Africana Studies Commons^™

Black: :Body: :Gesture: From Puppetry To Performance & Design, Gabrielle Civil, Kelly Walters

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

In this visual document, Gabrielle Civil and Kelly Walters distill and recreate key aspects of their live dialogue on African-American puppetry, black performance art, material and digital design. What are examples of African American living objects in the 21st century? What does it mean to animate objects when, as a people, we were once considered to be living objects ourselves? Drawing on their own practice, these artists engaged these questions, activated audience discussion, and transformed the results into a new source text for further activation.

Black And Blackface In The Performing Object: Bullock, Chessé, Paris, The Jubilee Singers, And The Burdens Of … Everything, Ben Fisler

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

The representation of Black identity through puppetry ranges from “grotesque exaggeration to near pictorial realism,” and engagement not only with racial stereotyping, but also the possibility of positive racial representation. Fisler details the extensive degree to which puppeteers in the early 20th century depended upon Black and blackface characters for their livelihood, and points out the complexities of such representations involving Black puppeteers of Federal Theater Project puppet companies, and the work of Creole puppet artist Ralph Chessé. Fisler argues that some white puppeteers, including Frank Paris, sought to portray such Black characters as Josephine Baker in a “potentially more …

Tar Baby: The Performance Of Object, Ra Malika Imhotep

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

This essay engages the figure of the “Tar Baby” as a guide through the theoretical terrain of Afro-Diasporic storytelling culture. Thinking about the role of gesture and voice in the repertoire of global Black performance, this presentation sets out to offer a nuanced Black feminist analysis of the sticky character and the impact of her diasporic flight. Calling in both theoretical work on Black performance and personal reflections on an engagement with the Tar Baby through storyteller and puppeteer Akbar Imhotep’s rendition of the story performed at the Wren’s Nest in Atlanta Georgia, the essay explores the ways Afro-Diasporic storytelling …

The Appropriation Of Blackness, Nehprii Amenii

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

The continuing appropriation of Black culture in the U.S. is closely tied to the trauma and injustice of the African diaspora and the history of slavery. Black people, Amenii argues, need to re-appropriate themselves, through the “excavating and re-articulating of our intellectual heritage and knowledge systems.” Citing Ahmad Azzahir’s description of African modes of thinking as “based on spirituality, symbol, mythos, and harmonium,” she sees her own work as “creative anthropology” that draws on storytelling and image-making to create self-study. Her production Food for the Gods, “a multi-media performance installation created in response to the killings of Black Men by …

African Puppetry And Brazilian Mamulengo: Possible Links Between Symbolic And Material Representations, Izabela Brochado

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Although Brazil’s popular Mamulengo hand-puppet tradition is often considered to have primarily European roots, Brochado argues that “the primary source of the Mamulengo lies with African slaves.” Citing sources including puppeteers and folklorists explaining the origins of Mamulengo in northeast Brazil, Brochado argues for the African roots of the form, citing the relation of Mamulengo performance to Afro-Brazilian cult rituals; the commonality of often-comic sexual content in Mamulengo and in Yoruba puppetry of Nigeria and Benin; as well as the similar mechanics of puppets from both traditions which display work activities. She concludes that “even if African puppets were not …

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 …

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.

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.

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 …

Race In The Galactic Age : Sankofa, Afrofuturism, Whiteness And Whitley Strieber, Clifton Zeno Johnson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Octavia Butler asked if black skin was so disruptive a force that the mere presence of it alters a story? In a post-colonial era, skin color remains a polarizing topic. While humans are still redefining perceptions about race, people across planet earth are opening up to the possibility of the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. This paper explores how the acknowledgment of a galactic presence would transform perceptions of whiteness. The experiences of the best-selling author and proclaimed contactee, Whitley Strieber, are used as case studies to analyze if Amero-European ingrained bias toward melanin would influence the western world’s interactions …

The Diversion Of Diversity: Uncovering The Antiblackness Of Diversity Initiatives, M. Jordan Alexander

Honors Theses

In more recent years, Diversity has been a driving force in universities across the country. As underrepresented groups in the United States have gained more traction in the political and legal realms, they have gained the agency and the ability to advocate for their inclusion in institutions and structures that previously denied their access. This gaining of agency within these public realms is what has fueled higher education institutions across the country to really push for diversity, in both their faculty and student populations. The ideology behind this push is multiculturalism or multiracialism; this idea by its premise, the inclusion …

La Modernité Tunisienne Dévoilée : Une Étude Autour De La Femme Célibataire, Madison Wagner

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explains recent accounts of discrimination and cutbacks in reproductive health spaces in Tunisia. Complicating dominant analyses, which attribute these events to the post-revolution political atmosphere which has allowed the proliferation of islamic extremism, I interpret these instances as a manifestation of a deeply rooted stigma against sexually active single women. I trace this stigma’s inception to the contradictory way that Habib Bourguiba conceptualized modernity after independence, and the responsibility he assigned to Tunisian women to embody that modernity. This responsibility remains salient today, and is putting Tunisian women in an increasingly untenable and vulnerable position.

After independence, Bourguiba …

The Homecoming Of The Negro Spirit: Black Spiritual Intelligence As A Structural Form Of Intelligence, Quincy Brown

CMC Senior Theses

In Is Spirituality an Intelligence? Motivation, Cognition, and the concern of Psychology of Ultimate Concern, Robert Emmons develops a case for spirituality as a form of intelligence. His thesis claims that spiritual intelligence is a “set of capacities and abilities that enable people to solve problems and attain goals in their everyday lives”: “the capacity for transcendence; the ability to enter into heightened spiritual states of consciousness; the ability to invest everyday activities, events, and relationships with a sense of the sacred; the ability to utilize spiritual resources to solve problems in living; and the capacity to engage …

Mind Control In The Post-Colonial State: The Impact Of Foreign Direct Investment In Tertiary Education In Senegal And Jamaica, Janiel Chantae Slowly

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Since the end of 17th to 20th century colonization, Senegal and Jamaica have been victims of the rhetoric of development. The economic, social, and political progress of these nations have always been overshadowed by their categorization as “developing countries”. Yet, this development rhetoric fails to acknowledge not only the wounds of colonization but the more modern manifestations of continued exploitation of these countries often by the same countries that “emancipated” their colonies. Senegal and Jamaica for example, are both dominated by large percentages of young adults, in both cases a large majority of the populations are individuals under the age …

Internalized Racism: Biases Children And Adults Hold, Daniela G. Gonzales

Student Publications

Due to one’s surroundings, many African American children have internalized these racial biases without them without consciously being aware of it. Hence, this paper highlights various studies that have done previous research on the racial biases children hold like the pioneering study, the Clark doll experiment of 1947. Furthermore, this paper elaborates on measurements of how children have internalized these biases along with the influence adults play on the lives of these children. Therefore, I expand on the many implications these biases have on the lives of African American children and suggest possible approaches to aid in the reduction of …

Seeking Representations Of Afrocentric Beauty: A Comparative Content Analysis Of Advertisements In Essence Magazine, Roy Phillips Jr.

Journalism Undergraduate Honors Theses

This comparative content analysis will investigate how African American women are depicted in Essence magazine advertisements and seeks to answer the research question: Are the characteristics of advertisements in Essence magazines significantly different when under complete corporate ownership compared to being under primarily African American ownership? The specific goal is to examine the extent to which Afrocentric or Eurocentric depictions are being reinforced, if at all, and to observe if depictions of African American women are shifting or are immobile. To do this, the study will compare advertisements in Essence magazines in 2001, when the magazine was 51 percent Black-owned, …

Examining The Strategies Of Formation And Action Among Social Movements: A Comparison Of The Civil Rights Movement And Black Lives Matter, Hailee Saxton

Political Science Theses and Capstones

In today’s tumultuous political landscape, the question of what makes an effective social movement? is often asked. This can be a complicated question to answer as social movements vary greatly across racial, ethnic, economic, and political boundaries. Therefore, I am conducting a case comparison of two widely-known socio-political organizations, the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter. In this comparison I will examine whether or not they truly fit the definition of a social movement, look at the strategies of action that have or could prove successful in enacting long-standing socio-political change, and make recommendations on how movements could continue …

Break Beats In The Bronx: Rediscovering Hip-Hop’S Early Years (Book Review), Matthew Oware

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Review of the book, Break Beats in the Bronx: Rediscovering Hip-Hop’s Early Years, by Joseph C. Ewoodzie, University of North Carolina Press, 2017, https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469632759/break-beats-in-the-bronx/.

“‘The Most Fabricated Exception’: Islam, Immigration And The White-Saviour Narrative In Laurent Cantet’S The Class.”, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

This article suggests that the acclaim director Laurent Cantet received for his 2008 award winning film “The Class” obscures the way this film reinforces the very undercurrents in French culture he sets out to critique. Rather than unearthing or mirroring the racial dynamics of twenty-first-century Paris, Cantet brings to the film a set of fascinations and anxieties latent in the French imagination about blackness, Islam and Arab culture. His preoccupations and preconceptions with race, religion and nationality appear first in the portrayal of Muslim immigrants as threatening; next, in his image of a ‘white saviour’ bent on rescuing racial minorities; …