Unruly Bodies

Author(s):  
Randolph Hohle

This chapter outlines a methodological approach to studying the body and embodiment in political and historical sociology. The advantage of incorporating the body into the study of political and historical sociology is that it captures how the body exerts causal effects on political outcomes. In particular, it will show how embodiment explains (1) the importance of affect on the formation of political knowledge, (2) how bodies produce meanings independent of their original construct and persist after the social group dissolves, and (3) a specific connection point between mobilization and the state response to the social movement. To illustrate, this chapter shows how the racially threatening embodied performance was both vital to the Black Panther Party’s success and served as the focal point for elite white and state actors to mobilize against racial equality in the post–civil rights era.

Author(s):  
Michele Elam

The afterword argues that so-called neo-passing narratives distinctively highlight the performative dimension to racial formation and are, moreover, particularly attentive to the social and political consequences of race. This essay argues that the desire for passing to be a phenomenon of the past can be problematic in that it wills away the social insights afforded by cultural and literary narratives of passing in the post–Civil Rights era.


2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyrone A. Forman ◽  
Amanda E. Lewis

During the crisis that followed Hurricane Katrina, many Americans expressed surprise at the dramatic levels of racial inequality captured in the images of large numbers of poor Black people left behind in devastated New Orleans. In this article we argue that, to better understand both the parameters of contemporary racial inequality reflected in the hurricane's aftermath and why so many were surprised about the social realities of racial inequality that social scientists have known about for decades, it is essential to recognize the shifting nature of Whites' racial attitudes and understandings. There is widespread evidence that in the post-civil rights era the expression of White racial prejudice has changed. In fact, during the post-civil rights era subtle and indirect forms of prejudice have become more central to the sustenance and perpetuation of racial inequality than are overt forms of prejudice. We draw on both survey and qualitative data to investigate current manifestations of White racial attitudes and prejudices. Our results indicate that racial apathy, indifference towards racial and ethnic inequality, is a relatively new but expanding form of racial prejudice. We further show that Whites' systematic “not knowing” about racial inequality (White ignorance), which was manifest in the reaction to the crises after Hurricane Katrina, is related to this racial indifference. Racial apathy and White ignorance (i.e., not caring and not knowing) are extensions of hegemonic color-blind discourses (i.e., not seeing race). These phenomena serve as pillars of contemporary racial inequality that have until now received little attention. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and the practical implications of our results for understanding racial dynamics in the post-Katrina United States.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Afifah Indriani ◽  
Delvi Wahyuni

This thesis is an analysis of a novel written by Nic Stone entitled Dear Martin (2017). It explores the issue of institutional racism in the post-civil rights era. The concept of systemic racism by Joe R.Feagin is employed to analyze this novel. This analysis focuses on four issues of systemic racism as seen through several African-American characters. This analysis also depends on the narrator to determine which parts of the novel are used as the data. The result of the study shows that African-American characters experience four forms of institutional racism which are The White Racial Frame and Its Embedded Racist Ideology, Alienated Social Relations, Racial Hierarchy with Divergent Group Interest, and Related Racial Domination: Discrimination in Many Aspects. In conclusion, in this post-civil rights movement era, African-Americans still face institutional racism.


Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone

This chapter analyzes representations of Hurricane Katrina in African American literature to argue that the storm served to illustrate the entrenchment of structural racism and the importance of a specifically racialized tradition in African American literature. Adopting the theoretical framework of “slow violence,” the chapter analyzes two novels which depict both the storm and its aftermath: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and Kiese Laymon’sLong Division (2013). In the context of the early twenty-first century, these representations of Katrina do not displace the social advancements of African Americans but instead force recognition of the incompleteness not only of specific political battles but also of ongoing race, gender, and class-based narratives, thereby questioning the optimism of a rhetoric of post-Blackness. In particular, the novels establish continuity between Civil Rights Era traumas and struggles and Hurricane Katrina to push against a rhetoric focused on the transcendence of the past.


Author(s):  
Courtney R. Baker

This chapter discusses the visual culture of 1970s Black America, focusing especially on popular culture artifacts such as film, television, and comics, to make sense of the idea of movement in the postsegregationist United States. It attends to the representation of black people in various locations—from the inner city to the suburbs to a historical memory of the plantation slavery, the middle passage, and an African motherland—in visual forms, including Afrocentrist iconography, photography, and fine art. By attending to popular images, an important if not fuller picture of Black visual politics during the post-civil rights era becomes apparent.


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