James Baldwin and the 1980s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Vogel
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Academic Journal ◽  
Inner Cities ◽  
Aids Crisis ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
The Media ◽  
Reagan Era

Few literary figures are as commonly referenced in contemporary culture as James Baldwin. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the election of Donald Trump, and daily debates about walls, borders, and bans, Baldwin’s righteous indignation and prophetic warnings speak to the urgent mood of the present. His words appear on signs at rallies, in speeches, and on social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook; he has been the subject of countless features in major magazines, as well as the inspiration for a new academic journal (the James Baldwin Review) and an Oscar-nominated documentary (I Am Not Your Negro). This Baldwin renaissance, however, follows decades of dismissals and neglect, particularly of his late career. James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era zeroes in on his final decade, revealing a still-razor-sharp, provocative writer who, with the benefit of hindsight, holds up as one of the most prescient observers of the post-civil rights landscape. Indeed, contrary to the conventional narrative of his decline, Baldwin’s work in the 1980s proves remarkably engaged with the cultural milieu of a new generation, commenting on everything from the culture wars to the deterioration of inner cities, from the Reagan Revolution to the religious Right, from gender-bending in pop culture to the AIDS crisis. A groundbreaking new assessment of Baldwin in the context of the media-saturated Reagan era, James Baldwin and the 1980s offers the first in-depth study of the author’s final decade -- and shows why his work from this period is so relevant to the world we live in today.

Thai People Don’t Get Hate Mail

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lane Demas
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Athletes ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Inner Cities ◽  
Minority Participation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Media ◽  
Thai People ◽  
Tiger Woods

This chapter explores the decline of golf in America’s inner cities in the 1980s, subsequent efforts to increase minority participation, and the rise of Tiger Woods. Complicating the notion of Woods as a traditional, popular figure in sport desegregation, the narrative instead posits him as a reluctant civil rights hero, contextualizing his popularity and exploring why the media (and many golf fans) struggled to turn back the clock and fit Woods into the mold of historic black athletes. It was a process that future historians may consider a failure, not only because the traditional “civil rights era” was over but also because the young Woods himself asked not to be identified as “black” and instead told the world that he was “Cablinasian,” a term he coined to describe his multiracial heritage. The chapter features an analysis of Woods that draws on a comparison with other athletes, including lesser-known black golfers like Calvin Peete as well as superstars like basketball great Michael Jordan.

scholarly journals “To Crush the Serpent”: James Baldwin, the Religious Right, and the Moral Minority

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-48
Author(s):  
Joseph Vogel
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Moral Majority ◽  
Major Transformation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Reagan Era

In the 1980s, James Baldwin recognized that a major transformation had occurred in the socio-political functions of religion. His critique adapted accordingly, focusing on the ways in which religion—particularly white evangelical Christianity—had morphed into a movement deeply enmeshed with mass media, conservativepolitics, and late capitalism. Religion in the Reagan era was leveraged, sold, and consumed in ways never before seen, from charismatic televangelists, to Christian-themed amusement parks, to mega-churches. The new movement was often characterized as the “religious right” or the “Moral Majority” and was central to both Reagan’s political coalition as well as the broader culture wars. For Baldwin, this development had wide-ranging ramifications for society and the individual. This article draws on Baldwin’s final major essay, “To Crush the Serpent” (1987), to examine the author’s evolving thoughts on religion, salvation, and transgression in the context of the Reagan era.

News on the 700 Club: The Cycle of Religious Activism

1994 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 887-892 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Abelman
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Past ◽  
News Program ◽  
The Media ◽  
Religious Activism

This content analysis evaluates political topics and themes of televangelist Pat Robertson's high-profile news program The 700 Club during the early months of the 1992 presidential campaign. Considered the media arm of the Religious Right, this program was found to go against the trend of increasingly political and less religious content observed in earlier analyses of equivalent episodes during the 1983, 1986, and 1989 seasons. In addition, political topics were addressed more neutrally than in the past. The study discusses the possible impact of an increasingly competitive telecommunication environment on religious broadcasters.

Claiming Martin Luther King, Jr. for the right: The Martin Luther King Day holiday in the Reagan era

2021 ◽  
pp. 175069802199593
Author(s):  
Francesca Polletta ◽  
Alex Maresca
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
General Abstract ◽  
The Right ◽  
Reagan Era ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
Roll Back

The article traces how American conservatives laid claim to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. We focus on a key moment in that process, when Republicans in the early 1980s battled other Republicans to establish King’s birthday as a federal holiday and thereby distinguish a conservative position on racial inequality from that associated with southern opposition to civil rights. The victory was consequential, aiding the New Right’s efforts to roll back gains on affirmative action and other race-conscious policies. We use the case to explore the conditions in which political actors are able to lay claim to venerated historical figures who actually had very different beliefs and commitments. The prior popularization of the figure makes it politically advantageous to identify with his or her legacy but also makes it possible to do so credibly. As they are popularized, the figure’s beliefs are made general, abstract, and often vague in a way that lends them to appropriation by those on the other side of partisan lines. Such appropriation is further aided by access to a communicative infrastructure of foundations, think tanks, and media outlets that allows political actors to secure an audience for their reinterpretation of the past.

James Baldwin

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American History ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
First Century ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Twenty First Century

The book is devoted to the works of James Baldwin, one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. The authors examine his most important contributions – including novels, essays, short stories, poetry, and media appearances – in the wider context of American history. They demonstrate the lasting importance of his oeuvre, which was central to the Civil Rights Movement and continues to be relevant at the dawn of the twenty-first century and the Black Lives Matter era.

scholarly journals Driving on the Left: Sorkin’s View of the Street, the City and architecture

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sorkin ◽  
Graham Cairns
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Graduate Program ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Environmental Threats ◽  
City College ◽  
The Media ◽  
Village Voice ◽  
The City

Sardonic, cutting, insightful, provocative: Michael Sorkin is one of today’s most radical architectural commentators with a staunch leaning to the political left and a literary bent for framing painful truths in ironic, and sometimes hilarious, verse. However, he should not be dismissed as a radical, isolated, or lone and unhindered voice however. He is a Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York, and he has been Professor of Urbanism and Director of the Institute of Urbanism at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. In addition, he has taught at architecture schools across the world, including the Architectural Association, Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Cornell. Sorkin runs his own design studio and research institute and has been a contributing editor of the Architectural Record . He was the architecture critic of the Village Voice for ten years and has published innumerable articles and essays. A list of some of his books includes: Twenty Minutes in Manhattan , Variations on a Theme Park , Exquisite Corpse , The Next Jerusalem , Indefensible Space , and a long list of other etcs . and alsos ….In this interview-article, he offers his opinion on a range of issues, including the environmental threats to contemporary America, architectural symbolism and paranoia, the importance of political action on the streets of the modern city, and the role of the architecture critic in the complex tapestry of contemporary culture. With regard the position of the modern critic, he begins by responding to a question regarding the relevance of Noam Chomsky’s description of the media as a form of propaganda and the contemporary journalist as functioning through the structure of what Chomsky defines as “filters,” or constraints and biases that dictate what gets written and published in the press.

scholarly journals Media Literacy Education for Students During Learning Online the Covid-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 628-634
Author(s):  
Fadhil Pahlevi Hidayat
Keyword(s):  
Online Learning ◽  
Media Literacy ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Learning Activities ◽  
Media Literacy Education ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
The Media ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
Basic Ability

One of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic is felt in the world of education, namely the Government's policy that all learning activities must be carried out from home online. With this policy, students tend to be affected by negative impacts during online learning due to the increasing consumption of the digital world. Therefore, media literacy education is needed for students so that it can become the basic ability of students to overcome negative and negative influences to improve understanding to build knowledge and have more critical thinking about information obtained from the media, especially for students who are currently learning from home online. This study uses a research method with a literature review with data collection techniques carried out through an in-depth study of various reference sources. The results of the analysis show that media literacy education for students during online learning during the covid-19 pandemic is a basic skill that is so important for a student to have, not only for online learning but also for learning in the 21st century as it is today. Media literacy education skills can be applied during online learning by applying skills such as access, select, understand, analyze, verify, evaluate, distribute, produce, participate and collaborate

scholarly journals The Black Culture Movement and the Black Community

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-214
Author(s):  
John Runcie
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Black Child ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Skin Bleaching ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The Media

The problem of defining a coherent cultural identity is one that has confronted generations of Afro-Americans. As part of the justification and defence of slavery and the slave trade many whites rationalized their actions by arguing that all Africans were cultureless savages. The same combination of guilt and arrogance induced them to attempt to suppress and denigrate surviving elements of a culture whose very existence they had already denied. Most black Americans responded to these pressures by rejecting Africa and their African heritage as a source of shame and by trying to deny and to erase their blackness. Malcom X clearly understood this when he proclaimed in 1965: ‘ We have been a people who hated our African characteristics. We hated our black heads, we hated the shape of our noses …, we hated the color of our skin.’ Identification with the dominant white culture took many forms. For some Blacks it involved the use of hair straightening and skin bleaching; for others it meant the elimination of any ethnic quality in their speech, dress, cuisine and religion; for many more it meant a life of morality and hard work lived according to the dictates of the Puritan ethic. The loss of any distinctive cultural identity involved in this process was made worse by the unwillingness of white society to recognize and accept the Afro-American as part of the dominant culture. In these circumstances many blacks found themselves in a cultural limbo without an adequate self-image. White domination of the media meant that they sometimes felt literally invisible. James Baldwin drew attention to this dilemma in a speech delivered in June 1963, when he noted that:A black child born in this country … discovers two terrifying things. First of all he discovers that he does not exits in it, no matter where he looks – by which I mean books, magazines, movies – there is no reflection of himself anywhere … [if] he finds anything which looks like him, he is authoritatively assured that this is a savage, or a comedian who has never contributed anything to civilization.

God Can Save Us

Rough Country ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Moral Majority ◽  
Jerry Falwell ◽  
Protestant Denominations

This chapter discusses the emergence of the New Christian Right or simply the Religious Right as a powerful new force in American politics. The rise of the Religious Right has been examined from all angles, and several key factors have been identified. It clearly depended on leadership. The most visible leaders were preacher Jerry Falwell, whose Moral Majority rallies at state capitals had been gaining attention in the late 1970s, and fellow televangelist Pat Robertson, whose popular 700 Club television program included discussions of social and moral topics. Both were canny entrepreneurs who knew how to attract media attention, and there were conservative political operatives eager to enlist their support. There were unifying issues as well, such as opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and promiscuity, and the more general sense that religion was under siege by secularity and humanism. And there were lingering divisions within Protestant denominations and among Catholics over such issues as social activism, the legacies of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, communism, gender equality, the ordination of women, and theology.

The Promulgation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kyle Day
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
National Response ◽  
The Media

Chapter Six narrates the Southern Congressional Delegation’s promulgation of the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, popularly known as the Southern Manifesto. Led by Sen. Walter George of Georgia and U.S. Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia, the Southern Manifesto produced a widespread national reaction the permeated every aspect of the American political discourse. From both national political parties, the media, and civil rights leaders themselves, this chapter assesses the national response, and its consequences for the legal fight for civil rights in the Hall of Congress, the President’s enforcement of Brown, and the struggle for eual citizenship for all Americans.

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