Korie L. Edwards
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195314243
- eISBN:
- 9780199871810
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195314243.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
In a race sensitive society, how people racially identify and the salience of these identities influence their associations, including the churches they to choose to attend. This chapter explores the ...
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In a race sensitive society, how people racially identify and the salience of these identities influence their associations, including the churches they to choose to attend. This chapter explores the racial identities of interracial church attendees, and the role of racial identity for explaining who attends interracial churches.Less
In a race sensitive society, how people racially identify and the salience of these identities influence their associations, including the churches they to choose to attend. This chapter explores the racial identities of interracial church attendees, and the role of racial identity for explaining who attends interracial churches.
Dan P. McAdams
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195176933
- eISBN:
- 9780199786787
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195176933.003.0008
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
Bringing together psychological research on life stories and generativity in African-American men and women with a reading of African-American autobiographies, folk tales, and 19th century slave ...
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Bringing together psychological research on life stories and generativity in African-American men and women with a reading of African-American autobiographies, folk tales, and 19th century slave narratives, this chapter examines the relationships between race, generativity, and narrative identity in American life. Like their Euro-American counterparts, highly generative African-American adults, such as Martin Luther King Jr, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, tend to construct highly redemptive life narratives. Their life stories, however, tend to draw from a rich storehouse of images and tropes favored in African-American psycho-literary traditions, stories about life that privilege the discourse of personal (and societal) liberation and underscore such themes as “early danger” and the role of a moral “opponent”.Less
Bringing together psychological research on life stories and generativity in African-American men and women with a reading of African-American autobiographies, folk tales, and 19th century slave narratives, this chapter examines the relationships between race, generativity, and narrative identity in American life. Like their Euro-American counterparts, highly generative African-American adults, such as Martin Luther King Jr, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, tend to construct highly redemptive life narratives. Their life stories, however, tend to draw from a rich storehouse of images and tropes favored in African-American psycho-literary traditions, stories about life that privilege the discourse of personal (and societal) liberation and underscore such themes as “early danger” and the role of a moral “opponent”.
Carol Bunch Davis
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781496802989
- eISBN:
- 9781496803023
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496802989.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter offers a reading of Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, arguing that it foregrounds the necessity for racial uplift ideology in the Younger family's pursuit of the ...
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This chapter offers a reading of Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, arguing that it foregrounds the necessity for racial uplift ideology in the Younger family's pursuit of the American Dream, culminating in the occupancy of their new home in the all-white enclave of Clybourne Park. Hansberry also sketches the postblack ethos in her representation of Beneatha Younger, the younger sister of the play's protagonist, Walter Lee Younger, and her allusion to intraracial debates about the false opposition between intellectual and corporeal freedom. In her interrogation of racial uplift ideology and the patriarchy that often underwrites it, Beneatha offers an alternative mode of self-representation built upon the pursuit of intellectual freedom. The chapter highlights the issue at the core of Hansberry's representation: race-based oppression and how it impacts concerns of equal housing access, economic enfranchisement, and African American identity politics.Less
This chapter offers a reading of Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, arguing that it foregrounds the necessity for racial uplift ideology in the Younger family's pursuit of the American Dream, culminating in the occupancy of their new home in the all-white enclave of Clybourne Park. Hansberry also sketches the postblack ethos in her representation of Beneatha Younger, the younger sister of the play's protagonist, Walter Lee Younger, and her allusion to intraracial debates about the false opposition between intellectual and corporeal freedom. In her interrogation of racial uplift ideology and the patriarchy that often underwrites it, Beneatha offers an alternative mode of self-representation built upon the pursuit of intellectual freedom. The chapter highlights the issue at the core of Hansberry's representation: race-based oppression and how it impacts concerns of equal housing access, economic enfranchisement, and African American identity politics.
Carol Bunch Davis
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781496802989
- eISBN:
- 9781496803023
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496802989.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This book challenges the cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle era that hinges on a master narrative focused on the “heroic period” of the Civil Rights Movement. It argues that ...
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This book challenges the cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle era that hinges on a master narrative focused on the “heroic period” of the Civil Rights Movement. It argues that this narrative limits the representation of African American identity within the Civil Rights Movement to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest leadership in the segregated South and casts Malcolm X's advocacy of black nationalism and the ensuing Black Power/Arts Movement as undermining civil rights advances. Through an analysis of five case studies of African American identity staged in plays between 1959 and 1969, the book instead offers representations that engage, critique, and revise racial uplift ideology and reimagine the Black Arts Movement's sometimes proscriptive notions of black authenticity as a condition of black identity and cultural production. It also posits a postblack ethos as the means by which these representations construct their counternarratives to cultural memory and broadens narrow constructions of African American identity shaping racial discourse in the U.S. public sphere of the 1960s.Less
This book challenges the cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle era that hinges on a master narrative focused on the “heroic period” of the Civil Rights Movement. It argues that this narrative limits the representation of African American identity within the Civil Rights Movement to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest leadership in the segregated South and casts Malcolm X's advocacy of black nationalism and the ensuing Black Power/Arts Movement as undermining civil rights advances. Through an analysis of five case studies of African American identity staged in plays between 1959 and 1969, the book instead offers representations that engage, critique, and revise racial uplift ideology and reimagine the Black Arts Movement's sometimes proscriptive notions of black authenticity as a condition of black identity and cultural production. It also posits a postblack ethos as the means by which these representations construct their counternarratives to cultural memory and broadens narrow constructions of African American identity shaping racial discourse in the U.S. public sphere of the 1960s.
Zandria F. Robinson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781469614229
- eISBN:
- 9781469614243
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469614229.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter considers the ways in which the South has been represented by and through several publics, from academics to rappers to filmmakers. It begins with a discussion of the place of region in ...
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This chapter considers the ways in which the South has been represented by and through several publics, from academics to rappers to filmmakers. It begins with a discussion of the place of region in African American identity, and then uncovers the discursive black South as it has been produced and consumed by myriad publics, especially African American publics. By traversing the black South(s) popularized in the American imagination by literature, art, dance, film, music, and television, the chapter elucidates the narratives emergent from and in the name of the black South and the function of such narratives for black identities historically and contemporarily. Finally, it shows how processes of place accomplishment and regional representation inform post-soul southern identity.Less
This chapter considers the ways in which the South has been represented by and through several publics, from academics to rappers to filmmakers. It begins with a discussion of the place of region in African American identity, and then uncovers the discursive black South as it has been produced and consumed by myriad publics, especially African American publics. By traversing the black South(s) popularized in the American imagination by literature, art, dance, film, music, and television, the chapter elucidates the narratives emergent from and in the name of the black South and the function of such narratives for black identities historically and contemporarily. Finally, it shows how processes of place accomplishment and regional representation inform post-soul southern identity.
Amanda J. Baugh
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780520291164
- eISBN:
- 9780520965003
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520291164.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
Chapter 4 focuses on a Faith in Place bible study on food and faith held at an African American church. This bible study was one of Veronica Kyle’s first sustained recruitment efforts and through the ...
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Chapter 4 focuses on a Faith in Place bible study on food and faith held at an African American church. This bible study was one of Veronica Kyle’s first sustained recruitment efforts and through the group she developed her approach for attracting other African Americans to Faith in Place. Rather than conforming to the norms of religious environmental ideology that developed through the work of white scholars and activists, this chapter demonstrates, Kyle helped the women cultivate an awareness of and language about the environment through a distinctive focus on the history and current circumstances of African Americans.Less
Chapter 4 focuses on a Faith in Place bible study on food and faith held at an African American church. This bible study was one of Veronica Kyle’s first sustained recruitment efforts and through the group she developed her approach for attracting other African Americans to Faith in Place. Rather than conforming to the norms of religious environmental ideology that developed through the work of white scholars and activists, this chapter demonstrates, Kyle helped the women cultivate an awareness of and language about the environment through a distinctive focus on the history and current circumstances of African Americans.
Carol Bunch Davis
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781496802989
- eISBN:
- 9781496803023
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496802989.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter frames Alice Childress's 1969 teleplay Wine in the Wilderness, as a counternarrative to cultural memory's master narrative of the African American Freedom Struggle era. Childress ...
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This chapter frames Alice Childress's 1969 teleplay Wine in the Wilderness, as a counternarrative to cultural memory's master narrative of the African American Freedom Struggle era. Childress explores the intersections of class, race, and gender in Wine in the Wilderness's representations, situating the Harlem Civil Disturbance of 1965 during which the play takes place as a site enabling productive reflection on and reconsideration of the rhetorical and representational strategies underwriting some Black Arts cultural expression and, by extension, African American identity. The chapter argues that Wine in the Wilderness troubles blackness and disrupts the standard ideas associated with it, consequently creating a new meaning. The play's counternarrative constitutes black solidarity and black consciousness through its critique of the sometimes reductive gender and class ideologies underwriting certain strains of the Black Arts Movement's cultural production alongside an alternate history of black protest led by African American fraternal organizations.Less
This chapter frames Alice Childress's 1969 teleplay Wine in the Wilderness, as a counternarrative to cultural memory's master narrative of the African American Freedom Struggle era. Childress explores the intersections of class, race, and gender in Wine in the Wilderness's representations, situating the Harlem Civil Disturbance of 1965 during which the play takes place as a site enabling productive reflection on and reconsideration of the rhetorical and representational strategies underwriting some Black Arts cultural expression and, by extension, African American identity. The chapter argues that Wine in the Wilderness troubles blackness and disrupts the standard ideas associated with it, consequently creating a new meaning. The play's counternarrative constitutes black solidarity and black consciousness through its critique of the sometimes reductive gender and class ideologies underwriting certain strains of the Black Arts Movement's cultural production alongside an alternate history of black protest led by African American fraternal organizations.
Rashida K. Braggs
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780520279346
- eISBN:
- 9780520963412
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520279346.003.0005
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
This chapter conjoins the literature and experiences of white French writer and musician Boris Vian and African American writer James Baldwin to explore how the authors' in-depth listening to blues ...
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This chapter conjoins the literature and experiences of white French writer and musician Boris Vian and African American writer James Baldwin to explore how the authors' in-depth listening to blues unearthed black rage and prompted confrontations with black identity in their writings. Vian imagines the rage and pain of African Americans from a distance, as he plays alongside jazz musicians in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He draws on the blues to literally write himself into an African American experience. Baldwin experiences dislocation from his homeland, yet greater understanding of his African American heritage while residing in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Paris, France. Listening to the blues and staging blues performance in his literature pushes Baldwin and his readers into a confrontation with African American identity. Looking at these two writers in concert with their counterparts in the United States, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Amiri Baraka, reveals how their blues literature addresses the concerns and struggles of African Americans in the diaspora and expands who may be included in a community of blues people and “black music.”Less
This chapter conjoins the literature and experiences of white French writer and musician Boris Vian and African American writer James Baldwin to explore how the authors' in-depth listening to blues unearthed black rage and prompted confrontations with black identity in their writings. Vian imagines the rage and pain of African Americans from a distance, as he plays alongside jazz musicians in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He draws on the blues to literally write himself into an African American experience. Baldwin experiences dislocation from his homeland, yet greater understanding of his African American heritage while residing in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Paris, France. Listening to the blues and staging blues performance in his literature pushes Baldwin and his readers into a confrontation with African American identity. Looking at these two writers in concert with their counterparts in the United States, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Amiri Baraka, reveals how their blues literature addresses the concerns and struggles of African Americans in the diaspora and expands who may be included in a community of blues people and “black music.”
Rachel Farebrother
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748646401
- eISBN:
- 9780748684410
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748646401.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter argues that that ancient Egypt became an important trope for imagining African American cultural identity and history in the early twentieth century — a means by which to intervene in ...
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This chapter argues that that ancient Egypt became an important trope for imagining African American cultural identity and history in the early twentieth century — a means by which to intervene in contemporary debates on such issues as colonialism, leadership, and nation-building. It also shows that a vindicationist narrative of ancient cultural splendour, which is to be found in popular revisionist histories such as J. A. Rogers's From ‘Superman’ to Man (1917) and 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro with Complete Proof (1934), is often disrupted by the spectre of modernity, as shadowed forth by a marginal yet significant modern Egyptian figure who symbolises the limits of cross-cultural understanding among ‘the darker races of the world’.Less
This chapter argues that that ancient Egypt became an important trope for imagining African American cultural identity and history in the early twentieth century — a means by which to intervene in contemporary debates on such issues as colonialism, leadership, and nation-building. It also shows that a vindicationist narrative of ancient cultural splendour, which is to be found in popular revisionist histories such as J. A. Rogers's From ‘Superman’ to Man (1917) and 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro with Complete Proof (1934), is often disrupted by the spectre of modernity, as shadowed forth by a marginal yet significant modern Egyptian figure who symbolises the limits of cross-cultural understanding among ‘the darker races of the world’.
Carol Bunch Davis
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781496802989
- eISBN:
- 9781496803023
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496802989.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This book explores the tensions between cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle and representations of African American identity staged in five plays between 1959 and 1969 during the ...
More
This book explores the tensions between cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle and representations of African American identity staged in five plays between 1959 and 1969 during the civil rights era. Through close readings of the plays, their popular and African American print media reviews, and the cultural context in which they were produced, the book shows how these representations complicate narrow ideas of blackness, which often limit the freedom struggle era to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest and cast Malcolm X's black nationalism as undermining the Civil Rights Movement's advances. These five plays strategically revise the rhetoric, representations, ideologies, and iconography of the African American freedom struggle, subverting its dominant narrative. This revision critiques racial uplift ideology's tenets of civic and moral virtue as a condition of African American full citizenship. The dramas also reimagine the Black Arts Movement's restrictive notions of black authenticity as a condition of racial identity, and their staged representations construct a counter-narrative to cultural memory of the freedom struggle during that very era. In their use of a “postblack ethos” to enact African American subjectivity, the plays envision black identity beyond the quest for freedom, anticipating what blackness might look like when it moves beyond the struggle. Finally, the book discusses recent revivals, showing how these 1960s plays shape dimensions of modern drama well beyond the decade of their creation.Less
This book explores the tensions between cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle and representations of African American identity staged in five plays between 1959 and 1969 during the civil rights era. Through close readings of the plays, their popular and African American print media reviews, and the cultural context in which they were produced, the book shows how these representations complicate narrow ideas of blackness, which often limit the freedom struggle era to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest and cast Malcolm X's black nationalism as undermining the Civil Rights Movement's advances. These five plays strategically revise the rhetoric, representations, ideologies, and iconography of the African American freedom struggle, subverting its dominant narrative. This revision critiques racial uplift ideology's tenets of civic and moral virtue as a condition of African American full citizenship. The dramas also reimagine the Black Arts Movement's restrictive notions of black authenticity as a condition of racial identity, and their staged representations construct a counter-narrative to cultural memory of the freedom struggle during that very era. In their use of a “postblack ethos” to enact African American subjectivity, the plays envision black identity beyond the quest for freedom, anticipating what blackness might look like when it moves beyond the struggle. Finally, the book discusses recent revivals, showing how these 1960s plays shape dimensions of modern drama well beyond the decade of their creation.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226554235
- eISBN:
- 9780226554259
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226554259.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
This chapter investigates the contingencies among American masculinity, American citizenship, and African American identity. It argues that James Baldwin's essays, like “The Fight,” punched out ...
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This chapter investigates the contingencies among American masculinity, American citizenship, and African American identity. It argues that James Baldwin's essays, like “The Fight,” punched out creative cultural space for his fictional characters to fill in with improvised narratives about manhood, democracy, and African American identity. “The Fight” presents Baldwin at a philosophical crossroads: he was completely invested in the fight for Negro political equality. His essays accentuate a striking style of black intellectual practice: the black intellectual as prizefighter. The improvised expression of suffering, community, and freedom inspires Baldwin's closing. By 1965 the rise in popularity of black nationalism, the aggressive, militant, and politically necessary ideas of Black Power and Black Art, crowded Baldwin out of his position as the primary independent public intellectual voice of the civil rights movement.Less
This chapter investigates the contingencies among American masculinity, American citizenship, and African American identity. It argues that James Baldwin's essays, like “The Fight,” punched out creative cultural space for his fictional characters to fill in with improvised narratives about manhood, democracy, and African American identity. “The Fight” presents Baldwin at a philosophical crossroads: he was completely invested in the fight for Negro political equality. His essays accentuate a striking style of black intellectual practice: the black intellectual as prizefighter. The improvised expression of suffering, community, and freedom inspires Baldwin's closing. By 1965 the rise in popularity of black nationalism, the aggressive, militant, and politically necessary ideas of Black Power and Black Art, crowded Baldwin out of his position as the primary independent public intellectual voice of the civil rights movement.
Julia H. Lee
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814752555
- eISBN:
- 9780814752579
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814752555.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
Why do black characters appear so frequently in Asian American literary works and Asian characters in African American literary works in the early twentieth century? This book attempts to answer this ...
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Why do black characters appear so frequently in Asian American literary works and Asian characters in African American literary works in the early twentieth century? This book attempts to answer this question, arguing that scenes depicting Black-Asian interactions, relationships, and conflicts capture the constitution of African American and Asian American identities as each group struggled to negotiate the racially exclusionary nature of American identity. The book argues that the diversity and ambiguity that characterize these textual moments radically undermine the popular notion that the history of Afro-Asian relations can be reduced to a monolithic, media-friendly narrative, whether of cooperation or antagonism. Drawing on works by Charles Chesnutt, Wu Tingfang, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, Nella Larsen, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Younghill Kang, the book foregrounds how these reciprocal representations emerged from the nation's pervasive pairing of the figure of the “Negro” and the “Asiatic” in oppositional, overlapping, or analogous relationships within a wide variety of popular, scientific, legal, and cultural discourses. Historicizing these interracial encounters within a national and global context highlights how multiple racial groups shaped the narrative of race and national identity in the early twentieth century, as well as how early twentieth-century American literature emerged from that multiracial political context.Less
Why do black characters appear so frequently in Asian American literary works and Asian characters in African American literary works in the early twentieth century? This book attempts to answer this question, arguing that scenes depicting Black-Asian interactions, relationships, and conflicts capture the constitution of African American and Asian American identities as each group struggled to negotiate the racially exclusionary nature of American identity. The book argues that the diversity and ambiguity that characterize these textual moments radically undermine the popular notion that the history of Afro-Asian relations can be reduced to a monolithic, media-friendly narrative, whether of cooperation or antagonism. Drawing on works by Charles Chesnutt, Wu Tingfang, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, Nella Larsen, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Younghill Kang, the book foregrounds how these reciprocal representations emerged from the nation's pervasive pairing of the figure of the “Negro” and the “Asiatic” in oppositional, overlapping, or analogous relationships within a wide variety of popular, scientific, legal, and cultural discourses. Historicizing these interracial encounters within a national and global context highlights how multiple racial groups shaped the narrative of race and national identity in the early twentieth century, as well as how early twentieth-century American literature emerged from that multiracial political context.
Melvin L. Rogers
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813174907
- eISBN:
- 9780813174914
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813174907.003.0006
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
This essay by Melvin L. Rogers provides an account of the political meaning of the term “the people,” using it to examine the rhetorical character of The Souls of Black Folk and the work’s ...
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This essay by Melvin L. Rogers provides an account of the political meaning of the term “the people,” using it to examine the rhetorical character of The Souls of Black Folk and the work’s relationship to the cognitive-affective dimension of judgment. Du Bois illustrates the way the categorization of “the people” makes normative work possible, while drawing attention to the gap between the descriptive and aspirational definitions of “the people” and the mechanisms used to bridge it. This gap prompted Du Bois to stimulate and direct America’s political and ethical imagination, appealing for polity even as he knew he could never be assured of success. As a work of political theory, The Souls of Black Folk connects rhetoric to emotional states as a way to eliminate the divide between descriptive and aspirational definitions of “the people.”Less
This essay by Melvin L. Rogers provides an account of the political meaning of the term “the people,” using it to examine the rhetorical character of The Souls of Black Folk and the work’s relationship to the cognitive-affective dimension of judgment. Du Bois illustrates the way the categorization of “the people” makes normative work possible, while drawing attention to the gap between the descriptive and aspirational definitions of “the people” and the mechanisms used to bridge it. This gap prompted Du Bois to stimulate and direct America’s political and ethical imagination, appealing for polity even as he knew he could never be assured of success. As a work of political theory, The Souls of Black Folk connects rhetoric to emotional states as a way to eliminate the divide between descriptive and aspirational definitions of “the people.”
Carol Bunch Davis
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781496802989
- eISBN:
- 9781496803023
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496802989.003.0007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This coda discusses recent revivals of the five plays examined in this book. The plays have been staged in a range of venues over the last ten years. A Raisin in the Sun, for example, returned to ...
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This coda discusses recent revivals of the five plays examined in this book. The plays have been staged in a range of venues over the last ten years. A Raisin in the Sun, for example, returned to Broadway in 2014 and earned a Tony award for the year's best revival of a play or musical. The other plays were revived Off-Broadway or in university or regional theaters. Critics reviewing the plays approached them as cultural artifacts, historicizing the productions and situating them as markers of a pivotal era in the nation's history and its narrative about race. In effect, the plays become a history lesson about the African American Freedom Struggle. But as they argued for the historical significance of the plays, they elided the representation of African American identity's complexities present in the play. In light of cultural memory's dialectic of remembering and forgetting in service of the narrative of the Freedom Struggle era, the coda urges a reconsideration of postblackness's literary genealogies.Less
This coda discusses recent revivals of the five plays examined in this book. The plays have been staged in a range of venues over the last ten years. A Raisin in the Sun, for example, returned to Broadway in 2014 and earned a Tony award for the year's best revival of a play or musical. The other plays were revived Off-Broadway or in university or regional theaters. Critics reviewing the plays approached them as cultural artifacts, historicizing the productions and situating them as markers of a pivotal era in the nation's history and its narrative about race. In effect, the plays become a history lesson about the African American Freedom Struggle. But as they argued for the historical significance of the plays, they elided the representation of African American identity's complexities present in the play. In light of cultural memory's dialectic of remembering and forgetting in service of the narrative of the Freedom Struggle era, the coda urges a reconsideration of postblackness's literary genealogies.
Karida L. Brown
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469647036
- eISBN:
- 9781469647050
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469647036.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter traces the process of African American children in the tri-city area of Harlan County, Kentucky, becoming, like many others in the country, “children of integration” through the historic ...
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This chapter traces the process of African American children in the tri-city area of Harlan County, Kentucky, becoming, like many others in the country, “children of integration” through the historic Brown v. Board of Education case. Both the inheritance and the risks of desegregation befell everyday black children; they would be the change agents for dismantling the “separate but equal” doctrine upheld by Plessy v. Ferguson. What was that experience like? By tracing the background of the Brown case and using oral history testimony, the chapter draws attention to the hidden injuries, loss of community, and transforming racial epistemologies that accompanied forced school desegregation. When asked to reflect on the perceived costs and benefits of desegregation, participant responses varied by generation and level of abstraction. While acknowledging the benefits, they all expressed some form of injury: a loss of community and African American identity.Less
This chapter traces the process of African American children in the tri-city area of Harlan County, Kentucky, becoming, like many others in the country, “children of integration” through the historic Brown v. Board of Education case. Both the inheritance and the risks of desegregation befell everyday black children; they would be the change agents for dismantling the “separate but equal” doctrine upheld by Plessy v. Ferguson. What was that experience like? By tracing the background of the Brown case and using oral history testimony, the chapter draws attention to the hidden injuries, loss of community, and transforming racial epistemologies that accompanied forced school desegregation. When asked to reflect on the perceived costs and benefits of desegregation, participant responses varied by generation and level of abstraction. While acknowledging the benefits, they all expressed some form of injury: a loss of community and African American identity.
