Being the subject and the object: reading African-American women's novels: Barbara Christian

2012 ◽  
pp. 198-203
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Women's Novels

Miscegenation and Progression: The First Americans of Jean Toomer and William Faulkner

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew B. Leiter ◽  
Jay Watson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
The Subject ◽  
First Americans

This chapter analyzes aspects of miscegenation in William Faulkner’s work relative to several African American antecedents, contends that Jean Toomer’s work contributed to Faulkner’s treatment of the subject, and argues for a partial realignment of the traditional critical paradigm in Faulkner studies that approaches miscegenation through the segregation-era lens of threatened “whiteness.” Relying on an intertextual reading of Go Down, Moses with Toomer’s Cane and “Blue Meridian,” the chapter contends that we can discern Toomer’s influence on Faulkner’s portrayal of miscegenation. Most significantly, Toomer’s vision of progressive racial evolution culminating in a multi-racial, original American helps us frame Sam Fathers as Faulkner’s first American. As such, Fathers represents not only the end of both the Native American presence and the wilderness era in America, but he also serves as an originary model for an evolving mixed-race nation.

“I Ought to Know How Negroes Talk”

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 48-76
Author(s):  
Christopher M. Sterba
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Black Film ◽  
Know How ◽  
Television Version ◽  
Radio Program ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Black Life

The African American actor, writer, and director Spencer Williams, Jr. (1895–1969) has been the subject of a range of academic studies in recent years. Scholars have explored his pioneering work in early black film and his problematic role as “Andy Hogg Brown” in the television version of the Amos 'n' Andy radio program as a means of interpreting representations of black life within the confines of the Hollywood culture industry. This new scholarship, however, has reflected a limited and often inaccurate understanding of Williams' remarkable career. As will be discussed in this article, major events in Williams' life that have been unknown until now strongly influenced his filmmaking and his strategies to make the movie and television industries more racially inclusive. Most significantly, Williams was at different times a soldier in a segregated army unit, a convicted felon, and a committed artist and activist in Hollywood. These experiences helped to shape the themes and subject matter of his films, which ranged from religious dramas and singing cowboy westerns to backstage musicals and the first African American horror movie ever made.

Addressing the Silence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen K. Black ◽  
John T. Groce ◽  
Charles E. Harmon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Male ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Male Caregiver ◽  
Research Interview ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

This chapter, as the conclusion to our book, is entitled Addressing the Silence. We went “behind the scenes” of our work to examine the research process and pondered various aspects of interviewing a coterie of African-American men. For example, why were our caregiving men so willing to discuss their experiences of caregiving? Were there topics within caregiving that men were reluctant to discuss? And, why did the methods of our research fit well with the subject of caregiving and with the communal history of our respondents? Although our research addressed the gap in the caregiving and gerontological literature about elderly African-American men, our respondents showed us how much more we need to learn from them. As men discussed their care work in the forum of the research interview, the role of the elder African-American male caregiver came out of the shadows, but not yet completely into the light.

Free Jazz and the French Critic

2008 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 541-581
Author(s):  
Eric Drott
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Free Jazz ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
European Culture ◽  
French Experience ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Political Radicalism

Abstract From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, free jazz was the subject of considerable public interest in France. The present article examines the conditions that fueled enthusiasm for American avant-garde jazz, focusing on the politicization of discourse surrounding the ‘new thing.’ Critics hostile to the movement felt that it undermined jazz's claim to universality, a cornerstone of postwar attempts to valorize the genre in the French cultural sphere. Yet the tendency to identify free jazz with various forms of African American political radicalism presented no less of a challenge for the movement's advocates. By constructing an image of free jazz that stressed its irremediable difference from the norms and values of European culture, writers were compelled to find alternative ways of relating it to contemporary French concerns. A reading of Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli's text Free Jazz Black Power shows how the authors' attempt to reinscribe African American cultural nationalism as an expression of transnational anticolonial struggle not only helped bring free jazz closer to the French experience, but also served as a way of working through the unresolved legacies of colonialism.

Between Fiction and Experience

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tess Chakkalakal
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Autobiographical Accounts

This chapter reads William Wells Brown's preoccupation with marriage through both his fictional and autobiographical accounts of slavery. Generally believed to be the first novel by an African American, Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter continues to be the subject of considerable critical controversy and debate. Of course, the source of the novel's controversy rests not on marriage but rather on its absence. Purporting to tell the stories of Thomas Jefferson's slave mistress, daughters, and granddaughters, Clotel provides one of the earliest fictional accounts of the now scientifically verified conjugal relationship between the nation's founding father Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Moving from this scandalous piece of the nation's history, Brown's romance provides something of an antidote to history. Relying, in part, on the lessons of Brown's own marriages, this chapter's analysis of his fiction rests on the disjunction between his autobiographical and fictional accounts of slave-marriage.

The Chickens Coming Home to Roost

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
South African ◽  
Black Nationalism ◽  
Circumstantial Evidence ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
African Unity ◽  
Organization Of African Unity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Che Guevara

This chapter presents Malcolm X’s travels in Africa during the months leading up to the Stanleyville (Kisangani) crisis of November 1964. Speeches, diaries, correspondence, FBI surveillance reports, and circumstantial evidence indicate that, during the final months of his life, Malcolm X may have been involved in recruiting African American volunteers through the OAAU (Organization of Afro-American Unity) and the OAU (Organization of African Unity) to serve in the Congo as mercenaries in opposition to white South African forces, a project that may have been a model for a similar effort soon undertaken by Che Guevara. In the wake of the 1964 U.S. airlift of Belgian paratroopers into Stanleyville to rescue white hostages, Malcolm spoke of the history of hand-severing, a reference which links him to Sheppard. Malcolm’s frequent commentary on the subject, in many of his most important forums during the final year of his life, locates the trajectory of African American involvement in the Congo at the center of his political vision and organizational praxis, and, by extension, at the heart of modern Black nationalism.

Charlie Murphy: American Storyteller

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Donahue
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
The Subject

This chapter argues that the “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Tales” participates in the tradition of the American Tall Tale. As satiric picaro, Charlie Murphy uses his tales – recounting incidents with Rick James and Prince – to critique various aspects of contemporary African American culture. Further, the multi-layered form of the tales itself, along with the subject matter addressing black celebrities, specifically targets the entertainment industry, which is thus depicted as a modern-day slave institution.

Animating Cane: Race, Affect, History and Jean Toomer

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Taylor
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Emotional Expressiveness ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
American Racism ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter explores the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer’s critical deployment of a racist stereotype that links African American subjectivity to extreme emotional expressiveness. In his 1923 experimental volume Cane, Toomer not only invites readers to question whether such affects “belong” to the subject, but employs these stereotypes to offer an embodied, affective history of American racism. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s concept of racial “animatedness,” which captures the slippage from vitality and exuberance to a powerless, puppet-like state of innervated, non-intentional agitation, the chapter argues that Toomer uses affective stereotypes to diagnose the powerlessness of his subjects and to narrate a traumatic history in which persons are confused with things.

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