African and African American Studies Research Papers (original) (raw)

Chapter 8 of "The Cool Kawaii". Abstract: Like cool and kawaii, dandyism uses ironical forms of resistance to fight bourgeois society up to the point that it produces a cultural situation that comes close to New World Modernity. Cornel West’s culture of alienation, combined with an eccentric pride derived from a past of oppression and the belief in a “decadent American civilization at the end of the twentieth century”, was anticipated by Baudelaire who wrote that “dandyism is the last spark of heroism within an age of decadence”

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- Dandyism, Cornel West, Charles Baudelaire, Kawaii

Convocation Address at Bethel University, August 29, 2016 about recent troubles in Minnesota, particularly the shooting of Philando Castille, and our responsibility as followers of the Gospel. There is an audio link also available. After you click the link, it's the first one in the queue; fast-forward to 15:00: https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/2016-2017-chapel-college-arts/id1148681753?mt=10

June 6, 2021 The genocide in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region has been going on for seven months now. The UN is doing nothing and the slaughter continues. To understand events there one must examine the context in which they were created.
The past 500 years of colonialism and even world politics today are very easy to understand. Euro-American colonialists are inherently white supremacist to give them a unifying bond, uniformly amoral and totally capitalist. Over time they realized its easier to get the “colored savages” to fight each other rather than waste good white boys on the effort so they became masters at dividing indigenous groups within the Americas, Asia and Africa, setting them upon each other, then rolling in later on to “clean up the mess” and totally take over while congratulating themselves on their kindness.
The First Italo-Ethiopian War 1895 – 1896 in which the Italians claimed the entire country of Ethiopia as their own was bad enough, but then the Second Italo-Ethiopian War from 1935 – 1937 saw 200,000 Italian soldiers invade proving what a totally ineffectual entity the League of Nations (1920 - 1946) truly was, precisely the same as the modern so-called United Nations.
What the foreign invaders were really after was a solid base in East Afrika, and specifically the Ethiopian Highlands, the largest continuous elevated area on the continent, sometimes called the “Roof of Africa.” The highlands mountain areas extend from central and northern Ethiopia north into Eritrea. Those are deliciously cool and beautiful lands far better suited to the more delicate European constitutions than the deserts, Savannah and tropics found elsewhere in Afrika along with all manner of fearsome wildlife including those horrid malaria carrying mosquitos.
Jumping forward in time a bit we find the USA with an urgent “existential need” of some kind to rule the entire world forever that looks upon the ancient land of Ethiopia with distain. Myopically addicted to fragmenting and dominating all nations of the earth in perpetuity, the clever but not wise directors of American foreign policies have decreed Ethiopia needs a good war to break it down some more, as if the droughts and endemic poverty brought about by predatory Euro-American aggression in Afrika weren’t enough.
So, the ever-so-clever but avaricious American foreign policy makers locked the former dominant political party called the TPLN located in the northern ancient holy Tigray region into power for an overly long time while feeding their corruption, and at the same time fed anger and resentment towards them from all directions, Eritrea to the north, and the other Ethiopian political parties to the south.
- This short brutally honest satire is an alternative introduction to the much more detailed and analytic article I posted on Academia.edu yesterday titled: Made in Amerika - Genocide in Ethiopia - A four-part article series. That the UN does nothing is not surprising, however it's astonishing to me that so few people seem to even care about another genocide. Is only 20,000 innocents slaughtered too insignificant to call your Congressional representatives and demand the UN send in peacekeepers?

- by Greg Brundage
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- African Studies, American Studies, Ethiopian Studies, War Studies

The issues of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ have been with us since the founding of our august republic. Unfortunately, they are perniciously still with us today. They were the reason we fought the Civil War (1861-1865) and have mired our history throughout. There is no period in our history, the history of the United States, when ‘race’ has not been significant in some profound way. For many reasons too, the American Civil War is still with us today. It is still with us in every racial conflict we have had since. It is still being fought, perhaps unknowingly by many African-Americans, who have experienced ‘structural violence’ in some way, whether in terms of wanting better education, better housing, or a better job, or even rights for a normal life. And it is still with us today when African-Americans are targeted unfairly by law enforcement.

- by J. P. Linstroth
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- History, Sociology, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Anthropology

What is at stake, here, is the quest for equilibrium versus disequilibrium in a society that marginalizes human beings into substandard racial groups. Identifying and counteracting the biopsychosocial and behavioral consequences of actual or perceived racism, gendered racism, and racial battle fatigue is a premier challenge of the twenty-first century. The term “racial microaggressions” was introduced in the 1970s to help psychiatrists and psychologists understand the enormity and complications of the subtle but constant racial blows faced by African Americans. Today, racial microaggressions continue to contribute to the negative experiences of African American boys and men in schools, at work, and in society. This chapter will focus on the definition, identification, and long-term effects of racial microaggressions and the resultant racial battle fatigue in anti-black misandric environments.

For African American youth of low socioeconomic status (SES), who fear losing communal and ethnic solidarity to Blacks who are moving into the middle class, insults related to selling out are often unconscious reactions to possible abandonment (Comer & Poussaint 1992). Sticking together based on a common racial identity is especially important for African American students who are bused
into White schools in White neighborhoods. As the Black middle class continues to grow and to move into the suburbs, many positive role models who have the ability to transmit social capital in the form of educational outcomes move also. This is why the success of the few African Americans who are academically successful make those who are not feel even more like failures (Comer & Poussaint 1992). Add the fact that both Blacks and Whites reinforce success for athleticism, and you have yet another impetus for African American males to gravitate toward sports for cultural affiliation and personal validation.

- by Theodore Ransaw and +1
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- Cultural Studies, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Education, Teacher Education

In two studies, this thesis depicts the relationship between minority group status in the United States, perceived discrimination, and coping with stress. Past literature on coping and its types – problem-focused versus emotion-focused – is inconsistent in terms of differences between minority status groups and majority groups. It remains unknown whether or why Black Americans and lesbian or gay Americans may demonstrate coping patterns that differ from White Americans and heterosexual Americans, respectively. What is altogether absent from the literature is the possible mediating factor of perceived discrimination experienced by these minority groups. That is, differences in internal, stable coping processes that manage stress may have been molded by one’s experience with discrimination. Study 1 examines the relationship between race (Black versus White) and coping, mediated by perceived discrimination. Study 2 examines the relationship between sexual orientation (lesbian or gay versus heterosexual) and coping, mediated by perceived discrimination. Both studies confirm the thesis that minority group members exhibit maladaptive, emotion-focused coping more than majority group
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members – but that this difference is explained by the minority group members’ perceived discrimination. Historical and political relevance, social implications, and possible limitations in design and interpretation are discussed.

- by Christa Vassillière
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- Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Psychological Assessment, Social Psychology

Why is support for marijuana legalization among African Americans notably modest given that such a policy would drastically reduce the number of African Americans arrested annually for nonviolent drug offenses? In this article I assess whether the urban frustration argument is an adequate explanation for Blacks’ generally low levels of support for marijuana legalization. I analyzed merged Supplemental Homicide Report and Drug Arrest data and General Social Survey data to determine the extent to which race-specific murder victimization rates and race-specific drug arrest rates in U.S. cities are predictive of support for marijuana legalization among Blacks and Whites between 1990 and 2000. Findings indicate that Blacks’ level of support for marijuana legalization is greatest in those cities with the highest Black drug arrest rates. Consequently, these findings provide no support for the urban frustration argument.

- by Ted Thornhill, Ph.D.
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- Sociology, Criminology, Psychology, Social Psychology
- by Ted Thornhill, Ph.D.
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- Management, History, American History, Sociology

The choice for a particular narrative architecture has been a major concern for the literary writer and to the African American literary writer, the use of African oral literary elements has been a resourceful option. The present study hypothesizes that August Wilson uses the dilemma tale as a narrative architecture in his The Piano Lesson play and argues that this narrative style helps Wilson to frame the dialogic surrounding what legacy is to the African American. The study reveals that tradition is problematic for the African American to conceive. The conclusion is that the dilemma tale type as a narrative style helps to understand that tradition or, legacy is a complex phenomenon for the African American to fathom.

Commentators have suggested that Nella Larsen’s Passing rejects the view that there is some sort of black essence. I want to challenge this reading. Since Irene is the most vocal advocate of an essence in respect to which all blacks are homogeneous, much of the evidence for thinking that Passing is skeptical about such an essence amounts to evidence for not trusting Irene’s judgment in general, and for not trusting her judgment on this matter in particular. My arguments, then, will often involve explaining why Passing is not leading the reader to mistrust Irene’s judgment on this matter. Now, what exactly is meant by a black essence is, explicitly in this book, mysterious. Nevertheless, I hope to shed some light on how Passing understands the nature of this something, this je ne sais quoi, peculiar to blacks. My tentative interpretation is that this something is an intangible and indefinite manner of being that is neither a conscious choice nor an inborn fact of biology, but rather a given of culture. I take this, in effect, blackness manner to be, so Passing seems to indicate, a function of one’s belief that one is black in a milieu of pervasive anti-black prejudice. Passing, as I see it, thus has something to offer those of us today who struggle to adjudicate between a pull towards essentialism and a pull towards constructionism. What Passing emphasizes in this discussion is the possibility that, in addition to biological and societal influences, one’s mind state is a crucial ingredient to one’s racial identity.

- by francis m. ganyi
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- African and African American Studies

In 1972 Guyanese historian and activist Walter Rodney (1942-1980) published his famous work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. 50 years later, his views on history and black power are still important, and can be fruitfully read in the 21st century as well. A collection of contributions discussing Rodney's works, his political and intellectual legacy, and the value of his thoughts for modern societies shall therefore be published in 2022.

- by Frank Jacob
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- African Studies, African Philosophy, African History, African American Studies

A short analysis of the representations of black female bodies through the case studies of Josephine Baker and Grace Jones.

Historical criticism attempts to read texts in their original situations, informed by literary and cultural conventions reconstructed from compara- ble texts and artifacts. African American interpretation extends this approach to questions about race and social location for the ancient text, its reception history, and its modern readers. It arose as a corrective and alternative to white supremacist use of the Bible in moral and political arguments regarding race, civil rights, and social justice.

- by Joseph Scrivner
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- Biblical Studies, African and African American Studies

Lauryn Hill was twenty-three years old when her 1998 solo debut album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, burst upon the global music market and swiftly became one of the most acclaimed and popular hip hop albums in history. Heralded by a hip hop beat, crooning love songs and rally cries, beaming black pride, and clamoring womanist wisdom, Hill scaled the treacherous summit of global pop stardom and was hailed as genius and prophetess. However, within four years Hill fell from the favor of much of the mainstream market. To have many pundits tell it, she veered across the thin line that supposedly separates genius from madness and prophecy from lunacy. This essay explores how various publics and pundits impute madness to Lauryn Hill and--most centrally--how Hill herself produces, mobilizes, and brandishes madness for radical art-making and self-making. Toward these aims, I closely examine her 2002 Unplugged 2.0 live album, as well as other performances, interviews, and media accounts. Her voice tuned to a mad pitch, Hill speaks truth to power and issues a sound that sometimes booms, sometimes sputters. Ultimately, this meditation upon Hill's life and work yields rich insights on black womanhood, performance, protest, and madness in American popular culture and beyond.

African Americans, who are descendants of slaves forcibly brought from Africa to America hundreds of years ago, and contemporary voluntary African migrants to the USA do not form a single “black community”. This statement contradicts the claims of many Black Nationalist movements from the nineteenth century onwards, which argued that all black people are “brothers and sisters” because they share common spirituality and have a common cause that demands their joint action all around the world. However, based on evidence collected in seven states in 2013 – 2015, African Americans and contemporary African migrants appear to have different historic memories of pre-slave trade and pre-colonial Africa. Furthermore, the two groups identify different events as key to its history. Many members of both groups do not feel that they share a common “black history”. To some extent, the idea of a shared history acts to unite Africans and African Americans as victims of long-lasting white domination. However, in the final analysis, the collective historic memory of both groups works more to separate them from each other by generating and supporting contradictory or even negative images of mutual perception. In general, the relations between African Americans and recent African migrants are characterized by simultaneous mutual attraction and repulsion of two magnets. While they understand that among all ethno-racial communities in the country, they, as well as African Caribbeans, are the closest to each other, myriads of differences cause mutual repulsion. This attraction-repulsion effect is, in significant part, due to the differences in historic memory of African Americans and recent African migrants in the USA.

In David Bindman, Suzanne Blier, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art, vol. 6 of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., The Image of the Black in Western Art (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,... more

To begin with, I do not use the phrase “race traitor” in its negative or pejorative sense, but instead I use it as an emblem of a certain kind of selfless artistic heroism that honors an individual white filmmaker’s sacrifice of immediate commercial interests in the effort to shift narrative focus from whites to African-Americans within a film. In the analysis that follows I am primarily concerned with white filmmakers who have taken it upon themselves, so to speak, to explore universal humanist themes by shifting narrative focus from whites to African-Americans. This deliberate choice that goes beyond the commercial considerations of the film reveals that the auteur of the film is using the work as a means of personal expression and not just as a means of generic entertainment. Moreover, in my analysis of the form of the films we will see that how these filmmakers break familiar and conventionalized film grammar is how they actually establish their authorial voice and express themselves within the medium of film beyond just the content and the shift of narrative focus from whites to African-Americans. Two films from two White filmmakers will be the major focus of this study: John Cassavetes' SHADOWS (1959) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's WHITY (1970). I will also discuss perhaps the first genuine race traitor filmmaker in American Film History, King Vidor and his film HALLELUJAH, as well as, a more recent race traitor filmmaker, Lance Hammer and his film BALLAST (2008). Yet the overall aim here is not to separate out friend from foe in regards to racial sympathies throughout the canon of highly regarded auteurs, but rather to examine the strength of particular auteurs to surmount certain ideological, political and financial obstacles as they made the narrative shift of racial focus. This is a chapter from my book: Slave Cinema: The Crisis of the African-American in Film 2nd Ed.

In 1877, the African American musical ensemble known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers traveled to Germany to raise money for their university. The choir’s ten-month tour provided German listeners with one of their first significant and sustained encounters with African Americans and African American culture in the nineteenth century. As listeners throughout Germany heard the ensemble perform, they began to debate the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ musical, cultural, and ethnic origins. At the heart of their growing ethnomusicological and anthropological interest in the Jubilee Singers’ music lied the question of whether or not African Americans were fulfilling the powerful promise of the civilizing mission: were they proof that people of the black diaspora were capable of accepting “Western” art music and cultural values? This article illustrates how African American music contributed to global conversations on the civilizing mission in the nineteenth century.

Most sociological research on racial discrimination has had an “inter-racial” focus. That is, researchers have been principally concerned with the disparate treatment that people of color receive relative to Whites in different social contexts. However, recent theoretical work emerging from legal studies sug- gests that an alternative conception of “intra-racial” discrimination exists that extends beyond colorism. This theory of intra-racial discrimination stipulates that many organizations in the “post-racial” era desire some measure of racial diversity. Yet, in their efforts to achieve this racial diversity they screen people of color based on their degree of racial salience. Whether a given person of color is hired, promoted, or in the case of college admissions, accepted, is a function of whether or not Whites within the organization consider them racially palatable, or not overly concerned with race. This creates an incentive for people of color to work their identity to allay any concerns among Whites that they may be too racially salient. In this paper I critically review this work and attempt to further buttress its claims by highlighting how this process has clear historical precedent. I conclude by showing how the audit method can be used to empirically examine this practice contemporarily.

- by Ted Thornhill, Ph.D.
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- Business, Management, Discourse Analysis, History
- by Ashaki Taha-Cisse
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- Tariqa Sufism, African and African American Studies
- by SAIKAT GUHA
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- Black Studies Or African American Studies, Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Poetry

Somalia is generally thought of as a homogenous society, with a common Arabic ancestry, a shared culture of nomadism and one Somali mother tongue. This study challenges this myth. Using the Jareer/Bantu as a case study, the book shows how the Negroid physical features of this ethnic group has become the basis for ethnic marginalization, stigma, social exclusion and apartheid in Somalia. The book is another contribution to the recent deconstruction of the perceived Somali homogeneity and self-same assertions. It argues that the Somalis, just like most societies, employ multiple levels of social and ethnic distinctions, one of which is the Jareer versus Jileec divide. Dr. Eno successfully portrays another Somalia, in which a mythical homogeneity masks the oppression and social exclusion suffered by some ethnic groups in the country

- by Mohamed A Eno
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- Religion, Modern History, Ethnohistory, Sociology

Published in the exhibition catalogue "Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens," published in 2009. This chapter examines practices by photographers from the Stieglitz circle to the Harlem Renaissance that demonstrate the range of interest in African objects and the diversity of approaches taken in translating them into Modernist photographic expressions. These photographs illustrate what Roland Barthes calls the rhetoric of the image, the embedded messages and significations that inflect the way we read and understand photographs. Also demonstrated in these examples is the manner in which issues about race, gender, identity, and difference were inextricably interwoven into the many faces of American Modernism, ultimately contributing to perceptions of and shifting attitudes toward African art.

- by Wendy A Grossman
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- Photography, American modernism, Harlem Renaissance, Primitivism (Art History)

Texts written by some white Zimbabweans in the post-2000 dispensation are largely shaped by their authors' endeavor to contest the loss of lands they held prior to the onset of the Fast Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP). Written as memoirs, these texts are bound by the tendency to fall back on colonial settler values, Rhodesian identities, and Hegelian supremacist ideas in their narration of aspects of a conflict in which tropes such as truth, justice, patriotism, and belonging were not only evoked but also reframed. This article explores manifestations of this tendency in Eric Harrison's Jambanja (2006) and Jim Barker's Paradise Plundered: The Story of a Zimbabwean Farm (2007). The discussion unfolds against the backdrop of the realization that much of the literary-critical scholarship on land reform in post-2000 Zimbabwe focuses on texts written by black Zimbabweans and does not attend to the panoply of ways in which some white-authored texts yearn for colonial structures of

- by Tavengwa Gwekwerere and +1
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- Pan Africanism, Africana Studies, Pan African Studies, African and African American Studies

Personal narrative and storytelling have always been key features of Critical Race Theory, that body of legal scholarship focused on the role that structural and institutional racism play in the alienation of persons of color from the protections of the legal liberal order. As Critical Race Theory has expanded from legal theory into philosophy, it has carried with it an openness to interdisciplinary approaches to grappling with the societal problems of race and racism, including using personal narrative, fiction and literature to provide insight into the human cost of these phenomena. Michael Boylan explains the usefulness of fiction to philosophy in his theory of “fictive, narrative philosophy.” Boylan’s Georgia is an instantiation of this theory. Through telling the tale of a racialized male trying to survive in the oppressively racially stratified American landscape of 20th century America, Georgia operates within the critical race theory tradition and at the same time explores philosophical questions such as the nature of racialized identity and the effects of the social construction of race and institutionalized, systemic racism on the quality of life of the racialized.

Black girls are more likely to be suspended or expelled through exclusionary discipline than their female counterparts, but continue to be overlooked and understudied. This article presents a case for using critical race feminism and figured worlds as theoretical frameworks for examining the effects of zero tolerance policies on Black girls. We use these frameworks to explore how adults' implementation of disciplinary policies not only affects the racial and gender identity development of Black girls, but perpetuates anti-Black discipline and represents behavioral responses to White femininity that may not align with Black girls' femininity and identification with school.

- by Dorothy E Hines and +1
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- Psychology, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory

The history of Black Studies as a discipline is one of struggle, adversity, failure and triumph. Involved in its birth and development are some of America’s most foremost intellectuals and activists. Historically, Black Studies at The Ohio State University has been given short shrift in the scholarly literature. This article helps fill that void. Utilizing materials from the personal archives of former professors, students and administrators coupled with oral histories, this work offers a vivid account of the birth of Black Studies at OSU. Situated firmly within the context of the tumultuous Vietnam War era, Black Studies at OSU is a history that is robust in character and far-reaching in impact, hence any history of Black Studies that omits the happenings at OSU is incomplete. | "A Ruckus on High Street: The Birth of Black Studies at the Ohio State University," Co-authors Thomas Abright, Judson Jeffries, (The Journal of Race & Policy, Vol. 9.1: Norfolk, VA, 2013).

The principle of communality is denoted as the ability of the originally and essentially communal worldview, consciousness, behavioral pattern, socio-political norms and relations to spread on all the levels of societal complexity including, though in modified or sometimes even corrupted form, sociologically supra- and non-communal. As a pivotal socio-cultural foundation, the principle of communality has a direct impact on all subsystems of the African society at all the levels of its being throughout its whole history. Precisely this is what can explain to a large extent the originality of African culture. In the embodiment of the principle of communality it can also make sense to seek the roots of specificity of the historical process in sub-Saharan Africa.

- by Dmitri Bondarenko
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- History, Cultural History, Sociology of Culture, African Studies
- by Jeanne B Law
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- New Media, Digital Rhetorics, Book Reviews, African and African American Studies