Author : Erica Renee Edwards
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 23,96 MB
Release : 2012
Category : History
ISBN : 0816675457
How a preoccupation with charismatic leadership in African American culture has influenced literature from World War I to the present
Author : Robert J. Patterson
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 28,40 MB
Release : 2013-11-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 081393527X
Using the term "exodus politics" to theorize the valorization of black male leadership in the movement for civil rights, Robert J. Patterson explores the ways in which the political strategies and ideologies of this movement paradoxically undermined the collective enfranchisement of black people. He argues that by narrowly conceptualizing civil rights in only racial terms and relying solely on a male figure, conventional African American leadership, though frequently redemptive, can also erode the very goals of civil rights. The author turns to contemporary African American writers such as Ernest Gaines, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Charles Johnson to show how they challenge the dominant models of civil rights leadership. He draws on a variety of disciplines—including black feminism, civil rights history, cultural studies, and liberation theology—in order to develop a more nuanced formulation of black subjectivity and politics. Patterson's connection of the concept of racial rights to gender and sexual rights allows him to illuminate the literature's promotion of more expansive models. By considering the competing and varied political interests of black communities, these writers reimagine the dominant models in a way that can empower communities to be self-sustaining in the absence of a messianic male leader.
Author : Jeremy C. Young
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 357 pages
File Size : 39,5 MB
Release : 2016-12-28
Category : History
ISBN : 1316943097
An innovative examination of American society, culture, and politics, The Age of Charisma argues that the modern relationship between American leaders and followers grew out of a unique group of charismatic social movements prominent in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Drawing on hundreds of letters and testimonials, Jeremy C. Young illustrates how 'personal magnetism' in public speaking shaped society by enabling a shift from emotionally-inaccessible leadership to emotionally-available leadership. This charismatic speaking style caused a rapid transformation in the leader-follower relationship, creating an emotional link between speakers and listeners, and the effects of this social transformation remain with us today. Young argues that, ultimately, charismatic movements enhanced American democracy by encouraging the personalization of leadership - creating a culture in which today's leaders appeal directly to Americans through mass media.
Author : Herman Beavers
Publisher : Springer
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 31,7 MB
Release : 2018-02-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3319659995
This book examines Toni Morrison’s fiction as a sustained effort to challenge the dominant narratives produced in the white supremacist political imaginary and conceptualize a more inclusive political imaginary in which black bodies are valued. Herman Beavers closely examines politics of scale and contentious politics in order to discern Morrison's larger intent of revealing the deep structure of power relations in black communities that will enable them to fashion counterhegemonic projects. The volume explores how Morrison stages her ruminations on the political imaginary in neighborhoods or small towns; rooms, houses or streets. Beavers argues that these spatial and domestic geographies are sites where the management of traumatic injury is integral to establishing a sense of place, proposing these “tight spaces” as sites where narratives are produced and contested; sites of inscription and erasure, utterance and silence.
Author : Stephanie Li
Publisher :
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 43,49 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0199398887
The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels--that is, texts by African American writers focused almost exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth century black writer, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry and James Baldwin, published one of these anomalous texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 50s, these novels have since fallen into obscurity given the challenges they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American literary canon. Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about the nature of African American literature and the unique expectations imposed upon black texts. In a series of nuanced readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies. Novels like Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and Wright's Savage Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America's abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this particular racial construction is freighted with social power and narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans. Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects also provides important historical context to understand how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly integrated nation.
Author : Julius B. Fleming Jr.
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 15,22 MB
Release : 2022-03-29
Category : Art
ISBN : 1479806854
2024 College Language Association Book Award Winner 2023 Hooks National Book Award Winner (Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change) Honorable Mention, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present 2023 Book Prize Honorable Mention, 2023 John W. Frick Book Award (American Theatre and Drama Society) Finalist, 2022 George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theatre Library Association. A bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of Black theater “Freedom, Now!” This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people wait—in the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyards—for their long-deferred liberation. In Black Patience, Julius B. Fleming Jr. argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, these artists turned to theater to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” Inviting the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Brown Jr. to the stage, Black Patience illuminates how Black artists and activists of the Civil Rights era used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. In this bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement, Fleming contends that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production.
Author : Erica R. Edwards
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 48,41 MB
Release : 2021-08-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1479808407
WINNER, 2022 John Hope Franklin Prize, given by the American Studies Association HONORABLE MENTION, 2022 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association Reveals the troubling intimacy between Black women and the making of US global power The year 1968 marked both the height of the worldwide Black liberation struggle and a turning point for the global reach of American power, which was built on the counterinsurgency honed on Black and other oppressed populations at home. The next five decades saw the consolidation of the culture of the American empire through what Erica R. Edwards calls the “imperial grammars of blackness.” This is a story of state power at its most devious and most absurd, and, at the same time, a literary history of Black feminist radicalism at its most trenchant. Edwards reveals how the long war on terror, beginning with the late–Cold War campaign against organizations like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Black Liberation Army, has relied on the labor and the fantasies of Black women to justify the imperial spread of capitalism. Black feminist writers not only understood that this would demand a shift in racial gendered power, but crafted ways of surviving it. The Other Side of Terror offers an interdisciplinary Black feminist analysis of militarism, security, policing, diversity, representation, intersectionality, and resistance, while discussing a wide array of literary and cultural texts, from the unpublished work of Black radical feminist June Jordan to the memoirs of Condoleezza Rice to the television series Scandal. With clear, moving prose, Edwards chronicles Black feminist organizing and writing on “the other side of terror”, which tracked changes in racial power, transformed African American literature and Black studies, and predicted the crises of our current era with unsettling accuracy.
Author : Stephen S. Bush
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 46,49 MB
Release : 2017-11-16
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1108506380
William James (1842–1910) argued for a philosophy of democracy and pluralism that advocates individual and collective responsibility for our social arrangements, our morality, and our religion. In James' view, democracy resides first and foremost not in governmental institutions or in procedures such as voting, but rather in the characteristics of individuals, and in qualities of mind and conduct. It is a philosophy for social change, counselling action and hope despite the manifold challenges facing democratic politics, and these issues still resonate strongly today. In this book, Stephen S. Bush explores how these themes connect to James' philosophy of religion, his moral thought, his epistemology, his psychology, and his metaphysics. His fresh and original study highlights the relevance of James' thought to modern debates, and will appeal to scholars and students of moral and political philosophy.
Author : Cameron Leader-Picone
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 42,58 MB
Release : 2019-08-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1496824539
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020 Post-Blackness. Post-Soul. Post-Black Art. New Blackness. How has the meaning of blackness changed in the twenty-first century? Cameron Leader-Picone suggests that this proliferation of terms, along with the renewed focus on questioning the relationship between individual black artists and the larger black community, indicates the arrival of novel forms of black identity and black art. Leader-Picone defines these terms as significant facets of a larger post era, linking them with the social and political context of Barack Obama’s presidency. Analyzing claims of progress associated with Obama’s election and post-era thinking, he examines the contours of black aesthetics in the new century. To do so, he sifts through post-era African American fiction, considering both celebrations and rejections of an early twenty-first-century rhetoric of progress. In addition, he maps the subsequent implications of these concepts for rearticulating racial identities. Through the works of Colson Whitehead, Alice Randall, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paul Beatty, Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn Ward, Leader-Picone tracks how recent fiction manifests the tension between the embrace of post–civil rights era gains and the recognition of persistent structural racism. Ultimately far less triumphal than the prefix post would imply, these authors address the Black Arts Movement and revise double consciousness and other key themes from the African American literary tradition. They interrogate their relevance in an era encompassing not only the election of the nation’s first black president, but also the government’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina, the expansion of class divisions within the black community, mass incarceration, and ongoing police violence.
Author : Erica R. Edwards
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 37,9 MB
Release : 2018-11-27
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1479888532
Introduces key terms, interdisciplinary research, debates, and histories for African American Studies As the longest-standing interdisciplinary field, African American Studies has laid the foundation for critically analyzing issues of race, ethnicity, and culture within the academy and beyond. This volume assembles the keywords of this field for the first time, exploring not only the history of those categories but their continued relevance in the contemporary moment. Taking up a vast array of issues such as slavery, colonialism, prison expansion, sexuality, gender, feminism, war, and popular culture, Keywords for African American Studies showcases the startling breadth that characterizes the field. Featuring an august group of contributors across the social sciences and the humanities, the keywords assembled within the pages of this volume exemplify the depth and range of scholarly inquiry into Black life in the United States. Connecting lineages of Black knowledge production to contemporary considerations of race, gender, class, and sexuality, Keywords for African American Studies provides a model for how the scholarship of the field can meet the challenges of our social world.
