AFRICAN AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY IN CHICAGO AND NEW ORLEANS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

2014 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
Davis-Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
New Orleans

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

African American Religions in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Suzanne Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Church ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church

The typical story of African American religions narrates the development and power of the Protestant black church, but shifting the focus to the long nineteenth century can reorient the significance of the story. The nineteenth century saw the boom of Christian conversions among African Americans, but it also was a century of religious diversity. All forms of African American religion frequently pushed against the dominance of whiteness. This included the harming and cursing element of Conjure and southern hoodoo, the casting of slaves as Old Israel awaiting their exodus from bondage, the communications between the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and Afro-Creoles in New Orleans, and the push for autonomy and leadership by Richard Allen and the rest of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. While many studies of African American religions in the nineteenth century overwhelmingly focus on Protestantism, this is only part of the story.

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.

“The Greatest Thrill I Get is When I Hear a Criminal Say, ‘Yes, I Did it’”: Race and the Third Degree in New Orleans, 1920–1945

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Adler
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Medical Care ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Police Officer ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Constitutional Protection ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Face ◽  
A Cell ◽  
Short Time

On May 11, 1938, two New Orleans policemen entered the Astoria Restaurant, marched to the kitchen, and approached Loyd D. T. Washington, a 41-year-old African American cook. They informed Washington that they would be taking him to the First Precinct station for questioning, although they assured the cook that he need not change his clothes and “should be right back” to the “Negro restaurant,” where he had worked for 3 years. Immediately after arriving at the station house, police officers “surrounded” Washington, showed him a photograph of a man, and announced that he had killed a white man in Yazoo City, Mississippi, 20 years earlier. When Washington insisted that he did not know the man in the photograph, that he had never been to (or even heard of) Yazoo City, and that he had been in the army at the time of the murder, the law enforcers confined him in a cell, although they had no warrant for his arrest and did not charge him with any crime. The following day, a detective brought him to the “show-up room” in the precinct house, where he continued the interrogation and, according to Washington, “tried to make me sign papers stating that I had killed a white man” in Mississippi. As every African American New Orleanian knew, the show-up (or line-up) room was the setting where detectives tortured suspects and extracted confessions. “You know you killed him, Nigger,” the detective roared. Washington, however, refused to confess, and the detective began punching him in the face, knocking out five of his teeth. After Washington crumbled to the floor, the detective repeatedly kicked him and broke one of his ribs. The beating continued for an hour, until other policemen restrained the detective, saying “give him a chance to confess and if he doesn't you may start again.” But Washington did not confess, and the violent interrogation began anew. A short time later, another police officer interrupted the detective, telling him “do not kill this man in here, after all he is wanted in Yazoo City.” Bloodied and writhing in pain, Washington asked to contact his family, but the request was ignored. Because he had not been formally charged with a crime, New Orleans law enforcers believed that Washington had no constitutional protection again self-incrimination or coercive interrogation and no right to an arraignment or bail, and they had no obligation to contact his relatives or to provide medical care for him.

The Business Life of Emmett Jay Scott

2003 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 667-686 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maceo Crenshaw Dailey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Insurance Company ◽  
Clearing House ◽  
Howard University ◽  
Black Entrepreneurs ◽  
Trading Firm ◽  
Black Township

Emmett Jay Scott was private secretary to Booker T. Washington and later became secretary treasurer of Howard University. He was involved in numerous business activities, ranging from the establishment of the National Negro Business League to the founding of an investment clearing-house, an insurance company, and an overseas trading firm. Scott also promoted the black township of Mound Bayou and backed African American entertainment enterprises. His business activities were largely unheralded, and the frustrations he encountered illustrate both the obstacles and the opportunities for black entrepreneurs in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans: Origins, Beliefs and Rituals of an African-American Religion

1993 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 330
Author(s):  
Anita M. Waters ◽  
Claude F. Jacobs ◽  
Andrew J. Kaslow
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
American Religion ◽  
African American Religion

When Pushkin's Blackness Was in Vogue: Rediscovering the Racialization of Russia's Preeminent Poet and His Descendants

Slavic Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-257
Author(s):  
Korey Garibaldi ◽  
Emily Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Queen Of Spades ◽  
Racially Ambiguous

This essay investigates interconnections between the novelist, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Aleksandr Pushkin and identifies the racial subtext of these associations. Several scholars have connected Pushkin and James. But none of this scholarship has speculated on whether it was the poet's African heritage that was at the root of hidden connections between these authors. Moreover, though most scholarship on Pushkin's reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, his African heritage was publicized much earlier. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic frequently discussed Pushkin's racial heritage as a canonical European writer of African descent. This essay recovers how Henry James used Pushkin's daughter, the morganatic Countess Merenberg, as a model for the racially ambiguous “morganatic” Baroness Münster in The Europeans (1878). A decade later, James seems to have invoked the Countess Merenberg once more in his rewriting of Pushkin's “The Queen of Spades” (1833) in The Aspern Papers (1888). While James publicly attributed Byron and Shelley as inspirations, the discourse surrounding the African heritage of Pushkin and his heirs helps explain why the novelist minimized and erased the racial lineage at the center of The Europeans and The Aspern Papers.

scholarly journals La rinascita della tragedia dallo spirito del blues nel teatro di August Wilson

Le Simplegadi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (20) ◽  
pp. 147-161
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
Blues Music

Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August Wilson was the most prolific and represented African American playwright of the twentieth century. His Century Cycle, a series of ten plays that chronicle the lives of African Americans from the early 1900s to the late 1990s, is an expression of Wilson’s spiritual realism, a form of drama that, while adhering to some conventions of the Western realist tradition, also introduces elements of innovation inspired by blues music and Yoruba cosmology. This essay analyses the double cultural genealogy of Wilson’s work to show how, despite respecting the Aristotelian principle of mìmesis, his playwriting draws on a quintessentially black aesthetic. In conceiving of theatre as a ritualistic performative context where music and words intertwine, Wilson restored what Friedrich Nietzsche regarded as the authentic spirit of Greek tragedy – the harmony between Dionysian and Apollonian – while at the same time injecting an African American ethos into the Western theatrical canon.

“All That You Can’t Leave Behind”

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (S1) ◽  
pp. 255-278
Author(s):  
Daphne A. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Female ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Level ◽  
Original Title ◽  
Early Twenty

Abstract As numerous scholars have shown, Hurricane Katrina exacerbated the already-ongoing precarity of African American communities in New Orleans. The crisis demanded a reckoning with the afterlives of slavery at the national and global level. This article focuses on the work of Black women popular music artists whose early twenty-first century recordings and stirring performances addressed the traumas, the challenges, and the spectacular subjugation of Black women who fell victim to brutal disenfranchisement in the midst of the disaster. Beyonce’s B-Day album and Mary J. Blige’s history-making Katrina telethon performance are central to this discussion. The original title of this article was “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe.”

Cultural Motifs Persist

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-31
Author(s):  
Jenny M. Luke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
General Overview ◽  
Lay Midwifery ◽  
National Perspective ◽  
Jim Crow South

After a general overview of childbirth’s shift to hospital in the early decades of the twentieth century from a national perspective, the chapter narrows its focus to the Jim Crow South. The cultural motifs established during slavery are highlighted as features of African American lay midwifery. A religious calling, an intergenerational female connectedness, and authority to practice were inherent characteristics of the midwife’s role.

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