Southern Looks? A History of African American Missionary Photography of Africa, 1890s–1930s

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 390-417
Author(s):  
ELISABETH ENGEL
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Christian Missions ◽  
Us South ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Institution ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
The Us ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual Description

This article traces and analyzes the missionary photography of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the most important independent black American institution that began to operate in colonial South Africa at the onset of the politics of racial segregation in the 1890s. It argues that AME missionary photography presents a neglected archive, from which a history of black photographic encounters and a subaltern perspective on the dominant visual cultures of European imperialism and Christian missions in Africa can be retrieved. Focussing in particular on how AME missionaries deployed tropes of the culturally refined “New Negro” and the US South in their visual description of South Africa, this article demonstrates that photography was an important tool for black subjects to define their image beyond the representations of black inferiority that established visual traditions constructed.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alys Moody
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This book has traced a history of modernism’s decline and of its doubters. In post-Vichy France, the US circa 1968, and late apartheid South Africa, modernism’s fate was precarious, its reputation tarnished, and its politics reviled. The inescapability of the political in these contexts compromised the structural conditions of the autonomous literary field on which modernism had been built. In turn, it threw into crisis the philosophical defense of autonomy and the literary legacies of modernism, which grew out of and were guaranteed by this autonomous literary field. The stories we tell about late twentieth-century literary history reflect this dilemma. According to received wisdom, the period between 1945 and 1990 saw postmodernism replace modernism in both literature and scholarship, and new waves of postcolonial literature and theory discredited the Eurocentric specter of modernism. ...

scholarly journals Past as Prophecy: Indigenous Diplomacies beyond Liberal Settler Regimes of Recognition, as Told in Shell

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 510
Author(s):  
Lee Bloch
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Us South ◽  
State Recognition ◽  
Temporal Differences ◽  
Indigenous Knowledges ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indigenous Ways Of Knowing

According to a prophecy told in a small, Muskogee-identified community in the US South, the seeds of Indigenous ways of knowing and relating to more-than-human kin will once again flourish in the ruins of colonial orders. Even settlers will be forced to turn to Indigenous knowledges because “they have destroyed everything else”. Following this visionary history-future, this article asks how Indigenous diplomacies and temporalities animate resurgent possibilities for making life within the fractures (and apocalyptic ruins) of settler states. This demands a rethinking of the global and the international from the perspective of deep Indigenous histories. I draw on research visiting ancestral landscapes with community members, discussing a trip to an ancient shell mound and a contemporary cemetery in which shells are laid atop grave plots. These stories evoke a long-term history of shifting and multivalient shell use across religious and temporal differences. They speak to practices of acknowledgement that exceed liberal settler regimes of state recognition and extend from much older diplomatic practices.

A Legacy of Exclusion: The Geopolitics of Immigration and Latinas/os in the South

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yalidy Matos
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
The South ◽  
Us South ◽  
Immigration Legislation ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Past

“A Legacy of Exclusion” briefly traces the historical migration of Latinas/os to the US South, countering the myth that the migration of Latinas/os to the region is new. Additionally, the piece argues that the exclusion Latinas/os face in the region is a continuation of racist policies and unequal power dynamics in the South that link Latina/o presence to a longer historical past and legacy. Through an examination of Alabama’s anti-immigration legislation, HB 56, I make two interrelated arguments. First, I argue that although there is nothing new about Latina/o migration to the region, what is new is the geopolitics of immigration — specifically, the proliferation of immigration enforcement within the interior of the United States. Second, these kinds of racist exclusionary projects have historical precedent. The contemporary regulation of nonwhite bodies is part of a much longer legacy of social control in the United States. Moving forward, I urge scholars of Latina/o studies and related fields whose focus is on the US South to engage with the history of settler colonialism, the displacement of native peoples, and the African American history of this region as a way to make important historical connections among and across racialized and otherized groups.

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