Reading Race and Place

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Chabot Davis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Book Clubs ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racially Mixed ◽  
Race And Place

This chapter focuses on the reception of two African American “post-soul” novels that deconstruct essentialist ideas about race. Inviting readers to reconsider binary understandings of blackness and whiteness, Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003) focuses on free blacks who own slaves in the antebellum South, while Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) details the coming of age of a mixed-race girl in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s. The chapter examines how the reading of a racially charged text is influenced by the readers' locality and the communities in which they live and participate. It also compares the conversations of racially mixed book clubs to those with all white or all African American members, and analyzes the connections and disjunctions between empathetic reading and the readers' political lives within a metropolitan area with a long history of racial antagonism.

scholarly journals “A Shplit Ticket, Half Irish, Half Chinay”: Representations of Mixed-Race and Hybridity in the Turn-of-the-Century Theater

2008 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory T. Carter
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Chinese Dialect ◽  
Stage Directions ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Racially Mixed

Charles Townsend's 1889 adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin features white actors playing light- and dark-skinned African-American characters, changing degrees of make-up as the script, stage business, or number of available players demands. Thomas Denison's stage directions to his 1895 play, Patsy O'Wang, an Irish Farce with a Chinese Mix-Up, stipulates that the alternation of the half -Chinese, half-Irish cook between his two ethnic personas is “key to this capital farce,” and that a comedie use of the Chinese dialect is central to this. The Geezer (c. 1896), Joseph Herbert's spoof of the popular musical, The Geisha, features white actors playing Chinese dignitaries, but also donning German and Irish accents. The white actors in these plays enact different paradigms of hybridity. The actors in Townsend's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a Melodrama in Five Acts embody conceptions of both mixed and unmixed African Americans, freely alternating between each. In Patsy O'Wang, the main character's background is central to the story, and the lead actor moves between the two ethnicities by his accent, mannerisms, and politics. Racial mixing is central to the plot of The Geezer through Anglo actors who make themselves hybrid by appearing Chinese and appropriating a third accent, rather than the creation of racially mixed offspring.

Tuckey Buzzard Lay Me

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-196
Author(s):  
Libra R. Hilde
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
White People ◽  
Biracial Children ◽  
Privileged Status ◽  
White Fathers ◽  
African American Communities ◽  
White Father

This chapter examines sexual exploitation and violence in the antebellum South and what it meant for an enslaved person to have a white father. Evaluations of white fathers varied considerably depending on how that father treated his illegitimate offspring, how slave communities treated mixed-race children (which also varied), and an individual’s sense of identity, which was tied to these other factors. Biracial children at times expressed admiration for the few white fathers who openly acknowledged their children and provided freedom and education. They tended to be more ambivalent about white fathers who offered a privileged status on the plantation but not freedom. African American communities expressed particular disdain for white fathers who violated paternal duty by abusing or selling their own children. Reactions to white fathers highlight slaves and former slaves’ consistent notions of paternal duty. African American communities understood that white people had a monopoly on concrete power, but that did not mean they had honor.

Miller Grove, Illinois

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
American Missionary Association ◽  
White Families ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
South Central ◽  
History Of ◽  
Archaeological Excavations

This chapter examines the connections between the Miller Grove community of free Blacks and the Underground Railroad. Established in 1844, Miller Grove is a cluster of rural farmsteads named for Bedford Miller, whose family stood among the sixty-eight people who received their freedom from one of four White families in south-central Tennessee. Primary archaeological excavations at Miller Grove took place at the farmstead of William Riley Williams, a free-born African American from Tennessee. Among the original migrants, former slaveholder Henry Sides and his wife lived among the freemen and freewomen at Miller Grove. This chapter begins with a discussion of how the American Missionary Association, through its missionary work, linked known Underground Railroad participants across the country. It then considers abolitionist strategies, particularly the dissemination of antislavery literature among African Americans. By tracing the history of Miller Grove, the chapter reveals distinct details of community formation and interracial cooperation within regional Underground Railroad operations.

Not as It Is Written

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
International Exhibition ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Made In

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.

The Question of Authority: Deracinating Race, Repositioning Religion, and Regenerating Gender in the History of African American Islam

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 213-227
Author(s):  
Rosemary Hicks
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Islam ◽  
African American Islam ◽  
Oxford University Press

A review essay devoted to Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection by Sherman A. Jackson. Oxford University Press, 2005. 256 pages. Hb. $29.95/£22.50, ISBN-13: 9780195180817.

Ethics of Conducting Virtual Ethnography on Visual Platforms

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-178
Author(s):  
Kayla Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Online Community ◽  
Gender Segregation ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Virtual Ethnography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Standard Set ◽  
Potential Risks ◽  
Visually Based ◽  
Diverse Groups

For scholars, the internet provides a space to study diverse groups of people across the world and can be a useful way to bypass physical gender segregation and travel constraints. Despite the potential for new insights into people’s everyday life and increased attention from scholars, there is no standard set of ethics for conducting virtual ethnography on visually based platforms, like YouTube and Instagram. While publicly accessible social media posts are often understood to be a part of the public domain and thus do not require a researcher to obtain a user’s consent before publishing data, caution must be taken when studying members of a vulnerable community, especially those who have a history of surveillance, like African-American Muslims. Using a womanist approach, the author provides recommendations for studying vulnerable religious groups online, based on a case study of a YouTube channel, Muslimah2Muslimah, operated by two African-American Muslim women. The article provides an important contribution to the field of media studies because the author discusses a “dead” online community, where users no longer comment on the videos and do not maintain their own profiles, making obtaining consent difficult and the potential risks of revealing information to an unknown community hard to gauge.

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