Representation Of African Americans Research Articles

Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature Terence Tucker Brian Norman . Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2010. vii + 214 pp. At first glance, Brian Norman's Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature would seem to be an extension of Kenneth Warren's thesis that African American literature is at an end, a claim based on the idea that African American literature is inseparable from and beholden to its relationship with white America and white oppression during the Jim Crow years after Reconstruction and before the Voting Rights Act. Warren's claims are part of a larger push to proclaim a "postracial" moment, an argument that conflates the end of de jure segregation with the end of Jim Crow. Yet one of the primary elements of the celebration of diversity and postraciality has been dissipating and delegitimizing African American voices and perspectives that openly speak about the despair of the black poor, the conflicts of the black middle class, or the reassertion of white supremacy. However, Norman rejects the very premises on which Warren bases his claim and which many use to express their hostility toward antiracist work and programs. In particular, Norman sees the terms "post-Jim Crow" and "post-Civil Rights" as especially vexing because they ignore the structural inequalities that continue to marginalize, appropriate, and exploit African American culture and experience. Initially, Norman's promotion of the neo-segregation narratives might seek to capitalize on the success of the neo-slave narrative. However, to Norman's credit, and ultimately to the book's, he knows what he's getting into and productively wrestles with the potentially troublesome terms (for example, "neo") that could sabotage his efforts in his introduction. In fact, throughout the first two chapters, Norman casts the neo-segregation narrative alongside the neo-slave narrative tradition and uses it to lay out the parameters for a definition of the neo-segregation narrative. Norman's first chapter uses Lorraine Hansberry's screenplay adaptation of her play A Raisin in the Sun as a brilliant starting point. Hansberry's unfilmed version of Raisin disrupts popular readings of the play as a universal family drama and produces a more explicitly critical viewing of integration than it appears in the play or the multiple film adaptations. In choosing Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Norman finds the perfect companion to Hansberry. The novel, like Norman's book, makes a compelling case against a mainstream narrative that promotes integration but retains its racial hierarchy, often to destructive effects on African Americans. Morrison's work is particularly useful because Beloved, like David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident, is [End Page 415] part of the neo-slave narrative tradition that Norman engages. In fact, Norman makes a daring play for Chaneysville as a neo-segregation narrative. More importantly, his claim stands as the guiding edict for the book as a whole: "The novel does not pose segregation as just an extension of slavery, as is common in neo-slave narratives, but rather poses slavery as another form of the longstanding and intricate maintenance of the color line in the legal sphere. Jim Crow remains the pivotal point of reference for all eras" (60). To drive home his point, Norman focuses on Alice Walker's The Color Purple and an obsession with the white gaze. In highlighting the womanist politics in Purple, Norman produces a community that centers on "a decidedly minoritarian perspective" (55). Nevertheless, Norman smartly avoids wedding himself to any strict theoretical or political ideology. Chapter 3 reveals his eclectic collection of works by performing a virtual resurrection of Wesley Brown's Darktown Strutters, a novel that Norman claims uses black-face as a radically political act. The pairing of Brown's novel with Spike Lee's film Bamboozled makes blackface minstrelsy a dramatic point of reference that signals virtually no change in the representations of African Americans in the mainstream imagination. Norman willingly engages volatile terrain and challenges us to consider the complex meanings that sit behind the donning of the blackface mask and, by extension, Jim Crow. In...

Maureen Moynagh, ed. African-Canadian Theatre

MAUREEN MOYNAGH, ed. African-Canadian Theatre. Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English. Vol. 2. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005. xxii + 130pp. SUSAN BENNETT, ed. Feminist Theatre and Performance. Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English. Vol. 4. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005. xvii + 161pp. Certainly one of the challenges of creating an ambitious and necessary series like Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English would be to determine the title of each volume and thus the ways in which readers are encouraged to engage with and draw connections to the material. Maureen Moynagh's and Susan Bennett's edited volumes provide important insights into three critical areas of inquiry in Canadian theatre and performance studies: AfricanCanadian theatre, feminist theatre, and feminist performance. When read together, Moynagh's and Bennett's volumes are also rife with intriguing points of intersection that problematize, in refreshing ways, the parameters set by their respective volume titles. AfricanCanadian Theatre and Feminist Theatre and Performance both include analyses of the implications for scholars, critics, and artists who, among other commonalities, work in historically under-examined fields of inquiry and stage subjects and subject matters that affirm and destabilize dominant notions of the Canadian nationstate. Informatively, both Moynagh's and Bennett's volumes also include an array of approaches for how scholars, critics, and artists subvert and engage these difficult realities. What emerges in these lucid volumes is a survey of complex theatrical practices, practitioners, subject matters, and, especially in the case of Bennett's volume, methodology. Organized chronologically, African-Canadian Theatre and Feminist Theatre and Performance suggest historical trajectories and gesture towards a canon. However, with varying degrees of emphasis Moynagh and Bennett resist categorizing their respective volumes as authoritative accounts, and instead both editors highlight the importance of continued research and writing to the expansion of their respective fields. In her introduction, Moynagh enters into a necessarily nuanced discussion about the complicated ways in which dominant discourse in Canada collapses the historical, political, and cultural contexts of blackness in Canada with those of blackness in the United States of America. Moynagh's introduction thoughtfully identifies intersections between race/ethnicity and nation as key sites of contemplation and contestation in the work of African-Canadian theatre artists, critics, and scholars. The analysis of these intersections is subsequently expounded upon in divergent ways in George Elliott Clarke's Must All Blackness Be American? Locating Canada in Borden's Tightrope Time or Nationalizing Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, Andrea Davis's Sex and the Nation: Performing Black Female Sexuality in Canadian Theatre, (1) Alan Filewod's 'From Twisted History': Reading Angelique, and Rinaldo Walcott's Dramatic Instabilities: Diasporic Aesthetics as a Question for and about Nation. The conundrum of black positionality in Canada vis a vis the influence of the United States of America also plays itself out in the volume's Suggested Further Reading list's subheading of Secondary Materials on Theatre and Drama, where numerous titles reference AfricanAmerican theatre. …

Representation of minorities in randomized lung cancer trials in the United States.

e16517 Background: The SEER data base shows a higher rate of lung cancer mortality for African Americans and a lower lung cancer mortality rate of Hispanics compared to Caucasians in the US. It is not clear if this is due to socioeconomic or biological factors. This study reviews the representation of Caucasians, African Americans (AA), Hispanics, and Asians in recent randomized trials published in the US. Methods: A systematic review was done of randomized trials in lung cancer published in the NEJM, JAMA, JCO. The percentage of patients of each race in the individual trials was listed. An average percentage with mean standard error for Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic and Asian race was obtained. The percentage for each group is compared to the racial distribution in the US Census data. Results: 30 randomized clinical trials were analyzed for racial distribution. A total of 227,411 patients were enrolled in the trials. Conclusions: African Americans and Hispanics have been significantly underrepresented in randomized trials published in the US. This affects the external validity of the trial results when generalizing the results to these minorities. Strategies to ensure accrual of people of all races are required to ameliorate the disparities clinical trial enrollment. [Table: see text]

Bullins and Me: A Remembrance of Past Times

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments Delivered at the Second Annual National Symposium on African-American Theater, North Carolina A&T, Greensboro, North Carolina, 1995.

Frequency and determinants of disagreement and error in gleason scores: A population‐based study of prostate cancer

To examine factors that affect accuracy and reliability of prostate cancer grade we compared Gleason scores documented in pathology reports and those assigned by urologic pathologists in a population-based study. A stratified random sample of 318 prostate cancer cases was selected to ensure representation of whites and African-Americans and to include facilities of various types. The slides borrowed from reporting facilities were scanned and the resulting digital images were re-reviewed by two urologic pathologists. If the two urologic pathologists disagreed, a third urologic pathologist was asked to help arrive at a final "gold standard" result. The agreements between reviewers and between the pathology reports and the "gold standard" were examined by calculating kappa statistics. The determinants of discordance in Gleason scores were evaluated using multivariate models with results expressed as odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI). The kappa values (95% CI) reflecting agreement between the pathology reports and the "gold standard," were 0.61 (95% CI: 0.54, 0.68) for biopsies, and 0.37 (0.23, 0.51) for prostatectomies. Sixty three percent of discordant biopsies and 72% of discordant prostatectomies showed only minimal differences. Using freestanding laboratories as reference, the likelihood of discordance between pathology reports and expert-assigned biopsy Gleason scores was particularly elevated for small community hospitals (OR = 2.98; 95% CI: 1.73, 5.14). The level of agreement between pathology reports and expert review depends on the type of diagnosing facility, but may also depend on the level of expertise and specialization of individual pathologists.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Teacher Education Reform

As for all teacher education programs, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been subject to a host of policy mandates for reform over the past three decades. As a group their approach to these changes has differed from those of majority institutions and their voice in the policy reform dialogue has been muted or absent. This article examines the consequences of HBCU exclusion and calls for more active participation from these institutions and a more receptive climate for their contributions. Keywords: teacher education reform, education policy, teacher education policy, historically Black colleges and universities Introduction Perhaps one of the most difficult, yet effective, approaches to accomplishing a goal is to recognize past success, acknowledge past failure, and proceed with the collective knowledge garnered from these experiences. For the past 30 years the African American community and its colleges and universities have focused attention on the survival, maintenance, and advancement of their teacher education programs and the representation of African Americans in the teaching force. The implicit goal has been to rescue, support, and leverage those PK- 12 students whose academic achievement is unrealized. Some of the initiatives that HBCU and other supportive organizations employed have met with success while others have been less effective. During this time of major change in the PK- 12 and postsecondary education sectors, it seems appropriate to examine the accomplishments and problems in some of these efforts to inform new and on-going efforts. In recent decades, a host of socioeconomic and political issues and factors have prompted unprecedented discussion and debate regarding the quality of teaching. All colleges and universities that train individuals to teach must make adjustments, but their approaches and strategies vary by mission, goals, size, affiliation and vicinity. Although HBCUs are a subset of all postsecondary institutions, their historical roots bind them in significant ways. Therefore, it is not surprising that one finds the HBCU approach distinctly different than that of majority institutions (Dilworth, 1984, 1986). This article focuses on the approach of HBCUs to teacher education reform over the past three decades and speculates how and why these institutions by and large are often marginalized or absent in the discussions and debates of the day. Reflecting on the key issues and trends of the past and the needs of all institutions, this author argues that the absence of an HBCU voice in the educational policy arena has disadvantaged a number of teacher quality initiatives and that there are compelling reasons for these institutions to continue to do what they do best in the preparation of educators, but to simultaneously consider new directions, strategies and missions. The author approached this work with the highest regard for all those who work to advance the quality of teaching for all children. While the observations and comments are derived largely from the literature they are influenced by this author's significant involvement in the teacher education reform initiatives of recent decades. This article begins with a discussion of the mission and goals of colleges and universities that train teachers for the nation's schools highlighting the various strategies that colleges of education, generally, and HBCUs, specifically, have developed to sustain their programs. The discussion moves to a review of select events that have influenced the expectations and nature of teacher education over the past three decades, noting HBCU accomplishments and missed opportunities. The author concludes with suggestions for leveraging the HBCU presence in today's teacher quality dialogue. MISSION AND PURPOSE Nearly 30 years ago, Garibaldi (1984) argued that HBCUs need to reinforce their traditional missions and goals in order to stay viable in the postsecondary sector. …

Assessing African American Students for Specific Learning Disabilities: The Promises and Perils of Response to Intervention

Response to Intervention (RtI) consists of multi-tiered instructional delivery systems in which educators provide research-based interventions to students that increase in intensity depending on students' instructional response. RtI is currently being implemented in schools across the United States. RtI's shift away from standardized testing offers new opportunities to consider the ways in which African American students are serviced within the general education setting, the assessment methods deemed appropriate when considering African American students for special education under the Specific Learning Disability category, and how multi-tiered intervention can address the overrepresentation of African American students in special education. This article provides an overview of a three-tiered RtI model, explores the promises and challenges of using RtI with African American students, and delineates a research and direct service delivery agenda to facilitate the development of RtI models that consider the educational needs of African American students.Keywords: African American studies, early childhood/elementary, learning and academic achievement, special education and disabilityMethods used to assess African American students, particularly in relation to special education, have generated controversy among educators, parents, and policymakers for decades (Graves & Mitchell, 201 1; Valencia & Suzuki, 2001). Such controversy stems, in part, from perceptions that standardized measures of intelligence, which are often used to help determine students' eligibility for special education services, are biased toward African Americans, and the use of these measures contributes to the disproportionate representation (i.e., over or underrepresentation of specific groups in disability categories) of African Americans in special education (Keams, Ford, & Linney, 2005; Larry P. v. Riles, 1979; Pitre, 2009; Powers, Hagans-Murillo, & Restori, 2004). The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEIA, 2004) along with No Child Left Behind's (NCLB, 2001) emphasis on accountability through mandated monitoring of academic outcomes for the most vulnerable student populations, including students with disabilities, has brought Response to Intervention (Rtl) to the forefront of policy and practice (Meyers, Meyers, Graybill, Proctor, & Huddleston, 2012). Rtl models consist of multi-tiered instructional delivery systems in which educators provide, and assess frequently the impact of, research-based interventions to students that increase in intensity depending on students' instructional response. IDEIA 2004 encourages states and local educational agencies to use processes, similar to Rtl, that provide instructionally relevant assessment data to identify a specific learning disability (SLD). Therefore, Rtl can serve as an alternative to the traditional assessment method (i.e., administration of standardized intelligence and achievement tests) used to identify students for special education under the category of SLD (Hartlep & Ellis, 2012; IDEIA, 2004). Although Rtl is now one option for assessing African American students for SLD, in order to implement Rtl in a culturally responsive manner, educators, parents, policymakers, and researchers must carefully and seriously consider both the benefits and challenges of Rtl for African American students.In this article, the authors explore the promises and perils of using a three-tiered Rtl model with African American students. The discussion is framed around SLD assessment and classification decision-making because IDEIA 2004 endorses Rtl for SLD identification only, and almost half of African American students identified for special education are serviced under the SLD category (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, Office of Special Education Programs, 2011). To provide context as well as a rationale for Rtl, a brief discussion is presented regarding intelligence testing in relation to African American students and the special education identification and placement process. …

Narrating Photography in The Sweet Flypaper of Life

Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955) is result of a collaborative effort between photographer Roy DeCarava and writer Langston Hughes. Their unique fusion of and images provides an opportunity to examine how two media can be brought together to form composite modes of expression. DeCarava and Hughes's reveals their deft command of both African American and Western cultural practices, which they employ to forward their vision of black Americans as full participants in American life and culture. My analysis of Sweet Flypaper of Life explores intersection of visual and verbal in work. two media are most fully appreciated through their relation to one another, as they are shown to interact in a constant flux of boundary crossings, resulting in a dynamic interconnectivity. In addition, two media are linked and interrelated by a passion for subversion: images created by DeCarava deviate from and subvert standard portrayals of black Americans in mainstream media, while text created by Hughes resorts to trickster tactics, articulating a double-edged message of compliance and subversion. Sweet Flypaper of Life has received little critical attention to date. None of approaches put forth has sought to read text comprehensively as an instance of boundary crossings between two media, yet they touch on complexity of image-text and provide a springboard for my investigations. Thadious M. Davis suggests, The dual communicative nature of enterprise aims at both a verbally oriented access and a visually oriented one. Yet, she keeps verbal and visual separate, positing that collaborative effort gives two contextual realities: that of the individual behind camera and individual behind word (152). Maren Stange emphasizes innovative photographic approach of DeCarava, delineating his struggle for artistic autonomy. She generally regards Hughes's verbal intervention with DeCarava's photos as reductive, an injustice to fullness of work (77). Yet in her closing argument, Stange examines a few one-word titles provided by DeCarava to his photographs, juxtaposing them with Hughes's verbal references, which leads her to suggest that issue of words can be reframed ... to enable a wider range of possibility: rather than only marking weakness and inadequacy, intertextual language may act as well to legitimate, empower, and liberate (85). Sara Blair's discussion of book situates it within shifting traditions of documentary reportage in Harlem. She underscores both Hughes's belief in power of image ... to render visible and to dignify its subjects (53) and DeCarava's desire to transform expressive capacities of medium (55). Blair implies that their attempts to forge new modes of expression were successfully explored in their unique collaborative effort, yet she does not fully explore how this occurs. My approach goes further, reading image and text as instances of cross-fertilization. My discussion originates in unconventional tale of production and publication of this book. DeCarava's photographs were rejected by publishing houses until Hughes created a verbal text to go along with them. This paper examines reasons behind rejection of DeCarava's photographs and considers function of text and how it mediated images to enable their publication. First, I discuss how DeCarava's photographs differ from other photographs of black Americans. In order to understand uniqueness of his and unwillingness to publish it, I survey standard representations of African Americans in media, underscoring DeCarava's distinct point of view. text written by Hughes pitches to two disparate audiences and lends itself to different readings. Unlike Arnold Rampersad, who feels text match[es] images almost perfectly (244), I suggest that it adopts a trickster strategy, which not only appealed to white publishers and their readership, but also spoke to African American readers through a complex network of signifying, conveying meanings that might have escaped many non-African American readers. …

Inscriptions on the African Body: Alice Walker’s 'Possessing the Secret of Joy'

The final novel of Alice Walker’s African trilogy, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), stands out within Walker’s writing as the literary text that comes closest to political activism. This paper aims at analyzing the inscription of/on the African woman’s body in Possessing the Secret of Joy by close reading the major episodes in the novel related to the experience of female circumcision in Africa and the search for psychological healing in Europe and the United States. The analysis suggests that Alice Walker constructs two archetypes of female complicity with patriarchy, “the betraying mother” and “the betrayed daughter”, and has them destroy themselves and each other because of their belief in, and questioning of, ritual female circumcision. The paper highlights that the novel’s campaign against this problematic aspect of traditional African culture represents a serious literary and political challenge, contributing to a demystification of romanticized African-American representations of Africa.

The Trinity River Plays (review)

Reviewed by: The Trinity River Plays Colleen Daniher The Trinity River Plays. By Regina Taylor. Directed by Ethan McSweeny. Dallas Theater Center and Goodman Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Chicago. 16 January 2011. The search for rootedness links the three plays that comprise Regina Taylor's The Trinity River Plays: Jarfly, Rain, and Ghoststory. Centered on the psychic and physical separation from and eventual return of Iris Spears to her family, Taylor's trilogy uses roots as a central metaphor to understand the cyclical yet sustaining role that family plays in the life of an individual. At a combined running time of over three hours, Taylor's digging spreads itself wide, but perhaps not deep enough. And yet, in its refusal to conceptualize "roots" beyond the myopic world of the Spears family unit, the trilogy speaks to a political present that is increasingly unwilling to address race as a framework that continues to structure everyday life, including the everyday experience of family relations. Set in the declining years of the civil rights and Black Power movements and in the long shadow of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's pathologizing condemnation of the black family in 1965, the Click for larger view View full resolution Karen Aldridge (Iris) in The Trinity River Plays. (Photo: Brandon Thibodeaux.) [End Page 642] Click for larger view View full resolution Karen Aldridge (Iris), Jacqueline Williams (Daisy), Jefferson A. Russell (Ray Earl), and Christiana Clark (Jasmine) in The Trinity River Plays. (Photo: Brandon Thibodeaux.) Goodman production staged a strange elision of race politics, even as it took the black matriarchal family as its central focus. What resulted was a production caught between performing a multigenerational story of black women's struggle and continued survival and insisting that this story transcend race. As staged by director Ethan McSweeny, this latest offering from Taylor, one of the nation's leading African American playwrights and performers, thus provoked critical reflection on the influence of colorblind thinking on contemporary African American theatre. The three plays follow Iris (Karen Aldridge) for seventeen years, from the morning of her seventeenth birthday in 1978 (Jarfly) to her return visit home to Oak Cliff, Dallas in 1995 (Rain). Upon the discovery of her mother Rose's diagnosis of terminal ovarian cancer, Iris's visit turns into an extended stay that carries over into the aftermath of her mother's passing (Ghoststory). Two major occurrences punctuate the extended narrative as it unfolds over the three plays: the rape of Iris by her uncle Ray Earl on her seventeenth birthday in Jarfly, and the aforementioned diagnosis of Iris's mother with advanced-stage ovarian cancer seventeen years later in Rain. The last play in the trilogy, Ghoststory, sees Iris reconcile with her ex-husband Frank, as well as come to terms with her mother's death with the help of her Aunt Daisy and cousin Jasmine. The seventeen-year chronology of the plays reflects the seventeen-year lifespan of the cicada, or jarfly, whose symbolic death and rebirth is mapped onto the "bug-eyed" Iris. Guided by Taylor's script, the Goodman production exhibited the realist aesthetics of the self-contained domestic drama; the set design by Todd Rosenthal was meticulously detailed, from the downstage garden in which Iris and Rose actually dig up soil, to the unanswered whistling kettle that signaled the decline of Iris's mother. This realism highlighted the almost tyrannical ordinariness with which Taylor and McSweeny imbued the Spears family. As necessitated by the physical environment, Aunt Daisy (Jacqueline Williams) was forever cooking or washing in the kitchen, while Rose (Penny Johnson Jerald) seemed to spend her days playing the piano and gardening. While the sustained focus on domestic rituals effectively established the Spears family as one "like any other," the relentlessness of the generic quotidian threatened to overshadow what was most compelling about the Goodman production—namely, the particular ways in which race informed the Spears family's relations and traumas. Indeed, the most moving moments of the evening occurred when the production engaged the cultural [End Page 643] specificity of its themes, as, for example, when the gospel rounds punctuating the scenic transitions sounded the bond among Iris, her mother, her cousin, and...

Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era (review)

Reviewed by: Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era Jeff Allred Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff. Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009. 328 pp. $35.00. Lauren Sklaroff ’s book examines a period in African American cultural history that often falls between the stools of the 1920s New Negro movement and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Her study of struggles over the cultural representation of African Americans in the New Deal era differs markedly from much recent work in African American studies (and ethnic studies more broadly): one searches in vain for accounts of radical experiments in aesthetic form, the articulation of heretofore silenced voices from the militant margins, the refunctioning of mainstream cultural forms for counterhegemonic goals, and the like. Instead, one finds the more sober yet strikingly fresh story of how the middling strata of cultural workers—primarily bureaucrats serving New Deal cultural programs, but also advocacy groups like the NAACP, performers working in the cultural industries, etc.— struggled to liberalize representations of African Americans within the cultural mainstream. Stories about cultural middle ranks tend to lack the punch of accounts of avant-gardes and movements from the margins, and Sklaroff ’s book does become somewhat repetitive in its account of the various straddles and compromises one associates with liberal politics. But the breadth of her account, spanning a wide range of genres, media, and cultural agents, as well as the intensity with which she analyzes the internal tensions within each site, lend the book an unexpected dynamism. Sklaroff ’s book argues that the cultural programs of the New Deal—including the familiar federal projects for theater, art, music, and writing, but also, especially during war mobilization, offices dedicated to film and radio—promoted progressive representations of African Americans. White liberals and leftists within the New Deal cultural apparatus collaborated with African American leaders, bureaucrats, and artists in a broad-based effort to dispel minstrel-tinged performance traditions and usher in new, more progressive roles for black performers. In doing so, Sklaroff emphasizes, they “worked within the tightest of spaces,” hemmed in by inadequate budgets, racist resistance at the state level, the enforced “unity” of war mobilization, and the rising tide of intolerance of “un-American activities” that lead to HUAC [End Page 544] and McCarthyism (2). The book thus offers an ironic narrative in which grand plans for new cultural forms, forums, and styles are diverted, diminished, and frustrated at many points while nonetheless improving the cultural climate for African Americans in heretofore underappreciated ways. Sklaroff ’s methodological focus throughout is not on cultural products but on processes: rather than the more traditional ideological reading of texts, she offers a peek behind the curtain covering the messy collaborations that produce culture. In this way her work diverges from past studies of similar terrain—Nicholas Natanson’s The Black Image in the New Deal (1992), for example—that emphasize the inadequate or falsifying white-authored representations of African Americans in the period. Rather, she reveals the agency (albeit highly constrained) of African Americans as filterers, shapers, and co-producers of the images of blackness consumed by the masses. Her well-chosen case studies recall the wide net cast by the New Deal’s antiracist efforts: on the stage (the Theater Project’s “swingcopated” take on Gilbert and Sullivan, Swing Mikado); in the arena (Joe Louis’s boxing demonstrations for fellow GIs); on the airwaves (the African American variety show Jubilee); and on the screen (the Bureau of Motion Pictures’ promotion of antiracist imagery in Hollywood films). In each case, she underscores the modest victories notched by cultural workers amid political pressure from conservative legislators, hostile elements within the American public, and unimaginative government officials. Sklaroff ’s account of the African American poet and critic Sterling Brown’s role in the production of the Federal Writers’ Project’s American Guide vividly illustrates the payoff of her approach. Brown was appointed head of Negro Affairs within the FWP in 1936, the highest post held by an African American within the entire Works Progress...

Slavery, the Civil War Era, and African American Representation in U.S. History: An Analysis of Four States' Academic Standards

This study is a mixed-methods text analysis of African American representation within K-12 U.S. History content standards treating the revolutionary era, the early U.S. republic, the Civil War era, and Reconstruction. The states included in the analysis are Michigan, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Virginia. The analysis finds that the reviewed standards devote considerable space to African Americans during the formation and development of the United States, but the nature of this inclusion is typically superficial and tends to trivialize the systemic institutional contexts of slavery and racial hierarchy. The standards also typically do not engage students in cognitively demanding historical thinking processes and avoid engaging students in critical analysis of historical racial tensions in order to promote a consensus narrative of social cohesion and national development. While the standards cannot be faulted on the grounds of numeric inclusion of African American names and events, they do not substantively promote critical thinking about the construction of racialized identities and their role in the political, economic, social, and cultural contexts of U.S. history.

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.

Two Professors Critique the Representations of Africans and African Americans in Picture Books

The authors examined the sociocultural representations of black children in picture books. Three critical perspectives were used to examine 23 picture books containing black characters. Questions used in this critical analysis were derived from sociocultural implications of implicit messages within texts, critical literacy, and cultural and social reader response theories. Our aim was to determine what stories are being told and how two adults, one black and one white, interpret these stories. We also considered the importance of analyzing these picture books when using them in elementary classrooms. We found that our different cultural and racial backgrounds influenced our response to a number of the books, clearly pointing to the advantage of discussing children's books with colleagues of different races.

Black Nativity as Valence of Cultural Survival

Black Nativity as Valence of Cultural Survival Macelle Mahala (bio) When Black Nativity premiered in New York City in December 1961, the usage of the term "black" was still considered a contentious and political act. New York Times columnist Sam Zolotow suggested that several cast members found the title "in bad taste," and the lead actress quit the production after producers discarded the more folksy title Wasn't It a Mighty Day? in favor of the more militant Black Nativity (49). Traditionally performed as a gospel musical, Langston Hughes's "song play" exists at the intersection of religion, theatre, politics, and cultural practice. Black Nativity re-imagines both the narrative and performance of Christ's birth in a way that creates an African American cultural space in a holiday performance season otherwise dominated by European works such as Dickens's A Christmas Carol, Handel's Messiah, and Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, not to mention the more plebian performances of innumerable white shopping-mall Santa Clauses. Claiming this cultural space and, at the same time, labeling it "black" is just one example of what the production of Black Nativity accomplishes in terms of the enactment of a specifically African American theatrical practice within the public sphere. Since its original production, Black Nativity has become a holiday staple for many African American theatre companies and other companies that seek to attract African American audiences. In 2007, American Theatre magazine featured four companies that produced versions of the play as evidence of the continued national appeal of this now-classic work. The article recognized Penumbra Theatre Company's production in St. Paul; Lorraine Hansberry Theatre's production in San Francisco; Congo Square Theatre Company's production in Chicago; and The Classical Theatre of Harlem's Broadway production in New York (14). Penumbra's production of the play contributes to African American cultural practice on three key fronts. First, the play is a religious celebration that equates the Nativity with various aspects of African American identity, such as the cultural survival of African Americans up from and out of slavery. The staging of these narratives ritually enact the collective memory of a common history in service of the survival and maintenance of a culturally specific group identity. Second, the production helps to maintain the theatre's relationship to the local community as the production where local artists, youth, and clergy are most broadly represented. And last, Penumbra's production of Black Nativity supports the vitality and survival of the theatre as a viable cultural institution and the livelihood of the artists who work within it. As one of the strongest selling show in the theatre's season each year, the company counts on it to bring in a certain amount of earned income. In the following pages, I examine how each of these different valences of cultural survival inform and interpenetrate one another. Black Nativity as Narrative of Cultural Survival Penumbra began producing Black Nativity in 1987 and has performed this work every year since, with the exception of the 2003–04 season (Penumbra Theatre Company 2009b). As a consequence of repeated annual productions and in order to differentiate Penumbra's more recent versions of the play from past productions and other companies' interpretations, the theatre occasionally varies the framing device of the play. In these cases, Hughes's original minimalist script operates more as inspiration than directive. Looking comparatively at the narrative frames featured [End Page 11] in Penumbra's various manifestations of Black Nativity reveals how each production concept stages African American cultural survival differently by emphasizing diverse aspects of black identity, history, and spirituality. Because black identity changes and is both temporally and geographically constructed and experienced, the narratives that support the expression and interpretation of black identity must also necessarily change from one historical moment to the next. Performance studies scholar E. Patrick Johnson writes that "[f]ar from undergirding an essentialist purview of blackness, performance, as a mode of representation, emphasizes the ways in which cultures struggle to define who they are and who they want to be" (606). Penumbra's evolving interpretation of Black Nativity is involved in precisely this ongoing process of continuous self-definition. Treating the Nativity...

To Each Body a Spirit: Jewett and African Americans

Many contemporary scholars accept that, until near the end of her career, Sarah Orne Jewett participated in the American construction of the superiority of whiteness by affirming almost universal nineteenth-century essentialist beliefs about racial hierarchy. This essay tests that interpretation by examining her fictional representations of African Americans.

Oreo, Topdeck and Eminem

A B S T R A C T • The slang terms Oreo (someone who looks black but acts white) and Topdeck (someone who looks white but acts black) draw on the language of popular culture to signify racial hybridity, superseding slurs such as ‘black honkie’ and ‘wigger’. Using the terms Oreo and Topdeck to frame the analysis, this article investigates how identity politics finds expression in language, youth media and popular culture. It questions how global media flows affect conceptions of black masculinity by contrasting cinematic representations of African-Americans and black Africans in Shaft and the South African film Hijack Stories, and by examining class, ethnicity and rap culture in 8 Mile. I argue that, as South African media culture reflexively reworks messages about black identities, it produces terminology and texts that neither simply reinforce nor resist racial stereotypes, but legitimate the diversification of blackness by making cultural transition and difference visible. •

Enrollment of women and minorities in NINDS trials

To determine policy-associated changes over time in 1) the enrollment of women and minorities in National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)-funded clinical trials and 2) the trial publication reporting of race/ethnicity and gender. All NINDS-funded phase III trials published between 1985 and 2008 were identified. Percent of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and women enrolled in the trials was calculated for those trials with available data. Z tests were used to compare reporting and enrollment data from before (period 1) and after (period 2) 1995 when NIH enacted their policies regarding race, ethnicity, and gender. Percent of main trial publications reporting enrollment of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and women was also calculated. Of the 56 trials identified, 100%, 48%, and 25% reported enrollment by gender, race, and ethnicity. Women constituted 42.1% of the trial population. Enrollment of women increased over time (36.9% period 1; 49.0% period 2, p < 0.001). African Americans constituted 19.8% of the enrollees in trials with available data and enrollment increased over time (11.6% period 1; 30.7% period 2, p < 0.001). Hispanic Americans constituted 5.8% of subjects in trials with available data and enrollment decreased over time (7.4% period 1; 5.0% period 2, p < 0.001). Improvements in reporting of race/ethnicity in publications and enrollment of Hispanics in NINDS trials are needed. While African American representation is above population levels, Hispanic Americans are underrepresented in NINDS trials and representation is declining despite Hispanics' increasing representation in the US population.

““Draggin' the Chain””: Linking Civil Rights and African American Representation in &lt;em&gt;The Defiant Ones&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;In the Heat of the Night&lt;/em&gt;

Discourse surrounding racial representation, particularly filmic representations of African Americans, has been overwhelmingly couched in terms of stereotype. For this reason, scholars have largely conceptualized African American representation as an example of ahistorical and detrimental continuity. The central black character in The Defiant Ones , Cullen, tells fellow white prison escapee Jackson when he trips that he is “draggin’ the chain” to their freedom, but to film and history scholars, the representation of African Americans is itself “draggin’ the chain,” presenting blacks only as signifiers whose meaning is largely homogenous and whose capacity to reflect the realities of black experiences is nonexistent. This paper aims to engage and explore this discourse of stereotype and the representation of race through a case study of two civil rights–era films starring Sidney Poitier: The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958) and In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967). In undertaking a comparative analysis of these two films it will be argued that these racialized representations evolved over time in a historically contingent manner that reflects directly upon, and is informed by, the changing nature of the civil rights movement. When stereotypes are utilized they are not necessarily ahistorical or of homogenized meaning; rather, a complex interplay of processes of subversion and containment of white patriarchal (stereotypical) values is presented that sits distinctly at odds with this notion. It is in examining this interplay, the process through which stereotype is used and given meaning, that we can begin to understand and deconstruct representations and construct new ones of greater meaning.

Urban Bush Women: twenty years of African American dance theater, community engagement, and working it out

Urban Bush Women: twenty years of African American dance theater, community engagement, and working it out