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Saints Tales

Deidre Helen Crumbley

in Saved and Sanctified: The Rise of a Storefront Church in Great Migration Philadelphia

This chapter contains life histories of ten founding church elders, who are currently in their 80s and 90s. All of the narratives begin with a socio-historical snapshot of the elders' hometowns, ... More

This chapter contains life histories of ten founding church elders, who are currently in their 80s and 90s. All of the narratives begin with a socio-historical snapshot of the elders' hometowns, followed by interviews covering their life experiences in both the North and the South. These experiences include employment patterns and salaries earned; “separate but equal” education during the Plessy v. Ferguson era; White on Black violence, such as false imprisonment and threats of and actual lynching; politics of sex between White men and Black women in the South; enculturation of White children in perpetrating racial violence and of Black children in surviving it; Black adult strategies for negotiating southern White terrorism and for migrating to and adjusting within urban life; economic survival strategies, such as sharecropping in the South and Black women's performing domestic “day labor” in the North; southern religious roots and new urban religious options; and colorism. The chapter concludes by exploring how these narratives inform Great Migration research.Less

“Sores in the City”: A Genealogy of the Almighty Black P. Stone Rangers

Rashad Shabazz

in Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago

This chapter examines the role of carceral power in the rise of Black gangs and particularly in the sociospatial production of Black masculinity. Focusing on the period between 1960 and the early ... More

This chapter examines the role of carceral power in the rise of Black gangs and particularly in the sociospatial production of Black masculinity. Focusing on the period between 1960 and the early 1980s, it considers how carceral power contributed to the emergence of the Almighty Black P. Stone Rangers street gang. It also explores how policing in Black Chicago and the growing prison industrial complex led to the incarceration of many gang members and Black men in Chicago. In Chicago (as well as other cities throughout the Black diaspora) gangs played a crucial role in the performance of Black masculinity. They did so not simply because of their swagger, clothing, or saturation, but because they were the group who had the strongest relationship with the criminal justice system. This chapter discusses the interrelationships among carceral space, Black gangs, prison masculinity, and the elements of masculinity in carceral institutions.Less

‘This is your story-teller, The Man in Black’: hosting horror

Richard J. Hand

in Listen in terror: British horror radio from the advent of broadcasting to the digital age

An exploration of the Man in Black, the legendary BBC host of Appointment with Fear and other shows. The chapter looks at the place of framed narrative and examples of hosting strategies. The ... More

An exploration of the Man in Black, the legendary BBC host of Appointment with Fear and other shows. The chapter looks at the place of framed narrative and examples of hosting strategies. The writer-producer John Keir Cross is also explored.Less

“Black Man’s Verse”: The Black Chicago Renaissance and the Popular Front Jazz Poetics of Frank Marshall Davis

John Lowney

in Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music

This chapter argues for renewed recognition of Black Chicago Renaissance writer Frank Marshall Davis, whose first collection of poetry, Black Man’s Verse (1935), was widely celebrated for its ... More

This chapter argues for renewed recognition of Black Chicago Renaissance writer Frank Marshall Davis, whose first collection of poetry, Black Man’s Verse (1935), was widely celebrated for its innovative adaptations of African American vernacular forms, including the blues and jazz. Situating Davis within recent scholarly reassessment of the Black Chicago Renaissance, this chapter demonstrates how Davis’s jazz writing, as a journalist, critic, and poet, exemplifies the global orientation of the Black Chicago Renaissance that is becoming increasingly recognized. Davis’s jazz writing is especially important, for the subsequent Black Arts generation as well as for his Popular Front contemporaries, not only because of his development of inventive vernacular forms, but also because of his insistence on the African roots of African American music. In articulating how African musical principles inform jazz, Davis also underscored the international and interracial importance of jazz for black and working-class social progress.Less

Ghost Mapping: The Geography of Risk in Black Chicago

Rashad Shabazz

in Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago

This chapter examines how high rates of Black male incarceration, enabled by the war on drugs that swept tens of thousands of Black men into state prisons, exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic among ... More

This chapter examines how high rates of Black male incarceration, enabled by the war on drugs that swept tens of thousands of Black men into state prisons, exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic among Black Chicagoans. As HIV/AIDS emerged in the early 1980s, prisons became key sites where the disease could hide and spread. The high rates of Black incarceration created a geography of risk—the sociospatial production of HIV infection—for prisoners and the communities they returned to. Although HIV/AIDS could affect anyone, the combination of geographic (segregation and the war on drugs) and structural forces (mass incarceration, premature death, lack of healthcare, and politics) increased the risk in Black Chicago. The risk of transmission of HIV is fourteen times higher in prison. Diseases like small spaces, and the confined space of Illinois prisons encouraged transmission. This was compounded by vexing political realities the returning prisoners faced at home.Less

Race, Masculinity, and Gendered Racism: President Obama’s Influence on Black Men

Christopher T. H. Liang, Carin Molenaar, and Shalena Heard

in Obama on Our Minds: The Impact of Obama on the Psyche of America

In this chapter, Liang, Molenaar, and Heard discuss how President Barack Obama—as a new, more positive model of Black masculinity—may serve to counteract negative stereotypes of Black men perpetrated ... More

In this chapter, Liang, Molenaar, and Heard discuss how President Barack Obama—as a new, more positive model of Black masculinity—may serve to counteract negative stereotypes of Black men perpetrated by the media. This chapter provides an overview of Black masculinity, discusses the concept of gendered racism as a context for understanding how Black men are stereotyped, explores the ways in which Black men have resisted gendered racism, and discusses how positive Black masculinity has been obscured by media to influence how young African American men may see themselves. In this chapter, the authors also discuss the hope of renewing positive Black masculinity in the wake of this two-term president.Less

Introduction: Parlor Fantasies, Parlor Nightmares

Jasmine Nichole Cobb

in Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century

This book explores how Black people appearing in early daguerreotypes reimagined and reconstructed Black visuality removed from the cultural logics of slavery. It explains how the daguerreotype ... More

This book explores how Black people appearing in early daguerreotypes reimagined and reconstructed Black visuality removed from the cultural logics of slavery. It explains how the daguerreotype became a means to create distance between freedom and slavery's mediation of Blackness, and as tools of “critical black memory.” It analyzes modes of picturing Black freedom before the Civil War and before the daguerreotype to trace its emergence in the transatlantic imaginary. It shows how picturing freedom before the advent of photographic technologies reorganized Black visuality, repositioning Black people within the conceptual space of the Atlantic world. It also discusses efforts to imagine both Black men and Black women as free in the context of slavery, with particular emphasis on “the black female body and the gaze.” Finally, it locates diverse conceptions of Black freedom in the transatlantic parlor as a place for dissimilar groups of people and cultural producers to convene around visions of Blackness separated from slavery.Less

Terror tales for the twenty-first century: The Man in Black

Richard J. Hand

in Listen in terror: British horror radio from the advent of broadcasting to the digital age

This chapter looks at The Man in Black (2009 onwards) featuring Mark Gatiss in the titular host role.

Protecting the Household

Adam Malka

in Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation

Antebellum racial policing also extended to the household, as Chapter 4 demonstrates. Police reform was implemented in the name of property, and in a patriarchal world, households often counted as ... More

Antebellum racial policing also extended to the household, as Chapter 4 demonstrates. Police reform was implemented in the name of property, and in a patriarchal world, households often counted as male property. Thus the new policemen were supposed to protect good householders. And they often did. But free black households fit into this system uncomfortably. Beliefs in black household disorder, and subsequent police regulations targeted at black families, combined with the prohibition of black testimony against white people both to undermine black men’s household autonomy and heighten white male power over black households. When a white person entered a black home, there was not much a policeman could do, even if he wanted to. As a result, free black Baltimoreans’ home lives were uniquely susceptible to white violence. Once again, policemen confirmed the disparity.Less

The Crime of Freedom

Adam Malka

in Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation

Slavery in Maryland died during the 1860s, but for all of their promise the changes also brought heartbreak. As Chapter 7 shows, black men’s acquisition of a fuller bundle of property rights and ... More

Slavery in Maryland died during the 1860s, but for all of their promise the changes also brought heartbreak. As Chapter 7 shows, black men’s acquisition of a fuller bundle of property rights and legal protections brought them into conflict with the very criminal justice system built to guard those rights and ensure those protections. White commentators scoffed at black men’s supposed indolence and bristled at their households’ apparent disorder; police officers arrested black Baltimoreans for an expanding list of crimes; and black people, black men in particular, were incarcerated at growing rates. During the years immediately following the Civil War, Baltimore’s policemen and prisons perpetrated a form of racial violence that was different from yet indicative of the violence inflicted by the old order’s vigilantes. Castigated as criminals, freedmen’s legal victories provoked a form of policing reserved for the truly free.Less

The Air of Analysis: Resolution and Composition in Poe’s Sublime and Confessional Tales

Paul hurh

in American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville

The third chapter argues that the analytical method on display in Poe’s detective fiction is drawn from and influential in structuring the dynamics of terror in his confessional and sublime tales. My ... More

The third chapter argues that the analytical method on display in Poe’s detective fiction is drawn from and influential in structuring the dynamics of terror in his confessional and sublime tales. My chapter returns to the poststructuralist readings of Poe’s detective fiction, and recovers in response Poe’s own definition of analysis as a bipartite system of resolution and composition. By ascertaining the shape of analysis responsible, ultimately, for the recursive and uncanny shape of the poststructuralist debate, my chapter shows the continuity between Poe’s seemingly calculated tales of reason’s mastery over nature and his seemingly irrational tales of madness and peril. The second part of the chapter finds and analyzes the same reciprocal dynamic of resolution and composition within his sublime and confessional tales.Less

Not to Oppose Evil: Johnny Cash’s Bad Luck Wind

Tony Tost

in The Poetics of American Song Lyrics

“A Boy Named Sue,” a song composed by Shel Silverstein and performed by Johnny Cash, is about a boy’s displeasure for growing up as a kind of comic legend because he has a woman’s name, for which he ... More

“A Boy Named Sue,” a song composed by Shel Silverstein and performed by Johnny Cash, is about a boy’s displeasure for growing up as a kind of comic legend because he has a woman’s name, for which he has faced a life of mockery and abuse. It is some sort of a fable: a boy raised by a name and not by a father. The strange resonance of “A Boy Named Sue” had to be among the precedents informing “Thirteen,” another Cash song about a man born without any name at all. Written by Glenn Danzig , it is a composition that toys with the fault line separating tragedy and farce. One of the song’s lines is “Bad luck wind blowing at my back.” This chapter examines the lyrics of “Thirteen” and how the song embraces Cash’s “Man in Black” persona, as well as how his rendering evokes the complexities involving his own mythology.Less

Good Guys and Bad Guys

Angela Stroud

in Good Guys with Guns: The Appeal and Consequences of Concealed Carry

This chapter examines cultural constructions of race, class, and gender that are embedded in how CHL holders imagine crime. Respondents describe CHL holders as a special class of citizen, a “good ... More

This chapter examines cultural constructions of race, class, and gender that are embedded in how CHL holders imagine crime. Respondents describe CHL holders as a special class of citizen, a “good guy,” who has not only the right, but the duty to be armed in public, something that leaves them outraged when they are banned from carrying into “gun free zones.” They draw clear lines between themselves and “bad guys,” and yet, some also admit to carrying guns illegally. Though they typically avoid discussing race explicitly, respondents draw upon racialized and classed perceptions of threat and safety that lead them to associate blackness with poverty and crime, constructs that shape their gun carrying practices. Whiteness and class privilege are key to understanding the significance of respondents’ experiences.Less

Southern, Christian, and Gay

James Hudnut-Beumler

in Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table: Contemporary Christianities in the American South

In no area is contemporary southern Christianity more deeply divided than over the issue of sexuality. Younger people (including many self-described Bible-believing Christians) do not think that ... More

In no area is contemporary southern Christianity more deeply divided than over the issue of sexuality. Younger people (including many self-described Bible-believing Christians) do not think that being gay has anything to do with one’s status before God, nor should it have before the law or in the family of faith. Baby boomers may be the last generation to feel otherwise, but for now gender identity and sexuality is a battleground. This chapter, however, is not about the southern Christians who exclude and decry their LGBT neighbors. It is about the several million gay southerners who bear up under that pressure while often holding on to the Christian faith that supposedly drives those who would exclude them. The chapter focusses on the LGBT Christians in the South and their allies who in the contemporary period have decided to be quiet no longer but instead to be proudly Christian and gay, and the growing minority of congregations that have staked out a publicly affirming identity of welcome. For these LGBT people of faith and their allies, the Christian message has sometimes proved stronger and more redemptive than all the resistance they have encountered from other Christians because of their identities.Less

Louis: “I’m Always Meeting the Underdog People”

Jesus Ramirez-Valles

in Queer Aging: The Gayby Boomers and a New Frontier for Gerontology

Louis lives in the uncertainty not only of HIV, but also cancer. He has being living with HIV since 1999 (he is now 55 years old) and has learned to manage the infection. However, his liver cancer ... More

Louis lives in the uncertainty not only of HIV, but also cancer. He has being living with HIV since 1999 (he is now 55 years old) and has learned to manage the infection. However, his liver cancer has returned. When we met, Louis, a medium-height black man, was going through another round of chemotherapy. He looked a little older than 56 and his walk was frail. He grew up in the inner city housing projects and, throughout his life, has had a variety of jobs. At one point, he exchanged sex for money with both men and women. He was married to a woman, with whom he had four children. He now lives a very modest life and is a recovering drug addict.Less

Marvin: “I Learned Very Early That It’s Not Just about Being Gay”

Jesus Ramirez-Valles

in Queer Aging: The Gayby Boomers and a New Frontier for Gerontology

Marvin recounts his life and his aging as shaped by larger societal forces. He speaks of racial segregation during the 1950s and 1960s, AIDS, and the 2008 financial crisis as the defining events of ... More

Marvin recounts his life and his aging as shaped by larger societal forces. He speaks of racial segregation during the 1950s and 1960s, AIDS, and the 2008 financial crisis as the defining events of his life. His main concern now, at the age 56, is the possibility of losing his home to foreclosure. Marvin is black, HIV negative, and in a very tenuous financial situation.: “I am under the sum of the Great Recession … A lot of my time is spent doing odd jobs --painting houses …I needed cash immediately because my savings have run out. I’m on unemploymentLess

Anthony: “There Has to Be Something Else to This”

Jesus Ramirez-Valles

in Queer Aging: The Gayby Boomers and a New Frontier for Gerontology

“I’ve been living with HIV now since 1990… One thing that is very significant in my own personal life, with my aging syndrome is that I’ve articulated my faith. I’ve always felt a connection to ... More

“I’ve been living with HIV now since 1990… One thing that is very significant in my own personal life, with my aging syndrome is that I’ve articulated my faith. I’ve always felt a connection to Jesus.” In his own words, Anthony is a man of faith and strong libido. He is 60 years old, black, and HIV positive. He grew up in a lower middle-class milieu and now lives in poverty. Anthony’s narrative underscores living with HIV, stigma, and religious faith as coping a mechanism.Less