Age Of Obama Research Articles

King warns the nation: white America, the political economy, the age of Obama

The author contends that white America’s resistance to black advancement is the primary cause for the current racism and resistance to democracy and democratic institutions. Beyond Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and witness, white America has mutated into the political economy that has hybridized surrogates, namely, neofascism and neoliberalism, philosophical constructs that represent the Theo political right and the Theo political left. Strikingly, the political economy and its hybridized surrogates and paralleling philosophical constructs have come to maturity during the age of Obama, which provides a narrative for this article.

Writing (as) Refusal

Writing (as) Refusal

The Black President: Hope And Fury In The Age of Obama, written by Clegg III, Claude A.

The Black President: Hope And Fury In The Age of Obama, written by Clegg III, Claude A.

Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism ed. by Eric D. Lamore

Reviewed by: Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism ed. by Eric D. Lamore Daniel Stein Eric D. Lamore, ed. Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2017. 296 pp. $74.95. The genre of autobiography, or life narrative, to use a more inclusive term, has perhaps been the most crucial mode of public self-fashioning for African Americans as well as one of the most effective means of documenting the humanity and essential Americanness of black folk from the moment the first Africans set foot on North American soil. As pioneering scholars like Rebecca Chalmers Barton, [End Page 315] Sidonie Smith, Stephen Butterfield, Frances Smith Foster, James Olney, Robert B. Stepto, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and William L. Andrews have argued, the very existence of life narratives by African Americans, especially when published in book form or presented as oral testimony, constitutes one of the most powerful arguments against reigning racist ideologies of black inferiority. In light of the centrality of the genre in African American literary and cultural history, it is not surprising that the emergence of African American Studies was fueled in part by an extended academic investment with the study of black autobiography. It is within this scholarly trajectory that recent essay collections in the path-breaking Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography series, edited by William L. Andrews, such as Angela A. Ards's Words of Witness: Black Women's Autobiography in the Post-"Brown" Era (2015) and Eric D. Lamore's Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism (2017) must be placed. Lamore's excellent volume combines a number of revised essays that originally appeared in a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies in 2012 with additional pieces solicited for the present publication. As Lamore suggests in his introduction, the goal is to take stock of the current state of African American autobiography and expand the analysis beyond the canon and the printed word (3-4). The purpose of the book, he writes, is "to embrace newly recognized African American life writers from a wide range of historical periods, to widen the field's understanding of the myriad ways in which African Americans have engaged in examining the self, to analyze the more contemporary routes of dissemination that have been used to circulate autobiographical acts, [and] to trouble the 'texts' that have been traditionally housed in the canon of African American life narrative" (4). Recognizing the vastness of autobiographical materials, Lamore wisely foregoes any attempt at comprehensiveness and chooses a chronological order instead, beginning the volume with Lynn A. Casmier-Paz's close reading of one of the earliest existing examples of African American life narrative, The Life, and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man; Who Was Executed at Worcester, October 20, 1768. For a Rape Committed on the Body of One Deborah Metcalfe, and concluding with Kwakiutl L. Dreher's analysis of the feminist perspectives in actress Pam Grier's Foxy: My Life in Three Acts (2010). Lamore positions the book as "an 'age of Obama' assessment of African American life narrative" (10) in response to Robert B. Stepto's A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama (2011). While this is an intriguing endeavor, it also marks the book as an assessment from what already seems to be a bygone era when a postracial society seemed to be at least a distant possibility for some. What's more, the book's potential to shake up established interpretations of the history and current state of African American autobiography remains largely confined to the individual chapters. Lamore gestures toward this potential when he speaks of the centrality of archival work for future investigations and encourages more "multilingual, transnational, and transatlantic" (11) perspectives on the genre, but it is ultimately left to the reader to draw larger conclusions (and there are several) from the book. Three thematic clusters inform the volume as a whole. First, all of the chapters acknowledge and investigate what Casmier-Paz calls "the limits and the possibilities of life writing" (19) for black Americans. If autobiography is understood as a textually or...

Party Identification in the Age of Obama: Evidence on the Sources of Stability and Systematic Change in Party Identification from a Long-Term Panel Survey

Political scientists have long disagreed about the nature of individual-level change in party identification. While some scholars conclude that party identification is a stable identity—attributing changes in individual responses to measurement error—others show that aggregate party identification responds systematically to short-term forces such as presidential approval. In this article, we use a unique long-term panel measuring party identification twenty times in the 2011–2016 period to support a subtle compromise between these competing claims. We show that individual-level party identification changes systematically over time even after accounting for measurement error and that this change is related to short-term evaluations of the parties and the president. However, although such change exists, it is modest in the medium term and more common among specific subsets of respondents. Finally, we show that that these findings are robust to numerous alternative modeling strategies. We believe that our analysis provides the most systematic examination to date of individual-level changes in party identification.

Ethan Michaeli. The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America: From the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama.

Ethan Michaeli. The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America: From the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama.

Cultural congruency in mediated gastrodiplomacy: a qualitative framing analysis of the U.S.–Japan Sushi Summit

Gastrodiplomacy, the confluence of public diplomacy and national cuisine, has elevated the meal as a symbolic and real tool in the acquisition of soft power among countries. The pairing of food with national values can help a nation reach out to the world (Nirwandy and Awang in Procedia 130:325–332, 2014) or illuminate a region or culture (Williams et al. in Int J Leis Tour Mark 4:1–8, 2014). Utilizing Entman’s theory of mediated public diplomacy and building on the concept of the national leader as a “diplomat-in-chief” (Snow in Persuader-in-chief: Global opinion and public diplomacy in the age of Obama. Nimble Books, 2009; Golan and Yang in Am Behav Sci 57(9):1277–1292, 2013), this study reports from a qualitative analysis of U.S. media coverage of the April 2014 dinner meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—dubbed the “Sushi Summit” by some media outlets. Through analysis of the projected media frames, highlighting an evolving relationship between the two nations and the role of the meal itself, this study highlights the important role of cultural congruency in mediated public diplomacy.

Abe Lincoln in the Age of Obama and Spielberg

Writing of Abe Lincoln after the Civil War, Frederick Douglass foreshadowed a natural divergence when evaluating the 16th president. ‘Viewed from the genuine abolitionist ground’, observed Douglass, ‘Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country … he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined’. Douglass himself concluded that ‘Great Emancipator’ had largely failed to imagine anything approaching a biracial America, remaining ‘pre-eminently the white man’s President’. Taking their cue from Douglass, scholars in our own time have largely concurred. A central tenet of Civil War history since the 1950s has revolved around the notion of a great chasm dividing the ‘dull and indifferent’ Lincoln from the zealous and idealistic abolitionists. Only recently, almost coterminous with the ascension of Barack Obama to American presidency, this divide seems to have shrunk and the evaluation of the radicals and the reformer president shown signs of what I call ‘convergence’. Prominent historians now view the radicals and the Republican leader more synoptically. Hollywood has reinforced the new Lincoln in the public eye. Stephen Spielberg has joined the scholars in giving us a Lincoln for the Age of Obama. How long this convergence view will last is open for debate, with the Trump era already reminding Americans that the stark divisions of the present suggest fundamental rifts in the past.

On the Portability and Meanings of Blackness in Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment (2009)

AbstractThis essay examines Korean American playwright Young Jean Lee’s provocative interrogation of the meanings of blackness in the Obama age with her 2009 play

The Risen Phoenix: Black Politics in the Post–Civil War South. by Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego

Reviewed by: The Risen Phoenix: Black Politics in the Post–Civil War South. by Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego Michael W. Fitzgerald (bio) The Risen Phoenix: Black Politics in the Post–Civil War South. By Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Pp. 233. Cloth, $49.50.) Let's accentuate the positive. This is a nuanced work reflecting on black congressmen during Reconstruction and its aftermath. Through an appreciative examination of six leaders, Dinnella-Borrego shows that they disagreed on a lot. But having determined to provide a deromanticized version of what these beleaguered legislators could accomplish, the author could have gone farther. These six congressmen were relatively prominent. They were James Rapier of Alabama, Josiah Walls of Florida, John Roy Lynch of Mississippi, Robert Smalls of South Carolina, John Mercer Langston of Virginia, and George White of North Carolina. They seem a plausible cross-section of the postwar era's twenty black House members. Still, the author never explains why he chose these individuals, beyond the existence of relatively ample evidence, three of them having written autobiographies. The tone is upbeat, with the author twice framing the study as an antecedent to the age of Obama. The author dissents from scholars such as Thomas Holt and Steven Hahn who see these leaders as elitists, locked into a political structure that diminished their ability to speak for the impoverished masses. "This critique is largely unjustified," Dinnella-Borrego concludes (6). The author emphasizes the relationship between these leaders and their grassroots constituency, rather than the machinations of Washington power politics. He also demonstrates quite tangibly that black congressmen were not monolithic, that especially after Redemption they differed on issue after issue as the wider political climate chilled. In general, this study approaches black officeholders with an appreciation of the practical constraints under which they operated. They were locked as junior partners in an interracial Republican Party, but they were not sellouts: "they did their jobs well" and their constituents took pride in them. Though they favored negotiation and compromise in their congressional roles, they also "functioned as national spokesmen for all African Americans" (216). This nuanced emphasis makes Dinnella-Borrego helpfully attentive to real-world constraints. In particular, he highlights the generational conflict between the older Republican officeholders and the younger generation of unelected black activists, like Ida Wells and T. Thomas Fortune, who saw themselves as protest leaders per se. And because this study extends beyond the normal Redemption endpoint of 1877, it enables exploration of the fluid political alignments of the 1880s and 1890s, as agrarian movements challenged the two-party order. This [End Page 341] is complicated political terrain, marked by apparent opportunistic shifts, and it is refreshing to see a knowledgeable take on how African American leaders responded. As should be evident, this book has much to recommend it. The discussion of what black congressmen actually did, and what the institutional constraints were, is refreshingly concrete. That said, having determined on a realist defense of these legislators, the author could have pursued that line more consistently. Dinnella-Borrego notes in his introduction that his subjects fought "for patronage and other government improvements," but he seldom recurs to the topic of government jobs again, once mentioning it in the context of corruption (6). This oversight understates the centrality of patronage, an abiding practical obsession of Reconstruction politics; patronage provided a tangible civil rights demand that tied black activists to the political structure. Nor does the author talk much about the related Reconstruction factional divisions—the Radical-versus-moderate conflicts—that facilitated black leaders' rise to elective office. One might expect discussion of the quadrennial presidential nomination process, which enabled black Republicans to maintain some modest bargaining power even after their party had abandoned Reconstruction. And the opposition Democrats did not "unwittingly" promote black officeholding through racial gerrymandering; they consciously did it to maintain control elsewhere and to hold their restive agrarian constituency in line (151). The book would have profited from a review of the published Ulysses S. Grant papers, especially since the congressmen Dinnella-Borrego examines so often acted as loyal foot soldiers for Republican administration policy. Given the Gilded Age context, and the Republicans...

Pessimism and the Age of Obama

This essay spotlights black pessimism within the “Age of Obama.” Looking to the Black Lives Matter movement and several artistic responses inspired by BLM, it identifies the rise of “black pessimism” within the Age of Obama. This essay engages the frequency of black death—such as the killings of Trayvon Martin and Philando Castile among others—against a backdrop of proclaimed hope and optimism: “Keep Hope Alive” and “Yes We Can.” It points to theater as an artistic form that has not only engaged and promoted social activism, but also reflected this widespread sense of pessimism.

Race and Politics in the Age of Obama

Race has rarely mattered more in US politics than it does now. The election of President Obama has laid bare the racial divisions that continue to fracture the United States. In this review, I explore the emerging scholarship that assesses Obama's impact on social and political life in the United States. I first examine the symbolic meaning of Obama's election to black and white citizens. Second, I analyze how racism has influenced whites' political behavior and policy preferences. Next, I examine how President Obama has influenced public policy. Then, I suggest that the toxic political climate surrounding Obama is just another installment of a saga in which rapid social change is met with anxiety and anger by some whites who perceive their way of life as being under threat. Finally, I illustrate how the “Obama effect” combines with the perceived “Latino threat” to affect whites' political behavior.

Make no exception, save one: American exceptionalism, the American presidency, and the age of Obama

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the circumstances under which U.S. presidents have invoked American exceptionalism in major speeches and how this concept has culminated in the Obama presidency. We find that U.S. presidents have increased their invocations of American exceptionalism since the Second World War and that they have relied heavily on this concept in times of national crises. Moreover, we demonstrate the overwhelming propensity of President Obama, relative to his predecessors, to emphasize American exceptionalism. We argue that this is due to the double-crisis nature of his presidency – two major wars and a recession – in addition to the racial bind that he has endured throughout his presidency. We reflect on the implications for other minority politicians and the broader American public.

Teaching “Narratives of Slavery” in Charleston, SC – Slavery Central

This essay describes a graduate course entitled “Narratives of Slavery” taught in Charleston, SC in spring 2014, in which I sought to recenter the dominant (national) discourse on slavery by stressing the local and insisting on our (the class’s) implication with the structures of things past, both the physical structures of the city of Charleston, and all of the legal, financial, historiographical, and ideological structures of the Atlantic World that continue to shape our contemporary reality. The course attempted to critically analyze the process and the consequence of narrativizing slavery – how we write slavery into (and out of) being; how we use narratives of slavery for the purpose of abolition and emancipation; what happens when we write particular narratives of slavery; what gets written out of the history of slavery when particular narratives become dominant; how contemporary narratives of slavery feed into and compare with historical accounts; how historical accounts feed into historical fiction, and how all these things play out in the postcolonial here and now of the American South in the age of Obama (and anti-Obama). In addition to offering a set of critical readings of texts, notably Zakes Mda’s neo-slave narrative Cion, the essay also presents some of the students’ thoughtful and moving responses to the texts and to Charleston’s evolving memorial landscape. The essay’s claim that we must read and discuss slavery and race in ways that do not reify or ossify either of those two terms was given even more urgency by the horrific mass shooting of 17 June 2015.

Poitier revisited: reconsidering a black icon in the Obama age

Poitier revisited: reconsidering a black icon in the Obama age

Racial Politics After Obama

In the waning months of the unprecedented Obama administration, the public sphere is marked less by a celebration of historic social and political inclusion than by anxiety over the present and future of the American racial order. Whatever else the Age of Obama has wrought in the long term for America’s future, at present it has occasioned an intense racialization of U.S. politics and an eruption of agonistic identity politics across partisan divides. These challenges will be among the most vital of the post–Obama era, for both black politics and the resurgent American left.

Campus Protests

Campus Protests Robert Greene II (bio) The protests that embroiled American college campuses in 2015 were a culmination of several factors. First, the rise of Black Lives Matter as a campaign influenced thousands of college students, many of whom were startled, like everyone else, by the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner. The Dylan Roof terrorist attack on Charleston in the summer of 2015, no doubt, also gave African American college students a new sense of urgency. Second, the battle over multiculturalism on college campuses—a debate that has gone on since the 1980s—has entered a new and uncertain phase. Finally, other protest movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, Fight for $15, and the left-led battle against a right-wing backlash aimed at the Obama administration has also pushed college students to become active on campuses from Missouri to Yale. The campus protests of 2015 have some similarities to those of the 1960s. Then, as now, college students were not oblivious to the changing world around them. College students joined the Civil Rights Movement in the South through organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or the Congress of Racial Equality. The Port Huron Statement of 1962 solidified a new ethos for college students born and raised during the post-World War II economic boom. At the same time, the Cold War backdrop and the potential of nuclear annihilation added an urgency to everything college students protested. Today’s campus protestors, as a generation, have also experienced considerable upheaval in the United States and around the world. Consider that this 18-to-21-year-old demographic was old enough to vaguely remember the September 11th terrorist attacks, the divisive 2004 election, and the 2007-2008 economic crash. By the time many college students entered college, they were also accustomed to a divided government and an embattled incumbent president in Barack Obama. Perhaps they had older siblings who voted for Senator Obama in 2008; by 2012, such voters would have been less inspired, but more grimly determined to stop Mitt Romney. Add to this growing up with near-constant warfare for the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a wider fear of terrorism across the country, and young Americans in college know a world different from that of their parents or even their older brothers and sisters. Modern college students are known for social media and selfies. But it might be more accurate to think of them as an economically distressed generation, worried about job prospects in the future. When the lens shifts to African American college students, then there is no surprise that campus protests occurred last semester. The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland have served to galvanize a young African American population already on edge about the place of blacks in American society. President Obama’s two terms in the White House witnessed a conservative backlash not expected by even the most pessimistic liberals. Much of this came with a racial tinge—the uproar over President Obama’s calling the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates “stupid;” the firing of Shirley Sherrod by the Obama Administration due to Andrew Brietbart’s editing of a video where Mrs. Sherrod spoke about her struggle with racism in the Deep South; and South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson’s shouting “You Lie!” during a State of the Union address—all of these events, and more, dampened hopes for better race relations during the “Age of Obama.” Then came the death of Trayvon Martin. His murder by George Zimmerman in February 2012 became one of the early examples of social media pushing a national story. Zimmerman’s acquittal in July 2013 touched off a national debate about race and racism—something young African American college students would remember all too well. If the high-profile murders of young African American men and women stopped with Trayvon Martin, it is possible America may have moved on while African Americans, once again, were left to reflect on the needless murder of a young African American. Of course, the year 2014 and the death of Michael Brown at the hands of officer Darren...

Measuring Congressional Partisanship on Energy and the Environment in the Age of Obama: The Cases of Offshore Drilling in Alaska and the Keystone XL Pipeline

The hypothesis for this article is that partisan voting in the US Congress since the 1980s prompts the need to confirm it empirically as a baseline for exploring other variables that may influence public policy decisions. It is worthwhile to measure that partisanship in two key energy-environmental policies during the Obama Presidency. First, how did partisan voting affect the decision by Shell to cease offshore exploratory drilling in the Arctic in 2015? Moreover, was partisanship a factor in President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline that year? I found the degrees of congressional partisanship to be very high on key votes in both cases, but relatively lower in the Keystone case. The inference is that legislative party politics can offer a partial explanation for policy continuity or change. These findings set the stage for further inquiry on other explanatory variables both within and external to the political system.

For a Neo-Marxism with Guarantees: A Critique of Critical Criticism

For a Neo-Marxism with Guarantees:A Critique of Critical Criticism Jared Sexton (bio) The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema by Gerald Sim. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 240 pages. $120.00 hardcover, $29.95 paperback. In the beginning of the age of Obama, there was the grand objection of Walter Benn Michaels. In a 2008 article for the New Left Review, the distinguished professor of English literature argued that the frenzy of public attention, especially from the foundering American Left, paid to the prospects of the first (white) woman or the first black (man) to occupy the White House is fundamentally misplaced, as these "campaigns are victories for neoliberalism, not over it—serving only to camouflage inequality."1 The terse intervention presented in Michaels's "Against Diversity" updated arguments first elaborated just two years prior in The Trouble with Diversity, a book-length version of a fundamental misunderstanding that is as easily clarified as it is enduringly useful to the speaker's benefit. Demonstrating its recyclable value, the New Left Review contribution was updated in turn several years later by an interview with Jacobin magazine. The so-called politics of identity, in this account, entail nothing much political at all, year after year. Racism and sexism, for Michaels, represent not historically specific structures of material and symbolic domination but rather [End Page 445] expungeable forms of discrimination within a governing structure of class inequality wrought fundamentally by the history of capitalist exploitation, most recently in its neoliberal stage. By this truncated logic, the social problems inscribed by race and gender hierarchies are extrinsic to capital and could be—indeed are being—resolved within its terms, moving U.S. society closer to a perversely representative, if growing, inequality between the haves and the have-nots: to wit, an equitable suffering without prejudice. So, we reject discrimination, but we are asked to admit that it is a minor problem at best and a terrible distraction at worst. "Diversity," as the promotion of such nondiscriminatory inequality, is not only compatible with advanced capitalism but also ideologically aids and abets its reproduction. A relation of inverse proportionality obtains between our supposed love for identity—the empty category to which race, gender, etc., are consigned—and our erstwhile opposition to inequality. If it has been argued, from within certain precincts of socialist thought, that racism serves mainly to divide and rule the workers of the world and to forestall the possibility of solidarity in the struggle against capital, we see now, in the neoliberal dispensation, that it is possible for the same egalitarian attitude to conclude that antiracism too serves "to ultimately deter materialist class consciousness" (31). There is within this framing no such thing as radical antiracism (or feminism or . . .) pursuant to a substantive equality of condition. There is, by definition, only liberal multiculturalism pursuant to a formal equality of opportunity. Michaels, as other critics have demonstrated, does not bother himself to engage in arguments with the political and intellectual positions of, say, the black radical tradition, in or beyond academe, regarding the practical-theoretical relations between race, nation, class, gender, and sexuality, among other axes of division. He is content to make sweeping assertions that conflate radical, progressive, liberal, and moderate elements of the U.S. body politic into an amalgam of antiracist sentiment devoid of—or rather detached from—what Lisa Duggin refers to as ongoing historical movements "advocating downward redistribution of economic, political, and cultural resources" (40). Gerald Sim, associate professor of film studies at Florida Atlantic University, openly borrows in The Subject of Film and Race more than a few pages from Michaels's playbook, but the latter treatment at least has the virtue of sustained commentary on or around actually existing scholarship. Across five chapters and a substantive introduction, Sim surveys what he terms "critical race film studies" in the U.S. academy over the second half of the twentieth century. He coins the term by noting what he sees as a convergence of [End Page 446] thought between "critical race theory" among legal scholars and analyses of race and racism in film studies over the last two generations. The first generation of critical...

Bringing race back in: black politicians, deracialization, and voting behavior in the age of Obama

Bringing Race Back In empirically investigates whether post-racial campaign strategies, which are becoming increasingly common, improve black candidates' ability to mobilize and attract voters of all races and ethnicities. In contrast to existing studies, this analysis demonstrates that black candidates who make positive racial appeals (for example, racial appeals that indicate that the candidate will either advance black policy interests or highlight the candidate's connection to the black community without attacking outside political players) not only perform better among blacks; they also improve their standing among Latino voters. Moreover, these appeals do not diminish white voter support. This finding counters conventional wisdom, which suggests that black candidates can succeed in majority white settings only if they distance themselves from the black electorate. Following President Barack Obama's 2008 success, both scholars and the popular media began examining how black candidates address race and racial issues in their campaigns, and scholars and journalists are now exploring whether black voters rally around black candidates who fail to discuss racial issues or distance themselves from the black community. Bringing Race Back In addresses both of these issues by using a wide variety of data sources and a number of sophisticated statistical techniques. The study utilizes content analysis of over two thousand newspaper articles on over thirty presidential, U.S. Senate, and gubernatorial elections with African American candidates in combination with the quantitative analysis of state exit polls and U.S. Census voter surveys. In addition to its significant contribution to the scholarship on American politics, African American studies, campaigns and elections, and public opinion, the book also provides valuable insight for political practitioners who want to better understand how deracialized campaigns influence the electability of black candidates in the Age of Obama.