Black Activists Research Articles

Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin By Eugene M.Avrutin. Russian Shorts. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, 160 pp. $16.15 (paper). ISBN 978‐1‐350‐09728‐5

Only in the last decade or so has racism undergone serious inquiry by scholars of Russia. Western academics had long taken at face value the words of Russian ethnographers and anthropologists that Russians themselves, as a people on the margins, had an innate understanding of the non-White societies they encountered and, in many cases, conquered. The Soviet Union, of course, portrayed itself as a bastion of anti-racism. Eugene Avrutin's slim volume attempts to synthesize new scholarship that finds race in important places in Russian politics and culture from the tsarist period to the present. Racial thinking, and racialization, developed in uneven ways in the multiethnic tsarist empire and Soviet Union. Even at the height of racist attacks in the Russian Federation a decade ago, the state, as well as its predecessors, never openly embraced racist rhetoric, unlike so many governments in the West. But racism lurked behind encounters that ended in mass violence as well as those that produced feelings of isolation among non-Slavic subjects or citizens. The book's opening chapter is its strongest, as Avrutin offers a nuanced and concise discussion of the appearance and development of racial theories in Russia, and how the color line in the region was “inherently messy” (p. 6). Racialization—the process of turning peoples into fixed others, culturally or biologically—underwent continual shifts within modern Russia, depending on the nature of encounters, the ideology of the regime and many other factors. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the author's previous publications and expertise, much of the focus of this volume is on anti-Semitism. Racial theories and practices had a particular resonance for Jewish peoples of the tsarist empire. Racial theorists worked to attribute them with all types of unfavorable attributes. Whereas racial categorizations appeared more complicated given long interactions between peoples who mixed, for example, on Slavic and Turkic frontiers, Jews were seen as a people apart. As part of Bloomsbury's “Russian Shorts” series, this volume has to be extremely selective in its examples. It was unfortunate, however, that the largest minorities in tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, or the Russian Federation are barely mentioned. We do not hear anything of substance on the Turkic peoples, from Tatars to those of Central Asia, or peoples of the Caucasus or Siberia. In addition to his focus on Jewish populations, the author spends a significant amount of space on the tiny number of African-Americans in the USSR. Black activist W.E.B. Dubois's observations are highlighted, even if it could be argued his thoughts on Russia are mainly used to underscore his views on racial relations in the United States. African-Americans had a particular status in the Soviet Union, due to their place in Cold War maneuvers. Avrutin does discuss the more central issue of substantial numbers of African students who passed through Soviet universities and faced significant racial prejudice even as the USSR was working to portray racism as a phenomenon linked to capitalism and the United States. The last chapter, which focuses on the Russian Federation, details the sharp rise in violent racism in the 2000s. Extremist groups felt a degree of impunity in attacking non-Whites. Putin's regime proved complicit in foregrounding Slavic superiority even as it made no overtly racist appeals. Avrutin sees Russianness and Whiteness as mutually reinforcing each other over this period, though it is hard to talk about a single “white power movement” in Russia (p. 92). What is missing in this chapter is a discussion of the sharp decrease in racially motivated attacks since the mid-2010s. The book does briefly mention that most ethnic Russians were neither active nor complicit in racist behavior, but the question of broader attitudes and context still lingers, and how and why things change over time. This volume offers a succinct portrayal of how racialization worked at different times and places from the late tsarist period to the mid-2010s. Its selective nature and focus on Jewish and African-Americans as on, supposedly, opposing poles of racist treatment means that we miss much about how racism worked in the vast majority of interethnic encounters in modern Russia.

“Since When Is Steve Urkel White?” – Vocal Blackface In The German Dubbing Landscape

Dubbed (i.e., lip-synchronized audiovisual translation of) movies and television are ubiquitous in German-speaking countries and often consumed without active reflection of their production. Due to this inattention, the domestication / replacement of cultural references in US media translated into German often goes unnoticed. Translational decision-making becomes highly problematic, however, when entire cultures are replaced or disregarded as a result. In 2004, applied linguist Robin Queen demonstrated that Black actors were dubbed by white voice actors with German dialects and sociolects traditionally read as “blue collar.” There has not been any follow-up research to her crucial contribution that remains topical: the (re-)presentation of Black Germans and other minoritized voices in German media is still based on colonial and other racist stereotypes, which are in turn reinforced through popular culture in dubbing. In the United States, pop-cultural monoliths such as "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" reluctantly recast voice actors for characters of Color after having come under pressure by discussions surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement and documentaries such as Hari Kondabolu’s “The Problem with Apu.” Following up on Queen’s work, this article provides accessible, up-to-date data and a snapshot of the current practice of casting white voice actors for characters of Color in US popular culture dubbed into German for German-speaking markets, defined here as “vocal blackface.” This research shows that these casting choices have been and remain in place largely without criticism by means of a close reading of publicly available German voice actor casting online database. The article provides the foundation to identify structural and societal reasons why recastings are not (yet?) happening in Germany.

Editors' Preface

Editors' Preface Patricia Anne Simpson and Birgit Tautz For this editorial team, volume 30 represents our valedictory effort. Over the past year, some of us were able to transition from the Zoom squares to in-person conferences; we tentatively removed our masks, applauded with real hands, and continued debates in the corridors outside conference rooms. Nevertheless, we have come to value even more the continued opportunity to share work in this venue, and we as editors have particularly enjoyed bringing current debates, controversies, and new directions of ongoing, exciting research to these pages. Hans Hahn's "Wielands Singspiel Alceste, ein Stein des Anstoßes für Goethe?" opens this issue with an exploration of the role Wieland's libretto, in particular, played in a literary dispute with Goethe. A certain synergy emerged in a cluster of contributions around issues of gender, influence, and female marginalization among Carl Niekerk's "Lotte's Bird, Female Desire, and the Language of 'Sexuality' in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers," Maryann Piel's "La Roche and Goethe: Gender, Genre, and Authorship," and an editorial by Margaretmary Daley in which she challenges us to confront gender bias. While Niekerk dwells on the scene of the canary's kiss as a moment in the history of sexuality at the edge of its biological and cultural construction, Piel latently picks up on Daley's challenge, restoring La Roche's constitutive role in Goethe's oeuvre (rather than the other way round, as much scholarship has it). Departing from scholarly analyses to the genre of editorial, Daley seeks to challenge women writers' continued relegation to the margins of an eighteenth-century literary canon that she sees revolving around Goethe and/or other "great men"; in picking bias as a Schlagwort, Daley also begins to reflect on the state of the humanities more broadly, oscillating between the seemingly privileged position of choosing one's own research topics and the festering of structural inflexibilities that are contributing to the crisis of the humanities. The next essay in the line-up, "Things of Art and Amor: Mediation in Goethe's Römische Elegien," by Sebastian Meixner and Carolin Rocks, offers an innovative and compelling reading of the figure of Amor as poetic guide, matchmaker, rogue, servant, and mediator to Goethe's own Roman past. By coauthoring the essay, Meixner and Rocks present a model of scholarly research and writing that remains relatively rare in the humanities and that we wish we could have featured more often over the past five years. In "Reading Performatively: Disruptive Gestures in Heinrich von Kleist," [End Page xi] Katherine Pollock brings Kleist's gestures into the framework of contemporary performance theory to implicate the body of the reader in the cognitive production of meaning. We move to a section that resonates with responses to the persistence of bias; it is devoted to new work on "(White) Enlightenment Legacies." In four parts, the section showcases a direction in scholarship we believe is urgent: an inquiry into the role that German Enlightenment thought and the culture of the Goethezeit play in the persistence of anti-Black racism. These brief interventions recapitulate a series of conversations that have emerged from ongoing research and conference presentations. Introduced by Birgit Tautz and Patricia Anne Simpson—"Reexamining (White) Enlightenment Legacies Through a German Lens"—the section builds on novel attention to literature, race, and the Global South in two exemplary ASECS sessions that Tautz attended ("New Horizons"), as well as Simpson's reflection on "Black Actors: Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Decolonial Fantasies." Sarah Eldridge's "Interior Whiteness: Race and the 'Rise of the Novel'" previews the incoming coeditor's book in progress. The section closes with a Tagungsbericht by our colleagues Sigrid Köhler and Claudia Nitzschke, "Racial Classification, Slavery, and Human Rights: The Impacts of the Transatlantic Order in Eighteenth-Century Germany." While the interlude hashes out ongoing debates and the faultlines that chart the present and, hopefully, the future of German eighteenth-century studies, our final forum section glimpses into this future. It arose from a series of MLA panels devoted to the topic of "Unexpected Bodies in the Eighteenth Century." The contributors take a range of innovative and generative...

Black Actors: Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Decolonial Fantasies

Black Actors:Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Decolonial Fantasies Patricia Anne Simpson Beyond the scholarly sources found in specialized archives, libraries, and bookshelves (or digitized downloads), streaming services and popular series have piqued widespread interest in a Black presence in eighteenth-century European cultures. A number of binge-worthy shows—among them Shonda Rhimes Bridgerton (2021–22), Tony McNamara's The Great: An Occasionally True Story (season 1) and The Great: An Almost Entirely Untrue Story (season 2), and La cocinera de Castamar—adapted from a novel by Fernando J. Múñez by the same name, feature Black characters whose identities are comprised in unequal parts of historical fact, decolonial fantasies, and professionally progressive color-blind casting practices. Bridgerton imagines a Regency world in which Black royalty and aristocrats coexist with tradespeople and merchants. The presence of Black courtiers in the dark dramedy that unfolds in the Russia of Catherine II (The Great) raised some viewers' eyebrows, but the historical record attests to the partial reality of this "occasionally true story."1 And Múñez's novel follows the path of the protagonist, Clara Belmonte, an agoraphobic cook who catches the eye of a widowed duke in the palace Castamar, as she navigates her affliction and the marriage intrigues that surround the hero. Her character is loosely based on a composite of historical figures—the royal kitchen of Philip V was staffed by men—the person of interest is the duke's adopted brother, Gabriel de Castamar, a formerly enslaved Black man who was educated and elevated into the family. These amalgams of fact and fiction veer into controversies about historical accuracy and the inability of fantasy to right centuries of wrong. Each story indistinctly maps a topography transversed by economic, racial, and cultural politics networking Africa, Europe, and the Americas around 1800. Much is made of Catherine's Germanness, deftly delivered by Elle Fanning, in The Great—in particular, the ability to transfer Enlightenment theory into political practice. Perhaps we can imagine a popularized version of "Frederick—The Great?," but the Forschungsstand offers compelling reading with greater gravitas, for much current German studies scholarship is engaged in the project of decolonizing the long eighteenth century. The Black Lives Matter movements galvanized anti-Black-racist activism, which directly or indirectly has an impact on the work we do: this scholarship itself has a history—Black lives have always mattered.2 Of crucial significance, scholars across disciplines and regions are collaborating to make [End Page 119] hitherto unnoticed or marginalized materials widely available. One sterling example is the website Black Central Europe (https://blackcentraleurope.com/), which argues, "quite simply, that Black people have always been a part of Central European history."3 Literary and cultural studies scholars, among them Wendy Sutherland and Obenewaa Oduro-Opuni, have examined the texts and contexts of dramas and the Sklavenstücke.4 In early December 2021, the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa hosted a symposium devoted to the work of Wilhelm Anton Amo. Professor Josephat Obi Oguejiofor gave the keynote address, arguing for the central importance of Amo's influence on contemporary African philosophy. The unveiling of an Amo memorial plaque in the Department of Philosophy enhanced the solemnity of the proceedings, dedicated to the life and work of the first Black scholar to earn a degree from the University of Halle—Oguejifor noted that it would be more than two centuries before the second. Professor Oguejiofor also honored the legacy of Amo in African philosophy, lamenting that his name has yet to become widely known. Further, he affirmed the hybridity of Amo's life and work as Afro-European and Ghanaian-German and acknowledged the importance of studies by W. E. Abraham and V. Emma-Adamah as well as translations. Presenters from Ghana, Germany, Sweden, Nigeria, France, and the United States shared work on topics that included Amo's theory of impassivity (apatheia), his Tractatus, the theory of knowledge, migration policies, and the rights of Blacks in Europe, among others.5 As Oguejifor stated, "We do not need Amo and his success to tell us that slavery and racism, that these two practices are horrendous. … "It is likely that Kant knew of...

Остров тоталитаризма: «Макбет» Орсона Уэллса

By the time of the eventual success of the premiere of Macbeth (1936) directed by Orson Welles as part of the Harlem Negro project by FTP, the African American theater already had its own small but remarkable history. However, this production received a tremendous response and is still the subject of controversy among scholars: evidence of this resonance is the appearance of the feature film Voodoo Macbeth (2021). All roles were performed by black actors, and the action was transferred to Haiti during the reign of Henry Christophe. Critics were disturbed by the disrespectful attitude to the Shakespearean text, modern researchers — by the exoticization of the African American cultural code. The reason for the discussion was (and still is) the director's radical interpretation, which shifted the semantic accents from Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to the witches. By increasing their role quantitatively and qualitatively, Orson Welles, a contemporary of the growing totalitarian regimes, created a piece about the all-pervading evil leveling the human personality. Having changed the chronotope of Shakespeare's tragedy and rethinking the principle of working with Shakespeare's heritage, Welles, for the first time in the history of American theatre, invited black actors to perform universal characters, to work with classical dramaturgy. Article is based on vast amount of archival materials, critical reviews and researches on Orson Welles and the Federal Theatre Project. Article examines the steps of the formation of the director's and set designer’s concepts, a reconstruction of the production is executed among other purposes.

Black Protesters in a White Social Movement: Looking to the Anti–Iraq War Movement to Develop a Theory of Racialized Activism

On the basis of ethnographic and historical accounts, many movement scholars hold that differences in political expectations and interaction styles inhibit cross-racial collaboration in social movements. Inspired by this research, the authors ask three questions about minority participation in social movements and address them using a survey of more than 6,000 participants in the anti–Iraq War movement. First, the authors ask about relational inequality. Did Black protesters have fewer ties with the antiwar movement than Whites? Second, the authors ask about siloing. Were Black protesters disproportionately concentrated in specific movement organizations? Third, the authors ask if patterns of inequality were similar for Latino and Asian activists? The authors find evidence of relational inequality for Black activists but not Latino or Asian activists. They find evidence of siloing for all three ethnic groups. These empirical results are used to articulate an account of racialized activism with special attention to organizational processes.

Afro-Asian Intimacies Across Southern Cartographies: Race, Sex, and Gender in Toni Morrison's Home and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dao

Afro-Asian Intimacies Across Southern Cartographies:Race, Sex, and Gender in Toni Morrison's Home and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dao Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (bio) In 1953, following the Korean Armistice Agreement that ostensibly ended direct U.S. intervention in Korea (but, in reality, merely led to a recalibration of the unending Korean War), African American soldier Clarence Adams was one of twenty-one prisoners of war who refused repatriation back to the United States and instead migrated to the People's Republic of China. His decision was influenced by the antiblackness that structured the segregated U.S. South, curtailing his chances of upward mobility, as well as his compassion for the Korean civilians devastated by U.S. military intervention, prompting recognition of the shared oppression of Third World peoples.1 Twelve years later, during the Vietnam War, he broadcast a message to Black soldiers via Radio Hanoi, urging them to return to the United States: "You are fighting the wrong war. Brothers, go home. The Negro people need you back there."2 According to Daniel Y. Kim, "Adams mobilize[d] a historiography of a race war to cast both the Korean and Vietnam Wars as ones waged by a white empire against a colored population," exemplifying what Bill Mullens terms "Afro-Orientalism": a phenomenon in which Black activists turned to idealized Asian subjects for anti-imperialist and antiracist inspiration.3 I begin with Adams' story for three reasons. First, it highlights continuities between Black narratives of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Whereas historians have elucidated the experiences of Black soldiers during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, respectively, few studies have grappled with these two Cold War fronts in relation, noting patterns and [End Page 97] particularities in Black subject formation across the two U.S. imperial conflicts.4 With the signing of Executive Order 9981 in July 1948, President Harry S. Truman desegregated the U.S. military, exemplifying the United States' project of racial liberalism and bolstering the expansion of the liberal empire, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, even as Jim Crow laws continued to delimit the mobility of African Americans on the home front. Whereas the Korean War was the first U.S. experiment in militarized integration, it wasn't until the Vietnam War that the question of Black–white tensions in the military, transposed from the continental United States to the battlefront in Asia, gained widespread visibility. As Martin Luther King, Jr., famously observed in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech of April 1967: "[We watch] Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago."5 Segregation at home was only interrupted by "brutal solidarity" abroad: the uniting of Black and white soldiers in a common project of racialized wartime destruction.6 But continuities between the Korean and Vietnam Wars also led to political mobilization: many civil rights and Black Power leaders active during the Vietnam War era, such as Bobby Seale, James Forman, Ivory Perry, and Robert F. Williams, were radicalized during their experiences as Black soldiers in Cold War Korea.7 Second, Adams' story stitches together three southern spaces that are rarely discussed in relation: the U.S. South, South Korea, and South Vietnam. To focus on the southern-ness of these three sites is to trace the convergence of white supremacy, antiblackness, imperialism, and anticommunism that cohere at the intersection of the U.S. Civil War and Cold War politics.8 Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, amid the structural antiblackness of the segregated U.S. South, Adams joined the U.S. Army to escape incarceration at the hands of white policemen. This military service brought him to South Korea: a decolonizing nation that the United States had taken upon itself to protect in the Cold War struggle against North Korea, Communist China, and the Soviet Union. These south-south relationalities—the transposition of a Black subject of the U.S. South to the southern warfront of a new...

The Epistemological Asymmetry of Framing “Woman” via US Women's Rights Pioneers

AbstractNineteenth-century US social activist contemporaries Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth are memorialized as women's rights pioneers. White activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony cemented a generational canon. Black activist Sojourner Truth anticipated the eventual crystallization of intersectionality. These figures’ historical proximity underscores the high epistemological and political stakes of claiming gendered categories, namely via “woman” as a mark of aggrievement. I link concepts of intersectionality, epistemic agency, epistemic resources, and social movement framing to examine how “woman” is asymmetrically categorized. To this end, I perform a textual analysis of memorialized documents: “Declaration of Sentiments” (1848) by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States” (1876) by Susan B. Anthony, and “Ain't I a Woman?” (1851) by Sojourner Truth. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony frame “woman” as a single-axis and vertical category, ultimately deferring to the seeming preeminence of the US nation-state. By contrast, Sojourner Truth frames “woman” as a multi-axis and horizontal category by synthesizing her feminist consciousness, lived experience of enslavement, and personal religiosity. This article revisits key memorialized events by utilizing a conceptual toolkit that interlaces feminist and social epistemology with social movement theory.

Dean Martin: King of Cool“Sammy and Dino,” You Must Remember This

Dean Martin: King of Cool“Sammy and Dino,” <i>You Must Remember This</i>

To Boldly Go: How Nichelle Nichols and Star Trek Helped Advance Civil Rights by Angela Dalton

Reviewed by: To Boldly Go: How Nichelle Nichols and Star Trek Helped Advance Civil Rights by Angela Dalton Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor Dalton, Angela To Boldly Go: How Nichelle Nichols and Star Trek Helped Advance Civil Rights; illus. by Lauren Semmer. Harper, 2023 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780063073210 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780063292796 $12.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* 6-10 yrs Star Trek is a family favorite in our narrator’s house, and while the little Black girl loves the show’s intergalactic travels, she is especially thrilled to see a face like her own in Lieutenant Uhura. With that framing, the picture book biography then launches into a thoughtful, energetic look at the life of actress Nichelle Nichols, who ultimately saw her role on Star Trek as a way to engage with the civil rights movement and eventually advocate for diversity in NASA astronauts. The book [End Page 152] touches on Nichols’ childhood and her experiences as a dancer and singer, but the focus is mostly on her time at Star Trek, relaying both her excitement at bringing Uhura to life and the racism and complacency of Hollywood that almost made her quit the show—until a conversation with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. highlighted her unique position to be a role model for young Black children. Nichols’ story makes for an engrossing biography, and Dalton’s candid, direct text and Semmer’s bold illustrations expertly capture her fierce intellect and genial nature. The framework that places a young Black girl as the narrator of Nichols’ life is especially effective, emphasizing Nichols’ place among iconic Black actors. The stylized digital art has an appropriately funky ’60s palette with thick saturation and flattened but still dynamic figures. A closing note highlights Nichols’ work with NASA and her campaign to bring in women and BIPOC scientists. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Evangelical Black Activism in Brazil - Political Liminality and Situational Configuration ,

Evangelical black activism exists in Brazil since the 1970s. Its current public reemergence, however, is still under-explored in the social sciences. Moreover, part of the specialized literature has recently characterized this activism as incomplete – since its actors are considered to be ‘rejecting African inheritances’ – and advocates that black and evangelical identities are incompatible. Differing from this perspective, this article shows how evangelicals participate in the public problematization of racism; it proposes to address this issue with a non-essentialist approach in three arguments: 01. evangelical black activism has reemerged publicly; 02. actors configure their religious and racial identities according to the problematic situations and public arenas in which they engage, which requires scholars to adopt a situated and relational approach to this form of activism; 03. the ways in which they reemerge and configure their identities are conditioned by the politically liminal situation of evangelical black actors and, consequently, by their need to acquire the status of a legitimate social movement and legitimate evangelicals. This article presents partial results of a research effort conducted between 2019 and 2021, in which qualitative research methods and techniques were used, such as direct and participant observation (in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Pernambuco), semi-directed interviews, document analysis, and social media monitoring.

Systemic racism in data practices

Systemic racism in data practices

Breaking the ‘colour bar’: Len Johnson, Manchester and anti-racism

This article explores the overturning of the ‘colour bar’ in a Manchester pub in 1953. Led by Black boxer and Communist Len Johnson, the resistance and ultimate success in breaking the ‘colour bar’ tells much about Black agency, the relationship between anti-racism and the Communist Party, and the making and unmaking of race in modern Britain. The article outlines Johnson’s life up until 1953 and the history of the ‘colour bar’ in Britain that shaped Johnson’s career trajectory. In Britain, formal ‘colour bars’ existed, like that in boxing, but it was far more common for informal ones to operate that were only revealed through resistance to individual impositions. In the post-war years, Johnson spent much of his time challenging these unwritten ‘colour bars’ in Manchester as well as creating a new and explicitly anti-racist space, the ‘New International Club’. Such actions were part of a vibrant and dynamic politics led by Black activists in 1940s and 1950s Manchester. This piece shows how Johnson’s Communist Party membership was both central to Johnson’s activism, which included hosting Paul Robeson in Manchester to the consternation of the Pan-Africanists, as well as how the Party itself held back on its commitment to fighting for racial equality.

The algorithm knows I’m Black: from users to subjects

In October of 2018, several Black Netflix users took to Twitter to air their grievances about images in movie thumbnails featuring Black actors with minor roles, even when the movie itself was a majority white cast. In response to these critiques, Netflix claimed that because users are not asked about their racial identity, it is impossible to personalize the individual Netflix experience using identity markers. This article explores the interplay between algorithmic cultures and representations of race, examining the identity and voices of users and how their agency is affected within algorithmic systems. Users are seeking agentic traction in these algorithmic spaces, and this research begins to address how Black users are positioning themselves to make sense of the digital constraints placed on them. Black subscribers of Netflix heavily critiqued the algorithms used to advertise content to them, and I examine how Netflix constructs Black users as Black subjects in order to keep them engaged with the platform.

Acting and Race in Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Acting and Race in <i>Night of the Living Dead</i> (1968)

Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 by Damian Alan Pargas

Pargas’ thoughtful new book is not quite what it seems. Its title notwithstanding, Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 is not a comprehensive new history of fugitivity from North American slavery. It does not attend to every variety of freedom seeking; military service with the British during the War of 1812 in return for postwar liberty is, for instance, noticeably absent. Nor does it assess the political significance of freedom seeking in the sectional crisis and the coming of the Civil War. Instead, Pargas has delivered something no less useful—a new and conceptually powerful spatial analysis of fugitivity. Taking a continental approach, Pargas delineates three spaces of freedom for African Americans seeking liberty from slavery: (1) spaces of informal freedom, (2) spaces of semiformal freedom, and (3) spaces of formal freedom.This differentiation is fresh yet wholly intuitive. Spaces of informal freedom were those locations within nineteenth-century slave states in which enslaved people could try to pass for free by disguising their identities and origins—urban centers like New Orleans and Baltimore, or maroon communities like those in Virginia and South Carolina. Spaces of semiformal freedom encompassed those states north of the Mason–Dixon line in which legislatures (or, occasionally, the judiciary) had begun the process of abolishing slavery. Fugitives from slavery arriving in these jurisdictions could live in de facto freedom, though the threat of capture and rendition under the terms of federal fugitive slave laws meant that that their liberty was fragile and potentially reversible. In contrast, the only reliable guarantees of formal freedom for fugitives from slavery existed beyond the borders of the antebellum United States, typically in British Canada and Mexico.Pargas’ tripartite territorial typology certainly has its limitations. The legal jeopardy of those who escaped slavery by manumission was more modest than that of those who simply took to their heels; the emancipatory experiences of these two groups should not be confused or collapsed. Likewise, in stark contrast to those who resettled in southern Ohio or southern Pennsylvania, fugitives who escaped to the most northerly regions of the free soil states—say, New England, Michigan, or Wisconsin—generally enjoyed robust protection from re-enslavement before the passage of Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Furthermore, Canada and Mexico achieved free-soil status only belatedly—Mexico in 1829 and Canada in a drawn-out process that was not complete until 1834—and quality of life for Black newcomers to these two legal sanctuaries varied enormously.Nonetheless, by imposing coherence on something that was, in his own estimation, “messy and exceedingly complicated,” Pargas provides scholars and students alike with a clear and usable set of tools to think about space, migration, and security (7). To do so, he musters an array of methods and approaches. On the one hand, Freedom Seekers is a legal and constitutional history of Black liberty in which statutes and court cases loom predictably large. On the other hand, it is also a human history attentive to motivation, opportunity, and contingency. Black actors from James Somerset to Margaret Morgan play prominent roles throughout; Pargas takes pains to remind readers that enslaved people were never passive passengers on the Underground Railroad. Quite the contrary. They were self-emancipators. They freed themselves.Freedom Seekers is never flashy. The language is generally flat; no one would ever mistake Pargas’ prose for poetry. Some of the terminology (for instance, slaves, masters, and runaways) is also unhelpful and outdated. Yet the analytical payload delivered between these covers is remarkable. Pargas’ book not only builds upon his 2018 edited volume about the same subject but also effectively synthesizes the profusion of recent work about practical abolition by Baumgartner, Harrold, Walker, Blackett, Churchill, and many others.1

The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America

The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America

Racial Differences in Response to Chadwick Boseman's Colorectal Cancer Death: Media Use as a Coping Tool for Parasocial Grief.

The August 2020 death of Black actor Chadwick Boseman, at age 43 from colon cancer was a notable public event. Given Boseman's popularity, particularly amongst Black audiences, and racial disparities in colorectal cancer rates, public responses to this news provided a window into potential racial differences in expressing and responding to parasocial grief, that is, grief at the loss of a public figure. Additionally, given how the movies he starred in were easily viewable by audiences stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic and given his popularity on digital spaces like Black Twitter, this case offers insights into how media use can help people cope with parasocial grief. We conducted a mixed-methods survey study of audience responses Boseman's death. Quantitative results reveal that Black audiences had different rates of social sharing and movie viewing than non-Black audiences, with additional insights emerging from a thematic analysis of the open-ended data.

Retweet for justice? Social media message amplification and Black Lives Matter allyship

Abstract White allies can advance racial justice on social media by amplifying Black activists and educating their White friends. Social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram have different affordances for message amplification, with some showcasing the message creator and others the message amplifier. How might these visibility differences influence the reception of a message created by a Black activist and amplified by a White ally? Two online experiments (N1 = 328, N2 = 328) of White participants found that affordances prioritizing the White message amplifier over the Black message creator led to reduced perceptions of messenger racism when the message was holding White people accountable for the maintenance of racism. However, participants in these conditions also had a harder time identifying that the message creator was indeed a Black activist. These results demonstrate the important nuances of social identity and allyship effects in the context of social media affordances.

For Land and Liberty: Black Struggles in Rural Brazil

It is a troubling time to be hopeful about land and labor in Brazil. As Merle Bowen notes in the concluding chapter of For Land and Liberty, the current president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his administration have dismantled environmental protections, opened protected areas to agro-industrial development, and stalled programs that provide access to land for members of Brazil's quilombo communities. Gains from conditional cash transfer programs and the rewriting of public school curriculuma are being reversed, eroded, or eviscerated. Other attacks on the lives and livelihoods of Black and Brown persons in Brazil include assassinations of environmental activists, attempts to revoke affirmative action in higher education, and the undermining of public health efforts to address COVID-19, which has disproportionately affected Indigenous and other minorities.Bowen spent fifteen years examining the ways structural racism operates in rural areas of Brazil, where access to land and labor continues to be one of the most pressing issues. Residents of Black rural communities are corralled by a “highly concentrated and racialized system of landownership” (212). The slow and highly contentious land reform process competes with agro-industrial interests, logging and mining companies, grileiros (people who claim ownership with fabricated deeds), and environmental protection projects, resulting in forced relocation, dispossession, and shifts in the nature, extent, and types of labor available.Bowen assembled information from a vast array of sources and stakeholders including anthropologists, government ministers, landowners, and Afro-Brazilian activists, as well as archives, primary and secondary publications, and ethnographic data. She provides a detailed, close-up view of what this looks like “on the ground” for twelve Black rural communities in two very different regions: Bahia (in the northeast) and the interior of São Paulo. This attention to regional differences is an important complement to the scholarly literature, as it provides a deeper understanding of the history, local conditions, demographics, crops, instability of wage labor, and the gendered nature of labor, disrupting the tendency to homogenize or romanticize the struggles that quilombolas face.Chapter 2 traces the history, heterogeneity, and shifting agendas of Black activists and the efforts that led to the insertion of a land reform initiative in the 1988 Constitution (Article 68), which guaranteed permanent collective ownership to federally recognized Maroon communities (also called remanescentes de quilombos or quilombo remnant communities). There are an estimated four thousand quilombo communities in both urban and rural areas in Brazil. The communities Bowen focuses on are representative of those still waiting for a land title. The titling process is long and complicated, and until they receive a land title, residents of traditional Black communities are under constant threat of expulsion or relocation. Petitions for land titles have generated charges of reverse racism and violence from those who refuse to accept the legitimacy of quilombola rights to territory. Since 1988, receiving a title has been the exception rather than the rule.Bowen's research provides a fine-grained assessment of the challenges in applying Article 68, including operationalizing “who” is a quilombola, and how shifting jurisdictional procedures, state laws favoring titling, and market forces have impacted the daily lives of rural quilombolas (Chapters 2 and 3). The anchor or signature of identity for those in Black rural communities is “rootedness” to the land they occupy, drawn from an intergenerational accumulation of agroecological knowledge and practices, a distinction from urban communities that do not rely on the land for their livelihood (Chapter 4).In Chapter 5, Bowen turns to the “commodification of Quilombola culture” as a revenue strategy and a chance for “self-determination and self-making” (182). There has been less investment in quilombo tourism than in tourism along coastal beach areas, ecotourism in the Amazon region, or pro-poor/reality tourism in urban shantytowns. Despite the lack of evidence, assertions are made about the potential positive impact of tourism in quilombos through job creation. Although there is little research on tourism in quilombos, some suggest that it presents a simplified and incomplete rendering of the past (and present) by focusing only on African cultural retentions while obscuring the knowledge, experiences, and skills of enslaved workers in a nation that was built on their labor. Success is more evident when quilombolas set the terms for what to showcase and have a major stake in ownership and representation. Unfortunately, conflict with tourist agencies' agendas and other imbalances in the quilombo tourism industry have reinforced racial, class, and gendered disparities, and do little to reduce poverty.Scholars of Latin American studies, Africana studies, history, geography, anthropology, and agrarian studies will get an extensive overview of the regional complexities in applying a land reform program, including what was promised and what has failed to deliver. It is not altogether a grim portrait; but the long-term benefits of these policies in transforming the livelihoods of those in Black rural communities remain contingent on access to labor as well as a land title.