For My People

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 173-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Luckett
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
State College ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Margaret Walker

When Margaret Walker founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People in 1968, she stood at the forefront of a nascent Black studies movement. At the time, she had served on the faculty at Jackson State College since 1949. In both a racist and a sexist society, she used her scholarship and art as vehicles for activism. Today, the Margaret Walker Center, named for its founder, continues to lift up her legacy as a museum and special collections archive dedicated to Black experience in America.

Look, blackness in Brazil!: Disrupting the grotesquerie of racial representation in Brazilian visual culture

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Andrea Dos Santos Soares
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Racial Representation ◽  
Racial Domination ◽  
And Performance

This article experiments with collage to explore the visual representation of black people in Brazilian media, popular culture and politics, examining how these representations constitute statements regarding dynamics of racial domination. The work proposes that the introduction of disruptive elements into the very images that objectify the black body could create the necessary conditions for a valuable criticism of how blackness is disposed within the nation’s formation. The articulation with black studies in visual culture and performance, black feminism, African diaspora and post-colonial theories intends to develop analytical frames to examine the interconnection between the representational process of ‘stereotyping’, symbolic violence and anti-black ideologies in the context of the national formation narratives. Methodologically, the articulation of these fields of inquiry intends to provide tools able to highlight and disrupt the regimes of racial representation circulating in Brazilian popular culture.

Nigger and Home

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
White People ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
White Children ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Free People

Chapter 1 is an etymology of the word nigger. Colored travelers described the word and the ideology it represented as a constantly looming threat. White children chased free people of color down the street shouting the word. White satirists and performers repeated it in literary and theatrical blackface productions that often depicted black caricatures as being dangerous precisely because they freely traversed the nation. In the nominally free states, nigger threatened brutal reprisals and thus shaped the black experience of mobility. This chapter argues that the source of the word’s virulence resided in the fact that African Americans in antebellum America had long used the word nigger to describe themselves and others. Black laborers adopted the word into their own vocabularies to subvert white authority. Whites therefore very much understood the word as part of the black lexicon. In turn, they ventriloquized nigger to mock black speech, black mobility, and, ultimately, black freedom. Considering nigger not solely as a white antiblack epithet but also as a word rooted in African American cultural and protest traditions goes a long way toward solving the perennial American racial conundrum of why black people can say nigger and white people should not.

scholarly journals “A Man's Story is His Gris-Gris”: Cultural Slavery, Literary Emancipation and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Black Nationalism ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
The Common ◽  
New Criteria

With the emergence of black nationalism in the late sixties, the delineation of a new black aesthetic became an urgent issue: it was first and most persistently raised by Hoyt Fuller in Negro Digest, and soon became the staple of radical black little magazines across America. In 1971, the appearance of a collection of essays entitled The Black Aesthetic and edited by Addison Gayle brought some coherence to the debate, and sanctified its assumptions. In his own contributions to that book, Gayle recorded the passing of the myth of the American melting pot and the consequent need to repudiate assimilationism. He argued that black nationalism implied the development of a black aesthetic in direct opposition to prevailing aesthetic criteria, in which white cultural concerns were privileged under a guise of “universalism”: this bogus universalism actually depended upon the marginalization of black perspectives and black writers by a white literary establishment. Such observations established the need for a new black aesthetic, and prescriptions for its form proliferated. These blueprints were handed down at a series of conferences at which black writers past and present stood trial against the new criteria. The emergent consensus was for writing that directly recreated the black experience out of which it arose; that found its style in the forms of “black folk expression”; that was socially progressive in effect – according to a very literal concept of functional literature; that addressed itself to the common readership of black people; and that assiduously cultivated positive black characters.

scholarly journals TOWARDS OTHER NARRATIVES: EDUCATION AND DERACIALIZATION OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN BRAZIL

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (171) ◽  
pp. 288-307
Author(s):  
Priscila Martins Medeiros ◽  
Paulo Alberto dos Santos Vieira
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Black People ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
National Question ◽  
Educational Spaces ◽  
Black Resistance ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Brazilian Identity ◽  
Black Agency

Abstract In this paper, we discuss the historical process involved in the construction of the Brazilian national identity, based on the racialization of the black experience, an element still present in the Brazilian identity formation process. Despite the processes of dehumanization endured by black people, they can and must be portrayed in educational spaces for their resistance and fight in order to escape from the zone of non-being and ontological erasure caused by modernity. The paper is organized in three general topics: a) racism, education and the national question in Brazil; b) the processes of racialization of black subjects; and c) black resistance and black agency as a way to construct new narratives in the field of education.

scholarly journals Black Masculinity and Plantation Patriarchy in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Lobodziec
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Margaret Walker

In <em>Jubilee</em>, Margaret Walker depicts plantation patriarchy as a racial and gendered context that coerces black men to redefine their masculine conceptualizations. The fictitious slave plantation represents the system which commodifies and divides black people “into those with skills […], field hands, ‘breeding females,’ concubines, and children” (Nichols 1972, p. 10). This portrayal of slave plantation is congruent with historically documented circumstances, when “Much of [the slave] labor was gender- or age- specific” (Ash 2010, p. 20). As far as the position of black men is concerned, ascribed a subordinate status to that of white masters, overseers, and servants, both free and enslaved black men begin to imbibe patriarchal mindset and redefine their own masculine prowess. As Margaret Walker portrays, this response to oppressive plantation patriarchy effects multifarious black male postures, ranging from resisting and self-asserting warriors to humiliated and silenced victims.

Defining Ourselves

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Reid-Merritt
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Multidisciplinary Nature ◽  
Academic Units ◽  
Ongoing Development

What's in a name? For the discipline that has become familiar to so many of us as Black Studies , much can be made of this question. While the study of Black people from multiple approaches and perspectives reflective of African worldviews and orientations is at the very core of the discipline, properly naming the field with a single, unifying designation has remained an elusive goal. In the past 40 years, the multidisciplinary nature of the field has contributed to the ongoing development of new programs and academic units with specialized foci and creative titles to match. This article examines the historical emergence and expansion of the field of Black Studies and the challenges that remain in appropriately naming the discipline and correctly identifying those who portend to be its practitioners.

Revisiting Auburn Avenue: The Construction of an Afrofuturist Counterpublic Space

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elyes Hanafi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black People ◽  
African Descent ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black History ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Movement ◽  
Overt Form

The black counterpublic, as a space where black people could exercise their discursive contestation and participatory deliberation, has too often served to produce a counter-discourse aiming at defying white hegemonic mode of rule and racialized categorization of members of society. In the same vein, Afrofuturism, as a burgeoning cultural movement in the United States, employs the Afrodiasporic experience as a backdrop against which to contest the white-narrated version of black history and to project a better future for people of African descent. Merging the underlying philosophies of the black counterpublic and Afrofuturism, this paper seeks to advance the notion of the Afrofuturist counterpublic as a more embedded concept that tends to address the past and future of the black experience in a more explicit and overt form. Drawing mainly on Inwood’s representation of the redevelopment project along Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, GA, as a contemporary form of the counterpublic, this article adds to his insights by suggesting that Auburn Avenue as a rehabilitated space is deeply informed by the undergirding tenets of the counterpublic and Afrofuturist theories so as to exalt it to a symbol of an Afrofuturist counterpublic.

The Enslaved, the Worker, and Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction: Toward an Underdiscipline of Antisociology

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moon-Kie Jung
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
Racial Slavery

At the heart of sociology lies a paradox. Sociology recognizes itself as a preeminently modern discipline yet remains virtually silent on what W.E.B. Du Bois identifies as modernity’s “most magnificent drama”: the transoceanic enslavement of Africans. Through a reconsideration of his classic text Black Reconstruction in America, this article offers an answer to the paradox: a profoundly antisocial condition, racial slavery lies beyond the bounds of the social, beyond sociology’s self-defined limits. Consequently, even when actually dealing with racial slavery, social theories—even radical social theories, such as Du Bois’s Marxism—inexorably misrecognize it. Placing the enslavement of Black people at the center of analysis and drawing on the insights of Saidiya Hartman and other radical theorists in Black studies, an underdiscipline of antisociology is proposed as a collective project to provincialize the social and to more adequately account for the incommensurability of antiblackness.

Unsettling the Coloniality of the Researcher: Toward a Black Studies Approach to Critical Humanisms in Qualitative Inquiry

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110218
Author(s):  
Bryce Henson
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Qualitative Inquiry ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
Critical Knowledge

This article unsettles the coloniality of the researcher, a convergence between coloniality, the researcher, and dominant representations of the human. This unsettling is necessary to call attention to, critique, and dismantle the institutional and systemic racism and its quotidian and mundane practices within Qualitative Inquiry as well as the human sciences in general. Engaging in Black Studies and the autobiographical, I first flesh out how coloniality continues to inform our notion of who does research, how one does research, and which cultural messages and knowledges are permissible. This coloniality naturalizes Man as our conception of the human and represents Black people as non-human even as we become researchers. Then, I illustrate how Black Studies approaches to Black cultural traditions and philosophies open up different possibilities in Qualitative Inquiry for the Black researcher, critical knowledge practices, and a more expansive conception of the human.

“This Quiet Revolution”

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-330
Author(s):  
Eli Meyerhoff
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Third World ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Student Union ◽  
The Third ◽  
State College ◽  
Experimental College ◽  
History Of ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
The Third World

One of the most revolutionary movements in the history of US universities—the Third World students’ strike that shut down San Francisco (SF) State College for five months in 1968–69—had a key precursor in the Experimental College (EC), which supported student-organized courses, including the first Black studies courses, at SF State. The EC offers inspiration for creating infrastructures of radical imagination and study. The EC appropriated resources—including spaces, money, teachers, credits, and technologies—for studying within, against, and beyond the normal university. The EC facilitated courses with revolutionary content, and they fostered modes of study in these courses that were radically alternative to the education-based mode of study. Contributing my concept of “modes of study,” I offer guidance for revolutionary movements on the terrain of universities today. Through analysis of archival materials and interviews with organizers of the EC and Black Student Union, I found that the EC organizers’ potentials for supporting revolutionary study were limited by their romanticizing of education, which was coconstituted with subscriptions to modernist imaginaries. Rejecting the education-based mode of study as bound up with liberal-capitalist modernity/coloniality, organizers today can appropriate their universities’ resources for alternative modes of study and world-making.

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