Beyond the Burden of History in Indigenous Australian Cinema

Film Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-53
Author(s):  
Benjin Pollock
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Indigenous Australian ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Indigenous Australia ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Experimental History

How Indigenous Australian history has been portrayed and who has been empowered to define it is a complex and controversial subject in contemporary Australian society. This article critically examines these issues through two Indigenous Australian films: Nice Coloured Girls (1987) and The Sapphires (2012). These two films contrast in style, theme and purpose, but each reclaims Indigenous history on its own terms. Nice Coloured Girls offers a highly fragmented and experimental history reclaiming Indigenous female agency through the appropriation of the colonial archive. The Sapphires eschews such experimentation. It instead celebrates Indigenous socio-political links with African American culture, ‘Black is beautiful’, and the American Civil Rights movements of the 1960s. Crucially, both these films challenge notions of a singular and tragic history for Indigenous Australia. Placing the films within their wider cultural contexts, this article highlights the diversity of Indigenous Australian cinematic expression and the varied ways in which history can be reclaimed on film. However, it also shows that the content, form and accessibility of both works are inextricably linked to the industry concerns and material circumstances of the day. This is a crucial and overlooked aspect of film analysis and has implications for a more nuanced appreciation of Indigenous film as a cultural archive.

We Shall Be Heard

Blue Texas ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Krochmal
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Equal Treatment ◽  
The South ◽  
Economic Opportunities ◽  
The Road ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter describes the growing demonstrations during the 1960s, as the sit-in movement spreads to Texas. Elder activists join the young in expressing their demands. In less than three years after the first sit-ins, the revived African American civil rights movements would succeed in desegregating public accommodations in urban areas throughout Texas and the South, counting a major coup on the road to their larger goals of equal treatment, improved economic opportunities, and real political power.

The Return of Civil Rights Television

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Television News ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Network Television ◽  
White House ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The 1960S

This book has explored how network television mobilized a certain type of image that, when appropriately paired with figures of whiteness, was presumed to make whites less anxious about social change. It has highlighted a common link in these representations of a dignified blackness intertwined with an accommodating and welcoming whiteness. It has considered a number of television shows, including East Side/West Side and Good Times, to emphasize the propensity of networks to tell narratives relating to “black and white together,” the “worthy black victim,” and the aspirational “civil rights subject.” This epilogue examines television news coverage of Barack Obama's historic election as president of the United States. It suggests that networks were returning to the familiar discourse about the civil rights movements during the 1960s as they packaged stories that celebrated black and white voters coming together to put a biracial black man into the White House, to make Americans feel good about their country and its race relations.

Cold War Progressives

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Castledine
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

In recognizing the relation between gender, race, and class oppression, American women of the postwar Progressive Party made the claim that peace required not merely the absence of violence, but also the presence of social and political equality. For progressive women, peace was the essential thread that connected the various aspects of their activist agendas. This study maps the routes taken by postwar popular-front women activists into peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The book tells the story of their decades-long effort to keep their intertwined social and political causes from unraveling and to maintain the connections among peace, feminism, and racial equality. It explains how the master narrative of U.S. history too often reduces the scope of leftist women's Cold War-era activism by containing it within women's, workers', or civil rights movements.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 253-263
Author(s):  
EDWARD J. BLUM
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Black Intellectuals ◽  
Job Opportunities ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The 1960S

In the middle of the 1960s, Harold Cruse was angry with his fellow “Negro intellectuals.” “The Negro movement is at an impasse,” he wrote in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, “precisely because it lacks a real functional corps of intellectuals able to confront and deal perceptively with American realities on a level that social conditions demand.” When his book was published in 1967, American race relations seemed to be vectoring toward another nadir. Urban unrest, declining job opportunities for African Americans, the escalating war in Vietnam, and the civil rights movements’ divide over “Black Power” were only parts of the “crisis” Cruse identified. To him, black intellectuals had failed to wrestle with the particularities of racism in the United States and thus had failed to offer meaningful solutions beyond what he deemed to be the dead-end roads of integration and black nationalism.

Fantasies of Blackness and Racial Capitalism

2017 ◽  
pp. 129-158
Author(s):  
Mark C. Jerng
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Milton Friedman ◽  
Gary Becker ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
Sword And Sorcery ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Market Economics

This chapter traces sword and sorcery’s re-emergence as a popular genre in the 1960s and 1970s during the era of U.S. Civil Rights movements. It shows how strategies for reproducing racism despite changing political sensibilities are constructed through the genre of sword and sorcery. These strategies go hand in hand with soon-to-be dominant re-imaginations of free market economics by economists such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. The chapter analyzes the work on the economics of discrimination in relation to Samuel Delany’s use of sword and sorcery to reflect on how race gets used to imagine market processes. Delany’s Nevèrÿon series adds another dimension to understandings of racial capitalism by focusing on race as economic utility.

scholarly journals White Compromises and American Prosperity

2022 ◽  
pp. 81-94
Author(s):  
Marvin T. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
White Men ◽  
Local State ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Black Empowerment

AbstractThe development and protection of American Prosperity was contingent upon Northern and Southern white men making compromises that allowed the continuance of slavery. These white compromises in 1787, 1820, 1850, and 1877 not only protected white supremacy, but also unity of the settler’s economy. The Federal government invaded the Southern states not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the union. After the War, during Reconstruction, Blacks started schools, farmed the land, and were elected to local, state, and national offices. This period of Black empowerment was cut short when Northern and Southern states compromised again to allow the establishment of the Jim Crow regime, the terrorism of lynching, and the re-establishment of the Ku Klux Klan. This compromise was disrupted with the 1960s civil rights movements, which has left us today without the unity necessary to create a climate of justice.

Mental health activism and the demand for recognition

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Health Activism ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Social ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter, “Mental health activism and the demand for recognition,” overviews developments in mental health activism in the United Kingdom and the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It begins by outlining the discourse of “mental hygiene, the “antipsychiatry” of the 1960s, the 1970s civil rights movements, and the consumer/service-user/survivor movements. The chapter continues with a focus on contemporary Mad Pride activism, describing the origins of the movement, the elements of the discourse, and the social and political demands that arise from it. It also discusses the problem of essentialism as it relates to social identities including Mad identity. The chapter concludes with an overview of philosophical engagement with Mad Pride and mad-positive activism.

scholarly journals Popular culture as a tool for critical information literacy and social justice education: Hip hop and Get Out on campus

2018 ◽  
Vol 79 (5) ◽  
pp. 234
Author(s):  
Kai Alexis Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Social Justice Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Slave Owner ◽  
Dred Scott ◽  
The North ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The 1960S

We live in a politically polarizing climate and at a time when there is great economic and social unrest in the United States. Our current moment brings to my mind other periods in our nation’s history. First, the 1857 Dred Scott decision, when the Supreme Court decided that slaves were not U.S. citizens and could not sue for their freedom. So that even if a slave escaped to the North, he or she was still considered the property of the slave owner and must be returned.1 The second is in the 1960s, when the antiwar and civil rights movements occurred.2,3

Mind Bending, Mental Seduction and Menticide: Brainwashing in British Spy Dramas of the 1960s

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Burton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Thought Control ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Scientific Background ◽  
Mind Control ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Cultural Fantasy

Brainwashing assumed the proportions of a cultural fantasy during the Cold War period. The article examines the various political, scientific and cultural contexts of brainwashing, and proceeds to a consideration of the place of mind control in British spy dramas made for cinema and television in the 1960s and 1970s. Particular attention is given to the films The Mind Benders (1963) and The Ipcress File (1965), and to the television dramas Man in a Suitcase (1967–8), The Prisoner (1967–8) and Callan (1967–81), which gave expression to the anxieties surrounding thought-control. Attention is given to the scientific background to the representations of brainwashing, and the significance of spy scandals, treasons and treacheries as a distinct context to the appearance of brainwashing on British screens.

Islamic Feminism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Schröter
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Islamic Feminism ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Democratic Reform ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Islamic Historiography ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Transformation Processes

The aims of Islamic feminism are at once theological and socially reformist. Its proponents are often activists, as well as authors and scholars. It is linked to democratic reform movements within the Islamic world as well as to civil rights movements in Europe and the USA, and is supported by actors who resist the advances of patriarchal religious positions as well as Western secular definitions of modernity. Unlike secular feminists, proponents of Islamic feminism see the justification for their fight for women’s rights and gender equality in their own interpretation of Islam’s sacred text, the statements attributed to the Prophet, and his supposed life circumstances. In addition, they draw on approaches taken from new Islamic historiography. This chapter deals with the foundations of Islamic feminism and its transnational political dimension, and asks in what national and local transformation processes its proponents were able to have an impact.

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