Jesse Jackson and the Symbolic Politics of Black Christendom

1985 ◽  
Vol 480 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES MELVIN WASHINGTON
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Symbolic Politics ◽  
American Political Culture ◽  
Presidential Nomination ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Political Praxis

This article examines the significance of the Reverend Jesse Jackson's bid for the Democratic party's presidential nomination. Jackson's candidacy represents a new use of political revivalism, an old evangelical political praxis recast in the modalities of African American Christian culture. This praxis is an aspect of American political culture that has often been overlooked because of past misunderstandings of American folk religion in general, and black Christianity in particular, as captives of an otherworldly and privatized spirituality. This article contends that black Christianity has an identifiable and coherent political style with both passive and active moods. The dominant manifestations of these moods are, respectively, political cynicism and political revivalism, which are the consequence of the correct folk perception that it is impossible to reason with the purveyors of the absurdities of racial injustice. A critical assessment of black Christianity's political symbolic capital seems appropriate.

scholarly journals Based on the Puritan Concept and Ethical Spirit: the Preliminary Formation of African American Political Culture

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Shu Qi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Black American ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
American Political Culture ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Political Idea ◽  
The Relationship

Puritan ideas and ethics are not only the cradle of the mainstream political culture in America, but also the ideological source of the African American political culture. However, what was the significance of puritanism for the emergence of early political ideas among black American? To answer the question, it is necessary to delve into the meaning of puritanism to the political culture of the black American. This paper will elaborate on the crucial role of puritanism in the formation of black political culture in America from three aspects, that is, establishing a close relationship between puritanism and African American political culture. In order to understand it profoundly, three relationships will be established and explained. Respectively, the first one is to establish the relationship between Puritan idea especially the concept of equality and African American political idea; the second one is to establish the relationship between Puritan life and African American political elites; the third one is to establish the relationship between Puritan ethical spirits and moral norms and African American self-consciousness. More specifically, First of all, the germination of the early political ideas of African American was based on Puritan ideas; Secondly, Puritan life was the cradle of the growth of black political elites; Finally, the Puritan ethical spirit, such as diligence and frugality, diligence and hard work, tidiness and cleanliness, decent behavior and other basic behavioral norms, had a deep influence on the cultivation of the moral behavior norms and the formation of self-consciousness of African American.

“Counter-Bopaganda” and “Torn Riffs”

Between Beats ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 109-149
Author(s):  
Christi Jay Wells
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Oral History ◽  
American Political Culture ◽  
Social Dancing ◽  
Black Popular Culture ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Off Time

This chapter focuses on the subculture of young African Americans who developed forms of social dancing to bebop music as recounted to the author in oral history interviews with self-identified bebop dancers and as documented by Russian modern dancer/choreographer Mura Dehn in her film The Spirit Moves and in her drafts for an unfinished study on jazz dance. Dehn’s work reveals fascinating creative adaptations to bebop’s accelerating tempos and complex melodic structures in new and expanded dances such as the applejack, Jersey bounce, and bop lindy. Through these developments, dancers engaged in intricate metric and hypermetric play with bebop music—which they refer to as dancing “off-time”—while also embodying bebop’s “cool” aesthetic and the emergent cynicism and radicalism that shaped postwar African American political culture. Their experiences, and Dehn’s work to document them, demand a re-examination of the discursive work performed by bebop’s reputation as a music innately hostile to social dancing, a label that has less to do with the music’s difficulty than with a desire to position bebop as “art” rather than “entertainment.” The chapter closes with a discussion of “the problem of Dizzy Gillespie” to highlight and explore the historiographic challenges that discussion of social dance poses to canonic narrative positionings of bebop. It suggests that bebop is better understood as part of a contiguous spectrum of Black popular culture that thrived alongside, rather than in opposition to, rhythm & blues and other popular music genres.

Religion, Race, and Humanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony B. Pinn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unitarian Universalist ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry

This chapter explores the history of humanism within African American communities. It positions humanist thinking and humanism-inspired activism as a significant way in which people of African descent in the United States have addressed issues of racial injustice. Beginning with critiques of theism found within the blues, moving through developments such as the literature produced by Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, to political activists such as W. E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph, to organized humanism in the form of African American involvement in the Unitarian Universalist Association, African Americans for Humanism, and so on, this chapter presents the historical and institutional development of African American humanism.

The drama of politics

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 142 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Werner Binder
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Performance ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Constructivist Approach ◽  
Research Strategies ◽  
Theoretical Innovation ◽  
Strong Program ◽  
Performance Effects ◽  
The One ◽  
Collective Representations

The concept of social performance is a major theoretical innovation of the strong program in cultural sociology, championed by Jeffrey C. Alexander. This article offers a critical assessment of Alexander’s last four monographs on political performances with the explicit aim of contributing to the future development of the performance approach. After an outline of Alexander’s theory of performance, I continue to discuss his book-length empirical contributions, highlighting the innovations introduced by each study. Confronting Alexander’s research strategies with his theoretical framework, I propose a recalibration of his ‘liberal’ sociology of performance, bringing ‘conservative’ aspects of political culture back in, first of all particularity and historicity. This entails a rethinking of performance effects in terms of ‘resonances’ attuned to particular audiences and a deeper hermeneutic engagement with specific historical backgrounds of collective representations in order to overcome the one-sidedness of Alexander’s constructivist approach.

scholarly journals Book Review: American Political Culture: An Encyclopedia

2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 174
Author(s):  
Carla Wilson Buss
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Reliable Information ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
American Political Culture ◽  
Israel Zangwill

Anyone seeking reliable information on American political life since the 1970s will be pleased with Michael Shally-Jensen’s work, American Political Culture. This three-volume set covers topics from abortion to Israel Zangwill, the nineteenth-century author who coined the phrase “melting pot” and who appears in the entry for “Cultural Pluralism.”

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