African American Studies Commons^™

Be: Fall/Winter 2023–2024 Issue, Be: A Journal Of Black Experimental And Interdisciplinary Work

Publications and Research

Our fall/winter issue explores, with a cool and objective eye, memory and history; it may give you some necessary de ja vu, as we think of family, books, and films we want to preserve. This is our interview/review issue, and we’ve spoken to people or reviewed work that seems necessary for building better futures. Our interview with Amos White argues for the preservation of life-giving and life-affirming trees. We’ve also included reviews of heart-opening books — Tara Christina’s “More than a Drop” and Caron Knauer’s “American Slavery on Film” — that reinforce the significance of familial and collective memory. And …

Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

English-language mass-market romance novels written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers and starring BIPOC protagonists are a small but important group. This article is a comparative analysis of how recent representations of diversity in this sub-set of the genre, specifically the character of the Black academic and the language of racial justice, compare with the first group of BIPOC novels that were published in 1984 (Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva and All Good Things as well as Barbara Stephens’s A Toast to Love). In Adrianna Herrera’s American Love Story (2019), Katrina Jackson’s Office Hours (2020), and …

Be: The Summer Issue, Be: A Journal Of Black Experimental And Interdisciplinary Work

Publications and Research

This season’s issue pays tribute to the #BlackLivesMatter summit at LaGuardia Community College (led by Kyle Hollar-Gregory, Esq., Jason Hendrickson, Rachel Romain, Allia Abdullah-Matta, Andre Ford, Sultan Jenkins, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Wendy Nicholson, Charis Victory, Shaunee Wallace, Donniece Davis, and Jeffery Batts) and writer and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a “Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist.” We’re thinking about how to support each other, sustain commitment, and create change, while living with joy and complexity.

— The Editors: Ahmad Wright, Tara Christina, and Rochelle Spencer (LaGuardia Community College, English Department)

Black Feminist Thought: Black Women's Emerging Power As Agents Of Knowledge, Oluremi Alapo

Open Educational Resources

To understand the black 21st woman’s struggle to reclaim herself from her experiences from the oppression of Structural Oppression. To discover the new standards of womanhood set after the years of the Atlantic slavery. To examine ways in which Black women can be empowered and also be known as an Agent of Knowledge.

Women Of Colour And Black Women Leaders Are Underrepresented In Architectural Firms Featured In Key Trade Publications, Nandi Prince

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

"Prophecies Of Loss": Debating Slave Flight During Virginia's Secession Crisis, Evan Turiano

Publications and Research

This article examines debates over fugitives from slavery during Virginia’s secession movement. By considering these debates in the context of Virginia’s history of freedom seekers, the constitutional politics of fugitive slave rendition, and white fears of politically informed slave resistance, this article clarifies how proslavery Virginians understood the threat posed by interstate slave flight in 1861. In the wake of Abraham Lincoln's election, proslavery Virginians on both sides of the secession conflict agreed that runaways posed a grave danger to the future of slavery in the state. Early in the convention, southeastern planters and northwestern unionists forged an alliance based …

Intro To Jazz, Jon De Lucia

Open Educational Resources

OER Based Syllabus for MUS 145 Intro to Jazz course at City College. Covers the history and development of jazz along with basic music fundamental vocabulary.

What Faith Teaches Us: An Essay On Faith Adiele, Rochelle Spencer

Publications and Research

Essay on the writer Faith Adiele and women's bodies.

Feeding Memories: A Conversation With Writers Who Write About Food, Rochelle Spencer, Tara Christina, Dera R. Williams, Shannon Holbrook

Publications and Research

Rochelle Spencer interviews Tara Christina, a writer and educator with degrees in holistic nutrition and is the founder and CEO of Tara’s Teas, an artisanal line of organic, loose leaf tea blends; Dera R. Williams whose work appears in several anthologies and you can find her food-related writing on her blog; and Shannon Holbrook, a writer and wine and food consultant who has organized prominent food-writing events throughout the Bay Area.

Black Feminist Citational Praxis And Disciplinary Belonging, Bianca C. Williams

Publications and Research

What does a Black feminist citational practice look and feel like? This contribution to the #CiteBlackWomen colloquy focuses on two arguments: First, that Black feminist citational praxis is one of the major interventions Black women scholars contribute to the academy; and second, that anthropology’s neglect and erasure of Black feminist anthropologists relates to disciplinary (un)belonging. I explore how citation and “disciplinary belonging” influence hiring practices, doctoral training, intellectual genealogies, and what is valued as anthropological knowledge.

Getting Back: The Chiffons’ Sonic Reclamation, Hilarie Ashton

Publications and Research

Sixties girl group the Chiffons are famous for their soaring 1964 hit “He’s So Fine,” a song in turn remembered almost as often for its plagiarism by George Harrison than in its own right. Much of the rest of their catalogue, including the tremendous “I Have a Boyfriend,” gets shunted into historical and critical gaps that paint rock music history as controlled by men. In this article, I examine the Chiffons in their own right, reframing a story of well-worn sonic theft to center on the group it obscured, through and alongside interpretative contradictions, assumptions, and historical lacunae. I show …

A Day At The Races In Black And White: How An 1898 Horse Race Led To A Whipping, A Lawsuit, And A 1901 Arrest, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

After losing an 1898 horse race in the Bronx, New York, African-American jockey Alonzo ‘Lonnie’ Clayton, who had won the Kentucky Derby in 1892 at the age of fifteen, heard an insult from the crowd along the rail and struck a white spectator from Brooklyn across the face with his riding whip. The blow resulted in a two hundred dollar fine by the track stewards, but ultimately led to a civil trial, a financial judgment against Clayton that he ignored, and then an arrest and incarceration for non-payment of the judgment, which some writers mistakenly still claim was for race-fixing. …

Dreaming Of Home: Youth Researchers Of Color Address Nyc’S Housing Crisis, Samuel Finesurrey, Waleska Cabrera, Meldis Jimenez, Brittiny Ando, Alanna Garcia, Alexander Garcia, Jayden Johnstone, Abdul Mohammed, Sheylany Paulino, Edwin Reed, Emelyn Saavedra, Gisselle Saavedra, Rajendra Singh, Aysia Smith, Marlena Syriaque

Publications and Research

New Yorkers are facing a housing crisis. Long-standing disparities of race and class in New York City have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Coronavirus and the looming eviction crisis threaten working-class communities, immigrant families and youth searching for housing stability throughout the city. This report is a call to action demanding that city and state elected officials, along with civic leaders, address the housing crisis that youth are inheriting. A team of youth housing fellows, housing organizers from the Broadway Housing Communities, and CUNY academics shaped this project around the ethos, “No research about us, without us.” The work …

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton

Publications and Research

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …

Sexuality And Borders In Right Wing Times: A Conversation, Alyosxa Tudor, Miriam Ticktin

Publications and Research

We respond to prompts about the relationships between race, migration, and sexuality, as these intersecting differences have been forced into the same frame by the violent practices of right-wing regimes, and brought into relief by Covid19. Even as we have long known that sexual politics are a way to govern bodies, and to distribute uneven states of vulnerability, we are seeing new incarnations of government. What we aim to point out is how people who are seen as “different” are being attacked, maimed, dispossessed and murdered. But perhaps more importantly, we insist on the specific nature of right-wing times because …

Natalie Bookchin In Conversation With Alexandra Juhasz: Performance Of Race And White Hegemony On Youtube, Natalie Bookchin, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

In November 2019, in her house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, I joined friend and fellow artist Natalie Bookchin for a conversation about her installation and film Now he’s out in public and everyone can see. The installation, which premiered at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), a venerable Los Angeles art space, in 2012, was remade into a film and released as a DVD double feature along with her film Long Story Short by Icaras Films in 2016. Our loose and lively conversation was recorded and transcribed and forms the basis for what follows. We have been in conversation about digital culture, …

Sonic Femininity: The Ronettes' Transgressive Gender Performance, Hilarie Ashton

Publications and Research

Iconic sixties girl group the Ronettes are frequently (and justly) celebrated for anchoring the Wall of Sound and inspiring the Beatles, but in their own right, they transgressed social, gendered expectations in revolutionary ways. Framed by a notion I call the sonic feminine, a recuperative theoretical space for the revolutionarily transgressive work of female and femme artists, I argue that the Ronettes, and lead singer Ronnie Spector in particular, enacted a kind of cultural rebellion: they crafted their images to made-up heights that tease the boundaries of drag across the spaces of the stage, the recording studio, the bathroom, and …

“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

Behold the Dreamers follows a Cameroonian couple who, as newcomers to America, harbor dreams of success unavailable to them back home. Undocumented immigration, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the thinly veiled racism of an avowedly "post-racial" culture converge in this new generation of immigrants' painful encounter with the American dream. I consider the ways Mbue's novel shares themes with a "second wave" of post- 9/11 literature—first, in centering the disillusionment of a protagonist aspiring to the American dream; next, in its representation of New York as a space haunted by 9/11, but also of resistance to the …

An Ode To James Van Der Zee: Lorna Simpson’S 9 Props, Emilie C. Boone

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Watching And Talking About Aids: Analog Tapes, Digital Cultures And Strategies For Connection, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

This paper is a conversation between activist videomaker Alexandra Juhasz and writer and organizer Theodore (ted) Kerr that explores the contemporary role of AIDS activist videos from the past.. Key to the text are ideas around history, technology, time, and community. Together they discuss and enact intergenerational dialogue, what to do with the imperfection of archives, and strategies for shared looking at the history of HIV through epochs. Their conversation is focused on a community created tape from, Bebashi — Transition to Hope, a Philadelphia non-profit.

Aids Normalization, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

Review of On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work, curated by Alexis Heller for New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, which was on view from September 2019 to January 2020, and other contemporary AIDS culture.

Film/Tv Response & Critique, Janelle Poe

Open Educational Resources

This extra credit assignment was designed for a joint humanities course in English and Black Studies, combining first-year writing and an introductory survey of African American Literature. Throughout the semester, students are encouraged to complete extra credit assignments, such as this film/tv review, to earn additional points (up to 5%).

Combining rhetorical analysis with applied research, students have a list of films or television shows to choose from, as well as the ability to select their own related media, and write a response that includes a synopsis, analysis of plot, character development and themes, and personal response to the text …

Lamin Fofana: Blues, Alaina Claire Feldman, Dino Dincer Sirin, Lamin Fofana

Publications and Research

Catalogue for the exhibition "Lamin Fofana: Blues" presented at Baruch College's Mishkin Gallery in 2020.

Book Review: The Making Of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History Of An Idea, Joni Schwartz

Publications and Research

Review of the book The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (2017) by Christopher J. Lebron.

The Making And Silencing Of “Axé-Ocracy” In Brazil: Black Women Writers’ Spiritual, Political And Literary Movement In São Paulo, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In this article, I will focus on two influential writers from the south of Brazil, Cristiane Sobral who currently lives in Brasília, from Rio de Janeiro, and Conceição Evaristo who currently lives in Rio de Janeiro state, from Minas Gerais. I got to know them in São Paulo in 2015 at a public event: the “Afroétnica Flink! Sampa Festival of Black Thought, Literature and Culture.” I will include references to some of their younger contemporaries such as Raquel Almeida, Jenyffer Nascimento, and Elizandra Souza, all of whom reside in São Paulo, in order to illustrate the Black Brazilian women writers’ …

Writing For The Humanities And Arts, Shamecca A. Harris

Open Educational Resources

This dynamic English Composition course asks students to both create and engage with texts, in a variety of forms, that demonstrate how culture and personal experience inform a writer’s work. In this class, students will read and write voraciously about social, political, economic and cultural issues that influence their lived experiences and use the conventions of multiple genres to both reflect and respond to the times in which they live. Moreover, they will also consciously consider what it means to write academically at the college level through regular self-reflection and revision. In doing so, students will strengthen their rhetorical knowledge …

The Heritage Of Imperialism, Afr 2402 Id, Course Outline, Javiela Evangelista

Open Educational Resources

This course offers an examination of the thought, structure, operation and results of imperialism in human history generally, and in the 19th/21st centuries in particular. We will use readings and films to examine European/American imperialism in the non-white areas of the world: the role of the Industrial Revolution; the imposition of Western European institutions on indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, North/South America; colonialism; attempts by these people to reestablish autonomous sociological and cultural systems.

The Evidence Of Things Unseen: Experimental Form As Black Feminist Praxis, Shelly J. Eversley

Publications and Research

This essay reads Carlene Hatcher Polite's little-known experimental novel Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play and situates it within Black Aesthetics and black feminist theory to argue that experimental forms is crucial to black feminist praxis. The form also exposes critical violences that not only diminish and obscure black feminist writing, but also black women writers.

Hyper-Selectivity, Racial Mobility, And The Remaking Of Race, Van C. Tran, Jennifer Lee, Oshin Khachikian, Jess Lee

Publications and Research

Recent immigrants to the United States are diverse with regard to selectivity. Hyper-selectivity refers to a dual positive selectivity in which immigrants are more likely to have graduated from college than nonmigrants in sending countries and the host population in the United States. This article addresses two questions. First, how does hyper-selectivity affect second-generation educational outcomes? Second, how does second-generation mobility change the cognitive construction of racial categories? It shows how hyper-selectivity among Chinese immigrants results in positive second-generation educational outcomes and racial mobility for Asian Americans. It also raises the question of whether hyper-selectivity operates similarly for non-Asian groups. …

Aas 267 African American Literature, Anne Rice

Open Educational Resources

A survey course that will take us from the early days of enslavement to the present. We will read, analyze, and discuss literary texts written by African Americans, paying particular attention to the political, historical and social context that informs these texts.

The full course site is available at https://aas267.commons.gc.cuny.edu/.