Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons^™

Study Guide For United In Anger: A History Of Act Up, Matt Brim

Open Educational Resources

The United in Anger Study Guide facilitates classroom and activist engagement with Jim Hubbard’s 2012 documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. The Study Guide contains discussion sections, projects and exercises, and resources for further research about the activism of the New York chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The Study Guide is a free, interactive, multimedia resource for understanding the legacy of ACT UP, the film’s role in preserving that legacy, and its meaning for viewers' lives.

Jackson Teaches African-American Life With Literature, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Advancing The Human Right To Housing In Post-Katrina New Orleans: Discursive Opportunity Structures In Housing And Community Development, Leigh Graham

Publications and Research

In post-Katrina New Orleans, housing and community development (HCD) advocates clashed over the future of public housing. This case study examines the evolution of and limits to a human right to housing frame introduced by one nongovernmental organization (NGO). Ferree’s concept of the discursive opportunity structure and Bourdieu’s social field ground this NGO’s failure to advance a radical economic human rights frame, given its choice of a political inside strategy that opened up for HCD NGOs after Hurricane Katrina. Strategic and ideological differences within the field limited the efficacy of this rights-based frame, which was seen as politically radical and …

Censuring The Praise Of Alienation: Interstices Of Ante-Alienation In Things Fall Apart, No Longer At Ease, And Arrow Of God, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

Interrogating Abiola Irele’s largely unchallenged praise of alienation, this essay is bold and insightful in returning to Chinua Achebe’s African trilogy to examine the subtler, equally dangerous agent of externality: ante-alienation, or social alienation within traditional African culture, which precedes race-based, colonial alienation. This ante-alienation challenges Négritude’s paradisiacal view of Africa and raises questions about Africans always being happiest with themselves within their traditional culture.

Lgbtq Womyn Of Color Conference — Crossroads And Crosswinds Connecting Across Race And Space, Arianne Benford

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

When I first arrived at the Second Annual LGBTQ Womyn of Color Conference, I was nearly knocked over by the embrace the conference's coexecutive director, Adrienne Williams. We had only spoken on the phone a few times, yet the last time I can remember being so warmly received was during one of my infrequent trips home to see my mother. While I was sure that in that moment she had a long list of other things to do, she still made time to ensure that I was being treated well. Adrienne's hug was not a singular experience, but more of …

\African-Centered Psychology, Education And The Liberation Of African Minds: Notes On The Psycho-Cultural Justification For Reparations, Karanja Keita Carroll, Dereef F. Jamison

Publications and Research

One means through which reparations can be provided to communities of African descent within America is through the creation and institutionalization of culturally enriching after-school programming, African-centered Saturday schools and independent Black educational institutions. Rather than looking to reparations as merely financial compensation for the descendants of the formerly enslaved, we can look to reparations as they relate to the building of educational infrastructures that will impact future generations of African descendants in America. This essay outlines the psychological and epistemological consequences of miseducation that many students of African descent experience within the Eurocentrically orientated education institutions they attend; The …

Mcclinton Teaches Sensitivity Toward Other Cultures, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Black Lesbians In The 70s, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

During the initial planning session for In Amerika They Call Us Dykes: Lesbian Lives in the 70s Spring Series, there was lack of clarity about the activity of Black Lesbians in the early part of the 1970s. The aim for Black Lesbian Herstory in the 70s: An At Home Tour and Guide to the Black Lesbian Herstory of the Collection was to present information to the lesbian community and increase Black Lesbian invisibility.

Focusing On Black Queer Writing: Clags At The Fire & Ink Cotillion Iii In Austin Texas, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

On October 8-11th, 2009, an historic event occurred in Austin, Texas. The Fire & Ink III: Cotillion brought together LGBT writers and artists of African descent from around the nation and beyond. In 2002, its founding year, Thomas Glave, editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (Duke University Press) and author of The Torturer's Wife (fiction), provided the keynote, later published in both his essay collection, Words to our Now as well as the Summer 2003 issue of Callaloo (literary journal) under the name: "Fire and Ink: Toward a Quest for Language, History …

About Us And Not About Us: Theorizing Student Resistance To Learning About Race And Racism From Underrepresented Faculty, Eve Tuck, Karanja Keita Carroll, Michael D. Smith

Publications and Research

Three early-career scholars write across their experiences as underrepresented faculty who teach required diversity courses to future educators in a predominantly white, small, state college. The authors theorize student resistance to course material and to faculty of color teaching about race and racism in a series of tableaus of their classrooms. They examine the ways that students' tactics of avoidance, consuming the Other, and "I won't learn from you" are simultaneously ''about us and not about us," unmasking uneven assumptions about the role of diversity courses in teacher preparation programs.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa’S Decolonizing Ritual De Conocimiento, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s work makes up one of the many Chican@ works that contribute another history, a history repressed by the national discourses on both sides of the border. Influenced by antecedents of U.S. Hispanic Literature who superposed “official” history with another history, Chicano activists had already enacted a retrieval of pre-conquest histories to revive their people’s historical consciousness. As Saldívar-Hull states in “Mestiza Consciousness and Politics: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La frontera,” the publication of Borderlands/ La Frontera distinguished itself from the Chicano movement’s as it unveiled the curtain that hid the Aztec goddesses and kept aspects of pre-conquest history …

My Name And My Face, Stuart Ewen

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Reclamation: The Value Of Black Gay Writing Lgbtq Studies Panel, Lisa C. Moore

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

How gratifying to see a packed house on October 14, 2008 for a discussion of Reclamation: The Value of Black Gay Writing! Co-sponsored by CLAGS and Freedom Train Productions (www.freedomtrainproductions.org), the panel of scholars—Terry Rowden, Professor of African-American Literature, College of Staten Island (CUNY), Jafari Sinclaire Allen, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African-American Studies/American Studies, Yale University, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Ph.D. student, African-American/American Studies, Yale University—and me, publisher Lisa C. Moore (Redbone Press) came to discuss the impact of black gay writers on the community and academia... and to bear witness, reclaim and critique the work within the first …

Brown, James, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

Encyclopedia article on James Brown focusing on his impact on African American history and the Civil Rights movement as well as, to a lesser degree, his impact on the history of music.

Sexual Violence As The Language Of Border Control: Where French Feminist And Anti‐Immigrant Rhetoric Meet, Miriam Ticktin

Publications and Research

When I first arrived in the Paris region in 1999 to do research on the struggle by undocumented immigrants (les sans papiers) for basic human rights, discussions of violence against women were remarkably absent from the public arena. Nongovernmental organizations and researchers had begun to broach the topic, but with little public visibility. However, this changed in late 2000, with a media explosion on the issue of les tournantes, or the gang rapes committed in the banlieues of Paris. Such tournantes involve boys “taking turns” with their friends’ girlfriends, both parties usually being of Maghrebian or North …

Sources On Lesbian Subjectivities For The Production Of Lesbian Of Color Identity Formation Through Literature, Art, Film, Or Documentation: An Annotatated Bibliography, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

Historically, coming out as a lesbian and then forming an identity of a "lesbian of color" includes seeking out like voices and stories. Librarians who hold an understanding of the lesbian of color coming out process as well as the fluidity of language in Queer Studies will be better equipped to service lesbian of color patrons. This paper holds three tools for reference librarians: A literature review outlining the history of lesbian of color identity formation, secondly, a bibliography with interdisciplinary humanities reference annotations that source lesbians of color in literature, film, performance art, and identity, and thirdly, a model …

Sitting On A Tinderbox': Racial Conflict, Teacher Discretion And The Centralization Of Disciplinary Authority, Judith R. Kafka

Publications and Research

The centralization of school discipline in the second half of the twentieth century is widely understood to be the inevitable result of court decisions granting students certain civil rights in school. This study examines the process by which school discipline became centralized in the Los Angeles City School District in the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, and finds that the locus of control over student discipline shifted from the school site to the centralized district largely in response to local pressures. Indeed, during a period of large-scale student unrest, and in an environment of widespread racial and cultural tensions, …

Exhibit Curriculum For Dominicans In New York: Lesson Outline, Sarah Aponte, Dania Diaz

Open Educational Resources

The Dominicans in New York is a display highlighting the experiences and contributions of the New York Dominican population. This exhibit uses primary source materials from the archival collections of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Archives as well as secondary source materials from the Dominican Library including documents, photographs and memorabilia to create a visual history of Dominicans as they developed communities that became integral part of New York’s incredibly diverse human landscape. The purpose of the exhibit is to introduce, through carefully selected images, the complexity of the Dominican experience in New York to the general public, students, scholars, …

A Transnational Conversation On French Colonialism, Immigration, Violence And Sovereignty, Miriam Ticktin, Ruth Marshall, Paolo Bacchetta

Publications and Research

This conversation was transcribed from a panel discussion that took place at The Scholar & Feminist Conference XXXII, “Fashioning Citizenship: Gender and Immigration,” held on March 24, 2007 at Barnard College.

Exhibit Curriculum For Dominicans In New York: Lesson Overview, Sarah Aponte, Dania Diaz

Open Educational Resources

The Dominicans in New York is a display highlighting the experiences and contributions of the New York Dominican population. This exhibit uses primary source materials from the archival collections of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Archives as well as secondary source materials from the Dominican Library including documents, photographs and memorabilia to create a visual history of Dominicans as they developed communities that became integral part of New York’s incredibly diverse human landscape. The purpose of the exhibit is to introduce, through carefully selected images, the complexity of the Dominican experience in New York to the general public, students, scholars, …

"Whether Beast Or Human": The Cultural Legacies Of Dread, Locks, And Dystopia., Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

Analyzing the ongoing problem of Caribbean racial exploitation, particularly fear signified through one of the most potent Caribbean symbols, dreadlocks, Kevin Frank offers a paradigm shift in arguing that Medusa's alterity is altered by Rastafarians' snake-like hair, but the transformative power of Rasta dreadlocks is contested through certain cinematic depictions of dread.

Introduction: The Sexual Body, Shelly J. Eversley, Jennifer L. Morgan

Publications and Research

Introduction to the special issue, "The Sexual Body," edited by Shelly Eversley and Jennifer L. Morgan.

Female Agency And Oppression In Caribbean Bacchanalian Culture: Soca, Carnival, And Dancehall, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

In this essay Kevin Frank discerningly analyzes agency and gender in public sexual performances emanating out of what Paul Gilroy identifies as part of the compensatory politics of the subordinated within Black Atlantic culture, Jamaican dancehall (dancehall reggae/ dancehall queens).

Edward Said And The Study Of Music, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

My first encounter with Edward Said’s work was in the 1980s with the book, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975). I was exploring a semiotic approach to late 18^th-century music, specifically, a beginning-middle-ending paradigm (an Aristotelian paradigm) that seemed to me to capture the rhetorical intentions of Classic composers. Said’s wide-ranging reflections and ruminations on beginnings – as inaugural moments, as sites for the establishment of difference, as authorially privileged moments, and as "first steps in the intentional production of meaning" – proved inspiring. My enduring impression of him at the time was that he was a very good …

To Cite Or Not To Cite? Confronting The Legacy Of (European) Writing On African Music, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

English Abstract:

The current citational practice in Western scholarship is ideologically loaded, being far more suited to a written economy than a primarily oral culture in which knowledge is preserved in memory and disseminated through repeated performance. The impact of orality on musical scholarship should be more closely investigated; African scholars have all too often become informants rather than theorists of their own traditions. It is therefore proposed that the routine citation of a body of scholarship developed without Africa's historically-specific intellectual needs and ambitions in mind should in fact be discouraged.

German Abstract:

Die heutige Zitierpraxis der westlichen Wissenschaft …

Revisiting Queer Latinidad: A Clags Seminar Course Review, Anel Méndez Velázquez, Ileana Jiménez

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Anel: The construction of a latinà-queer "we" is very problematic. The construction of a "queer we" and a "latinà we" separately—and any attempt to add them up in a "queer-latinà we"—privileges and universalizes particular imagined identities at the expense and exclusion of specific cultural and personal practices and ways of being.

The Sacred Performative: Holy Wednesday And Colonial Ritual/Theatre, Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

"Holy Wednesday" is a late sixteenth century adaptation of a Spanish auto sacramental (sacred play) written in alphabetized Nahuatl, the predominant pre-Columbian language spoken on the High Central Plateau of Mexico. The author remains unknown, however he was likely a Nahua amanuensis educated by Franciscans at Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco. Religious drama was one of the important evangelizing tools of the Catholic brotherhoods in colonial Mexico and although a record of performance of Holy Wednesday does not exist, this dramatic depiction of the final meeting of Christ and Mary prior to the crucifixion was almost certainly performed as …

Abroad At Home: Xenomania And Voluntary Exile In The Middle Passage, Salt, And Tide Running, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

This essay re-examines the causes and consequences of Caribbean alienation, with implications for understanding alienation in other postcolonial societies. The author argues that while externalization does follow colonial incursions or international travel by the colonized, exile and alienation also result from emotional or psychological migrations within the mind, a consequence of neocolonial mechanisms tied to globalization.

Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity In Going To Meet The Man, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

"Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity in Going to Meet the Man" employs the conceit of “impossible” fatherhood to critique mutually reinforcing racist and heteronormative constructions of reproduction. It argues, first, that the white paternal fantasy of creating “pure” white sons is undermined by the homoerotic necessity of bring the phantasmatic black eunuch, castrated yet powerfully potent, into the procreative white bed. The “fact” of the “white” child produced in that marital bed, however, not only cloaks the failure of racial reproduction in the living proof of success but also occludes the male/male union that subtends the heteronormative fantasy of reproduction. …

“Sons Of Adam”: Text, Context, And The Early Modern African Subject, Herman L. Bennett

Publications and Research

Seeking to dislodge the prism that a singular political practice—represented as the story from savage to slave—informed the slave trade, this essay points to a distinct genealogy shaping the earliest encounters between Europeans and Africans.