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Conrad and the Philosophy of History: Youth, Poland, and the Romantic Past

Richard Niland

in Conrad and History

This chapter introduces the Polish philosophical background to Conrad's life and writing. By outlining the importance of Hegel's philosophy of history in nineteenth-century Europe, the chapter ... More

This chapter introduces the Polish philosophical background to Conrad's life and writing. By outlining the importance of Hegel's philosophy of history in nineteenth-century Europe, the chapter analyses the Polish response to this thought giving a detailed study of Polish philosopher August Cieszkowski, a relatively neglected figure. The chapter then outlines the clash between Romanticism and Positivism in Conrad's Polish heritage before concluding with a discussion of how these conflicting attitude to history and the nation appear in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus.’Less

The Rules of the Game

ALLEN JONES and Mark Naison

in The Rat That Got Away: A Bronx Memoir

The streets of the Bronx and Harlem in the early 1960s were not polite and were as risky as they were attractive to boys like Allen Jones. What went on in the street had a code of conduct and a ... More

The streets of the Bronx and Harlem in the early 1960s were not polite and were as risky as they were attractive to boys like Allen Jones. What went on in the street had a code of conduct and a language all their own, just like any other sport or game people play. The stakes were high and the game was more than sport. People played for keeps. There were basically two kinds of players on the streets, and they went by the names of “nigger” and “bitch.” However, among musicians, hustlers, ballplayers, and people who had to do some of their business on the streets, the term was a sign of belonging and even one of affection. “Bitch” is a term that women readers may not like hearing or seeing, and they may not enjoy reading about his treatment of women in much of Jones's early life. There was a different standard for women.Less

“Slightly Known Territory”: Renaissance Admixture and the So-Called Van Vechten School

Scott Herring

in Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History

This chapter explores Carl Van Vechten's queer slumming. Prior to his controversial participation in the Harlem (New Negro) Renaissance, the transatlantic bohemian's “weird six-foot presence seemed ... More

This chapter explores Carl Van Vechten's queer slumming. Prior to his controversial participation in the Harlem (New Negro) Renaissance, the transatlantic bohemian's “weird six-foot presence seemed to be everywhere.” Throughout the 1890s, he affiliated with the Chicago regionalists. In prewar Greenwich Village, he frequented bohemian salons. At the dawn of the Jazz Age, he visited with Parisian expatriates. An extremely mobile modern, Van Vechten was also lauded as a New York dilettante whose wide-ranging literary connections were matched by substantial literary achievements. In the months preceding Nigger Heaven's publication, he had become something of a Harlem fixture. Van Vechten and his second wife, actress Fania Marinoff, hosted open-invitation interracial parties, and he frequented Harlem cabarets on an almost nightly basis. He also judged the annual Hamilton Ball Lodge drag shows.Less

“A Strange Nigger”: Faulkner and the Minstrel Performance of Whiteness

John N. Duvall

in Faulkner and Whiteness

In contrast to the assertions of many racist characters in Yoknapatawpha County, William Faulkner’s fiction repeatedly shows that race is always mediated by performance rather than a simple matter of ... More

In contrast to the assertions of many racist characters in Yoknapatawpha County, William Faulkner’s fiction repeatedly shows that race is always mediated by performance rather than a simple matter of essence or biology. In particular, Faulkner illustrates an opening between racial and cultural identity through certain reflections on the racist term “nigger.” This chapter argues that Faulkner’s fictional explorations of racial performance were influenced not only by American blackface minstrelsy but also by the conventions of an older European whiteface minstrelsy, allowing him to stress the fact “that not all Caucasians are fully white in a South that wishes to absolutize all racial difference.” It considers two classes of Caucasians not granted full southern whiteness in Faulkner’s world: poor whites and those characters who exhibit sexual or gender ambiguity. Finally, the chapter examines the figurative blackness of a number of presumptively white characters in Faulkner’s fiction, including the verse play The Marionettes and the novel Mosquitoes.Less

The Worldwide Circulation of Contemporary African American Television

Timothy Havens

in Black Television Travels: African American Media around the Globe

This chapter focuses on the international circulation of the newer forms of African American television, particularly, how different network organizations and audience configurations create ... More

This chapter focuses on the international circulation of the newer forms of African American television, particularly, how different network organizations and audience configurations create opportunities for new kinds of African American television flows. The priorities of premium cable channels, general entertainment broadcasters, and comedy channels abroad, combined with industry lore about “edgy” and “quality” programming, lead to a heavy reliance on black masculinity, heteronormativity, crime, violence, and frequent use of the word “nigger” in contemporary series. These similar aesthetic choices tend to dominate web-based television series as well, largely because online producers often strive to have their programs noticed by more traditional television outlets. The chapter looks at how series creators navigate these institutional expectations of what African American television should include in order to get their shows on air.Less

Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics

in Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop

This chapter addresses three issues that consistently provoke episodes of moral panic about the explicit content in rap music: the place and treatment of women in hip-hop, use of the words nigger and ... More

This chapter addresses three issues that consistently provoke episodes of moral panic about the explicit content in rap music: the place and treatment of women in hip-hop, use of the words nigger and nigga, and representations of gangsterism and criminality. Hip-hop culture was routinely criticized for sexist and antisocial themes and refrains. Despite the conflict and discursive multiplicity of commercial hip-hop, many of the most prominent gender discourses were quite troubling. The moral panic surrounding the n-word has a great deal to do with its power as a performative device that brings racial identity, authenticity, and racial inequality and racism into public focus. When discussing the link between hip-hop and criminal justice, respondents of all races foreground racial discrimination and inequality, and indicated that hip-hop is viewed as a racialized culture by criminal justice authorities and other public policemen of morality.Less

Nigger and Home

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

in Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War

Chapter 1 is an etymology of the word nigger. Colored travelers described the word and the ideology it represented as a constantly looming threat. White children chased free people of color down the ... More

Chapter 1 is an etymology of the word nigger. Colored travelers described the word and the ideology it represented as a constantly looming threat. White children chased free people of color down the street shouting the word. White satirists and performers repeated it in literary and theatrical blackface productions that often depicted black caricatures as being dangerous precisely because they freely traversed the nation. In the nominally free states, nigger threatened brutal reprisals and thus shaped the black experience of mobility. This chapter argues that the source of the word’s virulence resided in the fact that African Americans in antebellum America had long used the word nigger to describe themselves and others. Black laborers adopted the word into their own vocabularies to subvert white authority. Whites therefore very much understood the word as part of the black lexicon. In turn, they ventriloquized nigger to mock black speech, black mobility, and, ultimately, black freedom. Considering nigger not solely as a white antiblack epithet but also as a word rooted in African American cultural and protest traditions goes a long way toward solving the perennial American racial conundrum of why black people can say nigger and white people should not.Less

Applications

Kevin W. Saunders

in Degradation: What the History of Obscenity Tells Us about Hate Speech

This chapter discusses a number of applications of the obscenity-based test aimed at determining whether an expression constitutes hate speech. It presents examples that focus on the sort of speech ... More

This chapter discusses a number of applications of the obscenity-based test aimed at determining whether an expression constitutes hate speech. It presents examples that focus on the sort of speech that degrades a population to less than fully human status, the same sort of degradation that some people have seen in pornography's degradation of humanity as a whole to an animal level. These examples include the case of Keith Dambrot, the head basketball coach at Central Michigan University during the 1992–1993 season; the correspondence between Carl Van Vechten and Langston Hughes in which the former, a white man, wrote of “niggers”; and the use of the word “nigger” by characters in several of Quentin Tarantino's films. This chapter also examines hate speech based on gender and sexual orientation.Less

8 Applications

Kevin W. Saunders

in Degradation: What the History of Obscenity Tells Us about Hate Speech

This chapter discusses a number of applications of the obscenity-based test aimed at determining whether an expression constitutes hate speech. It presents examples that focus on the sort of speech ... More

This chapter discusses a number of applications of the obscenity-based test aimed at determining whether an expression constitutes hate speech. It presents examples that focus on the sort of speech that degrades a population to less than fully human status, the same sort of degradation that some people have seen in pornography's degradation of humanity as a whole to an animal level. These examples include the case of Keith Dambrot, the head basketball coach at Central Michigan University during the 1992–1993 season; the correspondence between Carl Van Vechten and Langston Hughes in which the former, a white man, wrote of “niggers”; and the use of the word “nigger” by characters in several of Quentin Tarantino's films. This chapter also examines hate speech based on gender and sexual orientation. Less

Dreamers of the Ghetto

Jonathan Rose

in Readers' Liberation: The Literary Agenda

This chapter does not pretend to offer a complete history of the African-American common reader. It only sketches in a few outlines of a much bigger story. But when that history is written, it will ... More

This chapter does not pretend to offer a complete history of the African-American common reader. It only sketches in a few outlines of a much bigger story. But when that history is written, it will inevitably have to confront this painful contradiction. The woman who did more than any contemporary American to promote reading was raised by a mother who hated books. For an explanation, we might begin by looking to Frederick Douglass’s classic autobiography. Once he realized that most slave-owners feared black literacy, “I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom,” and determined, “at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.” He developed strategies to acquire literacy surreptitiously, offering bread to poor white boys in return for reading lessons. And in The Columbian Orator, an anthology of great speeches, he found inspirational literature that spoke directly to his condition, in particular Sheridan’s philippics for Catholic emancipation. However, later he fell into the hands of a more brutal master, who completely (but temporarily) broke his desire to read: “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!” In another slave narrative, Leonard Black testified that when he bought something to read, his master “made me sick of books by beating me like a dog . . . He whipped me so very severely that he overcame my thirst for knowledge, and I relinquished its pursuit,” at least until he escaped from bondage. So there were two possible and polar opposite responses to the terror campaign against black readers. One was to acquire literacy at all costs and by any means necessary. “I do begrudge your education,” admitted a black steamboat steward as he served lunch to a white college student. “I would steal your learning if I could.”4 But others internalized the whippings and developed a fear of and aversion to books. These are both legacies of slavery, and they both survived far beyond the slave era. Less