A Completed Life

This chapter examines the global topography of religious emotion created by Victoria’s death and funeral, one which was thickly studded with church spires. It begins with the efforts to create a moving liturgy for Victoria after her death, showing that while her funeral was centred on London and Windsor Castle, it served as the template for memorial services around the world. It demonstrates that Christian clergy were impresarios of the emotions they unleashed, showing how they confidently used grief at Victoria’s death to celebrate national and imperial solidarities. The next section goes beyond the imperial rhetoric of the ‘Great White Mother’, supposedly universally mourned by natives, to argue that representatives of world religions voiced reverence for her as a tactical way of establishing their claims to greater consideration in her Christian but also cosmopolitan Empire. The chapter ends with a summary of the book’s key findings.

A Non-American Black Guide to American Blackness

This chapter’s focus on Black immigrant authors addresses the tension between the continued racialization of American culture and shifting demographics that undermine the applicability of previous definitions of Blackness. Novels such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah make explicit the connection between the prominence of such immigration and the rise of a figure such as Barack Obama. As Adichie’s novel makes clear, Obama’s background—the son of an African student and a white mother—underlines the shifting definitions of racial identity in twenty-first century America. While her protagonist’s presence in the United States is testament to the symbolic resonance that America still holds as a land of opportunity, her ultimate disillusionment with the United States, and the role that race plays in her return to Nigeria, underscores the incompleteness of the project of racial progress. The chapter engages with Afropolitanism as a post era discourse related to the African immigrant experience.

Head, Bessie Amelia (1937–1986)

Novelist, short-story and non-fiction writer Bessie Head was born in a Pietermaritzburg psychiatric institution, her white mother Bessie Amelia Emery (née Birch), who had had a long history of mental illness, having unexpectedly become pregnant (the identity of Head’s black father has never been discovered). Head grew up in foster care until the age of 13; thereafter the welfare authorities placed her in an Anglican mission orphanage in Durban. In 1961 she met and married fellow journalist Harold Head in Cape Town; their only child, Howard, was born in 1962. After the break-up of her marriage in 1964 she relinquished South African citizenship and took up a teaching post in Serowe, Botswana. Plagued by ill health and mental instability, she died in Serowe with six published works to her name and an international reputation as one of Africa’s foremost woman writers. Head’s first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), deals in predominantly realist fashion with the flight from South Africa of a young black political activist, his resettlement in Botswana and marriage to a Batswana woman. Her second novel, Maru (1971), which derives its name from its eponymous central character, is an altogether more complex work.

Gather in my name, my skin, my everything… (“Gather in my Name”: Maya Angelou, 1974)

Purpose Based on a performance of a conversation between my white mother and myself – her mixed race black daughter – the purpose of this paper is to deconstruct the complexity of the intersection of migration, racism, sexism, disability, and class within the space and place of the dynamics of our relationship. “Migration” and “borders” metaphors explore the “in between space that is neither here nor there” addressing key issues such as “migratory subjectivity” or, in other words, the translation of the process of inclusion and exclusion across the borders of oppressive social constructions to the lived emotional experience of being a mother and a daughter. Design/methodology/approach I explore my lived experience as black woman raised by a white Mum. My decision to use intersectionality as a tool with which to explore my personal experiences was based on me finding it enabled me to fully engage with the freedom of exploration, without feeling the need to “fit” with what was expected, in other words to be free to be able to express the “[…] lived experience of a presumed ‘Other’ and to experience it viscerally” (Orbe and Boylorn, 2014, p. 15). Findings A truthful account to aid the understanding of the complexities faced in the lived experience of a white mother and her black daughter. Research limitations/implications This piece has no limitations, and contains far reaching implications for social work practice and research methods. Practical implications This piece is embedded in social education and can be used as a research tool for best practice in anti-racist, black feminist practice. Social implications Social implications include a potential impact on diverse communities, with relevance to community engagement, social work practice placements, and critical reflection, and also education of the young to help them understand their own journeys. Originality/value This is an original report of an evidence-based lived experience, integrating theory to practice.

Racialized Maternalisms

This chapter explores how ideologies of white motherhood function as sites through which shifts in a nation's sense of the modern is enabled by locating the Diana phenomenon in the social context of 1990s Britain. It also considers how visions of “bad motherhood” became articulated to Blairite policies of cutting welfare for poor families and lone mothers on benefits, and how representations of Princess Diana's motherhood (as well as many other [white] mothers in popular culture in 1990s and early 2000s) signal a neoliberal logic of motherhood, along with the racial implications of such logics. More specifically, the chapter contrasts such white maternal (neoliberal) logics with the conditions of black mothers in Britain during the period by focusing on Doreen Lawrence's 2006 book, And Still I Rise. It argues that models of white motherhood constantly contradict nonwhite motherhood, rendering it deviant and dysfunctional, and that images of a new kind of (white) mother are often needed by the nation to produce a vision of a modern family.

RACHEL MORSE’S NEGOTIATING AS THE EFFECT OF DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS IN DURROW’S THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY

Racism towards African-American brings many impacts to African-American people’s life, especially who have ever experienced it. One ofsome psychological effects that experienced by African-American is doubleconsciousness experience that could be explored in Durrow’s The Girl Who Fellfrom the Sky. Double consciousness phenomenon is found in the main characterof the novel named Rachel Morse, a daughter of white mother and African-American father, who has identity problem in her new society. This study aimsto attend the identity negotiation of Rachel as the result of double consciousnessshe experienced using double consciousness theory by W.E.B. Du Bois. Thisstudy reveals that Rachel Morse who experience double consciousness has tonegotiate her biracial identity in American society who still believe in ‘one-drop’rule so that she could fit in the society. The practice of racism and stereotypeforms need to be reduced to make a better living for African-American andbiracial people in the United States.