Africana Studies Commons^™

Conference Conversations: Monique Charles On Corbyn And Grime, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Monique Charles

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

Yesterday Renewal co-hosted an event with The Corbyn Effect at Momentum’s conference, The World Transformed, in Brighton. One of the speakers, Monique Charles, recently completed a PhD on grime music. In The Corbyn Effect she looks at the phenomenon of Grime for Corbyn, and we had coffee with her to talk about her work, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Labour Party.

“Bein Alive & Bein A Woman & Bein Colored”:The Metaphysical Dilemma In Ntozake Shange, Sherley Anne Williams, And Toni Morrison | “Beinalive & Beinawoman & Bein Colored”: Odilemametafísico Em Ntozake Shange, Sherley Anne Williams E Toni Morrison, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Africana Studies: Faculty Publications

This essay is an analysis of three literary works by black women writers from the U.S.: Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Sherley Ann Williams’ novel Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. In my analysis, I use Shange’s trope of the “methaphysical dilemma” to consider the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality in these writers’ textual representations of black women’s bodies. Writing against a historical legacy of colonialism and domination that defined black bodies as “primitive” or “unbridled” (bell hooks 1991), I argue that these works illustrate some …

Grime Launches A Revolution In Youth Politics, Monique Charles

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

"The relationship between grime and politics has been an interesting and evolving one. Grime is a genre of music that emerged at the turn of the 21st century in London’s inner boroughs. Early on, its sound was most closely likened to US hip hop and rap. But those in the know appreciate grime’s deep connections to its UK predecessors, which include music from the British underground scene such as garage and jungle, in addition to Jamaican dancehall, electronic/experimental music, and British punk. The grime 'sound' developed as it grew, eventually being acknowledged as its own genre at the MOBOs in …

Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern 'Primitivist' Uses Of African And Oceanic Art, 1905-8, Joshua I. Cohen

Publications and Research

Fauve painters “discovered” African and Oceanic sculpture beginning in 1905. From that time, Vlaminck first collected African art; Derain studied Oceanic works at the British Museum in spring 1906; and Matisse struggled to paint a Kongo-Vili statuette he purchased in fall 1906. Fauve interests in shallow-relief, relatively naturalistic, and surface-ornamented sculptural works suggest conformity with turn-of-the-century artistic and scientific ideas conflating heterogeneous strains of so-called “primitive” material culture. Nevertheless, the dominant conceptual framework of “primitivism” has tended to limit art-historical understandings of external formal influences on modernism, which can be gleaned here by investigating the particular objects the Fauves appropriated.

Sacrificial Women: The Unlikely Heroes Of Uwem Akpan's Stories, Mary L. Bauer

English Faculty Publications

This paper examines whether the female characters in Fr. Uwem Akpan’s short story collection Say You’re One of Them accurately portray the challenges that African women face in the post-colonial era, particularly when faced with challenges of poverty and violence that threaten the lives of their loved ones. It investigates how these women use the limited devices available to them -- including transactional sex, voluntary starvation, and giving their own lives to protect others – to carry out the traditional role of African women in caring for dependents, including younger siblings. It highlights the impact of societal norms, such as …

“The Blood Remember Don’T It?”: The Ethnocultural Dramatic Structure Of Katori Hall’S The Blood Quilt, Artisia Green

Arts & Sciences Articles

The Yorùbá influenced Ethnocultural Dramatic Structure of Katori Hall’s The Blood Quilt is an example of the enduring philosophical permanence of African aesthetics within the tradition of Black Theatre. Within The Blood Quilt is the manifestation of a Yorùbá traditional divination system and body of orature, the Odù Ifá. Hall acknowledges exploring Yorùbá cultural expressions, yet she refutes any dramaturgical intention to locate the play within the Odù Ifá. Thus, the incarnation of verses of Ifá in the text evidences her belief that a playwright’s consciousness and her work are often phenomenologically informed. This analysis argues that recognizing, understanding, and …

Almsgiving As Patronage: The Role Of Patroness In Third Century North African Christianity, Charles A. Bobertz

Theology Faculty Publications

In the social world of the third century Roman Empire the most important determinant of political and social status and advancement was the giving and receiving of patronage. By means of a close study of two of Cyprian of Carthage’s well known treatises, De opere et eleemosynis (On Almsgiving) and De habitu virginum (On the Dress of Virgins) within the context of the larger social reality of the Roman patronage system, this study seeks to explore the level of status and authority that women benefactors (patronesses) may have enjoyed within parts of the early Christian Church and ultimately how such …

Blackness Written, Erased, Rewritten James Weldon Johnson, Teju Cole, And The Palimpsest Of Modernity, Daphne Lamothe

Africana Studies: Faculty Books

Book summary:

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) exemplified the ideal of the American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter, diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously in 1912, Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century African American literature, and its themes and forms have been taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole. Johnson's novel provocatively engages with political and cultural strains still prevalent in American discourse today, and it remains in print over …

Reclaiming The Streets: Black Urban Insurgency And Antisocial Security In Twenty-First-Century Philadelphia, Jeff Maskovsky

Publications and Research

This article focuses on the emergence of a new pattern of black urban insurgency emerging in major US metropolitan areas such as Philadelphia. I locate this pattern in the context of a new securitization regime that I call “antisocial security.” This regime works by establishing a decentered system of high-tech forms of surveillance and monitory techniques. I highlight the dialectic between the extension of antisocial security apparatuses and techniques into new political and social domains on the one hand and the adoption of these same techniques by those contesting racialized exclusions from urban public space on the other. I end …

Dollar Diplomacy By Force: Nation-Building And Resistance In The Dominican Republic, Written By Ellen D. Tillman, Richard L. Turits

Arts & Sciences Articles

Excerpt from publication: "Ellen Tillman has produced a major monograph on the U.S. military occupation of the Dominican Republic between 1916 and 1924. In it she offers a novel account of the powerful national army that the occupying forces created there. Prior to the U.S. invasion, a centralized Dominican military existed only nominally. In the eyes of many U.S. policy makers, this created vulnerabilities for U.S. capital and strategic interests. Drawing heavily on Dominican as well as U.S. archival sources, Tillman demonstrates that remedying this with an effective national army shaped by, and loyal to, the U.S. government was the …

The 1994 Rwandan Genocide: The Religion/Genocide Nexus, Sexual Violence, And The Future Of Genocide Studies, Kate E. Temoney

Department of Religion Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In recent genocides and other conflicts—for example, the Sudan, Burma, and now Iraq—sexual violence and religion have received increasing but modest systematic treatment in genocide studies. This essay contributes to the nascent scholarship on the religious and sexual dimensions of genocide by providing a model for investigating the intersections among religion, genocide, and sexual violence. I treat the Rwandan genocide as a case study using secondary and primary sources and proffer the reinforcing typologies of “othering,” justification, and authorization as an investigatory tool. I further nuance the influences of religion on forms of sexual violation by arguing that religion …

Macdonald-Miller Correspondence, Norman Miller, Duncan Macdonald Md

Dartmouth Scholarship

This file is an exchange of letters, e-mails, and documents between Norman Miller and Duncan MacDonald, MD, including a four-volume collection of MacDonald’s writings, over a 30-year period, all on witchcraft, some 600 pages extracted from the original 1100. As such, the following material is unfinished, presenting sketches of ideas, concepts, and arguments.

Duncan MacDonald served as a physician in Zambia and Kenya, including a period as a "Flying Doctor". He later served as a provincial psychiatrist in Cornwall, UK. His parallel interests in economic development and international witchcraft issues led to long-term research on these issues, the witchcraft concerns …

“Ni De Aquí, Ni De Allá”: Garífuna Subjectivities And The Politics Of Diasporic Belonging, Paul Joseph López Oro

Africana Studies: Faculty Publications

López Oro analyzes two census campaigns—one in New York City and one in Honduras—geared toward Garifuna populations in order to interrogate larger questions about how Garifuna populations are included, or not, within dominant discourses of Honduran multiculturalism and US Latinidad. He argues that Garifuna are a quintessentially diasporic population who disrupt common assumptions about what it means to be Honduran, Latino, and/or Black in the Americas.

Beyond The Flesh: Contemporary Representations Of The Black Female Body In Afro-Brazilian Literature, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Africana Studies: Faculty Publications

This essay takes an intersectional and transnational approach to analyze how selected poetic texts by contemporary Afro-Brazilian writers Conceição Evaristo, Esmeralda Ribeiro Cristiane Sobral, Miriam Alves, and Elisa Lucinda (re)design portrayals of Afro-descendant/black female bodies. As cultural artifacts, I argue that these poetic/political constructs give evidence of Afro- Brazilian female bodies as historical: on one hand, they represent the embodiment of “otherness” as they historically differ from the standards of (white) “normalcy;” on the other hand, they carry both the silenced histories of racial and sexual exploitation and the appeal of hyper-sexualized and exoticized stereotypes. I am also interested in …

Derrick Bell, Brown, And The Continuing Significance Of The Interest-Convergence Principle, Jamel K. Donnor

School of Education Book Chapters

Although he spent his career as a lawyer and law school professor, Derrick Bell had a profound impact on the field of education in the area of educational equity. Among many accomplishments, Bell was the first African American to earn tenure at the Harvard Law School; he also established a new course in civil rights law and produced what has become a famous casebook: Race, Racism, and American Law. The man who could rightly be called, «The Father of Critical Race Theory,» Bell was an innovator who did things with the law that others had not thought possible. This …

Queering Sugar: Kara Walker’S Sugar Sphinx And The Intractability Of Black Female Sexuality, Amber Jamilla Musser

Publications and Research

This essay analyzes the controversy surrounding artist Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, to unpack the pleasures and dangers that subtend discussions of black female sexuality. What Walker announced as a tribute to the labor of brown and black bodies produced myriad conversations about pleasure, danger, and black female sexuality. Most art critics argued that the piece reclaimed black female agency; many visitors criticized the work (and the public response to it) as disrespectful and problematic. In the essay, I argue that both of these responses highlight the difficulty of talking about black female …

Passing Strange: Embodying And Negotiating Difference In Academia, Daphne Lamothe

Africana Studies: Faculty Books

Book summary: In recent decades, American universities have begun to tout the “diversity” of their faculty and student bodies. But what kinds of diversity are being championed in their admissions and hiring practices, and what kinds are being neglected? Is diversity enough to solve the structural inequalities that plague our universities? And how might we articulate the value of diversity in the first place? Transforming the Academy begins to answer these questions by bringing together a mix of faculty—male and female, cisgender and queer, immigrant and native-born, tenured and contingent, white, black, multiracial, and other—from public and private universities across …

Du Témoin Et De L’Humain Chez Gilbert Gatore : Le Passé Devant Soi, Jean-Pierre Karegeye

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article revisits Gatore’s novel, The past ahead, in analyzing the idea of witnessing. Some critics estimate that the novel does not make a clear distinction between the perpetrator and the victim. While recognizing the danger, the article extends the debate on the notion of the human beyond the categories of “perpetrator” and “victim”. Without excusing acts of the former, the author of this article affirms that the perpetrator and the victim belong to the same humanity. While they remain extreme and inexcusable, crime against humanity and genocides are not a contingent acts, which opens a meditation on the fragility …

Writing At The Williamsburg Bray School?, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"I’ve become interested recently in whether writing was taught to the pupils in the Williamsburg Bray School. I had assumed all along that it was, and that the discovery of 40 some slate pencils at the Bray School Dig was confirmation of that.

I’d not been alone in my assumption about the teaching of writing, for the great majority of those interested in the Bray School have affirmed that the curriculum included writing..."

Regina Taylor's Crowns: The Overflow Of "Memories Cupped Under The Brim", Artisia Green

Arts & Sciences Articles

In crossing the cultural border between the North and the South, Yolanda, the main character in Regina Taylor’s Crowns, is sent on both a physical and metaphysical journey that symbolizes the ideology of the Kongo Cosmogram. South Carolina, Yolanda’s landing point and the play’s geographical context, bears multiple implications for the dramaturgy of Crowns. The land is saturated with memories of the African presence due to slave importation patterns within the coastal Sea Islands and low-country post–Civil War settlement by formerly enslaved people of West Africa and the Caribbean. As such Yorùbá aesthetics and theoretical ideas of the self …

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 …

Civic Goods And The Machine In Westchester: An Unauthorized Minority Report: The Case Of New Rochelle And Mount Vernon New York, Roxanne Neilson , '15

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

The purpose of this study is to look at what impact shifting demographics in a suburb of New York City has on publicly funded institutions as waves of immigrant groups arrive and then establish themselves. The study answers the question: Does political participation and representation matter; does access to the polity transform subsequent newcomers to the suburbs equally? Is there a case for reparations? I examine the historical record and closely review both the literal and figurative paths that led to the success of some groups as well as the demise of others in two cities in Westchester County New …

Sonic Jihad — Muslim Hip Hop In The Age Of Mass Incarceration, Spearit

Articles

This essay examines hip hop music as a form of legal criticism. It focuses on the music as critical resistance and “new terrain” for understanding the law, and more specifically, focuses on what prisons mean to Muslim hip hop artists. Losing friends, family, and loved ones to the proverbial belly of the beast has inspired criticism of criminal justice from the earliest days of hip hop culture. In the music, prisons are known by a host of names like “pen,” “bing,” and “clink,” terms that are invoked throughout the lyrics. The most extreme expressions offer violent fantasies of revolution and …

Bernard Binlin Dadié, Le Père De La Littérature En Côte D’Ivoire, Claire L. Dehon

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

To fully understand today’s literature in the Ivory Coast, it is important to remember its first steps. A general overview of the main ideas and characteristics of Bernard B. Dadié’s literary works demonstrates the audacity and originality of the first Ivorian who wrote in French, and who helped impose French as the national language in the Ivory Coast.

Matière Grise De Kivu Ruhorahoza : Un Nouveau Discours Filmique Pour Le Rwanda?, Charles J. Sugnet

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Films like Hotel Rwanda, Sometimes in April, and Shooting Dogs have codified certain ways of representing the 1994 Rwandan genocide, with realist aesthetics, epic sweep, and aspirations to historical authenticity. A young Rwandan director, Kivu Ruhorahoza, has won two major prizes at the Tribeca Festival for his 2011 feature Grey Matter, a breakthrough film that is different from its predecessors in almost every respect. Ruhorahoza’s film is intimate, cosmopolitan, metaphorical, and avant-garde; it requires some effort to understand, yet it is extremely moving. On the 20th Anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, it offers new ways of understanding the consequences …

On The Impossibilities Of A Post-Racist America In The Obama Era, Karanja Keita Carroll

Publications and Research

This chapter interrogates the reality of racism and white supremacy in what some today refer to as “the Obama era” and what others regard as evidence of a “post-racist America.” By utilizing an African-centered conceptual framework, centering on culture and worldview, this discourse constitutes a critical examination of the impossibilities of a post-racist America by investigating the lived experiences of African-descended people and other communities of color. Through this analysis, it will be evident that while we may be in “the Obama era,” we are far from a post-racist society. Thus, discussions of post-racism are assessed as conceptual masks used …

An African-Centered Approach To Land Education, Salvotore Engel-Dimauro, Karanja Keita Carroll

Publications and Research

Approaches to environmental education which are engaging with place and critical pedagogy have not yet broadly engaged with the African world and insights from Africana Studies and Geography. An African-centered approach facilitates people's reconnection to places and ecosystems in ways that do not reduce places to objects of conquest and things to be exploited for profitability and individual gain. Such an approach offers effective critiques of settler coloniser perspectives on the environment and deeper understandings of the relationship between worldview and ecologically sensitised education. Through examples from Africana Studies and Geography, this article provides an introduction to how an African-centered …

An Introduction To African-Centered Sociology: Worldview, Methodology And Social Theory, Karanja Keita Carroll

Publications and Research

Current advances in Africana (Black) Studies utilize an African-centered conceptual framework in the study of Africana life, history, and culture. This conceptual framework has been utilized and expanded on by those developing scholarship in the sub-discipline areas of Africana Studies, including African-centered psychology, history, and literature. However, to date the articulation of an African-centered sociology, grounded in an African-centered conceptual framework, has not developed; neither has it occurred for African-centered sociology as a sub-discipline of Africana Studies, a sub-discipline of traditional sociology, or as a stand-alone discipline, itself. After a review of the worldview concept and framework and an analysis …

Black Gay Genius Interview With Lisa C. Moore, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

An interview with the publisher of Redbone Press, the small press, black lesbian owned and operated, that republished the archival material of Joseph Beam, excavating the work of the gay black male icon and writer of Brother to Brother and In the Life.

Book Review Of: The African Genius: An Introduction To African Cultural And Social History, Basil Davidson, Tufail A. Qureshi

Business Review

Book review, Africa, Culture, Social history