Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History.

Alice Walker and former Democratic Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado have something in common. Both advocate the cessation of female circumcision in African countries, and both tout themselves as feminists, though Walker, borrowing from African American culture, prefers to be labeled as a womanist. What the elders had in mind when they described young African American women as “womanish,” or as “omanish,” the eclipsed form of that same word, was that such girls were too fast, or that they obtruded upon areas that were not their business. While Schroeder cannot properly be called a womanist (to do so would be to misapply the term), one can say that, similar to Alice Walker, Schroeder is putting herself into other people’s business, specifically the business of female circumcision in African communities.

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Conclusion: Noah’s Kin

The Flood Year 1927 ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691168838.003.0009 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Susan Scott Parrish

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Harlem Renaissance ◽

American Culture ◽

Public Awareness ◽

African American Culture ◽

Mass Audience ◽

The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter considers the question of what made the recent disaster called Katrina in 2005, and its mediation, distinct from its 1927 forerunner. It argues that what was most different about the two events is that artists and commentators in 2005 could be more openly critical of the racial and class dimensions of their disaster before a multiracial mass audience. The chapter also considers a poem that appeared in print in April 1927, which must have seemed a providential coincidence to many readers. The poem, called “Noah Built the Ark,” moves from the halcyon days in Eden to the point at which “God got sorry that he ever made man.” Like other works of the Harlem Renaissance, the poem called upon the currency of folk form to create a public awareness of traditions within African American culture.

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Sketching Out America’s Jazz Age in British Vogue

Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939 ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474412537.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Natalie Kalich

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Harlem Renaissance ◽

American Culture ◽

Jazz Age ◽

New Negro ◽

African American Culture ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Jazz Music ◽

The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter investigates the contributions to modernism of Dorothy Todd’s British Vogue (1922-1926) as the magazine traced the evolution of Bloomsbury in England and the Jazz Age in America. While scholarship on this periodical has traditionally focused on the publication of Bloomsbury artists in the magazine, this chapter examines Todd’s displacement of the high/popular cultural binary through her unflagging support of jazz music and avant-garde literature. Furthermore, in examining Anne Harriet Fish’s and Miguel Covarrubias’s cartoons and illustrations, the chapter reveals the era’s use of visual humour as a means of coping with deeper anxieties regarding women’s increasing independence and the emergence of African-American culture as a fixture in mainstream, American culture. Analysing the construction of the Modern Woman and the New Negro in a commercial magazine demonstrates readers’ initial introduction to Bloomsbury and the Harlem Renaissance, broadening our understanding of modernism’s function in commercial settings.

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