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Archibald Motley Jr. and Racial Reinvention: The Old Negro in New Negro Art

Phoebe Wolfskill

An essential African American artist of his era, Archibald Motley Jr. created paintings of black Chicago that aligned him with the revisionist aims of the New Negro Renaissance. Yet Motley’s approach ... More

An essential African American artist of his era, Archibald Motley Jr. created paintings of black Chicago that aligned him with the revisionist aims of the New Negro Renaissance. Yet Motley’s approach to constructing a New Negro—a dignified figure both accomplished and worthy of respect—reflected the challenges faced by African American artists working on the project of racial reinvention and uplift. Phoebe Wolfskill demonstrates how Motley’s art embodied the tenuous nature of the Black Renaissance and the wide range of ideas that structured it. Focusing on key works in Motley’s oeuvre, Wolfskill reveals the artist’s complexity and the variety of influences that informed his work. Motley’s paintings suggest that the racist, problematic image of the Old Negro was not a relic of the past but an influence that pervaded the Black Renaissance. Exploring Motley in relation to works by notable black and non-black contemporaries, Wolfskill reinterprets Motley’s oeuvre as part of a broad effort to define American cultural identity through race, class, gender, religion, and regional affiliation. The book concludes by considering how racist images of the past continue to fuel conflicts over black representation. Less

Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority

Eleanor Ty

Asianfail examines literary and filmic works by contemporary Asian Americans and Asian Canadians that deal with failure and unhappiness. While the hashtag #Asianfail pokes fun at cultural ... More

Asianfail examines literary and filmic works by contemporary Asian Americans and Asian Canadians that deal with failure and unhappiness. While the hashtag #Asianfail pokes fun at cultural stereotypes of Asians on social media, the myth of the model minority has serious negative consequences for many young people who feel pressure and anxiety when they do not succeed in professional careers. This book looks at how novelists, such as Ruth Ozeki, Madeleine Thien, Alex Gilvarry, and lê thi diem thúy reveal the "cruel optimism" that characterizes ordinary existence for many people in the 21st century. Films such as The Debut, Red Doors,and Saving Face query immigrant aspirations of the older generation and the feasibility of the American dream. The protagonists in the graphic novels of Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, Keshni Kashyap and Mari Araki express their ugly and painful feelings as they grow up, while Jan Wong and Catherine Hernandez grapple with work and stress-related depression. In Linda Ohama's Obaachan's Garden and Catherine Hernandez' performance, even the aged feel precarity and are burdened with secrets of the past. These works interrogate and expose the limits of our neoliberal notions of the good life and happiness.Less

Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora

Myriam J. A. Chancy

Autochthonomies is an intellectual project that engages readers in an interpretive journey: it engages and describes a process by which readers of texts created by artists and actors of African ... More

Autochthonomies is an intellectual project that engages readers in an interpretive journey: it engages and describes a process by which readers of texts created by artists and actors of African descent might engage such texts as legible within the context of African Diasporic historical and cultural discursive practices. It argues that there is a cultural and philosophical gain to understanding these texts not as products of, or responses only to, Western hegemonic dynamics or simply as products of discrete ethnic or national identities. By invoking a transnational African/Diasporic interpretive lens, negotiated through a virtual “lakou” or yard space in which such identities are transfigured, recognized, and exchanged, the study demonstrates how to best examine the salient features of the texts that underscore African/Diasporic sensibilities and renders them legible, thus offering a potential not only for richer readings of African Diasporic texts but also the possibility of rupturing the Manichean binary dynamics through which such texts have commonly been read. This produces an enriching interpretive capacity emphasizing the transnationalism of connections between subjects of African descent as the central pole for undertaking such investigations. Through the use of the neologism, autochthonomy, the study argues further that, despite colonial interruptions, critics of such works should seek to situate them as part of an intricate network of cultural and transnational exchanges.Less

The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century

Derrick P. Alridge, Cornelius L. Bynum, and James B. Stewart (eds)

From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have created a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This ... More

From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have created a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This interdisciplinary volume explores the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by four groups of African Americans: artists and intellectuals; performers and protest activists; institutions and organizations; and educators and religious leaders. By including both women’s and diasporic perspectives, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation.Less

Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics

Margo Natalie Crawford

Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s ... More

Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and shows the connections between this final wave of the Black Arts movement and the early years of 21st century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, the global South, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic. Black Post-Blackness argues that the full innovativeness of the BAM only emerges when we recognize the movement’s full anticipation of the “beyond black art” waves of 21st century black aesthetics. The BAM has much more in common with 21st century African American literature and visual art than we often realize. The push to the mixed media, abstraction, satire, and sheer experimentation in 21st century African American literature and visual art is often framed as a push away from the narrowness of the category “black art” but it is, often, a push back to the mixed media, abstraction, satire, and experimentation in the BAM.Less

Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America

Jennifer Brier, Jim Downs, and Jennifer L. Morgan (eds)

This book investigates the ways in which race and sex intersect, overlap, and inform each other in United States history. The book includes thought-provoking articles that explore how to view the ... More

This book investigates the ways in which race and sex intersect, overlap, and inform each other in United States history. The book includes thought-provoking articles that explore how to view the American past through the lens of race and sexuality studies. Chapters range from the prerevolutionary era to today to grapple with an array of captivating issues: how descriptions of bodies shaped colonial Americans' understandings of race and sex; same-sex sexual desire and violence within slavery; whiteness in gay and lesbian history; college women's agitation against heterosexual norms in the 1940s and 1950s; the ways society used sexualized bodies to sculpt ideas of race and racial beauty; how Mexican silent film icon Ramon Navarro masked his homosexuality with his racial identity; and sexual representation in mid-twentieth-century black print pop culture. The result is both an enlightening foray into ignored areas and an elucidation of new perspectives that challenge us to reevaluate what we “know” of our own history. The book looks at how racial subjugation feeds sexual normativity as well as how sexual and racial subjects enact liberating claims that can fall short of liberation even as they bring into being imaginative ideas about social, political, and cultural change.Less

Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School

Kimberly D. McKee and Denise A. Delgado

Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School uses personal narrative supported by scholarly research to identify the struggles faced by women of color in graduate school ... More

Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School uses personal narrative supported by scholarly research to identify the struggles faced by women of color in graduate school and the methods deployed by women to mitigate the academic and emotional struggles they face. Contributors represent a diverse group of women from different ethnic, racial, and national origin backgrounds in fields ranging from the humanities to sciences. The essays engage common themes that recur in many women of color’s narratives: racial microaggressions, alienation, disillusionment, a lack of departmental and institutional support, imposter syndrome, a lack of self-care, and limited support from family and partners. The authors then discuss the specific steps taken to resist the roadblocks that stop many women of color from completing their degrees. Focusing on self-care, the creation of supportive communities, finding like-minded mentors, and strategies on resisting racism and unsupportive faculty and graduate students, the contrubtors offer solutions and possible avenues to support other women of color’s success in academia.Less

Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American "Oriental"

Amy Sueyoshi

In the late 1890s, “wide open” San Francisco, considered also a model city for race relations, appeared to be a place where men and women could configure their intimate lives in expansive and ... More

In the late 1890s, “wide open” San Francisco, considered also a model city for race relations, appeared to be a place where men and women could configure their intimate lives in expansive and unconventional ways. Rising rates of divorce, increasing sexual independence among women, and state-condoned sex work defined the city. Yet as whites explored and enacted new norms of romance and womanhood, increasing freedoms would be less accessible for Asians in America. White writers, lyricists, illustrators, and other producers of leisure culture projected shifting norms of middle-class gender and sexuality on specifically Chinese and Japanese in newspapers, magazines, plays, and musicals. These characterizations would then conflate Chinese and Japanese, previously perceived as two separate races, into a single group. This book details how middle-class white expansion of their own gender and sexual norms marked the formation of the pan-Asian “Oriental,” a deeply sexual racialized stereotype, more than a hundred years ago.Less

From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity

Miles White

This multilayered study of the representation of black masculinity in musical and cultural performance takes aim at the reduction of African American male culture to stereotypes of deviance, ... More

This multilayered study of the representation of black masculinity in musical and cultural performance takes aim at the reduction of African American male culture to stereotypes of deviance, misogyny, and excess. Broadening the significance of hip-hop culture by linking it to other expressive forms within popular culture, the book examines how these representations have both encouraged the demonization of young black males in the United States and abroad and contributed to the construction of their identities. The book traces black male representations to chattel slavery and American minstrelsy as early examples of fetishization and commodification of black male subjectivity. Continuing with diverse discussions including black action films, heavyweight prizefighting, Elvis Presley's performance of blackness, and white rappers such as Vanilla Ice and Eminem, the book establishes a sophisticated framework for interpreting and critiquing black masculinity in hip-hop music and culture. Arguing that black music has undeniably shaped American popular culture and that hip-hop tropes have exerted a defining influence on young male aspirations and behavior, the book draws a critical link between the body, musical sound, and the construction of identity.Less

From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture

Koritha Mitchell

This book argues for a new reading practice. Rather than approach art and literature from marginalized groups as examples of protest or as responses to “dominant” culture, it demonstrates the power ... More

This book argues for a new reading practice. Rather than approach art and literature from marginalized groups as examples of protest or as responses to “dominant” culture, it demonstrates the power of reading through the lens of achievement, using case studies from black expressive culture. Even while bombarded with racist and sexist violence, African Americans remain focused on defining, redefining, and pursuing success. By examining canonical examples of black women’s cultural production, this study reveals how African Americans keep each other oriented toward accomplishment through an ongoing, multivalent community conversation. Analyzing widely taught and discussed works from the 1860s to the present (via Michelle Obama’s public persona), the book traces “homemade citizenship”—the result of practices of making-oneself-at-home, practices of affirming oneself while knowing violence will answer one’s achievements and assertions of belonging. The texts examined include Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness (1969), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Michelle Obama’s first lady persona. [220 of 225 words]Less

Health Equity in Brazil: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Policy

Kia Lilly Caldwell

This book highlights Brazil’s successes and challenges in its quest to provide quality healthcare to all of its citizens, particularly women and Afro-Brazilians. By exploring how health activists and ... More

This book highlights Brazil’s successes and challenges in its quest to provide quality healthcare to all of its citizens, particularly women and Afro-Brazilians. By exploring how health activists and policy makers have attempted to address gender and racial health inequities from the early 1980s to the mid-2010s, this book provides new insights into the Brazilian government’s efforts to meet the needs of populations that are often marginalized on the basis of race and/or gender. The methodological approach used in this book combines analysis of health activism within the women’s movement, black movement, and black women’s movement with examination of health policies and programs at the local, state, and federal level. In addition, the intersectional approach used in this project places health policies for women in dialogue with health policies for the black population. Through use of an intersectional approach that views race, gender, and class as co-occurring and inseparable aspects of identity and social experience, as well as policy formulation, this book sheds light on the effectiveness of Brazilian health policies in meeting the needs of African-descendant women in the country.Less

Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood

Ruth Nicole Brown

This book examines how Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths, or SOLHOT, a radical youth intervention, provides a space for the creative performance and expression of Black girlhood and how this ... More

This book examines how Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths, or SOLHOT, a radical youth intervention, provides a space for the creative performance and expression of Black girlhood and how this creativity informs other realizations about Black girlhood and womanhood. Founded in 2006 and co-organized by the author, SOLHOT is an intergenerational collective organizing effort that celebrates and recognizes Black girls as producers of culture and knowledge. Girls discuss diverse expressions of Black girlhood, critique the issues that are important to them, and create art that keeps their lived experiences at its center. Drawing from experiences in SOLHOT, the book argues that when Black girls reflect on their own lives, they articulate radically unique ideas about their lived experiences. The book documents the creative potential of Black girls and women who are working together to advance original theories, practices, and performances that affirm complexity, interrogate power, and produce humanizing representation of Black girls' lives. In doing so, this book expands on the work of Black feminists and feminists of color and breaks intriguing new ground in Black feminist thought and methodology. Emotionally and intellectually powerful, the book combines theory with creativity to show how the creative helps to theorize, and how theory can be enacted through creativity.Less

Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest

Brent M. S. Campney

Hostile Heartland examines racial violence—or, more aptly, racist violence—against blacks (African Americans) in the Midwest, emphasizing lynching, whipping, and violence by police (or police ... More

Hostile Heartland examines racial violence—or, more aptly, racist violence—against blacks (African Americans) in the Midwest, emphasizing lynching, whipping, and violence by police (or police brutality). It also focuses on black responses, including acts of armed resistance, the development of local and regional civil rights organizations, and the work of individual activists. Within that broad framework the book considers patterns of institutionalized violence in studies of individual states, like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas over a number of decades; it also targets specific incidents of such violence or resistance in case studies representative of changes in these patterns like the lynching of Joseph Spencer in Cairo, Illinois, in 1854 and the lynching of Luke Murray in South Point, Ohio, in 1932. Significantly, Hostile Heartland not only addresses the years from the Civil War to World War I, which are the typical focus of such studies, but also incorporates the twenty-five years that precede the Civil War and the additional twenty-five that follow World War I. It pioneers new research methodologies, as exemplified by Chapter 4’s analysis of the relations between and among racist violence, family history, and the black freedom struggle. Finally, Hostile Heartland situates its findings within the historiography more broadly.Less

Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media

Jasmine Mitchell

Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media demonstrates how mixed-race women of African and European descent are harnessed in popular media as a tool to uphold white supremacy and ... More

Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media demonstrates how mixed-race women of African and European descent are harnessed in popular media as a tool to uphold white supremacy and discipline people of African descent to uphold state policies of antiblackness. Uncovering the racialized and gendered paradigms of U.S. and Brazilian media, the book uses case studies of texts from a broad range of popular culture media—film, telenovelas, television shows, music videos, magazines, newspapers, and Olympic ceremonies—to elucidate how the U.S. mulatta and Brazilian mulata figures operates within and across the United States and Brazil as a response to racial anxieties and notions of white superiority. These shared concepts of race, gender, and sexuality crystallize in the mulatta/mulata figure as representative of interlinked racial projects in Brazil and the United States. Focusing on popular culture and political events of the 2000s, the book demonstrates how the mulatta and mulata figures facilitated multicultural and postracial discourses. Exploring representations, definitions, and meanings of blackness in the context of the Americas, the book traverses the cultural conditions of racializations in the United States alongside Brazil to unveil the workings of pervasive racial and gender inequalities.Less

The Minor Intimacies of Race: Asian Publics in North America

Christine Kim

An attempt to put an Asian woman on Canada's $100 bill in 2012 unleashed enormous controversy. The racism and xenophobia that answered this symbolic move toward inclusiveness revealed the nation's ... More

An attempt to put an Asian woman on Canada's $100 bill in 2012 unleashed enormous controversy. The racism and xenophobia that answered this symbolic move toward inclusiveness revealed the nation's trumpeted commitment to multiculturalism as a lie. It also showed how multiple minor publics as well as the dominant public responded to the ongoing issue of race in Canada. This book delves into the ways cultural conversations minimize race's relevance even as violent expressions and structural forms of racism continue to occur. The book turns to literary texts, artistic works, and media debates to highlight the struggles of minor publics with social intimacy. Its insightful engagement with everyday conversations as well as artistic expressions that invoke the figure of the Asian enables the book to reveal the affective dimensions of racialized publics. It also extends ongoing critical conversations within Asian Canadian and Asian American studies about Orientalism, diasporic memory, racialized citizenship, and migration and human rights.Less

Muncie, India(na): Middletown and Asian America

Himanee Gupta-Carlson

The book is a study of South Asian Americans in Muncie, Indiana – the author’s hometown. Muncie is the small Midwestern city made famous for being “typical America” through the Middletown studies. ... More

The book is a study of South Asian Americans in Muncie, Indiana – the author’s hometown. Muncie is the small Midwestern city made famous for being “typical America” through the Middletown studies. The book is among the first studies of the South Asian American community in Muncie as well as small-town middle America more generally. It situates the experiences of Muncie’s South Asians within the larger context of scholarship in Asian American Studies, racial and ethnic studies, postcolonial/diaspora studies, and the Middletown archive. At the heart of the book is the question: What does it mean to call one’s self an American is one is non-white, non-Christian, and/or non-U.S. born? It uses an interdisciplinary blend of auto-ethnography, and discourse analysis to argue that a failure to account for the racial, ethnic, and religious diversity of America has left behind a false legacy of what defines an American. It shows how the Muncie South Asian American community has sustained itself through extraordinary friendship and resilience, qualities which allowed the members of the community to negotiate internal differences among Indians and other South Asians to make a home in a city – and a nation – that renders them non-American.Less

Myths America Lives By: White Supremacy and the Stories That Give Us Meaning

Richard T. Hughes

The first edition of Myths America Lives By explores five Great American Myths—the Chosen Nation, Nature’s Nation, the Christian Nation, the Millennial Nation, and the Innocent Nation. This revised ... More

The first edition of Myths America Lives By explores five Great American Myths—the Chosen Nation, Nature’s Nation, the Christian Nation, the Millennial Nation, and the Innocent Nation. This revised edition introduces a sixth myth—the myth of White Supremacy—and argues, first, that the myth of white supremacy is the primal American myth that informs all the others and, second, that one of the chief functions of the other five myths is to protect and obscure the myth of white supremacy, to hide it from our awareness, and to assure us that we remain innocent after all. With one chapter devoted to each of the myths, the book relies especially on the voices of black Americans to help readers understand the pervasive power of white supremacy in American life and culture and how white supremacy translates into systemic racism, on the one hand, and white privilege, on the other. The book also explores how manifest destiny, the American dream, and capitalism have depended on the Great American Myths for their viability in American culture.Less

Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow

Mollie Godfrey

Vershawn Ashanti Young (ed.)

Bringing together fifteen essays by leading scholars, including a theoretical introduction by the editors and an insightful foreword and afterword by Gayle Wald and Michele Elam, respectively, this ... More

Bringing together fifteen essays by leading scholars, including a theoretical introduction by the editors and an insightful foreword and afterword by Gayle Wald and Michele Elam, respectively, this volume analyzes Godfrey and Young’s neologism neo-passing. Godfrey and Young define neo-passing as narratives and performative acts of passing that recall the complex racial politics that define classic tales of passing, such as Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912). The difference, however, between the former concept of passing and what Godfrey and Young call neo-passing is that neo-passing is performed and/or produced in various media after the end of legal segregation (circa 1954). Beginning with the Jim Crow–era assumption that passing will come to pass as soon as desegregation begins, this volume investigates how and why passing not only persists in the post–Jim Crow moment but has also proliferated. As with both neo-slave and neo-segregation narratives, performances of neo-passing speak to contemporary racial injustices and ideologies, asking readers to hold these in mind alongside the racial injustices and ideologies of the past. Typically, neo-passing also goes beyond the black/white binary that defined classic passing narratives to explore how identities are increasingly defined as intersectional—simultaneously involving class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. Through explorations of newspaper articles, advertisements, journalism, fiction, graphic novels, film, comedy sketches, reality television, music, and social media, the essays in this volume engage in a vigorous debate about the specific ways in which neo-passing alternatively shores up, deconstructs, or complicates our understanding of performance and identity production after Jim CrowLess

Raced to Death in 1920s Hawai i: Injustice and Revenge in the Fukunaga Case

Jonathan Y. Okamura

This book analyzes the larger racial significance of the quick conviction and death sentence given to a likely insane Japanese American, Myles Fukunaga, for murdering a White boy, Gill Jamieson, in ... More

This book analyzes the larger racial significance of the quick conviction and death sentence given to a likely insane Japanese American, Myles Fukunaga, for murdering a White boy, Gill Jamieson, in 1928. The Fukunaga case demonstrates how race operated in Hawai‘i to enforce the hierarchical relations between Whites and non-Whites. In arguing that Fukunaga was raced to death, two different meanings of race are employed. First, he was hanged because he was of the “Japanese race” and committed his crime during the 1920s, when Japanese Americans were perceived as the most politically and economically threatening group to continued White supremacy in Hawai‘i. Second, Fukunaga was raced or rushed to his death sentence less than three weeks after his crime because Whites wanted immediate revenge. The book argues that the Fukunaga case was a major component in a trajectory of racial injustice against non-Whites, including Japanese and Filipino labor leaders who, after organizing multiplantation strikes in 1920 and 1924, were imprisoned based on likely perjured testimony. Fukunaga’s hanging is also connected to the lynching in 1932 of Joe Kahahawai, a Native Hawaiian, who was falsely accused of raping a White woman and was also raced to death. The book also discusses how incipient forms of colorblindness and multiculturalism were strategically deployed by Whites to deny the significance of race in the accelerated conviction of Fukunaga.Less

Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity

Lindon Barrett

This book is the unfinished manuscript of literary and cultural theorist Lindon Barrett, who died in 2008. The study offers a genealogy of how the development of racial blackness within the ... More

This book is the unfinished manuscript of literary and cultural theorist Lindon Barrett, who died in 2008. The study offers a genealogy of how the development of racial blackness within the mercantile capitalist system of Euro-American colonial imperialism was constitutive of Western modernity. The book explores the complex transnational systems of economic transactions and political exchanges foundational to the formation of modern subjectivities. In particular, the book traces the embodied and significatory violence involved in the development of modern nations. Masterfully connecting historical systems of racial slavery to post-Enlightenment modernity, this pathbreaking publication shows how Western modernity depended on a particular conception of racism contested by African American writers and intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance.Less