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.

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.

“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.

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?

Masculinities and School Gun Violence in the United States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Deane
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The United States ◽  
School Shootings ◽  
Gun Violence ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday Interaction ◽  
Foucauldian Theory ◽  
The Impact

Schools are sites of personal, political, and symbolic violence. In the United States acts of rampage school gun violence, themselves symbolic, are connected to acts of personal violence via the inscription of social gender norms. Carried out by White teenage boys rampage school shootings call us to grapple with the ways in which schools form and discipline gendered subjectivities. Central to the field of masculinity studies is R. W. Connell’s theory of masculinity which draws on a Gramscian theory of hegemony rather than a Foucauldian theory of power. Whereas Gramsci focuses the ways in which power moves down, Foucault studies the impact of small interaction on our subjective sense of self. When addressing the phenomena of rampage school gun violence where White teenage boys target their schools in acts of gendered rage, a Foucauldian theory of power helps us to take seriously the significance of everyday interaction in legitimating gendered ontologies. Jointly Foucault and the contemporary works of Jane Roland Martin, Amy Shuffelton, and Michel Kimmel point towards an avenue that may afford us the opportunity to root out practices and environments wedded to hegemonic masculinity (and thus rampage school gun violence): the everyday celebration of gender-inclusive and egalitarian ways of learning and living.

scholarly journals Serialised Novels in the Polish Emigré Press in the USA, 1881–1918

2022 ◽  
Vol 124 ◽  
pp. 207-238
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Nowosielska
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Editorial Boards ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Financial Difficulties ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Historical Themes

This article discusses serialised novels published before 1918 in the Polish émigré press in the United States of America. These works were a popular feature of dailies and weeklies, but the periodicals’ regular financial difficulties meant that it was books published several years or indeed several decades earlier in Europe which were most often serialised. Consequently, most of the works that appeared in the periodicals failed to reflect contemporary literary trends while also overlooking subjects relevant to the everyday lives of Poles abroad. Still, the prevailing patriotic and historical themes complemented the values that many editorial boards subscribed to.

scholarly journals Riding Circuit: Bringing the Law to Those Who Need It

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Drisko Zago
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Early Treatment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Working Poor ◽  
Legal Issues ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
Court System ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Societal Problems

This article surveys the Access to Justice movement in the United States and proposes including more types of professionals to develop longer term solutions that will alleviate barriers to the court system. This article discusses the need to expand the access to justice concept to reach beyond the courthouse to address civil legal issues before they blossom into litigation. Mobile outreach providing preventive lawyering and early treatment of societal problems can prevent delays and the bottleneck that many courts are seeing with the vast numbers of Self-Represented Litigants. A team of professionals including lawyers, social workers, nurses, counselors, translators and law librarians, working with a network of public librarians, can make a significant impact into the everyday lives of the working poor and folk of modest means in underserved areas.

scholarly journals Confronting the North’s South: On Race and Violence in the United States

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliot Currie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Southern History ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
The Us ◽  
Northern Country ◽  
Structural Roots

More than any other ‘Northern’ country, the United States is distinctive in the degree to which its social, economic, and cultural development has been entwined with the global South from the beginning: and we cannot adequately understand the state of crime and punishment in the US without taking that uniquely ‘Southern’ history into account. In this paper, I sketch some of the dimensions of one crucial reflection of that Southern legacy: the extraordinary racial disparities in the experience of violent death between African-Americans and Whites. These disparities contribute substantially to radically different patterns of life and death between the races, and constitute a genuine social and public health emergency. But their structural roots remain largely unaddressed; and in some respects, the prospects for seriously confronting these fundamental inequalities may be receding.

“Thank You, Black Twitter”: State Violence, Digital Counterpublics, and Pedagogies of Resistance

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Lamont Hill
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Political Organizing

In this article, I examine the role of Black Twitter as a “digital counterpublic” that enables critical pedagogy, political organizing, and both symbolic and material forms of resistance to anti-Black state violence within the United States. Focusing primarily on post-Ferguson events, I spotlight the ways that Black people have used Black Twitter and other digital counterpublics to engage in forms of pedagogy that reorganize relations of surveillance, reject rigid respectability politics, and contest the erasure of marginalized groups within the Black community.

Cultural Communications of Mainland United States-Based Organizations and Their Hawaiian Workforces

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-190
Author(s):  
Erik S. Wright ◽  
Rose Baker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Communication Styles ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Unique Challenge ◽  
Doing Business

The Hawaiian Islands are a diverse melting pot of people, cultures, and languages that make doing business in the state a unique challenge for organizations based on the mainland United States. While Hawaii is indeed the 50th state in the union, culturally they are more closely aligned with Asia and other Polynesian cultures than the United States as a whole. Doing business in Hawaii can often feel as though one is doing business in a foreign country, a place where one only partially speaks the language. Understanding these cultural differences and shaping communication styles to align with the cultural values of the Hawaiian sub-culture is essential to success for any organization planning to start operations in Hawaii. Through a process of cultural analysis, organizations can more effectively manage change within their operations and engage their Hawaiian workforces with great success.

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