African American Presence Research Articles

“Tell Nannan I Walked”: Reconstructing Manhood in Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson before Dying

Abstract Drawing on a variety of philosophical and ethical views, as well as on African American studies, this paper discusses the way in which Emest J. Gaines's A Lesson before Dying reconsiders the black male character in the context of racial prejudices in the segregated South in the late 1940s. The paper demonstrates that Gaines is one of the authors who had to face the difficult task of transforming the invisible African American presence into the central element of his narrative. From a silent, subjugated figure, from being simply a substitute of the white man, the black protagonist metamorphoses into a polytropic character. The article proposes a close textual and intertextual analysis of Gaines's reconstruction of black male identity. The main argument focuses on the way in which Gaines rewrites the earlier representation of the lonely rebellious African American - (de )constructing the image of the native son and invisible man - by insisting on the importance of the pedagogical role of the community.

“Race” Toward Freedom: Post‐Cold War US Multiculturalism and the Reconstruction of Eastern Europe

In this article, I argue that the celebratory rhetoric of freedom following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Eastern Bloc must be understood as a discourse that was coconstitutive with the rhetoric of US nationalist multiculturalism of the 1990s. The demise of the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc was hailed by US politicians and dominant media as a victory of the ideals of freedom based in democracy, cultural diversity and free markets over totalitarianism and repression. In contrast to the rise in nationalism and ethnic violence in Eastern Europe, the US was upheld as a model for multicultural democracy that Eastern Europe might look to during its transitional period. One manifestation of this post-Cold War relationship was the emergence of comparisons between the Roma of Eastern Europe, who were combating a resurgence of racism in the new Europe, and African Americans in the US. Such parallels presumed African Americans to be a group that had already overcome injustice and could, therefore, provide a model for racial integration in a Western democracy. For instance, Kanata Jackson and Mark Whitaker, professors of business at the historically black Hampton University, proposed that in the post-Communist marketplace African Americans could serve as consultants whose unique experience in surviving qualified them to teach Eastern European ethnic minorities, such as the Roma, how to integrate into the global free market. Jackson and Whitaker's argument is representative of the conflation between multiculturalism and free markets during the 1990s that underplayed the history of racialized slavery in the Americas and persistent racial inequality that is at the foundation of the US capitalist economy. Such discourses served to relegate racism to the annals of US history. In order to interrogate the cultural conditions that facilitated the comparisons between the Roma of Eastern Europe and African Americans in the context of US interests in spreading free markets to post-Communist Eastern Europe, I will focus on two book-length journalistic accounts that sought to envision and evaluate democratic possibilities in the former USSR and Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War era through the rubric of US multiculturalism. They did so by refiguring Eastern Europe as a region newly freed from totalitarianism in which the US public could see its own racist past. The Afro-Russian journalist Yelena Khanga's 1992 memoir Soul to Soul: The Story of a Black Russian American Family 1865-1992 connected the African and African American presence in the USSR to the history of race relations in the US by telling the story of her own family. My reading of the US reception of Soul to Soul that conceived of this popular text as being representative of glasnost, multiculturalism, and the lifting of the Iron Curtain highlights the cultural reinvention of Eastern Europe as the negative reflection onto which the US could project its national, racial, and ideological anxieties at a moment of retreat from the promises of civil rights during the Reagan/Bush era. While US readers' interest in Khanga as an embodiment of multiculturalism, which was grounded in the symbolic position of African Americans as representatives of racial injustice in US national history, demonstrated how racial diversity came to signify the possibilities for US global leadership in the aftermath of the Cold War, US journalist Isabel Fonseca's bestselling 1995 book-length account of the plight of the Roma in post-Communist Eastern Europe, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, argued that racial and ethnic diversity in Eastern Europe proved to be an obstacle in the post-Communist transition of the 1990s. Although Fonseca's work sheds light upon the dual and contradictory processes of renewed ethnic nationalism in Eastern Europe and the transnational aims of European enlargement, it nevertheless upholds the US civil rights model, which is based in claims to equality in the law that supersedes those claims to material equality, as the only viable one for solving the problems of ethnic conflict in Eastern Europe. …

The African American Presence in Reading Intervention Experiments

This study examined what proportion of reading intervention experiments published in a sample of prominent, peer-reviewed education research journals evaluated the impact of the reading intervention on African American students. The last 10 years of articles from the Reading Research Quarterly and the Journal of Educational Psychology and all volumes of the journal Scientific Study of Reading (totaling 8 years) were hand searched. This search yielded 971 research articles, of which 8.14% (n = 79) reported reading interventions; none of these reading interventions reported outcomes by race, and only 2, 0.21% of the research articles, included 85% or more African American participants.

Blackening Europe: The African American Presence

Blackening Europe: The African American Presence

Idaho Ebony: The African American Presence in Idaho State History

Idaho Ebony: The African American Presence in Idaho State History

Troping Oroonoko from Behn to Bandele ed. by Susan B. Iwanisziw

313 How’s analysis of the nature of epistolary spaces and the growth of the postal system that changed letter-writing practice ; they will also appreciate a fascinating group of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century letter writers. Cynthia Lowenthal Newcomb College of Tulane University Troping Oroonoko from Behn to Bandele , ed. Susan B. Iwanisziw. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xv ⫹ 203. $69.95. The ‘‘Preface’’ of this book defines Oroonoko—‘‘the sign, the name, the character’’—as ‘‘a veritable trope that has evolved continually over the past 300 years to register changing attitudes toward the transatlantic slave trade, the place of Africans in global history, and the status of women writers.’’ If this collection stands as evidence, these claims are inflated. The volume contains very little material on texts other than Behn’s 1688 novel and Southerne’s 1695 play. Three of the eight essays engage with eighteenth-century adaptations of Behn’s and Southerne’s works. Additionally, Rhoda M. Troobof takes us into the nineteenth century, and Jessica Munns’s account of ‘Biyi Bandele’s Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko in a new adaptation (published and performed in London in 1999) is a welcome introduction to contemporary material. But the collection as a whole gives us no sense that there have been, over three centuries, ‘‘continual’’reformulations of the Oroonoko story. Nor does it provide new insight into the slave trade and African history. Aside from Behn’s novel and More’s ‘‘The Slave Trade,’’ women’s writing rarely makes an appearance here. Oroonoko studies have never been more vibrant than today, but this volume does not reflect the dynamic readings of the novel and its recent adaptations. One wonders why Ms. Iwanisziw chose to reprint three well-known essays from the early 1990s. An expanded version of Laura J. Rosenthal’s ‘‘Owning Oroonoko : Behn, Southerne, and the Contingencies of Property’’ appeared in her Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England (1996). Ms. Rosenthal observes , in an endnote to this chapter, that her ideas have not changed since that time. Although Moira Ferguson’s ‘‘Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm’’ laid the groundwork for much of the work undertaken on Behn’s novel in the 1990s, it now appears dated in its coverage of plot and observations. Ms. Iwanisziw claims that the second chapter represents an ‘‘updated’’ version of Margaret W. Ferguson’s 1991 ‘‘Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,’’but aside from a new introduction, it reproduces the original essay verbatim. Its reading of Oroonoko does not engage with any recent accounts of the novel; indeed, Ms. Ferguson’s endnotes reveal references to only two critical sources published after 1995. ‘‘Shocking’’ might not be too strong a word to describe the glaring omission of works that have shaped Oroonoko studies in the past ten years. Not one essay lists, in its ‘‘References,’’ Srinivas Aravamudan ’s Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Duke 1999). Chapter Two claims that ‘‘more work needs to be done on Imoinda’s symbolic and material existences,’’ but notes neither Charlotte Sussman’s seminal 1993 essay on this subject, nor Felicity Nussbaum ’s work on women and ‘‘race,’’ recently republished with an extended reading of Imoinda in The Limits of the 314 Human (Cambridge 2003). Only one chapter notes Catherine Gallagher’s edition of Behn’s Oroonoko (Bedford/St. Martin’s 1995)—an edition that has been instrumental in helping to place the novel in its global historical context. Readings of eighteenth-century adaptations of the Oroonoko story appear isolated from broader literary developments , including the publication of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative in 1789. With the exception of Ms. Trooboff’s essay, no chapter documents an Afro-British or African-American presence as a contributing factor to the representations described, despite evidence that black authors participated in a wide range of English economic and cultural practices in the eighteenth century (see Vincent Carretta’s anthology of eighteenth-century Black authors, Unchained Voices, Kentucky 1996). Ms. Trooboff’s chapter interestingly speculates that a play no longer extant, The Drama of King Shotaway, written and performed by African-Americans in 1823, may have drawn on the Oroonoko story; she...

Miguel A. De La Torre. Santeria: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004. xviii + 264 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $18.00. Paper.

Miguel A. De La Torre. Santeria: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004. xviii + 264 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $18.00. Paper. - Volume 48 Issue 2

Blackening Europe: the African American presence

Traditional Scholars have often looked at African American studies through the lens of European theories, resulting in the secondarization of the African American presence in Europe and its contributions to European culture. Blackening Europe reverses this pattern by using African American culture as the starting point for a discussion of its influences over traditional European structures. Evidence of Europe's blackening abound, form French ministers of Hip-hop and British incarnations of Shaft to slavery memorial in the Netherlands and German youth sporting dreadlocks. Collecting essays by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic and fields as diverse as history, literature, politics, social studies, art, film and music, Blackening Europe explores the implications of these cultural hybrids and extends the growing dialogues about Europe's fascination with African America.

Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture

In the early 1960s, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was a small, multi-racial company of dancers that performed the works of its founding choreographer and other emerging artists. By the late 1960s, the company had become a well-known African American artistic group closely tied to the Civil Rights struggle. In Dancing Revelations, Thomas DeFrantz chronicles the troupe's journey from a small modern dance company to one of the premier institutions of African American culture. He not only charts this rise to national and international renown, but also contextualizes this progress within the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights struggles of the late 20th century. DeFrantz examines the most celebrated Ailey dances, including Revelations, drawing on video recordings of Ailey's dances, published interviews, oral histories, and his own interviews with former Ailey company dancers. Through vivid descriptions and beautiful illustrations, DeFrantz reveals the relationship between Ailey's works and African American culture as a whole. He illuminates the dual achievement of Ailey as an artist and as an arts activist committed to developing an African American presence in dance. He also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey's dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution. Throughout Dancing Revelations, DeFrantz illustrates how Ailey combined elements of African dance with motifs adapted from blues, jazz, and Broadway to choreograph his dances. By re-interpreting these tropes of black culture in his original and well-received dances, DeFrantz argues that Ailey played a significant role in defining the African American cultural canon in the twentieth century. As the first book to examine the cultural sources and cultural impact of Ailey's work, Dancing Revelations is an important contribution to modern dance history and criticism as well as African-American studies.

Rebirth of a Nation: Frederick Douglass as Postwar Founder in Life and Times

In 1875, a year from the upcoming centennial celebrations, Frederick Douglass commemorated the African American presence in the nation's revolutionary past and Reconstruction present. “If … any man should ask me what colored people have to do with the Fourth of July, my answer is ready,” he proclaimed to a black audience in Washington, DC. “Colored people have had something to do with almost everything of vital importance in the life and progress of this great country” from its beginnings in 1776 to its greatest test in 1861 and beyond. Douglass drew upon the Revolution's legacies of liberty and democracy, urging his listeners to meet the challenge of incorporating themselves into the nation's citizenry despite sustained white resistance. Albeit a tall order, he placed this agenda in a broader perspective: “The fathers of this Republic … had their trial ninety-nine years ago. The colored citizens of this Republic are about to have their trial now.” The moment was full of possibilities: African Americans, he emphasized, faced comparable obstacles and hardships much like the founders themselves. Implied too within Douglass's invocation of the revolutionaries was the potential heroism and accomplishments of which African Americans were similarly capable, just as they had proven in the past.

Locating Paradise in the Post-Civil Rights Era: Toni Morrison and Critical Race Theory

Locating Paradise in the Post–Civil Rights Era:Toni Morrison and Critical Race Theory Richard L. Schur (bio) Home is not a little thing. Toni Morrison, Paradise This article attempts to "locate" Toni Morrison's Paradisein the post-civil rights era by identifying its place within contemporary discussions about African American culture and the civil rights movement's legacy. Paradise is but one instance of an ongoing conversation among critical race theorists about the possibility of social, cultural, and legal reform. In the twenty-eight-year period between the publication of The Bluest Eye (1970) and Paradise (1998), the civil rights movement declined as a contemporary social force. By the early 1980s, critical race theory emerged and began "uncover[ing] the ongoing dynamics of racialized power, and its embeddedness in practices and values which have been shorn of any explicit, formal manifestation of racism" (Crenshaw et al. xxix). The 1990s brought groundbreaking books that developed critical race theory and blurred disciplinary boundaries to demonstrate how discursive spheres have been racialized, gendered, classed, and sexed (Bell, Delgado, Guinier, hooks and West, and Williams). Due to its engagement with critical race theory, Morrison's novel translates paradise from a universalized concept that transcends race, class, nation, and gender toward a smaller, more local, and more "manageable" version. Paradise exemplifies and contributes to these new discourses on race and otherness by narrating the complementary histories of an all-black town (named Ruby) in rural Oklahoma and the nearby [End Page 276] convent that became a refuge for young women. The stories ultimately come together at the conclusion of the civil rights movement when the men of Ruby attack the "Convent Women" to drive them off and/or kill them. Through these interwoven stories, Morrison describes how the idealization of whiteness haunts the Convent and Ruby (spaces seemingly free from racism and white people), and how racial identity is always gendered and gender identity always raced.1 By situating the novel in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Morrison captures the shift from the civil rights movement to the post-civil rights era, in which the realities of racial integration and gender equality, as putative paradises, were first being examined. Morrison insists that there can be no simple escape from the effects of race, racism, gender, and sexism without some sort of decolonization. In Paradise, Morrison portrays how African Americans have houses, but not homes. Haven, this group's first settlement, and then Ruby fail to live up to their names because racist and sexist ideologies do not respect the borders established by the townspeople. These communities based on a utopian ideal are not homes because the racial ideologies that the inhabitants of Ruby sought to escape follow them within their hearts and minds. As in much of Morrison's work, racist ideologies transform "domestic" sites into racialized spaces due to the racism and sexism built into their foundations. Paradise thus testifies to the difficulties of building a real home within the racialized soil of the United States. In her nonfiction writings, Morrison has explored how an unspoken African American presence haunts American literature [End Page 277] ("Unspeakable Things" 210, 212). Thus the very foundation of Morrison's fiction, the discipline of literature, is marked by racialization. These racializations come to shape how scholars and students understand literary texts, including her own. Morrison has argued that "[f]or the most part, the literature of the United States has taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man" (Playing in the Dark 14-15). Her interrogation of literature's foundations suggests that perhaps other disciplinary tools, methods, and concerns may be useful in uncovering the effects of literature. To do justice to Paradise, students of Morrison must not use the tools of the literary tradition to limit the meaning of her work. While at work on Paradise, Morrison stated in a speech that "[i]n the novel I am now writing, I am trying first to enunciate and then eclipse the racial gaze altogether" ("Home" 9). In that same speech, she characterized her entire oeuvre as seeking a way "to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home" ("Home...

A Vision of Love: An Etiquette of Vocal Ornamentation in African-American Popular Ballads of the Early 1990s

Around 1990, buoyed by the success of Bill Cosby's situation comedy and Oprah Winfrey's daytime talk show, there was a renewed visibility of African-American pop culture in the mainstream. Movies such as Do the Right Thing (1989; directed by Spike Lee) and Boyz 'N the Hood (1991; directed by John Singleton) represented a point of arrival for black directors. The new Fox network (and, to a lesser extent, NBC) featured the situation comedies Living Single, Martin, and A Different World, which starred and were, to varying degrees, written, directed, and produced by African-Americans. These shows treated their subject matter in a more unapologetically black way and were less dependent on the stereotypes of past shows like The Jeffersons or Good Times, both from the 1970s.1 Another Fox show, In Living Color, represented a similar increase in the presence of mainstream black comedians (a way paved in the 1980s by Eddie Murphy). Murphy's protege, Arsenio Hall, was able to sustain a mainstream talk-show format from 1989 to 1994 that nevertheless maintained a black point of view.2 And of course in music, which had never lacked a strong African-American presence, hip-hop had made a significant mark on the charts; as a wide range of musicians became familiar with this music, some began to appropriate aspects of it for their own music, though not always with great success. What is significant about all these cultural products is that they demonstrated an unapologetic blackness while still enjoying mainstream popularity. That is, even if the material seemed to be about and to ad-

A Response to the Commentators

First, let me thank the three commentators for taking the time and trouble to read and discuss Civilising Subjects. Critical and constructive responses are what all authors want, and I am grateful that these scholars, whose work I greatly admire, have given my book their attention. To have the chance to reply is, of course, even better! The central argument of Civilising Subjects is that being a colonizer was part of the construction of Englishness in the nineteenth century. Given my location as a white English woman formed through socialist and feminist politics, my task as an historian, as I defined it at the end of the 1980s, was to explore Englishness as a racial formation. The complex ‘‘race’’ politics of postcolonial Britain with its multicultural population posed a challenge to the national story, the ‘‘island story’’ of the homogeneity of the English-British nation. What were the possible chains of connection in racial thinking between imperial and postimperial times? I wanted to understand what difference it made to the English-British sense of self in the nineteenth century that Britain was at the heart of an empire. In the United States race was understood as an issue within from the moment of the inception of the nation: the Native American and AfricanAmerican presence ensured this. Race was not present in the same way in British society, for empire was always at a distance and people of color had a relatively small presence in the metropole. Prior to decolonization and the arrival of large numbers of erstwhile imperial subjects in the metropole, issues of race were commonly conceptualized as belonging to the empire, outside of the nation. It was only in the wake of the migrations of the late 1940s and 1950s that race came to be seen as a problem of the ‘‘inside’’ rather than the ‘‘outside.’’ Yet if, as Frantz Fanon argued, colonialism shaped the colonizers as much as the colonized then how was this expressed in everyday culture? How was it lived ‘‘at home’’ as well as in the empire? How did Englishmen and women become colonizers, and what kind of racialized and gendered selves were these? And if particular kinds of racial thinking were embedded in what it meant to be English, then what were the implications of this for postcolonial times? I aimed to explore the construction of the colonizer and to break the binary of inside-outside through two case studies, one of Jamaica, the other of England. I focused on a relatively short period—between 1830 and 1867—in an effort to understand the shift in English racial thinking

Black Musicians in Appalachia: An Introduction to Affrilachian Music

This special issue of Black Music Research Journal, devoted to the African-American music of Appalachia, focuses on a long-neglected but important region of the African diaspora. Because the music of blacks in the Appalachian region has been poorly documented and rarely presented, this special issue is mostly descriptive in content. It contains survey articles addressing major genres of African-American music as well as essays on the African-American influence on white Appalachian music, the poetry and performance of classic blues singer Ida Cox, and the Appalachian genesis of the James Brown sound. In 1985, William Turner and Ed Cabbell published their pioneering compilation Blacks in Appalachia. It came as a revelation to many that there had always been a significant African-American presence in the southern Appalachians. In the wake of the publication of their monograph, regional serial publications Now and Then (1986), Mountain Life and Work (1988), and Appalachian Heritage (1991) published special AfricanAmerican issues. More recently, scholarship on diverse aspects of the African-American experience in Appalachia has been published. This special issue of BMRJ makes an important contribution to this new Affrilachian scholarship.' Since it is the first attempt at producing an overview of black Appalachian music, added documentation in the form of a directory of black Appalachian musicians (living and dead) and a 1. Affrilachian, a term coined by poet Frank X. Walker (2000) in the early 1990s, refers to

Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation (review)

Significant research has been done on the African American presence in Appalachia since 1985, when William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell published their groundbreaking Blacks in Appalachia, which stripped away the veil of "black invisibility." John Inscoe, well known for his own contributions to the field, has collected eighteen essays that admirably represent that new research. Although all but four of them have been published previously, it is a convenience to the reader to have them available in one volume. In addition to expanding our knowledge of black mountaineers, these essays address a major issue in Appalachian studies--"Appalachian exceptionalism," the degree to which the region is distinct. While that argument is not settled in these pages, the essays reinforce a growing awareness of the region's complexity and diversity.

A MULTI-FACETED ANALYSIS OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN PRESENCE IN JUVENILE DELINQUENCY TEXTBOOKS PUBLISHED BETWEEN 1997 AND 2000

ABSTRACT This paper presents findings from an ongoing study of the integration of African American perspectives into criminology and criminal justice courses. Content analysis is used to examine the African American presence in the leading juvenile delinquency textbooks published between 1997 and 2000. We examine the inclusion of African American scholarship, the portrayal of African Americans, and interpretations of African American youth involvement in delinquency. While some African American scholarship was present in all the texts, many of the contributions of criminologists were excluded. In most texts, portrayals of African Americans were more negative than positive. In some of the texts a wide variety of explanations were presented in discussions of African American delinquency. The authors conclude that, in the future, authors of juvenile delinquency textbooks should consider more closely the depictions of African American youth in their texts and augment the inclusion of African American perspectives.

Response to “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies”

Response to “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies”

Grace Paley's Faith: The Journey Homeward, the Journey Forward

Grace Paley is steeped in traditions of community, social activism, and struggle for transformation. A descendant of East European Jewish socialist tradition, who developed as a writer in tumult of 1960s, Paley remains a political activist. Like her politics, often-noted power and charm of her literary voice is not merely a personal idiosyncrasy but derives from extensive roots. Her Yiddish heritage blends with urban dialect and African American inflections to create a quirky expressiveness, a cross-section of everchanging American language. These influences coalesce in prototypical ethnic mix of New York City, scene of a plethora of linguistic styles, an exotic territory familiarized through Paley's community of voices. urban milieu is crucial in portraying a Jewish American community branching out and cross-pollinating with peoples, creating a (post)modern multicultural persona. Simultaneously, Paley tests and refines Jewish American identity against African American experience. Black presence forces an engagement with past Jewish marginalization, calling into question a comfortable incorporation into mainstream America. American minority communities must define not just against a presumed American center but against each other. Americanization as simple assimilation into a preordained culture is revealed as untenable. The spatial topography of center and margin, Henry Louis Gates suggests, started to exhaust its usefulness in describing our own modernity (189). There is no stable framework into which one fits one's cultural patterns, but an everchanging aggregation in which various communities interrogate each in an incessant reshaping. Paley's New York is ideal setting for a (post)modern literature: polyglot, multilingual, interethnic. As early as 1924 Mikhail Bakhtin defined modern literature as surmounting limitations of earlier forms to create a dialogic blending. Monologism is pierced by a multiplicity of voices, an expanding variety of classes and backgrounds, so that the world becomes polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly. period of national languages, coexisting but closed and deaf to each other, comes to an end. Languages throw light on each other (Bakhtin 12). This view of literature as an instrument of change proves somewhat idealistic in practice. Bakhtin overlooks elite nature of institutions through which literature is transmitted; spectrum of voices is inevitably filtered through an educated class. From a position not only of difference but of power, privileged authors may choose to write across class and racial boundaries; their authority and authenticity, however, is problematic. posture of speaking for Other has long marked Jewish speakers and writers regarding African Americans; in Andrew Lakritz's terms such representations make risky incursions on uncommon grounds of groups that have not been accorded authority to speak for themselves (4). Speaking for another often leads to representing one's own concerns, distorting or even erasing that identity. So Michael Rogin argues that by adopting blackface guise, such Jewish figures as Al Jolson created as Americans through contrast with excluded Other. minstrel guise passed immigrants into Americans by differentiating them from black Americans through whom they spoke, who were not permitted to speak for themselves (Rogin 56). However most situations in which Jews attempt to represent or speak for African Americans are ambiguous, characterized by mixed motives and mixed results. In representing African American presence within a larger cultural imagination, Paley, despite her obvious sympathy with Black communities, ratifies and interrogates her own Jewish American identity. As she herself explains, if you speak for others--if you really perform that great social task . …

In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990

A landmark history of African Americans in the West, In Search of the Racial Frontier rescues the collective American consciousness from thinking solely of European pioneers when considering the exploration, settling, and conquest of the territory west of the Mississippi. From its surprising discussions of groups of African American wholly absorbed into Native American culture to illustrating how the largely forgotten role of blacks in the West helped contribute to everything from the Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation ruling to the rise of the Black Panther Party, Quintard Taylor fills a major void in American history and reminds us that the African American experience is unlimited by reion or social status. [Rich] in scope and scholarly detail - it will certinaly stand as the definitive work on the subject for some time to come. - James A. Miller, Boston Globe [B]y far the most complete general history of blacks in the West. - Scott L. Malcolmson, Newsday An absorbing chronicle. - Publisher's Weekly Those looking for a solid overview of the African-American presence in our region would do well to let Quintard Taylor be their guide. - John C. Walter, Seattle Times

History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies

In the last twelve years several scholars have produced historical accounts of composition studies, seeking to define a field which is still, in many ways, in its infancy. Both James Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985 and Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field were published in 1987, just one year short of 25 years from the 1963 date they propose as the birth of composition as a discipline. In 1990 Albert Kitzhaber's often copied 1953 dissertation, Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900 was published in book form. In 1991, Susan Miller joined the discussion with Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition, and since then several other accounts, such as John Brereton's, The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925 (1995) and Sheryl Fontaine and Susan Hunter's edited volume, Writing Ourselves into the Story: Unheard Voices from Composition Studies (1993), have continued to enrich our views and participate in establishing national parameters for the field.