Decolonizing the Color-Line: A Topological Analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois's Infographics for the 1900 Paris Exposition

2021 ◽  
pp. 105065192110646
Author(s):  
Lynda C. Olman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Topological Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Paris Exposition ◽  
Black Life

As infographics are implicated in racist policies like redlining, we need to decolonize the genre. But previous studies have found that infographics’ panopticism—their at-a-glance reduction of complex issues—makes them tend to support hegemonic power structures in spite of their designers’ intentions. A way out of this dilemma can be located in the first attempt to decolonize the infographic: W.E.B. Du Bois's series depicting Black life in the United States, created for the 1900 Paris Exposition. This topological analysis of Du Bois's decolonial project reveals both problematic and promising avenues for our own attempts to decolonize the infographic.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caron E. Gentry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Imago Dei ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
Christian Realism ◽  
Feminist Thought

This introduction contrasts the election of President Obama with the election of President Trump, introducing the concept of anxiety politics and the role of emotions in discourse. It argues that while Christian realism, as articulated by Reinhold Niebuhr, continues to be relevant, its discussion of power structures and anxiety needs to be reevaluated in light of feminist thought. It does so by intersecting Niebuhr with other theologies on the imago dei and creativity. In this way it can better account for the racial and misogynist structures that the United States is founded upon and that continue to haunt and effect US politics.

scholarly journals Urban specters

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110302
Author(s):  
Asha Best ◽  
Margaret M Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spatial Method ◽  
Urban Futures ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The Relationship

In this piece, we take up haunting as a spatial method to consider what geography can learn from ghosts. Following Avery Gordon’s theorizations of haunting as a sociological method, a consideration of the spectral offers a means of reckoning with the shadows of social life that are not always readily apparent. Drawing upon art installations in Brooklyn, NY, White Shoes (2012–2016), and Oakland, CA, House/Full of BlackWomen (2015–present), we find that in both installations, Black women artists perform hauntings, threading geographies of race, sex, and speculation across past and present. We observe how these installations operate through spectacle, embodiment, and temporal disjuncture, illuminating how Black life and labor have been central to the construction of property and urban space in the United States. In what follows, we explore the following questions: what does haunting reveal about the relationship between property, personhood, and the urban in a time of racial banishment? And the second, how might we think of haunting as a mode of refusing displacement, banishment, and archival erasure as a way of imagining “livable” urban futures in which Black life is neither static nor obsolete?

Race and Ethnicity as Barriers to ART Access

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Daar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
The United States ◽  
Minority Populations ◽  
Lower Income ◽  
Patient Relationship ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Income Levels

This chapter analyzes the racialization of infertility care in the United States, and seeks to understand why ART stratifies along race and ethnic lines. Researchers and scholars have proposed several theories, including lower income levels and access to insurance in minority populations, social factors that make women of color less likely to seek treatment for infertility, historic factors that give rise to a continuing aura of mistrust in the doctor–patient relationship, and express and implied discrimination by doctors who view minority populations as less deserving of parenthood than white patients. The chapter shows how these new eugenics, like the old eugenics, can persist only so long as political power structures support and advance their agenda.

Black Mothering Legacies: Theorizing Lament as a Form of Justice Research

2021 ◽  
pp. 194084472110495
Author(s):  
Nichole A. Guillory
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Black Child ◽  
The State ◽  
Black Mothers ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Black Mothering

I feel compelled by the moment to take up these questions: What does it mean to mother a Black child within/against this historical moment within/against the (carceral) United States? What does it mean to mother a Black child when the legacy of enslavement in the United States is still the basis for assessing the “worth” of you and your children? How do I determine justice for my/a/the Black child in this historical moment? How does this justice come to matter? My approach to critical qualitative research is best understood through Cynthia Dillard’s (2006) notion of “endarkened feminist epistemology” (p. 3). Here I trace a lineage of Black mothering praxis that has been enacted in response to injustice across different historical moments and geographical locations in the United States. This lineage focuses on Black mothers who have lost their children to state violence, when that violence is perpetrated by the state or when the state fails to mete out justice for the taking of Black life.

Sokolow, Anna (1910–2000)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Kosstrin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Underserved Populations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
United States Mexico

In her seventy-year career, Anna Sokolow contributed to dance fields in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. A child of Russian Jewish immigrants, Sokolow rose to prominence in the 1930s as a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company and as an independent choreographer of her own leftist dance group. She infused her formalist compositions with substantive accusations against authoritarian power structures, highlighted Jewish themes, gave voice to underserved populations and marginalized countercultures, and composed lyrical love ballads and tributes to artists and social figures she esteemed. Sokolow’s early choreography exposed societal ills and indicted fascist governments.

Deflected Confrontations

2019 ◽  
pp. 223-238
Author(s):  
Rob Ruck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Dominican Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
Breaking Point ◽  
Professional Baseball ◽  
Color Line ◽  
The People ◽  
The Cold War

Though the Cold War ripped apart the almost century-long sporting connection between Cuba and the United States, Major League Baseball’s (MLB) color line and interference in Cuban and Mexican baseball had already stressed this relationship to the breaking point. The Cuban Revolution triggered the island nation’s final departure from the sporting empire that MLB had created and opened the way for the Dominican Republic to become the most important source of talent in professional baseball. Cuba, however, set its own course, building a noncommercial alternative in which sport became a right of the people and a means of statecraft.

American Elegy: A Triptych

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn A. Mariner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Children ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Northern Coast ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Interracial Violence

On March 26, 2018, Jennifer Hart drove her SUV off a cliff along the northern coast of California with her partner and at least five of their transracially adopted Black children inside. Their remains were recovered at the crash site. As of this writing, a sixth child, Devonte, remains missing and is presumed dead. Four years before the crash, Devonte was famously photographed at the age of twelve, tearfully hugging a white police officer at a Ferguson rally in Portland, Oregon. By simultaneously occupying the feel-good spectacle of interracial intimacy and the everyday tragedy of interracial violence, Devonte embodies and embodied the conditions of contemporary Black life and death in the United States. His disappearance is intimately linked to other forms and histories of American state violence. Through cultural analysis, autoethnography, and poetic intervention, this essay performs wake work as a method for living with the unmournable.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Cressler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Color Line ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
Black Catholics ◽  
Catholic History

This chapter begins with the ten Black bishops declaring in 1984 that Black Catholics should be “authentically Black and truly Catholic.” It contrasts this statement with the story of Mary Dolores Gadpaille, who argued in 1958 that Catholicism “lifted her up above the color line.” It juxtaposes these two examples in order to introduce readers to the central questions that govern the book. Why did tens of thousands of African Americans convert to Catholicism in the middle decades of the twentieth century? What did it mean to be Black and Catholic in the first half of the twentieth century and why did it change so dramatically in the thirty years that separated Gadpaille from the bishops? How would placing Black Catholics at the center of our historical narratives change the ways we understand African American religion and Catholicism in the United States? The chapter situates the book in scholarship and briefly introduces readers to Black Catholic history writ large.

“Multiplied without Number”: Lynching, Statistics, and Visualization in Ida B. Wells, Mark Twain, and W. E. B. Du Bois

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin J. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Data Visualization ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Statistical Graphics ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Black Life

Abstract Quantification has long played a vexed role in efforts to record and resist racial violence. Building from Ida B. Wells’s antilynching crusade, this essay examines the risks and power of calculating life and death at the close of the nineteenth century. For her part, Wells pushed mere counting past itself to a profound mode of ethical accounting. Two of her contemporaries, Mark Twain and W. E. B. Du Bois, sustained a similarly supraquantitative thrust; each attempted to harness the antilynching potential of numbers by enlisting data visualization. Twain falls short in a telling fashion, as his unpublished satire “The United States of Lyncherdom” (written in 1901) exacerbates the dehumanizing tendencies of quantification. Du Bois, however, pursues a more generative experiment, creating statistical graphics in 1900 that indict and outstrip the causal circuit that yoked scientific numbering to lynching and racial violence more broadly. This latter achievement resonates with scholarly efforts to access Black life from within a desolately tabulated archive of loss and erasure. Specifically, as triangulated with Wells and Twain, Du Bois’s graphics proffer a counterintuitive means to register life as a future-oriented, aggregate abstraction that is neither wholly conditioned by, nor separate from, a past whose violent legacies endure.

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