The Monstropolous Beast

2018 ◽  
pp. 141-170
Author(s):  
Catherine Keyser
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Food Industry ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Critical Race Studies ◽  
Race Studies ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Dorothy West

In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and The Living Is Easy (1948), Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West use the backdrop of agribusiness and fruit imports respectively to dramatize the precarity of black bodies within global capitalism. Their novels feature black male characters who have come to believe in the opportunities the food industry extends them, only to be sorely disappointed and in some cases utterly destroyed. In this way, Hurston and West suggest the racist limits of the category of Man. At the same time that they debunk this ideal subject, Hurston and West use figurative language to connect black bodies with animals and fruit. As scholars of critical race studies have shown, animacy hierarchies, the ranking of bodies according to their relative liveness, frequently subtend pejorative forms of racialization. Instead, Hurston and West overturn these hierarchies, pursue ecological enmeshment, and celebrate black women, queerness, and corporeality.

scholarly journals Antidiscrimination Meets Integration Policies: Exploring New Diversity-Related Challenges in Europe

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 221
Author(s):  
Tina Magazzini
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Studies ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Race Studies ◽  
Managing Diversity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Migrant Integration ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Racial Ethnic

Contemporary European societies are increasingly diverse. Migration both within and to Europe has contributed over the past decades to the rise of new religious, racial, ethnic, social, cultural and economic inequality. Such transformations have raised questions about the (multi-level) governance of diversity in Europe, thus determining new challenges for both scholars and policy-makers. Whilst the debate around diversity stemming from migration has become a major topic in urban studies, political science and sociology in Europe, Critical Race Studies and Intersectionality have become central in US approaches to understanding inequality and social injustice. Among the fields where ‘managing diversity’ has become particularly pressing, methodological issues on how to best approach minorities that suffer from multiple discrimination represent some of the hottest subjects of concern. Stemming from the interest in putting into dialogue the existing American scholarship on CRT and anti-discrimination with the European focus on migrant integration, this paper explores the issue of integration in relation to intersectionality by merging the two frames. In doing so, it provides some observations about the complementarity of a racial justice approach for facing the new diversity-related challenges in European polity. In particular, it illustrates how Critical Race Studies can contribute to the analysis of inequality in Europe while drawing on the integration literature.

Customer Service Representatives

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-571
Author(s):  
Julian Kevon Glover
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Transgender Women ◽  
Average Life Expectancy ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Murder Rate ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Customer Service Representatives

This article investigates sex work among Black transgender women in Chicago’s ballroom scene, drawing on ethnographic data to argue that Black transwomen engage in sex work as a practice of self-investment undergirded by an epistemological shift regarding the centrality of affective labor to their work. In so doing, interlocutors reap the benefits of deploying embodied knowledge—the harnessing and transformation of insight derived from lived experiences of racial, gender, and sexual subjection into useful strategies, tactics, and tools—to secure material and human resources necessary for survival. A focus on how Black transwomen live, despite continued physical, spiritual, socioeconomic, political, and cultural annihilation, remains critically important given the myriad indicators (low average life expectancy, low annual income, disproportionally high murder rate, etc.) that expose the world’s indifference to the plight of this community and Black bodies writ large. Further, the author places interlocutors in conversation with Black feminist historians’ and theorists’ discussions of sex work among Black women to expose points of convergence between Black cis- and transgender women. The author also complicates narratives that link sex work to “survival” and subsequently obfuscate explorations of limited and situated agency among Black women that have significant historical precedent.

West of Jim Crow

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn M. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
White Schools ◽  
Black Bodies

This book follows California’s history of segregation from statehood to the beginning of the long civil rights movement, arguing that the state innovated methods to control and contain African Americans and other people of color. While celebrated in popular discourse for its forward-thinking culture, politics, and science, California also pioneered new ways to keep citizenship white. Schools, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, parks, beaches, and pools were places of contestation where the presence of black bodies elicited forceful responses from segregationists. Black Californians employed innovative measures to dismantle segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they borrowed some tactics from race rebels in the South, others they improvised. West of Jim Crow uses California to highlight the significance of African American resistance to racial restrictions in places often deemed marginal to mainstream civil rights histories. Examining segregation in the state sheds light on the primacy of gender and sexuality in the minds of segregationists and the significance of black women, black bodies, and racial science, in the years preceding the modern civil rights struggle. California has much to teach us about the lives of African Americans who crossed the color line and the variety of tactics and strategies employed by freedom fighters across the United States.

scholarly journals Birthing a New World

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-63
Author(s):  
Marquita R. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Male ◽  
New World ◽  
Black Nationalism ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
Social Death ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
The Face

This essay analyzes how James Baldwin’s late novel If Beale Street Could Talk represents Black women’s care work in the face of social death as an example of how Black women act as surrogates for Black liberation giving birth to a new world and possibilities of freedom for Black (male) people. Within the politics of Black nationalism, Black women were affective workers playing a vital role in the (re)creation of heteronormative family structures that formed the basis of Black liberation cohered by a belief in the power of patriarchy to make way for communal freedom. This essay demonstrates how Beale Street’s imagining of freedom centers not on what Black women do to support themselves or each other, but on the needs of the community at large, with embodied sacrifice as a presumed condition of such liberation.

Black British drama, losses and gains: the case of Shoot the Messenger

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarita Malik
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Linear Form ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Black Representation ◽  
Black British ◽  
British Drama ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
The One

This chapter contributes to the debates around television drama and black representation that are presented in this book collection. It focuses on Shoot the Messenger (STM) (BBC2, 2006), which was heavily promoted by the BBC as a ‘bold’ and ‘thought-provoking’ television drama. The one-off ninety-minute BBC Drama production focuses on the psychological journey of a Black schoolteacher, Joe Pascale (portrayed by David Oyelowo), accused of assaulting a Black male pupil. This chapter discusses how stylistically, STM’s non-realist techniques, non-linear form and overt constructedness depart from the traditional modes of social realism that have prevailed in Black British television drama. Moreover, it breaks with British television drama traditions in terms of production, having an almost totally Black cast and written and produced by two Black women: Sharon Foster and Ngozi Onwurah respectively.

Food for the body and soul: Veganism, righteous male bodies, and culinary redemption in the Kingdom of Yah

Ethnography ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146613812091018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fran Markowitz ◽  
Nir Avieli
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Black Male ◽  
The Body ◽  
Vegan Diet ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Social Justice Movements ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
Justice Movements

This article grapples with the unlikely combination of veganism, righteous black bodies, and servitude as expressed in the “divine holistic culture” of the African Hebrew Israelite Community (AHIC). Based on our ethnography of how the Community re-scripts strong, virile black male bodies from rough brutes to responsible and righteous patriarchs, we show how the Hebrew Israelites’ vegan diet undergirds their Biblically based culture and fuels their salvation project. We propose the term “culinary redemption” to encapsulate the dramatic shift made by the AHIC from a theology based on salvation in the afterlife to a restorative cosmology in the here and now, and suggest that the food and foodways of other subaltern groups also provide powerful material for initiating social justice movements and religious change.

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