African American Identity Research Articles

“Black is Blak”: Bamboozled and the Crisis of a Postmodern Racial Identity

The authors contend that, although ostensibly supportive of and open to previously marginalized points of view, the postmodern age has effectively challenged the stability of all racial identities, and of African American identities in particular. Spike Lee's Bamboozled, as a decidedly postmodern document, serves as a useful lens through which to examine the process of identity building and reinforcement in contemporary times. By focusing on the primacy of the authentic self, by reinforcing the centrality of the image in contemporary thought, and by engaging a self-reflexive critique of its own message on race, Bamboozled both reflects and speaks to the ongoing struggle to forge and maintain a strong sense of racial self in a postmodern America.

Social Values, Democracy, and the Problem of African American Identity

Aristotle in The Politics argued that an effective government must allow a good man to become a good and decent citizen. Democratic processes, institutions, and practices must strive to provide assurances that public policy are of high quality and in the public interest, which means they are a manifestation of, and embody the values of, a society in a simultaneously reinforcing mutual relationship. This article attempts to demonstrate that assuming a similar line of reasoning, American political practices would make public policies that reflect its core democratic social values. Yet the negativity in the political location of the African American challenges and deflates those democratic credentials of the United States. Much worse is that this creates an inexorable duality that shapes the political identity of the African American and sidelines him or her from the American political mainstream.

Racial Identity: Toward an Integrated Developmental Psychological Perspective

This article outlines current knowledge and lines of research regarding racial identity and, in particular, African American racial identity. A developmental psychological framework is proposed as a means of integrating and synthesizing 2 lines of racial identity research that have emerged within the existing literature: (a) the developmental line of research and (b) the adjustment outcome line of research. The proposed integration of the current racial identity research will emphasize the interdependency of developmental mechanisms, outcome processes, and identity trajectories among minority individuals, and highlight the significance of those identities for individuals across their life spans. Potential benefits of integrating these 2 lines of research within a developmental psychological framework are discussed regarding both scientific theory and practice-related applications.

Fractured Identity and Agency and the Plays of Adrienne Kennedy

This paper examines the plays of African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962) and The Owl Answers (1963), which remain important for their engagement with notions of African-American identity, resistance and agency through their attention to mixed race female characters or mulattos who experience bodily and psychological traumas that demonstrate the abuse of the colonized on a deeply visceral level. Kennedy's plays have remained controversial because of their failure to comply with the nationalistic orientation of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of 1960s America. I aim to examine these plays through a framework of postcolonial-feminist performance analysis that finds its way back to histories of colonization and slavery, enabling through such returns, a compelling critique of the manoeuvrings of racial hierarchies and power imbalances. As well, I argue that Kennedy's protagonists are de-essentialized fractured beings who fail to embody either White superiority or Black nationalist pride, as they oscillate between two polarities. Such failure (on the part of Kennedy's mulattos) allows for a strategic de-essentialization of identity that interrogates fixed categorization. As well, through a form that is fluid, fragmented and blurs the distinctions among history, memory, space and time, her works impart political agency to the characters and enable an empowered sense of the ‘self-in-process.’

Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (review)

Reviewed by: Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic Heather S. Nathans (bio) Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic. By Jeffrey H. Richards. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp 404. Cloth, $85.00.) In the introduction to his compelling new work, Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic, Jeffrey H. Richards notes that "with the exception of Royall Tyler's The Contrast, relatively little has been said in detail about the particular plays and performances that graced—or disgraced—the stages and pages of American theatre . . . in the early republic" (1). Richards's book proposes to address this long-standing gap in scholarship, and does so in a way that historians of early American history, American literature, and American theatre will find invaluable. As Richards observes, scholars have paid considerable attention to Tyler's 1787 comedy The Contrast in a bid to claim a uniquely "American" identity for theatre in the post-Revolutionary period. For many, the paucity of American plays in the early Republican era underscored the need to discover native geniuses and new voices. Richards's study proposes to leave the search for "American-ness" behind, focusing instead on how the concept of "identity" itself shaped what Americans saw both inside and outside the playhouse. Rather than struggling to distinguish the "American" from the "non-American" aspects of the postwar theatre, Richards undertakes an investigation of popular plays and performances that can help scholars unlock the complex process of identity formation in both a larger transatlantic context, as well as a narrowly local one. Richards states, "What I entertain in these pages is the interpretive problem of how to read plays and performances in terms of a world where identity is volatile and where the oppositions that create identity themselves often shift or mushroom or wither in a relatively short time" (7). The book is divided into three parts, each of which examines a different aspect of identity formation in the playhouse. Richards also incorporates a discussion of the popular literature and travel narratives of the period, adding both depth and breadth to his study. In Part I, "Staging Revolution on the Margins of Celebration," Richards maps a broad cultural history for the "staging" of new identities in [End Page 505] the young nation. Part I is divided into six short chapters. Chapters 3 and 4 work particularly well together: one explores how British authors created "American" texts, while the other investigates how difficult it was for American authors to develop a dramatic form that diverged from British models. In Chapter 3, Richards investigates the popular comic opera, The Poor Soldier, which in the 1790s became fodder for Federalist/Republican debates because of its French character Bagatelle, and later became a mainstay at the short-lived African Grove Theatre in the 1820s. Richards questions how a play about an Irish soldier returning to his native village could be accepted by so many diverse American audiences, all of whom seemed to "recognize" themselves in the work. Chapter 4 examines Judith Sargent Murray's The Traveler Returned, a play which Richards argues is essentially a warmed-over version of Richard Cumberland's The West Indian. If Murray eliminates "bawdiness . . . for the affirmation of ideological themes linked to Revolutionary stoicism and republican virtues," her "American" ventriloquism does not wholly conceal that the puppet and its master are of British origin (101). In Part II, "Coloring Ideas: Race, Religion, and the Exotic," Richards studies the complex process of synthesizing identity in a nation already fractured along lines of racial and ethnic tensions. Part II includes four chapters that explore Muslim, Native American, Irish, and African American identity on the national stage. Each uncovers a genealogy of stereotypes, linking the four characters listed above to their transatlantic ancestors. For example, Richards traces Susanna Haswell Rowson's Muslim characters in Slaves in Algiers back to their French and British sources (most notably Voltaire's tragedy Zaire, adapted for the British stage as Zara). Yet he also demonstrates how Rowson "Americanized" her Muslim villain—making Muley Moloc an example of tyranny that "must be combated through a rigorous assertion of virtue" (165). Similarly, Richards exposes James Nelson...

RURALIZING THE CITY: THE GREAT MIGRATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL REHABILITATION IN BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

This article examines the discursive and material presence of the “rural” in the “urban,” relating it to the historical and contemporary production of African American culture and identity. By using the case of the Great Migration, it discusses how African Americans negotiated and shaped their urban surroundings and formed individual and collective identities by drawing on their rural, southern histories. It then suggests the relevance of these broad historical processes to contemporary analyses and interventions in the urban environment of Baltimore, Maryland. This article challenges assumptions that obscure the agency of urban residents in the formation of identity and the establishment of community. It demonstrates ways in which the historical movement from rural South to urban North was accompanied by a range of cultural resources that have been adapted, discarded, or reconstructed.

Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (review)

Reviewed by: Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity Lisa M. Corrigan Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity. By Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004; pp vii +249. $45.00. This comprehensive history of the politics of black power incorporates interviews by the author, archival materials, an extensive survey of periodical literature, and a large range of primary sources penned, uttered, and published by black power activists themselves. Historian Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar crafts a text that examines the complexities of the concept of black power. Ogbar argues, "Black Power affected African American identity and politics as much as any speech, march, or legal victory of the civil rights movement" because the thrust of its power was "black nationalism" (2). He is quick to point out that although black power was not always nationalist, it [End Page 331] "employed—even co-opted—the activism typified in civil rights struggles and operated on basic assumptions of rights and privileges" (2). Through activism, black power advocates sought the self-pride and self-determination of their political predecessors (Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and A. Phillip Randolph) to forge a group consciousness "that substantively altered American politics and culture" (9). Ogbar's text is noteworthy because it attempts to integrate the cultural, economic, political, and radical elements of nationalism into a history of black power that has been shaped largely by two institutions: the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). The text surveys a plethora of other black power organizations (including extended commentary on the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress on Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Us Organization, and so forth) and their relationships with both the NOI and the BPP. Still Ogbar argues that the Nation of Islam had the most significant impact on black power activists. This influence is because of the rhetoric of the NOI surrounding the foolishness of integration and "the organizational and leadership skills of [Elijah] Muhammad and his chief minister, Malcolm X" (19). Ogbar argues that the NOI was central in crafting a language and culture of self-determination, black support for black enterprises, and a mass black culture, even as it succumbed to problematic trends: sexism, denigrating blacks in the spirit of racial uplift, and conceiving of the races as entirely separate, distinct, and different peoples. In Malcolm X, black power found a martyr, particularly after he was gunned down in the Harlem ballroom on February 21, 1965. Ogbar traces Malcolm X's rhetorical influence on Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, Stokley Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, and others. Ogbar details the split between advocates for integration and nonviolence and those who saw a future in which revolution would involve self-defense. This book provides a compelling portrait of the gradual transformation that many advocates of nonviolence experienced with the increasing police brutality and state-sanctioned violence and decreasing protection from the state, even after the passage of some of the most remarkable pieces of civil rights legislation in the nation's history. Ogbar also tackles the NOI's incorporation of the lumpen proletariat, the criminal, the street hustler, the prostitute, the gambler, and the downtrodden masses as a model for later black power organizers who embraced the Marxism(s) of Mao, Che, Fidel, and Ho Chi Minh. Organizing the poor black masses became central to the BPP in its community breakfast programs, literacy programs, and other service-oriented projects to benefit inner-city communities. The BPP survival programs integrated black power [End Page 332] into the communities that the party members needed for financial, intellectual, and political support. In creating this tapestry of organizational and intellectual histories, Ogbar is also incredibly savvy in weaving together the relationship between black power and the "Rainbow Coalition" of other vanguard ethnic nationalist organizations that late Panther Fred Hampton was so keen on recruiting for the urban revolution. Ogbar includes the histories (albeit brief) of the Deacons for Defense, the Young Lords (and other Puerto Rican nationalist organizations), the Brown Berets (and other Chicano nationalists), the Young Patriots, the American Indian Movement, the Yellow...

Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (review)

Reviewed by: Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Leda M. Cooks Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. Edited by Nancy Foner and George M. Frederickson. New York: Russell Sage, 2004; pp 408. $45.00 cloth; $24.95 paper. Is the United States an immigrant nation or a nation of immigrants? The question raises vast differences in the roles of history and policy in the formation of the United States and notions of who is/is not a U.S. citizen. Indeed, the tensions raised by the role of immigrants and immigration in the conceptualization of the United States are intimately connected to the construction of race and ethnicity in that history. The authors featured in the edited volume Not Just Black and White explore a diverse range of historical and sociological analyses of the question and its relevance to the "color line" in the twenty-first century. Are race and/or ethnicity in the United States the most important basis for determining who is or is not included as American? Or is class or clash (cultural conflict) a more reliable indicator of how social hierarchies have formed throughout the history of the United States? The chapters in this book present a cogent argument for the relationship between immigrant identities and the structural (political, racial, economic, religious, cultural) or historical/contextual [End Page 344] factors that have determined the changing status of policy and, consequently, of polity in the United States. In their introduction to the book (1–19), editors Nancy Foner and George M. Frederickson state that Not Just Black and White is an interdisciplinary compilation of some of the best scholars on immigration and race/ethnicity in the country. While the reader might note a range of perspectives from scholars in sociology and history, it is important as well to note the perspectives on immigration and identity negotiation that are not present in the book: for our purposes we might question the absence of rhetorical, interactional, or performance-based studies of discursive and embodied American identities. For instance, in his discussion of Latino and Latina panethnic identities, Jose Itzigsohn notes of a Dominican official in his study that "the Dominican identity is important to me but my political identity is Hispanic" (201). Later, Itzigsohn explains that "my point is that the nationalist sentiments and intraethnic conflict [within the Dominican community in the United States] coexist with panethnic identification" (201). While I do not argue with the panethnic strategies posited by Itzigsohn, the contextual negotiation of Dominican identities in Providence (where he locates his study) has been elsewhere inclusive as well of strategic association with African American identities by the younger generation of Dominicans. The location and strategic negotiation of language intra- as well as inter-ethnically is as important as the contextualization of specific events of community formation or division—and yet is undertheorized or studied by the scholars in this book. The larger point for those who study interaction is that identities are negotiated in context and in relationship to conversational status, in addition to the larger frames of economic, social, and political mobility. Yet it should be noted that while the authors do not focus on the rhetorical construction of race and ethnicity in the United States, many essays do question the meaning and significance of these terms at different moments in U.S. history, and in different spaces as well. One notable study of the discourse of ethnicity and its impact on immigration and on immigration studies is found in Victoria Hattam's chapter entitled "Ethnicity: An American Genealogy" in which she charts intellectual debates over the basis of Jewish ethnic identification in the United States. The authors in this volume raise several issues that I think are important to the future of immigration, race, and ethnic studies in the United States. First, the role of whiteness as the construction against which all other configurations of immigrant identities (race, ethnicity, religion, class) are measured figures strongly in the historical and social analysis of political, social, cultural, and economic shifts among inter- and...

Pure Black: Class, Color, and Intraracial Politics in Toni Morrison's Paradise

This essay explores black class privilege and associated questions of skin color and racial authenticity in Toni Morrison's 1997 novel, Paradise, written during a period fraught with intraracial ambivalence and confusion about what it means to be "black" in the post-Civil Rights era. In their obsession with biological racial purity, Morrison's "8-rock" characters corporealize racial authenticity, a concept that usually exists for African Americans as a cultural ideal. Paradise ultimately critiques the black nationalist desire for a "pure," and purely "authentic," form of African American identity, in the process highlighting the frequent suppression of the multiracial in authenticity discourse.

Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity

Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity

"The Arab Is the New Nigger"

This article examines 9/11-related humor observed during a fifteen-month, pilot ethnographic study of African American urban stand-up comedy. Findings illuminate Black stand-up comedy as decidedly in-group contexts that afford multiple opportunities for intracultural deliberations around race, notions of truth and authenticity, and the state of the nation. Black stand-up comedy likewise presents a fitting stage through which to gauge African American responses to September 11 and the subsequent war on terrorism, as well as the ways Black comedic performances both reflect and shape African Americans cultural understandings of the world and their place(s) in it. An analysis of 9/11 jokes that worked and failed further reveals how race served to qualify expressions of post-9/11 nationalism and American identity for many African Americans.

Remembering the past in contemporary African American fiction

This work describes twentieth-century survivor narratives and African American identity. With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.

Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G. Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity

Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G. <i>Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity</i>

Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsJeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American IdentityPeniel E. JosephPeniel E. Joseph Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 91, Number 1Winter 2006The African American Experience in the Western States A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/JAAHv91n1p104 Views: 38Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing

Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold?... Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant. --Shakespeare, Timon of Athens 4.3 He's got a five-dollar gold piece for a stickpin and he got a ten- dollar gold piece on his watch chain and his mouf is jes' crammed full of gold teethes. Sho wisht it wuz mine. --Zora Neale Hurston, Gilded Six-Bits (1014) In 1920s, many black writers established African American identity as one of most significant issues to be addressed in post-World War I period. Figures as diverse as W E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and Jesse Fauset sought to define a black identity that had appeared on scene. They claimed that this New belonged to a modern generation of black shaped by great events of teens and twenties, from Great Migration North, World War I, industrialism, urbanism, and nationalist liberation movements to growth of internationalism following Bolshevik Revolution. To be sure, black writers and activists were often at odds over just who New was. Garvey, for example, championed what he saw as African character of New Negro, while Randolph welcomed arrival of a left-leaning, working-class New Negro. More often than not, however, definitions of New asserted that black belonged to a unique race of human beings whose ancestry imparted a distinctive and invaluable racial identity and culture. The New Negro, it was claimed, had thrown off yoke of racial prejudice that equated blackness with barbarism and was proud of his or her race and heritage. Many writers also believed that New Negro's racial revaluation would help to produce a friendly revaluation of black by white America. Writers heralded arrival of New as beginning of a phase of American history in which production of black culture would assist African in winning respect long overdue in US and abroad. At heart of New discourses of 1920s lies a crucial contradiction, one with important implications for discussions of black identity today. Writers claimed that New was shaped by modernity yet retained in some way a racial essence or character that preceded modernity. The New was as old as Africa but as contemporary as a jazz club in urban Harlem; his racial was as ancient as Hughes's dusky rivers (Voices 155) yet as modern as Garvey's Black Star Line ships ready to take black diasporic masses back home to Africa. The New had the instinctive gift of folk spirit (Locke, Youth 51), which did not preclude his evolution into a type of ... a city Negro (Johnson 285). In a word, new black identity also retained a good amount of an old, premodern racial self. Granted, not all Renaissance writers asserted that New was both premodern and modern. Exceptions stand out, such black socialists who, for a time, rejected racial categories out of hand, and George Schuyler, who called New Renaissance Negro-Art Hokum for claiming that black are a distinct race somehow unaffected by the same economic and social forces that mold actions and thoughts of white Americans (1173). (1) But taken as a whole, New discourses are caught between two poles: a notion of a premodern racial identity whose origins lie in ancient Africa and a concept of a modern self not exclusive to black Americans. A number of current literary studies of New have all but laid to rest racial essentialism predicated on concepts of a universal black soul or blood transmuted generationally. These critiques show how such essentialism reproduces fallacious premises integral to scientific racism dating back to period of slavery as well as to antiracist writers who problematically borrowed from these pseudoscientific discourses to argue against racism. …

O brother, let's go down home: loss, nostalgia and the blues

The blues genre is commonly (and not incorrectly) regarded as a key marker of African-American identity and one with ‘deep’ (folk, or ‘down home’) roots. But this status is inadequately understood unless it is placed in a context of inter-racial exchange, in which ‘roots’ are a product of a complex transaction between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’. This territory is explored in terms of a thematics of loss, nostalgia and trauma, evident both in blues content and in the historical structure of revival to which the genre has been continually subject. A useful background is the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a nostalgic celebration of nostalgia with a blues/bluegrass inter-racial dimension, and a productive theoretical framework is provided by Lacan's approach to fantasy, loss and nostalgia.

Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity

Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity

Hip-hop Realness and the White Performer

Hip-hop's imperatives of authenticity are tied to its representations of African-American identity, and white rap artists negotiate their place within hip-hop culture by responding to this African-American model of the authentic. This article examines the strategies used by white artists such as Vanilla Ice, Eminem, and the Beastie Boys to establish their hip-hop legitimacy and to confront rap music's representations of whites as socially privileged and therefore not credible within a music form where credibility is often negotiated through an artist's experiences of social struggle. The authenticating strategies of white artists involve cultural immersion, imitation, and inversion of the rags-to-riches success stories of black rap stars.

Migrating to the movies: cinema and black urban modernity

Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction A Nigger in the Woodpile: Black (In)Visibility in Film History Part One: Onto the Screen Chapter 1. To Misrepresent a Helpless Race: The Black Image Problem Chapter 2. Mixed Colors: Riddles of Blackness in Preclassical Cinema Part Two: Into the Audience Chapter 3. Negroes Laughing at Themselves? Black Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban Modernity Chapter 4. Some Thing to See Up Here All the Time: Moviegoing and Black Urban Leisure in Chicago Chapter 5. Along the Stroll: Chicago's Black Belt Movie Theaters Part Three: Behind the Camera Chapter 6. Reckless Rovers versus Ambitious Negroes: Migration, Patriotism, and the Politics of Genre in Early African American Filmmaking Chapter 7 We Were Never Immigrants: Oscar Micheaux and the Reconstruction of Black American Identity Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Racial(ized) Identity, Ethnic Identity, and Afrocentric Values: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges in Understanding African American Identity.

A survey of the literature reveals that there is conceptual confusion and inconsistent and sometimes inappropriate usage of the terms racial identity, ethnic identity, and Afrocentric values. This study explored the extent to which Black racial(ized) identity attitudes were related to ethnic identity and Afrocentric cultural values. Two hundred and one African American college students attending a predominantly White university or a historically Black university completed the Cross Racial Identity Scale (B. J. Vandiver et al., 2000), the Nadanolitization Scale (J. Taylor & C. Grundy, 1996), the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (J. S. Phinney, 1992), and the Africentrism Scale (C. Grills & D. Longshore, 1996). Results of a canonical correlation indicated 2 significant orthogonal roots that were labeled a nonracialized ethnic identity and a racialized ethnic identity. The results suggest important similarities and differences among the various identity constructs. Implications for racial and ethnic identity research and Afrocentric research are discussed.