Hollywood Shuffle and Bamboozled

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Black Films ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
Black Actors

On the heels of the expansion of comic rage into art forms beyond literature and stand-up, this chapter examines the presence of comic rage in films directed by African Americans. After the Blaxploitation Era and the surge of black films and television shows in the 1990s, these films critiqued the problematic representations of blackness that have been imbedded in two of the most popular mediums of the second half of the twentieth century. While Hollywood Shuffle castigates the limited roles African Americans are given in film, Bamboozled exposes the virtual return to blackface minstrelsy that black actors are expected to accept in an allegedly more diverse TV landscape. Both works wrestle with questions of authenticity that are imposed by mainstream society or blindly adopted by African Americans responding with simplistic “real” yet destructive counter-representations.

A Black Sherlock Holmes (1918): A Case Study in Racebending

Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann McClellan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Black People ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Racial Change ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Dime Novel

Abstract With hundreds of Sherlock Holmes screen adaptations, the silent all-Black-cast A Black Sherlock Holmes (1918) remains an under-researched anomaly. The essay provides an overview of colourblind and colour conscious casting practices, ultimately advocating for adopting fan studies approaches to ‘racebending’. Racebending involves alternately ‘racing’ canonical characters from white to Black Minority Ethnic. After briefly reviewing representations of African Americans in blackface minstrelsy and early twentieth-century race films, the essay argues that A Black Sherlock Holmes highlights the ways in which race filmmakers were trying to reimagine new ways for African Americans to become part of dominant literary culture. In reimagining Sherlock Holmes as an African American, the film (re)inscribes Black people into prominent literary and cultural history. Because Knick Garter is doubly descended from two notable fictional detectives, America’s Nick Carter of dime novel fame as well as Britain’s legendary Sherlock Holmes, his very existence posits a new world where famous Black characters are as much a part of the American literary landscape as canonical characters from Hawthorne, Poe, and Twain. Viewing A Black Sherlock Holmes in light of the possibilities the film offers, rather than its limitations, allows viewers today to see the ways literary history, film, and race coalesced to highlight the possibilities of radical racial change in the post-Reconstruction era at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Long Road: Catholic Schools and Catholic social integration since 1918 (Cardinal Winning Lecture, 2017)

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-73
Author(s):  
T. M. Devine
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Integration ◽  
Spiritual Formation ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Catholic Schools ◽  
Educational Experience ◽  
Social Division ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
Catholic Schooling

Critics, past and present, of state-funded denominational education in Scotland after 1918 have often asserted that the system has promoted social division, separateness and even fostered sectarianism. This lecture – the Cardinal Winning Lecture, 2017, delivered to the St Andrew's Foundation for Catholic Teacher Education, University of Glasgow – disagrees with these views. Instead, the presentation argues that Catholic schooling, in addition to its recognised importance in Christian spiritual formation, has been a crucial influence promoting the integration of a formerly disadvantaged and marginalised community into modern Scotland. ‘Integration’ is defined for this purpose as the process of incorporation into mainstream society as equal citizens. The lecture considers the long and rocky road to this achievement by setting the educational experience within the broader context of Scottish religious, social, political and economic history in the twentieth century.

Visualizing Winchester: a brand history through iconic Western images

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence H. Witkowski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Wild West Shows ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Lever Action ◽  
The Media ◽  
Heroic Narrative

Purpose This paper aims to present a visually documented brand history of Winchester Repeating Arms through a cultural analysis of iconic Western images featuring its lever action rifles. Design/methodology/approach The study applies visual culture perspectives and methods to the research and writing of brand history. Iconic Western images featuring Winchester rifles have been selected, examined, and used as points of departure for gathering and interpreting additional data about the brand. The primary sources consist chiefly of photographs from the nineteenth century and films and television shows from the twentieth century. Most visual source materials were obtained from the US Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West and the Internet Movie Firearms Database. These have been augmented by written sources. Findings Within a few years of the launch of the Winchester brand in 1866, visual images outside company control associated its repeating rifles with the settlement of the American West and with the colorful people involved. Some of these images were reproduced in books and others sold to consumers in the form of cartes de visite, cabinet cards and stereographs made from albumen prints. Starting in the 1880s, the live Wild West shows of William F. Cody and his stars entertained audiences with a heroic narrative of the period that included numerous Winchesters. During the twentieth century and into the present, Winchesters have been featured in motion pictures and television series with Western themes. Research limitations/implications Historical research is an ongoing process. The discovery of new primary data, both written and visual, may lead to a revised interpretation of the selected images. Originality/value Based largely on images as primary data sources, this study approaches brand history from the perspective of visual culture theory and data. The research shows how brands acquire meaning not just from the companies that own them but also from consumers, the media and other producers of popular culture.

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.

Contested Terrain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Weems
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Business ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Bank ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Business Person

This chapter examines the “contested terrain” associated with the founding of Chicago’s Douglass National Bank in 1921. Anthony Overton, one of history’s most prominent African American entrepreneurs, is widely regarded as the founder of the second national bank organized by African Americans. Yet, the evidence indicates that this distinction should go to Pearl W. Chavers, a relatively obscure early twentieth-century black business person. The story of Anthony Overton’s ascent and P.W. Chavers’ descent in the Douglass National Bank’s administrative hierarchy reveals the power of money and influence. It also illuminates the nuances of both group and individual entrepreneur-based strategies for African American economic development.

An Old Warrior Underestimates a New Foe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sid Bedingfield
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The State ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
Criminal Charge ◽  
A Chain

This chapter details McCray’s battle with James F. Byrnes, South Carolina’s most distinguished politician of the mid-twentieth century. The elder statesman ran for governor in 1950 after a long career in Washington. At the time the NAACP had filed Briggs v. Elliott, a suit in Clarendon County demanding an end to segregated schools. Byrnes hoped to persuade the state’s African Americans to withdraw the suit in return to more funding for all-black schools in the state. McCray and his newspaper led the fight to rally support in favor of the Clarendon County case. McCray paid a price for his defiance. He was charged with criminal libel and served time on a chain gang. He and his supporters believe Byrnes pushed for the criminal charge to silence McCray’s newspaper.

The Mystery of American Identity

2019 ◽  
pp. 148-175
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American Culture ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
The Individual

Although best known for his novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s essays, and the array of cultural and political agendas which prompt their conception, are integral to American literary theory and criticism. His essays defined the terms for ongoing debates around nineteenth and twentieth century American fiction, modernist aesthetics, and American culture. This chapter charts the various cultural, literary, and political interventions made by Ellison’s essays. Like James Baldwin (chapter 4), Ellison confronts the question of American identity, but he recasts it in terms of culture rather than of the individual. Through Ellison’s use of the vernacular process, which blends high and low styles, he maps cultural concerns onto the political stage. By emphasizing the cultural contributions made by African Americans, Ellison’s work complicates, reworks, and redefines our understanding of American culture.

The Whites Got the Best

2018 ◽  
pp. 81-120
Author(s):  
John M. Coggeshall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Community Identity ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Economic Opportunities ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World

This chapter presents the story of Liberia during the early twentieth century, through the Depression and the world wars. As the nation’s economy changes, African Americans continue to abandon the region for better economic opportunities as they are also forced out by restrictive Jim Crow segregation and racialized attacks. Both Soapstone Baptist Church and Soapstone School continue, critical anchors for community identity. Some residents return to care for aging relatives. The story of Liberia is presented through the memories of elderly residents and some local historical sources, including obituaries.

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