Deep History, Deep South

2018 ◽  
pp. 245-286
Author(s):  
Cameron B. Strang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Deep South ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Plantation Agriculture ◽  
Cotton Trade

During the 1830s, slavery shaped the practice, patronage, and application of geology in America. Plantation slavery—and the labor, patronage, and networks it provided—enabled collections and observations that defined the Gulf South’s geohistory while emerging geotheories inspired new means of justifying and furthering slavery. Slavery allowed Charles and Sarah Tait to offer patronage and recognition to northeastern naturalists, excavate and package the fossils needed to characterize the Gulf South’s geohistory, and circulate specimens and data through the networks built around the cotton trade. Rush Nutt drew on uniformitarian geotheory to legitimate African American slavery and proposed new geo-engineering techniques that would encourage the expansion of plantation agriculture. These case studies suggest some of the ways that slavery and science strengthened each other in the early United States.

From Bondage to Citizenship: A Comparison of African American and Indian Lower-Caste Mobilization in Two Regions of Deep Inequality

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 770-809
Author(s):  
Narendra Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
Social Classification ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
Demographic Patterns

AbstractThe paper explores mobilization to reduce the deepest inequalities in the two largest democracies, those along caste lines in India and racial lines in the United States. I compare how the groups at the bottom of these ethnic hierarchies—India's former untouchable castes (Dalits) and African Americans—mobilized from the 1940s to the 1970s in pursuit of full citizenship: the franchise, representation, civil rights, and social rights. Experiences in two regions of historically high inequality (the Kaveri and Mississippi Deltas) are compared in their national contexts. Similarities in demographic patterns, group boundaries, socioeconomic relations, regimes, and enfranchisement timing facilitate comparison. Important differences in nationalist and civic discourse, official and popular social classification, and stratification patterns influenced the two groups’ mobilizations, enfranchisement, representation, alliances, and relationships with political parties. The nation was imagined to clearly include Dalits earlier in India than to encompass African Americans in the United States. Race was the primary and bipolar official and popular identity axis in the United States, unlike caste in India. African Americans responded by emphasizing racial discourses while Dalit mobilizations foregrounded more porously bordered community visions. These different circumstances enabled more widespread African American mobilization, but offered Dalits more favorable interethnic alliances, party incorporation, and policy accommodation, particularly in historically highly unequal regions. Therefore, group representation and policy benefits increased sooner and more in India than in the United States, especially in regions of historically high group inequality such as the Kaveri and other major river Deltas relative to the Deep South, including Mississippi.

Labour Colonies in North America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Arneil
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
North America ◽  
General Population ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Canadian History ◽  
Domestic Labour

In Chapter 4, the author analyses the introduction of domestic labour colonies in the United States and Canada. Unlike Europe, permanent labour colonies for the general population of ‘idle poor’ were rejected. Instead they were either implemented temporarily at moments of crisis (post-WWI and the Depression) or, more importantly, for racialized minorities over a longer period of time. The bulk of the chapter is thus spent on two case studies: colonies for freed African-American slaves in the United States viewed as the necessary corollary of emancipation and colonies for Metis and indigenous peoples of Canada as important tools in the assimilation of such populations. Racialized colonies were justified by many of the leading thinkers in both countries, including two of the most iconic and celebrated figures in American and Canadian history, Abraham Lincoln and Tommy Douglas, who make the case for colonies for freed slaves and Metis people, respectively, in their jurisdictions, nearly a century apart.

When Temporal Orbits Collide: Embodied Trans Temporalities in U.S. Prisons

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rae Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Prison Industrial Complex ◽  
Trans Women ◽  
And Control

This paper explores trans temporalities through the experiences of incarcerated trans feminine persons in the United States. The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) has received increased attention for its disproportionate containment of trans feminine persons, notably trans women of colour. As a system of domination and control, the PIC uses disciplinary and heteronormative time to dominate the bodies and identities of transgender prisoners by limiting the ways in which they can express and experience their identified and embodied genders. By analyzing three case studies from my research with incarcerated trans feminine persons, this paper illustrates how temporality is complexly woven through trans feminine prisoners' experiences of transitioning in the PIC. For incarcerated trans feminine persons, the interruption, refusal, or permission of transitioning in the PIC invites several gendered pasts into a body's present and places these temporalities in conversation with varying futures as the body's potential. Analyzing trans temporalities reveals time as layered through gender, inviting multiple pasts and futures to circulate around and through the body's present in ways that can be both harmful to, and necessary for, the assertion and survival of trans feminine identities in the PIC.

Religion, Race, and Humanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony B. Pinn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unitarian Universalist ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry

This chapter explores the history of humanism within African American communities. It positions humanist thinking and humanism-inspired activism as a significant way in which people of African descent in the United States have addressed issues of racial injustice. Beginning with critiques of theism found within the blues, moving through developments such as the literature produced by Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, to political activists such as W. E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph, to organized humanism in the form of African American involvement in the Unitarian Universalist Association, African Americans for Humanism, and so on, this chapter presents the historical and institutional development of African American humanism.

Fixing Improvisation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthea Kraut
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Intellectual Property Law ◽  
Tap Dance ◽  
American Vernacular ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter juxtaposes brief case studies of African American vernacular dancers from the first half of the twentieth century in order to reexamine the relationship between the ideology of intellectual property law and the traditions of jazz and tap dance, which rely heavily on improvisation. The examples of the blackface performer Johnny Hudgins, who claimed a copyright in his pantomime routine in the 1920s, and of Fred and Sledge, the class-act dance duo featured in the hit 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate, whose choreography was copyrighted by the white modern dancer Hanya Holm, prompt a rethinking of the assumed opposition between the originality and fixity requirements of copyright law and the improvisatory ethos of jazz and tap dance. Ultimately, the chapter argues that whether claiming or disavowing uniqueness, embracing or resisting documentation, African American vernacular dancers were both advantaged and hampered by copyright law.

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