Black Soul Research Articles

Czarny ma tylko jeden los. I jest on biały – analiza problemów tożsamościowych społeczeństw afrykańskich w stosunkach międzynarodowych

“BLACK HAS ONLY ONE FATE. AND IT IS WHITE” – AN ANALYSIS OF THE IDENTITY PROBLEMS OF AFRICAN SOCIETIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS “Black Skin, White Masks” – the famous work of Franz Fanon is an elaborate analysis of the “Black-White” relationship, with the assumed emancipatory goal of releasing the coloured man from himself. His “black soul” is a white man’s social construct and it is impossible to get rid of it due to economic and political conditions and cultural subordination. Subsequent generations reproduced and/or superseded the problems of colonial subordination in various ways, but there is no doubt that identity attitudes still continue shaping the relationship between post-colonial communities and Western countries. I present the conclusions from Fanon’s reflections against the background of a short introduction to the issue of collective identities and the importance of their analysis for the study of international relations. The research goal of the article is to show how civilisational subordination disrupted the shaping of identity processes in colonised communities at the individual and collective level.

Fabricating the Black Psyche: Saint Elizabeths Hospital and The Psychoanalytic Review.

Between 1913 and 1917, The Psychoanalytic Review published several studies that argued for a distinct Black psyche. They were edited by the journal's co-founder, William Alanson White, and conducted by the staff at Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, where White served as superintendent. This article provides a brief historical context for better understanding of why and how The Review paid attention to the comparative study of race.

Correction to: “May God have mercy on his black soul”: Consul General Olof Lamm’s Private Diplomatic Efforts to Save Jews from Nazi Persecution

Correction to: “May God have mercy on his black soul”: Consul General Olof Lamm’s Private Diplomatic Efforts to Save Jews from Nazi Persecution

Underground Topography of the Political Unconscious in Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison

Coming from different socio-economic backgrounds but sharing the experience of being black intellectuals in the US before the Civil Rights movement, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison met in New York in 1937. Although they eventually grew distant, their friendship generated some of the most important political writings of African-American literature. They were interested in the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx for possible solutions to the “Negro question.” They argued for a Freudo-Marxist synthesis as a remedy for the broken black psyche under white supremacist pressure. With its dimension on American racism, the synthesis they proposed offers a distinct and important contribution to the dominantly European canon of the theory. This article investigates the political psychoanalysis of Wright and Ellison as represented in their ideationally interlinked novels, Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground (2021). It analyses how their novelistic writing emerges as a dynamic space to elaborate upon a political psychoanalysis through their own race-based version of a theoretical synthesis. Moreover, the study also offers a new approach to new material, as Richard Wright's The Man Who Lived Underground remained unpublished until it was recently rediscovered and printed for the first time in 2021.

Promoting Cross-Cultural Psychology Research in the Caribbean: Best Practices in Intersectionality

Given the Caribbean region’s post-colonial history with entrenched and daunting challenges of: structural racism, patriarchy, and colorism as epiphenomenal outcomes, it is imperative that cross-cultural investigators using 21st century research paradigms honed and crafted from strengths-based approaches interrogate issues surrounding national, cultural identity, and cultural hybridity. Additionally, push-pull factors in migration, acculturative influences, psychological resilience, and coping strategies within non-pathologizing frameworks of inclusivity and intersectionality are fodder for empirical research. These holistic perspectives borrow from multiple perspectives in Black Psychology paradigm shifting as they reject and deconstruct Eurocentric models in explaining Black psyche and behaviors. The discursive frame around subaltern voices, is that, it deracinates “grand” theories, splinters and challenges hegemonic assumptions. Moving from the mechanistic, binary constructions placing a premium on only quantitative models with a concomitant devaluation of qualitative approaches, this author argues that the kinds of cross-cultural research that offers the most qualitatively-rich analysis is ethnography, as this approach embraces concepts of lived epistemological realities of participants. As a cross-cultural tool, it triangulates participant observations, interviews, and case studies. The ethnographic report generated from this data-gathering methodology and comprised of multiple sections, illuminates the following: the uniqueness of indigenous psychologies; provides important historical contexts; addresses issues of language, cultural rituals, and norms; and grounds the work within multidisciplinary perspectives offering more integrative, cogent analyses of cultural phenomena. Further, even research ensconced in knowledge-production for academic consumption should hue to the penultimate, translational goals of nation building, community flourishings, and human capital development. Keywords: cross-cultural research, Caribbean psychology, intersectional research

“May God have mercy on his black soul”: Consul General Olof Lamm’s Private Diplomatic Efforts to Save Jews from Nazi Persecution

Abstract This article examines the private diplomatic efforts of Olof Lamm. A Swedish Jewish ex-diplomat and businessman, he used his personal network to protest against Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany, and informally lobbied the United States to increase its immigration quotas. Shedding light on these informal back-channel diplomatic networks, the author provides examples of the attitudes and obstacles Lamm faced when dealing with individuals, and reveals how those he petitioned justified their defense of Nazi ideology and actions and their own restrictive immigration policies.

Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

Fanon and Hair

What would it mean to think about Frantz Fanon’s work on race, embodiment, and identity in the context of the contemporary cultural politics of Black hair? Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks offers us some key terms for deepening our engagement with this issue and, in that continuing relevance, tells us something important about the persistence of the colonial gaze in contemporary life. The discourse around black hair has evolved to mean more than what it meant in the 1960s and 1970s. Though it continues to revolve around the symbol of black beauty, celebration and resistance, the symbol is not exclusive to one single hairstyle choice. One of the perils of freedom is the ability to exercise the right of choice. That includes the freedom to choose how you want to look and what language you want to speak. This is about giving agency to black bodies to make choices that make meaning for them and not define it around the white gaze or white ear. In trying to create safe spaces, we must take caution as not to create barriers around new thoughts and ideas that are uncategorizable. The existence of blackness has long been denied so we should take caution to not disqualify aesthetics that do not fit a specific type of mold. As a black woman born to Senegalese parents, raised in the United Arab Emirates and now living in the United States, I have always been around multiple cultures and that came with the ability to now speak multiple languages (Wolof, English, Arabic and French). And my hair journey…has ranged from having an Afro, braids, perming my hair, going through a period of transition, wearing it natural, adding extensions and the list goes on. Many have tried to disqualify my blackness for one reason or another. But, in no way am I less Black than another because of a hairstyle choice or the languages I speak. My blackness has always been spoken to me by my family. My blackness is a constant reminder to me by society. My blackness is rooted in my experiences. My blackness is rooted in my very existence. As long as I continue to live in my black body, no one can take away my blackness, and all the marvelousness it is capable of. To this, Fanon might suggest I read his Black Skin, White Masks as a way to explain my back-and-forth hair journey between natural and permed to further understand the effects of colonialism on the black psyche. Though Fanon’s perspective can explain so much this, I would like to put his text in dialogue with Rokhaya Diallo’s Afro where she compiles the experiences of 120 Afropeans, men and women, living in France and their experience of wearing their natural hair out. They range from professors, bankers to ministers and civil servants. Hair dictates a lot of factors in a black woman's life. Although they are talking about hair, their experience conveys what it means for a black body to exist in predominantly white spaces. By putting these two texts in dialogue, we can extend Fanon’s discourse around must black bodies conform when existing in white spaces? To what extent does Fanon’s theorization of black bodies in white spaces hold up?

Musicality and orixality in the film Barravento: the pedagogy of black cinema

ABSCTRAC This article aims to demonstrate that Glauber Rocha's performance in Barravento (1962) shows an element that is little discussed in his work, which is musicality. The presence of musical instrumentality in this title of "cinema novo" appears as a dimension of orixality. Considering that afrodiasporic rituality takes place in a process of black soul corporeality in which music and dance are established as an indissoluble solution in bantu cultures, being here a trace of the heritage of Africanity. In Barravento (1962), we confirm Prudente's thesis, that the black people is the aesthetic reference of Glauber Rocha's cinema novo, and we raise the extent to which this musicality is essential in the ontology of afro-descendants. For our perception, the black soul tamboreality translates the fundamental values of africanity that are present in the carnival revelries that have their origin in the ticumbi bantu. In addition to the rituality factor, which is not small, the article suggests that the musicality given by a demand from the orchestra of African divinities in which the sense of union points to an ideal of rescuing the black family that was victim of the attempt at fragmentation, imposed by the violence of slavery. This family rescue is mimicked in the dynamics of the black as a historical subject in the educational function of this cinematographic trend, characterized in the conceptual category of the pedagogical dimension of black cinema. Keywords: Musicality. Orixality. Barravento. Africanity. Pedagogical dimension of black cinema.

마커스 가비의 카리스마 리더십과 흑인민족주의

This paper examines the charismatic leadership and black nationalism of Jamaican-born black leader Marcus Garvey. Garvey’s charismatic leadership has created a black vision and consensus that can inspire African pride, African culture to blacks and realize a sharp sense of history and zeitgeist. He also became a political leader from a labor activist to advocate blackness, independence, and Africa for Africans, and united the black public with passion, wide-ranging insight and appealing eloquence, becoming the first pioneer of black popular movements in the world. Garvey’s black nationalism was political nationalism, unlike Booker Washington’s economic nationalism and DuBoise’s black soul and cultural nationalism led by elite intellectuals. Garvey opposed the integration of blacks into white society and promoted the ‘Back-to-Africa’ movement and extreme black nationalism to unify blacks around the world and create an independent black country. The Back-to-Africa movement and the meeting of white racists KKK with Clark severely damaged his charismatic leadership and was eventually deported to Jamaica for mail fraud. He did not regain his previous leadership, but to this day he has UNIA branches in more than 40 countries and has greatly influenced the leadership of the fledgling African nation.

White Skin and the Black Mask™

White Skin and the Black Mask™

Let Him Use You: Southern Womanism, Utterance, and Saint Katharine Drexel's Educational Philosophy

As a theoretical perspective and methodological tool, Southern Womanism continues the life-long work of Father Cyprian Davis by acknowledging the African roots of Catholicism and the existence of a Afro-Catholic diaspora. This scholarship invites readers into the Afro-Catholic Diaspora where the histories and experiences of Black Catholics are not isolated incidents, whimsical memories, or anecdotal musings. Instead, they are testimonies to the presence of socio-religious agency in the Black Catholic Community. In the Afro-Catholic Diaspora, Mother Katharine is neither hero nor villain; she is a beloved witness of the movement for self-determined Black Catholic education. And, as a witness to this self-determination, Mother Katharine experienced a shift from being a missionary to unchurched black souls to becoming an accomplice to the holistic survival of Black people -- mind, body, spirit.

Internal Tensions of Building a Dissertation through the Lens of Black Finesse: Toward Decolonizing Higher Education

In this paper, I focus on the process of building a dissertation that honored the Black souls of my undergraduate participants along with my own Black soul as a form of resistance to advance racial equity in higher education. Through endarkened narrative inquiry, this paper will address the internal tensions I navigated in building a dissertation that centered Blackness through the prism of what I have conceptualized as Black Finesse. I unveil components from my dissertation that manifested a shift in how knowledge generation can be developed and written. I conceptualized a methodology entitled race-grounded phenomenology (RGP) and call for a re-imagining of qualitative research around the ways Black students navigate higher education. I reflected upon the internal tensions and mental leaps of my dissertation process through theoretical decolonial inquiry. As decolonial praxis to unmake the canon of research and dissertation creation, I lean upon four elements of decolonizing higher education as a way to reimagine decolonial futures that were actualized via my dissertation process.

A Pedagogy for Black People: Why Naming Race Matters

ABSTRACT This article suggests pedagogical naming matters to the education of Black people. It refuses the idea of a universalist pedagogy for all, and thereby unmasks that which has been rendered invisible in teaching and learning, i.e., the Black self—so as to recover it so that it might be nurtured. In doing so, the article illuminates an important set of elements that a pedagogy for Black people must possess—such as a rootedness in a freedom that goes beyond justice; the development of critical consciousness, or “wokeness”; and a value for Black life and Black lives—answering Dumas“s(2010) question, what is ‘Black” in Black education? It concludes by suggesting that Black education must hold in placethe possibility for Black futures without clinging to ”an organic Black conservativism” that mythologizes and tragically over–romanticizes a fictive Black past. Thus, even when looking back, a pedagogy for Black people must always peer forward while simultaneously resisting the impulse for erasure, where race gets lost in the muddling stew of pluralism, or what is considered here to be false collectivism. By this, a pedagogy for Black people is about Black people, useful for the social, emotional, intellectual, physical, and political emancipation of not only the bruised Black body but also thetethered Black souls.

Cybersujetos: Reading Border Subjects across Mediums

CybersujetosReading Border Subjects across Mediums Salvador Herrera (bio) Search algorithms as media technologies present a cornucopia of differentiated subjects under one search query as archetype. For example, if one were to search the term "Mexican boy" in Google Images, the results would forefront photos of deceased and disabled children. They would then cascade into a range of stock vectors for sale—mostly cartoon caricatures of brown bodies in ponchos and sombreros. While these images are diverse, they all coalesce under the keywords deployed to index them. Taking a lesson from information studies scholar Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression, the indexing quality of search algorithms does not yield an objective truth about the pair of keywords deployed in this case; technologies are embedded with a host of oversights along with overt human biases which shape how we view the figure of the "Mexican boy."1 A reading of these images results demonstrates how we are all embedded in cybernetic systems of representation: those that reduce people and their cultures to .jpg files, keyword identifiers, numbers, and bio-metric information through a series of feedback loops, networked infrastructures, and other technologies of communication and control. This sea of media masks its own curated nature through a "model of integration" into umbrella terms and cohesive interfaces, not unlike the "gene splicing" of the "media cyborg" identified by poet and scholar Harryette Mullen.2 In the commodity production she assess, "black souls," or, the perceived essence of blackness, is artificially rendered transparent, knowable, and commodifiable as it is miscegenated into white bodies by [End Page 101] media representations and popular culture.3 This dynamic extends into the entire realm of media. Whether you are sending an instant message, amassing data, or writing an article, all of these processes involve limits on representation and abstractions from reality. These reductions are not carried out equally, however, as racial logics are embedded in everything from speech acts to computer coding. Therefore, the epistemological shortcuts we take to find knowledge, communicate information, and produce art, are not without political consequences for how we define, differentiate, and descry human subjects. I use the theoretical term cybersujetos to refer to the array of border subjects who are impacted by these processes of mediation across various forms of cultural production as technologies. Cybersujetos include a vast spectrum of Latinx people whose agency is cybernetically modulated, controlled, or circumscribed by technologies, but also enabled when those same tools are repurposed.4 These technologies include media representations and their narrative structures—those that enable visibility and legibility. The narratological functions of these representations steer subjects towards political ends and profit motives deemed useful or desirable by their controllers and users, namely content producers and consumers. Latinx studies scholar Roy Pérez identifies an example of this dynamic in his use of narratological theory to unpack what he calls "homo-narrative capture": the dominant structures of media representations and the epistemological structures of LGBT studies scholarship that bind racialized figures to profitable narratives of queer suffering.5 An understanding of these cybernetic processes is crucial for discussing any representations of a racialized population that has been surveilled and contained by bureaucratic systems armed with drones, sensors, computers, and other technologies for decades if not longer. Such is the work of Iván Chaar-López, whose research in science and technology studies, and his concept of "the cybernetic border," traces a history of communications and control technologies used to manage and order Latinx subjects in the US-Mexico borderlands.6 To that end, my formulation of cybersujetos seeks to carry critical theoretical purchase in the interdisciplinary fields from which I draw insight, including but not limited to Latinx studies, race and technology studies, media, communication, and information studies. [End Page 102] The "Mexican" boys negatively affected by the modulations of Google searches are examples of racialized cybersujetos caught in the trappings of representation. The logical sorting of discrete images via keywords promotes their legibility and identification as one, homogenous "brown" body, even as their individual differences are abundantly clear. This is a paradox of perception introduced by racialization as a form of mediation. In that vein, literary...

In Fear of Black Revolutionary Contagion and Insurrection: Foucault, Galtung, and the Genesis of Racialized Structural Violence in American Foreign Policy and Immigration Law

This article investigates the power relation between the political anatomy of the Black soul and non-somatic expressions of white supremacy-based violence. Utilizing Michel Foucault’s theories of discipline and punishment in conjunction with Johan Galtung’s theory of structural violence, I posit that the exercise of state-sanctioned discipline and punishment in furtherance of white supremacy constitutes racialized structural violence. Thus, this article contributes to the current public discourse concerning the role white supremacy plays in America by establishing a new construct that can be used to dissect the nature of racial oppression. Furthermore, this article analyzes the genesis and construction of racialized structural violence in American foreign policy and immigration law using America’s response to the Haitian Revolution as a case study. When combined, akin to discipline, American foreign policy and immigration law is a white supremacy-oriented, complex bundle of power technologies designed to evoke docility from Black and Brown nations. Both allow America to engage in dissociative white supremacy. Over time, America’s “right” and power to discipline and punish Black and Brown nations has been normalized as a rational function of our global society.

“All That You Can’t Leave Behind”

Abstract As numerous scholars have shown, Hurricane Katrina exacerbated the already-ongoing precarity of African American communities in New Orleans. The crisis demanded a reckoning with the afterlives of slavery at the national and global level. This article focuses on the work of Black women popular music artists whose early twenty-first century recordings and stirring performances addressed the traumas, the challenges, and the spectacular subjugation of Black women who fell victim to brutal disenfranchisement in the midst of the disaster. Beyonce’s B-Day album and Mary J. Blige’s history-making Katrina telethon performance are central to this discussion. The original title of this article was “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe.”

The black soul is (still) a white man’s artefact? Postcoloniality, post-Fanonism and the tenacity of race(ism) in A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass

ABSTRACT This paper examines the complexity of postcolonial manifestations of race, alongside class, colonialism and nationality in Igoni Barrett’s Blackass. I adopt a (post-)Fanonian approach in investigating how the novel depicts the psychopolitics of race in the aftermath of the empire. I analyse the ways in which the novel draws attention to white supremacy as a global phenomenon not only restricted to the conceptual West or settler colonies but also in settings where the colonisers are no longer present. This feeds into the critique of neoliberal democracy that, apparently, is still heavily yoked in the whims and caprices of racialism.

Sankofa Socialization as a Response to the Soul Trauma of Black Women Activists in Ministry

AbstractThis article sets out an emerging discourse on defining and repairing the generational spiritual consequences of racism, victimization, marginalization, and isolation experienced by women of African descent, identified in this paper as “soul trauma.” Drawing on the work of W.E.B. Dubois, Joy DeGruy, Iva Carruthers, and others, it establishes the deep and deadly effect of internalized white supremacy and cultural hegemony on the identity and socialization of Black women, an effect that requires substantial work and repair beyond what established human service delivery practices can provide to the essential core of one's being, the soul. This article posits the concept and practice of Sankofa as a form of holistic medicine in the repair of Black souls, specific to the use of Kindezi, a Kikongo education system.

Forever Disappearing

M. Lamar and Tucker Culbertson elaborate on M. Lamar’s aesthetics of Negrogothic cinema, music, and performance. The Negrogothic, explain the authors, is an approach to representation in which the black body verges on disappearance and the interior of the black psyche is revealed. M. Lamar’s multimedia artworks combine elements of horror, homoeroticism, s/m, Negro spirituals, opera, religious iconography, and ritual to subvert oppressive representations of the black male body. His work evades representations of “capture, containment, and capitalization” by conjuring a “holy theater” in which black consciousness becomes simultaneous with the whole history of black experience. In an attempt to disrupt the pornographic and objectifying imagination of white supremacy as its gazes on the black body, M. Lamar imagines the black body being transformed into more elusive materials: light, shadow, and voice.