Roots tourism: a second wave of Double Consciousness for African Americans

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 411-426
Author(s):  
Alana Dillette
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Roots Tourism ◽  
Second Wave

The Black Comic Sensibility

2020 ◽  
pp. 119-148
Author(s):  
Jean Lee Cole
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Jack Johnson

African Americans, by and large, were largely excluded from the empowering forms of the comic sensibility. Yet the works of George Herriman and James “Jimmy” Swinnerton display a distinctly black comic sensibility that drew on visual and literary conventions originating in the minstrel tradition and further developed and replicated in burlesque and vaudeville. Focusing on Swinnerton’s Sam and His Laugh (1905—1906) and Herriman’s strips depicting black boxers Jack Johnson and Sam Langford, this chapter shows how these two artists multiplied irony through a sensitive awareness and exploitation of DuBoisian double-consciousness, making their readers laugh even as they deftly undercut white supremacist attitudes.

Black Gringos in Brazil?

2018 ◽  
pp. 106-143
Author(s):  
Patricia de Santana Pinho
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Financial Aid ◽  
Racial Solidarity ◽  
Roots Tourism ◽  
Tourist Guides ◽  
Afro Brazilian

This chapter examines how roots tourism has allowed for the construction of black racial solidarity between African Americans and Afro-Brazilians. Aware of their power as U.S. citizens, African Americans have actively “made use” of their identity, as both tourists and Americans, to support Afro-Brazilians. In addition to donating cash and goods and providing financial aid to Afro-Brazilian organizations, they have often requested black tourist guides and prioritized patronizing black-owned businesses so that their U.S. dollars are channeled to Afro-Brazilians. Afro-Brazilian actors, in general, have responded very positively to such practices of solidarity, even if they are also critical of, and ready to challenge, what they view as the tourists’ “Americanness.” Most importantly, Afro-Brazilian activists have also set the terms of engagement in these interactions and, rather than being mere beneficiaries, they have become important agents in these projects of transnational black solidarity, acting as co-producers in the processes of diaspora-making.

Audre Lorde Revisited

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Higashida
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Third World ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Audre Lorde ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
Oppressed People ◽  
Free Mobility ◽  
Second Wave

This chapter argues that Audre Lorde's essays and poetry from the 1980s develop an overlooked yet significant strand of second-wave Black feminism that reveals continuities with postwar anticolonial internationalism. Lorde's poetry and prose from the mid-1980s on, after the invasion of Grenada, reveal that independent Black nationhood becomes an important political goal for her, one not yet superseded by “free” mobility or exilic diasporic communities. Moreover, it is in Lorde's post-invasion prose and poetry that she most explicitly and consistently explores a nationalist internationalism, positing that African Americans are morally and politically bound to support Third World and indigenous struggles for national sovereignty and that anticolonial struggles illuminate and impact African Americans' situation in the United States as an oppressed people.

On What Matters for African Americans: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Double Consciousness” in the Light of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons

Janus Head ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-131
Author(s):  
Michael Wainwright ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk ◽  
What Matters

In Reasons and Persons (1984), the greatest contribution to utilitarian philosophy since Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics (1874), Derek Parfit supports his Reductionist contention “that personal identity is not what matters” by turning to the neurosurgical findings of Roger Wolcott Sperry. Parfit’s scientifically informed argument has important implications for W. E. B. Du Bois’s contentious hypothesis of African-American “double-consciousness,” which he initially advanced in “Strivings of the Negro People” (1897), before amending for inclusion in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). An analysis of “Of the Coming of John,” chapter 13 in The Souls of Black Folk, helps to trace these ramifications, resituating Du Bois’s notion from the pragmatist to the utilitarian tradition, and revealing how his concept effectively prefigured Parfit’s scientifically informed Reductionism.

African Intellectuals in the Belly of the Beast: Migration, Identity, and the Politics of Exile

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-75
Author(s):  
F. Njubi Nesbitt
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
The West ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Talented Tenth ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Class Status ◽  
African Intellectuals

When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the “double consciousness” of Africans in America, he was reflecting on the complex identities of the “talented tenth,” the educated minority of a minority like himself who felt alienated because of their awareness that their qualifications meant little in a racist society. Though written in reference to the African American intellectual, this duality, this sense of “two-ness,” is even more acute for African exiles today because they have fewer social and cultural ties to the West than African Europeans and African Americans. The exiles are much closer to the African “soul” Du Bois referred to and are less prepared for the pervasive racism and second-class status that they have to overcome in the West.

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