Africana Studies Commons^™

Women's Legal Rights, In Oxford Research Encyclopedia Of African History (2019), Johanna E. Bond

Books and Chapters

In the colonial and postcolonial period, African women have advocated for legal reforms that would improve the status of women across the continent. During the colonial period, European common and civil law systems greatly influenced African indigenous legal systems and further entrenched patriarchal aspects of the law. In the years since independence, women’s rights advocates have fought, with varying degrees of success, for women’s equality within the constitution, the family, the political arena, property rights, rights to inheritance, rights to be free from gender-based violence, rights to control their reproductive lives and health, rights to education, and many other aspects …

Amjambo Africa! (January 2019), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue...

Public Charge Rule Change ..Page 3

Breaking News from DRC ......Page 4

City-Wide Meeting ................Page 6

Multicultural NightSMCC......Page 7

Global Awareness & Repsonsibility Conference.....................Pages 8 & 9

Axels Samuntu, PAE .............Page 11

Heritage Restaurant.............Page 12

Poetry ..............................Page 13/14

Deqa Dhalac..........................Page 14

On Being a Somali-Mainer ..Page 15

Imagining Revolutionary Feminism: Communist Asia And The Women Of The Black Panther Party, Benjamin Young

Research & Publications

Using newspapers, autobiographies, and interviews, this article examines the ways in which women of the Black Panther Party imagined the women of Vietnam, China, and North Korea as radical archetypes during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Using Judy Wu’s theory of “radical orientalism” in conversation with Ashley Farmer’s concept of the “gendered imaginary,” I argue that the Panther women imagined the women of “the East” as pioneers in world revolution and women’s liberation in order to protest against gendered injustices within the Party and broader U.S. society. This article also investigates the realities on the ground for the women …

Protected Areas In Tanzania: The Coevolution Of Conservation, Communities, And Conflict, Rachael Vannatta

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The consequences of human activities through territorial occupation, resource extraction, and waste deposition, all characteristics of the Anthropocene, have severely impacted biodiversity. In some countries, passing and enforcing environmental legislation to protect the environment has proven to be a major challenge. Various types of terrestrial protected areas have been established to safeguard, manage, and utilize the biodiversity of non-human species and anthropocentrically-defined natural resources, cover approximately 14.7% of the earth’s surface, according to the World Bank (n.d) and IUCN (2008). With 38% of its land dedicated to protected areas, Tanzania exceeds the global average, but not without controversy. Critics of …

Official Senegalese Photograph Collection, Meaghan Alston

Prints and Photographs Department

The Official Senegalese Photographs document political and cultural activity in the West African nation of Senegal in the 1960s and 1970s. The bulk of the images show Senegalese government activity and political leaders including Léopold Sédar Senghor, Daniel Cabou, Jean Collin, and Abdou Diouf. The collection also includes events such as The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Boy scout Meetings, and sports events.

The Professional Is Political: On Citational Practice And The Persistent Problem Of Academic Plunder, Brittney M. Edmonds

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Matter Of Life And Def: Poetic Knowledge And The Organic Intellectuals In Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, Anthony Blacksher

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the intellectual capacity of spoken word and performance poetry, and poets as intellectuals, where poets produce and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and data, in the form of narratives, that contribute to critical consciousness. The effectiveness of the series lay in the consistent blurring of entertainment, knowledge, anti-capitalism, and capitalism. This research demonstrates how Def Poetry Jam provided …

Resenhando Autoras Negras: Feministas, Plurais E Diásporicas/ Reviewing Black Authors: Feminists, Plurals, And Diasporic, Sarah S. Ohmer, Alexandra Lima Da Silva

Publications and Research

Este texto realiza um mapeamento de edições de autoras do pensamento feminista negro dos Estados Unidos e a circulação de tais livros no mercado editorial brasileiro. Procura compreender os significados do movimento de publicação de autoras negras no Brasil. O texto conclui que a emergência da autoria de mulheres negras no Brasil é um processo permeado pelas relações desiguais e pela necessidade de enfrentar lógicas heteronormativas, masculinas e eurocentradas. Resenhar obras de mulheres negras evidência um campo fértil, com repertórios plurais e diaspóricos.

This article maps out the various U.S. Black Feminist Thought publications translated into Portuguese and their circulation …

Power Puppets In Portable Pulpits: A Personal Account Of Puppet Ministry In The African American Community, Yolanda Sampson

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Yolanda Sampson relates the history of her path into puppet ministry and her PuppeTainment Productions company, which presents Christian stories in a “hip, entertaining way,” bringing “biblical principles to life for twenty-first century children.” She recounts her initiation in puppet ministry at the age of twelve, and her development of stories about the dangers of drug culture in the Washington, D.C. area, as well as her use of puppetry in beauty pageant competitions, and her ventures into puppet video productions such as What Time is It? and Tell It Like It Is. Sampson took a three-year hiatus to earn her …

Schroeder Cherry And His Puppets: Playing With Puppets, From Childhood To Adulthood, Schroeder Cherry

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Schroeder Cherry relates his path into puppetry, from childhood television shows to his exposure to European puppetry in Switzerland; and later an apprenticeship with Chicago puppeteer Gary Jones. After earning a master’s degree in museum education at George Washington University, Cherry began developing puppet performances for the Smithsonian Institution and other museums. Travels in Africa furthered his appreciation of that continent’s puppetry, and influenced his creation of such shows as How the Sun Came to the Sky. Cherry has developed an array of rod-puppet characters (including DiAndre, Ms. Lily, and Tevin) which he incorporates into museum performances and such …

Egg Whites: A Short Puppet Film Script, Alva Rogers

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Alva Rogers’ script for a short puppet film is a magical realist treatment of a mother’s efforts to help her young daughter, an unnamed African American girl, fall asleep in their New York apartment. The mother explains straightforwardly how she will make muffins for the girl’s breakfast, but the film then shifts into a surreal territory where the girl travels on a moonbeam to the sun, and then appears in a rowboat in a vast ocean, where she wants to plant a flower—all while the mother is baking in the kitchen. The sea explains that the girl’s flower will not …

Living Objects: Introduction, Paulette Richards

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

In her introduction to this collection of Living Objects: African American Puppetry online texts, co-curator Paulette Richards gives an overview of “the power of performing objects to disrupt dehumanizing views of blackness,” and the continuing history of African American object performance in relation to other aspects of popular culture and writing, despite the suppression of African figurative sculpture and object performance, and the persistence of racist stereotypes born of blackface minstrelsy. Relating W. E. B. DuBois’s sense of African American “double consciousness” to the inherent “double vision” of puppet and object performance, Richards proposes a “distinct lineage of African American …

Itsy, Dirk Joseph

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

The famed Itsy Bitsy Spider realizes that climbing up the spout only leads to a rain gutter, and so goes off on a sidewalk journey to find a better life. After encountering two men arguing about money, a fraudulent salesman, and a girl afraid of spiders, Itsy finds a tree in a meadow where it can build a web and catch flies.

Alma W. Thomas: “The Marionette Show As A Correlating Activity In The Public Schools”, Jonathan Frederick Walz

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

The wider world primarily knows Alma W. Thomas as an African American visual artist who, despite the challenges of race, gender, and age, produced a coherent body of brightly colored nature-based abstractions that made her world famous in the late 1970s. What remains virtually unknown, however, is the artist’s involvement with puppet theater and related professional activities. During the summers of 1925, 1930, and 1934, Thomas studied at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where she earned an M.A. in arts education; post-graduate coursework with acknowledged marionette expert Tony Sarg followed. The pedagogical theories of John Dewey, who taught at Columbia 1905–1930, …

Teeth, Tau Bennett

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Brooklyn-based puppeteer Tau Bennett’s shooting script for a television puppet comedy employs dark humor and surreal slapstick to tell the story of a man whose offhand wish to lose his “pesky teeth” becomes unfortunately true, thanks to larger-than-life forces, two bumbling hoodlums, and a boss looking for teeth.

Puppetry And Inside Change, Al Tony Simon, Tychist Baker

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Al Tony Simon and Tychist Baker describe their experiences as formerly incarcerated individuals, and their work with puppetry through the group Inside Change. Simon became involved in theater in prison, and then with prison activism through RAPP (Release Aging People from Prison), and Milk Not Jails’ efforts to reform New York State parole boards. Great Small Works theater company introduced Simon to puppetry, which he has used in his work with young people in youth detention centers, schools, and at-risk communities through the One Foot In and One Foot Out program, and later the creation of Inside Change. During his …

Shape-Shifter, Tarish Pipkins

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Tarish Pipkins’s early experiences with the “shape-shifting beast” of racism as he grew up near Pittsburgh, and later his growing awareness of African American history, have influenced his poetry, visual art, and puppetry: a “weapon of mass destruction to fight the beast.” His work with puppets and special-needs children led him to create larger puppet productions such as Just Another Lynching and 5P1N0K10: The Android Who Wants to be Real b boy, which allow him to “[fight] back using puppets as my swords.”

Five-Star Review And Other Responses, Sheila Gaskins, Tau Bennett, Nate Puppets, Akbar Imhotep

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Living Objects Festival and Symposium attendees Sheila Gaskins, Tau Bennett, Nate Puppets, and Akbar Imhotep offer their appreciation of the events, illustrated with photographs by Gaskins.

Rosana Paulino And The Art Of Refazimento: Reconfigurations Of The Black Female Body In The Land Of Racial Democracy, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Africana Studies: Faculty Publications

This essay analyzes the historical and aesthetic significance of the visual art project Assentamento(s) (2012-2013) by Rosana Paulino. Her work reinscribes the black female body into the historical narrative of Brazil, complicating long-established notions of “Brazilianness”. By using art techniques and materials that combine lithography, digital printing, drawing, sewing, video, and sculpting, Paulino develops a multi-layered artistic assembly that she describes as a process of refazimento (“remaking”). Paulino pushes the boundaries of the historical archives, highlighting both the struggles and agency of black women within Brazilian society. I argue that, as a contemporary black woman visual artist, Paulino engages in …

The New White Moderate: Bearing Witness To The Differend Of Race, Ethan T. Ashley

Honors Theses

As Frantz Fanon demonstrates in his text, Black Skin, White Masks, Sartrean existentialism fails to account for differences in racialized existence. Quite simply, the notion that “existence precedes essence” is reversed in the case of the black subject; he/she is living in a world that has rendered the black subject subservient to a predetermined essence. Ultimately, the fact that the white subject exists and may freely determine his/her essence while the black subject may not further demonstrates this gap or a chasm between black and white subjects that calls for further examination. In the first chapter, I will use …