Black Violence Research Articles

Dangerous or in Danger?

Rebecca Hall’s 2021 adaptation of Nella Larsen's Passing, establishes themes of safety in a visual context, examining the Black bodily experience in both white and Black spaces. Hall's use of greyscale lighting, diegetic & non-diegetic sounds, and, most importantly, omission, spotlights what it means to be Black in white space. In the same way Larsen’s story rejects the possibility of ever being safe as a Black person, regardless of whether one can pass as white or not, Hall's cinematic methodology reveals the character of Clare as both dangerous and yet always in danger. Controlling what the viewer is allowed to see, Hall presents a newfound method of storytelling that confronts Black violence in a manner that rejects the glorification of Black trauma, while also presenting the dangers Black persons face from merely existing in their body.

Effects of Structural Inequalities and Misleading Discourse of Social Policymakers on African American families in God Help the Child

In sociological and anthropological studies of African American family formation and development, racial hierarchies, criminal violence, social policies, and systemic disparities are often ignored. This study emphasizes the gradual development of consequences of xenophobic attitude of the society that stigmatizes African American family culture in the United States. The prevalent approach in social sciences was to blame the victim on certain group membership or racial specification such as color, background, and physical traits. These structural inconsistencies have been undervalued or studied only occasionally and irregularly. This is qualitative study that analysis Toni Morrison’s Gold Help the Child in the light of a rethinking history, a postmodern notion. The textual analysis of the selected text reveals that that formative policy makers focused on Black people’s violence and individual level incongruities but ignored their fundamental problems and latent potentialities. The finding further shows that the lack of structural and systematic analysis misled the discourse of policy makers and more precisely often justified black violence that reflects cultural inferiority and unique experiences of legitimatizing all kinds of violence and negativity propogated against them.

Being black and non‐citizen in South Africa: Intersecting race, white privilege and afrophobic violence in contemporary South Africa

AbstractPost‐apartheid South Africa is characterized by growing feelings of pain, anger and frustration amongst black communities triggered by pervasive social inequalities. This has given birth to a new form of political and social activism shaped by crude violence, vandalism, destruction, brutal killings of women and children as well as thuggery in different black communities. It has also led to an upsurge in violence particularly on Africans from other parts of the continent. In this article, I attempt to examine how racial politics and resilient white privilege intersect to trigger afrophobic violence in South Africa. I draw on existing literature on broad conceptions of race and xenophobia to make a set of assertions about racial valuations, the resilience of white supremacy and black on black violence. In the article, I argue that black South Africans' pain, anger and the performance of violence on African migrants are on one level a consequence of resilient structural racism and racial practices, which continue to marginalize, emasculate and dispossess blacks. These racial practices force black South Africans to look elsewhere to express their anger, pains and frustrations.

A Brief Analysis on the Narrative Art of Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino was made in 1994. With its novel and unique method and structure of narration, the film won many international awards including the Academy Award, the Golden Globe Award and the Golden Palm. The film adopted a seemingly messy but orderly form of expression, showing black violence, vulgar, marginal and other narrative elements, as well as subverting the traditional narrative perspective and space, creating a brand new visual experience for the audience. Today, China’s movie market is very prosperous, China has become the second largest movie market after the United States, and has the largest movie audience in the world. However, the overall level of Chinese film industry is low. This paper analyzes the non-linear narrative structure and omniscient narrative perspective of Pulp Fiction, thus exploring the feelings it brought to the audience through its unique narrative method. By doing so, this paper hopes to provide some reference for the development of Chinese narrative film.

Between Empirical Data and Anti-Blackness: A Critical Perspective on Anti-Asian Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents

Between Empirical Data and Anti-BlacknessA Critical Perspective on Anti-Asian Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents Janelle Wong (bio) and Rossina Zamora Liu (bio) After a US president (with connections to white nationalists), raised the specter of Yellow Peril and white shooters engaged in mass killings of Asian Americans in Atlanta and Indianapolis in the spring of 2021, white violence toward Asian Americans was difficult to ignore. Yet one leading story of anti-Asian violence in the wake of the pandemic is of an Asian American senior, often termed an "elder" in reporting, or young woman brutally beaten by a person who "appears to be Black." This story and others like it have circulated throughout the Asian American community via viral videos. The story has been the subject of calls for attention to "Black-Asian conflict" in the recent past.1 In March 2021, for example, Vox reporters noted that "Many of the attacks that have gained widespread attention have featured Black assailants, and have threatened to inflame tensions between Asian Americans and Black Americans."2 In April of 2021, a story by an NBC local affiliate in Seattle observed that "There have also been widely circulated videos that show Black men attacking Asian Americans."3 Meanwhile, survey and crime data suggest a different trend. Empirical data, for instance, shows that, compared to their share of the population, Asian American elders (over age 65) are underrepresented among victims of Asian American hate crimes and hate incidents. While women are more likely to report a hate incident to the StopAAPIHate reporting site, multiple sources of data show that men are as likely or more likely to experience a hate incident than women. Further, the vast majority of violence against Asian Americans [End Page 387] consists not of physical assaults but of verbal harassment and "shunning." The data also shows that Black offenders make up a minority of offenders. And, comparatively, Black Americans are up to ten times more likely to report being the victim of a hate crime than Asian Americans, and this pattern persists even in places like California, where Asian Americans comprise nearly double the population of Black Americans.4 This is true despite the fact that people of all racial backgrounds indicate that they are reluctant to report hate crimes. The point here is not to minimize the disturbing incidents, crimes, and even killings that have been widely circulated as part of anti-Asian hate media coverage; rather, placing these incidents in a broader context allows them to be better understood and ultimately addressed by well-informed policy. As two Asian American women and non-Black educators of Color, we seek to better understand the disconnection between the empirical data and the many Black-Asian conflict narratives of anti-Asian violence. We note that, despite a wealth of compelling empirical data, the media arc of anti-Asian violence—historically a symptom of white supremacy—quickly turned from the China-focused rhetoric of a white president and the heinous actions of white mass shooters to a focus on Black individuals physically assaulting Asian American elders. What is disturbing about this second narrative, which we describe as the "Black-on-Asian crime" narrative, is that it eclipses systematic racism captured by data, while gaining a widely accepted place in the discourse of Black aggression as a root cause of anti-Asian violence. The Black-on-Asian crime narrative has not only (re)ignited the Black-Asian conflict trope but seems to have also illuminated an undercurrent of anti-Blackness in narratives of Asian American victimization and perceptions of safety. In this paper, we present data regularly ignored in widely circulating Black-on-Asian crime narratives around anti-Asian violence, followed by a theoretically grounded reflection on the gap between empirical data and viral videos that emphasize Asian American vulnerability against the threat of Black violence. To be clear, we acknowledge that the anti-Asian incidents shown on viral videos are not only real and abhorrent but they have understandably elicited anger and fear in our community. What we hope to illustrate is the way in which these incidents have become prominent in discourses around anti-Asian violence, even though...

#MariellePresente: Black Feminism, Political Power, and Violence in Brazil

This article examines black Brazilian activist and politician Marielle Franco’s importance as a political figure, both during her life and since her assassination in 2018. It explores the intersectional dimensions of Franco’s political life, by locating her within two political genealogies: black women politicians in the city of Rio de Janeiro and black feminist activists in Brazil and the United States. The analysis underscores Franco’s impact on the Brazilian political landscape, and black women politicians in particular, during the 2018 and 2020 elections. It also examines Franco’s positioning within overlapping crises of anti-black genocide, femicide, and anti-LGBT violence in Brazil.

Black Protests in the United States, 1994 to 2010

Using novel data, we provide the first panoramic view of U.S. Black movement protest events as reported in U.S. newswires between 1994 and 2010 and put our quantitative data into dialogue with qualitative accounts. Struggles during these years presaged the Black Lives protest waves of 2014 to 2016 and 2020. Protests increased after the 1995 Million Man March into 2001 but dropped abruptly after the 9/11 attacks. Collective action increased again at the end of the 2000s. Protests in response to police violence and other criminal-legal issues were major arenas of struggle and news coverage. Also common were issues of national identity including celebrations of Black history and Black solidarity, protests about Confederate symbols, and protests about White hate groups and hate crimes. Although Black people protested about a wide variety of issues, newswires focused disproportionately on incidents of police violence and perceived threats of Black violence. There is substantial continuity in issues, organizations, and activism between this earlier period and the Black Lives Movement of 2014 to 2020.

The Deification of Black Consciousness as an Alternative Ideology in Simphiwe Dana’s “Bantu Biko Street”

In the context of gender-based violence and xenophobia (black on black violence), the question is being asked whether black people hate themselves. Scholars have sought explanations for these social ills in socio-economic challenges that are a legacy of apartheid. These challenges have continued in the post-apartheid era. One cultural site in which poverty and violence have been reflected is the song “Bantu Biko Street” by Simphiwe Dana. The singer invokes Bantu Biko’s philosophy of Black Consciousness as a possible solution. This article closely reads this song and argues that the current government fails to deliver its material promises. The article also depicts Black Consciousness as a possible alternative ideology to foster black pride, hope and communal sharing.

Pro-slavery Psychiatry and Psychological Costs of Black Women's Enslavement in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).

With careful attention to nineteenth-century race science's psychiatric discourses about slavery and insanity that led to the management and containment of African Americans in or on plantations, asylums, and society writ large, this article examines various themes, narrative sketches and intertextualities in Incidents that illustrate Harriet Jacobs's theoretical conceptions about the devastating mental harm caused by forms of violence that were integral to the practice of slavery vis-à-vis black women-sexualized violence, forced and controlled reproduction, separation from children between and within plantations, runaway attempts, witnessing violence, and hazardous labor conditions. I argue that Jacobs's narrative troubles visions of resiliency and resistance during slavery that elide the impact of the institution's routinized violence. It demonstrates that enslaved women's embodied experiences of psychological suffering were vexed, multilayered, and ongoing.

‘“Dare you meet a woman”: black women, abolitionism, and protective violence, 1850–1859’

ABSTRACT ‘Dare you Meet a Woman’ examines how black women exhibited their willingness to take on forceful and even violent action to dismantle the institution of slavery. Black resistance was central to abolitionism and black women were essential to the movement. This essay argues that their activism should be examined as the politics of protective violence. The politics of protective violence explains black women's employment of force to protect themselves and their communities and ultimately promote the overthrow of slavery. Beginning with the Christiana Resistance in 1851 and culminating with John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, this essay examines the bookends and high points of free and fugitive black women's responses during key turning points of the 1850s. In sum, black women violently resisted the Fugitive Slave Law and anti-black oppression. Moreover, black women leaders contributed significantly to the acceleration of violent sectional tensions and, ultimately, the American Civil War.

Of Rebels and Disobedients: Reflections on Arendt, Race, Lawbreaking

Hannah Arendt valued the unprecedented, the unexpected, and the new, yet in essays crafted at the end of the rebellious 1960s, struggled to square this valuation with a palpable desire for law and order. She lamented that criminality had overtaken American life, accused the police of not arresting enough criminals, and charged ‘the Negro community’ with standing behind what she named black violence. At once, she praised ‘the white rebels’ of the student movement in the United States for their courageous acts of disobedience. This essay explores how differential Arendt’s treatment of lawbreaking action was in an effort to understand how ‘certain sections of the population’ in the United States could appear to stand for criminality rather than civil disobedience to her mind. It examines how Arendt’s reflections on the ostensibly non-racial subjects of civil disobedience and lawbreaking were underwritten by racial, when not racist, ways of thinking. The essay also raises a larger question: to the extent that the concept of civil disobedience involves limits, how are those limits drawn to the exclusion of certain kinds of actors and their particular claims in the public realm? Pondering this question through Arendt, it concludes that in her theorization of civil disobedience, Arendt was profoundly limited by the fabulous tale that the United States is an exceptional land of freedom and democracy in the world.

Maleness to Manhood: A Transformational Model to Explore Unresolved Issues of Masculinity to Address Black Adolescent Male Gang Violence

Maleness to Manhood: A Transformational Model to Explore Unresolved Issues of Masculinity to Address Black Adolescent Male Gang Violence

Feeling and Falling in Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death

Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death is a video work that charts a path of Black expressive culture and racial violence. The artist employs found footage from popular culture, in...

History, Naming and Intellectualism in the #FeesMustFall Protests

This paper considers the black student as an emerging representative of the public intellectual's confrontation with history, institutional culture and language in the #FMF student protests. It pursues the manifestation of this confrontation through an analysis of specific episodes of articulation and events where the student as public intellectual encounters an academia that is incapable of comprehending or conceptualizing their demands. The protests animated the emerging black student public intellectual's projection into being and their confrontation with history, violence and academia. This paper examines the collaboration between the state and university as mechanisms of control to preserve the system and structure of neo-apartheid in a post-1994 South African society. I argue that the fixation with subjective violence, detracted from the greater, yet hidden narrative—that of the possibility of violence as ubiquitous in human social relations. Violence is also used to negate power. In confronting a powerful racist history and systems of racism, the #Fallists reference to the on-going complex levels of violence lived as a reality by black South Africans, could be understood as a form of social power to unchain the forced consensus that has been perpetuated around black violence and black ineptitude.

Curating Violence: Reflecting on Race and Religion in Campaigns for Decolonizing the University in South Africa

During 2015 and 2016, staff and students at university campuses across South Africa embarked on two campaigns for decolonizing higher education, but the efforts were met with various forms of violent repression and rationalization of violence by state and private security services. In the face of the securatization of university campuses countrywide, ordinary mediums of teaching and learning proved inadequate for helping students reflect on their social reality, and similarly, public gatherings for socio-political deliberation and commentary became irregular because of the policing and surveillance of student protest action. By reflecting on the curation of three memorials and performances about seemingly racialized violence in this context, this article interrogates the meaning and the relation to the aesthetic, as well as the commentary on the context within which it is produced. Drawing on the work of Mbembe, Fanon, and Spivak as theoretical interlocutors with respect to how I understand violence, this article reflects on how three interdisciplinary curatorial events raise pedagogical challenges and opportunities for critical reflection in a context of repression. It was precisely through this interdisciplinary effort that the black body, violence, and context aligned to produce a public pedagogy on physical and representational violence. The three curatorial moments allowed for meaningful reflection on violence, resistance, religion, and the racialized self that not only drew attention to the artifacts and the performances but deliberately opened possibilities for a kind of public classroom where the discussion, articulation, and critique of violence is possible and productive.

La Ilusión Persistente: Diálogos entre la Ciencia Ficción y el Campo Cultural by Silvia G. Kurlat Ares

639 BOOKS IN REVIEW Undermining hegemonic masculinity is also the subject of the first half of the fourth chapter. It further considers the role that typically marginalized characters play in sf cinema. Kac-Vergne addresses some of the problems with the theory of hegemonic masculinity by examining black male antagonists: the Predator in Predator 2 (1990) and Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) in Demolition Man (1993). The author argues that these characters are positive depictions of “black violence as a form of resistance and an assertion of power by the disenfranchised over a ‘civilisation’ always defined as white” (134). The chapter’s strength is, once again, its clear development of the volume’s thesis. I greatly appreciate the discussion of Demolition Man, a film that deserves more praise than it has so far received. Not all black male stars in sf action cinema resist hegemonic masculinity, however. In an fascinating reading of Will Smith’s sf cycle, Kac-Vergne asserts that his character’s “safe” blackness, as portrayed in I, Robot (2004), and his display of hegemonic masculinity in After Earth (2013), highlight the ways in which black heroes “tend to integrate into the system and assimilate its values whereby empowerment comes from material success and the domination of others” (155). Kac-Vergne concludes her fourth chapter by noting that Smith’s characters, complicit with hegemonic masculinity, are lonely at the top—contemporary sf cinema is almost exclusively populated by whites. Thus Smith’s vehicles are a step backward for sf action cinema’s politics, as in the author’s conclusion in the third chapter about the roles women play in this genre. Due to the radically disparate themes, stars, and plots of contemporary sf cinema, Kac-Vergne does not make many strong conclusions about overcoming hegemonic masculinity, although her analyses tend to suggest that some films attempt it. Nevertheless, the author’s evidence and arguments clearly indicate the role hegemonic masculinity plays in this period of film history. At first, I was concerned by Kac-Vergne’s decision not to introduce the theory of hegemonic masculinity in detail in the Introduction. As the chapters progress, however, the author gives us a nuanced account of that theory and we are able to understand its implications through her discussion of the films. This said, the book is of more interest to film studies scholars than to gender studies scholars as it lacks a critical engagement with the field of masculinities studies (however exceptional the author’s use of hegemonic masculinity theory may be). One glaring oversight is that while Masculinity and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema provides a breadth of analyses, it largely relies on action cinema characters at the expense of the men and women who do not resort to physical confrontations in other feature films (e.g., Moon [2009] and Her [2013]). But this shortcoming does not detract from this very readable and insightful volume. With Kac-Vergne’s study in hand, the field of masculinity and sf cinema studies is well poised to tackle films in the next era of sf blockbusters.—Troy Michael Bordun, Concordia University and Trent University An Impossible Good Book. Silvia G. Kurlat Ares. La Ilusión Persistente: Diálogos entre la Ciencia Ficción y el Campo Cultural. Pittsburgh, PA: Insituto Internacional de Cultura Iberoamericana, 2018. 430 pp. $30.00. 640 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) Silvia G. Kurlat Ares’s La Ilusión Persistente appears in the NUEVO SIGLO [New Century] series published by the prestigious Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, founded in Mexico in 1938 but currently based at the University of Pittsburgh. This information is pertinent to introduce an extremely ambitious volume that intends to bridge different cultural strata, but that is aimed for the most part at a highly specialized readership possibly more familiar with Latin-American culture than with science fiction. Kurlat, an independent scholar with an extensive CV, has taught at Johns Hopkins University, George Mason University, and the Universidad de Buenos Aires; she is also the editor of the forthcoming Latin American Science Fiction Studies Companion (Peter Lang). She is extremely well-positioned to connect the English-language field of science fiction and her native Argentinean context, which...

"A Very Curious Game": The Racialized Public Diplomacy of Toussaint Louverture in the United States

US newspapers introduced American readers to Toussaint Louverture as a military leader charging into battle and a protector of white people in war-torn Saint-Domingue. Louverture worked to cultivate such images across the Atlantic world to allay white American fears of black violence, stoked by racial biases and slanted US print coverage of the Haitian Revolution. Following his arrest, deportation, and death, white Americans remained fascinated by the life of the famous revolutionary leader. This essay argues that Louverture shaped the news carried to the United States of America for consumption by white Americans as part of strategic public diplomacy. It details the efforts Louverture employed from 1795 to 1802 to portray his evolving roles in Hispaniola in such a way that encouraged white Americans to contemplate bilateral relations with an independent nation of black people in the Caribbean.

Racial Undertones on Violence and Human Bodies: White Migrants' Online Epistemologies of Insecurity and Discomfort in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Violence and insecurity in post-apartheid South Africa are recurrent themes in online messages by white South Africans who have either migrated or wish to leave the country. These online authors position white people as victims or potential victims of crime committed by black people. It is a narrative which references apartheid as a period of safety and security, presupposing life is no longer what it used to be for white people. Through comparing the pre-1994 with the post-apartheid period and particularly emphasising that the black leadership is failing the country, the white migrants construct an epistemology – with racist undertones – of an unliveable South Africa. Narratives of black violence enacted upon white people, as well as white innocence and benevolence, are central features of the migrants' online complaints of an unliveable South Africa which I take up as a point of focus in this article.

“Entre-Lugar”: Uma noção pós-colonizadora, desde o século XIX

Grande parte dos escritos sobre a escravidão no Brasil tende a ratificar a hierarquia branco/negro atribuindo ao primeiro o poder imposto à força e ao segundo a submissão que o vitimiza. Lançando mão da noção de entre-lugar (Santiago, 2000) pretende-se uma leitura d’As vítimas-algozes. Quadros da escravidão (Macedo, 2006) apontando que, mesmo sob olhar branco abolicionista do autor, há uma figuração potente do negro para a luta contra sua condição de escravizado nas três narrativas que compõe o livro – Simeão: o crioulo; Pai-Raiol: o feiticeiro e Lucinda: a mucana. Nesta leitura, Joaquim Manuel de Macedo criaria uma contracena colonialista em que a perversão da escravidão lança senhores e escravos num jogo em que, ambos, desempenham posições de vítimas-algozes: os senhores almejando o enriquecimento pela exploração da ‘raça’ e os escravizados buscando resistir e revidar. Para o autor, a violência cometida pelos negros e negra não é atribuída à raça como característica biológica, mas à escravidão que é “árvore venenosa plantada no Brasil pelos primeiros colonizadores”. Assim, a escravidão como gesto político pode desnaturalizar a violência, permitindo que a força de luta negra apareça no ‘não-lugar’, no espaço intervalar que o próprio título do livro exibe.

The Kerner Commission and the Irony of Antiracist Politics

The Kerner Commission and the Irony of Antiracist Politics