A “Vacant Receptacle”? Blind Tom, Cognitive Difference, and Pedagogy

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 552-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Krentz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Mental Disability ◽  
Cognitive Disability ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Intellectually Disabled ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Better Than

If disability studies is often overlooked at universities today, cognitive disability is often overlooked by scholars in disability studies. How should we think and talk about mental difference? Our academic enterprise privileges intellect, as is appropriate. But how should we properly account for human beings who are intellectually disabled? How does mental disability relate to other disabilities or to more familiar identity categories like race and gender? Perhaps no one illustrates these questions better than an intriguing figure who captivated audiences in nineteenth-century America: Thomas Wiggins, also known as Thomas Bethune but most popularly known as Blind Tom.

Blackface Minstrelsy and the Reception of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-320
Author(s):  
Julia J. Chybowski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Black Swan ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis article explores blackface minstrelsy in the context of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's singing career of the 1850s–1870s. Although Greenfield performed a version of African American musicality that was distinct from minstrel caricatures, minstrelsy nonetheless impacted her reception. The ubiquity of minstrel tropes greatly influenced audience perceptions of Greenfield's creative and powerful transgressions of expected race and gender roles, as well as the alignment of race with mid-nineteenth-century notions of social class. Minstrel caricatures and stereotypes appeared in both praise and ridicule of Greenfield's performances from her debut onward, and after successful US and transatlantic tours established her notoriety, minstrel companies actually began staging parody versions of Greenfield, using her sobriquet, “Black Swan.” These “Black Swan” acts are evidence that Greenfield's achievements were perceived as threats to established social hierarchies.

scholarly journals A Legal History of the New Zealand Jury Service - Introduction, Evolution, and Equality?

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 283
Author(s):  
Michèle Powles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Jury Service ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jury System ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Service Introduction

This article traces the development of the New Zealand jury system. Most noteworthy in thisdevelopment has been the lack of controversy the system has created. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the pursuit of equality in the legal system generally led to debate and reform of juries in relation to representation, race and gender.

Ballad Knowledge and the Poetics of Repetition

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-140
Author(s):  
Alexandra Socarides
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Traditional Ballads ◽  
And Gender

Chapter 3 explores a genre (the ballad) that was wildly popular in nineteenth-century America, and investigates the ways in which women poets entered into discussions about authorship, poetics, and gender through their engagements with it. Focusing in particular on tropes of faithlessness, pride, laziness, and general “badness” that had long marked traditional ballads, this chapter shows how these tropes came to be associated with women and how American periodicals seemed to embrace the circulation of such ballads. But as women poets took up this genre and were faced with how to rewrite this female figure, they pushed its primary convention—repetition—to its limits in order to make explicit the particular problem that accompanies the recitation of “ballad knowledge” for women. Instead of looking away from the scenes of repetition that disempower women, these ballads go right to the center, employing repetitions to new ends.

scholarly journals The zone of non-being: When belonging becomes more important than being

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda L. Du Plessis
Keyword(s):  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Practical Theological ◽  
Speak Up ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Better Than

Silent screams echo in South Africa, objecting to violence due to cultural and gender differences. Bitterness and anger increase as the cultures, knowledge systems and ways of being or ‘non-being’ are despised, demonised and declared substandard and irrational or even eliminated. Most of these individuals cannot afford to speak up, because belonging has become more important than being. It is inevitable that people would question their personhood and dignity when they find themselves in the space of intersection between culture, gender and violence. If the meaning of formosus is to bring out the beauty of each person, how is it that ‘non-being’ for some is better than being? In the fable of Hyginus, an alternative word for ‘being’ is ‘care’. Human beings’ existence is essentially dependent on care. The intersection between culture, gender and violence probes for the reformation of practical theological anthropology and, especially, a rethinking of the ministry of compassion. This article seeks to explore hermeneutics of renewal. The focus is on restoring and reforming the human being which can help non-beings to express their deepest quest for personhood and dignity. In this sense, dignity is defined as being one with all the multiplicities, systems and paradoxes of one’s own way of being, doing and knowing. The epistemology is from a pastoral care point of view.

scholarly journals Testing the Truth of Phrenology: Knowledge Experiments in Antebellum American Cultures of Science and Health

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-374
Author(s):  
Carla Bittel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Experimental Environment ◽  
Marriage Partner ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Mind

In the first half of the nineteenth century, many Americans visited phrenological practitioners. Some clients were true believers, who consulted phrenology to choose an occupation, select a marriage partner and raise children. But, as this article demonstrates, many others consumed phrenology as an ‘experiment’, testing its validity as they engaged its practice. Consumers of ‘practical phrenology’ subjected themselves to examinations often to test the phrenologist and his practice against their own knowledge of themselves. They also tested whether phrenology was true, according to their own beliefs about race and gender. While historians have examined phrenology as a theory of the mind, we know less about its ‘users’ and how gender, race and class structured their engagement. Based on extensive archival research with letters and diaries, memoirs and marginalia, as well as phrenological readings, this study reveals how a continuum of belief existed around phrenology, from total advocacy to absolute denunciation, with lots of room for acceptance and rejection in between. Phrenologists’ notebooks and tools of salesmanship also show how an experimental environment emerged where phrenologists themselves embraced a culture of testing. In an era of what Katherine Pandora has described as ‘epistemological contests’, audiences confronted new museums, performances and theatres of natural knowledge and judged their validity. This was also true for phrenology, which benefited from a culture of contested authority. As this article reveals, curiosity, experimentation and even scepticism among users actually helped keep phrenology alive for decades.

“The White Girl in the Middle”

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel Monroe
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
White Female ◽  
White Girl ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Theories ◽  
Selling Point ◽  
Choreographic Analysis ◽  
Better Than

This chapter illustrates how the narratives of hip-hop dance films have historically used white female dancers to introduce mainstream white audiences to hip-hop dance forms. In Step Up 2: The Streets, however, the white female protagonist is not an outsider introduced to hip-hop dance forms, instead she is from the very streets where hip-hop originates. Yet her success as a white female hip-hop dancer weighs on her ability to perform “black” corporeality equal to or better than her black counterparts. Using choreographic analysis and critical race and gender theories, the chapter argues that hip-hop dance forms render whiteness hyper-visible, but the white performance of black performativity becomes the selling point for films like Step Up 2: The Streets, where black performers are cast as ancillary characters to authenticate the white protagonists.

Chicano/a Challenges to Nineteenth-Century History

2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 566-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raúúl A. Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Northern Mexico ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The U.S

This article explores the usefulness of Chicano/a history to teaching and representing the nineteenth-century history of northern Mexico, U.S. imperial expansion, and the constructed nature of borders. Typically considered a twentieth-century discipline, Chicano/a historians have a long history of engaging the subject in the nineteenth century. This focus dovetails with recent critical works on race and gender in the U.S. West as well as transnational approaches to history. This article makes the case that the perspective on the nineteenth century provided by Chicano/a historians forces readers to reframe their understanding of the sweep of U.S. history.

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