Black Ideas Research Articles

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, by Kira Thurman

<i>Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms</i>, by Kira Thurman

Introduction to “Queer Healing and Transformative Justice”: A Special Issue of QED

Introduction to “Queer Healing and Transformative Justice”: A Special Issue of <i>QED</i>

“Add up all my Black”: understanding race and genetic ancestry through critical interpersonal and family communication

ABSTRACT Critical interpersonal and family communication (CIFC) contributes a context and lens for analyzing the intersections of race, communication, and genetic ancestry tests (GATs). This essay presents a discourse analysis of GAT reveal videos by Black content creators. Interpersonal communication—between the people in the videos and between them and online audiences—is a vehicle through which people narrate into meaning complex ideas of genetics and race. Results of this analysis show that Black content creators situate genetic ancestry within ongoing communication about identity. The videos work to “prove” Blackness and mark the significance of naming the self, often by conflating ideas of Blackness and genetic ancestry. CIFC as an analytic uncovers the paradox in which GAT discourse is both liberating and oppressive within relational spheres.

The Analytic that Flesh Makes Possible. A review of Fred Moten Stolen Life

The Analytic that Flesh Makes PossibleA review of Fred Moten Stolen Life Janet Neary (bio) Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Duke UP, 2018. Stolen Life is the second book in Fred Moten's recent series, consent not to be a single being, published within a year by Duke University Press. Like the other books in the series, Black and Blur and The Universal Machine, Stolen Life is a set of interrelated essays in which Moten uses blackness as an analytic to propose open-ended ways of being in the world that sharply cut and exceed the seeming wholes and totalities that form the commonplace understanding of the modern world. In this aleatoric collection that resists collection (xii), Moten presents his inimitable and endlessly generative mode of thought in encounters with a wide range of primary and scholarly texts. From the opening essay, "Knowledge of Freedom," which draws on Winfried Menninghaus, Olaudah Equiano, David Kazanjian, Ronald Judy, and Bryan Wagner (among others) to produce a sustained analysis of the foundational disturbance of blackness in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, to the concluding essay, "Erotics of Fugitivity," which thinks alongside Sora Han's "Slavery as Contract" to present a fierce and beautiful re-thinking of consent as refusal in order to dismantle the terms of liberal statism, Moten illuminates what he has called the "improvisational immanence" of blackness to show how—as concept, radical aesthetic, political tradition, and mode of being—it precedes and disrupts the regulative discourses that enshrine notions of sovereignty. Situating himself as student and teacher, Moten is both frank pragmatist addressing concrete realities of life in the academy and among subjects who imagine themselves to be sovereign and sonic theorist performing devotional acts of analysis. The dynamic essays collected in Stolen Life enact the black radical tradition, recursively unfolding a reclamation of the antenormative (what he terms the "insistent previousness" of blackness in In the Break), dispatching "normative individuation," "judicial ownership," and "legislative priesthood" in ways that entail a rethinking of every aspect of epistemology and of human relations. If the collection is a kind of intellectual ensemble that returns often to Moten's primary interlocutors (Denise Ferreira da Silva, Nahum Chandler, Hortense Spillers, and Nathaniel Mackey), the essays are predominantly dialogic, each taking flight from a particular intellectual point of departure, drawing in and from many voices but moving by way of a devotional agonism in which one principal text becomes the grain against which Moten thinks. This method of critical close reading is the foundation of Moten's powerful critique of the academy's abetting of liberal individualism, even while he thinks out loud about how to be inside these structures without acceding to their terms. To describe Moten's fugitive engagement with continental philosophy, one could do worse than to cite his comment that in Kant's writings he finds an "unruly sociality, anarchic syntax, extrasensical poetics" (2). Stolen Life extends and amplifies the work of In the Break, presenting us definitions of blackness as boundless, dynamic, and vital, as "non-performed performance[,]…the surrealization of space and time," against the notion of blackness as "death-driven epiphenomenon…[either] bound by [or] originating in the white/nonwhite binary" (33). In Stolen Life, as in his other work, blackness is, rather than is not, and Moten recruits DuBois (via Chandler's reading of his early work) to present "blackness as that which is before the binary that has been said to define our existence" (35). In so doing, Moten presents a temporal and logical challenge to the notion of "blackness as an effect of the color line, which is to say the white/nonwhite binary which orients it and by way of which it is plotted" (33). Moten argues that to imagine that blackness is reducible to this axis is to accede to the very terms of the negation, which, in "its most extreme development," refuses "the idea of blackness as a form of life" (33-34). One consequence of this intervention is the philosophical distinction between blackness and black people. Though Moten is clear that "black people have a privileged relation to blackness" and "that black cultures are (under)privileged fields for the transformational...

A Requiem for Mr Wilson: Comments on David Goldberg’s Conversation with Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe’s book Critique of Black Reason has attracted scholarly interest and commentaries. In a conversation that took place between David Theo Goldberg and Mbembe, both men discuss some of the themes that are raised in the book. This paper examines that conversation and focuses on the idea of the archive and how the dehumanisation, damage, destruction and death that racism has visited on many black people can be resurrected, dusted down and repaired. I have used Mbembe’s idea of blackness as a way into the archive to retrieve and retell a particular story and, in doing so, to repair the damage to the life of an African American man, as only writing can do. I revive the humanity and dignity of that life against the brutal racism that ultimately claimed it. This is a requiem for Mr Wilson.

Black Meets Black: Encounters in America

This essay draws on James Baldwin’s ideas on race, immigration, and American identity to examine the experience of contemporary African immigrants in the United States. More Africans have come to the U.S. since 1965 than through the Middle Passage, and only now is their experience gaining the full creative and critical attention it merits. Since becoming American entails adopting the racial norms and sentiments of the U.S., I explore how African immigrants contend with the process of racialization that is part and parcel of the American experience. Drawing on Baldwin’s idea of blackness as an ethical category, I also consider the limits of the concept of Afropolitanism to characterize the new wave of African immigrants in the U.S.

The Prejudice towards Blacks in the 16th and 17th Century America

Historians believe that societal or implicit racism appeared very early, as a consequence of pre-existing European attitude towards blacks. Economic Necessities in America which called for some sort of controlled labor made Africans slaves. By 1640 it was clear that English Settlers kept Negroes as hereditary slaves for life. When English confronted with Africans, they did not realize that Africans were potentially subjects for a special kind of obedience and subordination which was to arise as adventurous Englishmen sought to possess for themselves and their children one of the most bountifulterritories of the earth. In England the concept of blackness was full with intense meaning. Englishmen found in the idea of blackness a way of expressing some of their ingrained values.

The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home: African American Literature and the Era of Overseas ExpansionMelville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America

The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home: African American Literature and the Era of Overseas ExpansionMelville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America

From ‘Hip Hop Revolutionaries’ to ‘Terrorist-Thugs’: ‘Blackwashing’ between the Arab Spring and the War on Terror

Rayya El Zein takes up a global analysis of how ideas of blackness, whiteness, and Arabness circulate in post-9/11 media accounts and argues that these concepts work to mediate Western understanding of politics in the Arab world. El Zein unpacks the paradox by which blackwashing is differentially deployed to mark certain Arab subjects as a “good rapper” or a “bad rapper,” and how both of these valences serve to expand neoliberal orientalism through the political familiarity promised by blackness. As an alternative, El Zein suggests attention to the material, historical, and geographic specificities of the power struggles that structure racial capitalism, classism, and racism, especially and essential because of their potential international unrecognizability.

Forging African American Minds: Black Pragmatism, “intelligent labor,” and a new look at industrial education, 1879–1900

ABSTRACTThis article examines black thought and black ideas about racial consciousness after Reconstruction in order to rethink the way African American leaders conceived the relationship between work and intellectual achievement in the late nineteenth century. Conventional scholarly accounts of the politics of black knowledge and education – including the still very prevalent paradigm of industrial and classical education – have missed a fascinating transformation of thought among many African American leaders after 1879 who sought to reinvent black identity. At the root of this transformation were shifting ideas about the black worker and a new industrial economy. The leaders who represented the transformation embraced progressive, pragmatist, and very modern approaches to intellectual cultivation – approaches that were more in line with theories of manual training and object-learning than with classical education. In other words, the intellectual rationales for industrial education among black educators were as important as the economic and practical ones. Those rationales were articulated not just by more conservative black voices intent on fitting into a new industrial order, but also by black progressives and radicals who hoped to cultivate black “self-consciousness,” vigorous engagement with the “real world,” and intellectual independence from white norms.

On the Self-Evidence of Blackness: An Interview with Charl Landvreugd

On the Self-Evidence of Blackness: An Interview with Charl Landvreugd

‘The Light of Knowledge Follows the Impulse of Revolutions’: Prince Saunders, Baron de Vastey and the Haitian Influence on Antebellum Black Ideas of Elevation and Education

This article details the influence that Haitian ideas about education had on early black intellectuals. Following the successful slave revolution, leaders of the new Haitian state set out to develop a new educational system. African-American observers paid close attention to these developments and often attempted to mimic them. Especially important was the black traveller and activist Prince Saunders, who was hired by the Haitian King Henry Christophe to build schools. Combining social and intellectual history, this article argues that black intellectuals in the North were inspired by the memory and symbol of Haiti to develop an education system and elevation ideology that served explicitly political purposes.

Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America by Christopher Freeburg (review)

Reviewed by: Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America by Christopher Freeburg Jeannine Marie DeLombard Christopher Freeburg Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xxii + 187 pp. With this ambitious and timely book, Christopher Freeburg negotiates between two strands of Melville scholarship. The first, dating to the Melville revival, has understood Herman Melville’s preoccupation with “blackness” as predominantly humanistic and metaphysical in nature, although in recent years it has become “both philosophical and socio-historical” (3). The second strand, coming out of the transformative effects on the academy of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s, emphasizes the political and cultural contexts for the globetrotting sailor-turned-novelist’s literary investments in a blackness undeniably linked to slavery and Western imperialism. Acknowledging that other scholars, notably Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark 1992 and Teresa Goddu in Gothic America 1997, have examined the productive, complicated relations between these two modes in antebellum literature, Freeburg directs our attention to Melville’s distinctive probing of a multivalent blackness in selected works of fiction from the 1850s. Freeburg’s conclusion is that “to understand fully Melville’s ‘power of blackness’ and its connection to slave revolts, Indian genocide, and colonial subjugation in the antebellum Americas, one must disturb the ready-made link between blackness and the lived condition of black people,” while appreciating that “for Melville blackness is not always racial but a figurative blackness to which racial difference is explicitly significant” (2). To demonstrate this point, Freeburg focuses not only on Melville’s black or darkly racialized characters, but also on the pervasive “black” or “dark” moods and settings in Melville’s mid-century fiction, most notably “The Encantadas” (1854). Throughout, Freeburg argues, blackness—often, but not exclusively, associated with racial encounters—marks the inevitable failure or impasse of Melville’s white/Western male protagonists to attain mastery, or even masterful knowledge, of self and others. Think not just Ahab with Pip, but Ishmael with Queequeg; Pierre with Isabel; the late Alexandro Aranda, Benito Cereno, and Amasa Delano with [End Page 36] Babo, Atufal, and the “Ashantee conjurors”; and the Dog-King and Oberlus with the human and other populations of the “Gallipagos.” The treatment of the last, in “The Encantadas,” is perhaps the most persuasive reading in Melville and the Idea of Blackness. Here the figurative blackness of the volcanic island’s landscape, right down to its tortoises, stands in equipoise with Melville’s evocations of (in this case, unsuccessful) Western imperialist bids for mastery over non-white peoples and places. This final chapter opens, as its predecessors do, by establishing a historical framework for the ensuing analysis. Freeburg begins by exposing what we might—simultaneously reverting to cliché and inverting Melville’s inversion of it in his figure of the tortoise’s “bright” underside—call the dark underbelly of antebellum American expansionist rhetoric. Specifically, Freeburg surveys articles in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, where the story first appeared, disclosing a fear of paralyzing stagnation—indeed, of timelessness—which an absence of such manifestly destined historical progression would seem to entail. Read against this backdrop, the Dog-King’s and Oberlus’s failed efforts at domination clarify the narrator’s morbid fascination with the sublimely aged (and thus hauntingly ageless) tortoise alongside the other black and blackened elements of an island seemingly destined for, but persistently impervious to, imperial conquest. In Pierre 1852, Freeburg finds more than a critique of antebellum reformers’ difficulties reconciling the era’s far-reaching social and philosophical theories with the practice of everyday life. Instead, he suggests, reading the novel against polemics by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Orestes Brownson, and Theodore Parker, the danger lies in the inevitably delusive self-interest that separates such idealists from the morally perfect Christ upon whom they would pattern their actions, especially as they encounter the dark others whom Parker calls “The Dangerous Classes.” Whether benevolent or exploitative (or some combination of the two), Pierre’s doomed efforts on behalf of Isabel reveal this truth; her black hair and racially opaque (but decidedly nonwhite) heritage signal her...

‘Mexicans will take the jobs that even blacks won't do’: an analysis of blackness, regionalism and invisibility in contemporary Mexico

Mexico's unique form of mestizaje has successfully excluded Afro-descendants from Mexican national imaginary for decades, treating Afro-Mexicans as though they do not exist. However, there is a small population of Afro-Mexicans that reside primarily in Mexico's two coastal regions. So how do coastal Mexicans understand blackness? Using ethnographic and interview data, I show that while Mexico as a nation does not have systemic racial ideologies that incorporate blackness, distinct local ideas of blackness do exist within rural coastal Mexico, and are constructed, in part, through this national invisibility. Moreover, I argue that these local understandings are subject to transnational processes as Afro-Mexican immigration to the USA grows. The racial meanings produced among Afro-Mexican migrants in the USA circulate back to Mexico and reshape racial identities. This process highlights both the persisting role of race and mestizaje in constructing Mexican national identity.

The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality. STANLEY E. BLAKE: University OF Pittsburgh Press, 2011

That Brazilian regional identities are racially charged is a truism. From naming practices in cuisine to the possibility of requesting a gaúcha at a brothel, elite and popular understandings of these identities belie the idea of a coherent “Brazilian race.” Until recently, however, English-language scholarship that hoped to interrogate this idea tended to project São Paulo and/or Rio de Janeiro conceptions of race onto the rest of the country or focus solely on ideas of blackness or Afro-Brazilianness. Studies of immigrants and their descendants who did not fit neatly into the classic black-white dyad helped to complicate these narratives, but regional approaches were still unexplored.

From Black Britain to Black Internationalism in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Pilgrims Way

Abdulrazak Gurnah's Pilgrims Way captures the demise of the inter-ethnic and inter-racial cooperative known as ‘black Britain’ in the 1970s, the estrangements between various ethnic and racial communities in Britain who had come together in previous decades to combat racism. But the novel keeps the spirit of black Britain alive through the political consciousness of its main character, which is inclusive, expansive, and international in its symbolic scope. Pilgrims Way rejects racialism as a means of combating racism and re-vitalises the idea of blackness as a political community.

Blackness in Opera ed. by Naomi Andre, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor (review)

Reviewed by: Blackness in Opera ed. by Naomi Andre, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor Tom Riis Blackness in Opera. Naomi Andre, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor, eds. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2012. 304 pp. $35.00. Arguably the greatest African American concert composer in the twentieth century, William Grant Still (1895-1978), as Gayle Murchison tells us here, [End Page 185] once declared, “My love has always been opera—the theater. This love of operatic music, stimulated in my early youth by listening to operatic records, was the thing that first aroused the desire to compose. All my other work has been a means to this end” (141). Such a statement demands close attention. What has opera meant for black folks in general? What has it done to them and for them, and what has black opera meant for everyone else? Blackness in Opera sets out to address these questions. Ann Sears, in her chapter on Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, lends a keynote for the whole volume by citing a passage from Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903): “Here [to America] we brought our three [African] gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song …; the gift of sweat and brawn …; the third, a gift of the spirit.… Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation” (112). Most of the other authors here join with Sears to illustrate the wide variety of contributions among Du Bois’s woven weavers—black composers, writers, directors, singers, actors. This collection of essays has evident roots in an academic setting (all fourteen of the contributing authors hold professorships in colleges or universities, while only one, George Shirley, has achieved an international reputation as a performer), and forms a part of the larger, continuing—perhaps perpetual—discussion about race consciousness within the performing arts, both lowbrow and highbrow, within the United States. The olio of “black” works and “black” performers discussed here is examined through many lenses, with attention given to dominant class or subaltern images, social and stage constructions of race, various understandings of opera as an American genre similar to but different from its European parents (although a few non-American works are included), various musical metaphors, period conventions, physical signs, and verbal markers for ethnicity, and the economic power dynamics implicated in theatrical productions everywhere. In his introduction, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. asserts, “The present collection … attempts to identify and theorize the various ways in which the idea of blackness has worked as a practice—as a complex of representational strategies in the genre of opera.” Ramsey acknowledges that “these essays do not present a unified theoretical voice, but like the practice of blackness itself forward complex ideas about race, humanity, and creativity … [derived from a] notoriously unstable set of assumptions, ploys, signs and compositional strategies” (ix). The themes expounded upon here range widely—from the meaning of blackface in a seventeenth-century Jacobean court entertainment (Schmalenberger, “Hearing the Other in The Masque of Blackness”) to an allegoric Weimar Republic fantasy about a black American violinist in a “jazz opera” with hardly any actual jazz music (Wipplinger, “Performing Race in Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf”) to the stimulus to black artistic consciousness and creativity provided by the U. S. invasion of Haiti in 1915 (Bryan, “Clarence Cameron White’s Ouanga! in the World of the Harlem Renaissance”) to gender-conscious studies of female characters created by such male writers as George Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Scott Joplin. The poet Vijay Seshadri once described William Carlos Williams as “moralistic, pragmatic, and quixotic in his search for an American measure to match the American voice.” The chapters of this collection are also aptly described by this diverse set of adjectives. All twelve chapters tackle in various ways the inherently gnarly challenge of distilling meaning from a genre encrusted with assumptions about its contemporary status (and for which sophisticated analysis is of uneven quality). The critical place of individual operatic works over time—the first ones appeared in Italy around 1600—has come down to us more or less correlated to the posthumous reputation of the composers or librettists...

SEARCHING FOR THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE: THE ‘AFRICANIST’ PRESENCE IN MARK TWAIN'S THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has, despite moves to ban the book nationally as well as have it removed from Junior High School curricula because of its derogatory representation of African-Americans, maintained its status in the American literary canon. Race and racial representation are fundamental to the novel's plot and this paper extends their significance by arguing for the centrality of what Toni Morrison has identified as an ‘Africanist’ African-American presence that pervades and in fact, inspires America's founding literature. The paper argues that Twain's representation of the ‘Nigger’ Jim is contingent on an ‘Africanist’ African-American presence which, ‘real or fabricated’, is premised on a particular idea of blackness signified by Africans. Through a close study of blackface minstrelsy, entertainment popular in the nineteenth-century, this paper investigates (white) Western perceptions of Africa and Africans utilized in African-American literary representations. The paper thus suggests a re-reading of Huckleberry Finn that focuses on the ways in which Africa and Africans are implicated in and central to white and black Western constructions of identity. Far from re-hashing the now banal argument of the racist, and therefore unreadable, character of the novel, this paper hopes to stimulate new readings and discussions of Huckleberry Finn. That is, the paper attempts to interrogate critically the novel's canonical significance and its applicability to (black) African audiences seemingly far-removed from, but integral to, its racial ideology and its literary status, so linking global theories of identity as well as African and (African-) American literary studies.

BLACK IS, BLACK AIN'T: BIRACIALS, MIDDLE-CLASS BLACKS, AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF BLACKNESS

Several scholars claim that group cohesion among black Americans is necessary for black advancement. Our research examines the extent to which group cohesion is possible given the increasing diversity of Black America, particularly with regard to race and class. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 33 middle-class blacks and 40 black-white biracials, we explore (1) the similarities and differences in the experiences of both groups, (2) their encounters with marginalization, (3) how they negotiate perceived marginalization, and (4) the extent to which all of the above are shaped by socially constructed ideas of blackness. We find that narrow notions of “authentic” blackness challenge group cohesion and threaten to splinter the black community along class and ethnic/racial lines. However, we find evidence of greater tolerance for the community's racial diversity than its class diversity. Nevertheless, the data presented here suggest that the increasing heterogeneity of Black America poses significant challenges to group cohesion.

Jews, race and popular music

Jews, Race and Popular Music Jon Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. 238 pp. $99.95 USD (Hardcover) ISBN: 978 0 75466 804 6 In Jews, Race and Popular Music Jon Stratton tells a good story with academic rigour and care for detail. His true focus is the cultural arena where ideas of blackness, Jewishness and whiteness have overlapped, and his most telling chapters focus on the way that Jewish performers and composers positioned themselves in American music by adapting styles commonly understood as black. This phenomenon can be traced to the 1920s and 1930s when, in the American mainstream, themselves were thought of as being racially negroid. Stratton describes, with attentiveness to specific and vocal stylings, the shared characteristics of early torch singers, such as the Jewish Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker, alongside figures like Mamie Smith and Ethel Waters. He conveys the kind of singing shared by these performers--emotionally expressive, robust, often making use of contralto and falsetto in ways that were considered hot. As well, he examines the connotations of such singing for black and white audiences. (Aspects of this were not American at all, but brought from Paris by Florenz Ziegfeld, through his presentation of the French singer Mistinguett.) Further complicating this picture is the fact that the great majority of torch songs of the era were written by Jews. This latter point reflects the complicated way that musical forms were shared by Jewish and black singers and composers. It is probably too simple to say, as Stratton does, that were mediators of blackness on its way to white audiences, when in fact, something more complete in terms of shared creative influence was in play. Stratton's study avoids stereotypic arguments about what represents authentic black or Jewish art forms. But issues of authenticity arise in his chapter Jews and Blues: The Jewish Involvement in the 1960s Blues Revival. Here Stratton draws a sharp distinction between the American folk revival of the early 1960s, whose resources he sees rising out of a recovery of white Appalachian and styles and the more rebellious effort on the part of young blues devotees to reinvigorate the black Chicago blues tradition. He attributes the desire after black styles and voicings to Jewish musicians' disillusionment with an incomplete and unsatisfying whitening of post-war Jewish life in the American suburbs. The blues, he argues, allowed Jewish musicians to express an uncivility, which was offensive to the white middle class, and, as well, to assert what Stratton describes as a new, if sublimated, assertion of ethnic identity. …