O problema da linha de cor e a diferença cultural: raça, etnicidade e diáspora no século XXI

Em The Fateful Triangle (2017) Stuart Hall discute assuntos centrais sobre a formação da modernidade e contemporaneidade. Boa parte da estratégia de argumentação de Hall no livro se dá à luz de importantes categorias de análise frequentes nos enredos políticos da história da modernidade como “raça”, “etnicidade” e “nacionalidade”, tendo em vista suas correlações com a produção discursiva da noção de diferença. The Fateful Triangle faz parte de uma série de publicações da Universidade de Harvard baseadas em palestras (lectures) conferidas por especialistas de diversas áreas do conhecimento sobre temas explorados e tangenciados pelo sociólogo W.E.B. Du Bois - as W.E.B Du Bois Lectures organizada pelo professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. O objetivo desta resenha é articular a sociologia de Stuart Hall em The Fateful Triangle (2017) à luz da obra de W.E.B. Du Bois.

The “Vernacular Process” and the (Re)construction of Tradition in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

The present paper is an attempt to explore, in and through the prism of Ralph W. Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the workings of Ellison’s “vernacular process” as a concept that informs the author’s critical views incorporated in the novel. More specifically, Ellison’s revisionary enterprise in this narrative demonstrates his view of African-American tradition as integrated in American and Western tradition. While the form of “invisible criticism” in which Ellison engages is a rather self-conscious manifestation of his critical model of the “vernacular process,” the present work contends that this Ellisonian model actually foreshadows Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s critical paradigm of “Signifyin(g).” What Gates names “literary Signification” stands for an indigenous African-American form of literary revision consisting in a black text’s repeating with difference of another black text’s tropes or rhetorical strategies, or such text’s appropriation of aspects of form in a white antecedent text. Through “literary Signification,” Invisible Man revises African-American texts exemplified in the present article by Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and Native Son (1940). Likewise, Ellison’s narrative also revisits American and European texts, an enterprise to be seen in the present work’s examination of Ellison’s revision of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Walt Whitman’s romantic poetry, and T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). By establishing through “literary Signification” his African-American literary “relatives” as well as his Western and American “ancestors,” Ellison ultimately constructs the African-American literary tradition as embedded in the Euro-American tradition and thus underlines the syncretic character of American literature and culture. Keywords: Integrative, Revision, Tradition, Signifyin(G), “Vernacular Process”.

“No CAP”: Reflections on the Intersectionality, Positionality and the Experiences of Navigating Race as a Black Male Criminologist

The arrest of respected Black professor and scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., by the Cambridge Police Department in 2009 for allegedly breaking into his own home proverbially “set the table” for this discussion. Following his arrest, Gates noted: “There are one million black men in jail in this country and last Thursday I was one of them. This is outrageous and this is how poor black men across the country are treated every day in the criminal justice system. It’s one thing to write about it, but altogether another to experience it.” Regardless of social class or occupational prestige, Black professors at predominately White institutions are subjected to hyper-surveillance and racially bias policing in public spaces on campus. Using intersectionality and positionality as conceptual frameworks, this paper describes the lived experiences of a Black professor and criminologist at a predominately White institution and his encounters with the university’s police department and the carceral state. Using Armour’s (2020) N*gga Theory, which is framed by Critical Race Theory, I analyze the relationship between race, class, unequal justice, and the politics of respectability. I use Armour’s N*gga Theory (2020) to show solidarity between those vilified as a “crime prone” Black underclass, and the less “crime prone” Black bourgeoisie. Although, the Black bourgeoisie in the academy may embrace the politics of respectability, according to N*gga Theory there is no moral or political distinction between the those considered good Negroes and those considered bad.

Breathing Free: Environmental Violence and the Plantation Ecology in Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative

This essay presents an ecocritical analysis of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative, the 1850s manuscript novel by a formerly-enslaved African American woman that was recovered by Henry Louis Gates in 2001. Examining Crafts's extensive engagement with Charles Dickens's Bleak House, it argues that Crafts's fictionalized narrative of enslavement and self-emancipation re-imagines a Victorian politics of environmental health as a critique of environmental racism. Showing how Crafts presents the material ecology of the plantation South as a site and vector of violence, it reads The Bondwoman's Narrative as resisting nineteenth-century scientific discourses of racialized immunity that sought to legitimize the systemic neglect of enslaved people in the antebellum United States.

Towards a pedagogy of deviance

This article engages the narratives of three Toronto hip-hop artists to explore the pedagogical possibilities revealed through the processes of performance identity construction. By immersing themselves in hip-hop communities, artists learn ways of knowing and negotiating their place at the interstices of the normative frameworks that underlie their unique combinations of cultural contexts. Artists’ stories reveal how they bring themselves into being through movement and sound. These narrations of identity become indicative of an artist’s style through performative iterations embedded with the opportunity for enacting difference. For hip-hop artists, deviating from performative expectations is not a mere possibility, but formative intention in the tradition of the African American practice of Signifyin(g), as delineated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Conversations with hip-hop artists invite reflection on what we could accomplish through a music education pedagogy that cultivates creative deviancy that reveals, breaks open and overturns limiting conventions.

Post Colonialist Features of Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs From the Viewpoint of Henry Louis Gates

Henry Louis Gates has taken Saussure’s term “signifying” and redefined it as a linguistic wordplay which postpones the delivery of meaning and believes in “double-voicedness”, this means to speak both the language of the dominant culture and that of the subordinated one. He also asserts “double-voicedness” as the epitome of “Signifyin (g)”. This paper intends to apply the notions of “Double-voicedness” and “Signifyin (g)” on the manuscript of Les Blancs, written by Lorraine Hansberry, and highlights the anti-colonial aspects of the play.