Black Hands Research Articles

Plastic monsters: Abjection, worms, the Cthulhic, and the black single-use plastic bag

The single-use plastic bag is the most legislated item of plastic in the world, banned in over 92 countries. The bans are largely concentrated in Africa and the Caribbean, where the plastic bags are often black and the plastic footprints small. The bans have destabilised essential economic, social, and technical arrangements of marginalised communities reliant on plastic engagements and adaptations to improvise against multiple, overlapping, incursive forms of violence. This article seeks to understand the spatial and material nature of these legislative actions and the particular item of single-use plastic they target. Acknowledging the (spatialised) material realities of the single-use plastic bag, this article argues that these bans are a legislative response to the black plastic bag as spatialised, racialised, sexualised, abject Other. Drawing from monster theory, the article reflects on the trans-corporeal body burdening of black plastic bags and the black hands, black bodies, black markets, and black, corrupt, illicit actions with whom and which they are associated. Reconceptualising the (black) single-use plastic bag as an agape, plastic monster that defines, patrols, and transgresses cultural/economic boundaries, this article calls for making explicit the vermicular activities within economic marginalisation and distinguishing them from the discursively constructed amorphous, tentacled mass.

Effect and reflect: opening the ‘black hands’ of foreign involvement in the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests

ABSTRACT This paper examines foreign involvement in Hong Kong’s 2019–20 protests. It focuses on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) and local supporters’ accusations that foreign ‘black hands’ fomented chaos on the streets of the city. The paper argues that these accusations are partly a consequence of actual external involvement in the tumult. However, this factor alone does not explain Beijing’s advocacy of the ‘black hands’ thesis. The CCP’s perceptions of the role of foreign forces in the social unrest have also been shaped by mirror imaging in the context of Hong Kong’s Cold War history as an intelligence and covert action frontline, as well as the city’s contemporary socio-political attributes.

White Faces, Black Hands: Race, Counterhistory, and the Poetics of the Letterform

White Faces, Black Hands: Race, Counterhistory, and the Poetics of the Letterform Nikki Skillman (bio) In the opening pages of her book Hollywood Forever (2017), harmony holiday reproduces a handbill the Citizens’ Council of Greater New Orleans distributed in the mid-1960s, when her father’s career as an R&B artist was at its peak. “NOTICE! STOP Help Save The Youth of America DON’T BUY NEGRO RECORDS,” the flyer proclaims, warning that “the screaming, idiotic words, and savage music of these records are undermining the morals of our white youth in America.” holiday’s choice to present a color facsimile of the document without commentary invites readers to examine it closely, while its reappearance in magnified excerpts interspersed among her poems requires us to keep looking at it throughout the book. It is as if, in the transparency of the text’s open hatred, holiday senses that there is more to see, or perhaps an end of seeing—a final inscrutability that is made all the more disturbing by the blandness of the handbill’s visual form. Embodying the ideals of clarity, order, proportion, and functionality that exploded into popular design at midcentury, the New Orleans flyer is set mostly in Futura, the iconically modern, neutral bearing of which credentialed it to appear on the plaque left on the moon to commemorate a mission “for all mankind.” The typeface courses [End Page 359] through Hollywood Forever in the reproductions of the flyer and in the titles of the poems, haunting the book’s interwoven pronouncements on Black celebrity culture at midcentury, white artistic appropriation, racial violence, and subversive Black art. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Back cover of Harmony Holiday, Hollywood Forever (Albany, NY: Fence Books, 2017). On the back cover of the book, Holiday transforms the New Orleans handbill into a substrate for her own inscription, mimicking its layout and typographic style in a superimposed text that dispels the flyer’s auratic power while maintaining its spectral presence. Issued by “HOLLYWOOD AFRIKANS & THE CITIZENS’ COUNCIL FOR REPARATIONS™ HOLLYWOOD, KALIFAS, CALIFORNIA” (Fig. 1), Holiday’s mock handbill urges “BIBLE BLACK” readers to “Help revive Black America from the artless stupor of celebrity culture” and to “BOYCOTT corporate imitations of black music on the radio.” “The screaming mediocre noise on those records,” she writes, “is packaging the suffering of American Africans to sell around the globe in the service of the false doctrine of white supremacy.” Like so many of the poems in Hollywood Forever that incorporate typography borrowed from archival ephemera, Holiday’s parodic graphic maneuver on the back cover of the book suggests that any act of writing involves inhabiting the page as a palimpsest of historical “misuse” (71), as she puts it, where public discourse meets private significance.1 “Call your father and tell him you love him,” she writes onto the document that so menacingly targeted her father and artists like him; “Séance if you have to.” Hollywood Forever demonstrates [End Page 360] that approaching inscription as a cultural practice implicated in histories of oppression and exclusion begets daunting expressive impasses, but letterforms also emerge in the book as formal proxies for repressive orders that the poet can in turn subject to symbolic reconstitution and counterfactual improvisation. Holiday’s allusive uses of marked typography to evoke archival traces of racist history suggest the tendency of letterforms to become racialized through patterns of use. The capacity of typography to accrue such cultural freight lends social and political significance to its manipulation as an element of literary form. Breaking with the prevailing literary “ethic of typographic invisibility” that persisted throughout the twentieth century and into the present, Holiday is one of a number of contemporary poets who deploy “visible” or “marked” letterforms to explore the racial valences of inscription as a cultural institution while also diverging from the experimental typographic practices of the white avant-garde tradition.2 Through visual allusions to the aesthetics of historical pages, these poets sound the depths we perceive, consciously or unconsciously, in typographic surfaces. They deploy conspicuous letterforms to reveal how racial meanings are woven into the “endless tapestry” of what Michel de Certeau calls...

Review: The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century, by Keneshia N. Grant

Review: <i>The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century</i>, by Keneshia N. Grant

In Black Hands: Tswana Chieftaincy and the Ethiopian Church Movements of 1880–1910

ABSTRACT The history of colonialism in Africa is often portrayed as a confrontation between black Africans and white Europeans, but African adoption of black solidarity as a feature of their liberation movements was a gradual process. Scholars have sometimes traced the beginning of that process in southern Africa to the ‘Ethiopian’ church movements of 1880–1910, particularly in the ways that they were encouraged by African-American resistance to racism in the United States. Cases of Christian independency in Tswana chiefdoms during that time, however, were shaped more by local forces than by the Pan Africanism that was arising in European-controlled towns, and they are better understood as products of nineteenth-century Tswana politics than as early examples of twentieth-century African nationalism.

On Birds, and: Elegy as a Railroad Watch, and: Axis Mundi

On Birds, and: Elegy as a Railroad Watch, and: Axis Mundi Jae Dyche (bio) ON BIRDS Appearing in the blush threads of morningor deep in the indigo hours, alone,or gaggled in the damp ryegrass— sometimes humming amongthe thrashed wheat, a few chestnut-banded, others with naked vermillion heads,the impossibility of their bodiescarried on graceless primitive legs. Below the sugar maples, robins.Descendants of one who'd pluckeda thorn from the temple of the dying Christ, while sparrows scuttled and whistledat the feet of Romans and the unbaptized. What of starlings, the interminablepitchy chorus? Souls of suicides perhapsas they purr and rattle low in the cedars, I think, in purgatory there are only black birds,their stygian wings pressing intothe backs of the penitent. In Heaven, peacocks.Resplendent and, according to the Greeks,incapable of decay. [End Page 96] Unlike Levis's wren in the gravelflushed with lice and emptiness— In truth there is no parable,even in the instant when hundreds of ordinarysmall birds thrust their wings against the air and the whole history of empire-building,high rhetoric, scientific inventiongives way in the fervor of their strokes. This is what is meant by divine. This,and the little blood-fat mites riddlingthe feathers, each a kind of god, carried on the headof a white-breasted nuthatchskittering across the limbs of apple trees. [End Page 97] ELEGY AS A RAILROAD WATCH The watch—gifted to my grandfather(or great-grandfather?) from the B&O Rail Company, token for his service; the hours, I'm told,spent between his fiddle and whiskey— its black hands resting at exaggerated numerals,5:56 and thirty seconds; have for some time, though I couldn't say for how long;or his name; or the angle of his jaw, the lines beneath his eyes; whether his stubble glintedthe same auburn as my father's— all I know is he was a railroader,of the many chafed and bent; hammering spikes into Appalachian bedrock—and Appalachia is unforgiving place. Yet someone had to lay the rails;hitch America with pins and girders, corroded relics of industry and the engine; of the new world.When father's people settled here, the mountains were frontier or Allegheny—or fine river; before the Potomac flushed with rust [End Page 98] left by generations of freight cars ferrying coalfrom our hills to Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago; to power another man's machines,soot etched to the row homes and fellowship halls staggering towards the Potomac's metallic depths:Piedmont, Cumberland, Martinsburg, cracked mortar and ocher ghosts.Nonetheless, except a finger-worn crescent on the back, the watch is polished; keptin a silk pocket envelope in father's bureau; in mine now:and I don't want it to be there— what do I know of granite and iron-straps, or scabs;of a day's hard labor, the weight of the sledge; the dialects of oak and creosote.Of 5:56 and thirty seconds. Of the steady outlying host of whistles; smut collecting in the brick,around puddles and porch steps, my father's tennis shoes wet and loose. What do I knowof Salvation Army clothing; of to provide for. [End Page 99] Of his blotched shoulders; or brow against a windowof the coach car, morning fog gathering, unspent seconds on the glass.What could I know of the sage cotton curtain drawn across the hospital room;of the whole of a man's parts set onto legal paper and notarized:bone and blood; ore and hot slag, the space of the train car benchbetween father and daughter; Mid-Western bethels of steel and exhaust;my father lost in the syllables of great named trains: Empire Builder, City of New Orleans,California Zephyr, syllables trembling and lurching forward beyond abeyance;beyond the Allegheny Front and Cumberland Valley; further than Pittsburg smokestacks and Ohio River;into the open expanse of memory. [End Page 100] AXIS MUNDI At the center of gravity's pullis a kitchen table, chipped laminate at the corners, dusted in whole-meal flour,skitters of biscuit...

Abolicionismo penal? Mas qual abolicionismo, "cara pálida"?

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Os discursos abolicionistas que brotam em nossa margem, de modo geral, ignoram o racismo como ideologia, fazendo eco ao abolicionismo escravocrata que manteve a Casa Grande intacta ao modular toda sua arquitetônica racista dentro da democracia monocromática. Assim, mantêm os privilégios recebidos como herança de um mundo projetado e construído branco por mãos negras, perpetuando o racismo na exata medida de seu silenciamento. Um abolicionismo penal brasileiro deve retomar o projeto de emancipação racial oitocentista, fincado em base afroespistêmica para romper as profundas barreiras do nosso apartheid, sob pena de transformar-se em um novo instrumento do sistema de controle racial/social, remodelando, novamente, a exemplo das prisões, as Senzalas, e aniquilando os Quilombos.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Black hands push back: Reconsidering the rhetoric of Booker T. Washington

ABSTRACTBooker T. Washington has long been considered a great compromiser—but not in a way that reflects positively on him. In his infamous Atlanta Exposition Address, he supposedly compromised with the segregationist South in a push for mere economic opportunity for African Americans. This essay, however, reconsiders Washington’s rhetoric, including his speech in Atlanta, by exploring the ways he spoke about human hands, deploying a language that positioned his listeners as agents of resistance capable of pushing back against systems of oppression. Beyond offering a reinterpretation, however, I argue that Washington adeptly navigated the tensions of race, geography, and body of his era and thereby expanded the constituency of civil-rights participants beyond those clustered in Northern urban communities. Ultimately, Washington’s rhetoric of hands prompts us to reconsider his place in the American and African American rhetorical traditions, and it demonstrates the importance of geography in rhetorical criticism.

Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America by Douglas R. Egerton

Reviewed by: Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America by Douglas R. Egerton Barbara A. Gannon (bio) Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America. By Douglas R. Egerton. (New York: Basic Books, 2016. Pp. 429. Cloth, $32.00.) To many Americans, the African American Civil War military experience begins and ends with the story of a single black Massachusetts regiment as told in the movie Glory. Ironically, the movie does not record the military experience of all black regiments organized by Massachusetts officials, or even cover the entire war. Massachusetts recruited and organized three “colored” regiments. The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, which the movie implies was destroyed in the climactic final battle, went on to be an enormously successful regiment that would fight again in places such as Olustee, Florida. Similarly, the Bay State recruited and fielded the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Infantry and the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry; these units served in crucial campaigns in the war’s last years. Douglas R. Egerton, professor of history at Le Moyne College, chronicles the story of all three regiments and their members—from their muster into service until the war’s end and beyond—in Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America, cowinner of the 2017 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. While historians have explored a number of aspects of the black military experience in the Civil War, this is the first time that these three regiments have been examined in a single volume. Egerton believes these [End Page 154] regiments were critical because “virtually all Americans—white and black, Confederate and Unionist, Republican and Democrat—understood that the three black regiments were to serve as a test case.” If these “soldiers succeed[ed] and [fought] brilliantly, that would open the door for other Northern states to begin recruiting African Americans.” If these men failed and lived down to the expectations of their detractors, “that performance would not only put an end to the experiment but set off repercussions for American society for generations to come” (7). It was the action of these men that “transform[ed] a white man’s war into a revolutionary struggle for freedom” (9). Much of the fate of what began as a white man’s war rested in black hands. Examining three Civil War regiments may seem like a daunting task, but Egerton made it more manageable by focusing on fourteen men—black and white soldiers, officers and enlisted men. According to Egerton, “Some had been born into slavery, and others were sons of privilege. Most survived the conflict, and some did not” (8). He begins their stories before the war and continues into the postwar era and on into the twentieth century. The best known of the fourteen men was Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, who died in the assault on Fort Wagner but found immortality in poetry. The title of Egerton’s book, Thunder at the Gates, was inspired by the poem “Robert Gould Shaw,” written by the famous poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose father served in the Fifty-Fifth. Lesser-known white officers include Philadelphians and brothers Edward Needles Hallowell, who commanded the Fifty-Fourth after Shaw’s death, and Norwood Penrose Hallowell, who took charge of the Fifty-Fifth. The lesser-known Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry was commanded by Charles Francis Adams Jr., who descended from both U.S. presidents named Adams. Though Frederick Douglass’s sons belonged to the unit, Egerton’s success in re-creating the life of the common African American soldier in these units—former waiters, laborers, and escaped slaves—represents one of the most valuable contributions of this study, adding to the history and memory of the black military experience. Yet this magnificent narrative history is more than a valuable contribution to the historiography of the black soldier. It is an absorbing and tremendously moving story that will likely attract a broad readership. The reader becomes totally absorbed in the lives and deaths of these fourteen men and their comrades. In light of the work’s importance, I propose focusing on what might be done in future studies. Egerton does...

Notes on a Marxist Interpretation of Black American Literature

As its title Notes on Interpretation of Black American Literature indicates, this paper is tentative and suggestive. It aims to present some initial thoughts about subject, raise some relevant issues, and chart some possible directions that criticism of black could take. Perhaps first question to be confronted is this: What does phrase a interpretation of black American literature mean? As obvious as answer may at first appear to be, it is not. Even though Marx and Engels left large body of commentary about art, they did not devise an original, formal, Marxist aesthetic system. Therefore, as one writer has put it, the history of aesthetics has been history of unfolding of possible applications of ideas and categories to arts and to theory of art. This yields many approaches and critical possibilities. However, at base of them all is belief that writer and work are dialectical products of particular historical moment, conditioned by economic-class realities. With this conception of as starting point, one can move in many directions (tracing correspondences between art and class, arguing revolutionary function of art, demystifying existing artists and works, and so on) or adopt methodology of any number of critics (Georg Lukacs, Ernest Fischer, or Herbert Marcuse, to name only three). For general, introductory purposes of this paper, a interpretation of black American literature can be taken simply to mean looking at body of black American from perspective of Marxism to see what relationships exist between two. This would involve examining elements in literature, as well as critiquing from point of view. Specifically, investigation could encompass at least five different tasks: (1) compiling bibliography; (2) studying authors and their works; (3) studying works of non-Marxist authors which contain elements; (4) discussing according to categories of realism, modernism, and socialist realism; and (5) comparing critical tenets with literature. Undoubtedly, most basic service that scholar could provide would be making list of works which would be necessary and helpful to interpretation of black literature. While Baxandall bibliography, Marxism and Aesthetics, contains section on black writers, reference that goes beyond this is needed. 2 The bibliography should list black writers and works, secondary criticism of them and their productions, and other sources which provide historical, sociological, and literary background (for example, James 0. Young's Black Writers of Thirties and Harold Cruse's The Crisis of Negro Intellectual). Al works which concern blacks and Marxism-communism-even those which are not focused on writers and literature-would be valuable. The bibliography should also be annotated to provide maximum guidance and assistance, especially to beginning students. Many of books and articles included in it would have an anti-Marxist, anti-communist bias. (Notation would indicate this as well as identify strongly partisan works.) Consequently, critic could see opposing view (which bibliography would also supply) and/or study raw materials and basic documents personally in order to form his or her own conclusions. An obvious beginning approach to per se could certainly be study of black writers and their works. Looking at writer as whole would necessitate paying attention to both his Marxistoriented and non-Marxist-oriented works, but former would be of greater interest. Furthermore, many black authors were for only period of their careers, and when they ceased subscribing to philosophy, they usually stopped overtly presenting that world view in their writings. The list is impressive: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Amiri Baraka, to name some of them. The nature of criticism given these writers would, of course, vary according to volume and quality of their works, their general stature, and degree to which they express philosophy. Richard Wright, for instance, has been accorded great deal of this type of critical attention. One of poems which he wrote in first eager flush of enthusiasm, I Have Seen Black Hands, is fairly well-known, anthologized, and commented upon in terms of its political origin. The same thing can be said of two of stories in Uncle Tom's Children

The Jazz Farmer and: Flared

The Jazz Farmer and: Flared Patrick Sylvain (bio) The Jazz Farmer for Art Farmer (Aug. 1928-Oct. 1999) Blades bled pain in his voice When he mentioned the wings he grew Flying to Stockholm, then Vienna To cultivate his art. After his last set at the Regatta bar, The pressure of his large palms Made an imprint on mine. America has been a difficult terrain for farmers. Black hands plowing land to raise home-grown crops were bulldozed, blocked, black-marketed. Art’s talent dipped in shadow, a rigged world where toilers are spat on. What he produced was not brash, his melodic lines strung deep peace with penetrating healing. Europeans salivated over his taste: Organic, full-bodied, round with an edge. Through his trumpet or the flugelhorn Art farmed his own art causing bopping heads to swim into the music. Ears, like butterflies fluttered by his lifting and reflective sound. I closed my eyes and felt the music traveling; sometimes like an albatross, or prowling like a cheetah. Blood rushed, spines shivered warm notes filtered to the solar plexus I became butter. You took us there, a baptism of musical grace, Art Farmer and Clifford Jordan waded in silk blues, blowing sunflower and apple seeds from golden horns into top-soil ears. I grew into your field of organic phrasings, as your trumpet and flugelhorn morphed into a hybrid voice, trident and yet mellow. Your flumpet became singular, your permaculture. Warm melody, two masters in a field where rhythm, lodged bone-deep, helps ferment and hybridize as if composting compositions in mycorrhiza-like terrain. Soul feeding. Feeding your soul, your soil, your fertility. [End Page 386] Eyes closed, rich brass paradise, nourishing on lyrical tones, until someone shouted: “YEAH! Art Farmer the master.” You humbly replied with a simple thank you as you bowed, offering your flumpet while praising in a deep soothing voice: “the one and only Clifford Jordan.” The tenor was sharp, C sharp sharper than a sickle it became the chalice of pure sound. Jordan roasted his horn crisp, holding the mouth-piece so his tongue could: panmpa pahda peedee panh won bon. Soft fire, sounds of passion that blazed out anger with music planted in the center of hearts. Keep me in the warm rain of your sound that reigned-in snapped ropes of your birth-land, where maestros of division rot-gutted souls, plotted against your skin. Still, you blew angels. Farmer blew to ocean core, fishing out ancestral notes from every scale, every cell. Sowing restrained, a tight swing. I reaped the Farmer’s notes. Elements cultivated from a tradition: Fresh, pure and bittersweet. When I heard of Art Farmer’s death, I picked up my dormant trumpet and tried to blow “bloodcount.” But my lungs were empty of notes. Flared For a moment, all stood still: No breath, no shouts, just the sweat-filled Air. A canister clicked, pin dropped. Feet dashed, hooves sounding On the hot pavement, then screams. Thick lachrymatory agents invaded the air, Penetrated throats, gagging. Fits of coughs drown out birds’ calls, We cried, begged for water. Shoes, sandals left behind. The sun blasted its rays, flared. Doors slamming shut as men In battle-gear flared the air [End Page 387] With more tear gas canisters¾peppery. Fearful of blindness, I pulled my swimming goggles From my camera bag as masked phantoms Closed in. I backtracked from the crowd, A few geared heads turned, an ugliness stamped In the mind like blitzing bats in the night. [End Page 388] Patrick Sylvain Patrick Sylvain is a poet, writer, social critic, and photographer, and is published in several scholarly and creative anthologies, journals and reviews. He earned an Ed.M. from Harvard GSE, an MFA from Boston University, and he is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Brandeis University. Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press and Saint Louis University

"Trash Is Gold": Documenting the Ecomafia and Campania's Waste Crisis

In her 1906 account Il ventre di Napoli [The Underbelly of Naples], the Italian writer and journalist Matilde Serao describes the “picturesque” cultural practice of milking cows and goats in the city of Naples, depicting herders who bring their animals into the urban center and pass fresh milk directly into the hands of waiting servants: “those cows covered in mud, that cowherd with black hands that dirty the glass” (28).1 Serao expresses concern for the practice, which she finds profoundly unhygienic, and worries that, while other cities prohibit farm animals from circulating in the streets, in Naples, “the custom is too picturesque to abolish” (28). Along via Santa Lucia, she notes that the confusion of fishermen, laundry, and card games, is “completely picturesque” and for that reason “ever outside of the laws of the building industry and of hygiene” (30). Pleasure in looking at the quaint scenes of Naples's underbelly, she suggests, distorts the gaze of the onlooker who is unable to activate that gaze to make ethically necessary changes. Serao describes a gaze that belongs to the grand tourist, the landscape painter, the politician in Rome: people who look from a safe distance and fail to engage meaningfully with the landscape in their sights. According to the journalist, conditions that should be unacceptable are instead integrated into a permissive idea of rustic beauty. Serao's treatise thus indicts the picturesque as a political practice that simultaneously sees and refuses to see.

Shifting economic power and a shifting onomastic landscape in post-1994 South Africa

Before the negotiated political settlement in the early 1990s that eventually culminated in the first fully democratic elections held in South Africa in 1994, the economic power in South Africa (and by implication also the ‘naming’ power) was firmly in the hands of the white (English and Afrikaans speaking) minority. The economy was dominated by longstanding companies that functioned largely in English, the language often referred to as the ‘language of the economy’. A predictable spin-off of the new dispensation was the coming into being of new indigenous African names in the economy, reflecting the new power relations particularly where ownership was in black hands or where existing concerns joined hands with black empowerment groups. Existing companies, obviously not keen on relinquishing company names that had been in existence for many decades, often took Black Economic Empowerment on board by creating a new company or brand, often reflecting an indigenous African name, within existing structures. This contribution reflects on the power of indigenous African names in the economy in post-1994 South Africa and highlights examples from the highest echelons, i.e. companies listed on the Stock Exchange, through the full spectrum to the more humble economic enterprises operating only in intimate and ‘own’ circles. Following Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1986), it is argued that such names in the economy, regardless of the particular context in which they operate, should be considered as assets and capital being strong indicators of success, power, competitiveness, participation and identity, and also in some cases (notably where ownership is not [fully] in black hands) as acknowledgement of the powerful potential contained in the numbers of black consumers.

Subverting the pastoral: the transcendence of space and place in J.M. Coetzee’s &lt;i&gt;Disgrace&lt;/i&gt;

This article investigates how J.M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” (1999) – portrayed as a postcolonial and postmodern fictional event – embodies, problematises and subverts the vision of the pastoral farm novel tradition by transcending traditional configurations of space and place. The novel offers a rather bleak apocalyptic vision of gender roles, racial relationships and family relations in post-apartheid South Africa and expresses the socio-political tensions pertaining to the South African landscape in terms of personal relationships. As a fictional reworking of the farm novel, “Disgrace” draws on the tradition’s anxieties about the rights of (white) ownership, but within a post-apartheid context. As such, “Disgrace” challenges the pastoral farm novel’s “dream topography” (Coetzee, 1988:6) of the family farm ruled by the patriarch – a topography inscribed – with the help of the invisible labour of black hands – as a legacy of power and ownership to be inherited and cultivated in perpetuity. Accordingly, the concept “farm” is portrayed as a contested and liminal space inscribed with a history of violence and dispossession – a dystopia. This article therefore conceptualises “Disgrace” as an antipastoral farm novel that reconfigures the concept “farm” – within the context of the South African reality – by subverting, inverting and parodying the structures of space and place postulated by the pastoral farm novel.

Black Hands, Blue Seas: The Maritime Heritage of African Americans. Mystic Seaport

Black Hands, Blue Seas: The Maritime Heritage of African Americans. Mystic Seaport

Mob culture: hidden histories of the American gangster film

I. Producing Crime: Gangs and the Gangster Film Gangsters and Governance in the Silent Era Lee Grieveson, King's College, University of London Why Boys Go Wrong: Gangsters, Hoodlums, and the Natural History of Delinquent Careers Richard Maltby, School of Humanities at Flinders University, South Australia Gang Busters: The Kefauver Crime Committee and the Syndicate Films of the 1950s Ronald W. Wilson, independent scholar residing in Lawrence, Kansas II. Gangster Transgressions: Gender and Sexuality Ladies Love Brutes: Reclaiming Female Pleasures in the Lost History of Hollywood Gangster Cycles, 1929-1931 Esther Sonnet, University of Portsmouth A Gunsel Is Being Beaten: Gangster Masculinity and the Homoerotics of the Crime Film, 1941-1942 Gaylyn Studlar, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Mother Barker: Film Star and Public Enemy No. 1 Mary Elizabeth Strunk, Syracuse University Good Evening Gentlemen, Can I Check Your Hats Please?: Masculinity, Dress, and the Retro Gangster Cycles of the 1990s Esther Sonnet, University of Portsmouth, and Peter Stanfield, University of Kent at Canterbury Waddaya Lookin' At?: Re-reading the Gangster Film Through The Sopranos Martha P. Nochimson, Mercy College Film Studies Program III. Other Gangsters: Race, Politics, and the Gangster Film Black Hands and White Hearts: Southern Italian Immigrants, Crime, and Race in Early Cinema Giorgio Bertellini, University of Michigan American Like Chop Suey: Invocations of Gangsters in Chinatown, 1920-1935 Peter Stanfield, University of Kent at Canterbury The Underworld Films of Oscar Micheaux and Ralph Cooper: Toward a Genealogy of the Black Screen Gangster Jonathan Munby, Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University, UK Walking the Streets: Black Gangsters and the Abandoned City in the 1970s Blaxploitation Cycle Peter Stanfield, University of Kent at Canterbury

How I See Things

How I See Things Yusef Komunyakaa (bio) I hear you were sprawled on the cover of Newsweek with freedom marchers, those years when blood tinted the photographs, when fire leaped into the trees. Negatives of nightriders develop in the brain. The Strawberry Festival Queen waves her silk handkerchief, executing a fancy high kick flashback through the heart. Pickups with plastic Jesuses on dashboards head for hoedowns. Men run twelve miles into wet cypress swinging bellropes. Ignis fatuus can't be blamed for the charred Johnson grass. Have we earned the right to forget, forgive ropes for holding on moonstruck branches? Every last stolen whisper the hoot owl echoes turns leaves scarlet. Hush shakes the monkeypod till pink petal-tongues fall. [End Page 753] You're home in New York. I'm back here in Bogalusa with one foot in pinewoods. The mockingbird's blue note sounds to me like please, please. A beaten song threaded through the skull by cross hairs. Black hands still turn blood red working the strawberry fields. Yusef Komunyakaa Yusef Komunyakaa, the subject of this issue of Callaloo, teaches at Princeton University. His most recent book of poems is Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part I. The numerous prizes, awards and honors he has received for his poetry include a chancellorship with the American Academy of Poets, the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (Wesleyan University), the William Faulkner Prize (Universite Rennes, France), the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Copyright © 2005 Charles H. Rowell From Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems © 2001 by Yusef Komunyakaa and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Black hands and white hearts: Italian immigrants as ‘urban racial types’ in early American film culture

Through the concept of ‘character’ or ‘urban racial type’, traversing literature, science and metropolitan life, Bertellini reconsiders early American cinema's colour-based biracialism epitomized by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). In the New York-based film industry race also emerged from the city's dense intermingling of ‘white ethnics’ and broader shifts in epistemological emphasis – from inheritance to the environment. If Italian immigrants were racialized as innately violent in early gangster films, after 1915 heartbreaking melodramas of destitution and misfortunes adopted instead a combination of still othering and universal characterizations.Half the people in ‘the Bend’ are christened Pasquale…When the police do not know the name of an escaped murderer, they guess at Pasquale and send the name out on alarm; in nine cases out of ten it fits. Jacob Riis, 1890I like to play the Italian because his costume, his mannerisms, his gestures, and his unlikeness to the everyday people of the street make him stand out as a romantic and picturesque person. Actor and director George Beban, 1921

Inscriptions in the Dust: A Gathering of Old Men and Beloved as Ancestral Requiems

The American a landscape of contradiction and continuity, is cast a repository of cultural memory in twentieth-century African American literature. Many writers recuperate South a site of reconnection with ancestral history this symbolic geography bears witness to what Jean Toomer labels pain and beauty of African American history. Frank Shelton amplifies on paradoxical construct of South: The dichotomy between kinship with Southern land and oppression blacks experienced on that land informs black Southern version of pastoral.... it seems clear that, many current black writers (Southern and non-Southern alike), unlike white Southern writers, meaning of life is to be found through forging a personal connection with Southern history, a history that involves enslavement, prejudice, and racism but nevertheless strengthens individuals through offering them a relationship with land and a in a community of people nurtured by a environment. (13,28-29) Carolyn Jones has added to this discussion, eloquently exploring configuration of South a site of violence and labor which African Americans wrested a homeland: Black Americans shaped landscape of American South. The houses that were built, human beings that were nurtured in them; forests that were cleared, and crops that were planted and harvested were all tended by Black hands and formed by African cultural practices, technologies and sensibilities. The landscape of in beginning so alien to African slaves, became, most part, neither legally nor economically their own, but became spiritually their own through their own labor and under most difficult of circumstances. (37) In this way, numerous critics have articulated South a complex geography of and exile: Baraka labels Black-South a homeland and the scene of crime (143, 142); Atkinson and Page remark on joy and shame of South (97); Yaeger considers Southland as ancestral torture chamber and ancestral home (56); Fultz argues that, for many African Americans, South remains a of comfort and contradiction--a to turn toward and a to turn from (79); and Beavers contends that men in Toni Morrison's fiction, South is a place of origin and curse (61). Farah Jasmine Griffin's explication of Billie Holiday's song Strange Fruit is particularly fitting this analysis: Her portrayal of naturally beautiful South, marred by realities of burning black bodies, gives meaning and emotion to descriptions written by novelists.... Holiday places black body at very center of pastoral. Its blood nourishes fertile earth which in life it tilled. (15-16) For Griffin, Holiday's insistence on lynched and burned black body in landscape disrupts spurious constructs of South Arcadia. Griffin seemingly intends to applaud Holiday forcing a recognition of South's violence; however, Griffin's language has larger implications this study. For my purposes, placing black body in very center of pastoral results in a revision of American Southern genre itself. While, in African American pastoral, this reasserted black body is enslaved body--lynched, maimed, tortured, and abused by racism and its institutionalized powers--it is also ancestral body, with its accompanying folk culture and practices, spirituality, community, and kinship networks. Ernest Gaines implicitly affirms conceptual model of this analysis: think that's what I have in my writing--you have that pastoral, agrarian thing--the fields, and streams and trees, and all that sort of thing, but then there's that other thing going on all time (Interview 318). …

Discovery of red colobus monkeys (Procolobus badius) in the Niger Delta with the description of a new and geographically isolated subspecies

AbstractA distinctive and geographically isolated population of red colobus monkey Procolobus badius has been discovered in the Niger Delta within what was previously believed to be a discontinuity in the distribution of the species some 1200 km across. This Delta red colobus represents a new subspecies, P. b. epieni, most closely resembling the taxon on Bioko (P. b. pennantii) in such features as black hands and feet, and lack of orange‐brown tones on head and neck, but differing in having whitish arms and hair whorls above the ears. It is less similar to subspecies on the mainland to the west or east (P. b. waldroni in Ghana and P. b. preussi in Cameroon, respectively), implying a complex zoogeographical history for the species. The Delta red colobus occupies an exceptionally low lying habitat of marsh forest, and its range lies within an area that had been independently identified as a centre of primate endemism, so it may have survived climatic vicissitudes of the Pleistocene in a Delta refuge. As it is confined to an area of about 1500 km2, it is now vulnerable to increasing human pressures.