Disrupting the Dream: Teaching Civil Rights History at a Twenty-First Century Community College

Author(s):  
Debra L. Schultz
2021 ◽  

The book is devoted to the works of James Baldwin, one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. The authors examine his most important contributions – including novels, essays, short stories, poetry, and media appearances – in the wider context of American history. They demonstrate the lasting importance of his oeuvre, which was central to the Civil Rights Movement and continues to be relevant at the dawn of the twenty-first century and the Black Lives Matter era.


Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone

This book analyzes twenty-first century African American fiction through the proliferation of post categories that arose in the new millennium. These post categories—post-black, post-racialism, post-Soul—articulate a shift away from the racial aesthetics associated with the Black Arts Movement and argue for the individual agency of Black artists over the meaning of racial identity in their work. Analyzing key works by Colson Whitehead, Alice Randall, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paul Beatty, Jesmyn Ward, and Kiese Laymon, this book argues that twenty-first century African American fiction highlights the push and pull between claims of post-civil rights progress and the recognition of the entrenchment of structural racism. The book contextualizes this shift through the rise of, and presidency of, Barack Obama and the revision of Du Boisian double consciousness. It examines Obama through an analysis of the discourse surrounding his rise, Obama’s own writings, and his appearance as a character. The book concludes that while the claims of progress associated with Barack Obama’s presidency and the post era categories to which it was connected were overly optimistic, they represent a major shift towards an individualistic conception of racial identity that continues to resist claims of responsibility imposed on Black artists.


2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 192-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Pac

AbstractIn this article, I examine the English-only movement in the United States and other countries in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Elaborating on research on the hegemony of English, this examination demonstrates English-only ideology, both linguistic and visual, as a primary means of restricting language and ethnic minorities’ access not only in the US, but also globally. First, I will present English as a social construction of the Anglo-Saxon elites in the process of the subordination of other language groups throughout American history up to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Second, I will briefly introduce the legislation of the Civil Rights Movement to show that language access increased the political presence of language minorities. Third, I will discuss the reemergence of the English-only movement appealing to nationalist sentiments in order to diminish language and ethnic minorities’ rising political presence in the US in the twenty-first century. Fourth, I will examine the spread of English-only ideology within the context of global capitalism, led by the US, in order to show forced compliance to the superiority of English by various diverse social groups on the global level.


Norteamérica ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (Número Especial) ◽  
pp. 119-139
Author(s):  
David A. Badillo ◽  

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