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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.

“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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.