{"title":"Matriarch of the Captive African Nation: Recollections of Queen Mother Moore","authors":"A. Umoja","doi":"10.1353/PAL.2018.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAL.2018.0025","url":null,"abstract":"As a college freshman, I attended a 1973 meeting of the Muhammad Ahmad (a.k.a. Max Stanford) Defense Committee (MADC). Police had captured Ahmad, a leader of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and a principal target of the Counter INTELligence PROgram (COINTELPRO). I was asked at the meeting, “You ever heard of Queen Mother Moore?” After receiving a brief explanation, I was assigned to escort Queen Mother to a speaking engagement. The proceeds of her California talks went to the MADC. As her driver and security, I accompanied Queen Mother on several speaking engagements in the 1970s. I was later recruited into RAM’s successor organization, the African Peoples Party (APP). Queen Mother was mentor to the APP. As the principal female elder in APP, she was commonly referred to as “Mother.” Queen Mother’s speech that 1973 winter day expressed themes that recurred throughout her addresses. I will briefly share some core themes that appeared in Queen Mother’s oratory, and reconstruct some of my experiences with her.","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/PAL.2018.0025","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46103084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poem for Queen Mother Moore","authors":"S. Sánchez","doi":"10.1353/pal.2018.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2018.0022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/pal.2018.0022","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45176671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light by Laila Amine","authors":"L. Amine","doi":"10.1353/pal.2020.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2020.0003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/pal.2020.0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42364575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kathleen M. Gyssels, Kevin J. Meehan, Courtney L. Thompson, Claudine Taaffe, Terrance Dean
{"title":"Editor's Introduction","authors":"Kathleen M. Gyssels, Kevin J. Meehan, Courtney L. Thompson, Claudine Taaffe, Terrance Dean","doi":"10.1353/pal.2018.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2018.0000","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/pal.2018.0000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46416382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"No Choice but to Strive\": Gender, State Power, and Resistance in the Life Narratives of Emma Mashinini, Mamphela Ramphele, and Wangari Maathai","authors":"Courtney L. Thompson","doi":"10.1353/PAL.2018.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAL.2018.0003","url":null,"abstract":"People often ask me how I could have survived under the conditions I had been subjected to in my life. The short answer is that if you are faced with adversity, you have no choice but to strive for survival. It is amazing what internal reserves come to the fore under stressful conditions—mostly reserves you did not even know you possessed until they are needed. —Mamphela Ramphele, Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/PAL.2018.0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46123599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anthologies, Ontologies, and Hauntologies: Resurrecting Léon-Gontran Damas","authors":"Kathleen M. Gyssels","doi":"10.1353/PAL.2018.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAL.2018.0001","url":null,"abstract":"In his excellent and most welcome collection of essays, The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966,1 David Murphy illustrates the vibrant art scene in the young republic with a thorough overview of a range of Senegalese authors and artists. And yet, someone is missing: Leon Gontran-Damas, the Martinican-born, French Guyanese cofounder of the Négritude movement, who put together several collections that included works by Senegelase authors. In fact, it was Damas who provided his friend, Négritude cofounder and Senegalese president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a first copy of what would be his second wide-ranging anthology of African voices in five languages, Nouvelle somme de poésie du monde noir/A New Survey of Poetry from the Negro World. The potency of this largely forgotten and unacknowledged anthology is revealed when compared with other examples of the genre. What do Nancy Cunard, Blaise Cendrars,2 André Gide, Albert Memmi, L.S. Senghor, Albert Helman, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Edouard Glissant have in common? Published anthologies form a genre that Paul Lauter convincingly argues we should take seriously, since knowledge of most works of “ethnic literature” has remained within classroom walls for too long.3 Anthologies were, and are still today, valued for their didactic function, as well as serving as inventories of new fields and schools of writing. They are essential to the creation of a specific corpus that needs to be presented as a subsystem, one that seeks legitimacy through editorial strategies. Many intellectuals, black and white, Anglo and Francophone, have served as intermediaries between artists and their potential audiences with respect to black literature and postcolonial literature (the Maghreb, for instance, with Memmi’s 1969 Anthology of French Writers from the Maghreb). Many of these thinkers—themselves poets and","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/PAL.2018.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44404597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"We Were Eight Years in Power—An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates (review)","authors":"Terrance Dean","doi":"10.1353/PAL.2018.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAL.2018.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/PAL.2018.0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43364099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Second Annual Black Feminist Methods and Methodologies Working Symposium: Black Girlhood and Black Girlhood Studies, an Introduction with Selected Abstracts","authors":"Claudine Taaffe","doi":"10.1353/pal.2018.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2018.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Sponsored by the callie house research center for the Study of Global Black Cultures and Politics, the second annual Black Feminist Methods and Methodologies Working Symposium held at Vanderbilt University in October 2017 focused on black girls and black girlhood. A symposium developed as a space for early to midcareer black women scholars to present their works in progress, the interdisciplinary two-day gathering featured speakers from education, history, and literary and women’s and gender studies. A significant and necessary purpose of the working symposium on black girls and girlhood was to disrupt the disappearing and devaluing of black girls and women within academic research and in program-based settings. Educational researcher Ruth Nicole Brown argues that black girls are the experts on their own lives. The problem is there is often no place for the narratives of black girls to be discussed, documented, and disseminated. In the work engaged by these black women scholars, a cacophony of innovative theories and methodologies were presented and discussed. The work of these scholars is a critical and intentional attempt to broaden the aperture into","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/pal.2018.0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43257892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rise Up?: New Directions in the Caribbean Women's Bildungsroman","authors":"Kevin Meehan","doi":"10.1353/PAL.2018.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAL.2018.0002","url":null,"abstract":"In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s phenomenally successful Broadway hip hop musical Hamilton!, the anthemic phrase “rise up!” returns several times as a lyrical and musical refrain. The Puerto Rican identity of Hamilton! ’s author and the Nevisian origins of its title character suggest that the idea of “uplift”— the quest for social ascension often associated with African American and American culture more broadly—is something that can also be seen as a core theme in Caribbean cultural expression. In fact, this same leitmotif of rising up has been central in the Caribbean coming-of-age novel, from Jane’s Career by H.G. DeLisser to canonical mid-century novels by George Lamming, Sam Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, and Jacques-Stephen Alexis to more-recent-but-nowclassic offerings from women writers such as Merle Hodge, Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Collins, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and others. Caribbean writers have repeatedly turned to the bildungsroman to explore the promises and pitfalls of regional decolonization, the uneven participation of women in currents of social change, and the contemporary struggle to survive and thrive in the latest dispensations of globalization. Two new books—Madinah Girl, by TrinidadianGrenadian author Anna Levi, and Moun Lakou, by Guadeloupean novelist Marie Léticée—carve out new spaces in the generic niche established by previous generations. Both are debut publications and together they point to how the Caribbean coming-of-age novel continues to function and be transformed in the way critic Maria Helena Lima describes as “one of the ways individuals find to create themselves as subject within new social and political contexts.”1 Both novels also suggest that the future of Caribbean literature is in good hands. Madinah Girl offers an unflinching depiction of life in the margins of contemporary Trinidad that is guaranteed to shock any reader unprepared for essays","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/PAL.2018.0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43722378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"History vs. Historical Memory Rosie Douglas, Black Power on Campus, and the Canadian Color Conceit","authors":"M. O. West","doi":"10.1353/pal.2017.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2017.0019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/pal.2017.0019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47595537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}