Rewriting the Body: Aida Overton Walker and the Social Formation of Cakewalking

1996 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Krasner
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
West African ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anna Julia Cooper ◽  
And Gender

Although Aida Overton Walker (1880–1914) belonged to the same generation of turn-of-the-century African American performers as did Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, Bert Williams, and George Walker, she had a rather different view of how best to represent her race and gender in the performing arts. Walker taught white society in New York City how to do the Cakewalk, a celebratory dance with links to West African festival dance. In Walker's choreography of it, it was reconfigured with some ingenuity to accommodate race, gender, and class identities in an era in which all three were in flux. Her strategy depended on being flexible, on being able to make the transition from one cultural milieu to another, and on adjusting to new patterns of thinking. Walker had to elaborate her choreography as hybrid, merging her interpretation of cakewalking with the preconceptions of a white culture that became captivated by its form. To complicate matters, Walker's choreography developed during a particularly unstable and volatile period. As Anna Julia Cooper remarked in 1892.

scholarly journals Visualizing Police Exposure by Race, Gender, and Age in New York City

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 237802311982891 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalisha Dessources Figures ◽  
Joscha Legewie
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Black Men ◽  
York City ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Gender And Age ◽  
Hispanic Men ◽  
And Gender

This figure depicts the disparities in average police stops in New York City from 2004 to 2012, disaggregated by race, gender, and age. Composed of six bar charts, each graph in the figure provides data for a particular population at the intersection of race and gender, focusing on black, white, and Hispanic men and women. Each graph also has a comparative backdrop of the data on police stops for black males. All graphs take a similar parabolic shape, showing that across each race-gender group, pedestrian stops increase in adolescence and peek in young adulthood, then taper off across the adult life course. However, the heights of these parabolic representations are vastly different. There are clear disparities in police exposure based on race and gender, with black men and women being more likely than their peers to be policed and with black men being policed significantly more than their female counterparts.

Sathima Bea Benjamin

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Muller
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Career Development ◽  
York City ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Singing Voice ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender

This chapter explores the life and career of Sathima Bea Benjamin, who grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, during the transition to apartheid in the 1940s. Taking melodies she heard on her grandmother's radio, Sathima developed her own jazz singing voice, weaving in her own compositions. With a life embedded in an awareness of race and gender, she left for Europe in 1962. Her migratory lifestyle took her through tours in Europe, supporting her husband musician and caring for her daughters, to her own career development in New York City as a jazz singer with her own trio—where she continues to record, create, and perform. Sathima's vocality and life-stories reveal risks, freedoms, and creative processes as she creates a counternarrative to the discourses of masculinity in jazz.

Code-Swishing

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-78
Author(s):  
Carlos Ulises Decena
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Gay And Bisexual Men ◽  
The Body ◽  
Bisexual Men ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
And Bisexual ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Immigrant Men

This article is based on retrospective life history interviews with Dominican gay and bisexual immigrant men who live or have lived in New York City. It offers an alternative to established and influential interpretations of queer subject constitution that overemphasize abjection while ignoring the polyvalence of identities. Through an engagement with the conditions that make the figure of la loca [the effeminate homosexual] instrumental in the expression of closeness and intimacy among the men with whom I spoke, the article analyzes the way this signifier operates in the making and regulation of networks of self-identified Dominican gay and bisexual men. It conceptualizes “code swishing,” borrowing from scholarship on bilingualism and “code switching.” But it revises this work to implicate the body and gender dissent as communicative practices and to make clear that these men juggled their desire to establish and sustain networks with one another so long as expressions of camaraderie and connection did not threaten their legitimacy in daily life and their investments in normative masculinity. For them, surviving and being respected was more important than any sense of “community” they may have felt toward one another.

scholarly journals Political correctness: back then and now

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 7-34
Author(s):  
I.I. Valuitseva ◽  
◽  
M.O. Krukovskaia ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Political Correctness ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Black Population ◽  
Time Intervals ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Social Events ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender

ork Age, Atlanta Voice, The Atlantic and others. Materials from early newspapers were taken from the New York Times official archives. The presented research aims, among other things, to identify the social factors that affect certain politically taboo vocabulary units in relation to the black population in America, how the environment and social events have influenced the politically correct language. The following analysis has identified the most frequently tabooed lexical units for a given period of time and the frequency of their occurrence in American public opinion at different time intervals. The article provides concrete examples of language changes at the morphological and lexical level as a response to an existing social demand in society, such as combating discrimination on the grounds of race and gender in public space, in employment or in personal interaction, combating xenophobia and segregation at the level of politically correct language. Projections, concerning the derivation in ethically appropriate language, are made on the basis of the obtained data about the future development vector of political correctness indicators.

A Poststructural Analysis of High School Students’ Gender and Racialized Bodily Meanings

2006 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Azzarito ◽  
Melinda A. Solmon
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Physical Education ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
The Body ◽  
School Students ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Poststructural Analysis

Recently, national studies have reported on young people’s low level of participation in physical activity. Because the effect of gender and racial differences among youth participating in physical activity have not been sufficiently addressed, examining the social construction of the body in physical education can provide valuable insights. This study uses poststructuralism as a lens to investigate how students’ construction of meanings around the body varied by gender and race, and how bodily meanings related to students’ participation in physical education classes. The participants were 528 students from public high schools. An instrument was used to assess students’ racial and gendered construction of bodily meanings around specific discursive constructs. Results indicated that students’ meanings differ by race and gender, especially in regard to size, power, muscularity, and appearance. These findings suggest that bodily meanings were influential in students’ self-reported levels of participation in physical education classes.

American Modernity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Scaff
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
New York ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Church Of Christ ◽  
Religious Ethics ◽  
Ethical Culture ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines Max Weber's thoughts on American modernity based on his observations during his trip to New York City. It first considers Max and Marianne Weber's experience with religious services in New York, including a Presbyterian service at the Marble Collegiate Church, the service of the First Church of Christ Scientist, and the service of the Ethical Culture Society. It then discusses Max's views about the social implications of religious faith and social capital, as well as Marianne's thoughts about Americanization. It also analyzes Weber's account of the “cool objectivity of sociation” and his ideas on the issues of class, race, and gender; the relationship between religious ethics and economic action; and cultural pluralism.

Beyond Respectability

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brittney C. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
American Women ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anna Julia Cooper ◽  
Racial Knowledge ◽  
And Gender

In the late nineteenth century, a group of publicly active African American women emerged from the social and educational elite to assume racial leadership roles. Their work challenged thinking on racial issues as well as questions about gender, sexuality, and class. Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.

scholarly journals Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education

2019 ◽  
Vol 109 (3) ◽  
pp. 1080-1115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac M. Opper
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Method Of Moments ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Value Added ◽  
Spillover Effects ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Method Of Moments Estimator ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

Does the impact of teachers extend beyond the students in their classroom? Using the natural transitions of students from multiple elementary schools into a single middle school, this paper provides a new method for isolating and quantifying peer spillover effects of teaching and shows that ignoring these spillovers underestimates a teacher’s value by at least 30 percent. Because the spillovers also affect teacher value-added estimates, I develop a method of moments estimator of teacher value-added and show that accounting for the spillovers does not have a large impact on the ranking of teachers in New York City. I conclude by showing that the spillovers occur within groups of students who share the same race and gender, which suggests that social networks play a critical role in disseminating the effect. (JEL H75, I21, J15, J16, J45, Z13)

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