Formation Of Black Identity Research Articles

Black identity formation and the civil rights in Brasil

This paper aims to establish an association between black racial identity formation and the struggle to guarantee civil rights in Brazil. The consolidation of racial identity is a determining factor for the subject to become an active social agent, able to enjoy all their rights as a citizen. The introduction contextualizes matters involving identity formation in the colonial e imperial periods. Next, we examine the construction and consolidation of black identity from the legal abolition of slavery until the contemporary advances in the conquest of rights in Brazil. Finally, we observe that the consolidation of racial identity is directly linked to the organization and strengthening of Black Brazilian movement.

Dios en Carne: Puerto Rican Rastas Choosing Black / Refusing White

AbstractIn this paper I argue that, due to the influence of Rastafari culture and beliefs, my interlocutors, members of the Rastafari community in Puerto Rico, are selecting a Black racialized identity for themselves—even though they have the social privilege not to do so. In doing so, they are critiquing how Blackness and Black identity formation is understood in Puerto Rico. By refusing said privilege and choosing what is largely understood to be a marginalized identity, they are defying Puerto Rican racial constructions as well as Eurocentric racial hierarchies. They present instead a number of counternarratives: (1) they acknowledge the reality and gravity of racism in Puerto Rico, (2) they favor and support a standard of beauty that is Afrocentric as opposed to the typical Eurocentric standard prevalent in Puerto Rico, and (3) they consider a Black/African identification to be a practice in empowerment and not suppression.

Afrofeminist Microhistories and the Making of Modern Black French Identities

This article explores recent works by French Afrofeminists that interrogate notions of Frenchness and colorblindness through staking claims to Black diasporic identity. Examining Audrey Celestine's Une famille française (Paris, Éditions Textuel, 2018) and Maboula Soumahoro’s Le Triangle et l’Hexagone (Paris, La Découverte, 2020) in relation to notions of intersectionality, diaspora, and the “Third Space,” the article reveals how these writers construe Black identity formation in the context of modern France through collective family memory and through conceptualizing both womanhood and race in the geographic prism of the French empire, past and present. Celestine’s and Soumahoro’s interwoven narrative style permits them tell intimate stories of family and personal identity while exploring broader phenomena of colonialism, empire, and systemic intersectional racial, gender, and religious discrimination. Ultimately, these writers work to draw the contours of modern Black French identity and to assert it as an essential part of French history and society that neither claims to systemic universalism nor colorblind rhetoric officially promulgated by the state can erase.

Black Identity Formation in Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Frederick Douglass and Toni Morrison both dealt extensively with problems of black identity within their works. In Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, we find that black identity is strongly affected and by outside forces that seek to limit the ways in which black identity can develop in order for powerful forces such as institutional slavery to maintain their control over black people. This essay reads Frederick Douglass’s self-fashioning in his Narrative in comparison with characters from Morrison’s novel, particularly Pecola, and explores the ways in which black identity may be constructed against prevailing norms (as in Douglass’s case), or may end up being lost through extreme conformity with norms (as in Pecola’s case). An exploration of black identity in these works is important not only for an understanding of historically significant literature, but for present day problems around black identity.

Black Middle-class Masculinities in Postapartheid South Africa: Consumerism, Fashion and the Portrayal of Masculine Identities in Destiny Man Magazine

This article examines the state of middle-class black South African masculinity in the postapartheid era as presented in Destiny Man, a popular lifestyle magazine targeted at accomplished, stylish, and affluent black men in South Africa. The magazine offers a blend of compelling and relevant business and lifestyle content, including articles on fashion, grooming, sport, technology, and motoring. This article’s focus on consumerism, fashion, and masculinity as represented and featured in the magazine offers a vital contribution to fashion studies in general and to the African diaspora’s dress sense in particular, as well as to the contemporary intersections of wealth associated with masculine identification Articles published in the 2014 issues of the magazine were selected for an in-depth multimodal discourse analysis of how factors such as fashion, access to economic resources, status, and wealth play a significant role in masculine black identity formation. Visuals were also analysed to understand the representation of black middle-class men in the magazine. The findings indicate that Destiny Man’s characterization of middle-class black South African masculinity is based on the acquisition of material goods, on perceptions of power and on the ability to transition into formerly white-only spheres.

Wild seed: Africa and its many diasporas

This paper engages with the epistemological assumptions of diaspora as it has been narrativised within North American discourses of Black identity formation. It will be argued that in light of the rapid growth of Black African migrant women populations in both the United States and Canada, and their second generation descendants over the past four decades, new frameworks for understanding Blackness are needed. The experiences of Black identity formation among these women in North America are particularly susceptible to exclusion within older and more dominant frameworks for narrativising histories of slavery, migration and Blackness. I will argue that Black feminist speculative fiction, with its history of subversion and reputation for unbound imagination, can be useful in addressing this exclusion. Thus, using Octavia Butler’s 1980 novel Wild seed as a case study, I will argue throughout this paper that Black feminist speculative fiction presents epistemological tools useful in exploring the limits of these older frameworks, while still drawing from them in order to create newer and/or more flexible epistemologies better suited to the gendered, ethnic and sexual differences within Black diasporic communities, especially those that have come about as a result of these newer migrations from Africa.

Faith Ringgold’s Die: The Riot and Its Reception

The year 1967 was a transitional moment for the rehabilitation of activist art and the formation of black identity. It was likewise significant for Faith Ringgold, who was preparing the solo exhibition that would introduce her to the New York art world. That summer, after riots devastated Detroit and Newark, NJ, she painted Die expressly for the show. The wall-size canvas depicts an interracial cast of clean-cut antagonists trying to kill one another. Although the painting represented the kind of large-scale, politically motivated figuration that had been out of favor since the 1940s, it earned favorable attention from key art journals. I argue that its warm reception indexes the painting’s ability to speak differently to different constituencies, from mainstream and African American modernists to the activists in the Black Arts and peace movements then beginning to make waves. The painting’s multivocal potential encompassed an iconography that reads as either warning against or wishing for social unrest and a format that inserts the large-scale figuration of public murals into the more rarified space of the commercial art gallery. As a microhistory focused on Die’s production and reception, this study aims to illuminate how racial politics influenced a politics of style in this volatile moment. To do so, it situates Die in relation to a mounting attention to protest, violence, social realism, and black aesthetics, especially as they crystallized in writer Amiri Baraka’s engagement with the Newark riot and in gallery director Robert Newman’s facilitation of Ringgold’s shift to large-scale imagery.

"Crazy for This Democracy": Postwar Psychoanalysis, African American Blues Narratives, and the Lafargue Clinic

The popularization of psychoanalysis after World War II provided African American writers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison with a new paradigm for exploring the effects of racial discrimination on the formation of black identity. Both were instrumental in helping the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham establish the Lafargue Clinic in 1946, the first community outpatient "mental hygiene" clinic in Harlem. I argue that the Lafargue Clinic's improvisations on psychoanalysis can best be understood as a type of blues epistemology, strategically revising and inverting traditional tropes. My approach uncovers the clinic's innovative use of patient narratives as an essential therapeutic strategy to help African American clients reframe their encounters with racial discrimination as symptomatic of a diseased democracy.

The Antinomies of Black Identity Formation in West Africa, 1820–1848

During the mid-nineteenth century, a group of United States-born property-holding free blacks struggled to establish themselves and fashion a new polity on the coast of West Africa. In doing so, these Liberians embraced a pair of simultaneously complementary and opposing aspirations: first, the insertion, entrenchment and expansion of a successful black commercial bourgeoisie into the global Atlantic economy of the nineteenth century, an aspiration tied to and dependent upon the accumulation of capital and the creation of a state which would operate in the interest of this group and no other. Secondly, they aspired to the creation and institutionalisation of a separate and distinct black nationality - a black identity - that covered the entire spectrum of people of African descent, that held out the prospect of solidarity for all black people in republican equality and citizenship, and that subsumed all other classes and categories of black people under the tent of the imagined black nation. In this way they contributed to the uneven, reciprocal and trans-Atlantic work of black identity formation during the middle of the nineteenth century.

Challenging a Pan-African Identity: The Autobiographical Writings of Maya Angelou, Barack Obama, and Caryl Phillips

In her 1986 book All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, Maya Angelou reflected on the meaning of identity among the people of the African diaspora. A rich and highly reflective memoir, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes recounted the author's experiences, relationships, and quest for a sense of individual and collective belonging throughout the African diaspora. At the core of Angelou's quest for individual and collective identity lay Africa, a continent whose geography and history loomed large in her very personal story, and in her efforts to create a sense of “kinship” among people of African descent throughout the world. Starting with Maya Angelou's All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, this essay considers the significance of “Africa” as a geographical site, political space, and constantly reimagined history in the formation of black identity in the travel writings of black diaspora authors since the 1980s. I compare Angelou's work with that of the Hawaiian-born President of the United States Barack Obama, whose Dreams from My Father (1995) offered personal self-reflections and critiques of the African diaspora from a Pacific world perspective. In Obama's rendering of African diasporic identity, Africa has become “an idea more than an actual place.” Half a decade later, and half a world away, the Caribbean-born Afro-Britain Caryl Phillips published The Atlantic Sound (2000), an account of African diasporic identity that moved between understanding, compassion, and a harsh belief that Africa cannot take on the role of a psychologist's couch, that “Africa cannot cure.” These three memoirs offer insight into the complex and highly contested nature of identity throughout the African diaspora, and present very personalized reflections on the geography, politics, and history of Africa as a source of identity and diasporic belonging. Taken together, these three personal narratives represent a challenge to the utility of a transnational black identity that Paul Gilroy suggested in his landmark book The Black Atlantic.

Afro-Mexicans: Discourses of race and identity in the African diaspora, by Chege Githiora

These books reflect two aspects of recent trends in scholarship on Afro-descendants in Latin America. The first is an interest in diaspora and the movement of ideas and people around the Atlantic, spurred by Gilroy’s pioneering work on the Black Atlantic, but with deeper roots in studies by scholars like Philip Curtin and Fernand Braudel who worked on trans-Atlantic systems of economic and intellectual exchange. The second is the widening of the geographical range of studies on Afro-Latins, beyond the classic locations of Brazil, Cuba, and, more recently, Colombia, to encompass countries such as Peru, Mexico, and Honduras. Although anthropological work on Mexico’s Afro-descendants dates back to Aguirre Beltrán’s 1958 study of the village of Cuijla, rather little attention has been paid, until recently, to Afro-Mexican populations of the Costa Chica region and around Veracruz. The edited volume by Sansone, Soumonni and Barry is a welcome addition to the growing literature that places the formation of black identity in a trans-Atlantic frame, with a focus here on the southern Atlantic, especially Brazil and Africa. The volume grew out of a conference held in Africa and scholars from the ‘North’ (Canada, Europe, US) are outnumbered by those from the ‘South’ (Brazil and Africa). History is the dominant influence, followed by social anthropology. Sansone’s introduction contextualizes the book’s key theme in relation to scholarship on black peoples in the Americas – the influence of Mintz and Price’s 1976 publication on Afro-American culture is still a departure point. He remains agnostic in the debate between those who favour the idea of ‘early creolization’ and constant hybridization and those whom he labels ‘new Afrocentrists’, who focus on ethnogenesis in Africa and its influence on the formation of identities in the Americas.

Negotiating the “Negro Problem”: Stew’s Passing (Made) Strange

“Black folks passing for black folks. That’s a trip!” A trip is just what we get in Passing Strange , Stew’s Tony Award–winning piece of “genre-defying rock-pop-funk-punk-cabaret.” Stew and his band, The Negro Problem, serve as tour guides on a semi-autobiographical “pilgrimage” beyond the tightly patrolled borders of the North American continent, the traditions of black musical theatre performance, and the “chains” of a rooted, African American authenticity. Passing Strange renders a musical critique of any traditional or idealist rendering of “double consciousness” and explores the negative—and hybridized—nature of black identity formation. In turn, this essay employs a dialectical and diasporic vocabulary to situate Stew in problematic yet productive relation to critical interlocutors like W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Gilroy among others in order to articulate the complex relations between racial and national identity that Passing Strange performs. It maps the varied problems of problematization for which Passing Strange is arguing by charting the piece’s often contradictory trajectories. Finally, the essay works to understand Stew where he is most at home, “between the clicks of a metronome”: between black and white, between music and theatre, between the United States and Europe, between past and present, between fictional representation and lived experience.

A recepção de fanon no Brasil e a identidade negra

Neste artigo, uso fontes bibliográficas e testemunhos para analisar a recepção de Fanon pelo meio intelectual brasileiro, assim como sua influência sobre a formação de identidades negras. Enquanto observo uma recepção morna, argumento que isso se deveu a três fatores: primeiro, a especificidade da esquerda latino-americana nos anos 1960; em segundo, uma constituição racial e nacional totalmente oposta a conflitos raciais; e, em terceiro, o número reduzido nas universidades brasileiras de professores e pesquisadores negros que abordem a formação da identidade negra ou a afirmação de sujeitos racialmente oprimidos.

Rhetoric of identity: An inquiry into symbolic syntax and composition of black identity in Bamboozled

The exploration into the epistemological function of symbols, their validity, and how they contribute to identity formation is imperative because of their rhetorical properties in the conceptualization and communication of black identity. In order to conduct such an effort, I draw from the term symbolic material to explore the formation of black identity and the representation of that identity, encrypted within the film Bamboozled’s character Pierre Delacroix. What emerges from this meditation is a fresh perspective from which to understand the evolution process of identity formation. Symbolic material, specifically, highlights the subtle psychological and rhetorical fabric interwoven into identity formation and composition. To finish, I introduce questions that future researchers might address.

Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (review)

Reviewed by: Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity Sean P. Hier Ron Eyerman , Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 302. There is an important distinction to be respected concerning the analytic fields which comprise "history" and "collective memory." Whereas the former delineates the terrain of the event, often recorded and reproduced in the form of institutionalized knowledge and symbolized by material artifacts and physical objects, the latter denotes the culmination of the spatially and temporally situated needs and desires of a generation, a negotiation of the present deriving from an engagement with the past. Material artifacts and physical objects, in other words, possess the potentiality to evoke a sense of the past, but it is the articulation of an assemblage of discourses which serve to grant temporal stability to what form those representations assume. Inspired by, and making good use of, discourse theory and the mediated generational character of cultural memory, Ron Eyerman invokes the notion of "cultural trauma" to exemplify the cultural memory of slavery in the imagination of the African American collective. Cultural trauma, Eyerman explains, is inherently representational by nature. Neither does it necessitate the direct experience of the members comprising the collective, nor does it in any final sense correspond to the beliefs and aspirations of an homogenous group. From Du Bois' narration of the "sorrow songs" to the discourses which comprise late 20th century film, the mediation of cultural trauma persists and continues to shape African American identity. In this emergent identity forged through trauma, slavery does not correspond to an experience, only to a point of origin. But it is that point of origin from which the formation of black identity in America has emerged. And it is against this alluring backdrop that Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity commences. In Eyerman's assessment, cultural trauma as it pertains to the formation of African American identity derives not so much from the experience but the experiential mediation of slavery. In the aftermath of American slavery, [End Page 317] reconstruction brought great anticipation for what the future promised to freed slaves. Educating children and establishing religious and educational institutions was paramount. From the sources of empowerment which persisted under conditions of servitude would emerge the future of the emancipated slave. Former slaves, in other words, were less focused on what was than what will be. The failure of reconstruction to deliver its promises of equality and acceptance signified the point at which the memory of slavery, cultural trauma, emerged as an important discursive resource for identity formation within the black collective. This of course neither implies a uniform process of identity building nor does it constitute essentialism. It does, however, draw attention to the argument that from the ashes of myriad ethnic distinctions — Ibo, Ashanti, Igba, etc. — emerged the social construction of blackness, race and, importantly, difference. Hence, the cultural trauma that was and remains slavery is, for Eyerman, the trauma of failed emancipation. Facilitated by the ascendance of an upwardly mobile, educated, black middle class comprised of charismatic intellectuals through the first half of the twentieth century — artists, writers, teachers, lawyers, journalists etc. — gaining control of black representation in a climate of a reactionary dominant society became paramount. Aided to a considerable extent by the expansion of the media of mass communications, Eyerman maintains that the question of how African peoples of the world should be represented has remained embedded in the popular consciousness of black intellectuals since the failed years of reconstruction. Through a fascinating exploration of art, music, literature, radio, television and film, Cultural Trauma probes the internal conflicts over the form and meaning of representation and culture in successive generations of black Americans after slavery. Drawing from Du Bois, Garvey, Washington, Hurston, McCall, Johnson, Frazier, Locke, Elijah Muhammad and more, Eyerman details the continuous conflict which saw the rise and fall of a Black public sphere. Engaging the diversity and complexity of the social movements that emerged in the aftermath of reconstruction through the acceleration of the New Negro, the Harlem Resistance, Black Nationalism and Civil Rights, as well as the role of...

Roots of Identity: The National and Cultural Self in Présence Africaine

In her article, "Roots of Identity: The National and Cultural Self in Présence Africaine," Marga Graf investigates some of the difficulties African, American, Brazilian, and Caribbean Blacks of the mid-twentieth century encountered in their attempts to voice their cultural and racial self-understanding, a self-understanding struggling to a large extent to challenge the established dichotomy between black racial inferiority versus white superiority. After the Second World War, black intellectuals meeting at the Sorbonne in Paris founded the journal Présence Africaine, a journal that became the voice of blacks investigating their history and culture throughout the different regions of Africa as well as diasporas worldwide. In Présence Africaine, well-known black writers, poets, and intellectuals joined hands with white authors, most of them French writers and intellectuals, in a common endeavor to support the formation of a new cultural, historical, and political identity of and for blacks. Focusing on the decades of the 1950s and the 1960s, a time of multiple struggles for political independence, Graf explores the journal's material with regard to major regional differences in the processes of black identity formation and in the interpretation of négritude as a concept supporting blacks in their search for the roots of their identity.

Racism, Culture and Black Identity in Brazil

Michel Agier examines race and culture in the formation of Black identity and its implications on the sociological and anthropological studies of Brazil. In particular, Agier draws on his work in the region of Bahia. Agier questions the evolutionist paradigm which has dominated Brazilian studies of race relations for several years by examining racial, cultural and social dimensions of the construction of black identity. In a first part, he presents an historical analysis of the construction of Brazilian identity, which he then applies to the current institutions of black identity in a modern urban milieu.

Ego Development and Black Identity

The relationship of ego development and Black identity formation was explored in thirty Black male and thirty Black female college students. The subjects were administered the Washington University Sentence Completion Test and the Racial Identity Attitude Scale. A significant inverse relationship was found between ego development and Black identity. This suggests that if an individual has strong ego, he or she defines self; if the individual's ego is weak, others define self. Social and cultural differences, the definition of self, and the perception of development, identity, and change are discussed as other possible explanations for this inverse relationship.

Black studies, Black identity formation and some implications for community psychiatry.

Black studies is defined as being of, by and about black people, occurring in multiple areas, including black homes, black communities, and academic departments of black studies. Black identity is a function of the socio-cultural reality of the times. Community psychiatry can be useful in this process, but leadership in such programs must be assumed by blacks.