Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple Tap Past Jim Crow

2016 ◽  
pp. 730-748
Author(s):  
Ann Murphy
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Tap Dance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Old Men

During the Great Depression, Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple made a number of films together in which narratives depict an America where African Americans are happy slaves or docile servants, Civil War (even southern) soldiers are noble Americans, and voracious capitalists are kindly old men. But within these minstrel tropes and origin stories designed for uplift, the films challenge regressive ideologies through the incendiary dance partnership of Robinson and Temple. Studying the Stair Dance in The Little Colonel, this chapter argues that their screendance interludes complexly shift and manipulate our perspective: while the tap dance is part of the story, it is bracketed as a time outside the movie’s narrative flow. This thrusts the dance through the fixity of Jim Crow social constructs to reveal them as constructs, demonstrating the layered and molten nature of race and gender, and offering moviegoers a vision of the sociological and existential structures of US society reimagined.

3. Tradition and modernization

2020 ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Holy War ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Great Depression

‘Tradition and modernisation’ details how, after the American Civil War, white southern ideologists minimized slavery’s importance as a cause of the war. The religion of the Lost Cause invested enormous spiritual significance to a cause portrayed as a holy war against northern atheism. The Lost Cause movement had solidified in the last decade of the nineteenth century at the same time new laws excluded African Americans from any political role in the South and segregated them into inferior schools and other public places. Jim Crow became the name for the southern system of racial segregation. The Progressive era, the Great Depression, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal are all important landmarks for this period.

The Great Depression and World War II

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Morris
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Major Elements ◽  
World War ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Social Security Act ◽  
Employment Programs ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Franklin Roosevelt

Although many American communities had erected an impressive array of charitable institutions by the 1920s, they crumbled under the unemployment and poverty generated by the Great Depression. President Franklin Roosevelt, elected in 1932, set aside the concerns of his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, about the dangers of federally provided relief, and presided over the creation of emergency public relief and employment programs as part of the New Deal. With the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, Roosevelt and his Congressional allies established a permanent basis for a federal role in social welfare provision. The benefits of these programs were substantial, but they were sharply influenced by the race and gender of their recipients. Hopes for more robust federal programs were dispelled by the economic recovery associated with World War Two. Instead, the war saw the expansion of private, workplace-based benefits destined to be major elements of postwar social provision.

Race and Gender

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Temin
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Latino Immigrants ◽  
Dual Economy ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

Racism, or racecraft, began when African slaves first were brought to America. Slaves were not included in “all men” who were created equal, and the Civil War did not make African Americans equal citizens. Jim Crow laws and actions prevented them from voting and getting a decent education until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The backlash from this movement led to a dual economy. Women also were not full citizens until the 20th century, and their right to full equality is still being contested. Latino immigrants more recently have entered racecraft on a par with blacks, as in pejorative statements about black and brown people.

scholarly journals Vocal Performance Through Electrical Flows: Making Current Kin

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-409
Author(s):  
Gretchen Jude
Keyword(s):  
Performance Practice ◽  
Vocal Performance ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Human Voice ◽  
Human World ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Human Embodiment ◽  
Audio Media

What do we hear in a human voice that vibrates through electrical flows? In this paper I argue for listening (and vocalizing) beyond the human in performances with audio media. I propose understanding such performance practice as engaging with what I call plasmatic voice, a phenomenon distinct from the merely additive, prosthetic conception of voice + electricity. Instead, plasmatic voice functions as instances of queer assemblage stretching to reach the radically Other that constitutes ourselves—facilitating the sense of what Alaimo (2010) terms transcorporeality, an understanding of human embodiment as “intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (2). The vibrations of plasmatic voice—as an example of Eidsheim’s (2015) intermaterial vibrational practice—loosen (post)human social constructs of race and gender and reverberate with nonhuman ecosystems, as I illustrate through analysis of musical examples.

Sally Haslanger and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the Possibility of Metaphysics of Resistance and its Implications for Postcolonial Feminist Theologizing

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-146
Author(s):  
Jeane C. Peracullo
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Asian Women ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Social Theorist ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Postcolonial Feminist ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

In Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, contemporary feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger claims that the reality of race and gender (both social constructs) is built on unjust social structures and must be resisted. Meanwhile, contemporary social theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak extends the term ‘subaltern’ to Third World Asian women who were rendered inarticulate by centuries of oppressive masculinist, imperialist, and colonial rule. This article examines how a metaphysics of resistance, culled from philosophy and postcolonial studies, can contribute to expanding postcolonial feminist theologizing.

On Gender, Labor, and Inequality

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Milkman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
Women's Labor ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

The author's groundbreaking research in women's labor history has contributed important perspectives on work and unionism in the United States. This book presents four decades of the author's essential writings, tracing the parallel evolutions of her ideas and the field she helped define. The book's introduction frames a career-spanning scholarly project: the interrogation of historical and contemporary intersections of class and gender inequalities in the workplace, and the efforts to challenge those inequalities. Early chapters focus on the author's pioneering work on women's labor during the Great Depression and the World War II years. The book's second half turns to the past fifty years, a period that saw a dramatic decline in gender inequality even as growing class imbalances created greater-than-ever class disparity among women. The book concludes with a previously unpublished essay comparing the impact of the Great Depression and the Great Recession on women workers.

Autobiographical narrative

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nahla Nadeem
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Collective Levels ◽  
Identity Model ◽  
Female Slave ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Close Investigation ◽  
Autobiographical Narrative

Autobiographical narrative is “a selective reconstruction of the ruminative past” and an account that serves to explain, for the self and others, how the person came to be whom s/he is at present (McAdams, 2011) and thus can provide a rich source of data for sociolinguistic analysis and a speculation in the studies of identity construction processes and narrative combined. The present paper aims to investigate how narrators — through the subtle exploitation of tense patterns manage to reflect an integrated vision of their identity and evaluate these identity construction processes. To do this, I will a) develop a model of identity construction and evaluation processes in autobiographical narrative that is based upon the writings of McAdams (1985 & 2011) and Luyckx et al. (2011)’s identity model; b) closely examine how narrators subtly use tense patterns to combine the acts of narrative with moments of reflection and finally, c) relate these linguistic features of autobiographical narrative to the process of identity construction and evaluation. For this purpose, I use as data two speeches by two females each representing a different socio-cultural background: an ex-female slave from pre-civil war America and a Lebanese author in which both reflect upon their ruminative past and how they became who they are at present. The model and the analysis give empirical evidence that a close investigation of tense patterns in autobiographical narratives is an effective analytical and explanatory tool that shows how narrators reflect their evolving self, display, and evaluate identity on its individual, relational and collective levels and make a stance on social constructs such as race and gender.

The Effects of Visible Customer Characteristics on Servers’ Perceptions of Tipping: Potential Threats to Service Interactions

2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 400-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Jeehyae Kim ◽  
Gumkwang Bae ◽  
Dae-Young Kim
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Main Effect ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Service Interactions

This study examined the effects of customer race (i.e., Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, and Asian), gender (i.e., female and male), and attire (i.e., business and casual) on servers’ tip expectations and service intentions. The results indicate that customers in business attire are perceived as better tippers and targeted for better treatment than customers in casual attire. However, this main effect of attire was qualified by significant interactions with race and gender. The positive effects of business (vs. casual) attire were greater for African Americans than for Caucasians and for males than for females. The implications of these findings for the training and monitoring of restaurant servers are discussed.

Confronting Racism and Sexism to Improve Men’s Health

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrie M. Treadwell ◽  
Mary E. Northridge ◽  
Traci N. Bethea
Keyword(s):  
Healing Process ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Men’S Health ◽  
Men's Health ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Extended Families ◽  
Men Of Color ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Health And Well Being

Two fundamental determinants of men’s health are confronted—racism and sexism—that the authors believe underlie many of the health disparities documented between women and men and place men of color at particular disadvantage in U.S. society. In doing so, the authors contend that race and gender, as well as racism and sexism, are social constructs and, therefore, amenable to change. They hope to allay concerns that gains in the health of men will come at the expense of continued advances in the health of women. Instead, by better understanding how the harsh intersections of racism and sexism have contorted roles for men of color and damaged their social ties, a healing process in intimate relationships, extended families, and entire communities may be fostered. Only by reforming historical injustices and reuniting men with their partners, families, and communities will sustained improvements in their health and well-being be realized.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document