African American Worldview Research Articles

Locating Value in the Study of Religion

AbstractReligious studies courses frequently justify their existence with the rhetoric of “value.” While appeasing the socio-economic concerns of college boards, this undermines the work of more critical approaches under the field’s big tent. The following paper responds to this disconcerting trend by casting religious studies as an analytical discipline that takes “evaluation” as its object of study. It details a way of navigating the critical turn using Michel de Certeau’s notion of “scriptural economy” as a pedagogical framework for three lower-level, undergraduate classes: REL-101Signifying Religion: An African American Worldview, REL-226Introduction to the New Testament, and REL-293Introduction to Islam. Students theorize religion as a heuristic for studying how bodies are conscribed, prescribed, described, and inscribed in relation to evaluative systems.

Toni Morison’s Beloved as a Minor Art Practice: A Deleuze-Guattarian Reading

Toni Morrison’s acute perception and treatment, in her novels, of the human and the postcolonial condition and her proposition of a problematics of individual and communal personhood have astounded contemporary readers and critics alike. This article aims to provide a Deleuze-Guattarian analysis of the workings of human relationships, human captivity and experiential writing in capturing the encounters between a sense of the self, a sense of the other and a remembrance of the past in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In this line, I argue that the text of Beloved instigates a formalistic deterritorialization of the English language by pushing it to the verge of non-signification. Through depicting a confrontation between traumatized ex-slaves and the haunting memories of captivity in the past, Beloved constitutes a minor art practice that gives rise to non-identitarian modes of self-conception and emancipatory lines of flight. I will also discuss how the clash between a dominating imperialist discourse with its claims to rationality and pragmatism on one hand and a specifically African-American worldview with a more open and inclusive perception of life’s real possibilities on the other leads to the formation of multiple and heterogeneous assemblages of reality, memory and thought against pre-determined and ethnocentric values of being, identity and privilege. This marks Morrison’s attempt in building up a cornerstone of minoritarian writing, a minor literature, in the Deleuze-Guattarian sense of the term.

Mules and Men and Messiahs: Continuity in Yoruba Divination Verses and African American Folktales

Abstract Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men reveals that African Americans were able to revise, restructure, and reformulate African orature to fit their social, political, and spiritual needs. This study examines the transformation of Yoruba ese Ifá (Ifá divination verses) into folktales and analyzes the similarities and divergences in the content and characters of the orature. This essay highlights the subtle ways that African Americans politicized and revolutionized the ese Ifá to protect the verses’ wisdom and facilitate their proliferation. The revised ese Ifá, disguised as innocuous folktales, were central to the formation of the African American worldview because they reminded dislocated Africans that divinity was not restricted to an invisible entity or controlled by a select few but was both an inheritance and an imperative essential for liberation and self-actualization.

Cultural orientation, ego resilience, and optimism as predictors of subjective well-being in African Americans

This study tested a portion of a model proposed by Constantine and Sue (2006) that examined whether certain attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors thought to be consistent with the cultural orientation and worldview of African Americans (i.e., religiosity, racial pride, and time orientation), would predict ego resilience, optimism, and subjective well-being in a sample of African American college students (N = 215). Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesis that cultural orientation would predict ego resilience, optimism, and subjective well-being in the current sample of African American college students. Religiosity and racial pride positively predicted psychological functioning and well-being. Present time orientation, however, negatively predicted psychological functioning and well-being. Implications of the study's findings are discussed in the context of future research and clinical interventions.

A Re-Examination of Cultural Factors that Mitigate Risk and Promote Resilience in Relation to African American Suicide: A Review of the Literature and Recommendations for Future Research

Suicide among African Americans has been acknowledged by the U.S. Surgeon General as a growing crisis. However, suicide remains understudied in this population. In this article, the authors examine the literature related to cultural protective factors that buffer African Americans from suicide risk. They present an overview of suicide among African Americans, review the culture and worldview of African Americans, and examine the degree to which these cultural variables protect against suicide risk. Finally, they discuss the limitations of the extant research on African American suicide, set an agenda for future research, and discuss its implications for clinical practice and public policy.

Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life (review)

Reviewed by: Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life Kathleen Pfeiffer Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life. William L. Van Deburg. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 283. $29.00 (cloth). In a previous work, Black Camelot: African American Culture Heroes in their Times 1960–1980 (1999), William L. Van Deburg presented the African American hero as an icon who shaped social values in the late twentieth century by providing black America prideful role models, helping to build bridges between the races. Now, in Hoodlums, the professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison turns his attention to the black villain, interrogating that icon's history of reflecting and influencing American cultural values. The full significance of African American villains across history has yet to be fully examined or understood, Van Deburg asserts, in much the same way that many of us "still do not have enough accurate information about the nation's racial past to make historically informed decisions on present-day issues" (xii). Hoodlums argues that a clear consideration of these anti-heroes in their various guises—villains, social bandits, and hoodlums—will contribute to a more truthful, if complicated, understanding of American racial history. "Just as villainy of any sort gives definition to heroism, black evildoers help define honor and virtue for whites" (217). For students, scholars, and teachers of modernism, this book provides a range of information to bracket the early twentieth century's insistence on newness, though it offers little consideration of the modernist era itself. Van Deburg seeks to identify the intersection of race and villainy, and as his first chapter offers a wide-ranging examination of binary divisions between good and evil, the evocation of binary racial divisions necessarily follows. Satan was colored as black early in history, Van Deburg notes, and the association of blackness with evil unfolded from there. "Is there cultural significance," he asks rhetorically, "in our blackening of prominent villains and in the manner in which they have been linked to the Great Deceiver, fount of natural evil?" (11) Hoodlums traces the cultural and social history through which black skin became inextricably associated with wickedness, sexual depravity, physical disfigurement, immorality, ignorance, laziness, dirtiness, and on and on. Much of Van Deburg's delineation underscores the racially self-serving nature of this projection: "Dazzled by their own brilliance," he notes, "whites easily confused essentialism with empiricism as they placed science in the service of racial subordination" (49). Van Deburg [End Page 945] establishes the connection between evil and blackness in a convincing and wide-ranging fashion, though this is not, one notes, a particularly novel observation. Van Deburg proposes that we distinguish between villainous types: for example, he suggests that "black social bandits" of various kinds address racial injustice through multifaceted strategies of activism designed to challenge white racial supremacy. As opposed to those villains whose selfish evildoing serves the individual, social bandits saw themselves as "agents of change . . . in order to improve the lives of beleaguered kinsmen" (68). Problematically, the individualistic black villainy—personified in, for example, the antebellum black slave owner who engages in all of the most reprehensible behavior of the white slave owner—challenges the community-oriented social bandit in continual intra-racial struggle. It is precisely this challenge, Van Deburg asserts, that defines the difference between what he calls "bad blacks"—those whose villainy undermines the community through its selfishness and sheer evil—and "baadd blacks"—those trickster figures whose primary function is to stick it to the Man. Hoodlums jumps rather quickly among historical periods, and these leaps create some curious assertions about late twentieth-century African-American culture, the period in which the book is most interested. For example, Van Deburg asserts that postbellum America's legacy of slavery, racial violence, and racial injustice (in the proliferation of turn of the century lynching bees, for instance) led to "the African American world view (that) privileged suspicion over fear" (107) evident in recent urban myths and conspiracy theories about government sponsored racial genocide. In Van Deburg's view, the important point here is that this suspicion testifies to the prevalence of white...

Pots, Kettles, and Interpretations of Blackness

Like any folklorist: would be, I was honored by the invitation to deliver the 2001 Archer Taylor Memorial Lecture. I first attended a California Folklore Society meeting in 1980, during one of my first years in graduate school. Although I eventually selected a different dissertation topic on African-American discourse, I became very interested in proverb study during that intellectually stimulating time. Because they are one of the most popular genres of everyday speech, proverbs encapsulate the appeal of folklore study to scholars dedicated to analyzing the worldview of peoples whose cultures are more oral than written. For those of us interested in African-American folklore, the omnipresence of proverb use in everyday speech indicates that studies of African-American world view may be incomplete without proverb analysis. At the UC Berkeley Folklore Archives, I ferreted out the files on African-American proverbs as well as the folders on Anglo ones. I was looking for commonality. I wanted to know which proverbs were commonly repeated and reported by both blacks and whites. And were there similarities in the interpretations of meaning? The most frequently reported proverb in the African-American files was some version or another of Don't let your mouth write a check your ass can't cash. But I didn't find versions of it in the Anglo file. That's like the pot calling the kettle was the most frequently reported proverb in the African-American files that also had a thick folder in the Anglo files. But while the proverb is clearly familiar in both cultures, informant interpretations vary. I began with my personal understanding of the proverb's meaning. For me, the proverb is probably the most appropriate idiom to use when I catch someone making a hypocritical statement. Since my family, my father in particular, did not suffer hypocrites gladly, I certainly grew up hearing this proverb and had it directed at me whenever I might accuse someone of a fault I possessed. Proverbs were teaching tools and by pointing out hypocrisy in this fashion, my parents were trying to mitigate this attribute in me. Another common usage in my own family is to utter the proverb itself in order to get away with a sharp observation. An example here might be, This is sort of like the pot calling the kettle black, but I heard that Jan was working on his paper right up until the California Folklore Society meetings. Here I've called myself a hypocrite before anyone else can level the accusation but also managed to get in a jab at Jan. The coloring of pots and kettles posed no problems. I grew up in kitchens adorned by black cast iron cookware and my own still fledgling culinary skills are rooted in the use of these imposing tools. My father's farm kitchen didn't have electricity until I was around eleven so when I ate there, it was food cooked in a cast iron pot on a wood stove. There was always a kettle of water on the stove because of the need to add moisture to the air in the house. I had no trouble understanding the proverb's core metaphor. My own interpretation of the proverb did not differ that much from those collected from black informants and submitted to the archives. The impulse to check hypocrisy permeates these texts. In 1976 a male African-American student explained the proverb by saying, person says this proverb when someone has made a hypocritical statement. It means that one person is accusing another person of a fault that the accuser already For example, if John said Mary is dumb because she got a D on her midterm and John also got a D on the same midterm, then John has accused Mary of a fault that John also possesses. As is often the case, informants and collectors assumed that this proverb so familiar to them belonged to their particular ethnic tradition. A 32-year-old black journalist explained to a student collector in 1974 that This expression originated in the south in the days of slavery. …

"By My Own Right Arm": Redemptive Violence and the 1851 Christiana, Pennsylvania Resistance

Our elevation as a race is almost wholly dependent upon our own exertions. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.(1) leading African-American spokesperson during his time, Frederick Douglass is expressing in this statement a rhetoric of resistance which reflected a collective African-American worldview defined and refined by the belief that Africans had a natural right to be free, that they had the right to defend themselves against any attempt to deny them that basic right and that they, themselves, individually and collectively, would have to secure their own liberation. rhetoric of redemptive violence used by so many African-American leaders and the willingness of African-Americans to resort to force to gain basic rights is an indication of the alienation blacks felt in a nation which showed its hostility so openly towards them, a nation unwilling to protect them from white violence, a nation whose very laws promoted their disfranchisement. Nowhere was this worldview exhibited more forcibly than in the little-known, but nevertheless significant, 1851 Christiana, Pennsylvania Resistance, led by William Parker who asserted, . my rights as a freeman were secured by my own right arm.(2) Armed with weapons and a sense of justice, Parker and his band defended their honor and their right to be free in a fearless demonstration of tactics and resolve. Parker's 1866 narrative, The Freedman's Story, in which he chronicles his life and the 1851 Christiana Resistance is one of the best sources for understanding the worldview and ideology of African-Americans committed to their own liberation. Apparently, he is the only African-American participant to leave a written record of the Resistance, so we know more about him than the other resisters and from his narrative we get an understanding of the Christiana Resisters' ideology of redemptive violence. In the period immediately leading up to the Christiana Resistance, most African-Americans, in bondage and free, had effectively been disfranchised through civil and social discrimination aimed at stripping blacks of the protection of the law. In most states, Africans endured segregated public accommodations and transportation, were discriminated against in employment and housing and suffered many other restrictions based solely on color. Suffrage had been denied to free Africans in most states, including northern ones, such as Pennsylvania which stripped its black citizens of the right to vote in 1838. That right was not restored until Reconstruction with the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870. Christiana Resisters, then, had very little political recourse in the state of Pennsylvania, a fact of which they were well aware. A major event in black disfranchisement during this period was the Dred Scott case which had been in the courts since 1846. final decision, effectively denying citizenship to African-Americans, was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857. This decision simply reinforced the attitude long held by most white Americans - that African Americans were not citizens of the United States. James W. Bryan remarked at the 1835 North Carolina Constitutional Convention which disenfranchised free Africans in North Carolina: I do not acknowledge any equality between the white man and the free negro, in the enjoyment of political rights - the free negro is a citizen of necessity, and must, as long as he abides among us, submit to the laws which necessity and the peculiarity of his situation compel us to adopt.(3) Ironically, the resisters at Christiana were charged with treason against a nation and a creed which had through de jure means and de facto practices denied their citizenship and which isolated African-Americans not only from the fabric of the larger American society, but from the protection of the laws which formed the basis of that society. …

African American Folklore

African American folklore offers researchers an invaluable framework for insight into the history and worldview of African Americans. Folklore, also called folktales, includes myths, storytelling, recollections, ballads, songs, rap, and other orally transmitted lore. African American folklore, though originally transmitted verbally, assumed a written form in the works of writers such as Charles Chestnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Whatever the genre or form of transmission, folklore is part of the African American's 300-year old oral called (Asante, 1987). More importantly, folldore embodies larger truths and yields much illumination through its study. Folklore is evidence of the ancient African life force and past that Africans forcibly brought to America, maintained through an expressive sense. In The Afrocentric Idea Molefi K. Asante (1987) argues that the scholar, rhetorician, or historian who undertakes an analysis of the African American past without recognizing the important role that orature has played and continues to play in the lives of African Americans is treading on intellectual quicksand (p. 86). According to Asante (1989) no art form reflects the tremendous impact of our presence in America more powerfully or eloquently than does folk poetry in the storytelling tradition (p. 491). Zora Neale Hurston (1995) referred to African American folklore as being the boiled-down juice of human living (p. 875). She maintained that folklore is the art of self-discovery as well as the first creative art of a people, shaping and rationalizing the natural

New day in Babylon: the Black power movement and American culture, 1965-1975

With a gift for storytelling and an ear for street talk, William Van Deburg has written the most comprehensive account available of the rise and fall of the Black Power movement - and of its dramatic transformation of both African-American and the larger American culture. New Day in Babylon chronicles a decade of deep change, from the armed struggles of the Black Panther Party and the separatism of the Nation of Islam to the cultural nationalism of artists and writers creating a new black aesthetic. If its tactical gains were sometimes short-lived, the Black Power movement did succeed in making a revolution - one in culture and consciousness that has changed the context of race in America. Drawing on a remarkable range of cultural expressions, from the voice of Malcolm X to the music of James Brown, from urban folklore, the visual arts, and religion to the language of soul, Van Deburg extracts the enduring cultural and psychological themes that ran through the ideologies of Black Power politics. For Van Deburg, Black Power was, underneath it all, a revolt rooted in culture - both high and low - as artists, writers, performers, politicians, and ordinary people alike begin to assert a distinctive African-American worldview and way of being. His book is a finely textured rendering of the years when the rhetoric of the gun gave way to an explosion of cultural forms that, in celebrating the uniqueness of African-American life, carried forward the militant philosophy of resistance, pride, and self-esteem. Like activists in the sixties and seventies, African-Americans today mobilize a rich variety of cultural resources in the struggle for group identity and racial justice. Whether in the filmsof Spike Lee or other new black directors, in rap music, or in experiments in Afrocentric education, African-Americans continue to reshape the contours of American values, ideals, and attitudes. This is the real legacy of the Black Power movement. And it has never been demonstra