An American Dream: The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China. Adams, Della, and Lewis H. Carlson, eds

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Dream ◽  
American Soldier ◽  
Communist China

Dream Denied

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Soyer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Dream ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Offending Trajectories ◽  
Minority Men

A Dream Denied: Incarceration, Recidivism, and Young Minority Men in America shows how the narrative of American dream shapes the offending trajectories of twenty-three young Latino and African American men in Boston and Chicago. Believing in the American dream helps the teenagers cope with the pains of incarceration. However, without the ability to experience themselves as creative actors, reproducing the rhetoric of American meritocracy leaves the teenagers unprepared to negotiate the complex and frustrating process of desistance and reentry.

African American Dreams

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan W. White
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Free African Americans

The experience of slavery had an indelible effect on the dreams of black Americans. Some slaves dreamt of escape, or of loved ones who had been sold away. Former slaves sometimes had vivid dreams of being returned into slavery. Whether slave or free, African Americans often looked to their dreams as signs from God or as confirmation of their conversion to Christianity. White Americans tended to look down on African American dream practices as superstitious, but in fact, white and black Americans had a shared dream culture that stretched back into the colonial era.

“One for Whom Bread—Food—Is Not Enough”: Beneatha Younger, Uplift Ideology, and Intellectual Freedom

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Bunch Davis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
American Dream ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Intellectual Freedom ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Alternative Mode ◽  
The Core ◽  
It Impacts

This chapter offers a reading of Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, arguing that it foregrounds the necessity for racial uplift ideology in the Younger family's pursuit of the American Dream, culminating in the occupancy of their new home in the all-white enclave of Clybourne Park. Hansberry also sketches the postblack ethos in her representation of Beneatha Younger, the younger sister of the play's protagonist, Walter Lee Younger, and her allusion to intraracial debates about the false opposition between intellectual and corporeal freedom. In her interrogation of racial uplift ideology and the patriarchy that often underwrites it, Beneatha offers an alternative mode of self-representation built upon the pursuit of intellectual freedom. The chapter highlights the issue at the core of Hansberry's representation: race-based oppression and how it impacts concerns of equal housing access, economic enfranchisement, and African American identity politics.

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