scholarly journals An African School for African Americans: Black Demands for Education in Antebellum Boston

2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 478-502
Author(s):  
ShaVonte’ Mills

AbstractThis article examines Black parents’ efforts to establish and secure quality education for their children in antebellum Boston, Massachusetts. It situates the African School, a Black-owned cultural institution, within Black nationalist politics and reveals how the schoolhouse became a site of political tension between Black Bostonians and the Boston School Committee. Analyzing petitions, school records, and newspapers, this essay finds that the African School cultivated Black citizenship ideologies that prioritized political activism. This study invites new understandings of the political intersections of education and citizenship, and it illuminates the utility of Black nationalism in antebellum Boston.

Author(s):  
Keisha N. Blain

This essay examines the political activities of Mittie Maude Lena Gordon (1889-1961) in Depression-era Chicago. A former member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Gordon established her own organization, the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME), in 1932. While her decision to form the PME was largely driven by her interest in West African emigration, she also believed that the plight of African Americans was similar to other nonwhites globally and envisioned her organization as a vehicle to unite members of the “dark races.” Building on Garveyism while implementing new strategies of her own, she used her organization as a site for collaboration and exchange with individuals from various parts of the globe. Her activities illuminate the entangled histories of twentieth-century Black nationalism and internationalism.


Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Natalie Kouri-Towe

In 2015, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Toronto (QuAIA Toronto) announced that it was retiring. This article examines the challenges of queer solidarity through a reflection on the dynamics between desire, attachment and adaptation in political activism. Tracing the origins and sites of contestation over QuAIA Toronto's participation in the Toronto Pride parade, I ask: what does it mean for a group to fashion its own end? Throughout, I interrogate how gestures of solidarity risk reinforcing the very systems that activists desire to resist. I begin by situating contemporary queer activism in the ideological and temporal frameworks of neoliberalism and homonationalism. Next, I turn to the attempts to ban QuAIA Toronto and the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ from the Pride parade to examine the relationship between nationalism and sexual citizenship. Lastly, I examine how the terms of sexual rights discourse require visible sexual subjects to make individual rights claims, and weighing this risk against political strategy, I highlight how queer solidarities are caught in a paradox symptomatic of our times: neoliberalism has commodified human rights discourses and instrumentalised sexualities to serve the interests of hegemonic power and obfuscate state violence. Thinking through the strategies that worked and failed in QuAIA Toronto's seven years of organising, I frame the paper though a proposal to consider political death as a productive possibility for social movement survival in the 21stcentury.


Author(s):  
Patricia Hill Collins

For youth who are Black, Indigenous, female, or poor, coming of age within societies characterized by social inequalities presents special challenges. Yet despite the significance of being young within socially unjust settings, age as a category of analysis remains undertheorized within studies of political activism. This essay therefore draws upon intersectionality and generational analyses as two useful and underutilized approaches for analyzing the political agency of Black youth in the United States with implications for Black youth more globally. Intersectional analyses of race, class, gender, and sexuality as systems of power help explain how and why intersecting oppressions fall more heavily on young people who are multiply disadvantaged within these systems of power. Generational analysis suggests that people who share similar experiences when they are young, especially if such experiences have a direct impact on their lives, develop a generational sensibility that may shape their political consciousness and behavior. Together, intersectionality and generational analyses lay a foundation for examining youth activism as essential to understanding how young people resist intersecting oppressions of racism, heteropatriarchy, class exploitation, and colonialism.


2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaia Delpino

AbstractThis essay analyzes the political dynamics involved in the construction of belonging in the case of African Americans’ “return” from the diaspora generated by the Atlantic slave trade to a town in Southern Ghana. Given the articulated belief of common ancestral origins, such arrival was initially welcomed by all the three groups of actors involved: thereturnees, the local authorities, divided by a chieftaincy dispute, and the Ghanaian government that was supporting homecoming policies. The concepts of origins and kinship and the way to validate them, though, were differently conceived by the various political actors; furthermore each of them held dissimilar reasons and had different expectations behind this return. All these differences created a mutual, mutable and dynamic relation between the actors who were involved in the arrival and aimed to assert their authority.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-311
Author(s):  
T. E. C.

The beginning of all growth studies in this country occurred less than a century ago when the Boston School Committee approved the following order permitting Henry Pickering Bowditch, Professor of Physiology at the Harvard Medical School, to measure and weigh children in the Boston public schools. This document is one of the great, and I believe little known, landmarks in modern pediatrics.1 In School Committee, March 9, 1875 Ordered, That permission be given to Prof. Henry P. Bowditch, of Harvard University, to ascertain the height and weight of the pupils attending the public school, through such an arrangement as the respective chairman and the headmaster, or masters, may deem most convenient.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faye Ginsburg ◽  

Abstract This article covers a wide range of projects from the earliest epistemological challenges posed by video experiments in remote Central Australia in the 1980s to the emergence of indigenous filmmaking as an intervention into both the Australian national imaginary and the idea of world cinema. It also addresses the political activism that led to the creation of four national indigenous television stations in the early 21st century: Aboriginal People's Television Network in Canada; National Indigenous Television in Australia; Maori TV in New Zealand; and Taiwan Indigenous Television in Taiwan); and considers what the digital age might mean for indigenous people worldwide employing great technological as well as political creativity.


Author(s):  
R. K. Napolitano ◽  
I. P. Douglas ◽  
M. E. Garlock ◽  
B. Glisic

Innovative technologies have enabled new opportunities for collecting, analyzing, and sharing information about cultural heritage sites. Through a combination of two of these technologies, spherical imaging and virtual tour environment, we preliminarily documented one of Cuba’s National Schools of Art, the National Ballet School.The Ballet School is one of the five National Art Schools built in Havana, Cuba after the revolution. Due to changes in the political climate, construction was halted on the schools before completion. The Ballet School in particular was partially completed but never used for the intended purpose. Over the years, the surrounding vegetation and environment have started to overtake the buildings; damages such as missing bricks, corroded rebar, and broken tie bars can be seen. We created a virtual tour through the Ballet School which highlights key satellite classrooms and the main domed performance spaces. Scenes of the virtual tour were captured utilizing the Ricoh Theta S spherical imaging camera and processed with Kolor Panotour virtual environment software. Different forms of data can be included in this environment in order to provide a user with pertinent information. Image galleries, hyperlinks to websites, videos, PDFs, and links to databases can be embedded within the scene and interacted with by a user. By including this information within the virtual tour, a user can better understand how the site was constructed as well as the existing types of damage. The results of this work are recommendations for how a site can be preliminarily documented and information can be initially organized and shared.


1969 ◽  
pp. 465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Asch

In this article, the author examines the need for constitutional recognition and protection of the political collective rights of minority groups in Canada, particularly those of Aboriginal nations. The author asserts that Canada's present constitutional approach to minority collective rights is one of "indirect consociation," an approach which embraces the ideology of "universalism" and does not expressly recognize or protect minority ethnonational communities. This is ineffective as it generates political instability. He examines both Canadian constitutional thinking as well as the thoughts of Aboriginal nations on the right to self-government and discusses the conflicting theories behind each position. Finally, the author suggests that the solution to resolving this conflict between minority and majority political rights is for Canada to adopt a "direct consociation" approach. This approach would recognize expressly and protect the political rights of Aboriginal nations and other minorities, based on the concept of equality, as opposed to continuing colonialist or assimilationist approaches which only serve to heighten inequality and political tension.


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