Black World Research Articles

Лексичні опозиції в поетичному ідіолекті В. Базилевського

The article analyzes the lexical oppositions in V. Bazilevsky’s poetic dictionary. The productivity of antonymic pairs, the components of which represent the religious ideas of a person: soul – body, spirit – body, and heaven – hell, is traced. Individual authorial genitive metaphors typical for the artist’s idiostyle, based on semantically opposed lexemes, which testify to the originality of the poetic perception of the world, have been identified. The poetic contexts, in which the direct and figurative meanings of antonymic polysemes are realized, are described. With the help of the parallel use of direct and figurative meanings of contrasting lexemes, the author achieves a specific sensory image. Individually authored antonymic phrases for common sayings (black world – white world, angel of existence – angel of death, room of laughter – room of tears) that enrich the poetic language have been identified. Syntactic and stylistic constructions that enhance the expressiveness of linguistic contrast are characterized: 1) parcellation; 2) identification of depicted contrasting phenomena; 3) denial of depicted contrasting phenomena; 4) chiasm; 5) refrain; 6) anepiphora; 7) constructions based on double opposition. The analysis of the actual material proved that antitheses in the studied texts are a productive means of creating contrasting characteristics of characters, conveying polar emotions, emphasizing the contrast of depicted objects and phenomena of objective reality, etc. Productivity in the poetic idiolect of V. Bazilevsky of oppositions, which ensure the creation of polar images and pictures of the surrounding world, testifies to antithetical thinking, a multifaceted idea of the complexity and contradictions of human life, a sharpened author’s perception of reality, and a tendency to reflection.

Sierra Leone: A Historical Cultural Capital of Pan-Africanism

This paper examines the concept of Sierra Leone serving historically as a cultural capital of Pan-Africanism. Culture is examined from the perspectives of race, language, formal educational attainment, and religion, especially Christianity. Racially and ethnically, the people of Sierra Leone today are the descendants of not just native Sierra Leoneans, but also natives of dozens of other Sub-Saharan African nations, and people of Black African descent from North America, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. As a result, the Sierra Leone Krio/Creole language is a Pan-African Krio/Creole. Historically, Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone has served as one of the most important academic/intellectual institutions in the Black world that have contributed to the brain thrust to Pan-Africanism. Finally, Sierra Leonean Christianity can be explained as a Pan-African Christianity.

A Brief Analysis About the Drug Addiction by Youths in India

Abstract: People have been taking the drug in various forms for many years for enjoyment, relaxation, sleeping, stimulation, or another reason. In the starting, people takes the drug for taste and alter the consciousness, behavior, mood, and thoughts but he/she becomes habitual and dependent on any substance use disorder such as alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, ecstasy, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin, amphetamines, or illegal drugs. As per my thoughts and watching surroundings, if you ask a drug intake person “how do you become a drug addictive”? Most people will answer this “they started taking the drug in their friend circle, at relatives home or with relationship partner”. The first time they take it for taste or due to forcing by someone but after some time this becomes a habit. Peer pressure can fall you in this black world. Also, if someone has family history of addiction then he/she may chance to catch this addiction and make habitual others as well. So good friend circle really matters. Drugs such as heroin and marijuana are structured in the same way as chemical messengers known as neurotransmitters. These neurotransmitters are produced naturally by the human brain. As a result of this similarity, the drugs can fool the receptors of human brain and activate the nerve cells in such a way that they send some abnormal messages. In case of drugs like methamphetamine and cocaine, the nerve cells get activated and they release extraordinarily large volumes of neurotransmitters. They are also capable of preventing the brain from recycling these chemicals in a normal manner. A normal level of production is necessary in order to end the signal between neurons. Keywords: Alcohol – Beer, Wine, & Liquor, Opioids – Heroin, Fentanyl & Oxycodone, Cannabinoids – Marijuana & Hashish, Benzodiazepines – Ativan, Valium & Xanax, Stimulants – Adderall, Cocaine & Meth.

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

Black Internationalism as “I and I” Praxis

Black Internationalism as “I and I” Praxis

Author Response

Author Response

The Black Pacific and the Shapes of Global Black Power

The Black Pacific and the Shapes of Global Black Power

Living in Between: A Grounded Theory Study of Depression Among Middle-Class Black Women

Empirical evidence consistently has linked the identification and treatment of depression among low-income Black women. Research on depression and Black women also suggests Black women are a monolithic group who experience depression similarly. The purpose of this qualitative study was to gain a deeper understanding of how the identity of middle-class Black women may shape their experiences with depression. Using grounded theory as the guiding method, I conducted 30 in-depth, semistructured interviews with Black women between 30 and 45 years old who self-identified as middle class. The core experience of depression among middle-class Black women was “living in between” because they straddled two worlds—one Black world and one White world—with competing sociocultural messages about depression. Two major categories emerged that informed the experiences of depression among the middle-class Black women in this study: (a) strategies to deal with depression and (b) minimization of depression. Each of these categories highlighted consequences for the women’s mental health. The women also described coping strategies for managing these experiences. Implications for research and practice are included.

Homenagem: Remembering the Life and Work of Abdias Nascimento

This essay provides a brief introduction to this special issue focused on the life and work of Black Brazilian scholar-activist Abdias Nascimento. The contributors include, Vera Lucia Benedito, Ollie Johnson, Zachary Morgan, Elisa Larkin Nascimento, and Cheryl Sterling who all participated in a 2015 conference at Africana Studies at Brown University. This group of scholars aptly illustrate that Nascimento had long contributed to the internationalization of Black Studies as a field in US academe and he was crucial in establishing Brazil as a central component of the Black World. The essays have much to teach us about Nascimento’s views on the relationship between art and politics, the role of military service in shaping his activism, the significance of black politicians in the reconceptualization of Brazilian democracy, and the importance of preserving archives and expanding our understanding of the Black radical tradition.

Peter Abrahams’s Island Fictions for Freedom

When South African–born Peter Abrahams moved to Jamaica in 1956, he thought he had found a racial paradise. Over the next six decades as a Jamaican, his understanding of race in Jamaica was complicated after independence. His last two novels—This Island Now (1966) and The View from Coyaba (1985)—fictionalize the transition to independence in the anglophone Caribbean and how that transition related to the set of concerns unfolding across the rest of the black world. This essay traces Abrahams’s thought on questions of race and decolonization through a close reading of his Caribbean fiction and how he came to theorize the literal and conceptual space of the Caribbean—the island—as a strategy for freedom. In so doing, the author asks, What are the limits of the Caribbean novel of the era of decolonization (1960s–80s) in the anglophone Caribbean? What constitutes it? And how does it articulate liberation?

Symposium Declaration: Third Eye – Struggle for Black and Third World Cinema

Symposium Declaration: Third Eye – Struggle for Black and Third World Cinema

Diasporic Consciousness in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

The term Diaspora has multiple layers of meaning in academic circles today. The term primarily used to refer to Jewish dispersion, came to be used to refer to contemporary situations that involve the experiences of migration, expatriate workers, refugees, exiles, immigrants and ethnic communities. The Indian Diaspora can probably be traced to ancient times when Buddhist monks travelled to remote corners of Asia. During the ancient times a large number of Indians migrated to Far East and South East Asia to spread Buddhism. The issues of colonialism and slavery, insider- outsider have posed the most difficult problems in the production of identity particularly for the black and third world people. In this way, the many diasporic–literary energies work today. For example, India, Africa, Canada and the West Indies have distinct diasporic backgrounds through which the respective writers’ works echo a variety of issues.

O CYBORG E A ESCRAVA: GEOGRAFIAS DA MORTE E IMAGINAÇÃO POLÍTICA NA DIÁSPORA NEGRA

In order to explore ways in which we can address anti-black hatred, a foundation of modern sociability, in this article I analyze two ideal types of black diasporic and trans-temporal political experience: the cyborg and the slave. These ideal types are analytical references with which we can interpret the black worlds of life and death: their geographies, their political projects, and their horizons of desires. While the cyborg refuses the abjection of black people and struggles to improve the social world, the slave considers this world fundamentally and hopelessly anti-black, and therefore seeks escape and refuge. The cyborg fights tirelessly against racism and sees (and hopes for) a redeemed social world in which black people are unquestionably part of it. With its multiracial political bloc, the cyborg demands the reform of society; he believes in the promise of multiracial democracy. The slave fights against anti-blackness, and therefore wants the destruction of the world and its protocols of sociability and ontology.

Zora Neale Hurston and Questions of Scholarship

Zora Neale Hurston and Questions of Scholarship

Black cargo

Black cargo

Ayuba Sulieman Diallo and Muslim Visual Culture in the Black Atlantic World

Ayuba Sulieman Diallo and Muslim Visual Culture in the Black Atlantic World

Building Black worlds: revisioning cultural justice for Black teacher education students at PWIs

This article presents the reflections of the authors, two Black women teacher educators, in ongoing dialogue with Black teacher education students at a PWI. The dialogues generated from several gatherings in which students’ concerns and feedback about their teacher education experiences were solicited. Ultimately, students continued to request a space where they could be candid about their experiences. We contextualize these dialogues with Black students in the literature elevating White supremacy culture and anti-Blackness in teacher education, as well as larger critiques about the complicit role of teacher education faculty in meeting the needs of Black teacher education students. The authors share wonderings about revisioning teacher education as a site for cultural justice and for the professional thriving of Black teacher education students, and offer suggestions about how abolitionist teaching and agitation literacies can be employed by teacher educators in ways that meet these students’ needs.

Painting the Cardboard House Red: Rewriting Colour in Wide Sargasso Sea

This article reads the end of Wide Sargasso Sea as a spectral portrait of the artist. As she is said to spread colour/fire, Antoinette asserts herself in a gesture where the frame of the picture replaces the frame of a mirror that is either broken, absent, or luring her with a deadly reflection. The I/eye that faces the red backdrop of the sky has stepped through the looking-glass to compose a landscape where another logic is made to prevail. The moment that is created is both a moment of meaning and a moment when meaning is resisted through a handling of colour that displaces codes and challenges the black and white world of the master/colonizer system as much as the symbolism of the mother-text itself. Colour triumphs as an event that sets all lines into motion and allows us to draw a line between modernist aesthetics and a postcolonial poetics of resistance.

The Case for the Courts: Military, Society, and the Legal Record

The Case for the Courts:Military, Society, and the Legal Record Jessica L. Adler (bio) Richard Gergel, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019. 324 pp. Appendix, notes, and index. $27.00. Kellie Wilson-Buford, Policing Sex and Marriage in the American Military: The Court-Martial and the Construction of Gender and Sexual Deviance, 1950–2000. By Kellie Wilson-Buford. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Xviii + 316 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $50.00. In 1945, as U.S. service members returned home from World War II, anthropologist William A. Caudill was concerned that a Black veteran would "often be considered first a Negro, second and incidentally a veteran." The distinction was important, Caudill maintained, because it meant that, in a largely segregated and non-egalitarian society, African Americans who had served would face challenges accessing the benefits available via the newly passed GI Bill—home loans, financial aid for college, unemployment payments.1 Scholars have since proven Caudill right. They have shown that, during and after military service, people from marginalized groups historically faced exceptional challenges—challenges that undercut the notion that privileged martial citizenship was universally accessible. Race, gender, and sexuality shaped access to opportunities within the military hierarchy, and inequities encountered during and after service compelled former service members to participate in and become civil rights activists.2 In order to study complex relationships between the military and society, we must acknowledge that service members and veterans have multifaceted identities, and we must examine policies and social movements. Richard Gergel and Kellie Wilson-Buford remind us anew that there is an underexplored expanse that both shapes and illuminates connections between military and civilian worlds: the courts. Though vastly different in scope and focus, their books both highlight that conversations and directives in courtrooms—like policies and social movements—are influenced by individuals' proclivities and larger social circumstances. The interpretation of doctrine is [End Page 596] pliable, and rights can be re-conceptualized, expanded, and undercut based on the outcomes of criminal investigations, hearings, and trials. Gergel knows that much firsthand. A U.S. district judge, he presides in the same Columbia, South Carolina courthouse once overseen by one of his book's protagonists, the long under-celebrated civil rights stalwart, Judge J. Waties Waring. Gergel's main focus is the U.S. South and the trajectory of several key civil rights cases of the 1940s and 1950s, including, Brown v. Board of Education. Aiming to trace legal change over time, Gergel ushers readers into the personal and professional lives of Waring, President Harry Truman, and movement heroes like Thurgood Marshall and Walter White, as well as families and business owners who risked everything to bring attention to injustice. A primary aim for Gergel is to show how the law can be used as a tool to undermine or stimulate change. Unexampled Courage, built on a foundation of archival research and pithy prose, and spotlighting some of the most horrifying and hopeful aspects of U.S. history, is an engrossing read. Gergel's story begins with a portrait of its key linchpin, a Black World War II veteran named Isaac Woodard. Like many of the millions of African Americans who served in the military throughout American history—including more than one million during World War II—Woodard faced a jarring return to civilian society. Having taken "intense enemy fire" (p. 13) while working in a segregated support unit in New Guinea, he wore sergeant stripes and battle medals when he was honorably discharged on February 12, 1946 at Camp Gordon in Georgia. Newly released, Woodard boarded a bus scheduled to traverse a swath of the deep Jim Crow South, from Augusta, Georgia to Winnsboro, South Carolina, where the veteran was to be reunited with his wife. While accounts of what transpired on the bus varied, according to Gergel, "what is clear is that Sergeant Woodard displayed a degree of assertiveness and self-confidence that most southern whites were not accustomed to and not prepared to accept." Woodard later maintained that the trouble began when he requested...