scholarly journals The difference that ‘one drop’ makes: Mexican and African Americans, mixedness and racial categorisation in the early twentieth century

Subjectivity ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-36
Author(s):  
Margarita Aragon
Author(s):  
Robert E. Weems

This chapter examines the “contested terrain” associated with the founding of Chicago’s Douglass National Bank in 1921. Anthony Overton, one of history’s most prominent African American entrepreneurs, is widely regarded as the founder of the second national bank organized by African Americans. Yet, the evidence indicates that this distinction should go to Pearl W. Chavers, a relatively obscure early twentieth-century black business person. The story of Anthony Overton’s ascent and P.W. Chavers’ descent in the Douglass National Bank’s administrative hierarchy reveals the power of money and influence. It also illuminates the nuances of both group and individual entrepreneur-based strategies for African American economic development.


Author(s):  
John M. Coggeshall

This chapter presents the story of Liberia during the early twentieth century, through the Depression and the world wars. As the nation’s economy changes, African Americans continue to abandon the region for better economic opportunities as they are also forced out by restrictive Jim Crow segregation and racialized attacks. Both Soapstone Baptist Church and Soapstone School continue, critical anchors for community identity. Some residents return to care for aging relatives. The story of Liberia is presented through the memories of elderly residents and some local historical sources, including obituaries.


Author(s):  
Hank Scotch

Jack London’s maritime writing often interrogates the difference between the savage space of the “outside” sea and the relative domesticity of land’s civilized interior, as well as the ways in which this spatial distinction supports the sovereignty of space, society, and the self. But instead of maintaining these spatial differences, London’s work is all about exposing their increasing indistinction in the early twentieth century and the effects such a spatial destabilization had on sovereignty itself. This interrogation of the new world order and its effects on previous forms of sovereignty, the chapter argues, is what makes London’s contribution to American maritime writing (especially The Sea-Wolf and The Cruise of the Snark) so important. London’s sea stories not only acknowledge the world’s new “nomos” but the effects this order has on political and personal forms of autonomy and coherence.


2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (2) ◽  
pp. 477-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan A. Black ◽  
Seth G. Sanders ◽  
Evan J. Taylor ◽  
Lowell J. Taylor

The Great Migration—the massive migration of African Americans out of the rural South to largely urban locations in the North, Midwest, and West—was a landmark event in US history. Our paper shows that this migration increased mortality of African Americans born in the early twentieth century South. This inference comes from an analysis that uses proximity of birthplace to railroad lines as an instrument for migration. (JEL I12, J15, N31, N32, N91, N92, R23)


Author(s):  
Reinhold Martin

This chapter considers the history and organizational effects of the suspended acoustical tile ceiling in terms of the difference between ‘space’ (below) and ‘plenum’ (above). Reviewing the development of the acoustic tile since the early twentieth century, and the construction systems with which it was suspended to create a plenum between ceiling below and floor above, the chapter argues that this separation gave the ceiling new meaning. Increasingly, by isolating the mechanical hum of environmental technologies within the plenum, the suspended acoustical tile ceiling maintains a difference between the silence of ‘space’ and the noise of the mechanical systems that serve it.


Author(s):  
Sam See ◽  
Scott Herring ◽  
Heather Love ◽  
Wendy Moffat

Langston Hughes’s “Spectacles in Color” envisions Harlem culture as a drag performance. The Weary Blues records a lyric history of modernist Harlem in poems that perform in drag, an aesthetic of visual crossing. This aesthetic ironically coincides with and also countermands the identitarian stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory.


Jazz in China ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 21-31
Author(s):  
Eugene Marlow

The superior war-making technology of the Western colonial powers—the steam-driven warship and cannon—made the difference between China prevailing and its defeat during the Opium Wars. It resulted in the colonial powers controlling Shanghai, tantamount to controlling China. In turn, the colonial powers brought their culture with them to Shanghai, which included jazz in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Within a couple of decades, jazz became not only the music of Shanghai but was global. This chapter asks how jazz traveled halfway around the world to China (and in the other direction, to Europe) so quickly? And how did the non-American musicians in Shanghai (Russians, Filipinos, and Chinese) learn to play the music for dance hall purposes? Transportation and communications technologies of the early twentieth century—the steamship, the locomotive, the gramophone, and early film—also were major influences in bringing jazz to China's shores.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 555-559
Author(s):  
Anthony S. Chen

Thanks to the work of numerous scholars, it is now well understood that African Americans were incorporated into the early twentieth-century welfare state—as it was then constituted—on a decidedly unequal basis. If African Americans were not altogether excluded by design from some programs, government officials were frequently less generous in determining the scope and extent of the benefits received by them compared to those received by Whites.


PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (3) ◽  
pp. 798-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam See

The chapter “Spectacles in Color” in Langston Hughes's first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), envisions modernist Harlem culture as a drag performance and offers a useful rubric for understanding Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926), a lyric history of that culture whose poems characteristically cross gender, sexual, racial, and even formal lines. The Weary Blues employs a low-down, or nature-based, and down-low, or queer, aesthetic of racial and gender crossing that I term “primitive drag,” an aesthetic that ironically coincides with the stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory: namely, that blacks and queers were unnatural and degenerate because they, unlike whites and heterosexuals, exhibited a lack of racial and gender differentiation. Disidentifying with those stereotypes, the primitive drag in The Weary Blues depicts queer feeling as natural and nature as queer, thus offering a productive paradox for rethinking literary histories of modernism and theories of sexuality by the rather Darwinian notion that “the nature of the universe,” as Hughes calls it, is always subject to change, or queering.


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