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Conclusion: Dreams Multiplied … A Final Entrée to Cuba

Andrea J. Queeley

John M. Kirk (ed.)

in Rescuing Our Roots: The African Anglo-Caribbean Diaspora in Contemporary Cuba

The concluding chapter reflects upon changes in Cuban society from the early twentieth century to the post-Soviet era, reviewing key moments for the Anglo-Caribbean Cuban community and emphasizing ... More

The concluding chapter reflects upon changes in Cuban society from the early twentieth century to the post-Soviet era, reviewing key moments for the Anglo-Caribbean Cuban community and emphasizing the paradoxical nature of the political subjectivities of Anglo-Caribbean Cubans. Queeley suggests that the historical pattern of discrimination directed toward people of African descent who have broken through racial barriers in education, employment, and even politics complicates claims to a raceless society and has implications for the direction of transformative visions and antiracist activism in Cuba and beyond. Queeley closes by first suggesting that this dilemma be taken into consideration by antiracist groups in Cuba and, second, by reflecting on what the future might hold for the next generation of Anglo-Caribbean Cubans.Less

Audrey Smedley: A Pioneers’ Pioneer Anthropologist

Janis Faye Hutchinson

in The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology

The making of an antiracist anthropologist is explored through the life experiences of a premier social scientist, Audrey Smedley. Examination of her childhood experiences and academic career provide ... More

The making of an antiracist anthropologist is explored through the life experiences of a premier social scientist, Audrey Smedley. Examination of her childhood experiences and academic career provide a lens for understanding race and racism in the U S. Smedley earned degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Manchester in the UK and also studied in Paris. This chapter also gives us a glimpse into the making of her classic Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview.Less

Holding One Another: Mario Savio and the Freedom Struggle in Mississippi and Berkeley

Waldo Martin

in The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s

This chapter examines the experiences of Mario Savio in the freedom struggle in Mississippi and Berkeley, California. It explains that Savio experienced violence because of his participation in the ... More

This chapter examines the experiences of Mario Savio in the freedom struggle in Mississippi and Berkeley, California. It explains that Savio experienced violence because of his participation in the Mississippi Summer Project and suggests that his development as an activist illustrated the importance of engagement in local civil rights struggle as a springboard to broader realms of activism. Savio brought his civil rights activism and lessons from his early Catholic moral training into the Free Speech Movement (FMS), lessons that strengthened his recognition of the responsibility of white Americans for participating in the antiracist struggle.Less

Teaching outside Liberal-Imperial Discourse: A Critical Dialogue about Antiracist Feminisms

Sylvanna Falcón, Sharmila Lodhia, Molly Talcott, and Dana Collins

in The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent

This chapter focuses on antiracist feminisms. It presents the multiple conversations of four members of a feminist group called Collective of Antiracist-Feminist Scholar Activists (CASA) about ... More

This chapter focuses on antiracist feminisms. It presents the multiple conversations of four members of a feminist group called Collective of Antiracist-Feminist Scholar Activists (CASA) about critical pedagogies, the challenges of navigating academic life while remaining engaged in a diverse social justice movement, and finding sustainable ways to remain present with their loved ones while pursuing their work. The article entitled New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights, a special issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFjP) in 2010, sought to explore the contradictions that emanate from, on the one hand, the institutionalization of human rights among imperial nation-states and global bodies, on the other, the growing embrace of human rights logics and languages by activists.Less

The Busing Crisis

Tracy E. K’Meyer

in Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945-1980

This chapter discusses the busing crisis created by the antibusing movement which produced an outburst of prointegration and antiracist activity on the part of traditional civil rights leaders, ... More

This chapter discusses the busing crisis created by the antibusing movement which produced an outburst of prointegration and antiracist activity on the part of traditional civil rights leaders, African American parents, and faith-based and secular human relations advocates. It reports that in September 1975, court-ordered busing began bringing black and white students together on a large scale in the newly merged city and county system, white opponents of integration launched a school boycott and mass demonstrations, the latter devolving into vandalism and rioting that required the intervention of the National Guard and earned the city condemnation from the national press. It further reports that the local antibusing movement — the largest, most organized, and most vocal opposition seen during the civil rights era in Louisville — revealed the extent of resistance to further change in the racial status quo.Less

The Paradox of Reparations: Japanese Americans and African Americans at the Crossroads of Alliance and Conflict

Greg Robinson

in Minority Relations: Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation

This chapter offers a more complex and multiracial view of history by revisiting the narrative of the Japanese American redress movement and discovers a paradox at its core: while the campaign by ... More

This chapter offers a more complex and multiracial view of history by revisiting the narrative of the Japanese American redress movement and discovers a paradox at its core: while the campaign by Japanese Americans for reparations for their wartime confinement started at the end of the 1960s as part of a wider antiracist coalition, and received key support in its early stages from African American political leaders, Japanese Americans increasingly distanced themselves from their black allies as the goal of redress grew nearer, even as African Americans became increasingly public in their opposition. The chapter also shows how the victory of the redress movement in 1988 offered a major precedent, and a model, for reparations efforts by blacks.Less

Introduction

Leah N. Gordon

in From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America

The introduction distinguishes between the different types of theories—dispositional, systemic, and relational—that circulated in mid-twentieth century debate on America’s “race problem.” It goes on ... More

The introduction distinguishes between the different types of theories—dispositional, systemic, and relational—that circulated in mid-twentieth century debate on America’s “race problem.” It goes on to chart racial individualism’s mid-century chronology and surveys the evolving intellectual and political landscape that nurtured individualistic theoretical and reformist approaches to racial questions in the postwar decades. Internalist and externalist factors—most importantly scientism, behavioralism, antiradicalism, shifts in civil rights legal strategy, and faith in education—intersected to favor individualistic approaches to the race issue and discourage alternative approaches. Still, racial individualism’s postwar history was both complicated and contested. Theoretical challenges to individualistic paradigms surfaced, especially in African American-led intellectual spaces, into the late 1940s and early 1950s. At the same time, antiracist scholar-activists faced dilemmas of scale—in which theoretically sound reforms were not politically feasible but realistic reforms proved theoretically insufficient—that complicated efforts to use social science for social action.Less

The Impersonal Is Political: Spinoza and a Feminist Politics of Imperceptibility

Hasana Sharp

in Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization

This chapter outlines the problems Elizabeth Grosz identifies with a politics of recognition and examines her exhortation to “imperceptibility” and “impersonality.” It proposes that Grosz’s idiom of ... More

This chapter outlines the problems Elizabeth Grosz identifies with a politics of recognition and examines her exhortation to “imperceptibility” and “impersonality.” It proposes that Grosz’s idiom of force, nature, and impersonality grounds her effort to produce a political vocabulary entirely alien to humanism. Humanism in politics is understood here as one that includes any vision of justice derived from a special feature of existence that is not exhibited by nonhuman beings but is held to be universally shared by humans. Grosz, however, is concerned not with political theory but with feminist, queer, and antiracist thought. She is concerned with movements among the oppressed that constitute alternative ways of life, one not defined by their oppressors.Less

Conclusion: Imagining an Antiracist Humanistic Theism

Dwayne A. Tunstall

in Doing Philosophy Personally: Thinking about Metaphysics, Theism, and Antiblack Racism

This chapter explores how a humanistic theism can be combined with Marcel’s religious existentialism to make an antiracist theism. The antiracist theism emerging from this chapter will not be a ... More

This chapter explores how a humanistic theism can be combined with Marcel’s religious existentialism to make an antiracist theism. The antiracist theism emerging from this chapter will not be a robust theism. Rather, this theism is a humanistic theism that takes antiblack racism seriously, but without any hope that any supernatural or superhuman entity will be the one who end it. This book concludes by contending that the only ones who can end racial oppression are us human persons working together and acting divinely.Less

The World Confronts Jim Crow

Gerald Horne

in Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle

This chapter argues that the Scottsboro case was profoundly important not least because it was seized upon by the Communist party and its global network of activists to highlight Jim Crow. This ... More

This chapter argues that the Scottsboro case was profoundly important not least because it was seized upon by the Communist party and its global network of activists to highlight Jim Crow. This placed tremendous pressure on the nation's rulers at a time when national security was being challenged frontally in leading capitals—Moscow particularly—which had decided to focus on Jim Crow, while training talented Negroes like Patterson to subvert this hateful system. For only months after the Scottsboro campaign had been launched, the CP was crowing about the gigantic steps that had been taken on the anti-Jim Crow front. Scottsboro occasioned a massive counterattack by the radical left not only on the antiracist front but with regard to the lineaments of Negro history generally. Ultimately, however, a delicate pas de deux was performed whereby those like Patterson, who had helped to place Jim Crow in the global spotlight, were sidelined, and in compensation, Jim Crow was eroded.Less

Immigration and the Drama of Affrmation

Roderick A. Ferguson

in The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference

This chapter explores the intimate relationship between the history of immigration and the antiracist movements of the 1960s. Though often taken for granted and deemed in some ways unsympathetic to ... More

This chapter explores the intimate relationship between the history of immigration and the antiracist movements of the 1960s. Though often taken for granted and deemed in some ways unsympathetic to the problems of the local minorities, the immigrants are in fact deeply implicated in U.S. racial discourse following the sixties. With the passing of the 1965 Immigration Act and the emergent antiracist movements, the immigrants were given special focus by the U.S. government, in terms of participating, however unwittingly, in social experiments and archival operations designed to reinforce the hegemony. The academy is the ideal site for exploration in this case, as student migrants are engaged in politics of affirmation, whereby the institution supports minority affirmation as a way of regulating the constructive and destructive effects the immigrant communities place upon state power.Less

Ancient Roots through Settled Land: Imagining Indigeneity and Place among Radical Faeries

Scott Lauria Morgensen

in Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization

This chapter explores how non-Native gay counterculturists pursued multiple desires for queer indigeneity that, while contested by antiracist critique, confronted their settler formation only in ... More

This chapter explores how non-Native gay counterculturists pursued multiple desires for queer indigeneity that, while contested by antiracist critique, confronted their settler formation only in relationship to Native gay and Two-Spirit men. Gay and lesbian counterculturists in back-to-the-land collectives across Canada and the United States inspired broader circulation of their rural practices. One of their lasting legacies is the Radical Faeries. Radical Faeries employ back-to-the-land principles to a mobile practice that made retreat to rural space a conduit for urban and itinerant people to realize portable truths. Radical Faerie culture privileged rural retreats as a way for non-Native gay men to liberate an Indigenous gay nature and incorporate it in their everyday lives.Less

Dances of All Nations: Choreographing Communism

Hannah Kosstrin

in Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow

This chapter argues that Anna Sokolow’s 1930s proletarian and anti-fascist choreographies contributed to an increasingly vibrant conversation with the transnational Left through shared ideologies of ... More

This chapter argues that Anna Sokolow’s 1930s proletarian and anti-fascist choreographies contributed to an increasingly vibrant conversation with the transnational Left through shared ideologies of egalitarianism and antiracism as they made space for women in these conversations. The chapter discusses a catalog of her work, including Histrionics (1933), Speaker (1935), Four Little Salon Pieces (1936), Strange American Funeral (1935), Case History No.— (1937), Excerpts from a War Poem (F. T. Marinetti) (1937), Façade—Exposizione Italiana (1937), Slaughter of the Innocents (1937), “Filibuster” from The Bourbons Got the Blues (1938), Dance of All Nations (1938), and Sing for Your Supper (1939). These choreographies match the progression of American Communism across the 1930s from early proletarian statements to aligning with the Popular Front against Fascism, and to Jewish–Black alliances across the American Left and leftist cries against the American government as it began to prosecute Communist-affiliated activities.Less

A Sort of Psychodrama: Verité Moments 58–61

Ivone Margulies

in In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema

This chapter explores the political and cultural contours of the late 1950s impetus for autocritique in France, focusing on two films engaged with antiracist role-play and self-awareness: The Human ... More

This chapter explores the political and cultural contours of the late 1950s impetus for autocritique in France, focusing on two films engaged with antiracist role-play and self-awareness: The Human Pyramid (Jean Rouch, 1959) and Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch and Morin, 1961). The chapter tracks the reception of psychodrama and group dynamics in late 1950s France correlating interests on authenticity, self-determination, and racism apparent in publications such as Arguments (Morin’s coedited journal) to cinema verité’s intent to stage a transformative process on camera. This program coalesces in Chronicle’s notorious postscreening scene, and it also emerges in The Human Pyramid’s suspended resolution in achieving an integration between French and African students at a high school in Ivory Coast. The quandaries of trying to register process in film are highlighted in the fixation with authentic emergent speech in cinema verité and in analyses of the brilliant ruptures of registers in The Human Pyramid.Less