Introduction

Author(s):  
Kendra Marston

The introductory section opens with a discussion of Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, examining this text’s significance as part of a broader cultural moment in which the depressive episodes of white women are used to provide commentary on the moral decay of the Western world. It situates the book’s analysis within the fields of postfeminist media studies and critical race and whiteness studies. The Hollywood manifestation of postfeminist melancholia is attributed to several factors, including a resurgence of interest in feminist politics, conflicts in US race relations, and the shifting image of the US internationally. It then argues for the examination of this cinematic figure’s relationship to a politics of white hegemony, briefly exploring Hollywood’s history of utilising stories involving ethnic appropriation as a means of assuaging national anxieties associated with earlier socio-political movements, such as the civil rights movement and sexual revolution.

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.


The “New Hollywood” that emerged in the late sixties is now widely recognized as an era of remarkable filmmaking, when directors enjoyed a unique autonomy to craft ambitious, introspective movies that evinced a cinematic world of hard choices, complex interpersonal relationships, compromised heroes, and uncertain outcomes. The New Hollywood Revisited brings together a remarkable collection of authors (some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood as it unfolded), to revisit this unique era in American cinema (circa 1967-1976). It was a decade in which a number of extraordinary factors – including the end of a half-century-old censorship regime and economic and demographic changes to the American film audience – converged and created a new type of commercial film, imprinted with the social and political context of the times: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, economic distress, urban decay, and, looming, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon presidency. This volume offers the opportunity to look back, with nearly fifty years hindsight, at a golden age in American filmmaking.


2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-117
Author(s):  
Holly Collins

Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans garnered significant attention for his book In the Shadow of Statues (2018), observing that many Confederate monuments were erected to buttress Jim Crow laws and serve as a warning to those who supported the civil rights movement. Likewise, there are a number of monuments in Québec that serve a particular political or religious purpose, seeking to reinforce a pure laine ideology. In this article, I explore the parallels between the literal and figurative construction and deconstruction of monuments that have fortified invented ideas on identity in francophone North America. Further, Gabrielle Roy’s short story “L’arbre,” which describes a “living monument,” tells the story of a racialized past in North America and unveils the falsities that have been preserved through the construction of statues that perpetuate racial myth. “L’arbre” examines the natural, unconstructed monument of the Live Oak: a tree that witnessed and holds the visible scars of the many terrible realities that took place in its shadows. I use Roy’s short story to show how she sought to deconstruct a whitewashed history of the post-Civil War American South and suggest that her broader corpus rejects determinism wholesale.


Troublemakers ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Kathryn Schumaker

The introductionexplains how and why student protest became common in the United States in the late 1960s and places these protests in the context of shifts in the history of education and in broader social movements, including the civil rights movement, the Chicano Movement, and black power activism. The introduction also situates students’ rights within the context of children’s rights more broadly, explaining the legal principles that justified age discrimination and excluded children and students from the basic protections of American constitutional law. The introduction identifies the two decades between the 1960s and 1980s as a constitutional moment that revolutionized the relationship of students to the state. It also connects students’ rights litigation to the issue of school desegregation and the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education.


Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck

The introduction includes Bible verses cited by ministers to defend segregation and verses to oppose segregation. There are slices of the history of the United States, the Civil Rights Movement, and African American history. The southern states, where white ministers confronted segregation, are identified. The term “minister” is explained as well as the variety of labels given these ministers ranging from “Liberal,” Progressive,” “Neo-Orthodox,” “Evangelical Liberal,” “open conservative,” ‘Last Hurrah of the Social Gospel Movement” to “Trouble Maker,” “Traitor, “ “Atheist,” “Communist,” “N_____ Lover.” Rachel Henderlite, the only woman minister mentioned in the book, is identified. Synopses of the book’s seven chapters are included. Comments by historians David Chappell, Charles Reagan Wilson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ernest Campbell, and Thomas Pettigrew are cited.


Author(s):  
John Lowney

There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.


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