Black Studies Or African American Studies Research Papers (original) (raw)

This article addresses some of the opportunities and challenges the Afro-Caribbean American author faced whilst researching Afro-Caribbeans in Britain. Despite perceptual insiderness as an Afro-Caribbean person, the author’s positionality had multiple dimensions, often shifting within complex identity-related contexts. These ideas and concepts will be illuminated through analysing the complexity of transnationalism, class and transcendental identity as they intertwined whilst an oral history project progressed. Positionality is rarely totally binary and this article provides some insight into how perceptions of insiderness and outsiderness can influence oral history in terms of interviewing, analysis and dissemination.

I propose a rich theoretical understanding on Afro-Latino student development based on critical race theory, culturally responsive pedagogy and practice. Addressing racial disparities is about engaging students thereby making their lives better. I believe that creating Afro-Latino pedagogy will create a community of practice in which inquiry is a cornerstone of continuous student self-redefinition through improvement in culturally responsive systems.
We need educators to get involved with Afro-Latino students, our history and the way we occupy space in the Americas in order to address this gap in education.

Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, Black Nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power... more

Conversations about reparations are not about money but about people and about the way that people are seen and valued in our society. These are difficult conversations, and we have found that what is most challenging about the idea of reparations today is the notion that America still owes a debt to black people. We have spent the past couple of years wrestling with the question about whether reparations—as Ta-Nehisi Coates so eloquently argued in his article, The Case for Reparations—could ameliorate inequality for black people in America.

- by Karsonya (Kaye) Wise Whitehead and +1
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- History, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Teacher Education, History of Education

In recent years, Black poets and other poets of color have increasingly won many of the most prestigious prizes and awards within the majority and historically white field of US poetry. This article traces the interventions (writing, activism, and institution building) that have resulted in this "change." Rather than understanding the racial politics of poetry as an endlessly revolving door of scandals, or simply as a contest over prizes and economies of prestige, this article attends to the relationship between the world of poetry and the history of social movements, an exchange often mediated through the work of writers’ collectives. In particular, this article delineates how the interventions of Black poets and other poets of color (both individually and collectively) have shifted the world of poetry, while at the same time mirroring, connecting with, and speaking back to broader movements that seek to transform the world writ large.

This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. The conception of economies of dispossession introduced in this essay draws attention to the overriding importance of rationalities of abstraction and commensurability for racial capitalism. The essay problematizes the ways in which dispossession is conventionally treated as a self-evident and circumscribed practice of unjust taking and subtractive action. Instead, working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, this essay critically situates the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites predatory value in the historical present. Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, the essay gestures toward alternative frameworks for building collective capacities for what the authors describe as a grounded relationality.

- by Alyosha Goldstein and +1
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- Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Native American Studies

Swahili program at UC-Berkeley indicating all levels of Swahili that are offered during the regular academic year and in the summer.

This article contributes to the reassessment of Scottish history and identity in light of the recovery of its connections with black Atlantic issues such as slavery and empire. The ‘paradox’ of the national bard seeking employment as a book-keeper on Jamaica remains an uncomfortable area for modern Scotland. This article considers Burns's biographical and textual (dis-)entanglement with the Caribbean in relation to the subsequent competition over his memory. It reads Robert Burns as a lieu de mémoire (Pierre Nora) that opens up a conflicted account of the nature of free labour ideology, slavery and abolition in the late eighteenth century.

A short introduction to the book. The anthology Curating as Anti-Racist Practice reflects upon museums and exhibitions from the perspective of postcolonial museology, and critical migration and regime research. Beyond critical analysis, this collection of texts is about collecting strategies and forms of action that make it possible to think of curating as anti-racist practice. Using as springboards the intersections between social battlefields and curatorial practices, as well as a focus on agency, this book examines the relationality of struggles for and against representation. Therefore, the focus is on discursive strategies of resistance, contact zones and approaches to re-appropriation.

- by Nora Sternfeld and +1
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- Black Studies Or African American Studies, Art Theory, Museum Studies, Postcolonial Studies

This senior honors thesis evaluates the theories for racial progress put forth in A Voice from the South (1892) and The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Using secondary sources by David Levering Lewis, Joy James, and more, I critique Du Bois’s gendered oversights and argue that Cooper at times offers superior paradigms for understanding oppression. This project positions Cooper as an early black feminist thinker.

First this paper will discuss Michel Foucault foundation of his ideas, and why more than a critical intervention from scholars of color is needed. Moreover, we should be aware that not only were Foucault’s deficient of political ideas or a vision of what the world ought to be, but in neglecting question of the human he indirectly made a very ontological statement “only white lives matter”. His ideas are well-known already and I don’t want to site them there or spend a lot of paper space discussing them, what is more important is who and what he represent. Secondly, I want to turn my focus on Marx, to argue that Marxism and Marxist do not and cannot provide us a solution to black suffering. I am not against Marxism, I believe that capitalist exploitation dominates the world and I am against it, but the ontological question “what and who is human?” when answer by the Marxist is always the white, worker, male. So if blacks are outside of human whose racial experiences are not relevant then how can we understanding the student slave, the worker slave, when chattel slavery has already ended? If black people are surplus, therefore disposable, then what is left of Marx? If black people do not have function or purpose within capitalism? I want to follow up with offering an alternative, the work of black feminist Sylvia Wynter is vital to understanding the racialization and the category of human in western modernity (Weheliye, 2014), I will attempt to piece together her call for a new humanism, alongside and relation to work by Afro-Pessimist and Critical Race Theory to gain a perspective of racialization and what does that mean for black students in the Afterlife. In all, I want to argue that the afterlife should be a more proper way of looking at history and progress here in the West. This will cause us to rethink slavery and freedom. Hopefully I will be able to messy picture of schooling where black children are posted to a social death but life is also worth living. To life a life in death or black life is not white social life.

As Olivia Pope hangs up on the President’s Chief of Staff, and starts strutting away, audiences have seen a character unlike any Black female character. For Olivia embodies a new kind of Black woman, one who commands respect wherever she goes, and one not held back by labels like Mammy, Matriarch or Black Lady. She is a woman on a mission to fix the lives of Washington’s elite, as well as the negative images of Black women (BW) that have graced the screens since slavery. She defies stereotypes and shows audiences how unique, flawed and normal BW really are. This chapter will examine the ways in which the negative stereotypes of BW discussed in the previous chapter, as well as dominant Eurocentric beauty standards, have started to be dispelled by popular television shows: Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder (HTGAWM). However, while these shows have started to dispel negative stereotypes, they only do so to an extent. Maxine Craig’s Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? about the experiences of BW will be used parallel to television roles to help demonstrate the changes in portrayal and representation. This chapter will also use Laura Mulvey’s Gaze Theory as a framework to look at the ways in which the female protagonists are viewed by the audience.

During the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West famously interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for "Best Female Video." A year later both performers returned to the VMAs with songs that responded directly to the original incident. In the meantime, the U.S. media and record-buying public had come to interpret the original incident using the stock scripts and characters of what Linda Williams has called “U.S. racial melodrama,” the fact of which both performers seemed aware. In this way, the Swift-West “incident” had come to reflect and mimic larger racial tensions, especially between black men and white women, as they had specifically come to be understood and portrayed during the Obama presidency, which many commentators have hastily and incorrectly identified as a symptom of “post-racialism.” This essay discusses how Kanye West and Taylor Swift reflect on and revise the tropes of racial melodrama, in the latter case to reinforce what Charles Mills calls "the epistemology of ignorance" when it comes to racism in America, and in the former case to challenge it.

Controversy surrounds the origin of the y-chromosome R lineages among Native Americans in the United States. Most researchers assume that the occurrence of this gene among Native Americans is the result of European admixture. This view is not supported by the phylogeography of haplogroup R1 which does not correspond to the former territories of the European colonies with the highest population densities. The
location of this paternal clade, on the other hand, does match the former centers of Black Native American occupation (and the forced migration of Mongoloid and Black Native Americans into the American Southwest), which suggest that the presence of R1 among Mongoloid Native Americans is the result of Mongoloid-Black Native American admixture. This Indian-African admixture would have been between SSA and the Black Native Americans already living here at the advent of the colonial era mating Mongoloid Native Americans. The African specific R-M173 yDNA form a Sub-Saharan African (SSA)
subclade , which in association with the SSA R-M269 subclade in Africa, reveal that there was gene flow from SSA toward mongoloid people in North America, probably during the past 500 years.

If, according to turn-of-the-twentieth-century observers, black Puerto Ricans were destined to become racially white in a few generations, how did 12.4 per cent of the population manage to remain black in 2010? And how did they survive in the face of both national and everyday forms of racism? How is the persistence and even increase in black identity in Puerto Rico supported? This article argues that there is a covert and largely unexplored social current at work in regard to how black Puerto Ricans live and reproduce their blackness. This is the desire to maintain and celebrate blackness. Using ethnographic data gathered during nearly two decades, the article illustrate that many Puerto Ricans have chosen not to engage in blanqueamiento, instead affirming their blackness, marrying within their communities, and valuing their own cultural practices and beliefs.

The focus of this article is the hagiographies and novenas to San Benito de Palermo that circulated in the territories of New Spain, most of which were produced locally in the 18th and 19th centuries. While these devotional books can be used as a means of taking the measure of official holiness during the years of their publication, upon closer analysis this body of religious literature reveals the virtues and attributes of this Sicilian Saint that descended upon, among others, people of African descent. For this reason, the discussion surrounding his «skin color» constituted the principal obstacle against which this Negro Franciscan found himself struggling constantly. In the final section, the paper highlights the role of the Franciscans in New Spain during the colonial period in America as the community that, through the medium of the printing press, most strongly promoted the cult of this illustrious figure.

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof opened fire at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In sum, he massacred nine people, including the pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pickney. Several days later at Roof’s first court appearance, relatives of the slain victims had the opportunity to confront the gunman. As many news stories noted, the relatives of the victims offered Roof their forgiveness even while articulating the pain and suffering of their loss. At the hearing, Nadine Collier spoke the powerful words “I forgive you,” to Dylan Roof (Izadi 2015). Collier’s testimony hinted at a theological imperative that is fundamental to Christianity, namely the notion of forgiveness. Forgiveness from the perspective of African American Christianity is composed of both reconciliation and justice. The aim of this chapter is to blend the pragmatic principles of Charles Sanders Peirce and W.E.B. Du Bois to understand the meaning of forgiveness centered on the perspective of Christianity from African Americans.

The pursuit of a deeper understanding of the societal barriers that African Americans face in their quest for equality can be aided by Critical Race Theory (CRT), developed primarily by lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist Derrick Bell (Minow, 2012), as well as by Richard Delgado, Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, Patricia Williams and Kimberlé Crenshaw (Khalifa, Dunbar, & Douglasb, 2013). Critical Race Theory has six main principles that help explain the issue of race relations in North America (Freemen, 2011). This study will explore the literature that identifies these six principles and the theoretical impact on various aspects of society, including education, and leadership.

MW 2:30-3:45 Office Hours: MW 11-12 or by appointment Spring 2020 Race and Medicine in U.S. History Af. Am 497I/Hist. 497I By the end of this course, you should be comfortable discussing how American physicians approached race from the colonial period to the present, as well as the response of everyday people to those unequal practices. Moreover, this class urges us to think about medicine as not simply the product of objective science, but as a set of practices influenced by and influencing the culture of the United States. This course argues that medical practice, medical thought, and public perception of the medical profession are contingent on the interaction of the American populace and the health sciences. In this sense, physicians and patients should be understood as consumers and producers of medical racial ideologies. As well as analyzing the history of medical racism, we also will study how people sought to reform medicine and even revolted against it. We will track the long relationship of distrust and opposition to the white medical professionals, studying cases such as formerly enslaved people exposing inhumane experimentation on plantations in their slave narratives to the construction of black hospitals at the turn of the twentieth century and into the present. To build an understanding of the historical relationship between medicine and race, we will spend much of the course steeped in primary and secondary sources (Ask about what these are, if you are not sure. The humanities think about this distinction differently than the sciences J) which considers various aspects of race in American medicine. These works will look at the roles of identity, discrimination, and the means of distributing medicine in shaping health

CONTENTS | Wulf D. Hund: RACISM IN WHITE SOCIOLOGY. FROM ADAM
SMITH TO MAX WEBER | Alana Lentin: POSTRACIAL SILENCES. THE OTH-
ERING OF RACE IN EUROPE | Felix Lösing: FROM THE CONGO TO CHICAGO.
ROBERT E. PARK’S ROMANCE WITH RACISM | Les Back, Maggie Tate:
TELLING ABOUT RACISM. W.E.B. DU BOIS, STUART HALL AND SOCIOLOGY’S
RECONSTRUCTION | Barnor Hesse: RACISM’S ALTERITY. THE AFTER-LIFE OF
BLACK SOCIOLOGY | Sirma Bilge: WHITENING INTERSECTIONALITY. EVANES-
CENCE OF RACE IN INTERSECTIONALITY SCHOLARSHIP | Silvia Rodríguez
Maeso, Marta Araújo: THE POLITICS OF (ANTI-)RACISM. ACADEMIC RE-
SEARCH AND POLICY DISCOURSE IN EUROPE

- by Wulf D. Hund and +1
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- Sociology, Political Sociology, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Cultural Sociology

This article presents a new interpretation of the famous folktale about enslaved Africans flying home, including the legend that only those who refrained from eating salt could fly back to Africa. It rejects claims that the tale is rooted in Igbo culture and relates to suicide as a desperate attempt to escape from slavery. Rather, an analysis of historical documents in combination with ethnographic and linguistic research makes it possible to trace the tale back to West-Central Africa. It relates objections to eating salt to the Kikongo expression curia mungua (to eat salt), meaning baptism, and claims that the tale originated in the context of discussions among the enslaved about the consequences of a Christian baptism for one's spiritual afterlife.

O objetivo do presente trabalho fora compreender de que modo se deu a tematização do racismo e das questões raciais no momento que inaugura as possibilidades de interlocução entre sociedade civil e instituições formais do Estado Brasileiro: a Assembleia Nacional Constituinte (ANC) de 1987-1988. Por meio do estudo dos documentos que registram a participação do Movimento Negro ao longo do processo Constituinte buscou-se responder as seguintes questões: 1- Quais foram as demandas pleiteadas por organizações do Movimento Negro no contexto da Assembleia Nacional Constituinte? 2- Que tipos de argumentos são mobilizados por tais atores/atrizes para
sustentar a necessidade e viabilidade da inserção dos pleitos no texto constitucional? 3- Essas demandas foram incluídas na Constituição Federal? De que maneira? Para além da pesquisa documental, realizou-se pesquisa bibliográfica sobre o contexto
sociopolítico em questão bem como fez-se considerações sobre a mobilização antirracista entre as décadas de 1970 e 1980. Através do estudo da atuação do movimento social na ANC e do balanço das inclusões e exclusões de dispositivos na
Carta Constitucional aponto os desafios do tratamento da temática pelo Estado brasileiro, os avanços e a persistência de determinadas questões passadas quase três décadas do evento histórico estudado.

A meditation on loitering as praxis in Tarell McCraney + Barry Jenkins' Moonlight--and beyond.

This article reckons with the figure of Blackness in the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, from captives who are racialized as both Muslim and Black to the invocations of racism and slavery in discourses incited by the prison. Broad continuities between the War on Terror and various forms of anti-Black state violence have long been observed by critical commentators, but this article aims to theorize these relationships with greater precision through the analytic of captivity. As a modality of racialization, captivity entails mobility across contexts as well as encounters of captivation through public narrative. This approach offers a distinctive vantage point on how the War on Terror's racialization of Muslims cross-cuts diverse geographies of Blackness, including in Muslim-majority societies. This essay follows the memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Mauritania) and Walid Muhammad al-Hajj (Sudan) and is informed by the author's experiences as an attorney and activist working to close the prison.

The historical and cultural space of the Black Atlantic—a diasporic world of forced and voluntary migrations—has long provided fertile ground for the construction and reconstruction of new forms of classicism. From the aftermath of slavery up to the present day, black authors, intellectuals, and artists in the Atlantic world have shaped and reshaped the cultural legacies of classical antiquity in a rich variety of ways in order to represent their identities and experiences and reflect on modern conceptions of race, nation, and identity. The studies presented in this volume range across the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone worlds, including literary studies of authors such as Derek Walcott, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and Junot Díaz, biographical and historical studies, and explorations of race and classicism in the visual arts. They offer reflections on the place of classicism in contemporary conflicts and debates over race and racism, and on the intersections between classicism, race, gender, and social status, demonstrating how the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome have been used to buttress racial hierarchies, but also to challenge racism and Eurocentric reconstructions of antiquity.

- by Ian Moyer and +2
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- Black Studies Or African American Studies, Classics, Black/African Diaspora, African Diaspora Studies

This article will show the role of free women in the San Benito de Palermo sisterhood founded in 1646. This research paper explores the social role in such a corporation: the composition by gender, the organizational structure in the system’s positions, the contribution of its female members -“cofradas”- in alms collection, their attitude and pious, festive and ludic behaviours in festivities, solemn parades and processions. This work is founded on their accounting books, registries and election meeting acts performed during the XVIIIth century. It is its goal to evaluate the role of women in brotherhoods and sisterhoods established by blacks and mulattoes, specifically those ones devoted to San Benito de Palermo, whose main feature is having a larger female membership as in those other found in most of the Hispanic world, where San Miguel el Grande, in New Spain’s Bajío, was not an exception. Current historiography requires more case studies to confront the established premises and give new insights to evaluate, as in this case, the importance of women in the operation of a religious corporation during the Ancien Regime.

Racial primes are an outgrowth and inculcation of a well-structured, highly developed, racially conservative, “race-neutral” or “color-blind” racial socialization process in which children learn race-specific stereotypes about African Americans and other race/ethnic groups. As they get older, they continue to receive—both involuntary and voluntary—corroborating messages of anti-Black stereotypes from adults, friends, games, folklore, music, television, popular media, and the hidden curriculum. A result of this belief system is Black misandry. Black misandry refers to an exaggerated pathological aversion toward Black men created and reinforced in societal, institutional, and individual ideologies, practices, and behaviors.

- by William A Smith and +2
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- Black Studies Or African American Studies, Race and Racism, Critical Race Theory, Race and Ethnicity

There is a line of reasoning shared by police officials, police unions, legislators, and civil rights organizers that supposes that videos of the police behaving badly will naturally lead to reform. This is the logic that fuels expensive body camera programs, like the ones implemented by the NYPD, LAPD, and Department of Justice. However, the idea that surveillance in the hands of the state can be somehow emancipatory is laughable. To equate the footage of Rodney King or Eric Garner with footage taken from police cameras is to fundamentally misunderstand the nuance that images express. Existing social vulnerabilities migrate seamlessly into new technologies, and photography’s dominant mode is to reinforce, not resist, existing structures of power.