White Authority Research Articles

Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South by Jeff Forret

Reviewed by: Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South by Jeff Forret Kay Wright Lewis Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South. By Jeff Forret. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 530. $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6111-1.) The centrality of violence to the institution of slavery has received considerable scholarly attention in the last half century, and Jeff Forret’s Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South makes a significant contribution to the field. This well-researched book provocatively traces the history of intraracial violence among those enslaved from approximately 1795 to 1865, focusing on Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi. Forret adeptly uses violence as a lens to examine interpersonal relationships between enslaved people, the institution of slavery, and the emotional trauma that was part of their everyday experiences. In doing so, Forret successfully demonstrates that intraracial violence exposes the agency that existed within enslaved communities across the South. Forret uses a variety of sources. He has mined an abundance of court records to show how enslaved people were often not executed in manslaughter and other criminal cases in order to preserve slaveholders’ investments. Forret also observes that because enslaved people had no legal access to the courts, many slaves used violence to protect their property from theft, to recover debt, to defend themselves, and to settle disputes between real and fictive kin. Baptist church records reveal new ways that enslaved men operated as proxies to white authority by participating in colored conferences where they resolved conflict within their communities, functioning much the same as secret societies in West Africa. The need for love and affection, despite the brutality of chattel slavery, generated the emotional commitments depicted in the many slave narratives Forret uses. Forret powerfully demonstrates how black men and women used violence to preserve marriages, to protect their children, and to assert their gendered identities. The inclusion of proslavery writers like Charles Colcock Jones, James Henry Hammond, and George Fitzhugh, who argued that black people were inordinately violent and little more than savages, is somewhat problematic in my view. Fitzhugh, Hammond, and Jones are not credible witnesses to the lived experiences of those enslaved. Moreover, I would be careful in assigning this book to classes. At times the reader is led to believe that the enslaved were what white southerners said they were—that black women, for example, lived “outside the boundaries of respectable womanhood” (p. 334). This was not how enslaved women saw themselves. Forret later clarifies this point, but not with the vigor it deserves. Nor were black men exceptional in their domestic abuse and violence toward black women and children, which again Forret later acknowledges. Although a central goal of this work is to examine violence and its causes from the enslaved point of view, one does not get any real sense of their humanity until chapter 4. Thereafter, the book comes alive with rich examples from the enslaved perspective of what was at stake and the circumstances that caused violent behavior. In the epilogue, Forret asserts that intraracial violence did not increase until the late nineteenth century, the period after Reconstruction that Rayford W. Logan called “the nadir” of the black experience, when white violence was at its height in the American South (The Negro in American Life and [End Page 155] Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 [New York, 1954]). Furthermore, Forret’s claim that modern-day black-on-black crime has nothing to do with the prior condition of enslavement is difficult to understand. Certainly violence is part of the human experience, but if Forret’s work does nothing else, it sheds light on how oppression and pervasive violence shaped the behavior of those enslaved in ways that were destructive and harmful to their communities. Certainly modern-day racism, an institutional construct emanating from more than 350 years of chattel slavery, continues to do just that. Kay Wright Lewis Norfolk State University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

“Acting White”: How the Past Implementation of School Desegregation Helped Create Today’s Attainment and Achievement Gaps

ABSTRACTSummarizing my prior work, the only book length treatment of the “acting White” phenomenon (Buck, 2010), I argue that while desegregation was both a moral necessity and a social good, the manner in which desegregation was implemented by White authorities led indirectly to today’s achievement gaps. In the course of desegregation previously all-African-American schools were closed, with their faculty and administrators typically demoted or terminated, and their students sent to previously all-White schools, where they were not always welcomed. This massive social change established scholarly achievement as part of a White identity, not a Black identity. Unfortunately, this diagnoses may not lend itself to easy solutions.

Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics

By 1919, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), a ten-year-old fledgling national civil rights organization, had organized across the South and—in some cities—pursued a more militant strategy of rights activism. In Atlanta, Georgia, the local naacp branch organized the community in a surprisingly successful campaign to compel the city council to budget $1.5 million for a black school. Jay Winston Driskell Jr. contends that in certain areas in the South during this time a more radical politics emerged that subverted the politics of respectability and helped the rise of an early form of black political militancy. Driskell's book, however, covers much more ground than the title suggests. It looks at a grassroots effort to adapt to city politics and organize progressive impulses at the start of the twentieth century. He explores the uses and constraints of the politics of black respectability—the tactic of excessive reflection of white concerns of black morality in the period—and argues that this strategy evolved by the end of World War I into a more direct and radical form of civil protest in which respectability gave way to a language of economic parity and a demand for a share of the city tax revenue. This led to a remarkable victory: tax dollars were spent on a black school despite persistent resistance from white authorities (p. 221).

F.Z.S. Peregrino, A Significant but Duplicitous Figure in the Black Atlantic World

The role of Francis Zaccheus Santiago Peregrino is one that has intrigued historians for many years. He represented a direct link between West Africa (Gold Coast, modern Ghana), Britain, the United States and South Africa. Peregrino was a campaigning editor and vocal supporter of black rights in both the United States and southern Africa. He appeared to be the embodiment of the black Atlantic. These qualities have, rightly, been celebrated, but there is another side to the man, which has received only limited attention. He was also someone of ruthless ambition. In New York he was accused of labour-broking practices that replicated slavery. In South Africa he thought nothing of denouncing some of his closest black associates to the white authorities. Peregrino also pursued his private agenda at the cost to the wider African and Coloured communities, threatening them at a critical moment in the formation of the Union of South Africa. This article traces his life in the USA, Britain and southern Africa to reveal Peregrino as a more complex and disturbing figure than has previously been acknowledged.

"Whitemouth": A Bakhtinian Reading of Narrative Voice in Ernest J. Gaines's Transitional Novel Of Love and Dust

"Whitemouth":A Bakhtinian Reading of Narrative Voice in Ernest J. Gaines's Transitional Novel Of Love and Dust Diane Chiriani Russo (bio) Ernest Gaines's narratives of the rural South in transition record African-American experience in the voices of its people, voices he became attuned to on the porches of the River Lake Plantation quarters in Louisiana where he lived and worked as a child. In a talk delivered in 1971, Gaines recalls listening to those voices: There were the people who used to come to our houses. . . . In summer they would sit out on the porch, the gallery—"the garry," we called it—and they would talk for hours. . . . Sometimes they would sew on quilts and mattresses while they talked; other times they would shell peas and beans while they talked. Sometimes they would just sit there smoking pipes, chewing pompee, or drinking coffee while they talked. I, being the oldest child, was made to stay close by and serve them coffee or water or whatever else they needed. In winter, they moved from the porch and sat beside the fireplace and drank coffee—and sometimes a little homemade brew—while they talked. But regardless of what time of year it was, under whatever conditions, they would find something to talk about. I did not know then that twenty or twenty-five years later I would try to put some of their talk in a book. ("Miss Jane" 24–25) It was this talk that Gaines needed to connect with again when he returned to Louisiana in 1963 and "tried listening—not only to what they had to say, but to the way they said it" ("Miss Jane" 31). He returned annually "not as an objective observer, but as someone who must come back in order to write about Louisiana. . . . to be with the land . . . to go into the fields. . ., to listen to the language" ("This Louisiana Thing" 39). Though Gaines situates his attempt to incorporate the voices of the quarters in his perhaps best-known work, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, his return to the language, which he experimented with using in short fiction, happens in a sustained way much before he writes Miss Jane's story. This return, [End Page 93] in all its political significance, is reenacted in Gaines's transition from the distanced, third-person narrative voice dominated by standardized English of his first novel, Catherine Carmier, to the narrative voice embodying the tensions among racial groups of his second novel, Of Love and Dust. Gaines incarnates the narrative voice in Of Love and Dust in an African-American man, Jim Kelly, who accesses the language of the landowning whites, the Cajuns aspiring to the status of plantation owners, and African Americans inhabiting a Louisiana plantation. Jim tells the story of a rebellion against white authority initiated by Marcus Payne, a young African-American man recently jailed for killing another man in a bar fight. Marshall Hebert, the white landowner, has bonded Marcus out of jail but created another kind of prison by requiring Marcus to work off his bond in Hebert's fields for years. Marcus, however, challenges the system of control by daring to love the wife of the Cajun overseer, Sidney Bonbon. Marcus dies in a confrontation with Bonbon orchestrated by Marshall Hebert, who wants to dispose of both men, but Jim Kelly, serving as the younger man's unofficial guardian, is forever changed by what he witnesses and vows to tell the story. Jim is well-situated to tell this story because, as a resident of the quarters, he has access to the talk that goes on there—often in whispers and veiled speech—among the African Americans who generally observe a code of silence outside this distinct space, and he maintains a good rapport with the whites, particularly Sidney Bonbon and Marshall Hebert, thereby providing insight into the class struggles among whites who assert power by manipulating the African Americans. During his three years on the plantation, Jim has been entrusted with such responsibilities as operating the farming machinery and reporting progress to the overseer; this trust depends partly on Jim's ostensible recognition of the power of...

‘White’ Martyrs and ‘Red’ Saints: The Ongoing Distortions of Hagiography on Historiography

‘White’ Martyrs and ‘Red’ Saints: The Ongoing Distortions of Hagiography on Historiography Emma Anderson22 For centuries, historiography has systematically distorted aboriginal Catholics’ experiences. Rather than reflecting the often ambiguous and ambivalent realities of indigenous encounters with Catholicism, historians have continued to be influenced by what are essentially hagiographic tropes of encounter first constructed by European missionaries to valorize their own identities and experiences. Two relational models: that of missionary/convert and martyr/slayer have been particularly popular and destructive over the centuries. Each highlights the struggle and the sacrifice of European Catholic missionaries (the “leads”) while casting native people in supporting, reactive, and largely non-speaking roles. In the late nineteenth century, these iconic ways of articulating missionary-native relationships helped to fuel a powerful new articulation of American Catholic identity and served as a powerful means of contesting popular (and often contradictory) anti-Catholic tropes in dominant, Protestant historiography. These fictive relationships have also, over the centuries, legitimated real and symbolic violence against native people, and have occluded scholars’ understanding of the far richer and more challenging reality of indigenous people’s engagement with Catholicism since contact. Catholic missionaries to the “New World” longed to be successful evangelists to ‘genuine’ converts. But how missionaries constructed the ideal indigenous neophyte bore little relationship to how native people actually experienced and experimented with Catholicism. Missionaries across North America performed a delicate balancing act: they sought to spark converts’ spiritual ardour whilst strictly controlling it.23 But when native converts sought to scale the lay/clerical divide, or to perform daunting feats of austerity or self-mutilation, this was [End Page 9] discouraged because it threatened missionaries’ desire to be uncontested spiritual leaders of the community. Dubbed “children in the faith,” native converts were admonished to avoid the hubris of too quickly seeking spiritual adulthood.24 Religious conversion, then, was not the extension of an invitation to native peoples to explore with European authorities their now shared faith, but the beginning of an indefinite obedience, as eternal laymen, to a European clerical elite. The life of famed seventeenth-century Mohawk convert Catherine “Kateri” Tekakwitha aptly demonstrates the link that missionaries attempted to forge between conversion and submission to white authority. An audacious and imaginative spiritual adventurer during her lifetime, only after her premature death at age of 24 could Kateri be safely appropriated by the Jesuits as “one of theirs” (quite literally, as missionaries claimed that the young convert’s skin tone miraculous lightened as she lay on her deathbed).25 Missionary writers also envisioned and presented their ideal relationship with native peoples as that of prospective martyrs and their potential killers. Missionary lives lost in intra-aboriginal warfare or native rebellions were thus interpreted as “martyrdoms” in odium fidei or “in hatred of the faith.”26 Although the activity and agency denied aboriginal people in the passive framing of religious conversion is permitted in this relationship, it comes at the cost of vilification and the distortion of native meanings of war and post-war practices. Native martyrs, such as Joseph Chiwatenwa27 or Joseph Onaharé28 were often ignored or denied by missionary writers because their suffering transgressed the tidiness of racially defined sanctity, in which “innocent” white missionaries suffered at the hands of their “barbarous” red slayers. In the nineteenth century, race became even more insistently linked to who was presented as a martyr, and who was not. Significantly, no aboriginal martyrs have ever been canonized by the Catholic Church.29 [End Page 10] Missionaries’ presentation of native people as either passive, childlike converts, or violent martyr-makers has had a number of nefarious effects, directly impacting the treatment of indigenous peoples across North America since the seventeenth century. Indeed by the late nineteenth century, these entrenched images of heroic martyrs and their bloodthirsty slayers, saintly missionaries and obedient converts had become central to the identity of the American Catholic Church as a whole. The campaign to canonize the Jesuit missionaries killed during the bloody 1640s and “their” saintly convert, Kateri, launched at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884, was an effort to personify American Catholicism in these figures. By promoting these figures from the distant colonial...

Urban Governance and Tolerance: The Regulation of Suspect Spaces and the Burden of Surveillance in Post–World War I Asheville, North Carolina

This article reconsiders the relevance of tolerance to urban history in the Southern United States. It examines the surveillance of commercial and residential spaces considered morally suspect by white authorities in post–World War I Asheville, North Carolina. Policing practices involved objects of suspicion in the management of order within pawnshops, dance halls, and African American neighborhoods. The regulation of such suspect spaces distributed the responsibility for surveillance to many actors. Pawnbrokers, dance hall operators, and prominent African Americans all were enlisted and enlisted themselves in policing networks. Participants’ involvement in such efforts at times facilitated their claims to self-regulation. These networks, however, did not remove white authorities’ suspicions from either the spaces or the individuals who surveilled them. Instead, the arrangements scrutinized here supported those suspicions. Examining the contradictions of these arrangements demonstrates how tolerance informed urban governance within the context of white supremacy.

Benito Cereno and the Impossibility of Civility

In Benito Cereno, Melville indicts Northern moderates who thought that civil relations between Northern and Southern whites could bind together a splintering nation. Mocking the notion of benevolent white authority, he explores the danger—and the impossibility—of omitting black men and women from meaningful conceptions of sociality.

Civil War Eufaula by Mike Bunn (review)

Reviewed by: Civil War Eufaula by Mike Bunn Ben H. Severance Civil War Eufaula. By Mike Bunn. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2013. 160 pp. $19.99 (paper). ISBN 978-1-62619-244-7. Southern communities experienced the Civil War in manifold ways. Some were the scene of a battle or siege. Others were the victim of an enemy raid or occupation. And then there were those that escaped physical damage, yet were traumatized all the same by a [End Page 128] war that stalked the streets and fields like an unwelcome specter. In his latest work, Civil War Eufaula, Mike Bunn provides a case study of this last wartime phenomenon. Located in Barbour County along the Chattahoochee River in southeast Alabama, Eufaula never felt directly the hard hand of war; nonetheless, the conflict dominated the daily lives of the city’s residents. Although Bunn’s account is more descriptive than analytical, his narrative presents a theme of angst with his characters seemingly holding their breath until the very end. Going into the Civil War, Eufaula played a prominent role in Alabama’s political economy. Annually, thousands of cotton bales passed through the city en route to the Gulf and markets beyond. Plantations and the Peculiar Institution prospered together. Not surprisingly, many of the state’s most vocal fire-eaters lived in Barbour County. Men such as Henry D. Clayton, John G. Shorter, and James L. Pugh, all three of whom went on to serve as important Rebel leaders, formed the Eufaula Regency, a pro-slavery organization that clamored for secession throughout the 1850s. When that moment came in 1861, the people of Eufaula overwhelmingly supported their state’s membership in the new Confederacy. Hundreds of young men from the city and the surrounding area volunteered to fight for the South. When the excitement of the secession crisis passed, however, Eufaula entered a four-year period of uncertain isolation. Drawing on an impressive array of diaries and letters, mostly from the local region’s women, Bunn chronicles the ordeal of a people who anxiously watched their world slowly disintegrate. The city’s commerce suffered steady decline, in no small part because of the Union blockade. Consequently, Eufaulians were forced to become more self-sufficient through rationing and creative home economics. Bunn points out that despite their privation, Eufaulians developed a praiseworthy spirit of shared sacrifice and so avoided much of the social unrest that adversely affected other parts of southern home front. Nevertheless, as Bunn explains, the war’s very distance produced different kinds of distress, namely lack of information and feelings [End Page 129] of insignificance. Residents of Eufaula rarely knew exactly what was going on outside of Barbour County. They constantly worried about loved ones at the front and the course of the war in general, often clutching to rumors in the absence of facts. To be sure, they took pride in their city’s involvement in the Confederacy’s larger war effort, notably its adjunct connection to the armaments factories and prison facilities across the state line in Georgia, but Eufaulians still wondered whether they were a genuine part of the struggle. Bunn stresses that this manifest frustration never gave way to defeatism. In fact, the arrival in the war’s closing days of Union forces under Gen. Benjamin Grierson elicited more curiosity among folks who were seeing the enemy at last, than it did fear and despair. Treating their conquerors with stolid politeness, Eufaulians accepted the war’s end and soon went about the process of Reconstruction. While focusing primarily on the lives of white Eufaulians, Bunn offers some valuable insights into the perspective of local blacks. According to the author, slaves in the area remained steadfast in their obedience to white authority, although they displayed little enthusiasm for the Cause. Blacks discreetly rejoiced whenever they learned of Union victories and greeted Grierson’s troopers as liberators. One segment of Eufaula society neglected in this study, however, is that of the soldier. Over 2,000 men from Barbour County wore the Rebel uniform, yet we learn virtually nothing of their exploits. Some discussion of Eufaula’s martial contribution to Confederate arms seemed in order, particularly since...

Behind the Scenes and Inside Out: Elizabeth Keckly’s Revision of the Slave-Narrative Form

This article examines Elizabeth Keckly’s postbellum narrative Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House . Attending to the narrative’s dense visual rhetoric, the essay shows how Keckly rejects the generic proposition that white authority must legitimate black experience in the slave narrative. Overturning the racial protocols which constitute the genre’s conventions of authentication, Keckly radicalizes the form, intervening in a mid-nineteenth-century epistemological conflict over race and claiming the slave narrative as a mode of cultural critique that exceeds the political mandates of abolition as well as the historical moment of the antebellum.

African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860 by Dea H. Boster (review)

Reviewed by: African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860 by Dea H. Boster Emily Tafford (bio) African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860. By Dea H. Boster. (New York: Routledge, 2013. Pp. 184. $125.00 cloth) Disability studies scholars in recent years have called for a broader conversation between the history of disability and more conventional histories, arguing that, like race, disability should be understood as a social construct and therefore not be confined to specialist medical texts. Despite shifting trends in the history of slavery, the issue of slave disability has remained obscured. Studies of slave experience and resistance—often because of their desire to highlight capability and agency—overlook the presence of slaves with disabilities and their impact upon southern society. Fully aware of her predecessors and contemporaries from multiple disciplines, Boster seeks to reclaim the history of disability in African American slavery and to analyze the [End Page 668] intersections and negotiations of race, disability, and power, which she argues were central to the plantation economy. As part of the Routledge Studies in African American History and Culture series, African American Slavery and Disability strives to incorporate disability history into the well-established discipline of slavery studies, which will potentially expose readers to concepts, stories, and methods that have not yet fully taken hold within its canon. Whilst acknowledging the foundations laid by medical historians such as Sharla M. Fett, Boster aims to avoid the confines of a specialist study and instead attempts to uncover disability not just in its relation to the slave body, but within the institution’s labor expectations, economy, and power dynamics. Using problematic sources such as slave narratives and abolitionist tracts alongside more traditional texts including plantation records and correspondence, Boster is able to point to the complex network of institutions and individuals who negotiated what it meant to be a disabled slave. African American Slavery and Disability is most engaging when it tells the stories of disabled individuals, referring to both their difficult circumstances as challenges to white authority, as well as their ability to manipulate understandings of defective and dysfunctional bodies for their own gain. In chapter four, Boster points to the activities and jobs that disabled slaves did perform, therefore providing a compelling argument that these individuals contributed to the plantation economy, and that slave owners were influenced by a variety of aesthetic and emotional, as well as financial, concerns when determining the value of their disabled chattel. The structure of the book, although useful in demonstrating the significance of the disabled slave to all manner of financial, legal, medical, and cultural aspects of the plantation society, makes the discussion of slave resistance somewhat repetitive, as instances of negotiation and malingering follow the core argument of each chapter rather than being discussed in one chapter. Yet this broad scope ultimately works in Boster’s favor, as it allows the reader to grasp the wider imperative of inculcating all history with disability history. The [End Page 669] focus in the second chapter on the meanings ascribed to race and disability, and the function of disability as metaphor, allows the book to have relevance beyond slavery history and can offer something to researchers who concern themselves with the creation of prescriptive norms and the maintenance of social hierarchies. The conclusion of the book emphasizes the volume of evidence about slave disability, its constructions, contradictions, and the varied black and white perspectives that negotiated the contested concept. The potential to use disability as a category of analysis presents great opportunities in slavery studies and to those concerned with the intersections between other categories such as race, gender, and class. Emily Tafford EMILY TAFFORD studies the history of human displays in American world’s fairs at the University of Liverpool. Her PhD thesis will be titled “Race and Disability in the Human Display: World’s Fairs in Western America, 1894–1916.” Copyright © 2014 Kentucky Historical Society

White Surveillance of the Black Arts

This essay explores the complex relationship between white authority and the Black Arts Movement. Conceived as a radical break from white traditions, the Black Arts Movement was intended to create a creative space, independent of white influence, through which artists could speak directly to the needs and aspirations of the black community. However, as this essay argues, the attempts to clear white presence from black art only succeeded in bringing it closer, with the radical verse of poets like Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez triggering the same mechanisms of repression that have long been employed to suppress black resistance. One of the results is that in the poetry itself, a tension emerges between the rhetoric of defiance and the performance of acquiescence, a tacit acknowledgment of the enduring relationship between white authority and black art in the U. S.

Chieftaincy and resistance politics in Lehurutshe during the apartheid era

This article focuses on the politics of chieftaincy in Lehurutshe, a rural region in South Africa’s North West Province, in the second half of the twentieth century. This was a period of profound social and political restructuring in the South African countryside. The imposition of Bantu Authorities, the extension of passes to African women and the deposition of Kgosi Abram Ramotshere Moiloa by the white authorities in 1957 sparked a popular struggle of resistance (better known as the Zeerust uprising or the Hurutshe revolt) that engulfed Lehurutshe in the late 1950s. The article analyses the establishment of a new political order in the aftermath of this period of resistance. It goes on to examine the attempted revival of the institution of chieftaincy by Lucas Mangope’s Bophuthatswana bantustan in the period from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s. The paper ends with the onset of another period of intense struggle over the incorporation of the “black spot” villages of Lekubu (or Braklaagte) and Mokgola (or Leeuwfontein) into Bophuthatswana in 1989. Like the Zeerust uprising of 1957-1959, the anti-incorporation struggle of 1989-1994 points to the complex and continued intersection of local political struggles for authority with liberation politics – crucially articulated through the institution of the chieftaincy - during periods of contestation over local resources.

Abolition, Race, and the Politics of Gratitude in Late Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico

Abstract This essay investigates the political workings of gratitude in Puerto Rico in the postabolition decades in order to uncover how these practices of benevolence, which obscure the violence of everyday marginalization, became key in liberal political forms as a means of rearticulating white superiority and patriarchal authority. The article analyzes the practice of gratitude that liberal elites demanded from former slaves after emancipation as well as the appropriation of and challenges to such practices by laborers. The dynamics explored here appear in a set of performances in newspaper writings and street demonstrations commemorating abolition from the 1870s to the 1890s in the southern city of Ponce, Puerto Rico. The politics of gratitude refers to the dynamics through which many came to see abolition as an effort to modernize Puerto Rico, an endeavor for which everyone should be morally indebted to abolitionists and their successors. The politics of gratitude thus provided the ideological structures through which liberal reformists could preserve a racialized and patriarchal social order in the absence of slavery. In the process, liberals also constituted themselves as the only intermediaries between popular subjects and the imperial state. Moral indebtedness was one racialized means by which various constituencies sought to craft or accommodate (in the case of authorities) a more inclusive political project that did not contradict the basis of imperial rule—even though it did alter its foundation, if only momentarily, before the US takeover of the island in 1898.

Harnessing the hijab: the emergence of the Muslim Female Footballer through international sport governance

The Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and other international sport governing bodies have recently been involved in contestations concerning the allowance of the hijab in sport. This article interrogates how these institutions participate in the regulation of Muslim women, and the relationship that these actions have with colonial and imperial constitutions of race. Drawing on critical race feminist theorizing, this article argues that the regulation of women who wear the hijab is a technology of power that frames these sport governance bodies as benevolent actors operating within the ‘best interests’ of female footballers. This hijab that has become a cause of concern in sport is hegemonically understood through Western colonialisms and racial grammars that have historically constituted the figure of ‘The Muslim Woman’ as in need of protection. The recent contestations represent a new moment in a global field, however, as notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘equal rights’ are being invoked to now allow the hijab, albeit under conditions that insidiously reinscribe white patriarchal authority.

Enslaved Ship Pilots in the Age of Revolutions: Challenging Notions of Race and Slavery between the Boundaries of Land and Sea

This article considers how enslaved pilots used the coastal waters of the Anglophone-Americas during the Revolutionary Era as a cultural and political space to invert racial/social valuations and gain uncommon privileges. It examines how captives in discrete societies similarly exchanged environmental and nautical wisdom for lives of privileged exploitation. Most were owned by slaveholding-merchants, who dispatched several pilots in pilot boats to navigate vessels into port. Recognizing their inability to supervise pilots who remained aboard ship for days, sometimes weeks, and return home in pilot boats capable of carrying them beyond their grasp, slaveholders granted these trusted men considerable autonomy and geographic mobility, permitting them to cultivate semi-independent, wage-earning lives that allowed some to obtain freedom. Water was an integral element in pilots’ lives. Waterways are often treated as literary backdrops; not regions for cultural creation. Coastal waters afforded pilots with liminality between the regimes of terrestrial and maritime authority, providing shipboard privileges exceeding those received by bondpeople toiling in other capacities. Enslaved pilots became temporary ship captains, permitting them to curse and command white sailors and officers, toast white women, and assault white shipmasters even as their race and status sought to subjugate them. The Revolutionary Period enhanced pilots’ opportunities, enabling them to manipulate revolutionary rhetoric, wartime circumstances, and rapidly changing social dynamics to subvert white authority, appropriate privileges, and seize freedom and sometimes rights for themselves and their family members.

Written in Stone by Rosanne Parry (review)

Reviewed by: Written in Stone by Rosanne Parry Elizabeth Bush Parry, Rosanne . Written in Stone. Random House, 2013. [208p]. Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-96971-3 $19.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-375-86971-6 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-375-98534-8 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-8. When the whaling canoe returns to the Makah village on the Olympic peninsula, Pearl's father is not in it among her uncles and cousins. As the daughter of the revered harpooner, Pearl once enjoyed elevated status, but now that she's ophaned, her restlessness and lack of carefully nurtured domestic skills have become problematic for both her and her paternal grandparents who care for her. The village as a whole is facing its own set of challenges: the whales seem to have abandoned them, white authorities have curtailed or outlawed many of the sacred customs, such as the potlatch, and now they must move inland to live among salmon fishers. Pearl admires her cousin, Susi, who lives independently in town as postmaster, buying her own clothes, and enjoying such modern delights as the latest Charlie Chaplin films. Stepping into the white community has its costs, though, as Pearl learns when a man claiming to be a collector for the Art Institute in New York arrives to bargain for tribal masks and regalia, forcing the cash-strapped Makah people to evaluate how to balance financial and cultural survival in post-World War I America. Parry successfully melds Pearl's quieter coming-of-age story with a faster-paced mystery plot concerning the true agenda of "art collector" Arthur Glen and the efforts of the Makah teens to thwart his predatory activities. Framing chapters focused on Pearl in her old age assure readers that the tribal knowledge and customs are endangered but not extinct, and closing notes address historical background and respect for maintaining the secrecy of certain stories and rituals. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

How Racism Takes Place By George Lipsitz Temple University Press. 2008. 310 pages. $27.95

In his book, Lipsitz reminds scholars how fundamental white privilege to our society and how white privilege works. In his previous book, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, he focuses on the disadvantages of African Americans, which, he argues, deflects attention away from the advantages of whites. However, in How Racism Takes Place he covers an array of topics, which include “the white spatial imaginary.” Lipsitz “explores the white spatial imaginary to explain how and why the racially propelled logic of hostile privatism and defensive localism has come to dominate decisions about both private investment and public policy.”(13) He then turns his attention to “black spatial imaginary that counters” the white spatial imaginary in black communities. In Chapter 1, Lipsitz debunks the notion that African Americans who moved to the North were welcomed in white spaces. Lipsitz mentions how, like in the South, whites in the North freely attacked African Americans knowing white authorities would not prosecute. Lipsitz describes several incidents in Northern cities. For example, in 1949, 30 black children were bombarded with baseball bats, knives, and lead pipes at the hands of hundreds of whites that didn't want them in a desegregated pool in St. Louis. In Chicago's Trumball Park in 1953, white violence erupted and intimidated the housing authority from placing new housing projects in white neighborhoods. In Michigan in 1971 whites used dynamite to blow up school buses to prevent desegregation. Historically, scholars have written about the problems of desegregation in the South. However, Lipsitz sheds an important light on the problems African Americans had integrating into historically white spaces. Lipsitz references the “white amnesia” that plagues the acknowledgements of white privilege that everyday whites have enjoyed in this country, which has led to unjust white enrichment and unjust black impoverishment. Lipsitz states, “The white spatial imaginary has cultural as well as social consequences.”(29) Lipsitz states, “Whites generally endorse the spatial arrangements that provide them with unfair gains and unjust enrichments.”(34)

Picturing Empire and Illness

Reflecting on recent debates within cultural studies on non-Western modernities and ‘cultural studies in/of Asia’, this essay explores a cultural history of venereal disease (VD) in Korea under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). The colonial representation of and discourse on VD in Western colonial settings was often built around a missionary medical account of sin and disease and a colonial dialectic of white civilization and non-white backwardness. This essay draws attention to the colonial discourse on VD in the non-Western Japanese Empire and its East Asian context, which compels us to look into the colonial framing of disease and bodies in imperial contexts where ruler and ruled shared close racial, cultural and religious affinities and where colonial medical power did not stem from white hegemony and Christian religious authority. By using methods from cultural studies and feminist history, this essay uncovers and critically reads the Japanese colonial medical and popular cultural archives on VD that range from state documents to laboratory reports to patent medicine advertisements, in order to reconfigure Japan's colonial medical empire and its underlying, gendered assumptions. It clarifies not only the legal, military and institutional bases for the intense governmental control over VD, but also the cultural image, metaphor and knowledge of VD and the biomedical female body promoted by Japan's transnational patent medical industry in close collaboration with the colonial state. By doing so, this essay sheds light on the gendered epistemic violence of Japanese colonialism.

Rethinking Blacula: Ideological Critique at the Intersection of Genres

This article considers Blacula (1972) as a radical self-reflexive critique of blaxploitation films. Blacula signifies on early 1970s blaxploitation and horror genres, reverses conventional tropes of monstrosity, and presents a romantic monster that challenges white patriarchal heteronormative authority while suggesting commercial blaxploitation films are complicit with power structures.