Representation Of African Americans Research Articles

Harvey Young, ed. The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, xix + 291 pp., $ 90.00 (hardback), $ 29.99 (paperback).

Article Harvey Young, ed. The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, xix + 291 pp., $ 90.00 (hardback), $ 29.99 (paperback). was published on December 1, 2014 in the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (volume 2, issue 2).

The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage by Soyica Diggs Colbert (review)

The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage by Soyica Diggs Colbert (review)

The Impresarios of Beale Street: African American and Italian American Theatre Managers in Memphis, 1900–1915

Music scholars Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff have researched what they call “a deep African American vaudeville theater tradition” in Memphis during the first decade of the twentieth century that helped lead the way to the commercialization of the blues. Their body of work provides a very useful and fascinating historical overview of the black vaudeville scene of the time on the national level. This article seeks to broaden that overview, using a much more focused, microhistorical perspective on the history of theatre management on one particular street in one particular, midsized southern city. It argues that in Memphis, the story of African American and Italian American theatre managers shows that realities were often much more complex than histories that portray a rigid and heavily drawn color line have suggested.

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 by Julia H. Lee (review)

Reviewed by: Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 by Julia H. Lee Caroline H. Yang (bio) Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937, by Julia H. Lee. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 228 pp. $23.00 paper. ISBN: 9780814752562. That 1896 is a defining year in the history of segregation and unequal citizenship in the United States is obviously common knowledge in critical race studies. What Julia Lee teaches us about the moment in Interracial Encounters is probably not: that the Chinese figured significantly in Plessy v. Ferguson as a crucial component in both the majority and dissenting opinions on whether or not segregation based on race—specifically, blackness—was constitutional. According to Lee, the discourse of what it meant to be Chinese was influential to the definition of what it [End Page 340] meant to be black, as both opinions adjudicated the placement of black bodies on a black–white racial binary through the figure of the Chinese. Naming the Plessy case as “the document that most dramatically reveals the ways that the figure of the Negro and the Asiatic were intertwined in this period” (42), Lee suggests in the rest of her book that 1896 was significant in not only instituting segregation but also inaugurating a particular brand of misreading. And this common misreading about the Plessy case has glossed over and continues to make invisible what she calls “encounters” between African Americans and Asians during this time, encounters wrought by the complexities of the historical moment following black emancipation and enfranchisement, as well as labor migrations from Asia. Interracial Encounters demonstrates that not accounting for the significance of Chineseness in how blackness was defined in the Plessy case had a critical role in how race was understood in the United States for much of the twentieth century. In this way, Lee’s close reading of the Plessy case speaks to her book’s methodological interventions. It shows the importance of literary studies in not just historical analyses of texts that have been read heretofore as concerning only blacks and whites but also Afro-Asian critique. As part of a vibrant and rising field of study that teases out Afro-Asian connections and disconnections, Lee’s book makes clear why many of its proponents are Asian Americanists whose approach to critical race studies is shaped by their understanding of the vicissitudes and contradictions of the Asian racial form in the United States. Quite simply, the reading practice developed in Lee’s book is original and insightful, and it brings to light figures and forms in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literatures that have often been rendered as insignificant nonpresence unrelated to other racialized figures. With a deep interest in writing a “historicizing project” (9), Lee points to a wide-ranging archive of minstrel show sheet music, political cartoons, and films, as well as literature, to explain that African Americans and Asians were the most rampantly compared minority groups in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She also writes that the process of racializing the two groups was mutually constitutive and essential in the creation of the “fantasy of modern American identity” (21). Despite this, Lee argues that if and when they are remembered together in this period, they are seen as either antagonistic opposites or natural allies bonded together in solidarity based on shared experience of discrimination, violence, and exclusion. Against this way of thinking, Lee argues that we need to study not just the hegemonic ways in which blackness and Asianness became meaningful but also the ways in which African American and Asian American literatures contributed to and challenged the process of racial meaning making. [End Page 341] As such, save for one substantive chapter that explores the representations of African Americans and Asians in dominant popular culture from the Reconstruction period to the early twentieth century, all of the book’s chapters call attention to the formal strategies of literary texts by wide-ranging authors of color such as Charles Chesnutt, Wu Tingfang, Nella Larsen, Edith Eaton, Winnifred Eaton, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Younghill Kang. Lee’s focus on...

The Disproportionate Representation of African Americans in Programs for Students With Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

African American students are disproportionally represented in educational programs for students meeting eligibility criteria for emotional disturbance. Although special education services are designed to improve student outcomes, the provision of services may result in social stigma, removal from the general education setting, and inadequate learning opportunities. This article reports on contextual factors that may contribute to the overrepresentation of African American students. Recommendations for educational practice are also discussed. These include using an ecological framework for evaluating student behavior, strength-based methodologies, and culturally responsive teaching methods.

Making a promised land: Harlem in twentieth-century photography and film

Making a Promised Land examines the interconnected histories of African American representation, urban life, and citizenship as documented in still and moving images of Harlem over the last century. Paula J. Massood analyzes how photography and film have been used over time to make African American culture visible to itself and to a wider audience and charts the ways in which the Mecca of the New Negro became a battleground in the struggle to define American politics, aesthetics, and citizenship. Visual media were first used as tools for uplift and education. With Harlem's downturn in fortunes through the 1930s, narratives of black urban criminality became common in sociological tracts, photojournalism, and film. These narratives were particularly embodied in the gangster film, which was adapted to include stories of achievement, economic success, and, later in the century, a nostalgic return to the past. Among the films discussed are Fights of Nations (1907), Dark Manhattan (1937), The Cool World (1963), Black Caesar (1974), Malcolm X (1992), and American Gangster (2007). Massood asserts that the history of photography and film in Harlem provides the keys to understanding the neighborhood's symbolic resonance in African American and American life, especially in light of recent urban redevelopment that has redefined many of its physical and demographic contours.

African American Legislators and Substantive Representation in Louisiana

African American Legislators and Substantive Representation in Louisiana

‘Cinematographic Calamity’ or ‘Soul-Stirring Appeal to Every Briton’: Birth of a Nation in England and South Africa, 1915–1931

D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) remains one of the most controversial films ever made, widely condemned for its offensive and racist representations of African Americans in its fictional recreation of the American Civil War and its aftermath. Whilst the reception of the film in the United States has been well documented, far less attention has been paid to the wider impact of the film outside the USA. I investigate the impact of the film in the UK and the issues this raised, shedding light on the protests that were made by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society, by Sol T. Plaatje (the well-known black South African writer and political leader who was in London at the time), and by several other concerned individuals. These protests brought the film to the attention of the British Colonial Office and the South African High Commissioner in London, W.P. Schreiner. I explore the reaction of the Colonial Office to the film, and the reasons for its decision not to recommend a blanket ban on showing the film in the colonies. W.P. Schreiner, however, took a different view, and as a result of the steps he took the film was not shown in South Africa until 1931. I then consider the reception of the film when it was eventually shown in South Africa, paying attention to the views expressed by Sol Plaatje and in the press more generally. I conclude with an assessment of the impact the film may have had on Plaatje's engagement with the medium of film, evidenced particularly in his ‘travelling bioscope’ in the 1920s and early 1930s.

The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre ed. by Harvey Young (review)

The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre ed. by Harvey Young (review)

Book Review: Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement, by Aniko Bodroghkozy

Equal Time: Television and the Rights Movement. Aniko Bodroghkozy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 280 pp. $50 hbk.Part of The History of Communication series, Equal Time: Television and the Rights Movement combines analysis of news coverage with a study of three prime-time programs to address representations of African Americans on network television during a critical era in American history. In the introduction, Aniko Bodroghkozy underscores the importance of her study by citing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: We are here to say to the white men that we no longer will let them use clubs on us in the dark corners. We're going to make them do in the glaring light of television.Edited by Robert W. McChesney and John C. Nerone, the series includes books written or compiled by well-known communication and media scholars, including Gerald J. Baldasty, Bonnie Brennen, John M. Coward, Clifford G. Christians, Theodore L. Glasser, Hanno Hardt, Denis McQuail, Peter Simonson, Linda Steiner, Inger Stole, and Doug Underwood. Although Equal Time occasionally drifts into com- mentary, effectively a compelling era and complements other studies pub- lished in the landmark University of Illinois Press series.Divided into two sections, Network News in the Rights Era and Civil Rights in Prime-Time Entertainment, Equal Time is the result of encyclopedia entries and essays Bodroghkozy published in collections such as African American Popular Culture and Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, and in journals such as Screen and Television and New Media. As she notes in the acknowledgments, the book had a rather long gestation, beginning during her graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1990s and culminating in 2012.An associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, Bodroghkozy focuses on two topics: First, Equal Time explores the crucial role American network television played during the civil rights revolution in reconfiguring a new 'common sense' about race relations and complicate[s] the picture of the relationship among the civil rights movement, television, audiences, and partisans on either side of the black empowerment struggle. Second, she discusses three prime-time television pro- grams that allow black actors to take center stage. Until the mid-1960s, Bodroghkozy writes, it was rare for viewers to see blacks in entertainment programming. This set up a bizarre disjunction between news which focused increasing atten- tion on the Southern black struggle, and fictional shows that presented mostly all- white worlds.Reasons for selecting East Side/West Side, Julia, and Good Times instead of other texts are not clear, especially since other prime-time programming might be more celebrated by the public and/or more critically acclaimed. One explanation might be the availability of viewer responses in the archives and libraries where Bodroghkozy conducted her research. Most television viewers did not record their responses to what they were viewing and thus leave a documentary record for historians. But some did, Bodroghkozy writes. And some of those responses, typically letters written to program producers or networks, have ended up in the collected papers of those pro- ducers . . . [or] published in newspapers.Bodroghkozy is especially effective when she discusses specific topics, including the Little Rock Nine, the contributions of the newsmagazine See It Now, heroic challenges to Mississippi voting practices, James Meredith and Ole Miss, and I Have a Dream. She is persuasive when she holds television networks accountable for their pursuit of the least objectionable programming, explaining how ideologically dan- gerous is for broadcasters to try to offend as few viewers as possible in order to maximize audience share. Additionally, she demonstrates formidable critical sensi- bility when she explains, for example, how photojournalism is often more effective than television images that can be chaotic, rapid paced, often difficult to see-and how the opposite can also be true. …

The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage by Soyica Diggs Colbert (review)

The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage by Soyica Diggs Colbert (review)

The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage. By Soyica Diggs Colbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; pp. xiii + 329, 11 illustrations. $99 cloth, $79 e-book.

The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage. By Soyica Diggs Colbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; pp. xiii + 329, 11 illustrations. $99 cloth, $79 e-book.

Minority Chairs and Congressional Attention to Minority Issues: The Effect of Descriptive Representation in Positions of Institutional Power

ObjectivesMarginalization of minority issues from the congressional agenda is widely recognized as a hurdle to the functional representation of African Americans and Latinos. This article examines whether the descriptive representation of minorities in positions of influence helps to address this marginalization.MethodsLogistic regression analysis of over 27,000 hearings held in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1979 and 2008 examines whether congressional hearings addressing minority interest issues were more likely to occur under Latino and African‐American committee and subcommittee chairs.ResultsFindings reveal hearings chaired by Latinos and African Americans were more likely to address civil rights, social welfare, and housing issues.ConclusionThese findings confirm that descriptive representation in positions with influence over committee agendas facilitates institutional attention to minority issues, and suggests that the acquisition of institutional power by black and Latino representatives is critical to the functional representation of minority interests.

Primitivist Modernism and imperialist colonialism: the view of African Americans in José Moreno Villa's Pruebas de Nueva York and Julio Camba's La ciudad automática

In the first decades of the twentieth century, New York City captured the attention of numerous Spanish writers who visited the city and wrote of their experience in the form of travelogues. In this article, I will discuss two of these texts: Pruebas de Nueva York (1927) by José Moreno Villa and La ciudad automática (1932) by Julio Camba. In particular, I will focus on the representation of African Americans carried out by these two writers. Whereas Black art was regarded as an essential source of inspiration for Modernism, the view of Black individuals as “subaltern others” was rarely challenged; on the contrary, it was often reinforced by the artistic appropriation of African art by the European avant-garde. The view of Blacks as an inferior “race” is one of a series of pervasive discourses of “Otherness” deeply ingrained in Western modernity, which served as justification for imperial colonisation and domination, to the extent that “racial” difference and inequality – especially in the case of Black people – was considered as a taken for granted truth which was barely questioned, if at all. This article will show the influence of these two coordinates of Western modernity – Primitivist Modernism and imperialist colonialism – in both travelogues, which in spite of their different approach to the situation of African Americans in New York, share a number of similarities that can also be found in other coetaneous literary works. Rather than qualifying these attitudes as merely racist – although these texts certainly contain racist and colonialist overtones – the article will highlight the strength of discourses of “Otherness” in Western though, which resist being challenged even when Black art is incorporated to the artistic vocabulary of Modernism.

More than a "Passing" Sophistication: Dress, Film Regulation, and the Color Line in 1930s American Films

When we think of African American representations of 1930s Hollywood, we likely first envision the maid or butler - Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939) or Gertrude Howard as Beulah Ihorndyke in I'm No Angel (1933). These films arguably normalize black servitude as an inevitable part of an intractable and glamorous class system. Ramona Curry argues that Mae West's maids augment West's featured - and fetishized - status, enhancing the star's aura of power and sexual allure through their roles as servants and through their vividly contrasting visual presence, their dark skin, hair and costumes, setting off West's shimmering bleached-blonde whiteness (1996, 87). l However, the composite image I describe above rests on a vague impression that black characters were uniformly servants and that onscreen servants always appeared in uniform. Take, as a counterexample, Morning Glory (1933), where maid Emma (Sana Rayya) seems to step out of the margins when she changes from her uniform into her fashionable leisure clothes. What is surprising is that despite Emma's narrative insignificance, the transition is emphasized by lighting and framing - and an audacious saunter (fig. l). Her placement at the center of the frame, between the arguing white protagonists, interrupts narrative attention, raising perhaps the ultimate cinematic question: who is she? The uniform, black and white and designedly nondescript, helps to set up the subsequent dramatic reveal of her flattering furs and hat, heightening the suddenness of the camera's central attention to her and highlighting the inability of her uniform to contain or represent its wearer.While the servant image was clearly the dominant black Hollywood representation during this era, it is also true that sometimes dress communicated a subtle roundness to black women's characters and an interracial parity at a moment when censorship threatened overt statements of racial equality and images of white and black intimacy.The Motion Picture Producer and Distributors of America's Production Code of 1930 (commonly known as the Hays Code) famously repressed onscreen sexuality2 But race was a part of a more daring, turmoil-ridden early Depression-era pre-Code cinema, which registered the desperate revolt of fallen women and forgotten men against a failing social system (Doherty 1999, 256). Accordingly, race also became a regulatory concern, as seen in the Code clause barring miscegenation and in the industry policy against racially motivated lynching (Courtney 2005; Wood 2009, 229). Costume, however, was a realm generally outside of censors' close scrutiny in the 1930s and was thus a freer space of racial inscription than the narrative.3 Not only was costume essential to Depression-era screen narratives of class rise (and fall); it sometimes operated to complicate the narrative, threatening to distract viewers with its overwrought embellishment of a character's affect and personality or glamorizing the low figures - the gold digger and the fallen women- that censors reviled (Gaines 1990, 188; Foster 2007; Jacobs 1997, 58-59).4 The lack of racial fixity in some 1930s Hollywood films revealed, if only incompletely, black women's modern, urban personalities and small-scale revolts against the color line. Through motifs in dress - the quick-changing maid, interracial sartorial and sardonic parity, and stylized idealization of interracial spaces - aspects of these films silently normalized racial similarity and undermined the uniform servitude of the 1930s black image.In these surprising moments black women stepped out of their prescribed subservience to glamorously become the center point of the camera's gaze in ways that cast doubt on the naturalness of black inferiority and sometimes disrupted prevailing narratives of gender, race, and power. I begin with analysis of several pre- Code-era films and end with readings of Codeera films starring light-skinned black actress Fredi Washington, who became the vessel for dress-borne tensions about the color line latent in earlier films. …

Disproportionate Poverty, Conservatism, and the Disproportionate Identification of Minority Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Previous investigations of disproportionate representation of students from certain ethnic groups in special education have suggested that disproportionality is the result of bias against the members of overrepresented groups or, conversely, the result of disproportionate exposure to poverty for these students. Strong evidence in favor of either position has failed to emerge over the past decades, leading us to conclude that the models underlying these examinations might be inadequate. We, therefore, examined disproportionality in ED at the national level (50 states and DC) for two ethnic groups, African-American and Hispanic students. Using a more complex model, we found that disproportionate poverty was positively associated with representation of these two groups in ED classification. The representation of African-Americans in the ED category was negatively correlated with levels of conservatism for a state while poverty more strongly affected individuals from Hispanic backgrounds. We suggest that the general underidentification of individuals from all ethnic groups may be the larger problem.

Exorcism

<i>Exorcism</i>

Metaphorical Mirrors and Subverting Selves in Adrienne Kennedy’s One-Act Plays

Abstract Beginning her career in the 1960s, Adrienne Kennedy was one of the most influential writers of the period. Her plays subverted both Western and African American theatre. Although like her contemporaries she reacted to the political events of the period, in contrast with them she presented racial issues in a non-realistic mode. Her plays exemplify the re-theatricalisation of the African American stage.

Predicting waist circumference from body mass index.

BackgroundBeing overweight or obese increases risk for cardiometabolic disorders. Although both body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC) measure the level of overweight and obesity, WC may be more important because of its closer relationship to total body fat. Because WC is typically not assessed in clinical practice, this study sought to develop and verify a model to predict WC from BMI and demographic data, and to use the predicted WC to assess cardiometabolic risk.MethodsData were obtained from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study (ARIC). We developed linear regression models for men and women using NHANES data, fitting waist circumference as a function of BMI. For validation, those regressions were applied to ARIC data, assigning a predicted WC to each individual. We used the predicted WC to assess abdominal obesity and cardiometabolic risk.ResultsThe model correctly classified 88.4% of NHANES subjects with respect to abdominal obesity. Median differences between actual and predicted WC were − 0.07 cm for men and 0.11 cm for women. In ARIC, the model closely estimated the observed WC (median difference: − 0.34 cm for men, +3.94 cm for women), correctly classifying 86.1% of ARIC subjects with respect to abdominal obesity and 91.5% to 99.5% as to cardiometabolic risk.The model is generalizable to Caucasian and African-American adult populations because it was constructed from data on a large, population-based sample of men and women in the United States, and then validated in a population with a larger representation of African-Americans.ConclusionsThe model accurately estimates WC and identifies cardiometabolic risk. It should be useful for health care practitioners and public health officials who wish to identify individuals and populations at risk for cardiometabolic disease when WC data are unavailable.

Reassessing the Unequal Representation of Latinos and African Americans

Recent research has adopted a proximity approach to measuring unequal representation, focusing on the ideological distance between citizen and legislator. This approach has produced evidence that Latinos and African Americans receive unequal representation relative to whites. In this article, I argue that work employing the proximity approach conflates two conceptual standards of equal representation, leading to ambiguous results. I clarify these conceptual standards and reevaluate analyses from two previous articles. My results confirm previous findings that Latinos and African Americans are ideologically further from their Representatives than whites. However, my analyses uncover no evidence that Representatives place greater weight on the views of white constituents. This seeming contradiction arises from minorities tending to reside in more ideologically diverse districts. These findings emphasize the importance of conceptual clarity and the role of heterogeneity in studies of unequal representation.