Black Theatricalities in Revisiting History for the Present

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-389
Author(s):  
SORAYA MARTINS PATROCÍNIO
Keyword(s):  
Black Bodies

This article seeks to reflect on how theatre presents itself as a fabular medium allowing for the emergence of performances that create and re-create stories and identities. In particular, it examines how theatre allows for the development of epistemologies that enhance our understanding of black bodies, knowledge, traditions, subjectivities and desires.

Race and the Epigenetics of Memory

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Soto Laveaga
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Dna Analysis ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Neural Function ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Race Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
Lasting Change

In my brief response to Terence Keel’s essay “Race on Both Sides of the Razor,” I focus on something as pertinent as alleles and social construction: how we write history and how we memorialize the past. Current DNA analysis promises to remap our past and interrogate certainties that we have taken for granted. For the purposes of this commentary I call this displacing of known histories the epigenetics of memory. Just as environmental stimuli rouse epigenetic mechanisms to produce lasting change in behavior and neural function, the unearthing of forgotten bodies, forgotten lives, has a measurable effect on how we act and think and what we believe. The act of writing history, memorializing the lives of others, is a stimulus that reshapes who and what we are. We cannot disentangle the discussion about the social construction of race and biological determinism from the ways in which we have written—and must write going forward—about race. To the debate about social construction and biological variation we must add the heft of historical context, which allows us to place these two ideas in dialogue with each other. Consequently, before addressing the themes in Keel’s provocative opening essay and John Hartigan’s response, I speak about dead bodies—specifically, cemeteries for Black bodies. Three examples—one each from Atlanta, Georgia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Mexico—illustrate how dead bodies must enter our current debates about race, science, and social constructions. 

Chutes, Not Ladders

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-130
Author(s):  
Pavithra Nagarajan
Keyword(s):  
School Success ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Research Data ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Boys Of Color ◽  
And Control

This article explores how a single-sex school for boys of color intentionally and unintentionally (re)defines masculinity through rules and rituals. The school’s mission posits that boys become men through developing three skills: selfregulation, self-awareness, and self-reflection. Drawing from qualitative research data, I examine how disciplinary practices prioritize boys’ ability to control their bodies and image, or “self-regulate.” When boys fail to self-regulate, they enter the punitive system. School staff describe self-regulation as integral to out-of-school success, but these practices may inadvertently reproduce negative labeling and control of black bodies. This article argues for school cultural practices that affirm, rather than deny, the benefits of boyhood.

Race, Work, and Disability in Progressive Era United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lawrie
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Assembly Lines ◽  
Actuarial Science ◽  
World War ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Mental Testing ◽  
Twentieth Century America

Throughout U.S. history, the production of difference, whether along racial or disability lines, has been inextricably tied to the imperatives of labor economy. From the plantations of the antebellum era through the assembly lines and trenches of early-twentieth-century America, ideologies of race and disability have delineated which peoples could do which kinds of work. The ideologies and identities of race, work, and the “fit” ’ or “unfit” body informed Progressive Era labor economies. Here the processes of racializing or disabling certain bodies are charted from turn-of-the-century actuarial science, which monetized blacks as a degenerate, dying race, through the standardized physical and mental testing and rehabilitation methods developed by the U.S. army during World War I. Efforts to quantify, poke, prod, or mend black bodies reshaped contemporary understandings of labor, race, the state, and the working body.

Unspoken Grammar of Place: Anti-Blackness as a Spatial Imaginary in Education

2021 ◽  
pp. 105268462199276
Author(s):  
DeMarcus A. Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
School Leaders ◽  
School Community ◽  
Holistic Healing ◽  
Music Preferences ◽  
Spatial Logic ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Black Populations ◽  
K 12 ◽  
Black Language

This article builds from scholarship on anti-Blackness in education and spatial imaginaries in geography to theorize an anti-Black spatial imaginary as the prevailing spatial logic that has shaped the configuration and character of American social intuitions, including K-12 schools. As a spatial imaginary, anti-Blackness is circulated through discourses, images, and texts that tell a story of Blackness as a problem, non-human, and placeless. Anchored by the assumption that Black populations are spatially illegitimate, the anti-Black spatial imaginary marks Black bodies as undesirable and therefore extractable from spaces and places that have been envisioned for their exclusion. I consider schools as sites spatialized terror where the exhibitions of terror consist of forcing students to observe other Black bodies being forcibly removed from the classroom and school community; constant rejection of Black language, traditions, music preferences, and other cultural forms of expression; the obliteration of Black names and identities. I offer ways that school leaders can unsettle the anti-Black spatial imaginary to transform schools as sites of holistic healing and possibilities.

RAGE!, Retaliation, and Retribution: Recurring Themes in August Wilson’s Work

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (5) ◽  
pp. 482-508
Author(s):  
Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
The Public ◽  
Resistance Strategies ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Black Rage ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Equity And Inclusion ◽  
Movement Activist

Following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others, recent protest in Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, DC, LA, Portland and a host of other locations, both, stateside and abroad are being framed in the public discourse as everything from radical resistance to public madness and everything in between. From the Black Lives Matter movement activist to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion advocates, one of the key components in, both, radical resistance strategies or public expressions of cultural madness, is a ground swelling of rage! But what is rage? How can we recognize it? Historically, what has been the consequences of Black rage? And in this unique, historical moment, what if anything can be done to leverage it? Mining August Wilson’s work for definitions, instances, and consequences of Black rage, this paper interrogates August Wilson’s narratives on rage as a way to talk about the historiography and commodifying of Black rage as a way of victimizing and disposing of Black bodies in America. In this way, we hope to offer suggestions in this historical moment on how to leverage Black rage, rather than to be snared by it.

Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-181
Author(s):  
Mikael Broadway
Keyword(s):  
Black Bodies

Customer Service Representatives

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-571
Author(s):  
Julian Kevon Glover
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Transgender Women ◽  
Average Life Expectancy ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Murder Rate ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Customer Service Representatives

This article investigates sex work among Black transgender women in Chicago’s ballroom scene, drawing on ethnographic data to argue that Black transwomen engage in sex work as a practice of self-investment undergirded by an epistemological shift regarding the centrality of affective labor to their work. In so doing, interlocutors reap the benefits of deploying embodied knowledge—the harnessing and transformation of insight derived from lived experiences of racial, gender, and sexual subjection into useful strategies, tactics, and tools—to secure material and human resources necessary for survival. A focus on how Black transwomen live, despite continued physical, spiritual, socioeconomic, political, and cultural annihilation, remains critically important given the myriad indicators (low average life expectancy, low annual income, disproportionally high murder rate, etc.) that expose the world’s indifference to the plight of this community and Black bodies writ large. Further, the author places interlocutors in conversation with Black feminist historians’ and theorists’ discussions of sex work among Black women to expose points of convergence between Black cis- and transgender women. The author also complicates narratives that link sex work to “survival” and subsequently obfuscate explorations of limited and situated agency among Black women that have significant historical precedent.

Battered bodies: Characterizing Johannesburg’s apartheid past and present in Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 213-228
Author(s):  
Addamms Mututa
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Past ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Narrative Spaces ◽  
The City

Narratives of traumatic citizenship not only raise questions about the past, but also they give voice to contemporary stories about this past. In post-apartheid South Africa, these questions, markers of apartheid temporality, are embodied in, among other sites, the representation of battered Black bodies in cinema. This article critiques the characterization of Blacks as narrative spaces to illustrate the temporality of distress and trauma from apartheid to post-apartheid Johannesburg in Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi. It argues that the film posits Black characters as latent archives of intergenerational historical narratives that probe the apartheid past and speculate on the post-apartheid future in the city of Johannesburg. Consequently, the juxtaposition of embodied narrative archives and apartheid temporality, the article posits, is a crucial model in the theorization of battered Black bodies’ contiguous nostalgia.

Black Bodies, White Gold

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Arabindan-Kesson
Keyword(s):  
White Gold ◽  
Black Bodies
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