Printed Religion, the Public Sphere, and the Disordering of the Union

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas P. Volkman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Chapter 4 reveals that the evangelical schisms in Missouri spurred a radical escalation of theological and political disputation between pro- and antislavery evangelicals in religious newspapers and other printed publications. This verbal sparring played a heretofore unexamined central role in spawning a vicious conflict between northern and southern evangelicals and partisans on the border with Kansas after 1854. To the extent that sectarian strife over the morality of African American bondage spurred armed strife in Missouri from the spring of 1854 through 1860, it played an important role in generating the larger sectional tensions that led to secession and the Civil War.

The Genteel Tradition and the Emergence of the African American Sonnet

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-38
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter traces the emergence of the sonnet in African American literature to the pervasive influence of genteel conventions. These conventions have widely been regarded as conservative or even stultifying, but they provided black poets with various opportunities for self-assertion in the public sphere. The sonnet was a favourite genre among the genteel establishment, and poets pushed the boundaries of black expression by appropriating the form to subvert racial stereotypes, develop a black poetic subjectivity, and participate in the debate over the memory of the Civil War. In tracing these developments, the chapter repositions the outstanding poets of the period, Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson, alongside their less-known contemporaries, Samuel Beadle, William Stanley Braithwaite, Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr., T. Thomas Fortune, and Henrietta Cordelia Ray.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Black Press ◽  
The Public ◽  
Introductory Section ◽  
African American Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere

This introductory section introduces the book’s major arguments and provides an overview of the history of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. The introduction also explores the theoretical conceptualization of the public sphere in relationship to African American life and the scholarship on pleasure and class in African American history. In laying out these terms, the introductory section of the book makes the case that they are useful categories of analysis for a deeper understanding of African American sexuality, pleasure, and the Black Press. Finally, the introduction features a discussion of the significance of the interwar period and its relationship to the history of African American sexuality in the Black Press.

Twerking and Cultural Appropriation: Miley Cyrus' Display of Racial Ignorance

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shereen Zink
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Miley Cyrus’ recent habit of twerking has sparked debate over whether the pop star is misappropriating African American culture; some even going so far as to accuse her of racism. This paper reviews the literature that exists in the public sphere on the topic, and delves into a scholarly analysis of Cyrus’ actions, statements, and the implications they have. My own post-analysis interpretation of the issue is addressed in the concluding paragraphs. Ultimately, twerking’s political context, and Cyrus’ lack of regard for said context, suggest that she is perpetuating harmful stereotypes about black women while her own white privilege allows her to maintain her integrity. Cyrus may not be intentionally exploiting black culture, but she is certainly communicating more than she may have bargained for.  

The Ethical Bind of Sentimentalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Greyser
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
African American Woman ◽  
American Woman ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sojourner Truth ◽  
The Public ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter maps intimacy in the public sphere and the alternately ethical and exploitative cross-racial bonds sentimentalists have cultivated. The chapter focuses on the challenges Sojourner Truth faced as an African American woman to occupy the position of a civic emoter who channels the nation’s feelings. The chapter examines the writing and editing of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850, 1875, 1884), a process that involved deeply felt and vexed relations between Truth and her white editors that continued through the text’s publication, as well as white women’s sympathy and emotional impositions in the text’s reception into the twenty-first century. Truth models sentimentalism’s ethical capacities, refusing victimization as she expresses compassion toward her former master. Much of her white audience failed to recognize her rhetorical power, yet Truth insisted on taking up space without apology, living out much of her life in her home in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Representations of Wales and the Welsh during the civil wars and Interregnum

2004 ◽  
Vol 77 (197) ◽  
pp. 358-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lloyd Bowen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
The Public ◽  
Charles I ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
High Politics

Abstract This article examines how Wales and the Welsh were represented in the pamphlet literature of the civil war and early Interregnum. It considers the historical construction of the Welsh image in English minds, and traces how this image came to be politicized by Welsh support for Charles I during the sixteen-forties. An examination of the public controversies surrounding the state-sponsored evangelization programme in Wales during the early sixteen-fifties shows how the contested image of Wales in the public sphere interacted with high politics at the centre. This study contributes to our understanding of the interplay between ethnicity, identity and politics during the sixteen-forties and fifties, and demonstrates how imagery and representation informed political discourse in the mid seventeenth century.

scholarly journals Taking Modernity's Wager: Tocqueville, Social Capital, and the American Civil War

2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-618
Author(s):  
Johann N. Neem
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Bonding Social Capital ◽  
The Public ◽  
Bridging Social Capital ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
American Society

Alexis de Tocqueville watched with horror as American society and politics changed in the two decades following the publication of Democracy in America. During the 1840s and 1850s, the factors that Tocqueville had earlier identified as sustaining the republic—its land and location, its laws, and its mores—had begun to undermine it. Recent work on civil society, the public sphere, and social capital is congruent with a Tocquevillian analysis of the causes of the Civil War. The associational networks that had once functioned as bridging social capital fractured under the stress of slavery, becoming sources of divisive regional, bonding social capital.

scholarly journals In Search of Bernabé: Politicized Motherhood

2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-47
Author(s):  
Fatima Mujicinovic
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Opposition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Individual Strategies

Connecting its storyline to the historical context of the civil war in El Salvador, this US Latina text dramatizes dehumanizing effects of political violence on individual and collective being. With an emphasis on the dialectical connection between the personal and the social, the novel focuses on individual strategies of survival and resistance in conditions of authoritarianism in order to suggest new forms of political opposition and liberation. Its narrative reveals subversive and empowering aspects of the intimate, as the discourse of motherhood and religiosity reclaims its place in the public sphere and takes a direct stance against violence and oppression.

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