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 Racial Identity: Material for Cross‐Racial Bridging?

Korie L. Edwards

in The Elusive Dream: The Power of Race in Interracial Churches

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 ... More

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

BLACK (AND WHITE)

Dan P. McAdams

in The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By

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 ... More

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

Affiliating With George Eliot

Daniel Hack

in Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

This chapter looks at George Eliot's usage of the “unwitting passing and voluntary racial affiliation” scenario in her works and what it means for African American writers. Virtually no other major ... More

This chapter looks at George Eliot's usage of the “unwitting passing and voluntary racial affiliation” scenario in her works and what it means for African American writers. Virtually no other major British writer ever told it at all. By contrast, a number of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American writers—most of them African American—constructed this same scenario, almost invariably in stories about African American identity. Within American literary history, such stories are legible as refutations of what has come to be known as the tragic mulatto/a plot. In stories with this plot, the discovery that a character who has believed himself or herself to be white has some African ancestry is cataclysmic, leading directly to enslavement, sexual violation, madness, and/or death.Less

Finding the Black South

Zandria F. Robinson

in This Ain't Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South

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 ... More

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

“One for Whom Bread—Food—Is Not Enough”: Beneatha Younger, Uplift Ideology, and Intellectual Freedom

Carol Bunch Davis

in Prefiguring Postblackness: Cultural Memory, Drama, and the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s

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 ... More

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

The Postblack Ethos in “Texts Out of Time”: Rosa Parks and the African American Freedom Struggle in Cultural Memory

Carol Bunch Davis

in Prefiguring Postblackness: Cultural Memory, Drama, and the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s

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 ... More

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

Food and Environment at an African American Church

Amanda J. Baugh

in God and the Green Divide: Religious Environmentalism in Black and White

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 ... More

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

Boris Vian and James Baldwin in Paris: Are We a Blues People, Too?

Rashida K. Braggs

in Jazz Diasporas: "Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II Paris"

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 ... More

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

Gathering Black Subjectivities and Cultural Memory in Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness

Carol Bunch Davis

in Prefiguring Postblackness: Cultural Memory, Drama, and the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s

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 ... More

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

‘Thinking in hieroglyphics’: Representations of Egypt in the New Negro Renaissance

Rachel Farebrother

in Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde

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 ... More

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

Cutting Session: Baldwin as Prizefighting Intellectual, Baldwin as Improvising Intellectual

in The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism

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 ... More

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

The People, Rhetoric, and Affect: On the Political Force of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk

Melvin L. Rogers

in A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois

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 ... More

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

Postblackness’s Ancestors and Relatives or “The Past Pushing Us into the Present”

Carol Bunch Davis

in Prefiguring Postblackness: Cultural Memory, Drama, and the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s

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 ... More

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

A Change Gone Come

Karida L. Brown

in Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia

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 ... More

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