White Readers Research Articles

“THE ACTUAL SCALE OF BREATHING”

Contemporary work in Black Studies reflects the urgency of integrating lived experience into scholarly work. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe employ autobiographical frames and anecdotes in their writing in order to legitimate historically undervalued forms of knowledge production, and, as Hartman writes, to “counter the violence of abstraction.” Despite the efficacy of this methodology, however, the move itself remains under-theorized, even as scholars advocate for the necessity of taking seriously the intellectual labor and output of Black female academics. “The Actual Scale of Breathing” examines the genealogy of Black feminist writers from slave narratives to the contemporary who find themselves in the impossible position of wanting to speak from experience but find the work of self-disclosure harmful. I argue that these writers innovate form to both refuse unearned access to interiority – specifically to white readers – while at the same time cultivating community through the incorporation of a polyphonic authority.

Dissection, media portrayals, and reaction: Black bodies and medical education in nineteenth-century newspapers.

Throughout the nineteenth century, medical schools in both the Northern and Southern regions of the United States required a regular supply of bodies for medical study and experimentation. Physicians and medical students targeted the bodies of African Americans, both freedmen and the enslaved, to meet this demand. Simultaneously, the nation's booming newspaper market became a stage on which debates about the cruelty of slavery and the social consequences of pursuing medical knowledge played out in articles about the dissection of Black bodies. Such stories increased fears about dissection and mistrust towards the medical profession among African American communities, which manifested in riots against physicians, vandalism against medical schools, and corrective responses from African American newspaper editors and journalists. Through an extensive examination of nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers, this article identifies themes evident in the coverage of dissection during this period. Southern newspapers crafted stories of dissection that served the dual purpose of entertaining White readers and humiliating African Americans. This public humiliation fostered what became a popular genre of derogatory and vile humor that reinforced negative and inaccurate racialized stereotypes as well as racist science. Ultimately, such newspaper coverage provoked reactions within Black communities and among antislavery advocates that showcase how people often excluded from practicing medicine themselves viewed issues like medical education. Newspaper rhetoric around these themes amplified tensions between religious and scientific perspectives, reflected differences and similarities between the northern and southern areas of the United States, and fortified racist views in both cultural and scientific contexts.

Reading the Tulsa Race Massacre: a study exploring a white reader’s shifts in stance across genres of historical text

PurposeUsing a discourse analytic approach, the purpose of this paper is to examine how genre impacts white readers when reading about historic acts of racial violence. Specifically, this study explores one white high school student’s stance-taking as she read an informational text and an eyewitness narrative about the Tulsa Race Massacre.Design/methodology/approachThis study used discourse analysis (Gee, 1999) and the think-aloud method (Pressley and Afflerbach, 1996) to explore the white student’s interactions with genres of historical texts. The authors coupled iterative coding and memoing with discourse analysis to analyze the stances she adopted while reading.FindingsThe findings illustrate that the informational text allowed for a distancing from the racialized violence in the text, whereas the narrative created an opportunity for more connection to those who experienced the violence.Originality/valueWhile genre and reader response has long been explored in English Education research, little research has examined the impact of genre on reading historical texts. This study demonstrates the influence that genre may have on white readers’ emotional responses and stance-taking practices when reading about historic acts of racial violence.

The Wind River Scribe: Grace Darling Wetherbee Coolidge and Her Teepee Neighbors

Grace Darling Wetherbee Coolidge’s 1917 book Teepee Neighbors is a little-known collection of twenty-nine sketches of Indian life on the Wind River Reservation, Wyoming, where she worked as a missionary from 1902 to 1910. Only recently have Coolidge’s personal papers been made publicly available by the Pioneers Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado, allowing scholars to investigate the true contours of her life for the first time. These primary source materials shed new light on a woman who—though born to great privilege in New York City—rejected a life of leisure and wealth in favor of a subsistence existence on a remote Indian reservation, devoted to charitable acts. This paper offers the first accurate essay-length biographical treatment of Grace Coolidge. It as well analyzes selections of her Teepee Neighbors as an attempt to generate sympathy among white readers for a colonized people, the Arapaho, and to offer a critique of Euro-American society from the standpoint of the communal Indian values she encountered at Wind River. Coolidge’s project, however, is ultimately hampered by her own ethnocentrism and admitted inability to understand Indian cultures.

Diversity Sells: Uzma Jalaluddin’s Muslim Adaptation of Pride and Prejudice

ABSTRACT Pride and Prejudice (1813) is transposed onto an Indian-origin Muslim community in modern-day Toronto in Uzma Jamaluddin’s Ayesha at Last (2019), and the novel is as much about being Muslim in the West as it is about being an Austen adaptation. These creative departures from the Austen hypotext contribute to the novel’s positive reception, which can be gauged from the 4.4 stars rating by 1184 users on Amazon. Ronald Robertson (1995) argues that “diversity sells,” and this article examines Amazon user reviews to demonstrate how Jalaluddin’s Muslim glocalization of Pride and Prejudice makes her novel a success and reveals the market for such diverse stories. She makes a commendable effort to make space for practicing Muslim protagonists in the Austen oeuvre and succeeds in providing realistic depictions of many aspects of the Muslim community. However, the novel’s unfortunate surrender to Western stereotypes of the “terrorist” Muslim male to appeal to the implicit white reader ultimately undermines its authenticity and does not fully represent the breadth of Muslim experience, thereby demonstrating that continued effort is required to overhaul the publishing industry’s employee and audience base to enable the inclusion of more equitably drawn minority characters.

Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America ed. by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield

Reviewed by: Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America ed. by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield Stephen M. Monroe Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America. Edited by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield. Foreword by Alex Lichtenstein. The History of Communication. (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 344. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-252-08615-1; cloth, $125.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04410-6.) One appealing American myth is that the mainstream press is objective and unbiased. One disappointing American reality is that the mainstream press has often been subjective and prejudicial. Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield are interested in the consequential nuances between the myth and the reality. They have assembled a powerful collection of essays exploring how white journalists helped create Jim Crow and how Black journalists fought for something better. Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America is a valuable book for historians, journalists, language scholars, and interdisciplinary researchers interested in the United States and the U.S. South during the decades after Reconstruction. The book contains ten engaging essays from junior and senior scholars. Additionally, Alex Lichtenstein contributes a quotable foreword, and the editors add a sweeping introduction, plus a generous epilogue replete with ideas for future research. All parts of the book are grounded in relevant scholarship and polished for clarity. The editors have organized a coherent group of essays that collectively prosecute a fresh and provocative argument: “After Reconstruction, white publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacist political economies and social orders across the South,” while “Black journalists fought these regimes” (p. 1). The authors make a cogent case. Compelling (and oftentimes disturbing) examples abound. We learn about major players in the white press who were motivated by racism, cronyism, and other forms of ethnic and material greed. Henry W. Grady earns much attention for his entrepreneurial corruption while leading the Atlanta Constitution in the 1880s. Grady used his power—and his newspaper’s pages—to defend Georgia’s brutal and racist convict-leasing program. He also promulgated the “New South,” a simplistic concept that framed oppressed African Americans as happy servants cared for and protected by honorable whites. Members of the white press, like Grady, spent decades writing and distributing tropes of American racism that are still plaguing us today. But white journalists went even further. In one of the volume’s best essays, “The Press and Lynching,” W. Fitzhugh Brundage analyzes the unsettling [End Page 174] interplay between the white press and the bands of white murderers who lynched hundreds of Black people during this period. Papers such as the Atlanta Constitution not only sensationalized lynching to sell papers, but also sometimes promoted or even catalyzed the horrible events. For example, in 1899 the paper forecast the site and time of one Black man’s lynching, thereby giving its white readers the opportunity “to catch specially scheduled trains to participate in the spectacle” (p. 88). The book also contains inspiring stories of resistance. Black journalists were working during this period, too, often risking their lives to publish counternarratives. Ida B. Wells, John Mitchell Jr., W. Calvin Chase, and other Black journalists wrote valiantly to correct the wrongs of mainstream white messaging. While the resulting victories were few, the Black press did successfully rally many African Americans to the cause of civil rights. As Robert Greene II shows in an excellent essay about the infamous Mississippi Plan, Black journalists built a sturdy foundation of protest, enriching “a legacy of African American resistance through newspapers, periodicals, and books.” Along the way, they “revitalized Black print culture and used it to rally opposition to those who would deny civil, political, and social rights to African Americans” (p. 116). Such examples are uplifting. Journalism can be a boon to democracy. In sum, Journalism and Jim Crow is a valuable book that delivers a convincing argument built on solid historical research. Many white American journalists used their power and platforms to actively assist in the construction of Jim Crow. Their...

Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America by Matthew Dougherty

Reviewed by: Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America by Matthew Dougherty Elizabeth Fenton (bio) Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America matthew dougherty University of Oklahoma Press, 2021 250 pp. The notion that populations described in the Bible had somehow migrated and settled across the Atlantic emerged in tandem with European arrival in the Western Hemisphere. Speculation about the origins of Indigenous Americans by Europeans typically ignored accounts given by [End Page 242] Indigenous people themselves and attempted to reconcile the revelation of these "new" continents with biblical accounts of the world's creation. The most popular version of these theories that cropped up in the colonial period was what Matthew Dougherty refers to as the "Israelite Indian" story in his book, Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America. Within these stories, European encounters with Indigenous American nations not only initiated a new era in human history but also solved a long-standing biblical mystery. According to the book of 2 Kings, the Assyrian Empire conquered the Kingdom of Israel around 740 BCE and relocated the tribes that comprised it to lands that appear on no known maps. Those ten tribes have been "lost" ever since. The Israelite Indian story presented the tantalizing prospect that those missing tribes, at long last and through the providence of settler colonialism, had been found. As Dougherty's book demonstrates, the story held particular importance to people living through the early decades of US nation-formation. Lost Tribes Found is an eloquent study of how the Israelite Indian story allowed a wide variety of people to situate themselves within the United States in an era defined by racial violence, territorial expansion, and religious change. Lost Tribes Found is an essential contribution to both the broad field of early American religious studies and the more particular study of religious nationalism. It offers a fresh perspective on stories of Israelite American origins, which persisted, despite all the evidence running counter to their claims, into (and in some corners beyond) the nineteenth century. It also persuasively suggests that the frameworks of providential exceptionalism and "manifest destiny," while useful, do not fully explain the development of competing claims to sovereignty in the early national era. Dougherty's main contention throughout the book is that "comparisons of Indigenous peoples to Israelites or Jews often articulated forms of religious nationalism in the context of an expansive U.S. empire. These nationalisms claimed that God had chosen some people—American Jews, Indigenous peoples, Mormons, or White settlers—to have territory and political sovereignty" (16–17). American nationalisms, helpfully plural in this reframing, come into being through their entanglements with religion. Rather than producing a single nationalism aligned with a particular faith tradition, Dougherty shows, Israelite Indian stories facilitated the proliferation of (at times competing) nationalisms within the ever-shifting American landscape. Central to this book's argument is the notion that Israelite Indian stories produced intense emotions in those who heard and believed them. Those [End Page 243] emotions, in turn, "became entangled with multiple nationalisms that reimagined or opposed the United States' growing empire" (4). The book's first chapter, for example, shows how Israelite Indian stories allowed Protestant reformers not only to imagine a singular "Indian religion" but also "to evoke in their White readers feelings of hope and anxiety about missions to Indigenous people" (24). Such a reading allows Dougherty to explain why Israelite Indian theories such as Elias Boudinot's foundational text on the subject, A Star in the West (1816), simultaneously express feelings of love for and kinship with Indigenous populations and treat the expansion of a white US empire as inevitable. Lost Tribes Found's third chapter shows how two outsiders to this tradition—the Pequot Methodist preacher William Apess and the Jewish utopian Mordecai Manuel Noah—used Israelite Indian stories "to evoke the pride and hope needed to nucleate new Indigenous and Jewish nationalisms" that could perhaps counter the nation's ascendant white nationalism (74). Although they address competing versions of the Israelite Indian story, these chapters together show how this story conjured feelings of hope for a future of American...

Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form

Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form

Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States by Thomas Koenigs

Reviewed by: Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States by Thomas Koenigs Betsy Klimasmith (bio) Keywords Fiction, Literary history, Print culture Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States. By Thomas Koenigs. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 336. Cloth, $45.00.) [End Page 672] With Founded in Fiction Thomas Koenigs sets out to write a literary history of the United States before 1865 that de-centers the novel genre even as it "recovers the array of theories and varieties of fictionality that early U.S. writers developed as they wrestled with the most pressing political and social questions of their moment" (2). Koenigs calls attention to the multiplicity of fictional forms from the period that are not novels and convincingly argues that retrospectively labeling them as such obscures their richness and diversity as well as their distinctness from the novel genre. Koenigs explores a wide variety of texts: novels and other fictions along with the reviews and paratextual material that, he argues, explain to us not just how the texts were read, but the reasons why fictionists, as Koenigs calls them, wrote the kinds of texts they did. Bringing Catherine Gallagher's influential focus on fictionality to the U.S. context, Koenigs argues, allows him to make visible the range of roles fictional texts played in their uneven and incomplete movement from instrumental form to literary art. Founded in Fiction makes a convincing argument that readers and writers of the varieties of extended fiction that proliferated during this period understood fiction's worth and impact in many ways—didactic, political, and aesthetic, to name a few. In addressing the early U.S. print landscape, Koenigs explores familiar and forgotten texts as he moves through the decades, at first chronologically and then thematically. He persuades that a diversity of strange and rich fictional forms and aims makes early American literature exciting, especially when we take seriously and at face value responses to fictional texts, including sermons and reviews, but also the paratext and responses to fiction found within the works themselves. Though arguing that readers should not "back project" ideas about genre and reading onto older texts seems to run counter to the project of literary history, the wealth of material Koenigs presents underscores his point that we need to look more closely at fiction in the U.S. through a frame that encompasses the period's strange diversity. The first half of Founded in Fiction looks at U.S. literary production through 1820, an era whose strange and unwieldy fictional texts benefit most from Koenigs's approach. The categories into which the texts are divided are familiar: Chapter 1, for instance, puts "Tales of Truth"—or what Koenigs terms "nonfictional novels"—like Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, and The Power of Sympathy in conversation with one another, while Chapter 2, "Republican Fictions," considers Modern Chivalry, The Algerine Captive, and Wieland. These chapters read the literary texts in [End Page 673] conversation with reviews, paratext, prefaces, and comments about fiction—especially novels—expressed within the text by narrators and characters. Chapter 3 explores the least familiar group of texts and authors: the numerous extended fictions including Margaretta, Dorval, and Female Quixotism written by U.S. women between 1800 and 1820. This chapter offers a useful catalog of the decades' many overlooked fictional productions, but the sheer number of the texts mentioned means that attention to any single work (besides Margaretta), remains limited. In the second half of the book, which covers the decades during which novels became a more familiar and recognizable form (1820–1850), Koenigs moves to a more thematic treatment of fictionality, with chapters on historical fiction, hoaxing, social criticism, and enslavement. This approach pairs texts and authors—sometimes in expected ways, like Cooper and Sedgwick (history) and Sheppard Lee and the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (hoaxes), and sometimes with more surprising duos, like the juxtaposition of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to Lippard's The Quaker City (social criticism). While it was heartening to see Koenigs attend to the thorny question of whether novels could provide white readers unmediated access to Black consciousness, which Frederick Douglass...

The Negro Laborer: William Hooper Councill and the Rhetoric of Compromise

The Negro Laborer: William Hooper Councill and the Rhetoric of Compromise Theresa McWilliams-Wessels (bio) By 1887, William Hooper Councill had been president of the State Normal and Industrial School of Huntsville, Alabama, for 12 years and had taught for 20 years. He filed suit against the federal government in a landmark discrimination case when his first-class ticket was refused on a train that did not have a car for people of color. That same year, he published The Negro Laborer: A Word to Him, a manuscript with his musings on the Labor Question—after the collapse of the slave-labor based economy and the rise of white supremacy combined with widespread illiteracy, the Black man’s position was precarious in the South. Councill hoped to gain support from white Southerners by demonstrating his willingness to train Black students in the industrial arts and by encouraging fellow Blacks to enter the work-force and prove their value in this new economy. In this manual, Councill uses a very specific rhetoric to reach his intended audience, which I will argue was not Black laborers but, rather, the whites who had the personal economic means to support his work and the political power to provide support in Montgomery, Alabama. Using coded language, Councill appeals to the paternalism of the southern whites as he seems to be promoting accommodationist practices among the Black laborers; at the same time, he makes a more radical argument by advocating for fairer treatment by their employers and fellow citizens. Because Councill has not received much attention from scholars, it may be useful to consider his contemporary Booker T. Washington to better understand the history and context of Councill’s contributions. Both men were presidents of their respective institutions, they became known for their oration skills, and they competed for private and public funding. Both Washington and Councill used the power of the printed word to secure support for Tuskegee Institute and the State Normal and Industrial School. Jane Gottschalk argues that the use of a very specific rhetorical strategy—the use of the homiletic, second--person, personal anecdotes and the careful wording—was selected to simultaneously disarm the white and inspire the Blacks in the audience of Washington’s speeches. Frederick K. McElroy proposes that Washington used trickster methodology in his writings, particularity in his autobiography, Up From Slavery. McElroy notes that “the black success narrative was Brother Rabbit conning and duping the larger animals, the slave trickster outsmarting his master, and the former slave Booker T. Washington mouthing subtleties in order to magically [End Page 246] remove money from the pockets of the rich in order to build Tuskegee Institute” (90). I shall argue that Councill, too, used these same rhetorical strategies in order to gain the confidence of his audience, but he did so in a more subversive manner. Councill was eight years older than Washington, and he had been a teen, not a child, when slavery ended. He would have had more time to understand the complexities of the relationships in the Deep South as he had lived in Alabama the majority of his life whereas Washington moved to Alabama only after his appointment to Tuskegee College. Councill spent his entire professional career in Madison County, Alabama, and had established a precarious relationship with the whites in power, and it was imperative to him that he maintain the support that he had. Thus, his text The Negro Laborer: A Word to Him may be addressed to the Black worker via its title, but the intended audience is the white reader; his rhetorical strategies allow him to address both audiences, white and Black, while simultaneously reassuring white and Black readers that there is a way to work together peacefully. The preface to The Negro Laborer, dated December 1887 and from Huntsville, reads as follows: Many friends have invited me to deliver addresses at various points upon the LABOR QUESTION. Being unable to attend all the appointments, I have concluded to reach them through the following pages. The LABOR QUESTION is one of vast importance to all good citizens, and continues to increase in magnitude with the growth of population. I claim no superior foresight...

A ‘Balanced’ History of Empire: Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland and Other Colonial Anti-Colonial Histories

ABSTRACT Sathnam Sanghera's Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain Empire articulates the violence and exploitation of empire, which Sanghera presents himself as having ‘discovered' in recent years. His ‘ignorance' is a point of connection for the intended reader, who is perhaps similarly ‘ignorant' - a result of the erasure of this history in the education system. Through this ‘ignorance' Sanghera adopts the position of seemingly neutral observer or explorer of colonial histories, presenting a ‘reasonable' understanding of colonialism, repeatedly arguing for the need of a ‘balanced' colonial history to be taught in schools, with the implication that his book fulfils this ‘decolonising' role. Alongside his critique, sometimes in contradiction, Sanghera highlights what he considers to be ‘positive' legacies of colonialism, presenting these as aspects of its ‘complexity.' A closer look at Empireland reveals continuities with, rather than critiques of, earlier histories and historians of empire invested in whiteness and Britishness, which raises questions about what kind of ‘decolonising' work the book is really doing. Empireland can be seen as part of a larger mainstream project of commodifying decolonization - which has been highlighted through the work of activists, often in response to contemporary racist violence and killing and at considerable personal cost to themselves. ‘Balanced' writers such as Sanghera can appear to represent the political energy sweeping the world today, seeming to take these struggles forward, while simultaneously ‘softening’ them for white readers.

Space to Grieve: An irreducible legacy

Space to GrieveAn irreducible legacy Latipa (bio) i was introduced to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee as an undergraduate student in the late 1990s and was immediately struck by the work's radical relationship to its audience. Cha never spoon-fed the experiences of colonialism and diaspora to a white readership. She was not trapped in the straitjacket of "multiculturalism" that reduces artists of color to an "identity" defined by the white gaze. It was the first time I had encountered an Asian woman who tried to write her life as it bled across oceans, generations, and political histories, poetically undoing the rigid categories by which the world is normally structured. It was only years later, as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, that I learned she had been raped and murdered in New York City [End Page 153] shortly after Dictee was released. Later editions of Dictee would include the fact of Cha's murder in her bio on the back cover, but I am of a generation of students who were protected from that knowledge. For those of us who love Cha's work—who have been altered forever by her capacity to dwell in the layered complexities of time, space, and memory—it is often difficult to separate her murder from her art. Dictee spills over with a death that is both premonitory and already past. When we try to engage with Cha's art on its own terms—as I was encouraged to do in college, by professors who did not acknowledge her rape or murder—we do not allow ourselves sufficient space to grieve. Just as humanities scholars continue to study and write about Cha, she continues to be discussed in another discursive realm: that of the law. There, Cha exists as a legal case that highlights the foundational patriarchy that infuses every aspect of our culture and its institutions. ________ to begin with, the investigation of Cha's rape and murder was inept. A 1986 opinion from the New York Supreme Court, where the case against her murderer had arrived on appeal, states: "The police were initially unable to ascertain where Mrs. Cha had been murdered. However, her husband and her brother searched the building where defendant worked and found a room the police evidently had overlooked"—a room full of evidence related to Cha's murder, including missing articles of clothing. Without the work of her family, key evidence against her murderer, who was a security guard in a building where Cha's husband had been working, might never have been found. Even after that evidence had been gathered and her killer convicted, Cha's posthumous existence in the juridical system did not end. The first conviction was thrown out by the New York Supreme Court, which ruled that inadmissible evidence had been used in the trial. This evidence comprised testimonies from three women who had also been raped by the same assailant; he had pleaded guilty to each of these acts, which he committed in Florida [End Page 154] years before he murdered Cha. On appeal, the court deemed the inclusion of these testimonies to be in defiance of the Molineux Rule, which states that it is inadmissible to use evidence of a defendant's prior crimes merely to establish "criminal propensity." In the end, it took three trials, and a total of five years, for Cha's murderer to finally be convicted. Cha's case continues to haunt the system; in the intervening years, it has been cited in other cases involving sexual violence, including one in early 2022. Both realms—that of the public intellectuals who write about Cha's art while eliding her murder, and that of the legal scholars for whom she is only "Mrs. Cha"—in some way need her not to be a whole person in order for the discourse to function. In the field of art, we would like Cha's vibrant and expansive practice to remain unsullied by the brutality of her death. Meanwhile, in law, Cha is not an artist, poet, or editor; she is simply a victim of sexual violence. Between these two types of discourse is an inexorable silence...

Johnson Publishing Company and the Search for a White Audience

Johnson Publishing Company, the publisher of Negro Digest and Ebony, made efforts to expand its white audience during the 1940s and early 1950s. Johnson Publishing aggressively sought “to sell white readers the idea that a Negro magazine is worth buying,” through the regular publication of letters from “white” readers, consistent references to its influence among whites, fundraising and subscription drives to circulate its magazines among white readers and within white institutions, advertising campaigns in major national publications, and other projects and editorial content. This study argues that these efforts can be situated within both a longer history of white readership of Black periodicals and are connected to a broader turn toward Black literature by white Americans during—and immediately following—World War II. In doing so, Johnson was able to position his publications as both recognizably Black periodicals and the “interracial magazine[s] that America needs.”

Africanizing Jesus Christ: Langston Hughes’s “Angels Wings” and “Christ in Alabama” and Countee Cullen’s “Christ Recrucified”

Among the various moments African Americans underwent for their freedom and equality, Harlem Renaissance plays an important role. It is an intellectual and cultural revival of black arts and literature centered in Harlem, Manhattan, during 1920s. It is recorded that first ship with twenty captives from Africa crossed middle passage and reached Port Comfort, Virginia in 1619, ushering the era of slavery in New England. The shady history of three hundred years covers several chapters of excruciating pains and innumerable sufferings of black slaves in the fields. To supply therapeutic comfort to the suffering black community and to make the white readers understand the pain of black people, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, made an attempt to Africanize Jesus Christ in their sonnets. This research article attempts to explicate how Jesus Christ is Africanized in various levels in the three poems viz. Langston Hughes’s “Angels Wings” and “Christ in Alabama” and Countee Cullen’s “Christ Recrucified.”

Race, Region, and the Black Midwest in the Dunbar Decades

AbstractIn this essay, I show how Paul Laurence Dunbar, today most associated with plantation poetry, successfully utilized Midwestern identity as an alternative site for Black expression and cultural affiliation. Writing in Midwestern dialects and tropes, Dunbar was able to become widely recognized as a Midwestern writer and in doing so compel white readers to place regional belonging over racial alterity as a framework for interpreting cultural difference even at the height of Jim Crow. Moreover, I argue that Dunbar intermixed regional conventions with racial ones, leveraging their commonalities to depict a Black Midwest. For a new wave of Black writers and reading communities in the region, Dunbar became a pivotal model of the possibilities of Black Midwestern cultural life. Reading Dunbar regionally illuminates a more dynamic relationship between popular conceptions of race and of region, rich with possible alternative aesthetic affinities and circulatory potential.[T]he wide-reaching success of Dunbar’s [Midwestern writing] shows that. . . . [u]nder the right print conditions, regional belonging could take precedence over racial alterity.

William Apess, religious liberty, and the conversion narrative

ABSTRACT This paper reads Pequot William Apess’s (1798–1839) The Experiences of Five Christian Indians (1833) in light of Apess’s equation between racial equality and religious liberty. Disgusted by the prejudices of the Congregational church he was forced to attend as a young indentured servant, Apess joined the egalitarian Methodists. His masters admonished that as an Indian he was unprepared to choose his religion, which spurred his association between racial and religious liberty. Five Christian Indians cleverly elaborates these views. Apess marshals the conversion narrative genre to undermine stereotypes of Native Americans as a vanished heathen race. His appropriation inserts his brethren into public discourse as both persevering as a people and exercising spiritual agency. In the concluding essay “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” Apess challenges White Christians’ prejudices with scriptural, logical, and historical interpretations demonstrating racial equality. White treatment of Native Americans thus mirrors white Americans’ spiritual monstrosity. This dissident exercise of religious freedom, which gained Apess brief notoriety in 1830s New England as part of the antebellum social justice milieu, did not sway the hearts and minds of white readers. The idea that scripture’s meaning was so self-evident as to be immediately accessible to any individual’s moral sense was thoroughly ingrained in nineteenth-century U.S. American Protestantism. White Christians’ understanding of scripture was conditioned by a deep belief in racial hierarchy. Despite this roadblock to Apess’s effort, the work’s resuscitation in recent years illustrates the survivance of antebellum native dissent.

Domestic Archives of Empire: Photographing Burma and Reconstructing British Imperialism for the Postwar Moment

This article examines how photography documenting the military campaign in Burma was mobilized in efforts to reconstruct the image and idea of the British Empire at the end of the Second World War. It analyses a selection of popular publications which provided visual instruction for white Anglophone audiences, promoting continuing British imperialism after the Allied victory. These publications were intended to be kept for posterity, acting as ‘domestic archives of empire’ for Anglophone audiences across the globe. Such publications represented the empire at war and in peacetime, supposedly fit for the postwar moment. At the time of their publication, these ‘domestic archives of empire’ exhorted white Anglophone readers to view the British Empire as embodying a liberal and tolerant mission. Today, they offer insights into a vernacular history of empire on the verge of fragmentation, presaging the challenges of reconstruction and decolonization and the development of imperial nostalgia.

Hagar Revisited: Afrofuturism, Pauline Hopkins, and Reclamation in the Colored American Magazine and Beyond

Hagar Revisited: Afrofuturism, Pauline Hopkins, and Reclamation in the Colored American Magazine and Beyond Tanya N. Clark (bio) If I found [the Colored American Magazine] more helpful to Christian work among your people I would continue to take it. May I make a comment on the stories, especially those that have been serial. . . ? Without exception they have been of love between the colored and whites. . . . Does that mean that your novelists can imagine no love beautiful and sublime within the range of the colored race, for each other? I have seen beautiful home life and love in families altogether of Negro blood. The stories of these tragic mixed loves will not commend themselves to your white readers and will not elevate the colored readers. . . . —Cornelia A. Condict Colored American Magazine, March 1903 With regard to [the letter from Mrs. Condict] I will say, it is the same old story. One religion for the whites and another for the blacks. My stories are definitely planned to show the obstacles persistently placed in our paths by a dominant race to subjugate us spiritually. Marriage is made illegal between the races and yet the mulattoes increase. Thus the shadow of corruption falls on the blacks and on the whites, without whose aid the mulattoes would not exist. And then the hue and cry goes abroad of the immorality of the Negro and the disgrace that the mulattoes are to this nation. . . . I sing of the wrongs of a race that ignorance of their pitiful condition may be changed to intelligence and must awaken compassion in the hearts of the just. I am glad to receive this criticism for it shows more clearly than ever that white people don’t understand what pleases Negroes. Let the good work go on. Opposition is the life of an enterprise; criticism tells you that you are doing something. —Pauline E. Hopkins Colored American Magazine, March 1903 [End Page 141] Scholars often overlook or misinterpret the significance of the above exchange between the white Colored American Magazine (CAM) subscriber, Cornelia A. Condict, and the magazine’s editor and most prolific contributor, Pauline E. Hopkins. Most critics regard it solely in terms of the role of mixed-race characters and interracial relationships in Hopkins’s novels.1 However, it is more than a commentary on white America’s rejection of interracial themes. This dispute is a public dramatization of the racial and cultural disagreements that often occur between Black and white America. Moreover, it is an unapologetic, political, and afrofuturist declaration of Hopkins’s authorial power to write from her own Black consciousness. In this sense, Hopkins’s response represents Afrofuturism as defined by Alondra Nelson as Black voices with “other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come” (9). Reading this exchange through Afrofuturism reveals its value for this examination of the editorial and literary contributions that Hopkins made to CAM. As I will ultimately show, such contributions make the magazine an example of an early speculative text, one that radiates liberating Afrofuturism throughout its pages. Condict opens her letter announcing that she will no longer subscribe to the magazine due to its content, namely the stories about “tragic mixed loves,” (“Editorial” 399) which she views as the writer’s attempt to gain favor with white readers and elevate Black ones. Additionally, she presumes to suggest that the writer tell love stories “within the range of the colored race, for each other” (“Editorial” 399). Last, her frame of reference for this suggestion is her own first-hand knowledge of the existence of such relationships through her job as a superintendent at a Sunday school where she “worked among a greatly mixed people, Indian, Negro, Spanish and Anglo-Saxon” (“Editorial 399). Condict’s subscription to CAM, her job, and her effort to write and engage the author/editor suggest that she was a white ally who sympathized with oppressed Blacks. However, working in tandem with one another, these aspects reveal that Condict is actually a zombie, someone who shambles along, eating people’s brains and spreading “zombie ideas, ideas that should have been killed by contrary evidence,” but instead keep persisting [End Page 142] (Krugman “The...

James Baldwin’s Readers: White Innocence and the Reception of “Letter from a Region in My Mind”

In 1962, James Baldwin became the second Black contributor to The New Yorker, appearing at a crossroads in his career and the magazine’s history. This article reconstructs the editorial development and critical afterlife of “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” arguing that the essay’s reception by white readers is already present in its gestation. A conversion tale, “Letter” attempts to extricate its audience from the American tradition of willful white innocence. Baldwin’s readers, from William Shawn to the author’s recent revival, set in motion the essay’s machinery of reciprocal reflection—its chiasmus of style and substance—with imperfect but enduring results.

Borderline: Reading Mark 7.24–30 as a white woman

ABSTRACT This article considers how to read the Bible attentive to whiteness, building on the approach proposed in David Holgate and Rachel Starr, SCM Studyguide to Biblical Hermeneutics 2nd edition (2019). Using Mark 7.24–30 as a case study, it asks how white readers might be open to confrontation and transformation in their encounters with the text. It considers how white readers need to both disassociate with the dominant character of Jesus and hear the challenge presented to Jesus by the Syrophoenician woman. It asks how Jesus’ racial slur still whistles through the English West Midlands, a region marked by racism. It engages with Silvia Regina de Lima Silva's reading of the text from her experience as an African Brazilian woman (En territorio de frontera: una lectura de Marcos 7, 24–30, 2001). In dialogue with de Lima Silva, it offers some suggestions for how white readers might read the biblical text in ways that reveal and challenge white supremacy and that contribute to the work of healing and solidarity.