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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Emily And Annie: Doris Lessing's And Jamaica Kincaid's Portraits Of The Mothers They Remember And The Mothers That Might Have Been, Daryl Cumber Dance
Emily And Annie: Doris Lessing's And Jamaica Kincaid's Portraits Of The Mothers They Remember And The Mothers That Might Have Been, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
In 2008 at the age of eighty-nine, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing returned to the mother who has haunted her life and her literature in order to rewrite a fictional account of the life that might have been and a biographical account of the life that she actually lived in Alfred & Emily. Her efforts to finally exorcise the powerful and hated figure that has hounded her for most of her eighty-nine years call to mind similar efforts throughout the canon of fifty-nine-year-old celebrated Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid to free herself. Both writers take advantage of and seek to find …
The Obama Effect On American Discourse About Racial Identity: Dreams From My Father (And Mother), Barack Obama's Search For Self, Suzanne W. Jones
The Obama Effect On American Discourse About Racial Identity: Dreams From My Father (And Mother), Barack Obama's Search For Self, Suzanne W. Jones
English Faculty Publications
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Joseph Curl reported that the Obama organization "would not answer when asked why the biracial candidate calls himself black," replying only that the question didn't "seem especially topical." Biracial ancestry and racial identity are still sensitive subjects in the United States, not suitable for sound bites. But they are perfect topics for the introspective musings of an autobiography, and Barack Obama must have thought he had answered this question in depth in Dreams from My Father (1995). In his introduction, Obama hesitates to use the term "autobiography" because it connotes, he says, "a certain closure"; …
Invisible Dread, From Twisted: The Dreadlock Chronicles, Bertram D. Ashe
Invisible Dread, From Twisted: The Dreadlock Chronicles, Bertram D. Ashe
English Faculty Publications
This excerpt traces the issues and process surrounding the dreadlocking of an African-American professor's hair. The personal history leading up to the decision to grow locks is briefly addressed, as is the experience of getting twisted for the first time and some reactions to the new hairstyle. Twisted discusses issues of cultural authenticity and academic nonconformity. It examines dreadlocks as a pathway to explore black identity, but in opposing ways: the act of locking ones hair does display unconventional blackness - but it also participates in a preexisting black style. To what extent, the excerpt asks, can the adoption of …
‘Broken Brotherhood: The Rise And Fall Of The National Afro-American Council,’ By Benjamin R. Justesen, Eric S. Yellin
‘Broken Brotherhood: The Rise And Fall Of The National Afro-American Council,’ By Benjamin R. Justesen, Eric S. Yellin
History Faculty Publications
The dominance of Booker T. Washington and the loyalty of most African Americans to the Republican Party are often mistaken as markers of black political unanimity at the turn of the twentieth century. Even worse, they are assumed to stand for the whole of African American political life. Benjamin R. Justesen’s story of the struggles to establish and sustain the National Afro-American Council should serve as an important reminder of the tensions, diversity, and energy within black politics in this period. The reminder is so important, and so potential productive, that one wishes that Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall …
Racism, Eugenics, And Ernst Mayr’S Account Of Species, Ladelle Mcwhorter
Racism, Eugenics, And Ernst Mayr’S Account Of Species, Ladelle Mcwhorter
Philosophy Faculty Publications
At his death at age one hundred in 2005, Ernst Mayr was hailed as the greatest evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century. His definition of species, published in 1942 in Systematics and the Origin of Species and known as the “biological species concept,” is familiar to every tenth grader: “Species are groups of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups.” That definition, together with Mayr’s and Theodosius Dobzhansky’s theory of speciation, enabled the integration of modern genetics and Darwinian evolutionary theory. In this paper I will argue that it imported racism into the heart of modern …