Coming Back Home to Oppressive Mississippi: A Figurative Study of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped

2021 ◽  
pp. 161-177
Author(s):  
Michał Choiński
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Us South ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
The Us ◽  
Return Home

The aim of the paper is to discuss the figurative aspects of Jesmyn Ward’s The Men We Reaped (2013). In her memoir, Ward demonstrates the connections between the systemic racism in the US South and the tragic stories of five African-American men who were close to her, and who died between 2000-2004. The tragic loss of these lives is presented through a number of figurative images which present the region through the metaphors of predatory animals, physical burdens and uncanny doubling. Also, the article reflects on how Ward coped with the trauma of loss through her writings, and how, in numerous interviews, she justified her decision to return home to Mississippi and to settle there, in spite of the systemic racism and the trauma of loss.

scholarly journals Prostate Cancer Incidence and Mortality in Barbados, West Indies

2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anselm J. M. Hennis ◽  
Ian R. Hambleton ◽  
Suh-Yuh Wu ◽  
Desiree H.-A. Skeete ◽  
Barbara Nemesure ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Prostate Cancer ◽  
African American ◽  
Cancer Incidence ◽  
West Indies ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Prostate Cancer Incidence ◽  
White American ◽  
Incidence And Mortality ◽  
The Us

We describe prostate cancer incidence and mortality in Barbados, West Indies. We ascertained all histologically confirmed cases of prostate cancer during the period July 2002 to December 2008 and reviewed each death registration citing prostate cancer over a 14-year period commencing January 1995. There were 1101 new cases for an incidence rate of 160.4 (95% Confidence Interval: 151.0–170.2) per 100,000 standardized to the US population. Comparable rates in African-American and White American men were 248.2 (95% CI: 246.0–250.5) and 158.0 (95% CI: 157.5–158.6) per 100,000, respectively. Prostate cancer mortality rates in Barbados ranged from 63.2 to 101.6 per 100,000, compared to 51.1 to 78.8 per 100,000 among African Americans. Prostate cancer risks are lower in Caribbean-origin populations than previously believed, while mortality rates appeared to be higher than reported in African-American men. Studies in Caribbean populations may assist understanding of disparities among African-origin populations with shared heredity.

Geomemory and Genre Friction: Infrastructural Violence and Plantation Afterlives in Contemporary African American Novels

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Evans
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Gulf Coast ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Us South ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Spatial Design ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Us

Abstract This essay argues that contemporary African American novels turn to the gothic in order to dramatize the uncanny infrastructural and spatial afterlives of the plantation through a literary strategy it identifies as geomemory: a genre friction between mimetic and gothic modes in which postplantation spaces in the US South are imbued with temporal slippages such that past and present meet through the built environment. Tracing the plantation’s environmental and infrastructural presence in the Gulf Coast and throughout the US South, this essay argues that the plantation’s presence is fundamentally gothic. Geomemory, a trope evident across the emerging canon of contemporary African American fiction, allows writers to address the representational challenge of infrastructural and spatial violence via a defamiliarizing chronotope in which past, present, and future come into uneasy contact. Further, geomemory’s particular enmeshment with spatial design and infrastructure means that it moves from identifying the modern afterlife of the plantation to situating the present in the long context of plantation modernity.

scholarly journals When Cars Become Churches: Jesmyn Ward's Disenchanted America. An Interview

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA HARTNELL
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
South African ◽  
American Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Us South ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Us

This interview with Jesmyn Ward, conducted in November 2013, takes as its starting point the publication of her memoir, Men We Reaped. It explores the role of her writing in the context of Hurricane Katrina, the US South, African American culture and identity, and new trends in twenty-first-century US writing.

Mobility, Skepticism, and Counter-storytelling in African American Travel Writing: Carl Rowan's South of Freedom

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
GARY TOTTEN
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Willingness To Participate ◽  
Individual Action ◽  
Us South ◽  
Institutionalized Racism ◽  
The Us

In South of Freedom (1952), Carl Rowan frames his travels through an investigation of the US South in terms of his doubts about cultural change, his safety, and whites’ and blacks’ willingness to participate in racial reform, among other things. His skepticism about improvements in race relations and his critique of the country's inadequate progress toward such goals inform his examination of various states of freedom and unfreedom existing in the United States. Rowan's narrative and specific descriptions of his and others’ mobility operate as instances of counter-storytelling that incorporate such skepticism and critique. Ultimately, his theorizing of modes of resistance to institutionalized racism through individual action serves as a model for understanding African American travel writing and mobility more generally.

scholarly journals Vision and the Pursuit of Constructive Social Change

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 115-122
Author(s):  
Holly Hanson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Change ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
The World

At this moment in history, when we are confronting the reality of systemic racism and when a global pandemic is revealing in deadly detail the consequences of extreme inequality, we need to pay attention to the process of social change. The intolerable reality of African American men killed by police has drawn thousands of people around the world into public rejections of racist structures, symbols, and thought....  

Revisiting Bergmann’s Occupational Crowding Model

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Holder
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Labor Force ◽  
Black Men ◽  
African American Men ◽  
High Wage ◽  
Jel Codes ◽  
The Us ◽  
Quantitative Analyses ◽  
Employer Discrimination ◽  
Level Of Analysis

In 1971, economist Barbara Bergmann developed the “occupational crowding model,” which posited that black men are “crowded into” low-wage occupations and “crowded out” of high-wage occupations due to employer discrimination. In quantitative analyses I have conducted for the years 2010 through 2011, the results have yielded a different picture from what Bergmann’s model predicts: although African American men are underrepresented in high-wage occupations, consistent with her model, this group does not appear to be overrepresented in low-wage occupational categories when the level of analysis is between major low-wage occupational categories instead of within categories. I attribute this to demographic changes in the US labor force, and conclude by suggesting that the model now requires further specification. JEL Codes: J15, J62, J71

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