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Full-Text Articles in Africana Studies
Neutral Ground Or Battleground? Hidden History, Tourism, And Spatial (In)Justice In The New Orleans French Quarter, Lynnell L. Thomas
Neutral Ground Or Battleground? Hidden History, Tourism, And Spatial (In)Justice In The New Orleans French Quarter, Lynnell L. Thomas
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
In 2017, the city of New Orleans removed four monuments that paid homage to the city’s Confederate past. The removal came after contentious public debate and decades of intermittent grassroots protests. Despite the public process, details about the removal were closely guarded in the wake of death threats, vandalism, lawsuits, and organized resistance by monument supporters. Workers hired to dismantle the monuments did so surreptitiously under the cloak of darkness, protected by a heavy police presence, with their faces covered to conceal their identities. The divisiveness of this debate and the removal lay bare the contestation over public space, historical …
Bessie [Film Review], Judith E. Smith
Bessie [Film Review], Judith E. Smith
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
Bessie opens with an arresting shot of Queen Latifah as singer Bessie Smith, dressed in the white costume familiarized by a widely reproduced photograph, with blue tones emphasizing both interiority (her eyes are closed, and the music viewers hear is playing in her head), and the blues genre associated with her. When the shift to every day colors returns viewers to the movie’s present (1927), an unsmiling Bessie walks through an adoring backstage crowd, press cameras flashing, into a waiting car. Rachel Portman’s score suggests foreboding; the next long shot shows Bessie framed in a doorway as she calls out …