Nicole A. Waligora-Davis
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195369915
- eISBN:
- 9780199893379
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195369915.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
“Graphic Inscriptions of Power,” examines the Chicago race riot of 1919 within larger histories of American foreign policy, specifically the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). Tracing the shared ...
More
“Graphic Inscriptions of Power,” examines the Chicago race riot of 1919 within larger histories of American foreign policy, specifically the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). Tracing the shared condition of blacks in and beyond the United States, this chapter reveals how the U.S. imagined Chicago as its heartland and while including Haiti within the outermost limits of its geographical claims. Placed in the context of WWI and its aftermath, both the violence that ensued and state and popular responses to the riot, illustrate how the war psychology present during the first world war transformed an American city into an urban battlefield, and reimagined black Chicago residents as enemies, foreigners, refugees, and slaves. The anti-immigrant sentiment mapped onto black Chicagoans mirrored federal legislation restricting naturalization and immigration along racial and ethnic lines. This recalibration of blacks into “foreigners in a domestic sense,” into a community legally identified as citizens but politically and socially disenfranchised, significantly occurred amidst the first U.S. occupation of Haiti. The racial ideologies and tensions altering the sociopolitical landscape of the island were but an extension of a rampant nativism and white supremacism actively curbing the life possibilities of black AmericansLess
“Graphic Inscriptions of Power,” examines the Chicago race riot of 1919 within larger histories of American foreign policy, specifically the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). Tracing the shared condition of blacks in and beyond the United States, this chapter reveals how the U.S. imagined Chicago as its heartland and while including Haiti within the outermost limits of its geographical claims. Placed in the context of WWI and its aftermath, both the violence that ensued and state and popular responses to the riot, illustrate how the war psychology present during the first world war transformed an American city into an urban battlefield, and reimagined black Chicago residents as enemies, foreigners, refugees, and slaves. The anti-immigrant sentiment mapped onto black Chicagoans mirrored federal legislation restricting naturalization and immigration along racial and ethnic lines. This recalibration of blacks into “foreigners in a domestic sense,” into a community legally identified as citizens but politically and socially disenfranchised, significantly occurred amidst the first U.S. occupation of Haiti. The racial ideologies and tensions altering the sociopolitical landscape of the island were but an extension of a rampant nativism and white supremacism actively curbing the life possibilities of black Americans
Madhu Dubey
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226167268
- eISBN:
- 9780226167282
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226167282.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This chapter spells out what exactly it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African–American studies. Selectively examining key texts from various disciplines, it sketches the lineaments of a ...
More
This chapter spells out what exactly it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African–American studies. Selectively examining key texts from various disciplines, it sketches the lineaments of a widely registered crisis in the idea of black community and specifies the problems of racial representation sparked by this crisis. To distinguish postmodern from modern projects of racial representation, it looks closely at exemplary efforts to forge new forms of community suited to the changed realities of the post-Civil Rights period. These entail a shift from uplift to populist and from print to vernacular paradigms of black intellectual work. It is argued that even as they stress their critical distance from previous models of black community, postmodern cultural critics find it difficult to legitimize their own claims to racial representation without reanimating the cultural politics of 1960s black nationalism. In the domain of print literature, antirealism and textual self-reflection are generally identified as the unique elements of postmodern black fiction and said to disable essentialist constructs of black culture and community. Such assumptions are disputed through a comparative analysis of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and John Edgar Wideman's Reuben. In their common effort to incarnate the black urban writer in the image of Thoth, Egyptian god of writing, these novels explicitly engage the difficulties of resolving postmodern problems of racial representation through the medium of print literature.Less
This chapter spells out what exactly it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African–American studies. Selectively examining key texts from various disciplines, it sketches the lineaments of a widely registered crisis in the idea of black community and specifies the problems of racial representation sparked by this crisis. To distinguish postmodern from modern projects of racial representation, it looks closely at exemplary efforts to forge new forms of community suited to the changed realities of the post-Civil Rights period. These entail a shift from uplift to populist and from print to vernacular paradigms of black intellectual work. It is argued that even as they stress their critical distance from previous models of black community, postmodern cultural critics find it difficult to legitimize their own claims to racial representation without reanimating the cultural politics of 1960s black nationalism. In the domain of print literature, antirealism and textual self-reflection are generally identified as the unique elements of postmodern black fiction and said to disable essentialist constructs of black culture and community. Such assumptions are disputed through a comparative analysis of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and John Edgar Wideman's Reuben. In their common effort to incarnate the black urban writer in the image of Thoth, Egyptian god of writing, these novels explicitly engage the difficulties of resolving postmodern problems of racial representation through the medium of print literature.
Ronald Williams
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036453
- eISBN:
- 9780252093487
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036453.003.0013
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
This chapter raises the question of how Barack Obama, an African American, was able to achieve the support of American whites, enough to win not only his party's nomination, but also ultimately the ...
More
This chapter raises the question of how Barack Obama, an African American, was able to achieve the support of American whites, enough to win not only his party's nomination, but also ultimately the presidential election by a landslide. It argues that Obama's success in American politics is rooted primarily in his “acceptability” as an African American racial representative in the eyes of American whites. By acceptable to American whites, the point here is that Obama was able to achieve his status as racial representative primarily because of categorical rejection, exclusion, and repression of black leaders with agendas that were understood to be in any way radical or as posing a threat to the existing racial arrangement. Obama was the modern-day representative Negro in that he represented black people most eloquently and elegantly, and because he was the race's great opportunity to re-present itself in the court of racist public opinion.Less
This chapter raises the question of how Barack Obama, an African American, was able to achieve the support of American whites, enough to win not only his party's nomination, but also ultimately the presidential election by a landslide. It argues that Obama's success in American politics is rooted primarily in his “acceptability” as an African American racial representative in the eyes of American whites. By acceptable to American whites, the point here is that Obama was able to achieve his status as racial representative primarily because of categorical rejection, exclusion, and repression of black leaders with agendas that were understood to be in any way radical or as posing a threat to the existing racial arrangement. Obama was the modern-day representative Negro in that he represented black people most eloquently and elegantly, and because he was the race's great opportunity to re-present itself in the court of racist public opinion.
Black Hawk Hancock
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226043074
- eISBN:
- 9780226043241
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226043241.003.0009
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
This chapter reflects on the limitations of cultural appropriation as a viable way to come to a sociological explanation for cross-cultural engagement. It offers some possible alternative ...
More
This chapter reflects on the limitations of cultural appropriation as a viable way to come to a sociological explanation for cross-cultural engagement. It offers some possible alternative orientations that could potentially open up common ground and hybrid space for new possibilities of racial engagement, interaction, and connection that emerge through “positive” racial representations. This is not just an avenue of analysis for the Lindy Hop, but a model for exploring racial interactions at their localized level of engagement beyond the realm of dance, in all spheres of cultural-racial intersections.Less
This chapter reflects on the limitations of cultural appropriation as a viable way to come to a sociological explanation for cross-cultural engagement. It offers some possible alternative orientations that could potentially open up common ground and hybrid space for new possibilities of racial engagement, interaction, and connection that emerge through “positive” racial representations. This is not just an avenue of analysis for the Lindy Hop, but a model for exploring racial interactions at their localized level of engagement beyond the realm of dance, in all spheres of cultural-racial intersections.
Madhu Dubey
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226167268
- eISBN:
- 9780226167282
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226167282.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to offer a historicized account of why problems of racial representation take the specific forms they do in African–American fiction ...
More
This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to offer a historicized account of why problems of racial representation take the specific forms they do in African–American fiction since the 1970s, why these problems are magnetized around issues of urban community, and why tropes of the book have become a chosen literary vehicle for exploring these problems. It draws on a wide range of materials from urban geography, history, sociology, political science, literary and cultural criticism, and media and technology studies to substantiate the claim, central to this book, that problems of racial representation are taking exacerbated forms in the postmodern era. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less
This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to offer a historicized account of why problems of racial representation take the specific forms they do in African–American fiction since the 1970s, why these problems are magnetized around issues of urban community, and why tropes of the book have become a chosen literary vehicle for exploring these problems. It draws on a wide range of materials from urban geography, history, sociology, political science, literary and cultural criticism, and media and technology studies to substantiate the claim, central to this book, that problems of racial representation are taking exacerbated forms in the postmodern era. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Jacob Agner
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496814531
- eISBN:
- 9781496814579
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496814531.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This essay discusses how Welty’s 1941 short story “Powerhouse” can be taught in a literary survey as a case study on how a white writer self-consciously engages legacies of racial representation in ...
More
This essay discusses how Welty’s 1941 short story “Powerhouse” can be taught in a literary survey as a case study on how a white writer self-consciously engages legacies of racial representation in American literature and culture. Based on Toni Morrison’s statement that Eudora Welty wrote “about black people in a way that few white men have ever been able to write,” this essay positions “Powerhouse” in an American literature survey as a story that casts light on the history and political challenges of racial representation, particularly the representation of African Americans. Eudora Welty can be seen as a white writer aware of styles of literary representation laid forth by legacies as different as blackface minstrelsy and the Harlem Renaissance.Less
This essay discusses how Welty’s 1941 short story “Powerhouse” can be taught in a literary survey as a case study on how a white writer self-consciously engages legacies of racial representation in American literature and culture. Based on Toni Morrison’s statement that Eudora Welty wrote “about black people in a way that few white men have ever been able to write,” this essay positions “Powerhouse” in an American literature survey as a story that casts light on the history and political challenges of racial representation, particularly the representation of African Americans. Eudora Welty can be seen as a white writer aware of styles of literary representation laid forth by legacies as different as blackface minstrelsy and the Harlem Renaissance.
Shirley Moody-Turner
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617038853
- eISBN:
- 9781621039785
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617038853.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
Before the innovative and groundbreaking work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, the Hampton ...
More
Before the innovative and groundbreaking work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, the Hampton folklorists worked within, but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream institutions, often calling into question the meaning of the very folklore projects in which they were engaged. This book brings together these folklorists, along with a disparate group of African American authors and scholars, including Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Anna Julia Cooper, to explore how black authors and folklorists were active participants--rather than passive observers--in conversations about the politics of representing black folklore. Examining literary texts, folklore documents, cultural performances, legal discourse, and political rhetoric, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation demonstrates how folklore studies became a battle ground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century. The book is framed by two questions of historical and continuing import, namely, what role have representations of black folklore played in constructing notions of racial identity that remain entrenched up to and through present day, and how have those ideas impacted the way African Americans think about and creatively engage with black cultural traditions. This study offers a new context for re-thinking the relationship between African American Literature, African American folklore, race, and the politics of representation.Less
Before the innovative and groundbreaking work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, the Hampton folklorists worked within, but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream institutions, often calling into question the meaning of the very folklore projects in which they were engaged. This book brings together these folklorists, along with a disparate group of African American authors and scholars, including Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Anna Julia Cooper, to explore how black authors and folklorists were active participants--rather than passive observers--in conversations about the politics of representing black folklore. Examining literary texts, folklore documents, cultural performances, legal discourse, and political rhetoric, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation demonstrates how folklore studies became a battle ground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century. The book is framed by two questions of historical and continuing import, namely, what role have representations of black folklore played in constructing notions of racial identity that remain entrenched up to and through present day, and how have those ideas impacted the way African Americans think about and creatively engage with black cultural traditions. This study offers a new context for re-thinking the relationship between African American Literature, African American folklore, race, and the politics of representation.
Heather Schoenfeld
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226520964
- eISBN:
- 9780226521152
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226521152.003.0005
- Subject:
- Law, Criminal Law and Criminology
This chapter argues that the early 1990s were a turning point in the development of the carceral state. It demonstrates that lawmakers in Florida could have decided not to build more prisons. ...
More
This chapter argues that the early 1990s were a turning point in the development of the carceral state. It demonstrates that lawmakers in Florida could have decided not to build more prisons. However, their earlier choices to build prisons and release offenders before the expiration of their sentences created a political opportunity for law enforcement organizations. Law enforcement argued, largely through the news media, that the state was protecting criminals’ rights at the expense of crime victims’ right to more prison space for criminal offenders. In an increasingly competitive partisan environment, the attention to the problem of “early release” caused legislators from both political parties to support longer prison terms and more prisons. In addition, the chapter argues that Democratic lawmakers’ resolve to oppose prisons was weakened by national Democrats’ move away from traditional liberal solutions to crime and by black leaders’ embrace of racial representation and racial uplift as means to address the unfinished legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.Less
This chapter argues that the early 1990s were a turning point in the development of the carceral state. It demonstrates that lawmakers in Florida could have decided not to build more prisons. However, their earlier choices to build prisons and release offenders before the expiration of their sentences created a political opportunity for law enforcement organizations. Law enforcement argued, largely through the news media, that the state was protecting criminals’ rights at the expense of crime victims’ right to more prison space for criminal offenders. In an increasingly competitive partisan environment, the attention to the problem of “early release” caused legislators from both political parties to support longer prison terms and more prisons. In addition, the chapter argues that Democratic lawmakers’ resolve to oppose prisons was weakened by national Democrats’ move away from traditional liberal solutions to crime and by black leaders’ embrace of racial representation and racial uplift as means to address the unfinished legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.
Nicole A. Waligora-Davis
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195369915
- eISBN:
- 9780199893379
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195369915.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This book examines the anomalous legal status of black Americans and its influence on the formation of American citizenship, the relationship of U.S. to other states, and the ...
More
This book examines the anomalous legal status of black Americans and its influence on the formation of American citizenship, the relationship of U.S. to other states, and the government’s conceptualization of its imperial reach and power. The coordinated relationship between U.S. international and domestic interventions helped produce an alienated black American community whose status resembles refugees and stateless persons. This book underscores the substantive legal, social, and political consequences of the state’s persistent misrepresentation of black citizens as aliens and refugees. Attending to the convergences among refugees, stateless persons, and African Americans, This book exposes the aggressive legal and political dislocations historically confronting black Americans in a new manner, and reveals how the anomalous status of black Americans impacted U.S. empire expansion and black civil rights. Fixed on forms of legal, political and social desubjectivation, dispossession, and violence that collectively transfigure black life and warrant the call for safety, this book illustrates how sanctuary remains perpetually deferred, tragically unsustainable, or simply untenable precisely because blacks continue to occupy something akin to Gerald Neuman’s “anomalous legal zone,” where law is suspended and a new juridical order is effectively produced.Less
This book examines the anomalous legal status of black Americans and its influence on the formation of American citizenship, the relationship of U.S. to other states, and the government’s conceptualization of its imperial reach and power. The coordinated relationship between U.S. international and domestic interventions helped produce an alienated black American community whose status resembles refugees and stateless persons. This book underscores the substantive legal, social, and political consequences of the state’s persistent misrepresentation of black citizens as aliens and refugees. Attending to the convergences among refugees, stateless persons, and African Americans, This book exposes the aggressive legal and political dislocations historically confronting black Americans in a new manner, and reveals how the anomalous status of black Americans impacted U.S. empire expansion and black civil rights. Fixed on forms of legal, political and social desubjectivation, dispossession, and violence that collectively transfigure black life and warrant the call for safety, this book illustrates how sanctuary remains perpetually deferred, tragically unsustainable, or simply untenable precisely because blacks continue to occupy something akin to Gerald Neuman’s “anomalous legal zone,” where law is suspended and a new juridical order is effectively produced.
Christine Kim
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252040139
- eISBN:
- 9780252098338
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040139.003.0003
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
This chapter looks at controversial online and print journalistic texts that launched heated debates about the cultural politics of racial representation in postsecondary institutions in Canada and ...
More
This chapter looks at controversial online and print journalistic texts that launched heated debates about the cultural politics of racial representation in postsecondary institutions in Canada and the United States. It studies the nature of the publics produced by Stephanie Findlay and Nicholas Kohler's “Too Asian?” article (2010) and Alexandra Wallace's “Asians in the Library” YouTube video (2011). By reading the influx of Asian students akin to an invasion of postsecondary institutions, Findlay, Kohler, and Wallace rework the language of Yellow Peril and other kinds of Orientalist imagery within Canadian and American contexts. The circulation of these shared Orientalist representations throughout Canada and the United States illustrates the transnational nature of dominant social imaginations bound together by common anxieties about the Asian despite the significant differences in the national histories of higher education in Canada and the United States.Less
This chapter looks at controversial online and print journalistic texts that launched heated debates about the cultural politics of racial representation in postsecondary institutions in Canada and the United States. It studies the nature of the publics produced by Stephanie Findlay and Nicholas Kohler's “Too Asian?” article (2010) and Alexandra Wallace's “Asians in the Library” YouTube video (2011). By reading the influx of Asian students akin to an invasion of postsecondary institutions, Findlay, Kohler, and Wallace rework the language of Yellow Peril and other kinds of Orientalist imagery within Canadian and American contexts. The circulation of these shared Orientalist representations throughout Canada and the United States illustrates the transnational nature of dominant social imaginations bound together by common anxieties about the Asian despite the significant differences in the national histories of higher education in Canada and the United States.
Shirley Moody-Turner
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617038853
- eISBN:
- 9781621039785
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617038853.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
Chapter four argues that Paul Laurence Dunbar, like the Hampton folklorists, had to negotiate the politics of being objectified as a representative embodiment of the African American folklore and/or ...
More
Chapter four argues that Paul Laurence Dunbar, like the Hampton folklorists, had to negotiate the politics of being objectified as a representative embodiment of the African American folklore and/or folk communities he chose to represent. In his literary works, masking and dissimilation become his vehicles for exposing the many intertwined literary and cultural conventions that determined the range of black racial representation. In his 1902 novel, The Sport of the Gods, he critiques the idealized notions of folklore through the text’s depiction of tensions within the Southern folk community. He further challenges the construction of folklore as a Southern, rural phenomenon by introducing a new geographic terrain--the urban North--in which to imagine black folklore, thereby introducing into African American literature alternative geographies for locating African American folklore.Less
Chapter four argues that Paul Laurence Dunbar, like the Hampton folklorists, had to negotiate the politics of being objectified as a representative embodiment of the African American folklore and/or folk communities he chose to represent. In his literary works, masking and dissimilation become his vehicles for exposing the many intertwined literary and cultural conventions that determined the range of black racial representation. In his 1902 novel, The Sport of the Gods, he critiques the idealized notions of folklore through the text’s depiction of tensions within the Southern folk community. He further challenges the construction of folklore as a Southern, rural phenomenon by introducing a new geographic terrain--the urban North--in which to imagine black folklore, thereby introducing into African American literature alternative geographies for locating African American folklore.
Darby English
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226131054
- eISBN:
- 9780226274737
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226274737.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This book explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of United States cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in ...
More
This book explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of United States cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, a racially integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto. The book looks at many black artists' desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their efforts—and those of their advocates—to further that aim through public exhibition. Amid calls to define a “black aesthetic,” these experiments with modernist art prioritized cultural interaction and instability. Contemporary Black Artists in America highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while The DeLuxe Show positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight. The importance of these experiments, the book argues, came partly from color's special status as a cultural symbol and partly from investigations of color already under way in late modern art and criticism. With their supporters, black modernists—among them Peter Bradley, Frederick Eversley, Alvin Loving, Raymond Saunders, and Alma Thomas—rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for interracial collaboration and, above all, responding with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture's preoccupation with color.Less
This book explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of United States cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, a racially integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto. The book looks at many black artists' desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their efforts—and those of their advocates—to further that aim through public exhibition. Amid calls to define a “black aesthetic,” these experiments with modernist art prioritized cultural interaction and instability. Contemporary Black Artists in America highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while The DeLuxe Show positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight. The importance of these experiments, the book argues, came partly from color's special status as a cultural symbol and partly from investigations of color already under way in late modern art and criticism. With their supporters, black modernists—among them Peter Bradley, Frederick Eversley, Alvin Loving, Raymond Saunders, and Alma Thomas—rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for interracial collaboration and, above all, responding with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture's preoccupation with color.
Charles Hiroshi Garrett
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520254862
- eISBN:
- 9780520942820
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520254862.003.0006
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
This chapter reviews the project of musical nation building and racial representation during the early twentieth century, centering on the craze for the Hawaiian and Hawaiian-themed music that ...
More
This chapter reviews the project of musical nation building and racial representation during the early twentieth century, centering on the craze for the Hawaiian and Hawaiian-themed music that arrived in the United States during the 1910s and 1920s. It also notes that the multifaceted relationship between the Hawaiian Islands and the mainland shows how the varying processes of cultural collision, cooptation, and crossover play out in musical culture.Less
This chapter reviews the project of musical nation building and racial representation during the early twentieth century, centering on the craze for the Hawaiian and Hawaiian-themed music that arrived in the United States during the 1910s and 1920s. It also notes that the multifaceted relationship between the Hawaiian Islands and the mainland shows how the varying processes of cultural collision, cooptation, and crossover play out in musical culture.
Stephanie Li
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- December 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199398881
- eISBN:
- 9780199398904
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199398881.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature, African-American Literature
The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels, that is texts by African American writers focused almost exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth-century ...
More
The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels, that is texts by African American writers focused almost exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth-century black writer published one of these anomalous texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 1950s, these novels have since fallen into obscurity, given the challenges they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American literary canon. Playing in the White aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about the nature of African American literature and the unique expectations imposed on black texts. In a series of nuanced readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies. Novels like Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee and Wright’s Savage Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America’s abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this particular racial representation is freighted with social power and narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans. Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in the White also provides important historical context to understand how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly integrated nation.Less
The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels, that is texts by African American writers focused almost exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth-century black writer published one of these anomalous texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 1950s, these novels have since fallen into obscurity, given the challenges they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American literary canon. Playing in the White aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about the nature of African American literature and the unique expectations imposed on black texts. In a series of nuanced readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies. Novels like Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee and Wright’s Savage Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America’s abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this particular racial representation is freighted with social power and narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans. Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in the White also provides important historical context to understand how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly integrated nation.
Jonathan O. Wipplinger
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036781
- eISBN:
- 9780252093890
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036781.003.0012
- Subject:
- Music, Opera
This chapter examines the role of race and racial representation in Ernst Krenek's 1927 opera Jonny spielt auf (“Jonny Strikes Up”) in order to determine whether it can be considered a work that is ...
More
This chapter examines the role of race and racial representation in Ernst Krenek's 1927 opera Jonny spielt auf (“Jonny Strikes Up”) in order to determine whether it can be considered a work that is deeply concerned with jazz, African Americans, and their image within European culture. Jonny spielt auf is a combination of European modernism, American popular music, and what Krenek took to be jazz. However, Krenek resisted the notion that his was a “jazz opera,” a term often applied to the opera during the Weimar Republic. This chapter explores how Jonny's musical, cultural, and racial identities are constructed in the opera by focusing on race and racial stereotypes embedded within the score and libretto. It shows how contradictory and competing ideas about African Americans and their music converge in Jonny spielt auf. It also highlights multiple strands of Jonny's identity, between blackface and blackness, that it argues are never entirely reconciled in the opera.Less
This chapter examines the role of race and racial representation in Ernst Krenek's 1927 opera Jonny spielt auf (“Jonny Strikes Up”) in order to determine whether it can be considered a work that is deeply concerned with jazz, African Americans, and their image within European culture. Jonny spielt auf is a combination of European modernism, American popular music, and what Krenek took to be jazz. However, Krenek resisted the notion that his was a “jazz opera,” a term often applied to the opera during the Weimar Republic. This chapter explores how Jonny's musical, cultural, and racial identities are constructed in the opera by focusing on race and racial stereotypes embedded within the score and libretto. It shows how contradictory and competing ideas about African Americans and their music converge in Jonny spielt auf. It also highlights multiple strands of Jonny's identity, between blackface and blackness, that it argues are never entirely reconciled in the opera.
Donna L. Franklin and Angela D. James
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199374878
- eISBN:
- 9780190254186
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199374878.003.0009
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity, Marriage and the Family
Chapter 8 details the retreat from the civil right movement era of political and social advances for African Americans and highlights the demographic indicators of the intensification of poverty ...
More
Chapter 8 details the retreat from the civil right movement era of political and social advances for African Americans and highlights the demographic indicators of the intensification of poverty among mother-only families in urban ghettos. Further, this chapter highlights the ongoing rhetorical assaults on black family, as well as specific government assaults on black women’s reproductive liberty. In this way, ideology is linked to the political response to concentrated poverty marked by race, class, and family differences. Specifically, Chapter 8 narrates the manner in which the discourse of “black pathology” and family deviance frames punitive public policies around welfare, as well as violations of black women’s reproductive autonomy.Less
Chapter 8 details the retreat from the civil right movement era of political and social advances for African Americans and highlights the demographic indicators of the intensification of poverty among mother-only families in urban ghettos. Further, this chapter highlights the ongoing rhetorical assaults on black family, as well as specific government assaults on black women’s reproductive liberty. In this way, ideology is linked to the political response to concentrated poverty marked by race, class, and family differences. Specifically, Chapter 8 narrates the manner in which the discourse of “black pathology” and family deviance frames punitive public policies around welfare, as well as violations of black women’s reproductive autonomy.
Donna L. Franklin and Angela D. James
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199374878
- eISBN:
- 9780190254186
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199374878.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity, Marriage and the Family
This chapter assesses arguments about the impact of slavery on the development of a distinctive African American culture. Specifically, historical arguments about the impact of slavery on ...
More
This chapter assesses arguments about the impact of slavery on the development of a distinctive African American culture. Specifically, historical arguments about the impact of slavery on contemporary marriage and family practices are presented and evaluated. Central debates, then, as now, revolve around the degree to which culture as opposed to social conditions determines family behavior. The chapter concludes by pointing out that there was diversity in slave experiences shaping practices, and although the survival of Africanisms is not denied, culture has interacted with ongoing changes in societal institutions.Less
This chapter assesses arguments about the impact of slavery on the development of a distinctive African American culture. Specifically, historical arguments about the impact of slavery on contemporary marriage and family practices are presented and evaluated. Central debates, then, as now, revolve around the degree to which culture as opposed to social conditions determines family behavior. The chapter concludes by pointing out that there was diversity in slave experiences shaping practices, and although the survival of Africanisms is not denied, culture has interacted with ongoing changes in societal institutions.
