Escaping the Folk

2018 ◽  
pp. 148-172
Author(s):  
Kevin D. Greene
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Music History ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Large Field ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Predominately White ◽  
Black Experience

Since 1955, when a Belgian jazz writer helped scribe the first book investigating Big Bill’s life and music, dozens of artists, scholars, journalists, and enthusiasts have left a long trail of written work dedicated to Broonzy and his past. Well into the twenty-first century, this trend continues. These brokers of Broonzy’s life, music, and public memory have shaped and reshaped his story reflecting each respective generation’s own understandings of race, celebrity, blues music, and the black experience in the United States, among other themes. In a sense, Broonzy has become a cipher for unlocking important questions about authenticity, folklore, black identity, music history, and more to a large field of predominately white authors. For nearly sixty-five years, Big Bill and his history pop up along a long trajectory of studies that have viewed him as an object of intrigue and mystery rather than how he wanted to be remembered. Big Bill was an African American, pre-war, pop music celebrity who built and reached the height of that celebrity recording and performing for black audiences. Unearthing his vague, working class past has prevented history from accepting Big Bill for what he was—an agent of black modernity.

scholarly journals African Americans in evolutionary science: where we have been, and what’s next

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph L. Graves
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
National Science Foundation ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Science Careers ◽  
National Science ◽  
Order Of Magnitude ◽  
Evolutionary Science

Abstract In 2017 National Science Foundation data revealed that in the United States the professional biological workforce was composed of ~ 69.5% “whites”, 21.3% “Asians”, and only 3% “African American or Blacks” (National Science Foundation, 2017, https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/doctoratework/2017/html/sdr2017_dst_03.html). There are problems with the categories themselves but without too deep an investigation of these, these percentages are representative of the demography of biology as a whole over the latter portion of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. However, evolutionary biologists would argue (and correctly so) that the representation of persons of African descent in our field is probably an order of magnitude lower (0.3%). This commentary focuses on the factors that are associated with underrepresentation of African Americans in evolutionary science careers.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 151-164
Author(s):  
Danielle Fuentes Morgan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Saturday Night ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Saturday Night Live ◽  
Opening Up

The book concludes with Dave Chappelle and his return to the stand-up comedy stage and Saturday Night Live. It examines a burgeoning sense of African American satire in the twenty-first century as focused not necessarily on inspiring easy laughter but instead on opening up space for Black selfhood. A post-“post-racial” United States demands that our satirists offer productive ways to express Black identity in a world that seems increasingly self-satirizing. This conclusion underscores the idea of kaleidoscopic Blackness and the variety of valid ways of autonomously choosing to express Black identity in the twenty-first century.

“Who Are You America but Me?”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Helgeson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Chicago Renaissance ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
Racial Progress

This chapter considers the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago, the first black-organized world's fair that sought to showcase African American artists on a national stage. It delineates the diversity of voices and competing visions of racial progress that defined the character of the Black Chicago Renaissance. Historians have described the exposition as a failure; the event did not attract mass audiences, and it did not create a broader public debate about the meanings of black identity, legacies of slavery, or contemporary discrimination in the United States. Yet, by examining the exposition as presented, rather than what it failed to be, the chapter uncovers important and sometimes surprising influences on the fair's messages.

Screen Woman

2020 ◽  
pp. 75-103
Author(s):  
Nelly Furman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Charlie Chaplin ◽  
African Film ◽  
Twenty First Century

The international appeal of the story of Carmen on the silver screen has been phenomenal. The story has spawned nearly eighty films by some of the world’s most celebrated directors. In the early days of cinema, we find a first cluster of Carmens among them films directed by Cecil B. Demille, Charlie Chaplin, and Ernest Lubitsch. In 1954, Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones calls attention to African American issues in the United States, as will in 2001, Carmen: A Hip Opera directed by Robert Towsend for MTV. In 1983, we find a second cluster of international film directed by Jean-Luc Godard (France), Francesco Rosi (Italy) and Carlos Saura (Spain). At the turn of the twenty-first century, Bizet’s heroine appears in two major African film production: Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen (Senegal) and U-Carmen by the Dimpho Di Kopan theater (South Africa). All these films testify to the continuous attraction of Bizet’s heroine through time from the lyric stage to the silver screen.

The New Principle-policy Gap: How Diversity Ideology Subverts Diversity Initiatives

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (5) ◽  
pp. 889-911 ◽  
Author(s):  
Candis Watts Smith ◽  
Sarah Mayorga-Gallo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Dominant Mode ◽  
First Century ◽  
Predominately White Institutions ◽  
Predominately White ◽  
White Institutions ◽  
Semistructured Interviews ◽  
Colorblind Ideology ◽  
Diversity Studies

Colorblind ideology is a dominant mode of thinking about race matters in the United States, but it is not the only racial ideology that operates today. The United States appears to be shifting toward becoming more race conscious. We add to the critical diversity studies literature, and argue that even though we see a greater appreciation for the presence of nonwhite bodies in various spaces, we are not likely to see real systemic change in the American racial hierarchy because of a reliance on diversity ideology. Through an analysis of semistructured interviews with 43 white Millennials, this article outlines the ways in which diversity ideology’s four tenets—diversity as acceptance, commodity, intent, and liability—help whites maintain power in multiracial spaces. This article pinpoints how whites employ these tenets to subvert policy efforts that aim to incorporate people of color into predominately white institutions, introducing a new principle-policy gap for the twenty-first century.

The “Japanese Turn” in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Acceptance

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

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.

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