Racial Imagination Research Articles

Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White

Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White

Whiteness on the border: Mapping the U.S. racial imagination in brown and white

Whiteness on the border: Mapping the U.S. racial imagination in brown and white

There’s Just No Place for a Street Fighting Man!: Understanding the Influences of Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation in Britain’s Counterculture Between 1964-1971

During the 1960s, young Britons began to challenge the restrictive social norms, roles and responsibilities that governed their culture and asserted their voices to promote individual expression and freedom. At the core of this youth rebellion were the Rolling Stones. Within their music, performance, appearance and fashion, the Stones epitomized the anti-establishment attitudes harboured by Britain’s young people and made the cultural shifts that were taking place in the country tangible. In this research paper, I will investigate how Blackness, sexual orientation and gender identification challenged and reshaped the Rolling Stones’s message of rebellion, nonconformity and decadence. By reviewing a diverse range of archival footage, including the Stones’s performances on Ready Steady Go!, Jean-Luc Godard’s short film One-Plus-One and The Stones in the Park, as well as contemporary literary sources, music periodicals, Parliamentary legislation and British feminist, queer and Black Panther activism, I will evaluate the complicated, and often obscurantist, ways in which Britain’s youth rebellion fortified the subordination of traditionally marginalized communities while simultaneously making racial, queer and gender-based injustice visible to the British public. In sum, by placing the Stones’ racial, gendered and queer imagination within a complex political culture, I believe that my research will provide a unique perspective to the complexities and nuances of the social upheaval that occurred in Britain during the 1960s.

Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. JackHamilton. University of Harvard Press, 2016. 340 pp. $29.95 cloth.

Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. JackHamilton. University of Harvard Press, 2016. 340 pp. $29.95 cloth.

Jack Hamilton, Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination

The history of rock and roll has long provided fertile ground for what the scholar K. Merinda Simmons identifies as a “‘post-black’ rhetorical schema” (2015: 13). As Simmons describes it, this schema advocates access, agency, flexibility, fluidity, mobility, and the ultimate autonomy of the individual, opposing what it asserts is a “problematically dated […] philosophy,” in particular America’s stark black-and-white racial structure (ibid.). From Maureen Mahon’s Right to Rock (2004), an ethno...

Jack Hamilton. Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination.

Jack Hamilton. Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination.

Talking Hospitality and Televising Ethno-national Boundaries in Contemporary Korea: Considering Korean TV Shows Featuring Foreigners

This essay examines Korean television shows that feature foreigners encountering Korean society. A recent example, Non Summit, presents a series of formal “summits,” borrowing the format of an international strategic meeting. The show enables Koreans to consider issues involving cultural differences, racial discrimination, and national hospitality, particularly related to immigrants. Indeed, Korean TV shows that focus on foreigners living in Korea are increasingly popular, which surely reflects changes in the Korean racial imagination along with the increased number of immigrants entering Korea in recent years. Nevertheless, despite their stated purpose of encouraging Korea to be a more harmonious multicultural society, programs like Non Summit seem to reproduce racialized colonialism in the context of contemporary global capitalism, particularly through their selections of participants and their efforts to paper over revealed cultural tensions.

‘Strange Rendering:’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Yiddish and the Staging of Race at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

‘Strange Rendering:’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Yiddish and the Staging of Race at the Turn of the Twentieth Century1 Rachel Rubinstein (bio) While the scholarly literature on Black-Jewish relations continues to expand, its archive has remained remarkably unchanged. Although recent explorations of representations of African Americans in American Yiddish literature and American Hebrew literature have newly revealed the ways in which immigrants in the early twentieth century engaged critically and creatively with race in the United States across languages, much work remains to be done.2 Curiously, while many scholars mention in passing the translations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin into Yiddish, very few have elaborated further on the consumption of this iconographic national text among Yiddish readers.3 There is even further silence on the subject of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the Yiddish stage, first in Yiddish literary and theatrical criticism at the time and consequently in contemporary Yiddish studies scholarship, reflecting historical biases against performances deemed middlebrow or lowbrow and the subsequent gaps in modern scholarly accounts.4 As theater historian John Frick notes, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not just a popular piece of abolitionist fiction; rather, it became a “cultural, commercial, ideological, and theatrical phenomenon,” arguably super-intending [End Page 35] representations of racial difference and racial justice for a full century to come.5 For this reason, seemingly narrow considerations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin can, in fact, open up broader histories of racialization, racial representations and interracial interactions in American culture. Yiddish performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the turn of the twentieth century received increased attention from drama critics in English, because they coincided with a large-scale theatrical revival of the original 1853 melodrama in Anglophone American theaters, even as bowdlerized Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows were ubiquitous. Even African American newspapers took note of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Yiddish, with the Freeman noting in 1902: “‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ in Yiddish again last Saturday at the People’s Theatre. Big hit.”6 And again, a few weeks later: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin was produced in Yiddish again Saturday 19, at the People’s Theatre. Sherman H. Dudley was in charge of the colored contingent.”7 In this essay, I begin the work of situating the Yiddish versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the context first of the publication history of Stowe’s novel and the many plays that were adapted from it, and then in the context of the broader history of racial performances on the popular stage at the turn of the twentieth century. Taken together, the Yiddish translations and adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (particularly the discourse in English around Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Yiddish), and black performances of Jewish voices and bodies further illuminate Jewish engagements with American national mythmaking, the positioning of Jews and blacks, and the relationship of language to bodies, in the turn-of-the-century racial imagination. Literary Translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin While Yiddish literary scholars often cite Yiddish translations of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin as evidence of Jews’ “special interest” in the fate of African Americans, the truth is that these translations were belated in comparison to the translation history of Stowe’s novel. In its first year of book publication, translations appeared in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Flemish, Polish, and Magyar. These [End Page 36] translations weren’t meant only for an overseas readership; in the 1850s, both Stowe and her publishers understood that the novel would have to be translated for the roughly 15 percent of American readers who were foreign-born.8 Stowe herself commissioned the first German translation in 1852, understanding that for the novel to wield its full political power, even within the nation, she would have to rely on translation. By 1860, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been translated into twenty languages and was the most widely circulated work of American literature.9 In fact, American literary scholar Colleen Boggs argues that Stowe’s efforts to control the rapidly proliferating translations and adaptations of her novel helped to form the basis for international copyright law.10 Eastern European...

Asian Fury: A Tale of Race, Rock, and Air Guitar

Abstract Attending to race has become essential in ethnomusicology at least since publication of Music and the Racial Imagination (2000). And what sort of musical performance could be more imaginary than air guitar? Competitive air guitarists realized long before scholars that their art form provided an ideal means by which to contest the overwhelming whiteness of rock and electric guitar, sometimes extending their critique to include gender as well. Asian and Asian American competitors in particular used their one-minute stage performances to comment ironically on the emasculation of Asian males and the infantilization of Asian females through the construct of “Asian fury.” Based on field research in Germany, Finland, and the United States since 2009, this article argues that air guitar performance has helped certain audiences to reimagine the linkages between race and rock.

Recycled Racism: Nicholas Wade and the Same Old Bad Science

In A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade articulates his vision of race and humanity in the 21st century. Wade believes that race determines life chances at the genetic level and, therefore, Europeans are wealthy and powerful because they have superior genes. Sub-Saharan Africans, on the other hand, are poor and powerless because they have inferior genes. Does this sound familiar? It should because, far from articulating a new vision of race, Wade has simply applied fresh makeup to an ugly brand of scientific racism: eugenics.

‘United by blood’: race and transnationalism during the Belle Époque

The Belle Époque, often thought to be a period defined by nationalism, also saw the remarkable global proliferation of transnational affinities – especially those centred on race. Across Europe and its settler territories, notions of pan‐racial affinity spread alongside imperial nationalism, in the context of technological advancement that permitted novel imaginative possibilities. Meanwhile, texts of political imagination in Africa and Asia during this period – particularly those of pan‐Africanism and pan‐Islamism – demonstrate not only an awareness of the significance of racial thinking for Europe but a theorisation of the connections between Europe's racial imagination and its policies in the colonised world. The same advances in the fields of communication and travel that opened the door for new imaginative possibilities in Europe also enabled disparate communities in the colonised world to conceive of themselves, often for the first time, as collectively racialised subjects of a European world order.

Cooling down jazz

This article deals with the role of racial imagination in the acceptance of Swedish jazz in Sweden in the first years of the 1950s and discusses how Swedish jazz was connected to an American jazz tradition. It is argued that in its early reception, jazz was intimately linked to African American musicians. The advent of cool jazz and the ideas of race connected to it were key in the acceptance of Swedish jazz. By analysing the racial imagination in articles in the Swedish jazz press the article concludes that the combination of the idea of cool jazz as an authentic, white style of jazz, and an American-Swedish cooperation, authenticated a performance of Swedish jazz musicians.

The Glory of Ancient India Stems from her Aryan Blood: French anthropologists ‘construct’ the racial history of India for the world

AbstractIn the last century the French presented their race-neutral policies as evidence of their colour blindness. Yet they were among the foremost proponents of race theory and racial hierarchy, which propelled the colonial machine of the nineteenth century. This article examines the role of French academics in creating a position for India in the racial imagination for the first time in history. It examines the motivations behind such a focus on India and the resulting response from Britain, the colonial ruler. The works of Paul Topinard, Louis Rousselet, Arthur Gobineau, and Gustave le Bon are situated in the colonial and political context of the mid-nineteenth century to demonstrate not only that it was the French, and not the Germans, who placed India on an Aryan pedestal, but that this move was propelled by the dream of an unfulfilled French empire in India.

American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination

American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination

American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination by Black Hawk Hancock

American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination by Black Hawk Hancock

Postracial Mestizaje: Richard Rodriguez’s Racial Imagination in an America Where Everyone Is Beginning to Melt

Postracial Mestizaje:Richard Rodriguez’s Racial Imagination in an America Where Everyone Is Beginning to Melt Lee Bebout (bio) And it seemed to me that the larger questions about America that the color raised is the fact that we are, all of us, in our various colors, our various hues, melting into each other and creating a brown nation. I tried to write a brown book, that is, brownly, by engaging contradiction and paradox, and rhetorical devices that suggest the way that I experience my own life. That is, for example, as the descendent of a conquistador and the Indian—as a Hispanic. Richard Rodriguez1 In recent years, racial formation in the United States has thrived in precipitous tension. Since the social and political tumult of the various freedom struggles from the 1950s to the 1970s and the rise of multiculturalism, explicitly racist discourses and practices have fallen from favor.2 Yet as many have noted, the material saliency of race is felt as much as ever. Thus, we are left with a wide array of seeming contradictions that maintain white supremacy and other forms of inequality in the guise of fairness and the protection of rights: ever-rising incarceration rates in communities of color through mandatory sentencing and policies of disparate impact, delegitimization campaigns against the first African American President of the United States through questions of his birthright citizenship, anti-(Latino) immigration policies that respond to the Hispanicization [End Page 89] of America that mark people under “reasonable suspicion” of foreignness, and the targeting and banning of Mexican American Studies curricula by calling for students to be treated as individuals.3 These are but a few examples of the dynamic tension of racial formation in contemporary U.S. culture. It is within this context that I seek to situate Richard Rodriguez’s exploration of race in America in his 2002 book Brown: The Last Discovery of America. Responding in part to Huntingtonian fears of a “clash of civilizations” and a “browning of America,” Rodriguez exalts the impurity of brown as a great American tradition.4 For Rodriguez, it is not “Brown, … in the sense of pigment, necessarily, but brown because mixed, confused, lumped impure, unpasteurized, as motives are mixed, and the fluids of generations are mixed and emotions are unclear, and the tally of human progress and failure in every generation is mixed, and unaccounted for, missing in plain sight.”5 Here one may find common ground between Rodriguez’s “brown” and theorizations of complex personhood by Gloria Anzaldúa and Avery Gordon. Each maps the interactions of multiple, contradictory elements that constitute any individual. For Anzaldúa, this means embracing rejected aspects of the self: the working class, the indigenous, and the queer.6 In complementary fashion, Gordon suggests that people are not so easily compartmentalized as either victims or agents of their own destiny.7 Together, they articulate the impurity that Rodriguez terms brown. As this article will demonstrate, however, even as Rodriguez seeks to contest notions of purity, racial and otherwise, Brown serves the interests of the dominant racial order vis-à-vis its relationship to neoliberal thought and discursive strategies. Through Brown, Rodriguez advances a post-racial mestizaje, an embrace of mixture and contradiction that seeks to subvert the social construct of race and yet simultaneously acquiesces to the logics that undergird current inequalities. In a Brown Context The political thrust of Rodriguez’s brown project takes on greater significance when placed in context with his earlier work and its critical response. A child of Mexican immigrants who came of age during the Chicano movement—although certainly not a part of it—Rodriguez is one of the most recognized Latina/o public intellectuals today. Yet his vocal arguments against bilingual education, ethnic studies, and affirmative action have long made him a target of criticism. With the publication of his first memoir, Hunger of Memory, and his speaking engagements in conservative circles, Rodriguez advanced a problematic argument of a split between private and public selves. For Rodriguez, his Mexican heritage and the Spanish language were relegated to the private, familial sphere. Because of this argument, Rodriguez became a veritable Hispanic, anti-Chicano boogieman. Tomás...

Book Review: Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

Book Review: Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. New York: Penguin Press, 2014. ISBN13: 978-1594204463 (Hard Cover). 288 Pages. $27.95.[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2014 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade's conjectures.2In A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade articulates his vision of race and humanity in the 21st century. Wade believes that race determines life chances at the genetic level, and, therefore, Europeans are wealthy and powerful because they have superior genes. Sub-Saharan Africans, on the other hand, are poor and powerless because they have inferior genes.Does this sound familiar? It should because, far from articulating a new vision of race, Wade has simply applied fresh makeup to an ugly brand of scientific racism: eugenics. For those unfamiliar with the term, eugenics is a 19th century school of thought originated by Francis Galten, a cousin of Charles Darwin.The lure of Gabon's eugenics was his belief that society would be better off if the intellectually eminent could be encouraged to have more children. What scholar could disagree with that? (Wade, 2014, P-27)Well, since he's asking...I for one don't find Gabon's eugenicist bait the least bit alluring. Wade may, but that's where he and I differ.Eugenicists like Galton argue that some genes are better than others. Therefore, the key to improving the human condition is to cultivate good genes and cull bad genes. The criteria that eugenicists use to distinguish good from bad genes depends entirely on the pet prejudices of the eugenicist in question: Hitler hated Jews, but other eugenicists have had it in for Africans, Native Americans, indigenous Australians, etc. Eugenicists tend to be obsessed with eccentric notions of racial purity and many have advocated horrific social policies, ranging from sterilization to genocide, to prevent inferiors from sullying the gene pool:The primary reason for restriction of the alien stream...is the necessity for purifying and keeping pure the blood of America. (Wade quoting Congressman Robert Allen from a floor debate about US immigration policy, 2014, p. 31)In Chapter 2, titled Perversions of Science, Wade wags his finger at those eugenicists who, over the years, have gotten carried away with the whole racial purity thing. After all, Hitler was a bag egg, and no reputable eugenicist would want to be associated with him.Hang on a second, ''reputable eugenicist? Isn't that an oxymoron?Apparently not. At least not in the context of Wade's curiously convoluted argument. You see, sometimes scientific exegeses are dauntingly difficult to comprehend because the phenomena they elucidate, such as dark energy or quantum entanglement, are profoundly difficult to understand. In other cases, authors intentionally obfuscate scientific ideas because, were they to articulate their ideas in clear, straightforward language, they would invite censure from outraged readers. The calculated murkiness of Wade's argument falls into the latter category.No doubt, Wade would cry foul for my suggestion that his thesis is a half-baked rehash of 19th century eugenics. After all, Wade cites a fair number of scientists whose research is on the cutting-edge of evolutionary biology and genetics. Though Wade does cite those scientists, those also happen to be the scientists whose open letter repudiates Wade's thesis.Wade adopts a similar attitude toward recycling eugenics. Just because a few eager beavers, like Adolf Hitler, may have gone overboard, Wade contends that it would be unfair to tar all eugenicists with the same brush. Wade tips his hand early on by launching an oddly caustic defense of Samuel Morton, a 19th century craniometrist. …

LeRoi Jones’s Radio and the Literary “Break” from Ellison to Burroughs

LeRoi Jones’s Radio and the Literary “Break” from Ellison to Burroughs K. C. Harrison (bio) The opening pages of The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (1984) depict a deeply visceral encounter with radio: “I pulled a big brown radio down, also on my head… . Another scar, still there. The radio had a knob missing and the metal rod sunk into my skull just left of my eye” (2). LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) doesn’t make much of the episode—only asking, half mockingly, “Ah, these multiple head injuries … is something beginning to occur to you?”—but its placement at the beginning of his life story suggests its importance. The metal rod does not merely graze or scratch his head, but sinks into the skull, where the scar of the radio remains. Baraka would become best known as a leader of the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s and ‘70s whose improvisational writing style was deeply influenced by jazz aesthetics. Rather than treat radio as incidental to the distribution of music, however, Baraka demonstrates in his work a deep concern for the relationships that develop among producers, performers, and listeners. Here I will argue that the technology of radio influenced Baraka’s early style and provided a model for the conflicting voices he portrays in Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961) and The System of Dante’s Hell (1965). Baraka understands radio as an interracial medium, and as such it is a fecund site for exploring his racial imagination during this transitional period. Furthermore, focusing on Baraka’s encounter with sound technology rather than jazz music exclusively highlights his role in a genealogy of media criticism from which he is typically excluded. I link Baraka with the protopostmodernist William S. Burroughs in a lineage that begins with Ralph Ellison’s use of the break, and in so doing I excavate an unexplored facet of the relationship between the Beats and black aesthetics. As his career progressed, Baraka increasingly came to identify black sound with an authentic racial identity rooted in African traditions. But his attention to early radio—not only as a disseminator of black music but also as a model for dispersed identity and disjunctive style—shows that the “blues continuum” he identified among diasporic descendants is fully immersed in the conditions of modernity. Rather than seeking a return to an imagined originary, integral community, it instead vitally participates in the challenges, opportunities, and contradictions of contemporary technology, particularly the material circumstances of broadcast sound. The recognition of Baraka’s interest in both the future, or “post-Western,” and the “pre-Western” “beginnings of our expression” (as he put it in a 1970 essay, “Technology & Ethos”) matters particularly at this supposedly “postracial” moment when depictions of Africans and African Americans continue to circulate as signifiers for premodern authenticity in a postmodern global media culture.1 Interracial Radio Baraka’s early treatment of radio in Preface and System builds on Ellison’s radio-phonograph in Invisible Man to consider technology as both a means of and [End Page 357] metaphor for interracial encounter. Critics note the deep nostalgia that poems such as “In Memory of Radio” and “Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today” show toward Baraka’s childhood radio drama heroes such as Captain Midnight, Green Lantern, and the Lone Ranger.2 Yet they miss how Baraka’s fondness for radio participated in the wrenching conflict he experienced, negotiating his identity in the period of transition from bohemianism to black nationalism. Radio, Baraka demonstrates in his work, has caused him to internalize white radio voices, mirroring the process Ellison’s hero describes when he asks his audience, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (581). Just as Baraka reconsidered his relationship to white colleagues, collaborators, and influences in the Village following his 1959 trip to Cuba, these works show him reevaluating the interracial communication radio provides. The imaginative boundary-crossing that was effortless to a child, and that he cultivated as an editor and cultural broker in Greenwich Village, becomes problematic. Rather than utterly reject the technological and figurative possibilities of radio, however, Baraka found in the medium’s static...

Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: Exploring Dr. Seuss’s Racial Imagination

Was the Cat in the Hat Black?:Exploring Dr. Seuss’s Racial Imagination Philip Nel (bio) In 1955, Dr. Seuss and William Spaulding—director of Houghton Mifflin’s educational division—stepped into the publisher’s elevator at 2 Park Street in Boston. As Seuss’s biographers tell us, the elevator operator was an elegant, petite woman who wore white gloves and a secret smile (Morgan and Morgan 154). They don’t mention that she was Annie Williams, nor do they say that she was African American (Silvey). Seuss was on that elevator because Spaulding thought he could solve the Why Johnny Can’t Read crisis by writing a better reading primer. When Seuss sketched this book’s feline protagonist, he gave him Mrs. Williams’s white gloves, her sly smile, and her color. However, she is but one African American influence on Seuss’s most famous character. One source for that red bow tie is Krazy Kat, the black, ambiguously gendered creation of biracial cartoonist George Herriman (Cohen 325). Seuss, who admired what he called "the beautifully insane sanities" of Krazy Kat (qtd. in Nel, Dr. Seuss 70), also draws upon the traditions of minstrelsy—an influence that emerges first in a minstrel show he wrote for his high school. The Cat in the Hat is racially complicated, inspired by blackface performance, racist images in popular culture, and actual African Americans. The Cat’s influences help us to track the evolution of the African American cultural imaginary in Seuss’s work, but also, more importantly, to exemplify how children’s literature conceals its own racialized origins. Considering the Cat’s racial complexity both serves as an act of desegregation, acknowledging the "mixed bloodlines" (to borrow Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s phrase) of canonical children’s literature, and highlights how during the 1950s—a turning point for African Americans in children’s literature—picture books were a site where race, representation, and power were actively being contested. Decades before the birth of his Cat in the Hat, racial caricature was an accepted part of Theodor Seuss Geisel’s childhood. D. W. Griffith’s acclaimed Birth of a Nation (1915), released the month Geisel turned eleven, offered a popular and racist depiction of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Jazz Singer (1927), the first feature-length "talking picture," starred Al Jolson in blackface. One of Geisel’s favorite childhood books, Peter Newell’s The Hole Book (1908), follows a bullet’s [End Page 71] comically disruptive journey through its pages, including one where a black mammy points to the hole in the watermelon, and addresses, in dialect, a group of wide-eyed black children: "‘Who plugged dat melon?’ mammy cried, / As through the door she came. / ‘I’d spank de chile dat done dat trick / Ef I could learn his name’" (fig. 1). Seuss remembered this book so well that sixty years after reading it, he could still quote its opening verse by heart (Nel, Dr. Seuss 18). If, as Tony Watkins has argued, "books tells stories that contribute to children’s unconscious sense of the ‘homeland’" (193), then these stories may have embedded racist caricature in Geisel’s unconscious, as an ordinary part of his visual imagination. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. From Peter Newell, The Hole Book (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1908). Public Domain. Image courtesy Morse Department of Special Collections, Hale Library, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. Seuss’s Political Evolution: From Early Stereotypes to Opposing Prejudice So, it is not surprising that racial caricature emerges in his work—that he wrote "Chicopee Surprised" and acted in it in blackface, at Springfield High School. Seventeen-year-old Ted Geisel performed as one of the members of the jazz quartet, and as one of the blackfaced "end men" [End Page 72] ("Minstrels Add $300 to Fund for Trip"). Seuss’s early cartoons also offer abundant examples of minstrel-like figures, along with many other stereotypes. A 1923 issue of Jack-o-Lantern, Dartmouth College’s humor magazine (of which he was editor), had a Ted Geisel cartoon in which two thick-lipped black boxers face off. Playing on the fact that one has a slightly lighter skin...

Macaulay and son: architects of imperial Britain

Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England was a phenomenal Victorian best-seller defining a nation's sense of self, its triumphant rise to a powerfully homogenous nation built on a global empire and its claim to be the modern nation, marking the route to civilization for all others. In this book Catherine Hall explores the emotional, intellectual, and political roots of Zachary Macaulay, the leading abolitionist, and his son Thomas's visions of race, nation, and empire. The contrasting moments of evangelical humanitarianism and liberal imperialism are read through the writings and careers of the two men.