Missionary Cultures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Culture ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
Fisk University ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

This chapter examines the work of APCM missionary Edmiston, a Fisk University graduate and skilled linguist, who in the first decades of the twentieth century controversially wrote the first dictionary and grammar of the Bushong (Bakuba) language. Shortly after her fellow Fisk alumni Du Bois used African American spirituals as signposts for his groundbreaking tour through U.S. history and culture in The Souls of Black Folk, she also contributed to the APCM’s effort to translate religious hymns into Tshiluba by adding African American spirituals such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to the Presbyterian hymnal. The translations by Edmiston and her colleagues insured that Tshiluba developed not only as the language of the colonial state, but also as a language that was shaped by the sacred texts of postbellum African American culture.

The Tenth Mind: Adams and the Action of the Remnant

2021 ◽  
pp. 162-195
Author(s):  
Emily Coit
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Mode Of Action ◽  
William James ◽  
Theodore Roosevelt ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

Chapter 5 shows how Henry Adams's Education intervenes in a conversation about the agency of the educated elite amongst Harvard-affiliated thinkers including William James, Theodore Roosevelt, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Charles William Eliot. Identifying Du Bois as a New England liberal, the chapter notes that both he and Eliot call 'college-bred' men to duty and advocate for liberal education in a sincere, direct mode. Adams's Education opposes such arguments partly by being ironic. Observing that its celebrated ironies are crucially constituted by sincere statements from liberal thinkers, the chapter shows that The Education takes up words and ideas that are salient in Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk. Its ironic rewriting of elements from that text flamboyantly exercises (and thus consolidates) the power that belongs to its author. Disparaging action grounded in consensus, collectivity, and sincerity, which he associates derisively with Boston and Harvard, Adams advocates an alternate mode of action that inheres in irony, doubt, indirection, and individual disruptiveness. In enacting this mode, The Education demonstrates its formidable potency. But Adams's showy performance of power via inaction nevertheless becomes a key source for the twentieth-century narrative about impotently passive 'genteel' thinkers.

But Some of Us Are Strong Believers in the Samson Myth

Black Samson ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 84-93
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior ◽  
Jeremy Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
American Culture ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
American Women ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Jack Johnson ◽  
And Gender

The African American women discussed in this chapter use the Black Samson tradition to focus on the complex intersections of race and gender. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts movement, the major artistic and literary movements that helped shape African American culture throughout the twentieth century involved women who found something in Samson’s story that resonated with them deeply. One might think that the story of a hyper-masculine biblical hero would not provide much material for reflections upon the intersections of race and gender in America. Yet, from the playful audacity of Christina Moody’s claim that she could defeat Jack Johnson to the painful predictions from Gaza in Lucille Clifton’s poem dedicated to Ramona Africa, the twentieth century witnessed African American women claiming a place within the Black Samson tradition.

The Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to the Brownies' Book

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 590-607 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle H. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Black Subjectivity ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois suggests that the history of double consciousness lies in childhood as the crisis that brings an end to the “days of rollicking boyhood.” Yet in his children's literature, written in the teens and twenties, Du Bois returns to the scene of double consciousness in an effort to transform this experience. In the children's numbers of the Crisis and in the Brownies' Book, Du Bois confronts a new problem for the twentieth century: how to raise black children in the face of disillusionment and despair. Collectively, Du Bois's works for children respond to this problem by crossing the line that separates youth and age. The systematic dualities of innocence and violence in these writings represent a revised effort to guide the black child's entry into double consciousness and to repurpose double consciousness as a model for a resilient black subjectivity beginning in childhood.

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