Sonidos Negros

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Meira Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Federico Garcia Lorca ◽  
Creole Identity

How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? Sonidos Negros traces how, between 1492—when Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula coincided with Christopher Columbus’s landing on Hispaniola—and 1933—when Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca published his “Theory and Play of the Duende”—the vanquished Moor became Black; and how the imagined Gitano (“Gypsy,” or Roma) embodies the warring images and sounds of this process. By the nineteenth-century nadir of its colonial reach, Spanish identity was paradoxically enacted in terms of a minstrelized Gitano, a hybrid of Spanish and American representations of Blackness. Flamenco’s imagined Gypsy, teetering between ostentatious ignorance and the humility of epiphany, references an earlier trope: the pastor bobo (foolish shepherd), who, seeing an angelic apparition, must decide whether to accept the light of Christ—or remain in darkness. Spain’s symbolic linkage of this religious peril with the Blackness of abjection scripts the evangelical narrative which defeated the Moors and enslaved the Americas. The bobo’s confusion, appealingly comic but holding the pathos of the ultimate stakes of his decision—heaven or hell, safety or extermination—bares a teeming view of the embodied politics of colonial exploitation and creole identity formation. Flamenco’s Sonidos Negros live in this precarious balance, amid the purposeful ruckus cloaking danced resistance, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by slavery and colonization.

Who Was This Man?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

Scotch-Irish Identity and Attitudes to Home Rule

2018 ◽  
pp. 87-134
Author(s):  
Lindsey Flewelling
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Ethnic Organizations ◽  
Irish Identity ◽  
Ethnic Heritage

This chapter surveys the immigration and identity formation of the Scotch-Irish in America during the nineteenth century. Two ethnic organizations, the Scotch-Irish Society of America and the Loyal Orange Institution of the United States, are analysed as windows to Scotch-Irish ties back to Ireland the involvement in the unionist cause. The chapter explores the ways in which the Scotch-Irish responded to Irish-American calls for Home Rule and independence, attempted to support the unionists, and remained connected to Ireland. The Scotch-Irish were influenced by and remained interested in conditions in Ireland. In addition, the Ulster Scots themselves were affected by the actions and legacy of the Scotch-Irish. They used Scotch-Irish ethnic heritage to help form their own “Ulsterman” identity, which was in turn utilized to unify the unionist movement.

Nationals and Liberals, 1904/1906

2020 ◽  
pp. 201-226
Author(s):  
Chelsea Stieber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
New Approaches

This chapter traces the continued civil war in Haiti that manifested itself along these newly formed post-1869 divides: between Liberals and Nationals in politics, divergent approaches to education and cultural policy, and new approaches to commemorating Haiti’s foundational 1804/1806 division at the turn of the new century. Yet these new divides are not invented out of whole cloth: they draw heavily upon Haitian history while responding to ever-changing Atlantic currents of thought. That is, the post-1869 divides are marked by both the divides that shaped Haiti’s first fifty years of civil war and the ideological debates that marked the nineteenth-century Atlantic world—specifically, France’s Third Republican debates on nationhood and imperial republicanism and the rise of a new US hemispheric imperialism at the turn of the century. Thus, the divides between government forms that had driven the first fifty years of Haitian civil war gave way to a new set of factions that reactivated and adapted these earlier divisions.

Reading, Reception, and Elite Education

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-40
Author(s):  
Laura Eastlake
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Elite Education ◽  
Latin Language

This chapter examines representations of identity formation in boys through acts of reading and particularly through acts of learning to grapple with the Latin language. This relationship between manhood and reading is evidenced in both the content and the semantic structures of schoolboy fiction. For Tom Brown, Eric, and Stalky—each of whom attend a different calibre or type of Victorian school—Latin is both the process through which boys become men and the designator of that manliness, with senior male figures like Thomas Arnold often being constructed as Caesar-like figures at the top of an ascending scale of maturity and seniority. Rome is often presented as both the maker and the marker of elite Victorian manliness in both its physical and intellectual varieties. Yet this chapter is also interested in changes and challenges to the classical curriculum in the nineteenth century as competing styles of masculinity emerged in the form of the captains of industry and science.

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