Between Nostalgia and History in the US South: Fictions of the Black Waiter on Film

Paragrana ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-173
Author(s):  
Lily Kelting
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Primary Case ◽  
Us South ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The U.S

AbstractIn this essay, I examine frictions between the past, present and future which, in the tension between them, generate fictions which conflate not only Southern nostalgia with history but undergird American exceptionalism more broadly. These fictions generated by the rubbing together of past and present are not only nostalgic for a past that never existed but actively anti-historical, supplanting discrete periods in the history of the U.S. South (such as slavery, the Jim Crow Era, and the present day) with an intentionally confounded “temporal estrangement”. To trace the fault-lines at which nostalgia and history chafe against each other, I focus on the figure of the black waiter.As to my choice of the word black instead of African-American: as this article focuses explicitly on racial divides in American Southern history, I have chosen to use the word black rather than African-American. I see this move as a way to emphasize the lived consequences of racial difference for black Americans in the time period I analyze here – effects which, like the murder of Booker Wright, do not live in the hybrid space of the hyphen. My primary case study is Paula Deen’s legal deposition, taken in Savannah in 2013 after almost three years of legal proceedings. But in order to situate Deen’s fictions more fully within and beyond the context of the U.S. South, I read this deposition through and against two films, one largely-forgotten documentary, Mississippi: An Inside Story and one blockbuster, Forrest Gump.

In Living Color: Early “Impressions” of Slavery and the Limits of Living History

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1732-1748
Author(s):  
Drew Swanson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public History ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Living History ◽  
Mount Vernon ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Historical Sites ◽  
Embodied History

Abstract In the 1970s, American historical sites began to more thoroughly and critically interpret slavery’s history, with a few institutions employing living history as an interpretive form. At sites like Virginia’s Mount Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg, the hope is that these historical “impressions” will engage audiences with a more authentic or credible representation of racial bondage. An earlier wave of living historical representations of slavery suggest the challenges and hazards of embodied history, however. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a significant number of southern sites employed African American interpreters who claimed to have been born into slavery, often on the very sites where they were currently working. Historical attractions used the “authenticity” and “credibility” of these interpreters to advance the narrative of a happy Old South. Historians have noted these performances as part of the sectional reconciliation of the Jim Crow era, but have rarely interpreted them as public history. Although the contemporary living history of slavery has different—and far better—goals than impressions of a century past, this long history of embodied bondage suggests the implicit dangers of interpreting slavery and race through living people.

No Future in This Country

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andre E. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Rhetorical History ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
The Public ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
African American Leaders

No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner is a rhetorical history of the public career of Bishop Turner during a critical point in American history—from 1896-1915—the “nadir of race relations.” It was during this period in history that African Americans lost many of the gains during Reconstruction. During this period, America adopted the “separate but equal doctrine,” lynching of African Americans went unabated, the convict leasing systems were on the rise, and the Jim Crow era had begun. In response to this, many African American leaders produced racial uplift narratives that focused on respectability politics. No Future argues that Turner opposed racial uplift and respectability politics as a panacea for what ailed African Americans. His answer was simple—emigration to Africa. While Turner did not see any bright and glorious future for African Americans during this time, he never gave up hope that African Americans would someday use their own agency to carve out a better future for subsequent generations. No Future argues that Turner does this within the African American Prophetic tradition by focusing in on Turner’s use of prophetic pessimism. In short, while many African American leaders were celebrating how far they had come from slavery, Turner reminded them and the nation that they had not come that far—indeed, in many instances, with conditions continuing to worsen, many felt they were still trapped, if not by slavery itself, then surely the lingering effects of slavery.

Liberia, South Carolina

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Coggeshall
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Her Family ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnographic History ◽  
First Time

In 2007, while researching mountain culture in upstate South Carolina, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall stumbled upon the small community of Liberia in the Blue Ridge foothills. There he met Mable Owens Clarke and her family, the remaining members of a small African American community still living on land obtained immediately after the Civil War. This intimate history tells the story of five generations of the Owens family and their friends and neighbors, chronicling their struggles through slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the desegregation of the state. Through hours of interviews with Mable and her relatives, as well as friends and neighbors, Coggeshall presents an ethnographic history that allows members of a largely ignored community to speak and record their own history for the first time. This story sheds new light on the African American experience in Appalachia, and in it Coggeshall documents the community’s 150-year history of resistance to white oppression, while offering a new way to understand the symbolic relationship between residents and the land they occupy, tying together family, memory, and narratives to explain this connection.

Archival Enthusiasm

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-102
Author(s):  
Lindsay V. Reckson
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Political History ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Death Scene ◽  
Moving Body ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Enthusiasm

This chapter examines the ecstatic performances haunting Stephen Crane’s 1895 narrative of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage. While much has been made of the way the novel strategically “forgets” the political history of the war, this chapter analyzes the novel’s complex overlay of religious enthusiasm and minstrel performance, exploring how Red Badge deploys these forms in order to grapple with the embodied semiotics of the Jim Crow era. Recovering traces of the midcentury minstrel figure “Dandy Jim of Caroline” in Jim Conklin’s exuberant death scene, the chapter argues that the narrative afterlife of such traces reveals the novel’s tendency to simultaneously erase and embed the excesses of war and postwar racial violence. Marking the historical resonance between minstrelsy and religious enthusiasm in their objectification of the moving body, Red Badge’s performances treat bodies as kinetic archives, whose stylized gestures offer stunning testimony to history’s traumatic returns. In this sense, the novel treats the ambivalence of performance as precisely the arena in which literature might grapple with history’s unaccountable remainders.

Eddie Anderson, Rochester, and Race in 1930s Radio and Film

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
Time Part

African-American dancer, singer, comedian Eddie Anderson pursued an entertainment career in California, his opportunities limited by Jim Crow-era racism in Hollywood but also shaped opportunities in night clubs and cabarets that catered to both black and white patrons. Winning an audition for a one-time role on Benny’s radio show, Anderson’s inimitable gravelly voice spurred Benny to create a full time part, the character of Rochester Van Jones, Jack’s butler and valet, in late 1937. Although initially hampered by stereotyped minstrel-show dialogue and character habits, Rochester soon became renowned by both white and black listeners for his ability to criticize the “Boss” in impertinent manner. Virtually co-starred in three films with Benny that were highly successful at the box office, commenters in the black press in 1940 hoped that Rochester offered “a new day” in improved race relations.

Race Women

2019 ◽  
pp. 70-100
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the fascinating history of Bennett College – one of only two single sex colleges dedicated to educating African American women. Although Bennett would not make that transition until 1926, the institution played a vital role in educating African American women in Greensboro, North Carolina from the betrayal of the Nadir to the promises of a New Negro Era. The latter period witnessed Bennett, under the leadership of David Dallas Jones, mold scores of young girls into politically conscious race women who were encouraged to resist Jim Crow policies and reject the false principals of white supremacy. Their politicization led to a massive boycott of a theatre in downtown Greensboro and helped to set the tone for Greensboro’s evolution into a critical launching point for the modern civil rights movement.

scholarly journals Jim Crow Downunder? African American Encounters with White Australia, 1942––1945

2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Brawley ◽  
Chris Dixon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
White Americans ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The American South ◽  
The U.S

Between 1941 and 1945, as the U.S. military machine sent millions of Americans——and American culture——around the world, several thousand African Americans spent time in Australia. Armed with little knowledge of Australian racial values and practices, black Americans encoutered a nation whose long-standing commitment to the principle of "White Australia" appeared to rest comfortably with the segregative policies commonly associated with the American South. Nonetheless, while African Americans did encounter racism and discrimination——practices often encouraged by the white Americans who were also stationed in Australia during the war——there is compelling evidence that their experiences were not always negative. Indeed, for many black Americans, Australians' apparent open-mindedness and racial views of white Britons and others with whom African Americans came into contact during the war. Making use of U.S. Army censors' reports and paying attention to black Americans' views of their experiences in Australia, this article not only casts light on an aspect of American-Australian relations that has hitherto recieved scant scholarly attention and reveals something about the African American experience, but also offers insights into race relations within the U.S. armed forces.

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