The Black Atlantic Metaphysics of Azealia Banks: Brujx Womanism at the Kongo Crossroads

Hypatia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Pérez
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Political Program ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Palo Mayombe ◽  
Discursive Constructions ◽  
Do So

Abstract Controversial Harlem-born rapper/singer, songwriter, and provocateuse Azealia Banks is the most (in)famous, vocal, and visible proponent of Black Atlantic traditions in recent times—making a critical reckoning well overdue. I begin here by tracing Banks's engagement with Afro-Diasporic religions (including Caribbean Espiritismo, Afro-Cuban Lucumí, and Dominican “21 Divisions”) as a trajectory from vamp to bruja [witch]/santera to mayombera. A review of Banks's public statements reveals her growing commitment to championing “so-called voodoo” and urging other African Americans to do so as well. I argue that the release of Beyoncé's Lemonade in 2016 catalyzed Banks's advocacy for Kongo-inspired Palo Mayombe, long overshadowed by Yorùbá-based orisha worship. I further demonstrate that Banks's espousal of Palo Mayombe has been bound up with her identity as a Womanist and dark-skinned, cisgender femme fatale. More than a political program, however, Banks's discursive constructions amount to a Black Atlantic metaphysics. Drawing on Irene Lara's formulation of “bruja positionalities,” I propose that the theoretical scaffolding for her metaphysics should be designated Brujx Womanism. Missteps notwithstanding, Banks emerges as a metaphysician, aspiring to repair Black bodies by re-membering Kongo traditions. In closing, I suggest that Banks's Brujx Womanism may contribute to the conceptualization of Conjure Feminism in four crucial respects.

West of Jim Crow

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn M. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
White Schools ◽  
Black Bodies

This book follows California’s history of segregation from statehood to the beginning of the long civil rights movement, arguing that the state innovated methods to control and contain African Americans and other people of color. While celebrated in popular discourse for its forward-thinking culture, politics, and science, California also pioneered new ways to keep citizenship white. Schools, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, parks, beaches, and pools were places of contestation where the presence of black bodies elicited forceful responses from segregationists. Black Californians employed innovative measures to dismantle segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they borrowed some tactics from race rebels in the South, others they improvised. West of Jim Crow uses California to highlight the significance of African American resistance to racial restrictions in places often deemed marginal to mainstream civil rights histories. Examining segregation in the state sheds light on the primacy of gender and sexuality in the minds of segregationists and the significance of black women, black bodies, and racial science, in the years preceding the modern civil rights struggle. California has much to teach us about the lives of African Americans who crossed the color line and the variety of tactics and strategies employed by freedom fighters across the United States.

scholarly journals De breuk van de 'daensistische' christendemocratie met het katholieke establishment en de 'katholieke' christendemocratie 1893-1914

2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 69-85
Author(s):  
Harry Van Velthoven
Keyword(s):  
Civil Liberty ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Christian Democracy ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
Deze Laatste ◽  
Political Program ◽  
Do So

Tussen 1884 en 1914 kende België homogeen katholieke regeringen. Wat veranderde de democratisering van het stemrecht in 1893 (algemeen meervoudig stemrecht voor mannen) en de invoering van de evenredige vertegenwoordiging in 1899 aan de machtsverhoudingen binnen de katholieke partij? De conservatieve kiesverenigingen werden toen extern met het socialisme en intern met een opstand van de middenklasse geconfronteerd. Katholieke subelites eisten namens een miljoen nieuwe kiezers de decratisering van de lijsten en de erkenning van deelgroepen op een gezamenlijke lijst. Dit vormt de bredere context ter verklaring van het vrij unieke parcours van de daensistische beweging. In welke mate slaagde de katholieke cijnselite erin haar politiek monopolie in de kiesverenigingen veilig te stellen en hoe deed ze dat? Hoe evolueerde de christendemocratie, die nog geen arbeidersbeweging was? Wat werd de aparte positie van de daensistische beweging en welke voorhoederol nam ze in?Parlementair mislukte de christendemocratische doorbraak in Vlaanderen. Zowel externe als interne oorzaken zorgden voor de genese van een ‘daensistische christendemocratie’ en haar ontwikkeling tot een zelfstandige partij, in tegenstelling tot een integrerende ‘katholieke christendemocratie’. Deze laatste zag haar linkerzijde verzwakt en werd een paternalistisch geleide organisatie. De daensistische beweging daarentegen radicaliseerde qua zelfdefiniëring en programmatische toenadering tot de linkerzijde op sociaal en politiek gebied. De kwestie van al dan niet kartelvorming met liberalen en socialisten tijdens verkiezingen zorgde echter voor een langdurige impasse. Naargelang de katholieke meerderheid in het parlement slonk, hoopten de daensisten scheidsrechter te kunnen worden. Tevergeefs. Wel kon de conservatieve regering vanaf 1907 de katholieke christendemocratie niet langer negeren, zodat haar boegfiguren minister werden. Hun opstelling verscherpte de confrontatie met de daensisten. De voorhoederol van die beweging bleek ook op een andere manier. Gezien het gebrek aan toegeeflijkheid bij de conservatieven en het episcopaat zouden zowel katholieke christendemocraten als katholieke flaminganten in het decennium voor 1914 hun burgerlijke vrijheid in politieke kwesties moeten inroepen en steun van de oppositie nodig hebben om een aantal cruciale eisen te forceren.________The Rupture of “Daensist” Christian-Demo-cracy from the Catholic Establishment and “Catholic” Christian Democracy, 1893-1914Between 1884 and 1914, Belgium had homogeneous Catholic governments. How did the democratisation of the suffrage in 1893 (general multiple suffrage for men) and the introduction of proportional representation in 1899 change power relationships within the Catholic Party? Conservative electoral associations were confronted externally with socialism and internally with a revolting middle class. In the name of a million new voters Catholic subelites demanded democratisation of electoral lists and the recognition of subgroups within a common list. This formed the broader context that explains the very unique trajectory of the Daensist Movement. To what extent did the Catholic censitary elite succeed in securing its political monopoly in electoral associations and how did it do so? How did Christian Democracy, which was not yet a workers’ movement, evolve? What were the particular positions of the Daensist Movement, and what role did they play in the vanguard?In Flanders, the Christian Democratic breakthrough failed in parliament. External as well as internal causes saw to the birth of a ‘Daensist Christian Democracy’ and its development toward an independent party, in contrast to the integration of the ‘Catholic Christian Democracy’. The latter saw its left wing weakened, and became a paternalistically-run organization. The Daensist Movement on the other hand radicalized its self-definition and political program towards the left parties. However, forming a coalition with Liberals and Socialists during elections caused a serious, long-lasting impasse. As the Catholic majority in Parliament shrank, the Daensists hoped to hold the balance of power – in vain. However, the conservative government could not, from 1907 onward, neglect Catholic Christian Democracy, so that leading personalities of the movement became ministers. Their accession to these positions and their political attitude sharpened the confrontation with the Daensists. The vanguard role of the Daensist movement appeared in another manner as well. Given the lack of permissiveness on the part of the conservatives as well as the episcopate, Catholic Christian Democrats and Catholic flamingants had to invoke their civil liberty in political questions, and needed support of the opposition in order to force a few crucial demands through.

To Be Black, Excess, and Nonrecyclable

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janine Jones
Keyword(s):  
Waste Management ◽  
Black People ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Management Problem ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Do So ◽  
People Today

One way of understanding the white man’s burden is as a waste management problem. The White West abjected Africans and people of African descent, thereby enacting and enabling their perception and treatment as a form of waste. The value of black waste to white Western economies is discernable in the metaphysics of a white imaginary of black abjection. It is necessary to elucidate that metaphysics, which reveals the structure of a humanist discourse that imagines black bodies as alienated from language, and the degradation entailed by such alienation. For example, when Africana people today chant “Black lives matter,” they do so against the historical perception and treatment of black people as waste.

Crossing the Black Atlantic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Grant
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
South African ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
State Repression ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Black South Africans ◽  
The U.S

This chapter explores how trans-Atlantic travel provided an important avenue through which black activists related to one another’s struggles. It also demonstrates how the U.S. and South African governments worked to regulate and restrict transnational black travel during the early Cold War. Focusing in on the lesser-known transatlantic journeys of Canada Lee, Sidney Poitier, and Z. K. and Frieda Matthews, the chapter argues that these individuals acted as important cultural translators that physically connected the struggle against racism in both countries. Finally, by tracing the international opposition to the removal of Paul Robeson’s passport, the chapter shows how experiences of state repression could be negotiated in ways that further strengthened bonds of solidarity between African Americans and black South Africans.

“Bled in, Letter by Letter”

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-202
Author(s):  
Daniel Y. Kim
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Foreign Student ◽  
Korean American ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Diasporic Identity ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Multidirectional Memory ◽  
Do So

This chapter examines how Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student and Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered negotiate the ethical and political complexities that shape the relationship between Koreans who directly experienced the trauma of war and Korean American authors who have constructed literary memories of that event. These are novels that are engaged in the cultural process that Marianne Hirsch has termed “postmemory.” These works constitute exemplary postmemorial texts that refrain from making the trauma of the war into the essentialist foundation of an ethnonationalist conception of Korean or Korean diasporic identity. These novels do so by highlighting the artifice of their constructions of memories that only belong, properly speaking, to those who experienced the war. In so doing they enact a form of postmemory that involves a kind of translation that is structured by approximations, interpolations, and gaps. Choi’s The Foreign Student is particularly noteworthy for gesturing as well toward the Korean War’s significance for Japanese Americans and African Americans without engaging in a problematic politics of racial comparison. This novel theorizes a mode of cultural memory that resonates not only with Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” but also with Alexander Weheliye’s notion of “racializing assemblages.”

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
William L. Barney
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Political Force ◽  
National Convention ◽  
Secession Crisis ◽  
Do So ◽  
Abolition Movement

Sectional tensions over slavery persisted since the writing of the Constitution and exploded into secession and the Civil War in 1860–61. The resistance to slavery of African Americans, both enslaved and free, prodded the consciences of enough Northern whites to produce the abolition movement and emerge as a political force in its own right. Southerners recognized that the morality of slavery was at the heart of the issue and sought in vain to make Northerners acknowledge slavery as a morally just institution and allow it to grow and expand. The Northern refusal to do so fueled the rise of the Republican Party and split the Democratic Party at its national convention in the spring of 1860, setting the stage for the election of Abraham Lincoln and the outbreak of the secession crisis.

scholarly journals Going South: Tracing Race and Region in the Post-Emancipation Black Atlantic

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-273
Author(s):  
ELISABETH ENGEL ◽  
NICHOLAS GRANT
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Rural South ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
International Visibility ◽  
Freed Slaves

The demise of American slavery in 1865 put black Americans in motion to an unprecedented degree. Freed slaves and their descendants migrated from the plantations in the rural South to destinations around the globe. Travelling in a variety of new roles – as missionaries, journalists, agronomists, scientists, athletes, performers, entrepreneurs and political activists – African Americans gained international visibility, inspiring other oppressed populations in the colonial world to struggle for their liberation.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Dyonne Thompson
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Minstrel Shows ◽  
Racial Slavery

This book examines the process by which racial stereotypes about blacks developed and were perpetuated in music and dance, and particularly in what it calls onstage and backstage performances. It argues that the history of blacks in entertainment, or more specifically blacks as entertainment, contributed to the construction of race and identity for African Americans. To support this argument, the book goes back to the slave society that fostered the first American entertainment venue to challenge the notion that the minstrel shows constituted the first American entertainment genre. It shows that forced performances during slavery not only served as a means for blacks to construct their identity and retain their cultures, but also played a key role in constructing white stereotypes of blacks. These stereotypes of blacks, the book contends, were a reflection of whites' anxieties and their desire to control black bodies while justifying a deplorable institution of racial slavery.

The Postcolonial Contemporary

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
East Asia ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Postcolonial Criticism ◽  
Do So

This volume invokes the “postcolonial contemporary” in order to recognize and reflect upon the emphatically postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture, as well as to inquire into whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it. Neither simply for nor against postcolonialism, the volume seeks to cut across this false alternative, and to think with postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity. Many of the most influential frameworks of postcolonial theory were developed during the 1970s and 1990s, during what we may now recognize as the twilight of the postwar period. If forms of capitalist imperialism are entering into new configurations of neoliberal privatization, wars-without-end, xenophobic nationalism and unsustainable extraction, what aspects of postcolonial inquiry must be reworked or revised in order to grasp our political present? In twelve essays that draw from a number of disciplines—history, anthropology, literature, geography, indigenous studies— and regional locations (the Black Atlantic, South Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, Argentina) The Postcolonial Contemporary seeks to move beyond the habitual oppositions that have often characterized the field, such as universal vs. particular; Marxism vs. postcolonialism; and politics vs. culture. These essays signal an attempt to reckon with new and persisting postcolonial predicaments and do so under four inter-related analytics: Postcolonial Temporality; Deprovincializing the Global South; Beyond Marxism versus Postcolonial Studies; and Postcolonial Spatiality and New Political Imaginaries.

Race and Relevance: Arthur Garfield Hays and the Integration of the American Bar Association, 1938-1943

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F Hamm
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Issue ◽  
The Press ◽  
Bar Association ◽  
Do So

Abstract This article explores the role of Arthur Garfield Hays and mostly Jewish lawyers in dismantling the American Bar Association’s prohibition of African Americans becoming members. By publicly resigning from the organization and encouraging others to do so over the ABA’s treatment of African-American applicant Francis Rivers, these lawyers made the color bar a public issue in the press. While earlier efforts in the late 1930s had failed, World War II contributed to the success of the activists’ campaign in the early 1940s, as the struggle against Nazi racism had begun to undercut American racial practices. In August 1943 the ABA changed its procedures governing admission that had previously functioned to exclude African-Americans. Other legal professional organizations soon followed its example. Thus the legal profession refashioned itself into part of the liberal order emerging in the wake of World War II.

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