Contesting the Terrain of the Ivory Tower


Book Description

This study examines the leadership of three African-American women administrators in higher education, and how they have used their spirituality as a lens to lead in the academy. The central questions in this case study include: How do African-American women make meaning of their spiritual selves in their everyday leadership practices? How does their spirituality influence their work and the type of relationships they develop with others in the academy? What are the ways in which these three women have used their spirituality as a lens to lead, and how does this leadership impact the social, cultural and political construct of a male-dominated arena?




The Selling of Civil Rights


Book Description

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee formed in April 1960 to advance civil rights. With a tremendous human rights mission facing them, the founding SNCC members included communication and publicity as part of their initial purpose. This book provides a broad overview of these efforts from SNCC's birth in 1960 until the beginning of its demise in the late 1960s and examines the communication tools that SNCC leaders and members used to organize, launch, and carry out their campaign to promote civil rights throughout the 1960s. It specifically explores how SNCC workers used public relations to support and promote their platforms and to build a grassroots community movement; and how the organization later rejected these strategies for a radical and isolated approach.




Black Liberation in the Midwest


Book Description

This book offers a response to the inadequate examination of the Midwest in Civil Rights Movement scholarship - scholarship that continues to ignore the city of St. Louis and the Black liberation struggle that took place there. Jolly examines this local movement and organizations such as the Black Liberators, Mid-City Congress, Jeff Vander Lou Community Action Group, DuBois Club, CORE, Zulu 1200s, and the Nation of Islam to illuminate the larger Black liberation struggle in the Midwest in the mid- and late 1960s. Furthermore, this work details the larger atmosphere and conditions in St. Louis, Missouri and the Midwest from which this local movement developed and operated. This work raises important questions about periodizing and locating Black liberation and Black Nationalism. As racial oppression in the United States was equated with neo-colonialism and internal-colonialism, this discussion reveals the global nature of white supremacy, race and class oppression and exploitation, as well as the material and ideological relationship between local and transnational liberation movements.




Words and Songs of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone


Book Description

This book explores the relationship between three African American women's dance-art-music sensibilities within the context of a Pan African aesthetic. Its purpose is three-fold: to show commonalities between Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone's lives and original compositions; to codify, examine and evaluate their selected song performances in accordance with the Pan African aesthetic "Nzuri theory/model;" and to illuminate the vast sources of transformational values that aesthetic analysis of African American song performance can foster. Following concordant procedures and principles of Afrocentricity, the study focuses on Smith, Holiday and Simone's performances as part of a whole African artistic and cultural value system. The goal of the Afrocentric methodological structure is to locate relevant African dynamics in songs and to promote knowledge for cultural transformation and continuity. Its use in this study provides meta-criteria for analyzing African American music, which the author has used to uniquely argue connections between African cultural memory and African-derived cultural expression.




Courting Communities


Book Description

Courting Communities focuses on the writing and oratory of nineteenth-century African-American women whose racial uplift projects troubled the boundaries of race, nation and gender. In particular, it reexamines the politics of gender in nationalist movements and black women's creative response within and against both state and insurgent black nationalist discourses. Courting Communities highlights the ideas and rhetorical strategies of female activists considered to be less important than the prominent male nationalists. Yet their story is significant precisely because it does not fit into the pre-established categories of nationalism and leadership bequeathed to us from the past.




The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights


Book Description

Paul T. Miller tells the story of African Americans in San Francisco, tracing the obstacles faced and triumphs achieved in areas as housing, employment and education, and adding to our understandings of civil rights and the intersection of race and geography within the postwar period of American history.




Boys, Boyz, Bois


Book Description

Boys, Boyz, Bois concerns questions of ethics, gender and race in popular American images, national discourse and cultural production by and about black men. The book proposes an ethics of masculinity, as ethnics refers to a system of morality and valuation and as ethics refers to a care of the self and ethical subject formation. The texts of analysis include recent films by black/African American filmmakers, gangsta rap and hip-hop and black star persona: texts ranging from Blaxploitation and New Black Cinema to contemporary music video to autobiography and the public image of Sidney Poitier. The book is a significant contribution to cultural studies and gender studies and critical race theory. What is distinctive about the book is the question of ethics as a question of race and gender.




Challenges and Opportunities for Women in Higher Education Leadership


Book Description

Gender studies in the professional realm has long been a heavily researched field, with many feminist texts studying topics including the wage gap and family life. However, female administration in higher education remains largely understudied, particularly on the influence of personal, professional, and societal factors on women. There is a need for studies that seek to understand how gender intersects with the multiple dimensions of women leaders’ personhoods, such as family status, marital status, age, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, to inform women’s career path experiences and leadership aspirations. Challenges and Opportunities for Women in Higher Education Leadership is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the specific challenges, issues, strategies, and solutions that are associated with diverse leadership in higher education. While highlighting topics such as educational administration, leader mentorship, and professional promotion, this publication explores evidence-based professional practice for women in higher education who are currently in or are seeking positions of leadership, as well as the methods of nurturing women in administrative positions. This book is ideally designed for educators, researchers, academicians, scholars, policymakers, educational administrators, graduate-level students, and pre-service teachers seeking current research on the state of educational leadership in regard to gender.




Race and Masculinity in Contemporary American Prison Novels


Book Description

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how contemporary American prison narratives reflect and produce ideologies of masculinity in the United States, and in so doing, compellingly engages popular culture in order to demonstrate the profound ways in which implicit understandings of prison life shape all Americans, and their reactions to people both incarcerated and not.




African American Slavery and Disability


Book Description

Disability is often mentioned in discussions of slave health, mistreatment and abuse, but constructs of how "able" and "disabled" bodies influenced the institution of slavery has gone largely overlooked. This volume uncovers a history of disability in African American slavery from the primary record, analyzing how concepts of race, disability, and power converged in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Slaves with physical and mental impairments often faced unique limitations and conditions in their diagnosis, treatment, and evaluation as property. Slaves with disabilities proved a significant challenge to white authority figures, torn between the desire to categorize them as different or defective and the practical need to incorporate their "disorderly" bodies into daily life. Being physically "unfit" could sometimes allow slaves to escape the limitations of bondage and oppression, and establish a measure of self-control. Furthermore, ideas about and reactions to disability—appearing as social construction, legal definition, medical phenomenon, metaphor, or masquerade—highlighted deep struggles over bodies in bondage in antebellum America.