On the Scenic Route to Irving Berlin's Holiday Inn (1942)

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 464-497
Author(s):  
Todd Decker

This study of Irving Berlin's Holiday Inn (Paramount, 1942) considers the collaboration of the film's four primary creative figures: Irving Berlin, Mark Sandrich, Bing Crosby, and Fred Astaire. Extracted from a wide array of production materials, the story of the making of Holiday Inn demonstrates how archival research can address questions of broad scholarly interest, such as large-scale form, star personas, musical style, musical-dramatic integration, the representation of blackness and African American characters, and political meaning in popular-culture products. Examining details of the film's production history sheds particular light upon the function of songs and musical routines as quasi-autonomous parts of the whole.

Author(s):  
Jane Caputi

The proposed new geological era, The Anthropocene (a.k.a. Age of Humans, Age of Man), marking human domination of the planet long called Mother Earth, is truly The Age of the Motherfucker. The ecocide of the Anthropocene is the responsibility of Man, the Western- and masculine-identified corporate, military, intellectual, and political class that masks itself as the exemplar of the civilized and the human. The word motherfucker was invented by the enslaved children of White slave masters to name their mothers’ rapist/owners. Man’s strategic motherfucking, from the personal to the planetary, is invasion, exploitation, spirit-breaking, extraction and toxic wasting of individuals, communities, and lands, for reasons of pleasure, plunder, and profit. Ecocide is attempted deicide of Mother Nature-Earth, reflecting Man’s goal to become the god he first made in his own image. The motivational word Motherfucker has a flip side, further revealing the Anthropocene as it signifies an outstanding, formidable, and inexorable force. Mother Nature-Earth is that “Mutha’ ”—one defying translation into heteropatriarchal classifications of gender, one capable of overwhelming Man, and not the other way around. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American scholarship; ecofeminism; ecowomanism; green activism; femme, queer, and gender non-binary philosophies; literature and arts; Afrofuturism; and popular culture, Call Your “Mutha’ ” contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence of Man’s supremacy over nature, but that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is going away. It is imperative now to call the “Mutha’ ” by decolonizing land, bodies, and minds, ending rapism, feeding the green, renewing sustaining patterns, and affirming devotion to Mother Nature-Earth.


2005 ◽  
Vol 31 (6) ◽  
pp. 880-889 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiffany L. Gary ◽  
Felicia Hill-Briggs ◽  
Marian Batts-Turner ◽  
Frederick L. Brancati

Purpose Large-scale effectiveness trials designed to translate evidence-based diabetes care to community settings are few. Studies describing these methods among high-risk minority populations are particularly limited. Methods The authors describe Project Sugar, a randomized controlled trial conducted in 2 phases: Project Sugar 1 (1994-1999), which piloted a 4-arm clinic and homebased intervention using nurse case management and community health workers in 186 urban African Americans with type 2 diabetes, and Project Sugar 2 (2000-2005), which examined effectiveness of this intervention among 542 diabetic, urban African Americans. Results and Conclusions Project Sugar had success with regard to recruitment and retention, both in phase 1 (80% rate at 24 months) and phase 2 (>90% at 24 months). Using the RE-AIM framework, planning and research design for Project Sugar 2 is described in detail for elements that contributed to the reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, and maintenance of this study within a minority community setting. In addition to successful strategies, challenges to conducting effectiveness trials in an inner-city African American community are identified.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-45
Author(s):  
Owen Thompson

Prior to the racial integration of schools in the southern United States, predominantly African American schools were staffed almost exclusively by African American teachers as well, and teaching constituted an extraordinarily large share of professional employment among southern Blacks. The large-scale desegregation of southern schools occurring after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act represented a potential threat to this employment base, and this paper estimates how student integration affected Black teacher employment. Using newly assembled archival data from 759 southern school districts observed between 1960 and 1972, I estimate that a school district transitioning from fully segregated to fully integrated education, which approximates the experience of the modal southern district in this period, led to a 41.7% reduction in Black teacher employment. Additional results, including event-study specifications and models with extensive controls for concurrent policy changes, strongly suggest that these employment reductions were a causal effect of integration and not due to school district self-selection into desegregation. To study the broader impacts of reduced teaching employment, I estimate race-specific changes in occupations and earnings in the Decennial Censuses, and find that displaced southern Black teachers either entered lower skill occupations within the South or migrated out of the region to continue teaching, and that integration induced displacement led to substantial earnings reductions.


Author(s):  
Christopher Tomlins

This introductory chapter considers what called William Styron's fictive realities into being, and how they were crafted. Styron had written The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which represented itself as the autobiographical narrative of the African American slave-turned-rebel leader, Nat Turner. The chapter asks what made his work a “meditation on history”—and why it failed. It also takes a look at whether it might be possible to redeem Nat Turner from endless deferral—the effect of multiple attempts to “understand” him as a figment of text without listening to (or for) him as a person. African American popular culture has tried, with some success, to retrieve Nat Turner, to recognize and assimilate him to itself, without deferral. However, this chapter considers whether or not he will ever be able to achieve a historical presence of his own that is other than past, and how.


2013 ◽  
Vol 115 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Chazan ◽  
Andrew Brantlinger ◽  
Lawrence M. Clark ◽  
Ann R. Edwards

Background/Context This opening article, like the other articles in this special issue, is situated in scholarship that attempts to understand the racialized nature of mathematics education in the United States and to examine the racial identities of students and teachers in the context of school mathematics. It is designed to respond to the current (mathematics) education policy context that largely ignores teachers’ experiential and cultural knowledge while stressing the importance of teachers’ content knowledge and academic achievement. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This article presents theoretical perspectives and research questions concerning the knowledge and other resources that African American teachers bring to teaching mathematics, perspectives and questions that are taken up in the five subsequent articles in this special issue. Setting The cases developed in this special issue were developed from observations of the introductory algebra classes of, and interviews with, two well-respected African American teachers in one neighborhood high school in a large urban school district that serves a predominantly African American student population. Research Design This opening article frames two case study papers and two analysis papers that report on findings from a large-scale qualitative study of the racialized identity and instructional approaches of two of the six African American mathematics teachers studied in the Mid-Atlantic Center for Mathematics Teaching and Learning Algebra 1 Case Studies Project. Conclusions/Recommendations Together with the other articles in this special issue, this work contributes to the development of more sophisticated attempts to integrate understandings of race into the work of the mathematics education community. It challenges taken-for-granted notions of the knowledge base and resources needed to be an effective mathematics teacher of African American students in underresourced large urban schools.


Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker

This chapter establishes the definition of comic rage and traces the history of humor and militancy in African American literature and history. It distinguishes between comic rage and satire, culminating in an examination of George Schuyler’s Black No More. It details how comic rage acts as an abjection (from Julia Kristeva) that breaks down simplistic ideas about race and representations that appear in literature and popular culture. While identifying Richard Pryor as the most recognizable employer of comic rage, this chapter also points to figures like Sutton Griggs, Ishmael Reed, and Malcolm X; who embody the multiple combinations of anger and comedy that appear in the chapters of the book. It outlines the contents of the chapters that trace the development of comic rage in relation to the various political and literary moments in American and African American life.


Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin

This introduction uses the popular James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson song “Congo Love Song” to consider the way that African American popular culture—in this instance a wildly successful vaudeville song—were integral parts of a larger culture of African American transnational engagement with the Congo. The song was written and first performed in 1903 at the height of an African American campaign against King Leopold II of Belgium’s colonial regime. The political significance of the song is further highlighted by the career of James Weldon Johnson, who was not only a songwriter, but also a novelist, journalist, lawyer, educator, diplomat, and political activist with the NAACP. His longer career trajectory points to the ways that the Congo is deeply embedded with a wide range of African American cultural and political engagements.


Author(s):  
Jade Broughton Adams

This chapter demonstrates how Fitzgerald invokes music in his short fiction, which heavily features jazz. Fitzgerald shows how white artists such as the Castles and Irving Berlin often profited from the appropriation of African American musical culture such as jazz and blues. Fitzgerald’s explorations of Tin Pan Alley’s output demonstrate that a more malleable treatment of established formulae can yield valuable results. This book draws parallels between Irving Berlin’s subversion of tired Tin Pan Alley formulae, and Fitzgerald’s own manipulations of the popular magazine short story genre. In his later use of music, Fitzgerald explores the limitations of language, the role of the artist in society, and questions the value of popular culture itself. He satirises the conventions of popular songs, and subtly parodies short story conventions (particularly romantic short story conventions). Fitzgerald identifies with the songwriter, whose role is to provoke emotion and forge an intimacy with the consumer, much like the commercial short storyist. By positioning Fitzgerald’s thematic and character repetitions and concessions to the magazine format as deliberate rather than desperate, this chapter suggests that his self-parody is a conscious aesthetic decision in the process of exploring the identity of the authentic literary craftsman, dancer, or musician.


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