scholarly journals The Sonnet and Black Transnationalism in the 1930s

2018 ◽  
pp. 57-74
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
First Century ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
Black Transnationalism ◽  
Social Improvement

While the transnational dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance are widely acknowledged, scholarly accounts often suggest that the Great Depression narrowed the scope of African American writing to localized concerns such as social improvement and folk expression. The chapter complicates this assumption by drawing attention to the little-known sonnets Claude McKay and Countee Cullen wrote in the 1930s, some of which remained unpublished until the early twenty-first century. These sonnets show that African American poetry sustained a range of transnational conversations throughout the 1930s. The chapter examines two such conversations: the negotiation of black travel around the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and the Pan-Africanism incited by the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935/36. Besides McKay and Cullen, the chapter considers sonnets by the neglected poets J. Harvey L. Baxter, Alpheus Butler, and Marcus Bruce Christian.

Elusive equalities and the Great Recession: restoration, retrenchment and redistribution

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-441
Author(s):  
Janine Brodie
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Crisis Responses

AbstractThe 2008 global financial meltdown, commonly called the ‘Great Recession’, was the most serious crisis in capitalism since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and a fundamental repudiation of neoliberal governing assumptions. This paper focuses on the contexts that informed two governmental responses to this economic crisis — restoration and retrenchment through public austerity. It explains that these responses were contingent, experimental, inequitable and, in the end, unsuccessful. Restoration and retrenchment, however, were entirely consistent with previous neoliberal crisis-responses and the abiding ambitions of this governing project. As the economic crisis crawled into the second half of a decade, the idea of inequality was increasingly identified as an underlying cause of crisis and its amelioration as a necessary part of rebuilding economies and communities in a post-crisis era. The paper tracks the case for the revival of equality politics and policies in the early twenty-first century.

Financial Crises and the Public Discourse on Financial Elites

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Youssef Cassis ◽  
Giuseppe Telesca
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Codes Of Conduct ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Late Twentieth

Why were elite bankers and financiers demoted from ‘masters’ to ‘servants’ of society after the Great Depression, a crisis to which they contributed only marginally? Why do they seem to have got away with the recent crisis, in spite of their palpable responsibilities in triggering the Great Recession? This chapter provides an analysis of the differences between the bankers of the Great Depression and their colleagues of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century—regarding their position within, and attitude towards the firm, work culture, mental models, and codes of conduct—complemented with a scrutiny of the public discourse on bankers and financiers before and after the two crises. The authors argue that the (relative) mildness of the Great Recession, compared to the Great Depression, has contributed to preserve elite bankers’ and financiers’ status, income, wealth, and influence. Yet, the long-term consequences of their loss of reputational capital are difficult to assess.

“All That You Can’t Leave Behind”

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (S1) ◽  
pp. 255-278
Author(s):  
Daphne A. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Female ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Level ◽  
Original Title ◽  
Early Twenty

Abstract As numerous scholars have shown, Hurricane Katrina exacerbated the already-ongoing precarity of African American communities in New Orleans. The crisis demanded a reckoning with the afterlives of slavery at the national and global level. This article focuses on the work of Black women popular music artists whose early twenty-first century recordings and stirring performances addressed the traumas, the challenges, and the spectacular subjugation of Black women who fell victim to brutal disenfranchisement in the midst of the disaster. Beyonce’s B-Day album and Mary J. Blige’s history-making Katrina telethon performance are central to this discussion. The original title of this article was “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe.”

Pink and Sister

Goat Castle ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen L. Cox
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
African American Principals ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
History Of ◽  
Edgar Allen Poe

This chapter introduces the African American principals in the book, Emily Burns and George Pearls a.k.a. Lawrence Williams. The history of the African American experience in Natchez, from slavery through Reconstruction and Jim Crow, is discussed. George lived in Chicago and when he came to Natchez in 1932 he introduced himself to Emily as Pinkney. He was called “Pink” and she was known in the community as “Sister.” Emily’s mother Nellie Black is introduced, as is their boarder, Edgar Allen Poe Newell or “Poe.” Both Emily and her mother were widows and domestics. All suffered from poverty, particularly in the depths of the Great Depression.

Beyond Mediocrity: The Dialectics of Crisis in the Continuing Miseducation of Black Youth

2017 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian D. Lozenski
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Achievement Gap ◽  
Black Youth ◽  
First Century ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
American Education ◽  
African American Education ◽  
Educational Decisions ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Education Debt

In this essay, Brian D. Lozenski explores why Gloria Ladson-Billings's 2006 pronouncement of the nation's “education debt,” as opposed to “achievement gap,” has not gained traction in the national discourse around educational disparity. He contends that education debt is a more nuanced, historically based, and generative framing of racialized educational disparity, which has been marginalized by the narratives of crisis in education, specifically with black youth, that necessitate a frantic urgency allowing for ahistorical, quick-fix solutions to complex problems. Through a tracing of four major epochs in African American education, including the mid-nineteenth-century era of slavery statutes, Reconstruction, post–Brown v. Board, and today's early twenty-first-century “crisis,” of the underachievement of black youth in schools, the author considers how African American education has always been precarious and, thus, able to be labeled a “crisis.” Using a combination of synchronic (snapshot) and diachronic (longitudinal) analyses, he demonstrates how the achievement gap logic does not allow us to address historical constructions of contemporary disparity. Lozenski concludes the essay by suggesting that African American self-determination, and not the reification of the nation-state through state-centered reform efforts, should be the driving force behind educational decisions that impact black youth.

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