Carrie Mae Weems’s Photo-(Auto)biographies

2018 ◽  
pp. 171-195
Author(s):  
Hertha D. Sweet Wong
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Historical Legacy ◽  
Surfaces And Interfaces

African American photographer and folklorist Carrie Mae Weems examines in image and text the nature of memory and history, insisting on a critique of historical wrongs as part of a process of self-formulation. As a storyteller-artist, she envisions the artist as the “narrator of history.” This chapter explores the development of her photo-autobiographies from photo-text sequences hung on gallery walls to elaborate architectural installation pieces that require viewers to enter and navigate the narrative visual-verbal space with its many surfaces and interfaces. In the process of showing and telling through photographs and texts and reframing photographic archives, she represents the historical legacy of racial violence to provoke readers-viewers to become aware of injustice and the false narratives that enable it.

A Troubled Region and its Possible Culinary Fix

2016 ◽  
pp. 50-76
Author(s):  
Ashli Que Sinberry Stokes ◽  
Wendy Atkins-Sayre
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Family History ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The South ◽  
Constitutive Function ◽  
Southern Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Food Movement

Chapter two surveys the rhetorical problem that the South faces, a complicated history marred by racial violence, segregation and discrimination, and economic inequality. Whether you are an African American Southerner with a family history haunted by racism and violence, a white Southerner with a family history of discriminating or tolerating discrimination, or a Mexican immigrant facing negative social outcry, feeling pride in the region can be troubling. Despite conflicting identities, Southerners continue to define themselves in relation to the region, and the reality-based and stereotypical images of the Southerner are part of the identity that Southerners must encounter. The Southern food movement serves a constitutive function by helping to craft a Southern identity based on diverse, humble, and hospitable roots that confronts a divided image of the South. This rhetorically constitutive work provides an opportunity for strengthening relations within the South, as well as helping repair the negative Southern image.

Seeing Race in Comics

Neo-Passing ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Glaser
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Police Shootings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter discusses the power of the medium of comics to shed light on discussions of race, racism, and the act of passing. Glaser moves from a close reading of Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s recent neo-passing narrative, the graphic novel Incognegro (2008), to a wider look at the history of visual media in representing racial violence during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This chapter makes the argument that comics provide an arena for thinking both about how we see and interpret race and how visual depictions of racial violence—from photographs of lynchings to recordings of police shootings of unarmed African American men—force us to grapple with complex ethical questions.

Cuba Calls: African American Tourism, Race, and the Cuban Revolution, 1959–1961

2013 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devyn Spence Benson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
White American ◽  
One Year ◽  
World Champion

Abstract This essay explores the role that conversations about race and racism played in forming a partnership between an African American public relations firm and the Cuban National Tourist Institute (INIT) in 1960, just one year after Fidel Castro’s victory over Fulgencio Batista. The article highlights how Cuban revolutionary leaders, Afro-Cubans, and African Americans exploited temporary transnational relationships to fight local battles. Claiming that the Cuban Revolution had eliminated racial discrimination, INIT invited world champion boxer Joe Louis and 50 other African Americans to the island in January 1960 to experience “first class treatment — as first class citizens.” This move benefited Cuban revolutionary leaders by encouraging new tourism as the number of mainstream white American travelers to the island declined. The business venture also allowed African Americans to compare racial violence in the US South to the supposed integrated racial paradise in Cuba and foreshadowed future visits by black radicals, including NAACP leader Robert F. Williams. The politics expressed by Cuban newspapers and travel brochures, however, did not always fit with the lived experiences of Afro-Cubans. This essay uncovers how Afro-Cubans threatened national discourses by invoking revolutionary promises to denounce continued racial segregation in the very facilities promoted to African American tourists. Ultimately, ideas about race did not just cross borders between Cuba and the United States in 1960. Rather, they constituted and constructed those borders as Afro-Cubans used government claims to reposition themselves within the new revolutionary state.

Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel

2002 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 143
Author(s):  
John McCluskey ◽  
Jerry Bryant
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
American Novel

Overcoming Enslavement with Toil, Gunpowder, and Land

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher C. Fennell
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Pike County ◽  
Racial Ideologies ◽  
The Town

The town of New Philadelphia was situated on the western edge of Illinois, in Hadley Township and Pike County. The community was just 25 miles east of the Mississippi River and Hannibal, Missouri. New Philadelphia was the first town planned in advance, platted, and legally registered by an African American in the United States. Frank McWorter founded the town in 1836. He was born into slavery in South Carolina in 1777, purchased his freedom in 1819, and established New Philadelphia decades later. The town grew from the 1840s through the late 1800s as a multiracial community. New Philadelphia was located in a region riven by racial ideologies and strife. Competing factions of proslavery elements and abolitionists clashed in western Illinois and the neighboring slave state of Missouri in the antebellum decades. No incidents of racial violence were reported to have occurred within the town. African-American residents of the community worked to obtain land and produce agricultural commodities. Others provided services as blacksmiths and carpenters. Through these enterprises they worked to defy the structural racism of the region that was meant to channel resources and economic value away from them.

Studying Racial Violence in America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward González-Tennant
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Population Density ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Detailed History ◽  
Multidisciplinary Study ◽  
Rural Settings ◽  
Single Moment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Geospatial Mapping

The primary goal of The Rosewood Massacre is to shed a light on the deep temporal connections between past racial violence and modern social inequality. González-Tennant’s approach involves a multidisciplinary study of racial violence and a new investigation of the destruction of Rosewood, Florida. This is not a study of a single moment or even the destruction of a single community, which was not truly destroyed, but rather displaced. Instead, it is a search for answers to the question of how culture, society, and violence intersect across time and space. González-Tennant’s study of Rosewood draws on additional datasets to construct an interpretive framework that begins with a case study—a microhistorical study—and builds toward a theory offering a fuller explanation of how ordinary citizens turned on their neighbors in terrifying ways. While previous studies of Rosewood accurately record approximate numbers of African Americans living in the area prior to the riot and present a broad review of the town’s development, they do not construct a detailed history of the town’s development through time. Collecting such information is difficult in rural settings. No maps or city directories exist for Rosewood due to its relatively remote location and low population density. We require new methods to explore the development of such rural contexts. In Rosewood, the use of geospatial mapping to analyze and interpret hundreds of property deeds demonstrates the development of a particular pattern of African American homeownership, and the role it played in contributing to the town’s destruction.

Securing the Foundation

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Gender Equity ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Office Building ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
Black Professionals ◽  
Financial Gain ◽  
Financial Pressure ◽  
Core Mission

This chapter describes the growth and consolidation of the Chambers law firm in the first half of the 1970s. As the firm hired new lawyers, it maintained a roughly equal balance of white and black attorneys. Growth gave rise to certain tensions, including those between the all-female staff and the firm’s all-male lawyers as a consequence of the firm's inattention to the issue of gender equity. The firm suffered some financial pressure, the result of diminished reimbursements from the LDF, waning fees as Title VII litigation wound down, and Chambers's continuing reluctance to prioritize financial gain over the firm's core mission of service to the African American community. Racial violence rocked the firm when, in February of 1971, an arsonist largely destroyed the firm's offices. No arrests are made. After the firm relocated to temporary quarters in an aging Charlotte motel, Chambers, several of his partners, black physicians, and other black professionals collaborated to build finance and build East Independence Plaza, a multi-story office building that opened in March of 1973, the first building of its type in North Carolina owned and operated by African Americans.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document