The Possibilities for “Humanizing” Posthumanist Inquiries: An Intra-Active Conversation

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 434-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bessie P. Dernikos ◽  
Daniel E. Ferguson ◽  
Marjorie Siegel
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Qualitative Inquiry ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Brown Bodies ◽  
Ethical Responsibilities

What are the ethical responsibilities of doing and teaching qualitative inquiry at a time when Black and Brown bodies are under assault, an expression of White supremacy that has become ever more visible in the wake of the election of Donald Trump? And how might scholars who “think with” posthumanist theories respond to the call for more “humanizing” methodologies being made by African American and Latinx researchers? This article responds to this moment by presenting a conversation among three literacy scholars about the ethical challenges they have encountered in their own engagements with posthumanist theories, and the implications this has for doing/teaching qualitative inquiry. We call for more openness about the limits as well as the possibilities of posthumanisms, and more attention to ethics for justice. The entanglements of human/nonhuman assemblages in these dangerous times call on us to act, not only think, with theory.

Coda

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Hamera
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Industrial Labor ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Heidelberg Project

The coda to Unfinished Business begins with the election of Donald Trump as US president, presenting this as a bookend to the election of Ronald Reagan nearly four decades earlier. Racialized and racist responses to the deindustrial are as central to the Trump phenomenon as they were to the so-called Reagan Democrats. Yet Trumpist nostalgia for industrial labor ignores or misremembers these jobs’ debilitating dimensions, as stated in the 1972 federal report “Work in America.” The coda notes that Michael Jackson’s legacy as an exemplary entrepreneur has been successfully redeployed by a new generation of African American artists, and addresses the continued gestic potential of the Heidelberg Project in the wake of Tyree Guyton’s decision to remove parts of it. It concludes by asserting that, until myths of white supremacy are confronted and dismantled, no systemic attempt to redress the predations of the deindustrial can be successful.

scholarly journals Structural Violence of Schooling: A Genealogy of a Critical Family History of Three Generations of African American Women in a Rural Community in Florida

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Evelyn Newman Phillips ◽  
Wangari Gichiru
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Family History ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Structural Barriers ◽  
American Women ◽  
Three Generations ◽  
American Children

Through the lens of structural violence, Black feminism and critical family history, this paper explores how societal structures informed by white supremacy shaped the lives of three generations of rural African American women in a family in Florida during the middle to the late twentieth century. Specifically, this study investigates how disparate funding, segregation, desegregation, poverty and post-desegregation policies shaped and limited the achievement trajectories among these women. Further, an oral historical examination of their lives reveals the strategies they employed despite their under-resourced and sometimes alienating schooling. The paper highlights the experiences of the Newman family, descendants of captive Africans in the United States that produced three college-educated daughters and a granddaughter despite structural barriers that threatened their progress. Using oral history interviews, archival resources and first-person accounts, this family’s story reveals a genealogy of educational achievement, barriers and agency despite racial and gendered limitations in a Southern town. The findings imply that their schooling mirrors many of the barriers that other Blacks face. However, this study shows that community investment in African American children, plus teachers that affirm students, and programs such as Upward Bound, help to advance Black students in marginalized communities. Further, these women’s lives suggest that school curriculums need to be anti-racist and public policies that affirm each person regardless of the color of their skin. A simple solution that requires the structural violence of whiteness be eliminated from the schooling spheres.

scholarly journals Understanding African American Males’ Schooling Experiences: A Qualitative Inquiry

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Bell
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
African American Males ◽  
Early Learning ◽  
Qualitative Inquiry ◽  
Educational Setting ◽  
Schooling Experiences ◽  
Schooling Experience ◽  
Eastern North Carolina

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how African American males feel about their schooling experiences. Eighteen participants were selected for this inquiry. This study took place in eastern North Carolina. Many African American males lack early learning experiences to adequately prepare for a positive schooling experience. The findings from this study might prove helpful for working with African American males in an educational setting.

Coda

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-180
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Black Lives Matter

This coda briefly addresses the election of Donald Trump and the implications of an increasingly visible white nationalist movement on the arguments of the book. The coda also analyzes elements of the Black Lives Matter movement to argue that while much of the optimism of the post era has been mitigated, several of its major theoretical strains—the emphasis on individual agency over racial identity, the turn towards racial identity as performance—remain critical to understanding current activism. It also explains the influence of theoretical frameworks such as intersectionality and Afropessimism on current movements. The coda also looks briefly towards growing and ongoing trends in African American literature, like Afrofuturism.

“Saturated” with the Past: William Faulkner, C. Vann Woodward, and the “Burden” of Southern History

2017 ◽  
pp. 210-228
Author(s):  
James C. Cobb
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
Southern History ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Common Time ◽  
Planter Class

This chapter explores how “two of the South's ablest interpreters, William Faulker and C. Vann Woodward, may have complemented, supplemented, or contradicted each other as they examined a common time and place ” Both struggled, for instance, to give African American figures the same historical weight and agency attributed to whites, and both at times cast a sympathetic eye on the antebellum planter class. Moreover, Woodward drew directly on Faulkner in developing his account of what he called the “burden of southern history”: a historical experience and consciousness among southerners that he nominated as an alternative to white supremacy as the basis of a distinctive regional identity and the central theme of a distinctive regional history.

The Great Migration Escape

Gone Home ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 29-52
Author(s):  
Karida L. Brown
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Order ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
Eastern Kentucky ◽  
United States Steel Corporation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Black Codes

This chapter provides an account of the first wave of African American migration into the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky. It addresses the implementation of Black Codes, also known as Jim Crow laws, the convict leasing system, and how psychological and physical terror in the form of public lynchings helped maintain the social order of white supremacy. Brown attends to the role of the labor agent as a grey-market actor in facilitating the onset of the first wave of the African American Great Migration. Drawing on the oral history and archival data, the chapter distils a profile of the legendary figure, Limehouse, the white labor agent hired by United States Steel Corporation to sneak and transport black men and their families out of Alabama to Harlan County, Kentucky to work in the coalmines. The chapter also focuses on the psychosocial dimensions of this silent mass migration, specifically the spiritual strivings, the hopes, dreams, and disappointments that accompanied the Great Migration.

Between Anger and Engagement: Donald Trump and Black America

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher C. Towler ◽  
Christopher S. Parker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Black America ◽  
Movement Dynamics ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
The Right ◽  
Racial Progress

AbstractHistory suggests that social movements for change are often met with powerful counter-movements. Relying upon movement counter-movement dynamics, this paper examines whether or not contemporary reactionary conservatism—in this case Donald Trump's candidacy in 2016, offers an opportunity for African-American mobilization. Today, the reactionary right presents a threat to racial progress and the black community as it has grown from direct opposition to the election of President Obama, immigration reform, and gay and lesbian rights. With conditions ripe for a movement in response to the right, we examine the mobilizing effect on African-Americans of the threatening political context symbolized by Donald Trump. If African-Americans are to retain political relevance beyond the Obama era, then black turnout will need to reach rates similar to the historic 2008 election. Using the 2016 Black Voter Project (BVP) Pilot Study, we explore African-American political engagement in the 2016 election, a time void of President Obama as a mobilizing figure. We find that African-Americans who hold strong negative opinions of Trump in 2016 voted at rates similar to the historical turnout of 2008, offering a possible strategy to mobilize blacks beyond Obama's presidency. Moreover, the threat that Trump represents significantly drives blacks to engage in politics beyond voting even after accounting for alternative explanations. In the end, Trump and the reactionary movement behind him offers a powerful mobilizing force for an African-American population that can no longer look toward the top of the Presidential ticket for inspiration.

scholarly journals Becoming-Black: Patterns and Politics of West-German ‘Afro-Americanophilia’ in the Late 1960s

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Moritz Ege
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Political Action ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Soul Music

In the late 1960s, African American culture and politics provided ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari) from outdated modes of subjectivity for many ‘white’ Germans; appropriating culture politics, and experimenting with forms of symbolically ‘becoming black’ represented a major cultural theme of the time. These tendencies resonated with: radical, anti-imperialist politics; countercultural sensibilities, where African American culture provided a radically contemporary critique of European modernity; the racialized, erotically charged logics of primitivism and romanticism in which ‘the repressed’ was to be brought back to the surface; and with a consumer-based economy and pop culture that supported the incorporation, domestication and aestheticisation of difference, desire and conflict.  This article sketches the patterns, forms and politics of the cultural theme of Afro-Americanophilia in Germany at the time, stressing the links between politics and corporeality.  In doing so, it illustrates that questions of race and racism were crucial for the 1968 conjuncture in Germany and it critically reviews the assumptions and implications of a specific form of hedonistic anti-racism in which ‘white’ European protagonists claimed ‘chains of equivalence’ (Laclau and Mouffe) between their position and that of people oppressed by racism and white supremacy.  Two case studies illustrate different forms and common patterns.  The first concerns a West Berlin network of radical-left groups that called itself ‘The Blues’ and combined militant political action (partly modelled on the activities of the Black Panther Party, according to some of its participants) with a countercultural sensibility. This included a felt connection to African American culture and stylistic practices. The second case study reviews the reception of soul music in the German music press and in countercultural circles, contrasting different readings of the supposedly ‘authentic.’  Overall, the article reconstructs practices of Afro-Americanophilia as ambiguous phenomena that foreshadow later forms of fetishistic cultural appropriation, but where, in some cases, the selective, erotically charged exoticism also led to tangible solidarity and strong connections. 

Perceptions and Beliefs About Body Size, Weight, and Weight Loss Among Obese African American Women: A Qualitative Inquiry

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 410-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christie A. Befort ◽  
Janet L. Thomas ◽  
Christine M. Daley ◽  
Paula C. Rhode ◽  
Jasjit S. Ahluwalia
Keyword(s):  
Weight Loss ◽  
African American ◽  
Body Size ◽  
Weight Gain ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Lifestyle Modification ◽  
Target Population ◽  
Qualitative Inquiry ◽  
Health Clinic ◽  
American Women

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore perceptions and beliefs about body size, weight, and weight loss among obese African American women in order to form a design of weight loss intervention with this target population. Six focus groups were conducted at a community health clinic. Participants were predominantly middle-aged with a mean Body Mass Index of 40.3 ± 9.2 kg/m2. Findings suggest that participants (a) believe that people can be attractive and healthy at larger sizes; (b) still feel dissatisfied with their weight and self-conscious about their bodies; (c) emphasize eating behavior as the primary cause for weight gain; (d) view pregnancy, motherhood, and caregiving as major precursors to weight gain; (e) view health as the most important reason to lose weight; (f) have mixed experiences and expectations for social support for weight loss; and (g) prefer treatments that incorporate long-term lifestyle modification rather than fad diets or medication.

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