Geomemory and Genre Friction: Infrastructural Violence and Plantation Afterlives in Contemporary African American Novels

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Evans
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Gulf Coast ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Us South ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Spatial Design ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Us

Abstract This essay argues that contemporary African American novels turn to the gothic in order to dramatize the uncanny infrastructural and spatial afterlives of the plantation through a literary strategy it identifies as geomemory: a genre friction between mimetic and gothic modes in which postplantation spaces in the US South are imbued with temporal slippages such that past and present meet through the built environment. Tracing the plantation’s environmental and infrastructural presence in the Gulf Coast and throughout the US South, this essay argues that the plantation’s presence is fundamentally gothic. Geomemory, a trope evident across the emerging canon of contemporary African American fiction, allows writers to address the representational challenge of infrastructural and spatial violence via a defamiliarizing chronotope in which past, present, and future come into uneasy contact. Further, geomemory’s particular enmeshment with spatial design and infrastructure means that it moves from identifying the modern afterlife of the plantation to situating the present in the long context of plantation modernity.

Coming Back Home to Oppressive Mississippi: A Figurative Study of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped

2021 ◽  
pp. 161-177
Author(s):  
Michał Choiński
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Us South ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
The Us ◽  
Return Home

The aim of the paper is to discuss the figurative aspects of Jesmyn Ward’s The Men We Reaped (2013). In her memoir, Ward demonstrates the connections between the systemic racism in the US South and the tragic stories of five African-American men who were close to her, and who died between 2000-2004. The tragic loss of these lives is presented through a number of figurative images which present the region through the metaphors of predatory animals, physical burdens and uncanny doubling. Also, the article reflects on how Ward coped with the trauma of loss through her writings, and how, in numerous interviews, she justified her decision to return home to Mississippi and to settle there, in spite of the systemic racism and the trauma of loss.

scholarly journals When Cars Become Churches: Jesmyn Ward's Disenchanted America. An Interview

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA HARTNELL
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
South African ◽  
American Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Us South ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Us

This interview with Jesmyn Ward, conducted in November 2013, takes as its starting point the publication of her memoir, Men We Reaped. It explores the role of her writing in the context of Hurricane Katrina, the US South, African American culture and identity, and new trends in twenty-first-century US writing.

Mobility, Skepticism, and Counter-storytelling in African American Travel Writing: Carl Rowan's South of Freedom

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
GARY TOTTEN
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Willingness To Participate ◽  
Individual Action ◽  
Us South ◽  
Institutionalized Racism ◽  
The Us

In South of Freedom (1952), Carl Rowan frames his travels through an investigation of the US South in terms of his doubts about cultural change, his safety, and whites’ and blacks’ willingness to participate in racial reform, among other things. His skepticism about improvements in race relations and his critique of the country's inadequate progress toward such goals inform his examination of various states of freedom and unfreedom existing in the United States. Rowan's narrative and specific descriptions of his and others’ mobility operate as instances of counter-storytelling that incorporate such skepticism and critique. Ultimately, his theorizing of modes of resistance to institutionalized racism through individual action serves as a model for understanding African American travel writing and mobility more generally.

scholarly journals The Cityscape in the Contemporary African-American Urban Novel

2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (29) ◽  
pp. 65-71
Author(s):  
Yuri Stulov
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
American Novels ◽  
The World ◽  
Big City ◽  
The City

This paper discusses the cityscape as an essential element of African American fiction. Since the time of Romanticism, the city has been regarded as the embodiment of evil forces which are alien to human nature and radiate fear and death. For decades, African-Americans have been isolated in the black ghettos of major American cities which were in many ways responsible for their personal growth or their failure. Often this failure is determined by their inability to find their bearings in a strange and alien world, which the city symbolizes. The world beyond the black ghetto is shown as brutal and terrifying, while the world inside is devoid of hope. Crime, vandalism, poverty, overcrowding, and social conflicts turn out to be the landmarks of big cities, because the people who migrate to them and make up most of their population are also the poorest and least adapted to urban life: they have lost their roots, and feel displaced in the anonymous urban society. A number of African-American novels depict protagonists who are unable to adapt to life in a big city, and end in degradation and misery. James Baldwin’s novels are among the most representative. His disordered and dislocated characters are products of the external world of the city of the machine age, and as such they are characteristic of all African-American fiction. This paper analyzes some of the recent black novels that reverberate with Baldwin’s ideas.

Abandoned and abused: prisoners in the wake of Hurricane Katrina

Race & Class ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Gulf Coast ◽  
The State ◽  
The Us ◽  
Women And Children

During Hurricane Katrina, which struck the US Gulf Coast in August 2005, thousands of men, women and children were abandoned in Orleans Parish Prison (OPP), the New Orleans jail. As the floodwaters rose in the OPP buildings, prisoners were trapped for days in locked cells without food, some standing in sewage-tainted water up to their chests, while guards left their posts. Predominantly poor African-American pre-trial detainees, held on minor charges, such as failure to pay court fees, the prisoners were eventually evacuated to various receiving facilities around the state of Louisiana, only to face systematic racial abuse, assaults and further brutality. The experiences of the OPP prisoners lay bare the routine injustices that permeate a system of incarceration that is effectively run as a profitmaking concern.

scholarly journals African American Unemployment and the Disparity in Periviable Births

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Catalano ◽  
Deborah Karasek ◽  
Tim Bruckner ◽  
Joan A. Casey ◽  
Katherine Saxton ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Unemployment Rate ◽  
Racial Disparity ◽  
Live Births ◽  
Percentage Point Increase ◽  
Point Increase ◽  
The Us ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Hispanic White

AbstractPeriviable infants (i.e., born before 26 complete weeks of gestation) represent fewer than .5% of births in the US but account for 40% of infant mortality and 20% of billed hospital obstetric costs. African American women contribute about 14% of live births in the US, but these include nearly a third of the country’s periviable births. Consistent with theory and with periviable births among other race/ethnicity groups, males predominate among African American periviable births in stressed populations. We test the hypothesis that the disparity in periviable male births among African American and non-Hispanic white populations responds to the African American unemployment rate because that indicator not only traces, but also contributes to, the prevalence of stress in the population. We use time-series methods that control for autocorrelation including secular trends, seasonality, and the tendency to remain elevated or depressed after high or low values. The racial disparity in male periviable birth increases by 4.45% for each percentage point increase in the unemployment rate of African Americans above its expected value. We infer that unemployment—a population stressor over which our institutions exercise considerable control—affects the disparity between African American and non-Hispanic white periviable births in the US.

Contesting Commemorative Landscapes: Confederate Monuments and Trajectories of Change

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Simko ◽  
David Cunningham ◽  
Nicole Fox
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
African American Church ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Dependent Process ◽  
Trajectories Of Change ◽  
Path Dependent ◽  
Path Dependent Process

Abstract Following the racially motivated shootings at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, a wave of contentious campaigns around Confederate statuary emerged, or at least intensified, in communities across the country. Yet local struggles have culminated in vastly different alterations to the built environment. This paper develops a framework for differentiating distinct “modes of recontextualization” rooted in the relocation and/or modification of commemorative objects. Building on models of memory as an iterative, path-dependent process, we track recontextualization efforts in three communities—St. Louis, Missouri; Oxford, Mississippi; and Austin, Texas—documenting how each mode alters the meaning of contested symbols. An analysis of local news sources in the year following recontextualization shows how each mode exerts identifiable proximate effects on broader political debates and, through that process, structures the horizon of possibility for longer-range outcomes. 

Southern Looks? A History of African American Missionary Photography of Africa, 1890s–1930s

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 390-417
Author(s):  
ELISABETH ENGEL
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Christian Missions ◽  
Us South ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Institution ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
The Us ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual Description

This article traces and analyzes the missionary photography of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the most important independent black American institution that began to operate in colonial South Africa at the onset of the politics of racial segregation in the 1890s. It argues that AME missionary photography presents a neglected archive, from which a history of black photographic encounters and a subaltern perspective on the dominant visual cultures of European imperialism and Christian missions in Africa can be retrieved. Focussing in particular on how AME missionaries deployed tropes of the culturally refined “New Negro” and the US South in their visual description of South Africa, this article demonstrates that photography was an important tool for black subjects to define their image beyond the representations of black inferiority that established visual traditions constructed.

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