Black Discourse Research Articles

Interior Intersubjectivity: Hortense Spillers's Theory of “the One”

Abstract There is much in Hortense Spillers's work to celebrate—from black feminism to literary criticism. One of her crucial contributions, however, has received little, if any, scholarly attention. Calvin Warren calls this a black discourse theory. Although we've focused on “the American Grammar Book” and its discursive violence, her proposed “solution” to this violence is virtually neglected. These remarks are intended to foreground this intervention by reconstructing her discourse theory of “the One” and “Interior Intersubjectivity.” In particular Warren notes the influence of Jürgen Habermas on her discourse theory, and how both find psychoanalysis beneficial in the task of restoring speech and addressing muteness. In short, this reconstruction provides a brief overview of the theoretical infrastructure rather than an exhaustive exposition and assessment.

From Black Zionism to Black Nasserism: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Foundations of Black Anti-Zionist Discourse

This article explores the transformation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ viewpoint on Israel between the early and mid-20th century. It highlights historical and political forces that compelled him to support the Zionist project, especially Black Orientalism, and the connections between Black Nationalism and Zionism, connections between Black and Jewish diasporic experiences. Finally, the article reveals how Gamal Abdel Nasser and the connections between Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism he forged, and the Suez Canal crisis propelled a new era in the Black discourse on Israel, envisioning Israel as a neo-colonial state set to protect Western interests in the Middle East.

BLERD: The Exploration of Blackness in gaming spaces, practice of fan-interpretations, and creation of counterpublics

The politics of visibility is determined and impacted by existing physical and digital environments. In recent years, the focal point of game studies has shifted to the culture and impact that games have on everyday life in and out of virtual spaces, one of these spaces being fanfiction communities. Gaming spaces and counterpublics have historically been sites for critical intervention and play. Fanfiction is a unique landscape that culturally exists at the intersection of pop culture, politics of space and play. Black fanfiction communities and counter publics are an important source for understanding Black discourse in academia. As such it is important to consider how fanfiction communities add to existing narratives and create a collaborative individual experience. Fanfiction is an art form that centers Black cultural production. Drawing on the works such as of Mary Flanagan in Critical Play, Intersectional Tech by Kishonna Gray, and Black fanfiction authors, I argue that Fanfiction provides grounds for understanding and integrating Black discourse surrounding fandom and video games within academia. Including these interpretations of game media complicates the players understanding and interaction with the game as a technological artifact.

Breakfast with “Her inky Demons”: Celebrity, Slavery, and the Heroine in Late Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

Late eighteenth-century British newspapers were vehicles of celebrity and scandal; they were also venues for the advertising of slaves. The juxtaposition made newspapers a potentially explosive and productive object in British fiction. This essay identifies a formulaic scene, originating in William Hayley’s popular poem The Triumphs of Temper (1781) and recurring in various forms in fictions by Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, as well as many less well-known novels of fashionable life, in which a young white woman experiences sudden unwanted celebrity by reading about herself in a morning newspaper. This essay introduces the term “dyspathy” for the mechanism by which these fictions present the heroine as always threatened by, but inevitably rescued from, a newspaper sphere in which older discourses of blackness, and metropolitan unease at the commodification of humans, were tightly but implicitly associated. Emerging white supremacist ideas of race are shown to be fundamental to the construction of feminine domestic subjectivity in these fictions.

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Review: American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship, by Niambi M. Carter

Review: <i>American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship</i>, by Niambi M. Carter

Review of Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures by André Brock, Jr. (New York University Press)

In Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, interdisciplinary scholar André Brock, Jr. offers a timely and powerful examination of Blackness in the digital age. The book centers Black technology use from Black perspectives and investigates the online distribution of Black discourses. In six exploratory chapters, Brock reconceptualizes Black technoculture in a way that corrects deficit models of Black digital practice.

Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question

Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question

Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminine Identity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

The present study is going to read Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the light of Patricia Hill Collins’ notions of “matrix of domination” and “controlling images” to see how the novel produces resisting Black discourse. This study argues that these notions can be discussed through Morrison’s attempts at storytelling within the novel, resulting in the creation of a distinctive identity. The significance of this study lies in its use of a new approach, that of Collins’ notions, to the novel. In the beginning, an introductory note on Morrison and Collins is presented. This is followed by a survey of theoretical background on Collins’ ideas. Then, the questions of identity and storytelling are explored in the novel. Finally, the concluding notes are presented.

Seeing Black: Foote’s Afro-American Company and the Performance of Racial Uplift in Imperial Germany in 1891

Abstract By 1914 African American entertainers had become a regular part of variety show programmes across the German lands, but despite their evident popularity, they have received little scholarly attention except as part of the pre-history of jazz. But even before 1914 African American performers took an active part in transatlantic conversations about the meanings of race, challenging racialized understandings of nation, culture and modernity. To illustrate the challenge presented by African American performance and the range of German responses, this article takes up a little-known case study, the German tour of William Foote’s Afro-American Company in 1891. Led by a white impresario, the show brought together the broad range of black popular performance—minstrel song and dance, jubilee choirs, social dance and concert singing—to demonstrate the rapid progress of African American cultivation since emancipation. This message of racial uplift was framed in ethnographic terms, making a case that African Americans, like Germans, possessed distinctive folk forms that could be refined into cultivated forms with universal value. This framing made an uplifting case for an equivalence between African American and German cultures, but there were also ambivalences built into Foote’s project as organizers played to audiences’ racialized expectations. Analysing German commentators’ responses to performances of American blackness allows us to interrogate competing discourses of blackness in the German lands and the ways they could be used strategically. More broadly, those responses also illustrate how ideas about race were negotiated, produced and popularized in commercial entertainments.

Diaspora and Entanglement

Abstract This essay interrogates rising interest in the concept of “entanglement” by Black studies scholars. Beginning with its definition in theoretical physics, the essay moves to Karen Barad’s “agential realism” to explore how diasporic ways of knowing are used to define and connect Black identities across space and time. The majority of the essay focuses on close readings of two contemporary novels on diasporic pasts, presents, and futures, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) and Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu (2018), to contrast “vertical” and “horizontal” epistemologies, respectively. Although Gyasi’s novel impressively and warmly constructs a Middle Passage epistemology between the United States and West Africa, this essay argues that its reliance on vertical relations between the past, present, and future is inimical to producing an equality of relations between Black subjects. However, Makumbi’s novel, while defying traditional diasporic narrative structures by focusing on diaspora within East Africa, specifically Gandaland and Uganda, and by rejecting fixed hierarchies of relations for horizontal ones, in which all Black subjects are equally knowing and unknowing, offers a model for more equitable diasporic epistemologies in Black discourses.

Poder Negro in Revolutionary Cuba: Black Consciousness, Communism, and the Challenge of Solidarity

Abstract This article analyzes the personal experiences of African American refugees in Cuba as well as the ways in which the Cuban government sought to mitigate and frequently repress the appeal of the movement of Black Power / poder negro to which Cubans might autonomously ascribe. By universalizing Communist standards of culture, behavior, and political values that leaders glossed as colorless, state agents ranging from the Ministry of Education and the media to Fidel Castro and Cuba's top intelligence chiefs anticipated and co-opted historical memories of slavery as well as cultural expressions of black pride. They did so, however, with varying degrees of success, much as the long legacy of devotion to slave-crafted religiosity and the survival of black discourses of identity reveal then and today.

The promise of political blackness? Contesting blackness, challenging whiteness and the silencing of racism: A review article

This article reviews three books that examine black discourses and perspectives on whiteness and delineate the negative impacts of structural, institutional and interpersonal racism on the life chances and inclusion of people of colour within the national imaginary through both epistemic and material violences. The books explore practices of silencing which surround racism, facilitated by post-racial and colour blind frames which deny people of colour’s lived experiences of racism: Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race; Hirsch’s Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging and Andrews’ Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century. The review focuses on the British context. It explores the politics of place and the journeys undertaken by those marked as racially Other to belong and the recuperative potential of a form of intersectional politics as a means of understanding and navigating how we might overcome divisions between differentially marginalised groups to challenge the system of racism premised on white privilege and dominance more effectively. It concludes with arguing that a politics of discomfort is required to dislodge white privilege from its seat of comfort.

How to think the world? Achille Mbembe on race, democracy and the African role in global thought

How to think the world? Achille Mbembe on race, democracy and the African role in global thought

“The Negro's Peculiar Work”: Jim Crow and Black Discourses on US Empire, Race, and the African Question, 1877–1900

In 1887, T. Thomas Fortune published an editorial, “The Negro's Peculiar Work,” in the black newspaper theNew York Freeman, wherein he reflected on a recent keynote speech delivered by Reverend J. C. Price on 3 January in Columbia, South Carolina, to commemorate Emancipation Day. Price, a member of the Zion Wesley Institute of the AME Zion Church, hailed from North Carolina and his denomination considered him to be “the most popular and eloquent Negro of the present generation.” On the occasion meant to reflect on the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation (which went into effect on 1 January 1863) for present-day African Americans, Price turned his gaze away from the US towards Africa. In his speech “The American Negro, His Future, and His Peculiar Work” Price declared that African Americans had a duty to redeem Africans and help them take back their continent from the Europeans who had partitioned it in 1884–85. He railed,The whites found gold, diamonds, and other riches in Africa. Why should not the Negro? Africa is their country. They should claim it: they should go to Africa, civilize those Negroes, raise them morally, and by education show them how to obtain wealth which is in their own country, and take the grand continent as their own.Price's “Black Man's Burden” projected American blacks as agents of capitalism, civilization, and Christianity in Africa. Moreover, Price suggested that African American suffering under slavery, failed Reconstruction, and Jim Crow placed them in a unique position to combat imperialism. He was not alone in seeing parallels between the conditions of “Negroes” on both sides of the Atlantic. Many African Americans, Afro-Canadians, and West Indians saw imperialism in Africa as operating according to Jim Crow logic: white Europeans would subordinate and segregate Africans, while economically exploiting their labor to bring wealth to Europe.

Real/Talk: Glenn Ligon's Re-Membering of Queerness in (Post-)Black Discourse

Real/Talk: Glenn Ligon's Re-Membering of Queerness in (Post-)Black Discourse

Eusebia Cosme and Black Womanhood on the Transatlantic Stage

A woman of African descent born in Cuba, Eusebia Cosme relocated to the United States during the late 1930s. She quickly became an internationally renowned performer of “Afro-Antillean” poetry, dressing in elaborate costumes as she recited the works of prominent poets who included Nicolas Guillén, Luis Páles Matos, and Langston Hughes. This article argues that Cosme utilized male-written texts, in addition to attire and choreography, to engage discourses of blackness on the transatlantic stage. The article compares her performances to those of her female contemporaries who included Josephine Baker, Carmen Miranda, and Katherine Dunham. It analyzes how Cosme employed a range of identity maneuvers that allowed her to challenge depictions of African culture as primitive, and to address the history and legacies of African enslavement. Finally, the article explores the ways in which various audiences—African American, white American, white Latin American, and Afro-Caribbean—translated her performances of blackness. Cosme’s success stemmed from her ability to construct a nuanced representation of blackness within both Cuban and Afro-diasporic perspective.

Promoting sovereignty, rapping mshkiki (medicine): a critical (Anishinaabeg) reading of rapper Tall Paul's ‘prayers in a song’

ABSTRACTThis paper analyzes Leech Lake Anishinaabe rapper Tall Paul's ‘Prayers in a Song.' The essay explores these questions: In what ways do Indigenous people use hip-hop to articulate ideas of sovereignty? Through hip-hop, how do Native artists challenge the ideas of authenticity and the modern/traditional binary? Located at the nexus between hip-hop studies and Indigenous studies, this essay argues that, by using both Indigenous and Black discourse styles, Tall Paul is able to assert Indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous artists challenge the idea of ‘authenticity' and the modern/traditional binary by constructing new meanings of what it means to be Indigenous in the twenty-first century. The essay focuses on three major themes. First, it analyzes how hip-hop challenges the modern/traditional binary; second, rapping in Anishinaabemowin is a political project that expresses Indigenous sovereignty; and, finally, hip-hop serves as an avenue through which Indigenous people can reclaim urban spaces, where mainstream society continues to render them invisible.

Within a ‘white’ affective space: racialization in Iceland and development discourses

Racialization does not always take place through discourses of blackness as emphasized in American research, or exclusively in relation to immigration, as emphasized in the European context. As an affective process, racialization is entangled with particular views of nation-states and a sense of belonging in a wider community of nations where humanitarianism can play a large role. By looking at international development in Iceland, the paper emphasizes that racialization takes place in different spheres of society where Icelandic racial subjectivities are shaped by global ideas of humanitarianism and international development that intersect with older Icelandic anxieties of belonging with sovereign northern European nations. The article emphasizes whiteness as being embedded in local Icelandic conversions of nationhood and belonging, entangled in global international development discourses that involve mobilizations of the idea of ‘humanity’.

For Us by Us (FUBU): The Politicized Space of Black Women's Entrepreneurship in Canada

The Black presence in Canada is most commonly described as a homogeneous foreign presence that emerged during the 1960s. In this paper, I explore how Afro-Caribbean women entrepreneurs in creative industries deploy a counter-discourse against hegemonic racist white discourses of blackness in Canada. The counter-narrative they deploy, that I call For Us by Us discourse, challenges the official national story of Blacks in Canada. Black women rearticulate, through their business activities, a Canadian blackness that is defined by them. This articulation is described in both local, as rooted in Canada and global, Black diaspora, ways. The notion of the Black diaspora allows for great malleability and fluidity of notions of identity and belonging. This powerful political counter-discourse can, however, also be exclusionary when it too homogenizes identity. This counter-discourse, however contested, is made possible through entrepreneurship. Participation in this status of work is very strategic, in that, it allows for the creation of political spaces, aimed at developing community, that are often denied to Blacks.