Introduction: Global Morrison

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-269
Author(s):  
Justine Baillie
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Black Intellectual ◽  
Colonial And Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Black Writing ◽  
New Generation

Abstract As novelist, academic, and public intellectual Toni Morrison has made a profound contribution to the transformation of the black intellectual and political aesthetic. In many ways Morrison’s literary and theoretical formulations represent the feminization of black writing traditions through her representations of identity as being fluid and socially constructed. Her novels transform memory into alternative narratives of recovery that illuminate obscured histories of slavery, migration and urbanisation. This project constitutes a rich legacy for a new generation of writers who, working within a global nexus, interrogate the racial economics of trauma, dislocation and exile in ways that dissolve the distinctions between African American, colonial, and postcolonial studies. The introduction to this special issue highlights the transnational scope of Morrison’s work, with a particular focus on her non-fiction.

Genealogies of Black Modernities

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-622 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick R Spires
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
Black Intellectual ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Black Writing ◽  
Pauline Hopkins

Abstract This essay introduces the major themes and concerns of “Genealogies of Black Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century,” a special issue of American Literary History. How does modernity look when read through Black diasporic literary production in the long nineteenth century, broadly conceived? What new narratives can we create by reading this literature as participating in and producing transatlantic genealogies of literary modernity? How does reading Black literary modernity in the nineteenth century disrupt our understandings of modernity as a conceptual framework both for contemporary scholarship and as an object of nineteenth-century Black intellectual inquiry? This introductory essay defines Black modernities of the long nineteenth century as a set of related, sometimes connected, practices and questions focused on the nature of Black life and culture in an ever-shifting antiblack world. Writers from Phillis Wheatley to Pauline Hopkins—to offer one framing—were invested in chronicling and intervening in the newness of their moment, even as they worked to imagine new possibilities for the future. Our task, then, was to deliberate over what something called modernity meant and means for and in African American literary history through the archive of Black writing and through the terms and forms these writers set forth.

African and African American Religions in the Early Americas

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Young
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
African Religion ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Generation ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter chronicles the relationship between African religious practices on the continent and African American religion in the plantation Americas in the era of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. A new generation of scholars who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s have demonstrated not only that African religious practices exhibit remarkable subtlety and complexity but also that these cultures have played significant roles in the subsequent development of religious practices throughout the world. Christianity, Islam, and traditional African religion comprised a set of broad and varied religious practices that contributed to the development of creative, subtle, and complex belief systems that circulated around the African Diaspora. In addition, this chapter addresses some of the vexed epistemological challenges related to discussing and describing non-Western ritual and religious practices.

Ideologies of English in Asia: an editorial

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (271) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Alexandra Grey ◽  
Loy Lising ◽  
Jinhyun Cho
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The West ◽  
Binary Structure ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Local Perspectives ◽  
East West

Abstract That English has spread in Asia is well-known, but this critical reflection, and the five contributions and book review that we hereby introduce, contribute to rectifying the relative absence in the sociology of language literature of studies approaching language ideologies and practices in specific Asian contexts from local perspectives. We are not alone; our inspections of journal archives show that scholars are increasingly responding to this relative absence in recent years. What this special issue offers is further diversity of both authors and cases, and moreover this special issue draws attention to the immutable, binary structure underlying the various globally-circulating discourses of the East and the West as part of investigating how socially constructed East-West binaries interact with language ideologies about English and other languages. It shifts the attention from fixity – East versus West – to diversity, extending East to Easts and West to Wests as our contributors identify and examine multiple, endogenous “imaginative geograph[ies]” (from Arif Dirlik’s [1996] “Chinese history and the question of Orientalism”, History and Theory 35(4): 97) constructed through various Orientalist ideologies. It founds this approach on a combination of the theory of recursive language ideologies and critical Orientalism scholarship. This is generative of new and useful sociolinguistic analyses. Having laid out this theoretical extension, this editorial then provides an overview of the issue’s contributions, which examine how socially constructed East-West binaries are interacting with language ideologies about English and other languages on sub-national scales in various Asian contexts including in Korea, China, Japan, Tajikistan and Pakistan.

Introduction to Looked Class, Talked Red by Barbara Harlow

Race & Class ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 32-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neville Hoad
Keyword(s):  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ruth First

The author remembers his friend and colleague Barbara Harlow and provides an introductory context for the selection from her book-in-progress on Ruth First published in this special issue of Race & Class 60, no. 3 (2019). He describes just how Ruth First became of interest to Harlow, explaining the intersections of Ruth First’s personal history as a public intellectual with the history of decolonisation and the anti-apartheid movement, and the intersection of a ‘public’ and ‘private’ or domestic life. He speculates as to why the project of over thirty years remained unfinished in terms of a final publication.

Special Issue on Knowledge and Information Discovery in New Generation Systems

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Radosław P. Katarzyniak ◽  
Ngoc Thanh Nguyen ◽  
Tzung-Pei Hong
Keyword(s):  
Information Discovery ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
New Generation

Socially constructing safety

2009 ◽  
Vol 62 (9) ◽  
pp. 1259-1266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Turner ◽  
Garry C. Gray
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Behavior ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Occupational Safety ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Organizational Conditions ◽  
Cultural Considerations ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Social Scientific

Social scientific perspectives on occupational safety largely characterize it as a disembodied, tangible, and easily quantifiable phenomenon. Recent research efforts have focused on exploring organizational conditions that predict occupational safety outcomes, resulting in top-down, often de-contextualized prescriptions about how to control safety in the workplace (e.g. ‘management should promote a culture of safety’). There is growing interest in how social processes of organizing, wider socio-cultural considerations, and the situated production of safety can contribute to the appreciation of the ‘lived experience’ of life and death at work. This Special Issue focuses on the socially constructed nature of occupational safety and the insight it provides in understanding broader social and organizational processes. In this article, we first describe how various social scientific disciplines share an interest in occupational safety and organizational behavior, yet rarely speak to another. We provide an overview of the five articles that comprise the Special Issue, and briefly highlight some ways forward for studying safety in organizations.

What Mathematics Education Might Learn from the Work of Well-Respected African American Mathematics Teachers in Urban Schools

2013 ◽  
Vol 115 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Chazan ◽  
Andrew Brantlinger ◽  
Lawrence M. Clark ◽  
Ann R. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Mathematics Education ◽  
Urban Schools ◽  
Mathematics Teachers ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
African American Student ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
African American Teachers

Background/Context This opening article, like the other articles in this special issue, is situated in scholarship that attempts to understand the racialized nature of mathematics education in the United States and to examine the racial identities of students and teachers in the context of school mathematics. It is designed to respond to the current (mathematics) education policy context that largely ignores teachers’ experiential and cultural knowledge while stressing the importance of teachers’ content knowledge and academic achievement. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This article presents theoretical perspectives and research questions concerning the knowledge and other resources that African American teachers bring to teaching mathematics, perspectives and questions that are taken up in the five subsequent articles in this special issue. Setting The cases developed in this special issue were developed from observations of the introductory algebra classes of, and interviews with, two well-respected African American teachers in one neighborhood high school in a large urban school district that serves a predominantly African American student population. Research Design This opening article frames two case study papers and two analysis papers that report on findings from a large-scale qualitative study of the racialized identity and instructional approaches of two of the six African American mathematics teachers studied in the Mid-Atlantic Center for Mathematics Teaching and Learning Algebra 1 Case Studies Project. Conclusions/Recommendations Together with the other articles in this special issue, this work contributes to the development of more sophisticated attempts to integrate understandings of race into the work of the mathematics education community. It challenges taken-for-granted notions of the knowledge base and resources needed to be an effective mathematics teacher of African American students in underresourced large urban schools.

Who’s Afraid of Post-Soul Satire?: Touré’s “Black Widow” Trilogy in The Portable Promised Land

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bertram D. Ashe
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Black Widow ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Racial Authenticity ◽  
Non Fiction

This chapter provides an analysis of Touré’s fiction in light of his later non-fiction Work that addresses racial authenticity. In Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, Touré explores the fluid definitions of blackness in contemporary African American culture. These definitions are read against his earlier fiction, where he portrays the varieties of blackness through the character of the Black Widow, through which he explores notions of racial authenticity.

Learning Is an All-Black Thing

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-90
Author(s):  
E. James West
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Black History ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Northwestern University ◽  
Black Revolution ◽  
Black World ◽  
Black Public Intellectual

This chapter situates Ebony’s evolving black history content within the broader struggle for black-centred education and the ‘Black Revolution’ on campus during the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, Ebony’s historical content presented a militant and, at times, heavily gendered interpretation of the African American past. On an individual level, Bennett’s developing relationship with organisations such as Northwestern University and the Institute of the Black World underscored the uniqueness of his role as Ebony’s in-house historian, and the complexity of his position as both a magazine editor and a black public intellectual.

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