scholarly journals “Somebody Bigger than You and I”: The African American Healing Traditions of Camp Minisink

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Robyn Brown-Manning ◽  
Sharon Lockhart-Carter ◽  
Avon Morgan
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
African American Families ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Unconditional Love ◽  
Higher Power ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Adult Lives

Four hundred years after the first enslaved Africans landed on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, it can be difficult to recognize the myriad ways in which the traditional healing processes of the Motherland are embedded in the day-to-day lives of African Americans. Much of what has sustained us through the insidiousness of systemic racism is sourced from the traditions of our ancestors: our faith; our creativity; our sense of community; our respect for elders; our food; and our connection to the natural environment. Employing a narrative form of inquiry, the authors dialogue and reflect on our histories at Camp Minisink, a premier African American camp servicing Black youth from New York City. We use our personal experiences as “Minisinkers” in the 1950s and 1960s, to unearth patterns of Africentric healing traditions embedded in our camp activities. The “MinisinkModel”, unbeknownst to the thousands of children who grew up through the various camp programs, provided a multitude of safety and protective factors informed by these healing practices. The foremothers and forefathers of Minisink instilled in us the belief in a higher power; unconditional love; service; and family that continue to sustain us in our adult lives. This model holds promise for present-day organizations that are struggling to identify meaningful ways of working with African American families, youth and children.

Channelling the dead: A conversation on Desdemona with Tina Benko

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
York City ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Broad Variety ◽  
Character Building

Tina Benko is an American stage, screen and television actress who has steadily trodden the Broadway boards for twenty years while starring in films and TV series and teaching acting and movement in New York City. An intensely focused and versatile performer, Benko has played in a broad variety of genres, ranging from screwball and Shakespearean comedies to realistic Russian, Scandinavian and American plays. In this interview, she discusses the factors that attracted her to drama and theatre, her acting training and approach to character-building, and theatre as a space for healing and reconciliation as she experienced it while working in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré.

America’s Signal Crisis in Salman Rushdie’s Fury

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 484-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Treasa De Loughry
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Financial Markets ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
Class Status

This article examines how Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2001) registers a signal crisis of American hegemony through its hyperreal production of an aesthetics of excess, constituted by fragmented subjectivities, a frenetic narrative form, references to the decaying years of the Roman Empire, and irruptions of violence against women. The text’s libidinal investment of personal anguish with public discontent, or a psychopathological fury, is read through Fredric Jameson’s account of third-world allegory as a symptom of the novel’s registration of America’s hegemonic decline. The scalping of several upper-class young women in New York City by their financier boyfriends is thus further examined as an aspect of the text’s aesthetics of excess and use of allegory, which frames the violent interrelation between public discontent and private hubris. The murdered women are read as symbols of American hegemony and class under threat by turbulent financial markets, and hoarding their scalps is represented as a crude and violent attempt by their boyfriends to halt the dwindling value of America’s cultural capital and financial markets. The destabilization of class structures due to turbulent financial markets breeds a semantic confusion between real and symbolic signifiers of class status, a process facilitated by the narrator’s comparison of these women to prototypically American symbols, such as “Oscar-Barbie” statuettes and dolls. Fury’s mapping of Solanka’s cultural products, dolls and masks, from New York to the peripheral nation of Lilliput-Blefescu further actualizes the flow of American cultural and economic power to peripheral regions. This, alongside the text’s problematic characterization of gender and race, is read as evidence of Rushdie as a writer in terminal decline.

Walking to the Pier and Back

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110423
Author(s):  
Sam Stiegler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Young People ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
York City ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Place Making ◽  
The West ◽  
Community History ◽  
Community Space

This article narrativizes a walking go-along interview I, a cis white queer man, completed with JS, a Black trans young woman, while walking to the Christopher Street Pier in the West Village of New York City. The narrative form of this piece works to think against white- and cis-normative senses of time-keeping and place-making by illuminating how our bodies and social positions were perceived in relationship to each other and the environs of the go-along. While the Pier has long been an important public and community space for trans and queer Black and Latinx communities, especially young people, it has concurrently faced waves of gentrification that have made this place inhospitable to these communities. Giving an account of this walking interview through this contested area attends to JS’s experience and perception of place, community, history, and safety, including the ways it aligns and is in tension with my own and others’ experiences and perceptions of the Pier and its surroundings.

A Tale of Two Cities I

2019 ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
York City ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Experiences ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
English Speaking

The first of two companion chapters, this essay focuses especially on the historical meeting of European and African American movement vocabularies in English-speaking early-nineteenth-century contexts. It focuses particularly upon public music and dance in two creolized cities: Kingston, Jamaica, and New York City. Primary source evidence includes period illustrations (most notably, a ca. 1802 watercolor entitled A Grand Jamaica Ball) and period accounts of entertainments at lower Manhattan’s African Grove Theater; both are analyzed for the evidence they provide regarding the synthesis of creolized movement vocabularies and, by extension, cultural experiences. Methodology is drawn especially from iconography and kinesics.

Fortitude

2019 ◽  
pp. 194-226
Author(s):  
Robert S. Kurtz
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Medical Education ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
Behavioral Health ◽  
York City ◽  
Residency Education ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
Covert Racism

In New York City, from the 1990s to the present, covert racism is alive and well in the field of medicine and medical education. The most heavily impacted are African American and Caribbean American females and males. The inequitable treatment thus engendered has concrete results ranging from unwarranted criticism in residency education to forced changes of medical occupations and jobs, to false attributions of behavioral health issues. Combating these challenges requires fortified character armor, seeking percipient well positioned minority, white and off-whites allies, and a willingness to maintain continued vigilance. With persistence and tenacity, success is possible in terms of protecting minorities both in the educational process, and in a mature medical life.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas H. Greenland
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
York City ◽  
The Other ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Collaborative Interactions ◽  
Ideological Debate ◽  
Realistic Representation

This book challenges the convenient distinction between jazz musicians and audiences by calling attention to the collaborative interactions of performers with the other “nonperforming” participants. It provides a realistic representation of jazz in New York City by taking a somewhat paradoxical and ironic approach: it examines small, specialized jazz scenes to suggest broad-based patterns of jazz participation while also deemphasizing what is happening on stage in favor of the offstage listeners—in other words, the unseen scene. This introduction provides an overview of research on the themes addressed in the book; the symbiosis and synergism that characterize New York City's jazz scene, particularly the avant-jazz scene; and the ideological debate between essentialist and universalist positions—the former emphasizing African American cultural values and the latter emphasizing multiculturalism, individual merit, and colorblindness. The book's main argument is that jazz's deeper meanings and expressions are conveyed when both artists and audiences participate in collective improvisation.

Edna Lewis

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
York City ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Oak Trees ◽  
Professional Woman ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Wild Strawberries

Edna Lewis (1916-2006) wrote some of America's most resonant, lyrical, and significant cookbooks, including the now classic The Taste of Country Cooking. Lewis cooked and wrote as a means to explore her memories of childhood on a farm in Freetown, Virginia, a community first founded by black families freed from slavery. With such observations as "we would gather wild honey from the hollow of oak trees to go with the hot biscuits and pick wild strawberries to go with the heavy cream," she commemorated the seasonal richness of southern food. After living many years in New York City, where she became a chef and a political activist, she returned to the South and continued to write. Her reputation as a trailblazer in the revival of regional cooking and as a progenitor of the farm-to-table movement continues to grow. In this first-ever critical appreciation of Lewis's work, food-world stars gather to reveal their own encounters with Edna Lewis. Together they penetrate the mythology around Lewis and illuminate her legacy for a new generation, making a case for Lewis as a critical voice in African American foodways, and a pioneering professional woman chef, and the single most important figure in regional American food.

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