Disturbing Boundaries: Temperance, Black Elevation, and Violence in Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends

Prospects ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 349-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Levine
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Program ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Universal Love

At the inaugural 1837 meeting of the American Moral Reform Society, one of Philadelphia's many African American reform groups, William Whipper called for blacks to commit themselves to total abstinence and “temperance in all things.” The group itself offered a resolution that subsumed a number of social desires and reforms under the rubric of temperance: “Resolved, That the successful promotion of all the principles of the Moral Reform Society, viz.: Education, Temperance, Economy, and Universal Love, depends greatly upon the practical prosecution of the Temperance Reform.” But of course temperance could only go so far, and at times those blacks most committed to temperance — whether conceived narrowly in terms of drinking, or more broadly in terms of a Franklinian commitment to economy and industry — seemed to lose sight of the limits of the black temperance movement in a racist culture. At the same 1837 meeting of the American Moral Reform Society, James Forten, Jr., addressed this issue head on. While endorsing temperance as a worthy social program of black elevation, he pointed to the central reality of the black experience in America: “that the arm of oppression is laid bare to crush us; that prejudice, like the never satiated tiger, selects us as its prey; that we have felt the withering blight of tyranny sweeping from before us, in its destructive course, our homes and our property.” But despite these obstacles, Forten advised, blacks should not give up the struggle to improve their lot and, as temperate and productive citizens, “to set an example to the rising generation.” As he rhetorically put it in his concluding remarks: “What … would the cause of learning and our country have lost, if a Franklin, a Rittenhouse, a Rush, could have been made to quail before the frowning brow of persecution?”

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

Not as It Is Written

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
International Exhibition ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Made In

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Dudley
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Political Views ◽  
African American Artists

Paul Laurence Dunbar, born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872, became the first African American to make his living solely as a writer. When he died of tuberculosis in 1906, he was perhaps the most famous and best-loved black man in America. During a short but prolific career, Dunbar composed about five hundred poems, one hundred short stories, four novels, many essays, and song lyrics. His public performances of his own works were wildly popular, and generations of African Americans were raised knowing, often by heart, his best-loved poems. In 1896, William Dean Howells, dean of American literary critics, hailed Dunbar’s work, but singled out the dialect poems for special praise. The public preferred them, too. For the decade that remained to him, Dunbar continued to write dialect poems, some of which seem to reinforce negative stereotypes of African Americans, and others that appear to romanticize the “good old days” of the antebellum South. On the other hand, Dunbar produced essays and poetry critical of America and the severe limits and indignities imposed on African Americans. Why would such a writer produce works so contradictory? This has been the crux of Dunbar studies almost from the time of his death. His critical reception reveals much about the taste and political views of subsequent generations of his readers and critics, who would do well to remember the enormous challenges facing Dunbar and all African American artists who strove to find their voices and make a living during those post-Reconstruction years, the “nadir” of the black experience in America.

Rethinking African American Migration

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
And Migration ◽  
American Migration

This chapter explores the relationship between migration, displacement, and the Underground Railroad movement. More specifically, it considers the processes of community building and the causes of migration that led Blacks to live where they did and to flee when they had to. It shows how migration became a means of escape from slavery, first by discussing maroon settlements that functioned as the African diaspora's first communities for free Blacks and began the progression to the Underground Railroad. It then explains how Black community formation and the Underground Railroad shifted between constant migration and displacement that began with the Middle Passage, and how emigration and colonization schemes of the pre-Civil War abolitionist era influenced displacement and migration patterns. This analysis looks at African American migration from a new perspective by sifting through the range of ways in which people of color entered into and interacted with their surroundings. It suggests that migration, both voluntary and forced, courses through the Black experience.

scholarly journals “Beef Jerky in a Ball Gown”: The Camp Excesses of Titus Andromedon in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 442-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Dexl ◽  
Katrin Horn
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Critical Distance ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Black Representation ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
Beef Jerky

AbstractIn this essay, we look at Titus Andromedon from the Netflix-sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2014-) as a singular phenomenon in contemporary TV: a black queen whose use of camp distances him from stereotypes, but connects him with audiences. Titus thus not only adds to a more diverse representation of black experience on TV but also interrogates prevailing TV tropes. Titus thus presents a crucial (and critical) addition to the contemporary TV landscape, to which several TV critics in leading media outlets have recently attested a turning point in the representation-both in quantity and quality-of black characters on big and small screens. Titus breaks with historical traditions of African American representation in the sitcom, both in so-called “black sitcoms” with a majority of African American characters and in white sitcoms which have featured people of color as sidekicks. In addition, Titus picks up on gay sidekicks and their relation to female lead characters, whose dynamics are interrogated through Titus’s growing agency as a character in his own right. Titus expands on these novelties in meaningful ways, as he wholeheartedly embraces his queer identity and furthermore offers a running commentary on other characters’ “white nonsense,” thereby clearly refusing the assimilationist tendencies typical for much of “Post-Cosby”-sitcom black representation. This article therefore claims that Titus’ character relies on camp in his balancing act between comic relief, affective centering, and critical distance, and illustrates this by analyzing the specific techniques of Titus’ critical engagement with stereotypical representation of gay and black TV characters.

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