The Techniques of Disavowal

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-191
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
The Public ◽  
The One

This chapter considers the limitations of civil rights disobedience in transforming white citizens. Building on the work of James Baldwin, Charles Mills, and Elizabeth Spelman and chronicling a “failed” protest at the 1964 World’s Fair, this chapter attends to the discursive techniques of disavowal that white citizens and state officials used to dismiss black activism as inappropriate, irresponsible, gratuitous, and violent—thereby avoiding the claims such protest made upon them, while preserving their own innocence and moral standing. In stepping outside the South and the familiar set of events that make up the public memory of the “short” civil rights movement, this chapter also suggests that some aspects of campaigns like the one in Birmingham were enabled—and publicly legitimated—by the very techniques of disavowal that limited the movement’s radical potentialities.

scholarly journals Baldwin This Time

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-128
Author(s):  
Bill V. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Third World ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The South ◽  
Psychological Vulnerability ◽  
In Fire ◽  
The U.S

This excerpt from James Baldwin: Living in Fire details a key juncture in Baldwin’s life, 1957–59, when he was transformed by a visit to the South to write about the civil rights movement while grappling with the meaning of the Algerian Revolution. The excerpt shows Baldwin understanding black and Arab liberation struggles as simultaneous and parallel moments in the rise of Third World, anti-colonial and anti-racist U.S. politics. It also shows Baldwin’s emotional and psychological vulnerability to repressive state violence experienced by black and Arab citizens in the U.S., France, and Algiers.

scholarly journals “So sensual, so languid, and so private”: James Baldwin’s American South

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-29
Author(s):  
Jeff Fallis
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American South ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The South ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Essential Question ◽  
The American South ◽  
Legal Fact

James Baldwin has frequently been written about in terms of his relationship to geographical locations such as Harlem, Paris, St. Paul-de-Vence, Istanbul, and “the transatlantic,” but his longstanding connection to the American South, a region that served as a vexed and ambiguous spiritual battleground for him throughout his life and career, has been little discussed, even though Baldwin referred to himself as “in all but no technical legal fact, a Southerner.” This article argues that the South has been seriously underconsidered as a major factor in Baldwin’s psyche and career and that were it not for the challenge to witness the Southern Civil Rights movement made to Baldwin in the late 1950s, he might never have left Paris and become the writer and thinker into which he developed. It closely examines Baldwin’s fictional and nonfictional engagements with the American South during two distinct periods of his career, from his first visit to the region in 1957 through the watershed year of 1963, and from 1963 through the publication of Baldwin’s retrospective memoir No Name in the Street in 1972, and it charts Baldwin’s complex and often contradictory negotiations with the construction of identity in white and black Southerners and the South’s tendency to deny and censor its historical legacy of racial violence. A few years before his death, Baldwin wrote that “[t]he spirit of the South is the spirit of America,” and this essay investigates how the essential question he asked about the region—whether it’s a bellwether for America’s moral redemption or moral decline—remains a dangerous and open one.

James Baldwin

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American History ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
First Century ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Twenty First Century

The book is devoted to the works of James Baldwin, one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. The authors examine his most important contributions – including novels, essays, short stories, poetry, and media appearances – in the wider context of American history. They demonstrate the lasting importance of his oeuvre, which was central to the Civil Rights Movement and continues to be relevant at the dawn of the twenty-first century and the Black Lives Matter era.

The Surgical Elimination of Violence? Conflicting Attitudes towards Technology and Science during the Psychosurgery Controversy of the 1970s

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian P. Casey
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Violent Behavior ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
Public Controversy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Community Activists ◽  
Attitudes Towards Technology ◽  
Brain Operations ◽  
The One ◽  
Psychiatric Establishment

ArgumentIn the 1970s a public controversy erupted over the proposed use of brain operations to curtail violent behavior. Civil libertarians, civil rights and community activists, leaders of the anti-psychiatry movement, and some U.S. Congressmen charged psychosurgeons and the National Institute of Mental Health, with furthering a political project: the suppression of dissent. Several government-sponsored investigations into psychosurgery rebutted this charge and led to an official qualified endorsement of the practice while calling attention to the need for more “scientific” understanding and better ethical safeguards. This paper argues that the psychosurgery debate of the 1970s was more than a power struggle between members of the public and the psychiatric establishment. The debate represented a clash between a postmodern skepticism about science and renewed focus on ultimate ends, on the one hand, and a modern faith in standards and procedures, a preoccupation with means, on the other. These diverging commitments made the dispute ultimately irresolvable.

The American South

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
American South ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
The American South

The American South: A Very Short Introduction explores the American South, a distinctive place with a dramatic history. It is a cultural crossroads, where Western Europe met West Africa in a colonial slave society. The Civil War and civil rights movement transformed the South and remain a part of a vibrant and contested public memory. Moreover, the South's pronounced traditionalism in customs and values have always contended with the forces of modernization and the continuing challenges of racial tension. This VSI looks at Southerners' diverse creative responses to these experiences, in literature, film, music, and cuisine, which have had worldwide influence.

Pedagogies of Protest: African American Teachers and the History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1940–1963

2011 ◽  
Vol 113 (12) ◽  
pp. 2777-2803 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Baker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Teachers ◽  
Black Educators ◽  
The South ◽  
Student Protest ◽  
African American Teachers ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
Extracurricular Programs

Background/Context Although the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement marginalizes the role of black educators, revisionist scholars have shown that a significant number of black teachers encouraged student protest and activism. There has, however, been little analysis of the work of black teachers inside segregated schools in the South. Purpose/Objective This study examines the courses that Southern African American teachers taught, the pedagogies they practiced, and the extracurricular programs they organized. Using Charleston's Burke Industrial School as a lens to illuminate pedagogies of protest that were practiced by activist educators in the South, this study explores how leading black educators created spaces within segregated schools where they bred dissatisfaction with white supremacy. Research Design This historical analysis draws upon archival sources, school board minutes, school newspapers and yearbooks, oral testimony, and autobiographies. Conclusions/Recommendations In Charleston, as elsewhere in the South, activist African American teachers made crucial contributions to the civil rights movement. Fusing an activist version of the African American uplift philosophy with John Dewey's democratic conception of progressive education, exemplary teachers created academic and extracurricular programs that encouraged student protest. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, students acted on lessons taught in classes and extracurricular clubs, organizing and leading strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations. The pedagogies that leading African American educators practiced, the aspirations they nurtured, and the student activism they encouraged helped make the civil rights movement possible.

Conclusion: The Long Stride Toward Freedom1

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kyle Day
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American History ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
The South ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
Martin Luther King

The conclusion assesses the long term implications of the Southern Manifesto for both the course of the Civil Rights Movement as well as the larger racial dynamic s of Postwar America. Under the circumspect rhetoric of moderation, the Southern Manifesto undermined the efforts of civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to desegregate the South, and empowered southern officials to ignore the Brown decision for years. This conclusion thus places the Southern Manifesto in proper historical perspective and provides a summary of the implications of this event, the greatest episode of antagonistic racial demagoguery in modern American History.

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