Black Struggle Research Articles

The Long History of Black Political and Identity Struggles in Minnesota: A Consideration of the Work of William D. Green

The Long History of Black Political and Identity Struggles in Minnesota: A Consideration of the Work of William D. Green

Tricksters and female warriors: womanist interweavings from Oríta to Wakanda

Túndé Kèlání's The Narrow Path (2006) may be read as prefiguring the emancipatory, womanist project of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018). Hence, a broad understanding of the black struggle in Black Panther as encompassing an African presence propels this article's womanist reading of Túndé Kèlání’s The Narrow Path, from the Nigerian film industry, alongside Coogler’s film. The article uses images of the trickster deity, Èṣù, and the warrior woman to respond to Ananya Kabir’s call that Black Panther demands an interpretive model which excavates the layers of signification that make Afro-Futurism the arena where the African diaspora and the African continent confront each other. Both films reveal how women, marginal to patriarchal power structures, may come to possess an ambivalent agency rendered visible in their transformation of marginality through rhetorical, and technological weaponry.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Online Youtube News Coverage of South African Discourses on Xenophobia in Democratic South Africa

ABSTRACT This paper considers news coverage of South Africa as it relates to the continuous occurrence of xenophobia in the country. Through purposely selected news videos uploaded on Youtube, the paper adopts a qualitative content analysis research method guided by the key words ‘South African leaders, election speech, xenophobia’. Thirteen videos were purposively selected and transcribed from a list of 18 videos drawn from the first two pages of the keyword search on https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=South+African+leaders+election+speech+xenophobia. Using Van Dijk’s Ideological Square, the qualitative data generated indicate narratives that speak to ideologies binding South Africans together as a ‘we’ against the migrant ‘them’. The binding ‘we’ factors include the historical Black struggle for liberation, the country’s Constitution as well as the Rule of Law. Qualities for ‘them’ (which the narratives suggest spark xenophobia) include various perceived acts of immigrant criminality; the result of which is economic instability and negative influences on the South African people.

Finding Common Ground: Understanding Ourselves and the World Through Literature: Essential Question: How Do We Value Black Lives, Struggles, and Joy?

Finding Common Ground: Understanding Ourselves and the World Through Literature: Essential Question: How Do We Value Black Lives, Struggles, and Joy?

Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West

Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West is an ambitious collection of essays by sixteen historians who illuminate the understudied freedom rights struggle of African Americans and their allies in the West and integrate it as part of a crucial national effort. The authors focus on the stories of black westerners to articulate how they tirelessly challenged oppression and discrimination in dismantling racial barriers, just as their counterparts did in other parts of the United States. Similar, overlapping struggles of other groups of color are brought into the essays, when applicable, in connection to the black struggle. The authors showcase mostly urban areas where black westerners, often predating actions in the South or the North, used the political tactics of nonviolence, civil disobedience, direct action, legal battles, suffrage, and the quest for empowerment that were foundational to the modern civil rights movement strategy. The book focuses on the time of the greatest racial justice struggle, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, though some chapters cover a broader period as appropriate to the activities of their geographic focus.

Haiti and the United States: In Black print

ABSTRACT This essay examines the editorial positions of Thélismon Bouchereau and Frederick Douglass on abolition and Black uplift to explore a transnational, bilingual discussion of Black freedom in the Atlantic world. It surveys reporting in Haitian and U.S. newspapers, including La République and Douglass’ Monthly to argue that Black editorship of newspapers in Haiti and the United States provided a cohesive intraracial perspective of nineteenth-century Blackness and of the shared Black struggle for the abolition of slavery and for the uplift of free Black people across the Atlantic world.

Ontogênese do estético e vissungos: cantos de trabalho dos negros escravizados na mineração

Resumo O artigo, num primeiro movimento, recupera categorias da estética marxista e trata em termos gerais da ontogênese do ritmo, do canto, das categorias da autoconsciência e da antropomorfização de caráter estético, dimensionando a capacidade humana de dominar por essas vias o entorno e as forças socialmente desencadeadas; num segundo movimento, são tratados os vissungos, cantos de trabalho, resistência e luta dos negros escravizados nas atividades da mineração, numa discussão de suas bases de entificação e função social, quando as categorias estéticas inicialmente tratadas em termos ontogenéticos reaparecem e são tratadas de forma concreta, no âmbito de uma formação social específica.

‘Disenchanted with the state’: confronting the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism in Colombia

ABSTRACT The Colombian government’s embrace of multicultural policies in the 1990 s had far-reaching implications for black and indigenous struggles for self-determination and autonomy. In the context of widespread violence, multicultural policies seemed to offer a semblance of protection. However, after nearly three decades of multicultural reforms, black and indigenous communities continue to face disproportionate violence and dispossession at the hands of the state, multinational corporations, drug traffickers, and other armed groups. This article explores the autonomy/inclusion dialectic in order to understand why some black and indigenous social movements are turning away from the state’s recognition policies.

Memories of an Imperial City: Race, Gender, and Birmingham, Alabama

AbstractSeptember 15, 2013, marked the 50thanniversary of the 16thStreet Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, USA. The bombing remains one of the most infamous events in the history of white supremacist violence in the United States. While conventional accounts of the event and its aftermath often consider the legal restructuring of the US state following the passage of subsequent Civil Rights legislation, little has been written about the transnational significance of Birmingham in shaping the character of US power abroad. This article argues that memorialisation and cultural architecture of Birmingham represent a significant crucible forging a particular style of liberal empire. Tracing a cultural genealogy of Birmingham through the writings of former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and famed scholar‐activist Angela Davis, I demonstrate how Birmingham, as a site of historic black struggle, has been remembered alongside the place‐making of empire.

On Reckoning with White Privilege and the Black Struggle to Survive

Book Review| February 01 2020 On Reckoning with White Privilege and the Black Struggle to Survive Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. 208 pages, hardcover, $20.80.Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir, New York: Scribner, 2018. 256 pages, hardcover, $18.58. Kate Carroll de Gutes Kate Carroll de Gutes Kate Carroll De Gutes is a wry observer and writer who started her career as a journalist and then got excited by new journalism, which then became creative nonfiction and is now called essay (well, you can see where this is going). She is the author of two award-winning memoirs and her essays have been widely anthologized. Her work centers around sexuality, gender presentation, and questioning cultural norms of femininity and masculinity. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction (2020) 22 (1): 229–234. https://doi.org/10.14321/fourthgenre.22.1.0229 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kate Carroll de Gutes; On Reckoning with White Privilege and the Black Struggle to Survive. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 1 February 2020; 22 (1): 229–234. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/fourthgenre.22.1.0229 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressFourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Michigan State University Board of Trustees Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Democracy, Race, and the Socialist Project in the United States

This paper examines the relationship between race, socialism, and democracy in America. It is organized into five sections and a conclusion. The first section explores how socialism has been viewed by many black leaders and intellectuals as necessary, imperative perhaps, in the black struggle for material equality, and further investigates the relationship of this black perspective on socialism to white opposition. The second section uses the most recent historical work to identify the factors that have the stalled the development of socialism in America. I also assess how these factors have changed or not in terms of making the socialist project more likely. In the third section, I analyze available poll data on American opinion about socialism from the 1930s to the present. While the data show unambiguously increased support for socialism since the 1930s, socialism does not today command the support of a majority of the American people. In the fourth section I examine the paradigmatic Franklin Roosevelt presidency on how liberal Democratic presidents have avoided the socialist label while embracing socialist programs. The fifth section is a brief examination of what socialism—really existing socialism—means in the early twenty-first century, and the idea of “socialist smuggling” as manifested in the presidencies of FDR and Lyndon Johnson. The speculative conclusion asks what are the prospects for the socialist project, and whether the white liberal cosmopolitan bourgeoisie rather than the white working class might become a mass base for the socialist project.

Mafeje on black struggles in South Africa: history and theory

ABSTRACT Archie Mafeje had an unusual ability for socio-political prognosis. This is true both in terms of his theoretical and of his concrete analysis of the South African liberation struggle. Much of what he wrote in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s is still relevant today. Although he had hoped for a socialist democracy, things did not turn out that way. In his work on revolutionary theory and politics, Mafeje set out to understand the path to complete liberation, primarily of the African people, but also of oppressed people in other parts of the world, generally. This article revisits Mafeje’s conception of the South African revolution.

“come into the / black / and live”: Poetry and the Dream of Black Liberation

CLA JOURNAL 157 “come into the / black / and live”: Poetry and the Dream of Black Liberation Shauna M. Morgan the news everything changes the old songs click like light bulbs going off the faces of men dying scar the air the moon becomes the mountain who would have thought who would believe dead things could stumble back and kill us1 ~Lucille Clifton “The poetry sustains,” said Lucille Clifton in conversation with Sonia Sanchez at The New School in New York City during the first of the now well-known Cave Canem reading series (1070). During the reading, which occurred shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Clifton, within a matter of ten minutes or so, read several poems that demonstrated the scope and range of her writing and engagement with era-shifting and history-making moments, whether they be personal or public. She began with a poem written about her sister, moved through poems that bore witness to racist violence against Black and indigenous people, and connected that reality to a continental Black struggle. Her short reading closed with new poems, as she noted, written after the tragedies of that moment. One opened a space that acknowledged that the collective trauma the nation felt was something not unfamiliar to Black folks in the United States. Worth quoting fully here, the poem “Friday nine fourteen” presents as analogous to the U.S. American crimes against Black and brown folks and the “villainy” of that moment in 2001: 1 From Clifton’s Good News about the Earth: New Poems, Random House, 1972. 158 CLA JOURNAL Some of us know we have never felt safe all of us Americans weeping as some have wept before Is it treason to remember? What have we done to deserve such villainy? Nothing we reassure ourselves Nothing. The nuance here is not to be missed, however, as she further indicts the United States and questions its culpability. The line breaks in this short poem signal that there are multiple audiences and multiple speakers within the collective “we” of the poem. Indeed, as she begins, “Some of us know / we have never felt safe / all of us / Americans weeping as some / have wept before” (1045). A student of Sterling A. Brown and Owen Dodson, Clifton, in the vast body of her work, which is at once artful and instructive, has a poem for every day and every moment. In Toni Morrison’s foreword to The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2000, she noted that Clifton was most often praised for her “moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness [and] eloquent elegies for the vulnerable and the prematurely dead” (xxviii). However, she cautions us not to miss the “astute, profound intellect”and“the range and complexity of the emotions she forces us to confront” (xxx-xxxi). Particularly in this moment, we must return to Clifton, reaching for not only the inspiring and loving words within, but seeking the insight that she offers through an imagination that calls us to participate in our own visioning of a future. Writing in a literary tradition that long declared the need for political art, Clifton remembers the experiences of people in the Diaspora and roots our liberation in the spirit of African identity as she declares “the news” of the time, offers the answers to our cries, and situates them within the realm of history and a past rooted in a Black radical tradition. Writing then, Clifton was even preparing Shauna M. Morgan CLA JOURNAL 159 “come into the / black / and live”: Poetry as a Sanctum for Black Liberation for the now, and she has left us a body of work to help us reflect and guide us to the life of freedom we have always desired—a life we must continue to imagine. It is this moment of creating, too, which sustains. Not only is the content of Clifton’s poetry sustaining but also the context to which it speaks and the revisioning and imagining that moment engenders. In her poem “after Kent State,” which opens the collection Good News about the Earth, we are warned about the unbridled possibility of white violence. The poem reads,“only to keep / his...

Insurgent Intimacies

Abstract This article examines the intertwined arguments for sexual revolution and decolonization in the Dutch Atlantic in the 1960s and 1970s. In this period, Antillean activists in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Antilles celebrated aspects of the Cuban Revolution and the US Black Power movement for their purported ability to regenerate romantic love. Activists contended that socialism and antiracist activism could forge new bonds of erotic equality to explode the ongoing effects of colonialism, slavery, and the regimes of sexual violence that maintained both. Considering the centrality of sexual politics to Antillean radical imaginaries, this article argues that Antilleans viewed sexual liberation as a primary rather than ancillary component of self-determination. Illuminating the Atlantic currents that informed Antillean arguments for insurgent forms of intimacy—from revolutionary Cuba to black struggle in the United States—this article reconceives of both the substance and geography of the sexual revolution.

Anarchism and anticolonialism in Portugal (1919-1926): Mário Domingues, A Batalha and black internationalism

ABSTRACTThis article evaluates the nature and resonance of the writings of the Príncipe-born journalist Mário Domingues. Domingues published numerous articles in the Portuguese anarcho-syndicalist daily newspaper A Batalha between 1919 and 1923 on colonialism as part of a programme of anticolonial and anti-capitalist struggle that was the earliest and most substantial campaign of the time. The contents of his work are analysed and the connections that he and A Batalha forged with black African organizations in Lisbon are assessed. It is argued that Domingues’ work represents an alternative to both nation-centred and Marxist-oriented programmes of anticolonialism and its study aids in the reconstruction of the contours of a radical and active “Black Lisbon” of the late 1910s and early 1920s in Portugal and sheds new light on the associational culture of black political struggles during the period.

Nang’umfazomnyama: Race and Technology in Dineo Seshee Bopape’s is i am sky

Portia Malatjie presents song as a technology of black struggle in the ‘cosmic ceremony’ of Dineo Seshee Bopape’s is i am sky.

The Black/White Binary Paradigm of race: The `normal science' of American racial thought

The Black/White Binary Paradigm of race has become the subject of increasing interest and scrutiny among some scholars of color. This Article uses Thomas Kuhn’s notions of paradigm and the properties of paradigms to explore several leading works on race. The works the author explores demonstrate the Black/White paradigm of race and some of its properties, among them extensive paradigm elaboration over the years. Paradigms have limitations, however. Among them is a tendency to truncate history for the sake of telling a linear story of progress. The author demonstrates how one constitutional law text truncates history, by omitting entirely Mexican-American struggles for desegregation, and presenting a linear story of the Black struggle for civil rights. Omitting important history from the narrative of civil rights history becomes extraordinarily damaging, since it distorts history and contributes to the marginalization of non-Black peoples of color. While recognizing the centrality of slavery and White racism against Blacks at the core of American history and society, this Article seeks to expand our understanding of racism through the use of legal history. The author contends that mutual and particularized understanding of racism as it affects all people of color has the potential to enhance our abilities to understand each other and to join together to fight the common evil of racism.

Palestinian Engagement with the Black Freedom Movement prior to 1967

This article examines early Palestinian engagements with multiple facets of the Black American struggle for freedom through a content analysis of influential Palestinian press outlets in Arabic prior to 1967. It argues that, since the 1930s, Palestinian intellectuals with strong anti-colonial views linked anti-Black racism in the United States to larger imperial and Cold War dynamics, and that they connected Black American mobilizations against racism to decolonization movements around the world. This article also examines Mahmoud Darwish's early analytical writings on race as a social construct in both the U.S. and Israeli contexts. Understanding these early engagements sheds light on subsequent developments in Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity and on Palestinian Afro-Arab cultural imaginaries.

An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee

An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee

An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee

An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee