Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity PDF Download

Author: Lindon Barrett
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095294
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The unfinished manuscript of literary and cultural theorist Lindon Barrett, this study offers a genealogy of how the development of racial blackness within the mercantile capitalist system of Euro-American colonial imperialism was constitutive of Western modernity. Masterfully connecting historical systems of racial slavery to post-Enlightenment modernity, this pathbreaking publication shows how Western modernity depended on a particular conception of racism contested by African American writers and intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance.

Author: Joshua L. Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131603352X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel offers a comprehensive analysis of US modernism as part of a wider, global literature. Both modernist and American literary studies have been reshaped by waves of scholarship that unsettled prior consensuses regarding America's relation to transnational, diasporic, and indigenous identities and aesthetics; the role of visual and musical arts in narrative experimentation; science and technology studies; and allegiances across racial, ethnic, gendered, and sexual social groups. Recent writing on US immigration, imperialism, and territorial expansion has generated fresh and exciting reasons to read or reread modernist novelists, both prominent and forgotten. Written by a host of leading scholars, this Companion provides unique interpretations and approaches to modernist themes, techniques, and texts.

Author: Adrienne D. Davis
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252051491
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
A daring collaboration among scholars, Black Sexual Economies challenges thinking that sees black sexualities as a threat to normative ideas about sexuality, the family, and the nation. The essays highlight alternative and deviant gender and sexual identities, performances, and communities, and spotlights the sexual labor, sexual economy, and sexual agency to black social life. Throughout, the writers reveal the lives, everyday negotiations, and cultural or aesthetic interventions of black gender and sexual minorities while analyzing the systems and beliefs that structure the possibilities that exist for all black sexualities. They also confront the mechanisms of domination and subordination attached to the political and socioeconomic forces, cultural productions, and academic work that interact with the energies at the nexus of sexuality and race. Contributors: Marlon M. Bailey, Lia T. Bascomb, Felice Blake, Darius Bost, Ariane Cruz, Adrienne D. Davis, Pierre Dominguez, David B. Green Jr., Jillian Hernandez, Cheryl D. Hicks, Xavier Livermon, Jeffrey McCune, Mireille Miller-Young, Angelique Nixon, Shana L. Redmond, Matt Richardson, L. H. Stallings, Anya M. Wallace, and Erica Lorraine Williams

Author: Phoebe Wolfskill
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252099702
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
An essential African American artist of his era, Archibald Motley Jr. created paintings of black Chicago that aligned him with the revisionist aims of the New Negro Renaissance. Yet Motley's approach to constructing a New Negro--a dignified figure both accomplished and worthy of respect--reflected the challenges faced by African American artists working on the project of racial reinvention and uplift. Phoebe Wolfskill demonstrates how Motley's art embodied the tenuous nature of the Black Renaissance and the wide range of ideas that structured it. Focusing on key works in Motley's oeuvre, Wolfskill reveals the artist's complexity and the variety of influences that informed his work. Motley’s paintings suggest that the racist, problematic image of the Old Negro was not a relic of the past but an influence that pervaded the Black Renaissance. Exploring Motley in relation to works by notable black and non-black contemporaries, Wolfskill reinterprets Motley's oeuvre as part of a broad effort to define American cultural identity through race, class, gender, religion, and regional affiliation.

Author: George J. Sefa Dei
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319530798
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This book grounds particular struggles at the curious interface of skin, body, psyche, hegemonies and politics. Specifically, it adds to current [re]theorizations of Blackness, anti-Blackness and Black solidarities, through anti-colonial and decolonial prisms. The discussion challenges the reductionism of contemporary polity of Blackness in regards to capitalism/globalization, particularly when relegated to the colonial power and privileged experiences of settler. The book does so by arguing that this practice perpetuates procedures of violence and social injustice upon Black and African peoples. The book brings critical readings to Black racial identity, representation and politics informed by pertinent questions: What are the tools/frameworks Black peoples in Euro-American/Canadian contexts can deploy to forge community and solidarity, and to resist anti-Black racism and other social oppressions? What critical analytical tools can be developed to account for Black lived experiences, agency and resistance? What are the limits of the tools or frameworks for anti-racist, anti-colonial work? How do such critical tools or frameworks of Blackness and anti-Blackness assist in anti-racist and anti-colonial practice? The book provides new coordinates for collective and global mobilization by troubling the politics of “decolonizing solidarity” as pointing to new ways for forging critical friends and political workers. The book concludes by offering some important lessons for teaching and learning about Blackness and anti-Blackness confronting some contemporary issues of schooling and education in Euro-American contexts, and suggesting ways to foster dialogic and generative forums for such critical discussions.

Author: Derrick P. Alridge
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052757
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
Considering the development and ongoing influence of Black thought From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have drawn on homegrown and diasporic minds to create a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This volume presents essays on the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by African American artists and intellectuals; performers and protest activists; institutions and organizations; and educators and religious leaders. By including both women’s and men’s perspectives from the U.S. and the Diaspora, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Throughout, contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation. Expansive in scope and interdisciplinary in practice, The Black Intellectual Tradition delves into the ideas that animated a people’s striving for full participation in American life. Contributors: Derrick P. Alridge, Keisha N. Blain, Cornelius L. Bynum, Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, Stephanie Y. Evans, Aaron David Gresson III, Claudrena N. Harold, Leonard Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, La TaSha B. Levy, Layli Maparyan, Zebulon V. Miletsky, R. Baxter Miller, Edward Onaci, Venetria K. Patton, James B. Stewart, and Nikki M. Taylor

Author: Ian Rocksborough-Smith
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050339
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
In civil-rights-era Chicago, a dedicated group of black activists, educators, and organizations employed black public history as more than cultural activism. Their work and vision energized a movement that promoted political progress in the crucial time between World War II and the onset of the Cold War. Ian Rocksborough-Smith’s meticulous research and adept storytelling provide the first in-depth look at how these committed individuals leveraged Chicago’s black public history. Their goal: to engage with the struggle for racial equality. Rocksborough-Smith shows teachers working to advance curriculum reform in public schools, while well-known activists Margaret and Charles Burroughs pushed for greater recognition of black history by founding the DuSable Museum of African American History. Organizations like the Afro-American Heritage Association, meanwhile, used black public history work to connect radical politics and nationalism. Together, these people and their projects advanced important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labor that paralleled the shifting terrain of mid-twentieth-century civil rights.

Author: Richard A. Courage
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252051912
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
The Black Chicago Renaissance emerged from a foundational stage that stretched from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition to the start of the Great Depression. During this time, African American innovators working across the landscape of the arts set the stage for an intellectual flowering that redefined black cultural life. Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed have brought together essays that explore the intersections in the backgrounds, education, professional affiliations, and public lives and achievements of black writers, journalists, visual artists, dance instructors, and other creators working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Organized chronologically, the chapters unearth transformative forces that supported the emergence of individuals and social networks dedicated to work in arts and letters. The result is an illuminating scholarly collaboration that remaps African American intellectual and cultural geography and reframes the concept of urban black renaissance. Contributors: Richard A. Courage, Mary Jo Deegan, Brenda Ellis Fredericks, James C. Hall, Bonnie Claudia Harrison, Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey Jr., Amy M. Mooney, Christopher Robert Reed, Clovis E. Semmes, Margaret Rose Vendryes, and Richard Yarborough

Author: GerShun Avilez
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052250
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomical injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces—specifically prisons and hospitals—and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.

Author: Robert E. Weems Jr.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050029
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
From Jean Baptiste Point DuSable to Oprah Winfrey, black entrepreneurship has helped define Chicago. Robert E. Weems Jr. and Jason P. Chambers curate a collection of essays that place the city as the center of the black business world in the United States. Ranging from titans like Anthony Overton and Jesse Binga to McDonald’s operators to black organized crime, the scholars shed light on the long-overlooked history of African American work and entrepreneurship since the Great Migration. Together they examine how factors like the influx of southern migrants and the city’s unique segregation patterns made Chicago a prolific incubator of productive business development—and made building a black metropolis as much a necessity as an opportunity. Contributors: Jason P. Chambers, Marcia Chatelain, Will Cooley, Robert Howard, Christopher Robert Reed, Myiti Sengstacke Rice, Clovis E. Semmes, Juliet E. K. Walker, and Robert E. Weems Jr.