American Activists Research Articles

Review: Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960, by Liza Black

Review: <i>Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960</i>, by Liza Black

Introducing Native American Conflict History (NACH) data

The colonization of the Northern Hemisphere between 1500 and 1900 produced nearly 150 separate conflicts between colonial powers and Native American communities. These conflicts have been largely overlooked in studies of international relations, particularly the quantitative tradition of scholarship. This article introduces a new dataset on conflicts involving Native American groups and colonial actors. As a starting point, this article briefly examines how the discipline has approached Native Americans and indigenous peoples. Next, the criteria for a new dataset on Native American Conflict History (NACH) is introduced. The challenges of navigating the historical record are discussed. And finally, a descriptive statistical overview of the data is presented that explores temporal and geographic patterns in the frequency, scale, and duration of conflicts. The article notes different patterns between European state combatants and ‘settler’ state combatants. Notably, the frequency of conflict increases dramatically in both Mexico and the United States during the second half of the 19th century while the scale of conflict remains largely unchanged.

Impact of an unannounced standardized veteran program on access to community-based services for veterans experiencing homelessness

BackgroundThe United States Department of Veterans Affairs established a program in which actors incognito portray veterans experiencing homelessness with pre-determined needs to identify barriers to access and services at community-based organizations.MethodsFrom 2017 to 2019, actors who varied in gender, skin color and age portrayed one of three scripts at all VA Community-Based Resource and Referral Centers (CRRCs) serving veterans experiencing homelessness in 30 cities and completed an evaluative survey. They carried authentic VA identification and were registered in a VA patient database for each identity. CRRCs were provided with reports annually and asked to implement corrective plans. Data from the survey were analysed for change over time.ResultsAccess to food, counselling, PTSD treatment, and hypertension/prediabetes care services increased significantly from 68–77% in year 2 to 83–97% in year 3 (each P < 0.05 adjusted for script present). A significant disparity in access for African American actors resolved following more uniform adherence to pre-existing policies.ConclusionsThe ‘unannounced standardized veteran’ (USV) can identify previously unrecognized barriers to needed services and care. Audit and feedback programs based on direct covert observation with systematic data collection and rapid feedback may be an effective strategy for improving services to highly vulnerable populations.

As an Act of Protest and Emotional Catharsis About the Ugly Truth of Racism

In this edited interview, psychologists Eric Greene and Nisha Gupta interview filmmaker Dennis Leroy Kangalee about his film As an Act of Protest (2002), which is about a young African American actor named Cairo Medina who goes through a station-of-the-cross journey to find the meaning of his life and eradicate the racism and police brutality that continue to plague the world. In this conversation, Dennis shares the genesis of the film as a response to the police brutality occurring in New York in the late 1990s, the psychological struggles he experienced while making this film and enduring backlash to it, and his desire to convey raw emotional truths about the ugliness of racism and racial trauma through a style of radically honest filmmaking that can foster catharsis, reflection, and transformation.

Regional professionals, American activists, and the Iron Curtain: transnational memory work during the Cold War in the Jewish neighbourhood of Kraków

ABSTRACT In the search for the roots of the cosmopolitanization of Polish memory in the first decade of the twenty-first century, this article looks past the chronological boundaries of post-socialist Poland. It identifies regional memory professionals as the key “scale” in transnational memory work. It demonstrates that the present state of Jewish sites of Kraków is the outcome of transnational work conducted from as early as the 1970s, and it is the effect of competition and collaboration among Jews from the American diaspora, Polish Jews, and Polish regional memory professionals. In a field regulated by the Polish socialist state, diaspora Jews tried to impose on their Polish collaborators their vision of Jewish sites. Polish Jews fought to protect those same sites as a key component of their identity work. Prompted by local and transnational Jewish pressure, ethnically Polish professionals discovered the Jewish past for themselves. They began by protecting Jewish sites, later turning them into valuable parts of the heritage of Poland and, eventually, into a constitutive element of Polish heritage. This article claims that it is precisely regional memory professionals who are the key to transnational memory work.

The American Influence on German Neo-Nazism: An Entangled History of Hate, 1970s–1990s

ABSTRACT This article takes a transatlantic approach to the history of the Far Right by examining the American influence on German neo-Nazism from the 1970s through the 1990s. The main argument reveals a disturbing yet hitherto unacknowledged reality, which has implications for the way we understand the global Far Right today: the strengthening of Germany’s neo-Nazi movements would have been unthinkable without US involvement. In the decades after Hitler, when East and West Germans struggled to suppress Nazism, American neo-Nazis exploited the US right to free speech and the increasing ease of global communications to circumvent restrictive German censorship laws and ship propaganda across the Atlantic Ocean. In so doing, they contributed to the expansion of a worldwide network of Holocaust deniers and galvanized a new, younger generation of neo-Nazis on both sides of the Berlin Wall who turned their hatred not only against Jews but also against the immigrants and asylum seekers who arrived in the context of postwar mass migration to Europe. In exposing these transatlantic far-right entanglements, the article makes several interventions into the study of German history, Holocaust memory, and antisemitism. First, it speaks to recent historiographical approaches that aim to analyze the role of the long taboo concepts of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ in German efforts to come to terms with the Nazi past. Second, it reconsiders the triumphalist Cold War narrative of America’s influence on post-Hitler Germany; not only does it highlight the failure of US denazification efforts to eradicate the racist mentalities of the Third Reich, but it also reveals that American actors played a crucial role in re-Nazifying Germany. Finally, it encourages historians to examine the politics of racism, xenophobia, and Holocaust denial beyond nation-state borders as a means to better understand the resurgence of global far-right extremism today.

Blackness and food resilience: black culinary epistemologies, the slow food movement and racial justice

ABSTRACT In this paper, I develop a concept that I call black culinary epistemologies. I argue that the cookbooks of Bryant Terry, African American chef and food justice activist, are an archive for black culinary epistemologies. I define black culinary epistemologies as the culinary knowledge produced by black cooks, chefs, and food preparers that build upon the black radical tradition, reframe black foods and black consumption, and participate in life-making practices in death-producing spaces. Terry builds upon this archive through his cookbooks and food activism. Black culinary epistemologies have numerous impacts: First, they demonstrate that black cooks, chefs and food preparers engage food as a critique of racism and inequities. Secondly, black culinary epistemologies highlight the ways in which black communities participate in alternative food practices. This contests the notion that “slow foods” is an idea of European origin and that black bodies only consume unhealthy foods. Finally, black culinary epistemologies demonstrate how food is a site through which black communities have produced vitality and empowerment. Through a cultural studies analysis, I argue that Terry’s four cookbooks and food activism are sites that recuperate black culinary epistemologies. This paper brings together literature in cultural studies, food studies, and critical race studies.

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

Corona XXXIII – Elementary

Corona XXXIII – Elementary

Black‐Asian Solidarities and the Impasses of “How‐To” Anti‐racisms

AbstractDuring the 2020 summer of global uprisings in defense of Black life, widely circulated anti‐racist reading lists created heightened demand for books that promised to teach readers how to examine their internalized racism. Situated in U.S. racial liberalism’s extensive literary genealogy, anti‐racist “how‐to” literature has historically swooped in during moments of heightened racialized confusion to restore narratives of American exceptionalism. This literature sustains the tenuous promise that racism is something that one can challenge in interpersonal relationships and by following specific steps toward individualized behavior correction. Building on a broader body of work that has critiqued liberal anti‐racisms for detracting from abolitionst struggles against racialized injustice, this article specifically frames the limitations that “how‐to anti‐racisms” place on transgressive multiracial coalition building. Through ethnographic analysis of discourses and practices that move through various sites of contemporary Black‐Asian American activist encounters, I build on Black and radical women of color feminist theorizations of solidarity to show how “how‐tos” destabilize coalition building by overdetermining resolutions to conflict. I argue that in “settling” anti‐racism into a repertoire of predetermined steps, how‐to‐ism constrains the contradiction, anger, and uncertainty that is fundamental to forging the radical accountability central to abolitionist work.

Literary Verbatim Theatre between Actuality and Creativity: Reading of My Name is Rachel Corrie (2005)

It is historically known that many dramatists were sort of adaptors. Playwrights have often used myths, poems, historical events or even earlier stories as their source material but with literary verbatim theatre (the most text-based of all verbatim subcategories), the audience deals with facts found in the original words of a real figure who wrote privately and not for publication. Consequently, some have accused verbatim theatre growing in popularity of lacking creativity claiming that it is not even produced by a playwright while others have disagreed since it undergoes a selective editing process indicating that it is ultimately a creative process. This way the play is filtered by a playwright who goes by the name of an “editor”. Selecting the archives and arranging the given material, is a very subjective process that owes as much to an artist's predilections as to any rule of dramaturgy. Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner's My Name is Rachel Corrie (2005) was developed from one hundred eighty-four pages of a young American activist's unpublished writings, including diaries and e-mails, that were given with her parent's permission. The twenty-three year old American was killed in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli defense bulldozer as she attempted to prevent destruction of a Palestinian family's home. The play with its unresolved conflict over Palestine in addition to its cancelled production in the United States a number of times has made it a true controversial literary verbatim play. My paper aims at expounding the abovementioned points of view shedding the light over where they meet leading to the understanding of what John Grierson defined as “the creative treatment of actuality”.

Análisis del proceso creativo en el documental Looking for Richard: aproximación a las bases de la construcción de los personajes Shakesperianos desde el sistema Stanislavki y el método Strasberg

Analysis of the creative process in the documentary Looking for Richard: Approach to the bases of the construction of Shakespearean characters from the Stanislavki system and the Strasberg method.The American actor, Al Pacino, in 1996 approached Shakespeare with his documentary Looking For Richard. A 112-minute film in which Pacino reflects on Shakespeare, the public’s perception of his works and the way in which the actors approach the characters.In this article we propose a study of the film to analyze the acting methods used by Al Pacino and the rest of the cast to be able to play the roles of Ricardo III. The goal is to identify the bases of the Method through the work of Al Pacino and the rest of the North American actors opposite to the way of working of the English actors, as well as to establish the similarities with the Stanislavski System.Through the case study we can discover the work of each interpreter and we will build on the methodological contributions of Stanislavski, as creator of the System, Strasberg as initiator of the Method and finally we will include Peter Brook as renovator of the English theater.

Transferring Technical Knowledge to Turkey: American Engineers, Scientific Experts, and the Erzincan Earthquake of 1939

On 27 December 1939, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Erzincan, Turkey, claiming close to 33 000 lives, and leaving 100 000 injured and 250 000 homeless. World War II was in its initial stages, and the USA was particularly concerned about the vulnerable situation in Turkey, since there was a possibility that it would join forces with Germany, as the Ottoman Empire had done in World War I. Consequently, the Turkish request for information on ‘a type of quake resistant concrete construction understood to have been developed in California’, resulted in a flurry of correspondence between numerous Turkish and American actors, including the US State Department, which supplied this material with notable attentiveness. As this article will argue, this request not only represents an early critical juncture in the transfer of earthquake engineering knowledge from the USA to Turkey, but also illustrates how diplomacy and engineering can intersect at pivotal points in time. Engineers and other scientific experts strengthened the Turkish–American relationship during this period, thereby laying the foundation of the technical cooperation that would flourish during the Cold War. This watershed moment also resulted in immediate developments in Turkey, such as the development of a comprehensive national disaster management programme, a seismic zone map, and earthquake building codes.

Anti-alcoholism, Turkish and American non-state actors, and their mutual pursuits of national and global sobriety

In April 1920, few months after America’s implementation of Prohibition, several MPs of Turkey’s renegade Grand National Assembly in Ankara proposed a ban on the production, sale, import, and consumption of alcohol. Some MPs questioned the need to prohibit what Islam already forbade centuries earlier, but others stressed the medical, social, and moral imperatives for an injunction. After many contentious debates, the bill passed and remained law until 1924. This article adds to historical scholarship on the parliamentary passage of the ban through its interrogation of the American and Turkish non-state actors (NSAs) that worked towards this end. Following the passage of the US’s Eighteenth Amendment, leading Prohibition figures moved quickly to internationalize their agenda and created the World League Against Alcoholism in 1919. It became the principal American NSA to engage with Turkey’s emergent anti-alcohol interests; interests that coalesced into what became Yeşilay (the Green Crescent), which today is Turkey’s leading anti-addiction organization. Through analysis of American, Ottoman, and Turkish documents regarding both NSAs’ origins and various leading figures’ agendas, this study reveals the emergence of these relations while also identifying the plurality of agendas at play that exceeded simply mandating sobriety in lands of Ottoman and early republican Turkey.

“Death or Liberty”: Henry Box Brown “Personificating” Himself in Edward Gascoigne Burton's The Fugitive Free and The Nubian Captive

In 1857, Henry Box Brown starred in Edward Gascoigne Burton's The Fugitive Free and The Nubian Captive, two “slave dramas” based on his life. His performance inevitably infused both with an antislavery message: in a radical departure from conventional black abolitionist strategies of resistance in the British Isles, the plays change our understanding of British anti-slavery, of Brown, and of black British performance in general. Despite his short acting career, Brown should be placed alongside fellow African American actors like Ira Aldridge for his integral role in challenging the white racial schema on the Victorian stage.

In the Wake of George Floyd: Hmong Americans’ Refusal to Be a U.S. Ally

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the tenuous relationship between refugees and African Americans, specifically Hmong Americans in relation to Black Lives Matter following the murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers, one of whom is Hmong. We argue that Hmong expose the messiness of race relations in the U.S. due to their implication as a U.S. ally in Southeast Asia. While Hmong refugees/Americans can be called to enact violence on behalf of the U.S. militarized state, Hmong American activists refuse the reprised role of the ally, insisting on justice for Floyd and other Black people killed by the police.

The consequences of the 1989 changes in the socio-political activity of Lemkos in Poland and the United States of America

Abstract During the communist period, the Lemko community did not have its own separate ethnic organization in Poland. In the USA, the Lemkos were able to conduct social and political activities without any obstacles. Even before World War II, two important organizations were established: the Russophile Lemko-Soyuz and the Ukrainophile Organization for the Defense of Lemkivshchyna in America. The social and political transformation initiated by the elections of June 1989 changed the situation of national and ethnic minorities. The period of political transformation in Poland also activated the Lemkos, who also took advantage of these changes to formalize and develop their activities. The first postwar Lemko organization was the Lemko Association. As a counterbalance for Lemkos Association, Ukrainophiles created in Gorlice their own organization – Union of Lemkos. American activists also had to find their way in the new political circumstances. When the Soviet Union collapsed, not only did the ideological base of Lemko-Soyuz fall into ruin, but also its financial base. OOL found itself in a much better position than Lemko-Soyuz during the period of political transition in Eastern Europe. The anti-Moscow stance of the Ukrainianophile organization allowed it to remain credible and continue to fight for the interests of Ukraine. However, the organizations, both Polish and American, in their multifaceted activity still contribute to consolidation and preservation of Lemkos’ cultural identity and preservation of their traditions.

Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black

Reviewed by: Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black Andre Seewood Liza Black. Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. 354 pp. Hardcover, $65.00. The Hollywood Indian is a well-known constructed figure born within the mythology of White civilizing of the American wild West as represented in hundreds of Hollywood films of the twentieth century and beyond. Various Native American, White, and Black scholars have [End Page 405] studied the construction of the Hollywood Indian from White actors painted in “red face” to the dramatic binary trope of the savage Indian and the noble savage. The Hollywood Indian is a necessary component of the White racial imaginary, just as its counterparts of the Black and the ethnic other form the base upon which an ideal of White purity can exist. That much we know is true, but the book Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black takes an altogether different approach to the construction and maintenance of the Hollywood Indian during and through the immediate postwar period. Through combined methodologies of archival research, tribal histories, actor biographies, and labor histories Black provides insightful, “connections between Indian Actors and the tribes represented on screen” (11). Black teases out tensions between the White man’s Indian and the Native American individuals and tribes surviving their attempted cultural erasure and negotiating resistance to the mythology of settler colonialism as actors within the Hollywood Western. Black’s study of the lives, labor, and organized guilds of Native American and (faux) Native American actors within the Hollywood film industry is not a recuperative gesture, but instead it is a radical intervention that turns the tables on the simple vilification of the Hollywood Indian and the settler colonialist ideology imbued within the films. If Picturing Indians is a book about tribal sovereignty, then the author looks at that sovereignty through a critical lens to address how “Native Americans as employees in the film industry . . . sought to delimit and control their representations,” within a system of production created only to exploit that tribal sovereignty for its own gains (4). In an approach similar to that taken by African American scholar Cedric J. Robinson (Forgeries of Meaning and Memory, 2007), whose critical reading of the performances of African American actor Mantan Moreland revealed a thinly veiled secondary message of resistance and criticism of Whites in his once-thought stereotypical servant roles, Black reads a similar thinly veiled resistance and criticism in the work of Native Americans cast as extras or in supporting roles in Westerns. For example, when Native Americans were hired in Hollywood films for authenticity and to speak their native language, Black discusses how these actors either intentionally spoke gibberish or words that when accurately translated were critical of the settler colonialist ideology, the [End Page 406] role, or the accuracy of the representation of historical events in the Hollywood Western. This resistance and criticism were cloaked from the Whites controlling the film but could be understood by those Native Americans participating in the film and any of those who might watch it. Just as the “twoness” of the African American allowed for a double-coded gesture of resistance against the White racial imaginary within the servant role in film, there is a “twoness” in the representation of the Hollywood Indian that also affords a mode of resistance through language for Native Americans. Black’s intervention into the labor of Native Americans allows her to investigate the material construction of a mythological figure. The mass manufacture of fake Indian noses, the accumulation and refinement of fake Indian wigs, and the mass body painting of Native American extras with cost projections and limits provides the scale and scope of the economy of racial misrepresentation in the construction of the Hollywood Indian. Black invites us to contemplate the material basis of a racist mythology as an economic artifact and as a cultural ideal for transnational export. If Native Americans were to be confined to roles of extras and small speaking supporting roles, then the notion of tribal sovereignty is maintained by the creation of labor guilds and the acceptance of several...

Sanitizing history: National identification, negative stereotypes, and support for eliminating Columbus Day and adopting Indigenous Peoples Day.

Despite the fact that Christopher Columbus did not discover America and was arguably one of the most brutal colonizers in recorded history, the United States continues to celebrate a holiday in his honor. A growing movement by Native American activists and allies aims to adopt Indigenous Peoples Day in lieu of Columbus Day to shed light on historical inaccuracies, acknowledge the legacy of colonialism, and celebrate Indigenous Peoples. Research suggests that national narratives, such as those undergirding Columbus Day, build on negative stereotypes about minoritized groups to help bolster national identities. We examined whether national identification and negative stereotyping of Native Americans shapes support for each holiday. We conducted 2 large-scale national studies (Study 1: college students, N = 4,625; Study 2: adults, N = 2,805). Across both samples, people who endorsed the continued celebration of Columbus Day and people who were least supportive of adopting Indigenous Peoples Day were those high in national identification. In contrast, people who endorsed eliminating Columbus Day and people who supported adopting Indigenous Peoples Day were relatively low in national identification who also believed that negative stereotypes about Native Americans were highly unacceptable (Studies 1 and 2) and/or inaccurate (Study 2). The results suggest that garnering support for eliminating Columbus Day and adopting Indigenous Peoples Day requires interrogating the roots of national identification and rejecting negative stereotypes about Native Americans. Implications for why people continue to hold onto national narratives that reify the continued subordination of minority groups are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Urban Renewal in the “Human Renaissance”

ABSTRACT In the post–World War II era, state and federal legislators introduced a legal rhetoric of the environment and urban renewal that reshaped discourse and decision-making by municipal leaders and African American activists in Pittsburgh. This study presents a fuller historical analysis of the regulatory framework and sociopolitical context of Pittsburgh's postwar urban renewal by examining the environment, renewal, race, and the law as interrelated and inextricable concepts. It argues that both white political leaders and Black activists navigated a shifting regulatory framework and legal environmental rhetoric to craft divergent narratives of urban renewal. By examining municipal, state, and federal laws, urban planning documents, court decisions, and newspaper articles, this analysis demonstrates the evolution of environmental arguments with changing social, legal, and political contexts from the postwar years to the 1970s. Conclusions reveal a fluid definition of “environment” and demonstrate the ongoing struggle for power over decision-making spaces.