” open for (re)settlement by (mostly white) creative entrepreneurs. Recently, scholars have addressed the ways in which this frontier rhetoric arouses settler colonial desire for land based not just on a notion of black criminality or ineptitude, but also more fundamentally on an assumption of deferred white possession. Though this work has productively described the settler colonial conditions of racialized (re)development in the Motor City, it ignores white possession as a process that mythologizes Indigenous history and delegitimizes Indigenous people. In this paper I read Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive as a “landscape of monstrosity” that inadvertently and momentarily recovers Indigenous and African American presence in moments of erasure and absence, as werewolves and ghosts to the white vampire elite and zombie working class. More broadly, I argue that Only Lovers Left Alive actively participates in an ideological process of (re)settlement that disguises land speculation (and its inherently disruptive cycles of uneven development) in a renewed frontier mythology. I read the film’s central characters, the vampires Adam and Eve, as disaster tourists whose nostalgia for Detroit’s lost civilization heralds in its renewed form.

West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands. Culture America Series. By Emily Lutenski

West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands . Culture America Series. By Emily Lutenski. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. xii + 332 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $37.50.) In West of Harlem , Emily Lutenski argues that although “African American presence” is often “forgotten in the American historical memory,” African American literature and the American West have always been mutually constitutive cultural, material, and symbolic sites (p. 7). Opening with a productive juxtaposition of two speeches delivered within a month of one another at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Frederick Douglass’s speech on the fair’s “Colored American Day”—Lutenski works in the conceptual space opened between the two, identifying the damaging effects wrought by the … jneary{at}hunter.cuny.edu

Pecknold, Diane (ed.). Hidden in the Mix. The African American Presence in Country Music. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013. 383 pp.

Pecknold, Diane (ed.). Hidden in the Mix. The African American Presence in Country Music. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013. 383 pp.

“Being Uncle Remus”: The Folk Uncanny and the Remus/Rabbit Archetype in Faulkner’s “Was” and The Reivers

“Being Uncle Remus”:The Folk Uncanny and the Remus/Rabbit Archetype in Faulkner’s “Was” and The Reivers Chad Jewett (bio) Beginning with Go Down, Moses (1942) and ending with his final novel, The Reivers (1962), William Faulkner’s final two decades of writing consistently focused on questions of black humanity and racial discord in his Yoknapatawpha County. While the literal voicing of narrative is left in the hands of white characters like Cass Edmonds in “Was” and Lucius Priest in The Reivers, the role of expressing the New South’s racial turbulence is left to black characters like Tomey’s Turl and Ned McCaslin. Like Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit in Joel Chandler Harris’s plantation stories, to which both Turl and Ned share a similarity, both of significance and depiction, these characters offer counter-narratives of disruption and expressions of black striving and resistance. As this article will show, Faulkner’s ironic use of the Uncle Remus/Brer Rabbit archetype serves as the forum for these physical “narrations,” which come in the form of a disturbing uncanny within the folk-nostalgia milieu of Cass and Lucius’s reminiscences. Both tales are narrated by a version of the white youth that makes up Remus’s audience, only to reveal the reality of the African American presence as the driver of these narratives, just as Remus’s narration of the self-asserting Brer Rabbit becomes a sleight-of-hand reflection of Remus’s own precarious freedom. [End Page 370] Like the young audience of Uncle Remus, these oblivious, white storytellers miss the assertion of autonomy coded into the Brer Rabbit-like actions of the black men they narrate, only sensing the dissonance between their attempts at golden memory and the interruptions of racial discord signified by the black characters in their stories. Like Brer Rabbit in the Remus tales, smuggling questions of black self-expression into minstrel folk stories, Faulkner plants interrogations of white ignorance and black travail in his own versions of “folk uncanny.” I use the phrase “folk uncanny” to define the moments in which expression of black struggle and strife arise in the otherwise nostalgic and (allegedly) humorous narrative of the folk tale or legend that is The Reivers and “Was.” Freud defines the “uncanny” as “something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed,” a submerged memory or idea that nevertheless resurfaces (148).1 Thus in the context of Faulkner’s nostalgic narrators, the “un-canny” becomes the moments in which a sort of “unpleasant aftertaste” surrounds attempted white revisions of black action, from drama to comedy. The uncanny is the uncomfortable repression and familiarity that we see in Cass’s and Lucius’s attempts at folk memory, which are attempts at removing racial pain from a sepia-toned, remembered South, but that nonetheless show moments of surprising struggle on the part of their black characters. While the Southern folk tale, of which the Remus stories are prime examples, establishes expectations for surprise and defiance of expectation and its own set of uncanny moments (talking animals, violent ends followed by later resurrections), Faulkner uses these generic conventions to surprise the reader with differently “uncanny” moments of racial strife. As Remus’ Brer Rabbit finds his way into conflicts that allow him to make a case for his own autonomy (and for Remus to make a case for black autonomy), so too do the actions of Ned and Turl, which are narrated as moments of laughter and surprise by the willfully nostalgic Lucius and Cass, allow for expressions of black independence and effort. Ned’s and Turl’s actions become narrations that replace the actual narration of Remus.2 David W. Robinson and Caren J. Town interrogate similar questions of expression and signifying blackness in their article “‘Who Dealt These Cards’: The Excluded Narrators of Go Down, Moses.” They frame the significance of the African American characters of the novel as a kind of [End Page 371] “narration,” in which “narration is understood here to denote not just verbal articulation, but also nonverbal, nonmimetic shaping of the text … Faulkner’s excluded narrators may not always come to voice, but they...

DianePecknold. Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 392 pp.Charles L.Hughes. Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Pre

DianePecknold. Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 392 pp.Charles L.Hughes. Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Pre