African American Presence Research Articles

The Early African American Settlement of Chicago, 1833-1870

nEARLy two CEntuRIES AftER ChICAgo’S EMERgEnCE as a city of economic promise, two major voices had reason to extol the city’s vitality, each recognizing the African American presence as contributing to Chicago’s prominence. Advertising giant Leo Burnett broadcast in 1985 that Haitianborn and Frenchbred Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable was Chicago’s founder and, importantly, the embodiment of its entrepreneurial and business spirit.1 Three decades later, Crain’s Chicago Business wrote, “[Chicago] is the most important city in the long struggle of AfricanAmericans [for the enjoyment of full citizenship and economic rights], a history that set the stage for the election of the first AfricanAmerican president.”2 What Du Sable represented to the first generations of permanent black settlers to Chicago was freedom’s possibility, while the later emancipation phase in the city’s history manifested it in actuality with the fullest opportunities of citizenship for following generations. The historically documented influence of Chicago’s first permanent, Europeanized settler, Du Sable, might or might not have been directly transmitted to the slowlyarriving black migrants of the 1830s and 1840s. However, it is quite unreasonable that some inkling of his impact on this strategic economic site over a twodecade span between the years 1779 and 1800 was not communicated through exaggerated daytime utterances, along with desolate nighttime storytelling in this frontier setting. It almost seems an imperative given the dearth of recreational activities and the scope of Du Sable’s entrepreneurial and business accomplishments as a proverbial and yet immensely successful “other,” being a “handsome, welleducated Negro.”3

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Edited by Diane Pecknold. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2013. Pp. [vi], 383. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-5163-4; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-5149-8.) This is a useful collection with an engaging interdisciplinary balance of focus and imagination. The book features twelve essays, averaging between twenty and thirty pages each, with the exception of one short thirteen-page chapter and a longer opening piece on old-time hillbilly records that sets a foundation from which to move forward through the collection (p. 39). The contributing scholars include editor Diane Pecknold, and their fields include women's and gender studies, history, African American studies, music, southern studies, anthropology, and English. The collected essays can stand alone for readers who want to pick and choose within, but the volume also coheres nicely in its overall effect. Though individual chapters may be more or less valuable depending on a reader's orientation, the book is on the whole accessible, fresh, and contemporary in its tone and synthesis. The non-music specialist as well as the music history insider should find much to appreciate. New fields of inquiry seem to follow a common course. There is the initial recovery stage, wherein an unacknowledged historical community or cultural force--African Americans in country music, past and present, in this case--is recovered in the public record by scholars committed to taking it seriously. In this initial stage, a historical gap is redressed with a flush of ground-level research that is new and important. Next, there is a subsequent stage, wherein the essential first body of scholarship is tempered, reexamined, or complicated. Country music studies can be traced back to Bill C. Malone's seminal Country Music, U.S.A. (Austin, 1968). Pecknold is among a school of contemporary revisionists working in recent decades to take the field to a next level of complication and sophistication. The editor, for instance, highlights Pamela E. Foster for her important interventions, moving past just acknowledging influences in the background of white country music (My Country: The African Diaspora's Country Music Heritage [Nashville, 1998] and My Country, Too: The Other Black Music [Nashville, 2000]). Pecknold also credits Karl Hagstrom Miller for his lucid recent book deconstructing the very notion of black and white in southern U.S. vernacular music (Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow [Durham, N.C., 2010]). Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music is a next positive step in this revision stage of country music scholarship. …

“Memories wasn’t a place, memories was in the mind”: The Gothic in Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

MATTHEW TEUTSCH Auburn University KATHARINE HENRY UNC Chapel Hill “Memories wasn’t a place, memories was in the mind”: The Gothic in Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman ONE DOES NOT TYPICALLY PERCEIVE ERNEST J. GAINES AS A GOTHIC, OR more technically, Southern Gothic, author. Instead, readers tend to see him as a historical realist and regionalist writing, in Faulkner’s words, about his “little postage stamp of native soil” in South Louisiana. Reading Gaines through these lenses serves an important purpose since one of his major goals is to tell the stories of the people he knew, people whose voices were absent from literature and history until he began writing. We would like to provide an alternate lens to consider when approaching Gaines’s texts. Rather than limiting him as a regionalist or a realist, we propose studying him as a Southern Gothic author who highlights the changing South and the loss of its governing rules in ways that rival Faulkner’s examinations of the decaying South. Herman Beavers makes this move in Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson when he notes the Gothic elements in Catherine Carmier, Of Love and Dust, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and In My Father’s House. For this essay, we expand upon Beavers’s observations to focus on how southern codes affect the psyche of Gaines’s white characters. In 1971, Theodore L. Gross observed that African American texts “instinctively adopted the Gothic tradition of American literature and given its more supernatural and surrealistic characteristics a realistic basis, founded on actual lives often lived in the Gothic manner, that is indeed terrifying” (184). While the fearsfacedbycharacters in the works ofCharlesBrockdenBrown,NathanielHawthorne,EdgarAllanPoe,and others carry with them “supernatural and surrealistic characteristics” that represent society, the terrors that Gaines’s characters encounter are found in their own lives through firsthand experience, creating, in 512 Teutsch and Henry essence, what Maisha L. Wester calls a “gothic existence” (35). Wester expounds upon Gross’s observation when she writes that “the horror in [Toni Morrison’s] Beloved is different—it comes from reality—and so, is that much more threatening and terrifying” (1). The tangible aspects of such Gothic lives lead African American authors to “appropriate and revise the genre’s tropes in unique ways to both speak back to the tradition’s originators and to make it a capable and useful vehicle for expressing the terrors and complexities of black existence in America” (1-2). Gaines does this in his novel In My Father’s House (1978), a narrative that traces the lost relationship between Phillip Martin and his son Etienne. The text strongly correlates this familial loss with the continued effects of slavery and segregation. In one scene, the novel takes on a particularly Gothic tone as Etienne hides in his tomb-like bedroom while Chippo Simon speaks with Joanna about Phillip. Chippo senses Etienne’s ghostly presence from the other side of the wall with an eerie feeling that Etienne is listening even though he does not make his presence known. When Gaines’s work incorporates elements of the Gothic, it is not necessarily to speak back to the originators of the tradition but to reply specifically to William Faulkner and his representations of the South. Wester argues that American culture, whether it realizes it or not, makes a concerted turn towards the Gothic: “This is largely because of the nation’s tendency to exclude and repress counter narratives from its dominant metanarrative” (4). If Faulkner, and as some critics note, Quentin Compson, has become the “universally acknowledged spokespersonforthesouthernpsyche”(Kreyling99),thenGainescreates a counternarrative that draws upon the genre to highlight Faulkner’s myopic representation of the South that addresses the African American presence but ultimately relegates it to white spaces. Part of Gaines’s response to Faulkner comes through his examination of the psychological effects of slavery and segregation on the white landowners who worked to preserve their way of life. In this way, Gaines’s deployment of the Gothic differs from that of Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Sherley A. Williams’s Dessa Rose, all of...

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music ed. by Diane Pecknold (review)

Reviewed by: Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music ed. by Diane Pecknold Barbara A. Baker Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Edited by Diane Pecknold. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013. 392 pp. $27.95. ISBN 978–0–8223–5163–4. Diane Pecknold’s edited collection acknowledges an African American presence in country music that goes beyond a matter of influence or aesthetic borrowing by arguing that “African American performers and audience members . . . not only lent their blues sensibilities and chord progressions to white country musicians,” they created and perpetuated old-time and country American music over the course of the twentieth century (1). Pecknold’s title, Hidden in the Mix, is slightly misleading since the essays most often reveal the complexity of an American musical complexion and imply that African American old-time and country music is worthy of study beyond its relationship to country music generally. The essays, although not arranged chronologically and uneven in tone and substance, make up a highly readable volume that should appeal to scholars of American culture, identity, music, and history. Taken in sum, they advance the aesthetic statements of Alabama intellectual [End Page 418] Albert Murray, who articulated a similar thesis in The Omni–Americans (New York, 1970): “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite.” American country music, as illustrated by Hidden in the Mix, is a composite churned from a highly American process that amalgamates race, class, and (to a lesser extent) gender. The myth of whiteness associated with American country music is a matter of racially politicized genres and marketing. The point is best illustrated by Pecknold’s excellent piece on Ray Charles, “Making Country Modern: The Legacy of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.” Charles released the landmark album in 1962, when racialized genre conventions left no context in which its highly amalgamated genius could be interpreted or embraced, since record companies often intentionally reinforced commercial and vernacular divergences among consumers. The amalgamating process inherent in aural production had often been purposefully concealed. The Genius of Soul had long been re-appropriating so-called white interpretations of black styles and exercising the “shared roots and continuous exchange between musics;” he had always “understood popular music as a process of natural cross-racial exchange” (85). That aural cross-fertilization occurred frequently in country music, which is to say, southern music, has everything to do with proximity. As Michael Awkward points out in his discussion of Al Green, country constitutes a space in which “historically divided peoples, whose cultures and bloody interaction have come to define a region, can come together productively” (202). The point is underscored in Adam Gasgow’s treatment of Cowboy Troy’s “transracial aesthetics.” Cowboy Troy’s flagrant mixing of “black” rap and “white” country music demands “that we understand both musical traditions as already amalgamated” (238). Gasgow interprets “I Play Chicken with the Train” as “a creolized history” of “frontier brag-talk” and “urban rap braggadocio” owing to the influence of “African praise-song, . . . blackface minstrelsy,” and western frontier life before Emancipation calling to mind Constance Rourke’s configuration of the American national character (238). [End Page 419] Particularly interesting is Barbara Ching’s “If Only They Could Read between the Lines: Alice Randall and the Integration of Country Music,” the only essay that explores African American women in country music. Ching explicates Randall’s elision of fiction and lyric, the extensive influence she has had, and a surprising subtext that explores the relationship of country music to the black female understanding of racial ambiguity. Also interesting as a history of race and marketing is the final essay in the collection, David Sanjek’s “What’s Syd Got to Do with It?: King Records, Henry Glover, and the Complex Achievement of Crossover.” Sanjeck allows the founder of King records, Sydney Nathan, to speak for himself as a Jew who welcomed African Americans to his company. Primarily a salesman, he recognized the talents of Henry Glover in assisting him in selling the products of a musical melting pot that was stoked largely by the phenomenon of recorded music...

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music DianePecknold, Editor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

The Journal of American CultureVolume 37, Issue 3 p. 358-359 Book Review Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music , Diane Pecknold, Editor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Leigh H. Edwards, Leigh H. Edwards Florida State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Leigh H. Edwards, Leigh H. Edwards Florida State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 September 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12245Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume37, Issue3September 2014Pages 358-359 RelatedInformation

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music ed. by Diane Pecknold (review)

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music ed. by Diane Pecknold (review)

Gothic Storytelling and Resistance in Charles W. Chesnutt'sThe Conjure Woman

This essay explores how Chesnutt uses gothic strategies to expose the historical contradictions of race and conjure up black-abject, revisiting the American gothic via Kristeva's concept of “the abject.” The Conjure Woman (1899) deploys gothic strategies to speak of the unspeakable experiences associated with slavery and contest the rationalist discourses that enforce and legitimate racism. Chesnutt's conjure stories reverse the “national process of forgetting” in the Reconstruction era to reintegrate the nation through the racially charged abjection process. His use of the gothic decisively reverses racist abjection through the juxtaposition of narratives between the former slave Julius and the Yankee investor John. Chesnutt's stories create a space of struggle between the oppressed and oppressor by summoning the abject that has been thrown off in the institution of Western hegemony. Julius's conjure stories wield the subversive power to challenge John and Annie, disrupt their binary thought, and instigate a form of multiple discourse. The Conjure Woman became a groundwork articulating the African-American presence through inarticulate gothic sounds and imagery, and has paved the road for later generations of African-American literature to continue to summon up the black-abject that has long been silenced and marginalized.1

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Ed. DianePecknold. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 383 pp. $27.95 paper.

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Ed. DianePecknold. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 383 pp. $27.95 paper.

Gambling and sexual behaviors in African-American adolescents

ObjectivesLate adolescence represents a developmental risk period when many youth become involved in multiple forms of high-risk behaviors with adverse consequences. This study assessed the degree to which two such behaviors, adolescent sexual behaviors and gambling, were associated in a community-based sample with a large African-American presence. Study designData are derived from a cohort study. This study focuses on 427 African-American participants with complete information on gambling and sexual behaviors by age 18 (72% of original cohort). Gambling involvement and related problems were based on responses to the South Oaks Gambling Screen — Revised for Adolescents. Several questions assessed sexual behaviors, including age of initiation. Multivariable logistic regression models adjusted for demographics, intervention status, impulsivity, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and alcohol and illegal drug use. ResultsAlmost half of the sample (49%, n=211) had gambled at least once before age 18. More gamblers than non-gamblers had initiated sexual intercourse by age 18 (aOR: 2.29 [1.16, 4.52]). Among those who had initiated sexual activity, more gamblers than non-gamblers with high impulsivity levels at age 13 (vs. low impulsivity levels) had become pregnant or had impregnated someone. Among those who had initiated sexual activity by age 18, more male gamblers had impregnated someone by age 18 as compared to female gamblers becoming pregnant. ConclusionsGambling and sexual behaviors often co-occur among adolescents. Such findings prompt the need for the inclusion of gambling, an often overlooked risky behavior, in behavioral prevention/intervention programs targeting adolescents.

Africa in Florida: Five Hundred Years of African Presence in the Sunshine State ed. by Amanda B. Carlson and Robin Poynor (review)

AFRICA IN FLORIDA: Five Hundred Years of African Presence in the Sunshine State. Edited by Amanda B. Carlson and Robin Poynor. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2014.Africa in Florida offers a fresh perspective on U.S. History, American Cultural Studies and scholarship about the African Diaspora. Originally based on a student-curated exhibit at the University of South Florida (2001), the work evolved in response to the erasure of the African and Native American presence in the 2013 celebration of 500 years of Spanish heritage to honor Ponce de Leon's landing on the Florida coast. The editors of this volume are Africanist art historians who emphasize spatial knowledge and visual images as the lens through which to grapple with established categories of knowledge that tend to separate European, African, and Native American experience while challenging the standard narrative that reduces the story of Africans in Florida to one of slavery in the deep south. Accordingly, the contributors offer a way of looking at Florida that goes beyond the nineteenth-century notion of Florida as untouched nature and the twentieth-century notion of Florida as a fantasy world. The editors contend that this approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of how and why individuals in Florida situate themselves in relation to Africa (as an idea or as place) and the importance of the African influence on personal, local, state, and national histories.A comprehensive volume that spans from African ethnicities in the colonial era to neo-Yoruba iconography in Florida today, the work is divided into five sections. Part I introduces Africa in Florida by way of geography, an overview of historical themes, and the work of visual artists Adrian Castro and Gordon Bleach who explore what it means to cross the Atlantic and re-imagine home as Africans in Diaspora. Part II, Seeking Freedom in and out of Florida: Slaves and Maroons, deals with the problem of slavery and freedom from various perspectives including the relationship between Florida's maroon communities and Seminole Indians and the migration of free blacks to Veracruz. One essay deals with the porous nature of the Florida-Georgia frontier for fugitive slaves seeking refuge as well as for smugglers and slave catchers engaged in the illegal slave trade. Part III examines the formation of new identities by considering Africanisms in African American cemeteries, cultural survivals in anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston's writings on black life, and the legacy of Mother Laura Adorkor Kofi, a female Garveyite. …

Hidden in the mix: the African American presence in country music

Hidden in the mix: the African American presence in country music

Economic inequality and ideological roll-call votes: Income stratification, minority threat and support for conservative legislation

This study assesses whether the growth in economic inequality since the late 1960s produced enhanced support for conservative policies in the U.S. House of Representatives. Tests of the effects of inequality and tests of hypotheses derived from minority threat theory are conducted using a pooled time-series, fixed-effects design. The political influence of the most menacing street crime the public blames on underclass minorities is captured as well. Analyses based on 1.488 state-years show that income inequality, minority presence, and the murder rates reduce liberal roll-call votes. Interactions that assess period contrasts in the strength of relationships show that increases in inequality led to greater congressional support for conservative measures particularly in the later years of the post civil rights era. Such tests also support racial threat theory because they show that a strong negative relationship between African American presence and liberal roll-call votes persisted throughout this period. Such results corroborate claims (Bartels, 2008; Krugman, 2006) that the expansion in economic inequality since the late 1960s helped increase support for conservative legislation.

This Land Was Mexican Once: Histories of Resistance from Northern California

This Land Was Mexican Once is a well-thought-out and carefully organized book that provides historical background on Northern California. It explores important questions that seek to shine light on the ways that social systems were established throughout the region and normalized through the use of history. Author Linda Heidenreich attempts to destabilize white supremacist narratives by using a wealth of primary sources to present an account of the Napa Valley as it was experienced by nonwhites since the beginning of the nineteenth century. She makes use of Prasenjit Duara’s notion of “bifurcated history,” which is “to write a history that recovers counter memories while demonstrating ways in which the past was transmitted to the present” (p. 4), and utilizes testimonios, including those dictated to Enrique Cerruti by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Salvador Vallejo, and Rosalia Vallejo de Leese; census records; and birth and death certificates to map out dispersed histories coexisting in time. She then turns to the dominant narrative that was used to cover and subordinate many of those histories to map out how such histories became dominant.This Land Was Mexican Once is organized into chapters interspersed with sections comprised of primary source materials critical to understanding the sociopolitical climate of the time. It begins by mapping precolonial histories, specifically those of Wappo-speaking peoples and other California Indian groups, and concludes by examining immigration and life among racialized minorities in post-1848 Napa. Heidenreich describes the impact that the missionaries, the Spanish, the Mexicans, and finally the Americans had on the Wappo- and Patwin-speaking peoples. This book has a particular focus on Spanish colonial and Mexican periods to demonstrate the complex and class-stratified societies of the time. It also presents history as it was experienced by Chinese and African Americans in the area to further illustrate racial tensions within the complex class-based power dynamics that developed within the regions now known as Sonoma, Napa, and Solano Counties. In particular, chapter 6 examines immigration and life among racialized minorities in post-1848 Napa and shows how African American, Chinese immigrant, and Chicana/o communities were pushed to segregated areas of Napa. Today in this same region, US citizens and residents of color and their white allies continue to “do battle on an uneven playing field” (p. 165). Although the author asked very important questions and sought to analyze “‘how things got to be so messed up’ at both the local and national level” (p. 1), her analysis of African Americans was under developed. The African American presence in Napa’s neighboring city Vallejo is extremely prominent. Thus, further analysis of this community is warranted if a holistic account of Napa’s history is to be presented.In sum, This Land Was Mexican Once is an important book that demonstrates the role of history in constructing dominant discourses of the nation. Heidenreich has written a history that reflects the coexisting and conflicting histories that underlay this nation’s historical background. Historians, students, and anyone else interested in colonial and contemporary Latin America will find this volume useful and rewarding.

Race and Women’s Imprisonment: Poverty, African American Presence, and Social Welfare

Female imprisonment rates have increased proportionately more than male imprisonment rates over recent decades. There are substantial race differences in women’s rates, as is the case for men. Yet, there has been little quantitative research on the correlates of women’s imprisonment using data over time, or on potential race differences in those correlates. The present research analyzes data on black and nonblack female imprisonment rates in the 50 states for the period 1981–2003. The analyses are guided substantively by existing research on race, social threat and criminal punishment, and theory and research on the penal-welfare hypothesis. The study uses bivariate-response multilevel modeling to simultaneously examine the factors associated with black and nonblack women’s imprisonment rates. The results show that black female imprisonment rates increase when the concentration of African Americans in metropolitan areas and poverty rates grow, whereas nonblack female imprisonment rates are unaffected by poverty rates and actually decrease when African American populations become more concentrated in metro areas. Both black and nonblack women’s imprisonment rates increase when welfare spending declines. The results are consistent with social threat perspectives and the penal-welfare hypotheses.

“… All of Cross”—African Potters, Marks, and Meanings in the Folk Pottery of the Edgefield District, South Carolina

African Americans were integral to the stoneware-manufacturing district that developed around Edgefield, South Carolina. Enslaved African Americans worked as potters at several of the Edgefield shops, and the most renowned potter of the district was an enslaved African American named Dave, who incorporated poetic verse onto some of the pottery he made, as well as other marks including an X and slashes. A cross mark was also associated with two of the potteries in the district where Dave had once worked: the Rev. John Landrum Pottery, and the subsequent operation of this pottery by Rev. Landrum’s son, Benjamin Franklin Landrum. This cross-in-circle mark, known as the Landrum cross, resembles the African Bakongo cosmogram dikenga. The Landrum cross, as well as Dave’s use of the X and slashes, may be representations of African symbols brought to the New World and found archaeologically in other settings and contexts. This paper looks at the African American presence in Edgefield, Landrum crosses, and Dave’s use of the cross mark, to examine the meaning of these marks and their potential expression of African American identity.

SEARCHING FOR THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE: THE ‘AFRICANIST’ PRESENCE IN MARK TWAIN'S THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has, despite moves to ban the book nationally as well as have it removed from Junior High School curricula because of its derogatory representation of African-Americans, maintained its status in the American literary canon. Race and racial representation are fundamental to the novel's plot and this paper extends their significance by arguing for the centrality of what Toni Morrison has identified as an ‘Africanist’ African-American presence that pervades and in fact, inspires America's founding literature. The paper argues that Twain's representation of the ‘Nigger’ Jim is contingent on an ‘Africanist’ African-American presence which, ‘real or fabricated’, is premised on a particular idea of blackness signified by Africans. Through a close study of blackface minstrelsy, entertainment popular in the nineteenth-century, this paper investigates (white) Western perceptions of Africa and Africans utilized in African-American literary representations. The paper thus suggests a re-reading of Huckleberry Finn that focuses on the ways in which Africa and Africans are implicated in and central to white and black Western constructions of identity. Far from re-hashing the now banal argument of the racist, and therefore unreadable, character of the novel, this paper hopes to stimulate new readings and discussions of Huckleberry Finn. That is, the paper attempts to interrogate critically the novel's canonical significance and its applicability to (black) African audiences seemingly far-removed from, but integral to, its racial ideology and its literary status, so linking global theories of identity as well as African and (African-) American literary studies.

Monuments of the Black Atlantic: Slavery Memorials in the United States and the Netherlands

CROSSCURRENTS IN A F R I C A N A M E R I C A N H I S T O R Y Graham Russell Hodges, Series Editor Writings on Black Women of the Diaspora: History, Language, and Identity I Gender in the Civil Rights Movement •. Edited by Sharon Monteith and Peter I. Ling Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era By Lean'tin L. Bracks The Slaves of Liberty: Freedom in Amite Country, Mississippi, 1820-1868 By Dale Edwym Smith Black Conservatism: Essays in Intellectual and Political History By Clarence Lusane Contested Terrain: African American Women Migrate from the South to Cincinnati, Ohio, Edited by Peter Eisenstadt Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World By Beverly Bunch-Lyons Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight for Equality from Jim Crow to the Twenty-first Century Blackening Europe The African American Presence Edited by JobnW. Pulis Afro-Virginian History and Culture By Clarence Taylor Edited by John Saillant Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and Slavery in Early Canada and Jamaica Rebels, Reformers, and Revolutionaries: Collected Essays and Second Thoughts By Douglas Egerton ProblematizingBlackness: Self-Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States Edited by By Maureen G. Elgersman Historical Roots of the Urban Crisis: African Americans in the Industrial Cit)' Heike Raphael-Hernandez With a Foreword by Paid Gilroy Edited by Jean Muteba Rahier and Percy Hintzen Blackening Europe: The African American Presence Edited by Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. and Walter Hill Edited by Heike Raphael-Hernahdez ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK A N D LONDON

Cyprian Davis and the Black Catholic Intellectual Vocation

Cyprian Davis and the Black Catholic Intellectual Vocation Bryan N. Massingale Theological reflection is an intellectual activity whose questions and modes of analysis are conditioned by the cultural resources and social interests of those who engage in it. Paraphrasing an insight of the African American theologian, James Cone, a people’s social and cultural environment in a large measure determines the kinds of religious questions they ask. The historical circumstance which most decisively affects the theological and ethical intellectual endeavors of African Americans is the reality of racism, that is, the existence of an unequal distribution of power, privilege, and prestige based upon race—and the beliefs used to justify and defend such disparities. Racism has constantly and consistently stymied the quest of black Americans for justice, acceptance, and equal access to social, political, and economic opportunity. My assertion that black intellectual pursuits are influenced by the reality of racism is not meant to deny either the diversity of the black community or the pluralism present in the black experience. That is, many other factors also influence or condition African American perceptions of reality, not the least of these being gender and class. Such factors notwithstanding, the experience common to all visible African Americans is the rejection, humiliation, and otherwise pejorative treatment which stems from the dominant culture’s insidious, pervasive, albeit largely unarticulated, belief that most blacks are intellectually, culturally, and morally inferior to whites. This essay seeks to articulate—even excavate—the experience of being Black, Catholic, and scholar of religion.1 How does such the “Black Experience,” that is, the experience of contending with the crushing ordinariness of daily assaults upon one’s [End Page 65] talent, beauty, character and intelligence—qualify theological work so that it makes a distinctive contribution to the Church’s understanding of faith and what it requires? What unique insight does this cultural experience provide to the craft of religious scholarship? Why should this experience matter to the rest of the Church? And on a more personal level, but more existentially relevant especially for the Black Catholic faithful: Given the history and continuing reality of the Catholic Church’s complicity in white racial privilege, why would a black man choose not only to belong to it, but also to serve it as a scholar and minister? Cyprian Davis’ contribution to Catholic historical scholarship is well-known. His award-winning and seminal explorations of the African American presence and contribution to the Catholic Church are classic texts and examples of the historian’s craft. But Cyprian2 is not only the “dean” of black historical scholarship. Through his labors, example, and mentorship, he has also been a pioneer and a foremost practitioner of Black Catholic intellectual life in the latter part of the twentieth century. Yet this aspect of Cyprian’s vocation has not been well studied or noticed. This essay seeks to rectify this oversight and attempts to discern how Cyprian’s work and ministry illuminate the distinctive characteristics of Black Catholic intellectual life. My goal, then, is to situate the vocation of the Black Catholic religious scholar within the context of both African American intellectual life and Catholic theology. I will structure my remarks by first reflecting upon the vocation or self-understanding of the black scholar; then, of the Catholic theologian; and then of the Black Catholic theologian. I will conclude with some reflections on how Cyprian’s life work illustrates what might be considered as the marks of the Black Catholic intellectual. Prolegomenon: The Compounded Marginality of Black Catholic Intellectual Life Before undertaking this project, it is necessary to consider the marginality of black Americans in accounts of U.S. intellectual life, the omission of religious intellectuals in accounts of black intellectual life, and the absence of Black Catholic scholarship in U.S. and black accounts of intellectual life. This helps us to better appreciate the import and originality of Cyprian’s vocation and the genuine contribution he makes to American and Catholic scholarship. Clarence Taylor’s conclusion to his path-breaking study of black religious intellectual life puts the matter directly and without varnish: “Intellectual history in the [End Page 66] United States usually has been described as...

Race, crime, and Republican strength: Minority politics in the post-civil rights era

This investigation assesses the relationships between racial threat and partisan dominance in state legislatures with tests of interactive hypotheses. The findings show that historically contingent expectations derived from racial threat theory, Republican law and order campaign appeals, and fundamentalist strength account for Republican strength in the legislatures. Two-way fixed-effects estimates based on pooled time-series analyses of 799 state-years in the post-civil rights era show that the percentage of Republicans in the state legislatures grew after increases in African American presence and the violent crime rates. The combined effects of a growth in African American and fundamentalist populations also account for increased Republican seats in these bodies. Statements by Republican campaign officials on how they deliberately used mass resentments against minorities to gain votes provide evidence about the intervening links between minority threat, the menace posed by high violent crime rates, and increased Republican strength in the state legislatures.

Staging a New Literary History: Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus, In the Blood, and Fucking A

The early plays of Suzan-Lori Parks often are referred to as plays in which the playwright reconstructs historical events to fill a lack or hole in caused by the exclusion of any African-American presence. (1) These nonrealistic, experimental plays feature characters that are alienated from the that they (and Parks) revisit, deconstruct, resurrect, and reconstruct. Parks claims, Through each line of text rewriting the Time Line--creating where it is and always was but has not yet been divined. (2) Beginning in 1996 with the production of Venus, Parks's plays began to explore new directions. Venus, in its depiction of a historical character, has much in common with the earlier plays; however, it serves also as a transition to In the Blood and Fucking A. In these three plays, Parks places African or African-American women center stage in order to representations of women's bodies as possessions, as objects of desire, and as bloody biological battlefields. Parks also questions the place of African-American women in literature. So much of the discussion today in literary criticism Parks explains, concerns how the African-American literary contribution should be incorporated into the canon. The of Literature is in question (4). These three plays are experiments in dramatic form as well as content and as such belong to a new category of writing for Parks that could be called the plays. (3) If we can allow painters to have different Parks declares, then we can allow playwrights to have different periods, too. (4) Exploring a few of the literary references and the structures of these plays in progression reveals that Parks draws from diverse literary sources to reconstruct a classical poetic epic in Venus, a classical tragedy in a contemporary setting in In the Blood, and an example of Brechtian epic theater in Fucking A. Parks, by utilizing forms established by Western European males throughout history, creates additional works that constitute a new literary to fill the absence where the presence of African and African-American women frequently was omitted. (5) Parks views the theater as a place where and literary can be revisited and rewritten. In part because the African-American cultural tradition was oral rather than written, much of this tradition was not included in the Western literary canon as it had been conceived prior to the postmodern era. Nor were African-Americans historically in positions of power that would foster publication and respect for their stories. Parks claims, I'm working theatre like an incubator to create 'new' historical events. re-membering and staging historical events which, through their happening on stage, are ripe for inclusion in the canon of history (6). In Venus and in the plays, Parks draws heavily on historical records and scholarship, but she makes no claim to writing factual accounts of actual events. Rather, she sees in a phenomenological manner that insists that the present exists in the future and that the past exists in the present. In response to those who criticize her for distorting history, she says of her work, think it is just as valid as what we are told happened back then. I think it has an equal weight. (7) Parks believes that because theater is an ephemeral art that exists only in a present moment, it has the ability to bring the past and possible futures to life in the present, thereby reconstructing our perception of who we were, who we are, and who we wish to be. This, in turn, potentially alters who we may become. This is what Parks would have us question, and in doing so, she is reconfiguring and critiquing the primarily androcentric white European tradition that, prior to postmodern interrogation, had been accepted as the Western literary canon. I. Venus: The Epic Poem Parks begins her creative reconfiguration of the canon with the earliest form of Western literature that developed from an oral tradition: the classical narrative epic poem. …