Funky Bluesology

Groove Theory ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 147-181
Author(s):  
Tony Bolden
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Biographical Information ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Black Aesthetics ◽  
Critical Methods

This chapter examines Gil Scott-Heron as an exemplar of the socio-political manifestation of the contrarianism in funk aesthetics. Combining biographical information from Scott-Heron’s memoir and interviews, critical methods from literary scholarship, and insights from philosophy, the chapter highlights Scott-Heron’s understanding of the blues as a locus of black aesthetics and political philosophy. In doing so, the chapter illuminates Scott-Heron’s prescience, and examines many of his multiple talents, including poetry, songwriting, singing, and playing keyboards. Unlike most recording artists, however, Scott-Heron was influenced by writers, especially the Black Arts writers who generally believed that artists should create primarily for working-class African Americans. Consequently, he curtailed his budding career as a novelist and shifted his concentration to performing and recording songs and poems in the early 1970s. The chapter includes textual analyses of key recordings as well as discussions of Scott-Heron’s satire and social criticism. Additionally, Bolden highlights musical aspects of Scott-Heron’s appeal, especially the timbre of his voice but also the musicianship of the Midnight Band, which he co-led with longtime collaborator Brian Jackson.  

Workers in Transition

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-75
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Organization ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Working Class ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
American Federation Of Labor ◽  
Labor Laws ◽  
American Federation ◽  
The U.S

This chapter argues that change in the U.S. labor movement from American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft unionism to Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) industrial unionism largely lay behind Jersey City’s opposition to the CIO in 1937, not just Mayor Hague’s supposed antilabor inclinations. Hague aligned with AFL unions, but Depression and New Deal labor laws weakened them, while boosting CIO industrial unionism and its appeal to suffering Jersey manufacturing workers, including women and African Americans. Moreover, the CIO’s class-conscious culture of “working-class Americanism” clashed with Hague’s ethnicity-based rhetoric of “Patriotic Americanism.” Meanwhile, interwar anticommunism intensified Jersey City’s opposition to CIO organizers, who themselves drew on Popular Front rhetoric of antifascism to oppose “dictatorial” regimes like Hague’s. This polarization complicated Jersey City’s reception of the CIO.

‘A very Moloch of a baby’

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-106
Author(s):  
Tamara S. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Rescue Work ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Infant Behaviour

Dickens’s portrayal of babyhood comprises comical creations as well as complex symbols and infants as victims of social injustice, yet, especially his funny babies are often overlooked. The first chapter explores how Dickens satirizes the growing commodification of babyhood in Victorian Britain and, in playing with readers’ expectations, produces comical scenes that strengthen rather than undercut his social criticism. His exposure of failed middle-class projects of child rescue urges his readers to reconsider prevailing ideas of charitable intervention, while he uses comically exaggerated infant behaviour to render working-class practices of child care mundane and familiar without sentimentalizing them. His representation of working-class baby-minding, a practice that Victorian philanthropists notoriously misunderstood, exemplifies how Dickens could combine comedy and social criticism to draw attention to topical issues, upend clichés, and at the same time create individualized infant characters. His Christmas book for 1848, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, produces a grotesquely comical image of a baby, minded by a small boy, as ‘Moloch’, a deity demanding child sacrifice. While Baby Moloch becomes central to a reassessment of emotional attachment, the narrative complicates middle-class rescue work. The simultaneity of the comical baby and infants as symbols of suffering is then further developed in Bleak House (1853), whereas in Our Mutual Friend (1865), the failed rescue of an orphaned toddler dramatizes pressing issues involving paid child-minding and unregulated adoption. The analysis of Dickens’s fictional infants simultaneously reveals the different narrative roles of the comical baby in Victorian literature.

Let the Buyer Beware

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-166
Author(s):  
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Urban Housing ◽  
Disposable Income ◽  
Property Value ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
Racist Ideology ◽  
Housing Options

One major problem with the HUD’s response to the urban housing crisis was the quality of the homes made available to working class and poor African Americans. While affordable housing was a government goal, it relied on private businesses that operated in the interest of profit. Additionally, the business of home appraisal was based on the assumption that property value decreased with proximity to African Americans. This racist ideology greatly limited the housing options of working class and poor African Americans. Homes with major issues were deemed inhabitable and sold. Unsuspecting buyers often did not have the disposable income to keep up with home repairs and mortgages. Mortgage lenders made a habit of profiting off houses that went into foreclosure quickly. The HUD was unable to effectively address the predatory practices of the private sector because of low staffing, over-extension, and anti-black racism within the organization.

The Aesthetics of Anticipation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Natalie Crawford
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Black Aesthetics

The first chapter argues that black aesthetics pivot on the spirit of anticipation. The first section of this chapter focuses on the 1920 and 30s Harlem Renaissance anticipation of the Black Arts Movement. Crawford then shows how the Black Arts Movement anticipates the post-black maneuvers of the 21st century. This chapter examines literature written by Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Claudia Rankine, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others.

TEST USE AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

2009 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn Fulcher
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Positive Test ◽  
Negative Test ◽  
Negative Role ◽  
Test Use ◽  
Test Impact ◽  
Test Architecture ◽  
Broad Approach

Since Messick (1989) included test use in his validity matrix, there has been extensive debate about professional responsibility for test use. To theorize test use, some researchers have relied upon Foucault's social criticism, thereby stressing the negative role of tests in the surveillance of the marginalized. From a wider perspective, Shohamy (2001a) sees negative test impact as stemming from centralizing agencies, which still leaves open the possibility of positive test use. In this article I argue that how tests are used is a reflection of the wider political philosophy of a society. Political philosophy can generally be characterized as placing more emphasis on either the state or the citizen, leading to collectivist or individualist solutions to problems, be they real or perceived. In collectivist societies, tests, like history, are used to achieve conformity, control, and identity. In individualistic societies, they are used to promote individual progress. The role of tests within each broad approach will be described and illustrated. Finally, I briefly describe effect-driven test architecture as a method for testers to proscribe unintended uses of their tests.

RACISM, MORALISM, AND SOCIAL CRITICISM1

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tommie Shelby
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Philosophical Study ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Normative Evaluation ◽  
Social Arrangements ◽  
Empirical Analyses

AbstractThrough a critical engagement with Lawrence Blum’s theory of racism, I defend a “social criticism” model for the philosophical study of racism. This model relies on empirical analyses of social and psychological phenomena but goes beyond this to include the assessment of the warrant of widely held beliefs and the normative evaluation of attitudes, actions, institutions, and social arrangements. I argue that we should give political philosophy theoretical primacy over moral philosophy in normative analyses of racism. I also show how conceptualizing racism as an ideology gives us a unified account of racism and helps us to see what is truly troubling about racism, both in the past and today.

Kimberley L. Phillips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–45. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xv + 334 pp. $59.95 cloth.

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 246-248
Author(s):  
Peter Gottlieb
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Working Class ◽  
North African ◽  
University Of Illinois ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
And Gender ◽  
North And South ◽  
Landmark Study

Kimberley Phillips adds a fine study of African-Americans' northward migration, community development, and working-class formation to a series of similar works published in the 1980s and 1990s. Alabama North opens new reaches of African-Americans' early twentieth century experience in both North and South, but especially in Cleveland, a major industrial city and significant destination for Southern black migrants. We have known most about the city's African-American community at this time from the landmark study of ghetto development by Ken Kusmer, published in 1976. Like the more recent field of research which has examined black migration and migrants in Northern industrial cities, Phillips focuses her study not on the spatial and social aspects of African-Americans' increasingly segregated community but on the racial, class, and gender dynamics that produced a particular form of community in Cleveland.

Black Inside/Out

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Natalie Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Open Space ◽  
Installation Art ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Black Aesthetics ◽  
Cultural Movements

The sixth chapter examines the role of inner and outer space in cultural productions of black post-blackness. Crawford develops a theory of black public interiority (a theory of black cultural movements’ ability to create a sense of shared interiority within the public space of the collective). She argues that the Black Arts Movement was aspiring for public art that could be experienced as both a black interior and an open space created by a collective. This chapter analyzes a range of installation art and other visual art, film, and letter writing that dramatize the black interior being experienced as the black outdoors. Crawford demonstrates that the BAM set in motion a vital process (that black aesthetics continue to engage) of refusing to allow black interiority to be defined as the province of the black bourgeoisie. The art examined includes installation art created by Kara Walker, outdoor murals, the film Night Catches Us, the letter writing of Carolyn Rodgers and Hoyt Fuller, and more.

The Black Press and a Mass Black Readership

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-44
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Mass Movement ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
Black Life

This chapter examines the mass movement of southern African Americans to Northern cities in the first half of the twentieth century and shows how it dramatically altered the Black Press. After 1920, black newspaper editors covered more news that they believed would appeal to working-class African Americans. In charting the development of the early-twentieth-century Black Press, chapter 1 presents a comparative analysis of five different newspapers: The Amsterdam News, The Baltimore Afro-American, The Chicago Defender, The Philadelphia Tribune, and the Pittsburgh Courier. These five newspapers demonstrate how the Black Press fostered and imagined an African American readership’s interest in sexuality through its sensational coverage of the variegations of black life throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

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