Black Soul Research Articles

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

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

Rene, Louis, and Leopold: Senghorian Negritude as a Black Humanism

Drawing from archival documentation of their long-standing literary relationship, this essay examines the correspondences between the negritude writings of Léopold Sédar Senghor and the assimilationist thought of his literary precursor René Maran. It traces the history of Senghorian negritude as a theory of cultural intermixture or métissage. As Fabre demonstrates, Senghor's ideas about the ethical and political significance of cultural hybridity, which emerged from his intellectual relations with transnational black figures of the 1920s and 1930s, aimed to counter biologically-rooted forms of racial essentialism with a notion of blackness—what Senghor referred to as the "black soul"—considered as a set of cultural properties.

Redefining Paris: Trans-Modernity and Francophone African Migritude Fiction

Redefining Paris:Trans-Modernity and Francophone African Migritude Fiction Pius Adesanmi I met you in the elevators of PARIS. You were from Senegal or the Antilles And the seas traversed surfed on your teeth, Permeated your smile, Sung in your voice like waves in the hollows. Midday on the Champs Elysées I suddenly encountered your tragic faces: Your expressions attested secular grief. And yet at the Boule Blanche And under Montmartrian colors, Your voice, your breath, your whole being exuded joy. You were music, you were dance. Jean Brierre, "New Black Soul" On Transmodernity: Paris and Foundational Black Internationalism Three scenarios—two obvious, the third less so but far more important—emerge from Haitian writer Jean Brierre's poem that [End Page 958] serves as the epigraph to this essay. The first relates to the universally acclaimed status of early-twentieth-century Paris as the crucible of black intellection, a site for the articulation of polyvalent cultural expressions in all areas of the arts; the second, a corollary of the first, underscores the geographical position of the French capital at the heart of a centripetal nexus that consolidated the nascent black internationalism of the period by bringing together black cultural luminaries from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.1 In this complex but felicitous interweaving of black politics and culture, negritude movement encountered Harlem Renaissance; avant-garde "white" Paris of Dada and Surrealism encountered l'art nègre, laying the foundation, much later, for cubism's so-called discovery of primitivism via Pablo Picasso;2 white musical Paris encountered African-American jazz. The expression of Paris's desire for black otherness reached its ultimate consecration in the aestheticization and consumption of the body of African-American model and actress, Josephine Baker.3 What these two scenarios foreground is the emergence of "Parisianism"4 and "Black Paris," two hermeneutic categories that have entered critical/cultural discourse as a means of engaging the totality of black cultural and textual practices informed by the matricial ontology of Paris. The third scenario borders on the centrality of Paris to the discursive fashioning of a transnational black modernity at once deconstructive of and resistant to the dominant post-Enlightenment narrative of Euromodernity the space of which it problematically inhabits. It is no longer news, as Enrique Dussel reminds us in his Frankfurt lectures, that the project of modernity, narrativizing itself as the reason, rationality, technology, and liberal democracy of the Western white male, circumscribed the black subject as an alterity defined and instrumentalized solely within the political economy of slavery and colonialism. By denying agency and even coevality to its constructed others, Euromodernity set the stage for the emergence of alternative modernities that, as Dussel claims in another context, are "trans-modernities", because they lie beyond the truth claims of the European episteme, constantly undermining its will to universalism: "To repeat: the thesis advanced in this essay is that modernity's recent impact on the planet's multiple cultures (Chinese, Southeast Asian, Hindu, Islamic, Bantu, Latin American) produced a varied 'reply' by all of them to the modern 'challenge.' Renewed, they are now erupting on a cultural horizon 'beyond' modernity. I call the reality of that fertile multicultural moment 'trans'-modernity (since 'post'-modernity is just the latest moment of Western modernity)" (World System 221). Of particular interest to our discussion is Dussel's description of the other's voice as a form of rebellious modernity. For Africa and its [End Page 959] Atlantic diaspora, the rebellion against the tropological claims of modernity and its subalternizing symbologies came in the form of a veritable textual revolution for which Paris served as a confluence. From the 1920s to the 1940s, African American, Caribbean, and African intellectuals met and fraternized in Paris. In the process, they founded a plethora of journals and newspapers such as Les continents, La voix des nègres, La revue du monde noir, La dépêche africaine, Légitime Défense and L'Etudiant noir. Although these journals, reviews, and newspapers did not always reflect monolithic ideological positions and varied considerably in the degree of their militancy vis-à-vis the European ur-text of representational modernity they aimed to undermine...

TWO NOTES ON "BEOWULF" (WITH GLANCES AT "VAFþRUĐNISMÁL", BLICKLING HOMILY 16, AND "ANDREAS", LINES 839-846)

'Beowulf', lines 1415a, 'ofer harne stan'; 1423b, 'horn stundum song'; and 88b, 2553b, and 2744b, 'under harne stan'Neither Klaeber nor Wrenn commented on the 'harne stan' of Beowulf', line 1415 a. Like other editors they both glossed 'bar' as 'grey, old'. Probably most readers have assumed that the poet mentions this hoary or ancient stone to add to the 'eldrich' atmosphere of the haunted mere, but it takes on another meaning when we compare the following passage from the apparently related passage in the Buckling Homily on St Michael:(... St Paul was looking northwards over this earth to where all the waters run down underneath. And there beyond the water he saw a certain har stan; and north of the stone woods had grown up, very rimy, and there was deep gloom there; and under the stone was a dwelling place of water goblins and outlaws. And he saw that on the cliff in the icy woods many black souls hung bound by their hands; and their (attendant) devils, in the shape of water goblins, were clawing at them like greedy wolves; and the water down below the cliff was black. And between the cliff and the water were some twelve miles. And when the branches broke, the souls fell down that hung by the branches, and the goblins seized them. Those, then, were the souls that were brought to ruin by sin here in this world and would not give it over before their life's end.)7(Then the one hardy in fight awoke and surveyed the plain before the city gates. Steep crags, cliffs, towered, structures adorned with tiles stood round a bar statt, windswept walls; then the wise man knew that in (his) journey he had reached the land of Marmcdonia.)Here editors and translators have mostly taken 'harne stan' to mean the 'beorgas' and translated the phrase as 'grey rock' or some equivalent. But the city must stand either on the crags or in a hollow between them; so if the poet had meant what the commentators think he does, one would have expected either ofer or under, not 'ymbe'. The Andreas-poct seems to have envisioned his 'harnc stan' as a monumental stone pylon marking the entrance to the city, with the buildings and walls flanking it. Like the 'hare stanas' in Beowulf, line 1415 a and the homily, his 'harne stan' marks a boundary between one domain or jurisdiction and another. This usage may represent an extension of a sense originally applied to single trilithons standing alone in the countryside.The passage in Andreas in turn helps to elucidate the other 'hare stanas' mentioned in Beowulf, lines 88yb, 2553b, and 2744.13. These are plainly not upright stones standing alone in open country. In each of the three passages a warrior either passes or is ordered to pass 'under harne stan': Sigemund and Beowulf go to challenge the dragons they slay, and dying Beowulf tells Wiglaf to go and view the treasure that he has won. The poet seems to envision both dragons as living in barrows and keeping their hoards there; so in each of these passages the 'harne stan' appears to be the stone trilithon that forms the barrow's entrance. 'Under' in this formula probably means 'through' or 'within' rather than 'under'; compare '(inn) under eorðweall', meaning 'within the earthmound', in Beowulf, lines 2957a and 3090a, and 'in under eodoras', meaning something like 'into or within the precincts', in line 1037 and Genesis, lines 2447 and 2489, and 'undar ederos' used in the same sense in Heliand, line 4943. …

Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996

Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996

If Sambo Were a UFO

Remember when you used to watch science fiction? How it was acceptable that there were no black characters because it was an imaginary world? Well, that didn't sit well with David Huffman, an artist who inserts the black subject into science-fiction narratives. His fantastic sci-fi images go so far as to suggest that the black psyche can be liberated by ultra-advanced robotics and military technology. Huffman's choice to portray black characters turning toward technology to escape inner and outer defects is full of implications. While his work deals with notions of race enforced by images in the entertainment media, it is particularly concerned with the psychological and physiological ramifications of our shared history and anxiety about blackness.

Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups (review)

Reviewed by: Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups Patricia Hill Collins (bio) Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups. Cynthia Burack . Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. In Healing Identities, Cynthia Burack brings together the tools of psychoanalysis and political theory with the theoretical work of modern Black feminism in order to shed light on the workings of groups. The six chapters in Healing Identities render difficult concepts in all three discourses accessible to readers who may be unfamiliar with psychoanalysis, political theory, or Black feminist thought. Burack believes that all three theoretical traditions have important things to say about developing the kinds of groups that will be adequate to social justice projects. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the connections between psychoanalysis and political theory, in order to introduce the repressive nature of groups. They also survey how race and racism appear in both discourses. Chapter 3, titled "Reparative Group Leadership" is in many ways the heart of Healing Identities. Burack introduces Black feminist thought, which she describes as both an academic and identity group discourse that is produced by Black women scholars for a primary audience of Black women. Burack perceives Black feminist scholars so defined as comparable to the leaders of other identity group discourses, and sees them as group leaders. Burack uses the term "reparative," which she suggests has a positive and healthy meaning within Black feminist thought. Burack [End Page 227] understands reparative groups to be those that "collectively work through issues that routinely plague groups without giving in to the worst, most destructive and unfortunately most common group possibilities" (59). When applied to groups, the term "reparation" suggests a group's ability to mend harms done or desired, possible or imagined to other groups. With psychoanalytic theory and Black feminist thought so defined, Burack proceeds to examine the differences between group psychoanalytic expectations associated with group leadership and the actual reparative group leadership of Black feminist thought. Using Black feminist thought as a touchstone for analysis, chapters 4 and 5, titled "Conflict and Authenticity" and "Bonding and Solidarity," respectively, take up different dimensions of Burack's model of repressive and reparative leadership. Chapter 6, "Coalitions and Reparative Politics," explores the implications for mainstream scholarship of Black feminist thought's reparative leadership: "Black feminist theorizing about groups violates pessimistic expectations about group life that are widely held by social and political theorists. The reparativeness of Black feminist thought is most plainly revealed precisely by the dimension that is so often celebrated by scholars and commentators of Black feminism: coalition-building and coalition politics" (159). Despite its good intentions, Healing Identities raised two sets questions for me. For one, there is the question of how Burack's intended audience affects the overall organization and arguments of this volume. Healing Identities does not seem designed for African American readers. Instead, this book appears to be written to appeal to White feminist readers who are engaged in debates about the merits of interpretive uses of psychoanalytic theory and of political theory for Western feminist projects, especially those that might build feminist coalitions. As the author points out, "black feminist thought . . . evokes emotion in many of its readers. I am convinced that, like much passion in political life, this emotion is defensive—an attempt to fend off guilt, self-examination, and genuine confrontation with otherness" (5). Just who exactly are the readers who would engage Black feminist thought as a site of otherness? Certainly not Black women. In a similar vein, the author's goal to "refine a set of theoretical uses of psychoanalysis for feminists and other interested in the social production of groups" (4) seems undermined by her parallel claim that "black feminists are more likely to bypass than to debate psychoanalytic explanations" (8). If this is the case, one might wonder why Black women who are so involved in building reparative groups would reject psychoanalytic frameworks. Some Black women readers might see the treatment of healing and reparations in Healing Identities as violating the very spirit of Black feminist thought. Burack seems unaware of how the thesis of the damaged Black psyche renders her focus on healing suspicious. Healing...

Daryl Michael Scott. Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1997. Pp. xix, 269. Cloth $39.95, paper $14.95

Daryl Michael Scott. <italic>Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996</italic>. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1997. Pp. xix, 269. Cloth $39.95, paper $14.95

Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996

For over a century, the idea that African Americans are psychologically damaged has played an important role in discussions of race. In this provocative work, Daryl Michael Scott argues that damage imagery has been the product of liberals and conservatives, of racists and antiracists. While racial conservatives, often playing on white contempt for blacks, have sought to use findings of black pathology to justify exclusionary policies, racial liberals have used damage imagery primarily to promote policies of inclusion and rehabilitation. In advancing his argument, Scott challenges some long-held beliefs about the history of damage imagery. He rediscovers the liberal impulses behind Stanley Elkins's Sambo hypothesis and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Negro Family and exposes the damage imagery in the work of Ralph Ellison, the leading anti-pathologist. He also corrects the view that the Chicago School depicted blacks as pathological products of matriarchy. New Negro experts such as Charles Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, he says, disdained sympathy-seeking and refrained from exploring individual pathology. Scott's reassessment of social science sheds new light on Brown v. Board of Education , revealing how experts reversed four decades of theory in order to represent segregation as inherently damaging to blacks. In this controversial work, Scott warns the Left of the dangers in their recent rediscovery of damage imagery in an age of conservative reform. |In reassessing the image of the damaged black psyche from 1880 to 1996, Scott argues that damage imagery has been the product of both liberals and conservatives, racists and antiracists. While racial conservatives, often playing on white contempt for blacks, have sought to use findings of black pathology to justify exclusionary policies, racial liberals have used damage imagery primarily to promote policies of inclusion and rehabilitation. Scott challenges long-held beliefs about the history of damage imagery, warning the Left of the dangers in their rediscovery of damage imagery in an age of conservative reform.

Scott, Contempt And Pity - Social Policy And The Image Of The Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996

Societal-generated images and perceptions of a population group invariably exact a price. Even when such images are the handiwork of scholars and experts, a toll results nonetheless, often with social and public policy implications. African-Americans are arguably the most glaring population group example of this scenario. Certainly the scholarly debate continues regarding the historical origins of popular perceptions of and about African-Americans. There is as well an ongoing scholarly debate about the social and public policy ramifications of popular images of African-Americans, both historical and contemporary. In his recent publication, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996, Daryl Scott of Columbia University endeavors to isolate and identify specific bodies of social science scholarship that have given historical currency to notions of pathology in Black life. Indeed, as to his own scholarly intent, Scott leaves little, if any, doubt. It is "to make a contribution to the study of social science history by combining a study of social science ideas with the making of social policy." Scott provides an engagingly crafted analysis and discussion of the linkage between social science scholarship, Black imagery, and social policy engineering.

Reworking the Conversion Narrative: Race and Christianity in Our Nig

An early example of an African American novel, and earliest known novel by an African American woman writer, Harrie E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859) has prompted ongoing excitement among modern scholars. Since Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discovered text more than a decade ago, contemporary criticism of Our Nig has for most part linked autobiographical novel to nineteenth-century tradition of slave narrative and sentimental novel. Wilson's adaptation of conversion narrative warrants further discussion,(1) however, because it represents a literary experiment more complex than mere imitation or synthesis of popular literary genres. Frado's failed conversion affords Wilson literary space to undermine prevailing social constructions of Christianity, race, and womanhood. Through Frado's narrative, Wilson demonstrates how Christian doctrine anchors popular notions of womanhood and domesticity, and how these concepts are limited by race and racial signifiers. Though Wilson manipulates well-known trappings of conversion narrative that date back to American Puritan tradition, Our Nig tells story of heroine's failed initiation into community of earthly saints. Moreover, Frado's rejection of Christianity's promised eternity demonstrates how race might interrupt Christian rite of passage for those black candidates who could not resolve ambiguities of popular racial myths. In both her worldly and spiritual quests, Frado faces limitations imposed by race. From moment Wilson introduces story of Jim and Mag's union, we begin to see an unsettling vision of Christianity and racial blackness as diametric opposites. black outside, I know,' Jim tells Mag, `but I's a heart inside' (12). For Jim, blackness stands in contradistinction to Christian images of goodness; moreover, with unfolding of Frado's narrative, we become increasingly aware that race stands as an obstacle to her religious conversion as well. Frado's inability to envision black souls as candidates for heaven thwarts her full submission to conversion process, and her failed religious conversion impels story's deviation from popular conventions of domestic fiction. A text that uses conversion narrative pattern, Our Nig ends as an anti-conversion experience. Unable to dispel inherited social images that equate whiteness with Godliness, heroine cannot envision blackness in divine hereafter. In a novel by a black woman writer more than a century after publication of Our Nig, we witness kind of narrative that can result a fictionalized black female heroine successfully resolves question of race and religious experience. In Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Celie finds God only after she expels whiteness that threatens her conversion. Celie shares with Shug her image of God as big and old and tall and graybearded and white (176). However, Celie confesses that vision of God leaves her uncomfortable: when I think about it, it don't seem quite right. But it all I got (176). As a confidant and mentor to Celie, Shug explains that this old man is same God she used to see she prayed (177). She then shares with Celie her vision of a God who is found in everything and everyone, and informs Celie that first step to finding God is to remove the old man, in order to see God who exists everywhere. This transformation is not an easy one. Celie reveals difficulty in trying to rid oneself of old man: Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I'm still adrift. Trying to that old man out of my head (179). Again, she reveals seeming omnipresence of whiteness that makes it so difficult to chase away images of whiteness as inherently powerful: on your box of grits, in your head, and all over radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. …

Contempt and pity: social policy and the image of the damaged black psyche, 1880-1996

Contempt and pity: social policy and the image of the damaged black psyche, 1880-1996

"A Music Seeking Its Words": Double-Timing and Double Consciousness in Toni Morrison's Jazz

"A Music Seeking Its Words": Double-Timing and Double Consciousness in Toni Morrison's Jazz

Jessica Hagedorn and Manila Magic

In 1975, then relatively unknown Filipino-American poet named Jessica Hagedorn wrote poem called Song for my Father in which life in Manila took on some of the surreal appearance of life in some Latin-American city under siege: dope dealers are executed in public and senators go mad in prison camps the nightclubs are burning with indifference curfew draws near soldiers lurk in jeeps of dawn warzones as the president's daughter bogies nostalgically under the gaze of sixteen smooth bodyguards and decay is forever even in the rage of humorless revolutionaries (Danger and Beauty 37) The tone of this poem, and of few other poems and stories dealing with life in the Philippines, suggested an interesting contrast with Hagedorn's other work, her Filipino-American writing which, although it shares the same sharp-edged glitter and flamboyance of the Philippine-centered work, lacks its dreamy, fantastic cast. Hagedorn's novel, Dogeaters, nominated for the National Book Award, deals with life in Manila in the 1970's, and makes this reader think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude. In contrast to Marquez, Hagedorn's story is urban-centered (and terribly urbane), moving in milieu which could only be Manila, with its outrageous blend of Spanish elitism And elegance gone seedy, American flash and decadence, and Third world desperation and brazenness. It is slicing and cutting and irreverent, disjointed like Marquez's dream world, but little more nerve-tingling than dust-covered Maconda. Nevertheless it carries strong sense of magic realism, of bizarre characters and strange coincidences, of real life gone unreal with sudden verbal twist, exposing the reader to a world totally reconstructed and subverted by fantasy (Llosa 5). We are left in limbo between the magic and the real, in world as it might be described by peasant, for instance, or street-boy - someone far removed from the logic and power of that world, experiencing reality but reality touched with the magic of incomprehension. Jessica Hagedorn was born in l949 in the Philippines to Visayan Hagedorn family. She immigrated to the United States as a, twelve-year old in 1961, living in San Francisco and New York, where she was deeply influenced by black soul music, black culture, rock and roll, and group of black and Chicana women writers and musicians. She was one of four women featured in McGraw-Hill's early collection of ethnic and women's poetry, Four Young Women: Poems. She has published in various Asian-American collections and magazines: Liwanag (1975), Time to Greez (1975), The Greenfield Review (1975), and. Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Poets (1983). She has published three books of her own: Dangerous Music (1975), Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions (1981), and Dogeaters (1990). As Filipina writing in the United States, Hagedorn had strong literary antecedents to draw on. Filipino immigration to the mainland United States started in the 1920's, after the waves of Chinese and Japanese immigration had been controlled by discriminatory legislation. By 1932 Carlos Bulasan, an Ilocano of basically peasant stock, had launched his very prolific writing career, in effect getting head start on what was to become the Asian American Movement of the seventies. Bulosan's America is in the Heart is still considered the classic account of the Filipino-American historical experience, and the old manong whom Bulosan loved so, still around in the fifties and sixties and seventies, older, of course, and maybe poorer, became the natural starting point for the new Filipino-American writers. Oscar Penaranda worked in the hop fields and the salmon canneries to duplicate the experience of the manongs, while Al Robles recorded hundreds of hours of taped interviews with the old-timers and Lou Syquia went into political activism to forestall the demolition of the old International Hotel in San Francisco, where so many of the manongs lived. …

Black Soul White Artifact: Fanon's Clinical Psychology and Social Theory

Black Soul White Artifact: Fanon's Clinical Psychology and Social Theory

Black Soul, White Artifact: Fanon's Clinical Psychology and Social Theory

List of abbreviations Introduction 1. The three paradigms: negritude, ethnopsychiatry and African socialism 2. Negritude 3. Ethnopsychiatry and the psychopathology of colonialism: Fanon's account of colonised man in 'Black Skin White Masks' 4. From psychiatric practice to political theory 5. Culture and personality 6. Class conflict and the liberation of Africa 7. The failed revolution 8. The neo-colonial state 9. Towards a critique of Fanon's class analysis 10. Conclusion Appendixes Notes Select bibliography Index.

Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (review)

90CIVIL war history together skillfully. He rescues the lesser-known Beechers from obscurity and offers fresh insights into the familiar careers of Lyman, Harriet, Henry Ward, and Catharine. He discusses in detail their role in a variety of issues, especially slavery, civil rights, and the women's movement. Specialists may be put off by his lack of references to current scholarly literature in those areas and by the minimal notes and bibliography. Nevertheless , the analysis is informed and intelligent, the balance impressive . Rugoff's literary criticism of Harriet's lesser novels, while not always convincing, sheds valuable light in a neglected corner. Throughout the book religion is the leitmotif binding the most disparate of subjects together. From Rugoff's group portrait emerges a clear sense of why Calvinism was not a religion for America. The fear of hell made life a living hell for Lyman's own children; to other Americans the rigors of self-denial simply became irrelevant to their ambitions. So tortuous a road to salvation could not compete with the promise of material success. It was the gift of newer ministers like Henry Ward Beecher to sense this change and provide it a theology that detached the world and the flesh from the devil. Much has been written about this transformation but few have depicted it with such graphic clarity as Rugoff. The research is impressive, the writing graceful. This is a rewarding, often compelling book, worth the attention of scholars or anyone interested in nineteenth-century America. Maury Klein University of Rhode Island Long Memory: The Black Experience in America. By Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Pp. xxi, 486. $19.95.) In discussing African survivals in the American slave community, authors Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame quote an Ashanti proverb: "Ancient things remain in the ears" (p. 32). It is a particularly good quotation for reminding a society used to the printed word that an unwritten history is not a forgotten one. The modern black community, the authors point out, is resting on a foundation of rich history endowed it by its forebears. Its "long memory" reaches back past the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois to the folklife of illiterate slaves who nurtured the recollections of Africa in the proverbs and stories they told to their children. It is the authors' purpose to survey that past and to restore the "human substance and spirit" (p. x) to its telling. Berry, a professor of history and law at Howard University, and Blassingame , a professor of history at Yale University, facilitate their purpose by replacing the usual chronological narrative of other surveys of Afro-American history with a topical organization that emphasizes the "subjects most revealing of the complexities of the black experience in BOOK REVIEWS91 America" (p. x). They explore slavery—the black community's formative experience—and the family and the church—its two most important institutions—as well as the uneasy place of the free Negro in antebellum America, sex and racism, politics, economics, criminal justice, education , military service, black protest, and black nationalism. Their approach succeeds in producing insightful interpretive chapters that synthesize a large bibliography of secondary materials and provide the vehicles for the authors' own well-known areas of research expertise. The topical approach always seems to keep one alert to the "two-ness" of Du Bois's black souls, and the authors are adept at showing how the black experience was apart from but still of the larger history. A particularly striking example is their treatment of blacks and military service. By fighting for America's causes, the authors note, blacks fought to advance their own. The sadness here, of course, comes from knowing that many gave their lives for a country that restricted the freedom of the survivors and neglected the memory of their community's heroes. While historians will find much of what Berry and Blassingame write familiar, Long Memory will provide their undergraduate classes with stimulating reading that should provoke classroom discussion. The authors have not avoided controversy and at times their words take on an outraged tone...

Common Words of African Origin Used in Latin America

EVER since the discipline of linguistics began to solidify itself around the end of the 18th century, scholars in this field have been interested in the phenomenon of language contact and have studied the complexities of linguistic borrowing. As we know, languages do not develop in isolation in any part of the world and Latin America is certainly no exception. Here we find a wide variety of words from many different American Indian languages that have filtered into the Spanish, Portuguese, French Creole, English, or Papiamento spoken in the geographical area of Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Most students of Spanish and Portuguese are aware of this indigenous substratum influence, especially as concerns the Aztecs in Mexico, the Mayans in Mexico and Central America, the Incas in Peru, and the Tupi-Guarani in Brazil. Most students, however, do not realize that the Atlantic slave trade was also instrumental in supplying a rich flow of vocabulary items to the superstrate languages throughout a relatively large portion of Latin America. This was especially true in the Caribbean area and in Brazil, since these places needed large numbers of blacks to provide the muscle necessary for the sugar and coffee industries, and, to a lesser extent, for the production of cocoa. That the languages and dialects spoken by the African slaves easily penetrated the superstrate languages may be seen by noting the large number of these black souls that were brought to Spanish and Portuguese America. Philip D. Curtin, in his The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, tells us that the estimated number of blacks imported to Spanish America during the entire period of the slave trade was approximately 1,552,000, and to Brazil, some 3,646,000.' Even though all these slaves spoke many different languages, it was only natural that some words from them would find their way into Spanish or Portuguese and become permanent fixtures there. No one has ever calculated the approximate number of languages and/or dialects which the slaves brought with them to the Americas, but based upon the areas of sub-Saharan Africa from which the Portuguese, British, Dutch, French, and Danes2 took slaves (parts of all the countries of western Africa, from Senegal in the north to the southern border of Angola, and from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and Somalia), it is probably safe to guess that at least about 500 to 700 languages-dialects were involved. Of these, of course, some had more speakers among the slave population than others, and some, such as Yoruba, remained alive and active because of a very strong religious fervor among the people who spoke them, in addition to the numerical preponderance of their speakers. Many of these languages faded out of existence in the Americas when their speakers died, but of those which remained, albeit if only in the form of a few borrowed words cemented into the superstrate language, we ight be safe in assuming a number of about 150-200. To be sure, there are many words of supposed sub-Saharan origin, such as burundanga 'a special drink prepared to bewitch someone,' or candonga 'earring,' the exact source languages of which have not yet been identified. This, of course, is also true for English; the origin of the word chimpanzee, for example, has bewildered scholars for years and to date no one has been able to pin down the language from which it came. Also the source language of the word banjo remains somewhat of a mystery, although there is a strong possibility that it comes from the KiMbundu word mbanza, which is a musical instrument similar to our banjo. In this article, I should like to supply a list of words which are generally well known and found with a relatively high frequency of usage throughout most of Spanish America or Brazil, as the case may be. They are words which, according to my own findings, may be categorized as stemming from a definite sub-Saharan language. As part of the information given under each entry, I will also provide

Counseling from the Past and Present with Blacks!

If counseling services remain as a viable force in the American school system, Black counselors must be involved in significant numbers. Their help is necessary because our heritage dictates this course of action, our youth need the counseling and our wisdom, and the profession must be guided by the black experience. Black Americans must be in counseling because they live, work, rear children, struggle, and die in this land. This is their home in spite of the injustices and oppression experienced. This is the place where counseling is promoted as a profession to help people in institutions and organizations. This is the land where Blacks must help themselves reach fulfillment by protecting those values which are dear in their social, psychological, economic, political, and religious life. This is the place where Blacks need to come to grips with themselves and accept their life style in coalition with other Blacks and in coalition with others who wish to understand, and implement the concept of self-respect, self-determination, and the utilization of black power. Perhaps the most important reason for Blacks to be in counseling is the fact that the concept is a part of their heritage. If counseling is described as a process of helping people think, feel, and do things in an attempt to solve problems, consider these Black Americans who have counseled us through time. There were Brothers David Walker, Henry Garnet, and Denmark Vesey who counseled us to resist oppression at all cost. Sister Harriet Tubman guided many black souls from the clutches of slavery to freedom through the underground. Booker T. Washington counseled about the value of developing business and occupational skills, and Brother Du Bois stressed the importance of enriching the intellectual skills. Mary McCloud Bethune and Charlotte Hawkins Brown guided many of our youth to develop discipline and personable