Psychoanalysis and anti-racism in mid-20th-century America: An alternative angle of vision

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110427
Author(s):  
Tom Fielder
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
History Of

The conventional historiography of psychoanalysis in America offers few opportunities for the elaboration of anti-racist themes, and instead American ‘ego psychology’ has often been regarded as the most acute exemplar of ‘racist’ psychoanalysis. In this article, consistent with the historiographical turn Burnham first identified under the heading of ‘the New Freud Studies’, I distinguish between histories of psychoanalytic practitioners and histories of psychoanalytic ideas in order to open out an alternative angle of vision on the historiography. For psychoanalytic ideas were in fact omnipresent within American culture at mid-century, and they played a fundamental role in the psychological reworking of race that unfolded in the work of social scientists, literary artists, and cultural critics in the 1940s and early Cold War years, culminating in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954, a major landmark in the civil rights narrative. By pursuing the implications of psychoanalysis in anti-racist struggles at mid-century, and with particular attention to Richard Wright and his autobiographical novel Black Boy, I move towards unearthing an alternative historical account of the intersection between psychoanalysis and race, which offers new ways for psychoanalysis and the history of the human sciences to think about this period.

Introduction

Troublemakers ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Kathryn Schumaker
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Chicano Movement ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The introductionexplains how and why student protest became common in the United States in the late 1960s and places these protests in the context of shifts in the history of education and in broader social movements, including the civil rights movement, the Chicano Movement, and black power activism. The introduction also situates students’ rights within the context of children’s rights more broadly, explaining the legal principles that justified age discrimination and excluded children and students from the basic protections of American constitutional law. The introduction identifies the two decades between the 1960s and 1980s as a constitutional moment that revolutionized the relationship of students to the state. It also connects students’ rights litigation to the issue of school desegregation and the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education.

The End of Apocalypticism: from Burton Mack’s Jesus to North American Liberalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
James Crossley
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social History ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
The Right

Abstract This article takes a different look at the work of Burton Mack on apocalypticism and the post-historical Jesus crystallisation of the Christian ‘myth of innocence’ in terms of the social history of scholarship. After a critical assessment of previous receptions of Mack’s work from the era of the ‘Jesus wars’, there is a discussion of Mack’s place in broader cross-disciplinary tendencies in the study of apocalypticism with reference to the influence of liberal and Marxist approaches generally and those of Norman Cohn and Eric Hobsbawm specifically. Mack’s approach to apocalypticism should be seen as a thoroughgoing updating of Cold War liberal constructions of apocalypticism for an era of American ‘culture wars’, from Reagan to Trump. Part of this updating has also meant that, while much of his work against the apocalyptic Christian myth of innocence has been explicitly aimed at the de-legitimising the Right, it also continues the old Cold War intellectual battles by implicitly de-legitimising anything deemed excessively Marxist.

The Capital

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Denson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Heritage Tourism ◽  
Cherokee Nation ◽  
World War Two ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
World War ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
History Of

This chapter describes the expansion of removal commemoration in the post-World War Two decades, focusing particular attention on Georgia's reconstruction of New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. While the project began as a local effort to promote heritage tourism, state officials applied a loftier theme to the commemoration, describing the site as an apology for Georgia's part in removal. The chapter examines the New Echota project in the context of the South's civil rights-era politics and as an example of American Cold War culture. It argues that the commemoration of the Trail of Tears offered white southerners a politically safe way to contemplate their region's history of racial oppression. The New Echota project included very little Cherokee participation, a feature that suggests the organizers assumed modern Cherokees were mostly irrelevant to their work in Georgia. The New Echota project required Cherokees to act as witnesses to commemorative acts conducted by non-Indians. It did not require them to participate as authors of those commemorations.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 329-345
Author(s):  
Adriane Lentz-Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
National Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explores grand strategy as an intellectual and cultural project by considering its willful unseeing of race as a political project. To ignore race is to misapprehend how power works in the United States and how domestic formulations of subjectivity, difference, and racialized power imbue American foreign relations. The chapter focuses on African Americans in the era of Cold War civil rights. For Carl Rowan and Sam Greenlee, the two African American veterans who provide concrete cases for thinking about the United States and the world, their blackness and ambitions for their people would color how they interpreted America's role in political and military struggles in the Third World and beyond. As with other people of color, their encounters with white supremacy shaped their understandings of liberation, violence, and the United States security project. Their perspectives challenge scholars’ conceptions of the Cold War as a period of “defined clear national interests” and “public consensus.” Centering the stories of Rowan and Greenlee highlights not simply ongoing contestation over the myth and history of the Cold War, but, more fundamentally, the unthinking whiteness of grand strategy itself.

scholarly journals The metaphysical standing of the human: A future for the history of the human sciences

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Fuller
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Century Science

I reconstruct my own journey into the history of the human sciences, which I show to have been a process of discovering the metaphysical standing of the human. I begin with Alexandre Koyré’s encounter with Edmund Husserl in the 1930s, which I use to throw light on the legacy of Kant’s ‘anthropological’ understanding of the human, which dominated and limited 19th-century science. As I show, those who broke from Kant’s strictures and set the stage for the 20th-century revolutions in science - from Hegel, to John McTaggart, to Max Weber - typically were pursuing crypto-theological questions about how a finite being can comprehend an infinite universe. This journey is about the ‘common measure’ of being human, which is what links Plato to Kuhn, but has been most consistently taken up by law. I suggest that in seeking this ‘measure of man’, we may discover that to be human is not necessarily to be Homo sapiens, which would suggest a radical reorientation of the history of the human sciences.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE USES OF TRADITION: ROBERT REDFIELD AND ALTERNATIVE VISIONS OF MODERNIZATION DURING THE COLD WAR

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLE SACKLEY
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

The history of the rise and fall of “modernization theory” after World War II has been told as a story of Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, and other US social scientists who built a general theory in US universities and sought to influence US foreign policy. However, in the 1950s anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Comparative Civilizations project at the University of Chicago produced an alternative vision of modernization—one that emphasized intellectual conversation across borders, the interrelation of theory and fieldwork, and dialectical relations of tradition and modernity. In tracing the Redfield project and its legacies, this essay aims to broaden intellectual historians’ sense of the complexity, variation, and transnational currents within postwar American discourse about modernity and tradition.

scholarly journals Ethnographic Trailblazers: Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-28
Author(s):  
Robert Prus ◽  
Matthew Burk
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Participant Observer

While ethnographic research is often envisioned as a 19th or 20th century development in the social sciences (Wax 1971; Prus 1996), a closer examination of the classical Greek literature (circa 700-300BCE) reveals at least three authors from this era whose works have explicit and extended ethnographic qualities. Following a consideration of “what constitutes ethnographic research,” specific attention is given to the texts developed by Herodotus (c484-425BCE), Thucydides (c460-400BCE), and Xenophon (c430-340BCE). Classical Greek scholarship pertaining to the study of the human community deteriorated notably following the death of Alexander the Great (c384-323BCE) and has never been fully approximated over the intervening centuries. Thus, it is not until the 20th century that sociologists and anthropologists have more adequately rivaled the ethnographic materials developed by these early Greek scholars. Still, there is much to be learned from these earlier sources and few contemporary social scientists appear cognizant of (a) the groundbreaking nature of the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon and (b) the obstacles that these earlier ethnographers faced in developing their materials. Also, lacking awareness of (c) the specific materials that these scholars developed, there is little appreciation of the particular life-worlds depicted therein or (d) the considerable value of their texts as ethnographic resources for developing more extended substantive and conceptual comparative analysis.  Providing accounts of several different peoples’ life-worlds in the eastern Mediterranean arena amidst an extended account of the development of Persia as a military power and related Persian-Greek conflicts, Herodotus (The Histories) provides Western scholars with the earliest, sustained ethnographic materials of record. Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War) generates an extended (20 year) and remarkably detailed account of a series of wars between Athens and Sparta and others in the broader Hellenistic theater. Xenophon’s Anabasis is a participantobserver account of a Greek military expedition into Persia. These three authors do not exhaust the ethnographic dimensions of the classical Greek literature, but they provide some particularly compelling participant observer accounts that are supplemented by observations and open-ended inquiries. Because the three authors considered here also approach the study of human behavior in ways that attest to the problematic, multiperspectival, reflective, negotiated, relational, and processual nature of human interaction, contemporary social scientists are apt to find instructive the rich array of materials and insights that these early ethnographers introduce within their texts. Still, these are substantial texts and readers are cautioned that we can do little more in the present statement than provide an introduction to these three authors and their works.

Nation and Ethnicity in American Performance and Theater

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather S. Nathans
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
American Theater ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
History Of

Scholars have long wrestled with definitions of what might constitute “American” performance or theater. Early 19th-century histories defined it in strictly white, largely anti-British terms, imagining an art form that could instruct citizens of the newly created nation in lessons of civic virtue. In his History of American Theatre (1832), playwright, theater manager, and theater historian William Dunlap described theater as a “powerful engine” for a democratic state. Subsequent theater historians would catalog records of “firsts”—such as the first American stars (including Edwin Forrest and Charlotte Cushman), or the first long-running American dramatic hits (including The Drunkard or Uncle Tom’s Cabin). The roles of women and racial or ethnic minorities were frequently relegated to the anecdotal or the exceptional. In the wake of the Civil War, and with the expansion of the frontier, definitions of American theater grew more capacious, encompassing more amateur, popular, and immigrant performances as new groups struggled to establish footholds in American culture. The turn into the 20th century and the unfolding series of civil rights movements on behalf of women, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer) citizens, people of color, and people with disabilities rapidly transformed the nation’s theatrical landscape. Groups that had found themselves represented by others onstage discovered new opportunities for creative expression in the playhouse. Over the past twenty-five years, theater scholars have shifted away from a narrative of “firsts” and national exceptionalism toward a more nuanced series of intertwined histories that illuminate the complex discourses of national and ethnic identity in American culture. Their work has revealed a performance community—whether in the playhouse or on the streets—constantly struggling to create workable definitions of citizenship and belonging. Theater artists have never stopped pushing themselves and their audiences to challenge definitions of national identity. Their work invites contemporary students to expand their understanding of what constitutes the canon of “American” theater.

Totalitarismus – eine kleine Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
Alfons Söllner
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Scientific Concept ◽  
Negative Experience ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Political Idea ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Totalitarianism is problably the most ambivalent political idea of the 20th century: it stands for the most negative experience with politics, it was used as polemical weapon within the major political conflicts of the epoch, and it attracted as many ingenious political thinkers in order to clarify totalitarianism as a scientific concept. The essay is only a sketch and tries to reconstruct the variations of the concept throughout five stages: its origins in Mussolini’s Italy, the pluralistic formation in the 1930/40s, the canonization during the cold war, its diminuation in the 1960/70s, and the comeback after 1989. The author argues that it is exactly the multiplicity or even then controversial character of the concept which makes it so significant for the ruptured history of the 20th century.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah M. Griffith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Asian Immigration ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Important Time

Liberal Protestant resistance to anti-Asian discrimination evolved over the first half of the twentieth century to become a powerful force for social change. Through their various institutions and organizations, liberal Protestants worked to change the way Americans and policy makers thought about racial difference and inclusion. The interracial coalitions that liberal Protestants built during WWII continued to impact the fight for minority civil rights in the early Cold War era. The 1952 McCarran Walter Act embodied the racial liberalism of liberal Protestants when it lifted the decades-long ban on Asian immigration. Understanding the history of liberal Protestant activism comes at an important time as the nation continues to struggle over the meaning of inclusion and searches for ways to achieve racial equality.

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