Conceptions of Agency in Social Movement Scholarship: Mack on African American Civil Rights Lawyers

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (02) ◽  
pp. 522-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan D. Carle
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Professional Role ◽  
Identity Performance ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
New Generation ◽  
African American Civil Rights

This essay examines the theory of individual agency that propels the central thesis in Kenneth Mack's Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (2012)—namely, that an important yet understudied means by which African American civil rights lawyers changed conceptions of race through their work was through their very performance of the professional role of lawyer. Mack shows that this performance was inevitably fraught with tension and contradiction because African American lawyers were called upon to act both as exemplary representatives of their race and as performers of a professional role that traditionally had been reserved for whites only. Mack focuses especially on the tensions of this role in courtrooms, where African American lawyers were necessarily called upon to act as the equals of white judges, opposing counsel, and witnesses. Mack's thesis, focused on the contradictions and tensions embodied in the performance of a racially loaded identity, reflects the influence of postmodern identity performance theory as articulated by Judith Butler and others. Mack and others belong to a new generation of civil rights history scholars who are asking new questions about contested identities related to race, gender, sexuality, and class. This essay offers an evaluation of this new direction for civil rights scholarship, focusing especially on its implicit normative orientation and what it contributes to the decade‐old debate over how to conceive of agency in social movement scholarship.

scholarly journals The Violence of Nonviolence: Contextualizing the Movements of King and Gandhi

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Mileski
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
African American Civil Rights

King and Gandhi: two names that have come to be synonymous with nonviolence. And yet, the movements they led responded to and, in some cases with, significant violence. In a recent paper (2016), August H. Nimtz analyzes the role of violence in the movement of Dr. King, concluding that violence played a significant role in the success of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. Using Nimtz’s work as a starting point, this paper analyzes King’s movement and views, comparing definitions of “principled nonviolence” versus “pragmatic nonviolence.” From there, this paper analyzes the role of violence in the struggle for Indian independence from British colonialism and Gandhi’s own views on when, if ever, violence is appropriate. This paper concludes that, indeed, violence—that of sanctioned, state-sponsored violence and that of non-sanctioned actors—has had significant roles in both of these movements. In what way, then, could these movements be said to be nonviolent? Finally, this paper asks why there remains such an impetus to identify these movements, and their leaders, with “principled nonviolence.”

“I Know I Can’t Change the Future, But I Can Change the Past”: Toni Morrison, Robin Coste Lewis, and the Classical Tradition

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-356
Author(s):  
Grace McGowan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Generation

Abstract “A central figure in transnational intellectual history” (Roynon, 2013), Toni Morrison’s oeuvre has helped deconstruct the triangulated relationship between a European Graeco-Roman classical tradition, Africa, and America. Morrison’s deconstruction of the classical past and its aesthetics have laid the foundation for the reconstructive work of a new generation of writers, including Robin Coste Lewis. Both writers renegotiate and reclaim a classical aesthetic by recovering its African roots and situating it in an African American context. In addition, the article (1) examines the role of a classical aesthetic in beauty discourse and Robin Coste Lewis’s re-vision of the black female body and (2) addresses what this means for canonicity, linking Lewis’s ambivalence about reclaiming a classical aesthetic to Morrison’s ambivalence in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” (1987).

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