scholarly journals The Voice of the Southern Diaspora: Muddy Waters and the Multi-Layered Influences Associated with the Diffusion of Blues Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 39-52
Author(s):  
John Byron Strait

This paper focuses on the dynamic nature of the Southern Diaspora, the twentieth-century mass migration of African-Americans in United States from the rural south to the urban north and west. The significant migratory links between the Mississippi Delta and Chicago, Illinois, and the influences it had on the larger diaspora, are emphasized. The music of famed blues artist Muddy Waters is used as a lens to demonstrate both the causes and the significant impacts of this diaspora. By exploring the multi-layered circuitry of change associated with the evolution and diffusion of Delta blues music, this paper reveals the transnational and transcultural dimensions of the Southern Diaspora.

Author(s):  
John Byron Strait

This paper focuses on the dynamic nature of the Southern Diaspora, the twentieth-century mass migration of African-Americans in the United States from the rural south to the urban north and west. The significant migratory links between the Mississippi Delta and Chicago, Illinois, and the influences it had on the larger diaspora are emphasized. The music of famed blues artist Muddy Waters is used as a lens to demonstrate both the causes and the significant impacts of this diaspora. By exploring the multi-layered circuitry of change associated with the evolution and diffusion of Delta blues music, this paper reveals the transnational and transcultural dimensions of the Southern Diaspora.


Le Simplegadi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (20) ◽  
pp. 147-161
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti

Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August Wilson was the most prolific and represented African American playwright of the twentieth century. His Century Cycle, a series of ten plays that chronicle the lives of African Americans from the early 1900s to the late 1990s, is an expression of Wilson’s spiritual realism, a form of drama that, while adhering to some conventions of the Western realist tradition, also introduces elements of innovation inspired by blues music and Yoruba cosmology. This essay analyses the double cultural genealogy of Wilson’s work to show how, despite respecting the Aristotelian principle of mìmesis, his playwriting draws on a quintessentially black aesthetic. In conceiving of theatre as a ritualistic performative context where music and words intertwine, Wilson restored what Friedrich Nietzsche regarded as the authentic spirit of Greek tragedy – the harmony between Dionysian and Apollonian – while at the same time injecting an African American ethos into the Western theatrical canon.


Free the Land ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 79-112
Author(s):  
Edward Onaci

This chapter focuses primarily on the ideas behind and the practice of naming. It argues that name choices are the most fundamental form of individual and group self-determination developed by New Afrikans (and Black Power activists more generally). This chapter historicizes black naming practices in the United States, covering their importance from the era of racial slavery to the moments when Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, among others, were helping instil Black pride in mid-twentieth century African Americans. Specifically, it examines the ways that individual and group names, identity, cartography, and orthography became effective tools for the mechanics of liberation struggle. Taken for granted by both the name studies scholarship and histories of the Black Power Movement, this consideration of naming encourages scholars and activists to think more deeply and critically about the value of politically conscious naming practices.


2021 ◽  
pp. 86-114
Author(s):  
Julie Golia

This chapter examines the advice column “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise,” which ran in the Chicago Defender, one of the most successful black newspapers in the United States. In the early twentieth century, black publishers recognized the many ways that mainstream newspapers reinforced the racial status quo in America and failed to address the needs of African American readers. They also sought to offer more feature content to women readers. “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise” was one of the country’s most widely read black advice columns. Columnist Princess Mysteria, a vaudeville mentalist, embraced the Defender’s mission of racial “uplift” and advocacy. But her counsel also reflected a unique sensitivity to the dual prejudices that her female readers faced as African Americans and as women. The columnist offered a worldview very different from that of white columnists, one that doled out assertive, even feminist advice.


2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (2) ◽  
pp. 477-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan A. Black ◽  
Seth G. Sanders ◽  
Evan J. Taylor ◽  
Lowell J. Taylor

The Great Migration—the massive migration of African Americans out of the rural South to largely urban locations in the North, Midwest, and West—was a landmark event in US history. Our paper shows that this migration increased mortality of African Americans born in the early twentieth century South. This inference comes from an analysis that uses proximity of birthplace to railroad lines as an instrument for migration. (JEL I12, J15, N31, N32, N91, N92, R23)


Author(s):  
Matthew J. Cressler

This chapter begins with the ten Black bishops declaring in 1984 that Black Catholics should be “authentically Black and truly Catholic.” It contrasts this statement with the story of Mary Dolores Gadpaille, who argued in 1958 that Catholicism “lifted her up above the color line.” It juxtaposes these two examples in order to introduce readers to the central questions that govern the book. Why did tens of thousands of African Americans convert to Catholicism in the middle decades of the twentieth century? What did it mean to be Black and Catholic in the first half of the twentieth century and why did it change so dramatically in the thirty years that separated Gadpaille from the bishops? How would placing Black Catholics at the center of our historical narratives change the ways we understand African American religion and Catholicism in the United States? The chapter situates the book in scholarship and briefly introduces readers to Black Catholic history writ large.


2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dylan Shane Connor

With more than 30 million people moving to North America during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1913), governments feared that Europe was losing its most talented workers. Using new data from Ireland in the early twentieth century, I provide evidence to the contrary, showing that the sons of farmers and illiterate men were more likely to emigrate than their literate and skilled counterparts. Emigration rates were highest in poorer farming communities with stronger migrant networks. I constructed these data using new name-based techniques to follow people over time and to measure chain migration from origin communities to the United States.


1987 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 473-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander J. Field

The introduction and diffusion of what Alfred Chandler called modern business enterprise had a profound capital-saving impact on the American economy. Given the availability of the railroad and telegraph, purchasing more managerial labor services paid off principally via increased speed of production and inventory turnover, which spread costs of holding capital over a larger volume of output. This article challenges the consensus that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century technological change in the United States was overwhelmingly labor saving and interprets the factor-saving bias of modern business enterprise as representative rather than anomalous.


Author(s):  
Tim Watson

The introduction summarizes the process of decolonization in the British and French Empires and the role of the United States. Anthropology became a more professionalized discipline, raising the barriers to interdisciplinary conversations between anthropologists and other intellectuals and making it less desirable for colonial intellectuals to choose anthropology, as a significant number had done earlier in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, exchanges continued between literature and anthropology. I argue that the literary-anthropological dynamics of the 1950s and 1960s were prefigured by three examples in the 1930s and 1940s: Zora Neale Hurston’s fieldwork among African Americans in the US South, Michel Leiris’s account of Marcel Griaule’s 1930s anthropological expedition from Dakar to Djibouti, and the establishment of the Mass-Observation program to document British everyday life. The introduction analyzes Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques as a key text in the flourishing of a new literary anthropology in the 1950s.


1995 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Young ◽  
Jerome S. Burstein

Not so long ago, nearly all African-Americans living in the United States were subject to a multitude of racial restrictions officially prescribed and enforced by state governments and their local subsidiaries. Most of the Jim Crow system dated from 1890–1910. By the middle of the twentieth century, this system was well established, so much so that many people assumed that it had always existed and that it expressed the timeless folkways of the South. However, in what strikes the historian as an astonishingly brief period during the 1950s and 1960s, the edifice was largely torn down. The puzzle is this: How could any institutional apparatus so deeply embedded, long-standing, and apparently strong be toppled so quickly? Although many scholars have discussed aspects of the puzzle, no one has offered a simple, clear, and compelling explanation. We aim to do so in this essay.


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