BLACK SCHOLAR最新文献

{"title":"Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community","authors":"K. B. Golden","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2022.2007442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2022.2007442","url":null,"abstract":"son, and Denise Ferreira da Silva are moving within. For those who would like to explore Black and Indigenous thought, especially the conceptual and methodological overlaps between the two fields, this book is an exceptional primer. Valuably, this book bestows a new vocabulary for scholars to continue to put Black and Indigenous thought into conversation. “Conquistadorhumanism,” “shoals” and “shoaling,” and “grammars of conquest” are some of the conceptual tools that will help scholars rethink the regimes of truth in Western intellectual thought, passed down through generations, that silenced counter-histories and occluded the ethical futures to come.","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"52 1","pages":"89 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45062168","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":"Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America","authors":"Sid Ahmed Ziane","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1972396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1972396","url":null,"abstract":"E. James West’s Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett, Popular Black History in Postwar America presents the first detailed examination of senior editor Lerone Bennett Jr., revealing the crucial role he played in popularizing and complementing professional historical research and how he endorsed and recovered the history of Black America for Ebony magazine. West’s scholarship is a much-needed contribution to the Black intellectual historiography as it builds upon previous works by contending and demonstrating Bennett as a nationally recognized expert in Black history rather than, as was seen by other scholars, “a subservient to professionally trained historians” (7). West’s manuscript is divided into six core thematic chapters, chronologically spanning from the early 1950s to the late 1980s. The author takes as his starting point Ebony’s mandate to celebrate the Black past, arguing that this was not new but expanded upon the efforts of traditional Black outlets such as Freedom Journal. He shows that while these newspapers endorsed Black history as an essential conduit for African Americans to forge an image of respectability and righteousness, they often lacked the standard quality needed to disseminate the gospel of Black history. West illuminates the apparent discrepancy between the limited number of professional Black historians and Black outlets in popularizing and professionalizing Black history. This laid the groundwork for future editors such as Lerone Bennett Jr. to position himself as a popular historian in producing Black history within Ebony. The next chapter delves into Bennett’s early career as an editor for Ebony and a popular historian, demonstrating that upon his arrival to Ebony, “Bennett exerted an immediate influence over the magazine’s historical content, employing an understating of black history as a ‘living history’” (27). Here, the author sheds light on Bennett’s major publications in Ebony and externally in the early 1960s, including The Negro History special feature, which endorsed an Afrocentric approach and emphasized a diverse slave resistance history during the antebellum era, and his new account Before the Mayflower, a book-length adaptation of his series. West illustrates that through his output, Bennett sought to develop “a more historiographical and critically incisive perspective” rather than just recovering “the lost histories of black life and culture” (35). It was the scholarly insight of his publications, West underscores, and the readers’ and the critics’ acclaim that gave Bennett a reputation as a leading historian in the absence of professional training. The manuscript’s most significant chapter, “White Problems and the Roots of Black Power” details the manner by which Bennett reflected the socioeconomic concerns of Black Americans in the mid-1960s","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"47 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46771985","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":"Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past","authors":"Daniel Chukwuemeka","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1972398","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1972398","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"53 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48428018","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":"Violent Illumination","authors":"L. Yared","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1972394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1972394","url":null,"abstract":"OnAugust 13, 1906, the town of Brownsville, Texas was in chaos. A shooting that night left a white bartender dead and a white police officer wounded. The townspeople, already on edge due to the alleged attack of a white woman the previous evening, pointed all blame at the 25th Infantry Regiment stationed at nearby Fort Brown. The 167-member troop, an allBlack regiment, had arrived just over two weeks prior. At the center of the case was eyewitness testimony. Several residents testified that they saw between 5 and 12 African American men shooting in the streets or sprinting away after the crime. Though the night was dark, they testified that they could make out the men’s skin color and distinctive khaki uniform by the light of nearby street lamps. One man, named Mr. Rendall, testified that he saw eight men jump a wall in escape from a distance of about 150 feet. Another said that the street lamp cast a radius of about 20 feet, and in that distance, he saw the Black men retreat. The accused Black soldiers denied all charges, and no single man was ever indicted for the crime. Even so, President Theodore Roosevelt responded by dishonorably discharging the regiment. Over the course of the following year, the Senate Military Affairs Committee investigated what happened that night in Brownsville. Investigators wanted to know whether a person could tell a man’s skin color by the light of a street lamp on a city street shrouded in darkness. So they conducted an experiment. They had African American, white, and Mexican men pass beneath street lamps of similar candlepower on a similarly starlit night from varying distances, and they tested whether observers could determine the men’s skin color. Lieutenant Robert P. Harbold, who ran the experiment, had men pass him and other officers from a distance of 25 feet, with a “light shining brightly about 10 or fifteen feet beyond the squad, so the men were between the officers and the light.” Harbold quickly made a discovery:","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"4 - 16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49574944","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":"When Militancy Was in Vogue","authors":"Zachary Manditch-Prottas","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1972392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1972392","url":null,"abstract":"I n the comical vignette published in the Pittsburgh Courier, “Simple’s Comment on Color: It’s a Gasser,” Langston Hughes debates with his most enduring fictional character, the humorous and wise Harlem everyman, Jesse B. Simple. Their jocular dispute questions the relationship between corporal Blackness and “Black thought.” Things move swiftly from the abstract to the personal when Simple states that because Hughes “is colleged” he has “Black skin but not a Black brain.” In response to this allegation Hughes cites author and emerging public figure Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones) as a counter example of a “college man” who exemplified “Black Nationalist” consciousness. In 1965, when the short piece was published, Baraka personified an intellectual artistic class that retained, even regulated, a folk-centered conception of Black authenticity; Baraka was seemingly a foolproof counter figure to Simple’s argument. Simple, who is no fool, however, responds to Hughes with a question that seemingly had little to do with the topics of education and nationalist ideology, “Didn’t I read in the papers where he married a white woman?” For Simple, all that needed to be known was that Baraka’s wife, Hettie Cohen, was white. In Simple’s estimation, despite appearing Black and gushing Black Nationalist rhetoric, Baraka was an example of one whose “Black head was filled up with white thoughts.” The accusation that Baraka was insufficiently Black would have seemed a ludicrous charge at that time; indeed, who was Blacker than Baraka? This paradox is Hughes’ point. The sardonic exchange between Hughes and his folksiest character is a clever act of signifying in which Hughes both affirms and questions the Black author’s relationship to whiteness. Hughes validates Baraka as the prime Black Nationalist pundit, through the retort to Simple that Baraka’s “private life was his own business” and his marriage not an appropriate topic for evaluating his political stance, while raising questions regarding the significance of Baraka’s ties to whiteness. Indeed, Baraka’s marriage to Hettie Cohen was not an issue for Hughes at all. However, his relationship with white audiences was. Simple’s provocative personal question acts as a sly gesture toward Hughes’ anxieties regarding Baraka’s broader relationship to whiteness and, more precisely, his concern regarding how white audiences received Baraka’s work. Expressed across several telling newspaper reviews and editorials in the middle part of the 1960s, Hughes, while praising Baraka as undoubtedly talented, is troubled that the young upstart benefited from, if not knowingly leveraged, a peculiar desire of white audiences to be rhetorically assaulted by Black dramaturgy. This essay will situate and explore Hughes’ unease and skepticism regarding what he called a “masochistic” pleasure white liberal audiences found in Baraka’s stages dramas during his transition from Beat to Black Nationalist (roughly between 1963 and 1965). Hughes ","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"17 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45916608","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":"Introduction","authors":"P. J. Edwards","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1972395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1972395","url":null,"abstract":"I n 1965, Bob Dylan shifted from acoustic folk music to albums and live performances backed by drums and electric guitar and bass. To a small but vocal number of fans, this change was a step in the wrong direction. Having developed a reputation as the folk heir to Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, Dylan famously went “electric.” Throughout his career, Dylan continued to change styles. However, no other moment in his career took on such importance and mythos than his 1965 transformation, which began with the album Bringing It All Home in March of that year and culminated with its follow-up, Highway 61 Revisited, five months later. Although the latter opens with the famous and perhaps overplayed “Like a Rolling Stone,” the album final track, “Desolation Row,” almost returns Dylan to his acoustic folk roots. With its narrative pastiche of references, like many Dylan lyrics from the 1960s, the song leaves much to be interpreted. Still, the first line starkly portrays an execution with a commercial enterprise, the selling of postcard bearing the image of a hanging. Although Dylan moves on from this scene, leaving ambiguity between who is selling the postcards, who died, and who buys such postcards, to scholars who study the history of American racism, the answers are quickly at hand. In the United States, mobs hang Black men and women, and white spectators take in the spectacle firsthand and collect and exchange souvenirs of their swinging bodies. Scholars Sean Wilentz and Robert Polito have placed Dylan’s lyrics to a specific historic lynching, the 1920 triple murder of Elmer Jackson, Elias Clayton, and Isaac McGhie in Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota and the postcards produced of their cruel deaths. The streetlight lynching occurred two blocks from the home of Abram Zimmerman, Dylan’s father, who would have been nine at the time. Speculation by Dylan scholars has gone into Abram’s presence or absence at the lynching, with Dylan’s lyric suggesting that he, perhaps through his father, had some familiarity with the event. Moreover, even if Abram had not been in attendance, the events of that day would be etched into the city’s history, emerging in Dylan’s “Desolation Row” as its own folk story. For scholars who have speculated about the effects of that day on Dylan’s life and songwriting, none have connected the lynching, the implement of the electric lamp post, with Dylan’s own going electric. Dylan is not alone in producing speculative knowledge of Black traumawithin circuits of white American poetics. Ezra Pound provided the only first-person account of the death of Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father. Executed by the US Army at a detention center near Pisa, Louis’ only chronicler was his fellow prisoner, Pound, who recorded only fleeting mentions of the man in The Pisan Cantos, noting Till’s nickname by his fellow prisoners and a slightly longer passage that functions as a eulogistic note. Again, this moment is marked by its apparent ambiguity. It o","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"1 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45893662","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":"Dear Science and Other Stories","authors":"C. Smith","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1972397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1972397","url":null,"abstract":"Taking interdisciplinary curiosity as methodological guide, Katherine McKittrick’s rhizomatic Dear Science and Other Stories explores how Black “creatives”—scholars, writers, musicians, data scientists, geographers—engage science through storytelling to glimpse Black livingness and liberation. Instead of focusing on depictions of scientific racism and biological determinism, McKittrick presents Black stories, which she describes as “scientifically creative and creatively scientific artworlds” (2). These stories demonstrate “how we come to know black life through asymmetrically connected knowledge systems” and “imagine and practice liberation” despite being weighed down by biocentric violence (3). At its heart, Dear Science reorients Black studies toward Black life and argues for an alternative science from a Black sense of place. McKittrick utilizes the story form because it “prompts” imaginative departure and “asks that we live with the difficult and frustrating ways of knowing differentially” (7). In other words, because stories foment curiosity about what is in and outside of the story itself, McKittrick uses the form to train readers in diasporic literacy—a way of knowing Black life that abandons the need for “reams of positivist evidence” of biocentric violation (7). As an alternative, she hypothesizes: “Maybe the story is one way to express and fall in love with black life. Maybe the story disguises our fall” (8). Storytelling finds a challenging pleasure in blackness and offers cover for the periodic stumbling on the path to understanding. This conceptualization of the story form as a useful academic mode for imagining Black life’s dynamism is one of McKittrick’s major contributions. Dear Science’s 10 stories and 7 images can be read on their own or in any order. As demonstrated in the contents’ titles, Dear Science’s themes suggestively overlap like a Venn diagram. Despite resembling academic chapters in tone, McKittrick’s insistence in calling her sections “stories” suggests that the value of her insights lies in the thoughts they spark for readers. These simultaneously tangential and consequential thoughts enable readers to build imaginative worlds from which to contemplate Black life. The first five stories exemplify McKittrick’s theorizing. In the first story, McKittrick explores Black studies citational practices (endnotes, footnotes, references, bibliographies, parentheses, etc.). She theorizes these practices as ways of knowing that enable Black people to “unknow ourselves” and share, not what we know, but “how we know ... imperfect and sometimes unintelligible but always hopeful and practical ways to live this world as black” (16, 17). She argues that effortful sharing-through-citation “reorganizes our knowledge worlds by providing textual and methodological (verbal, nonverbal, written, unwritten) confirmations of black life as struggle” (27). By promoting diasporic","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"50 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43063920","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":"Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital","authors":"Kirin Wachter-Grene","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1972402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1972402","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"59 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47048781","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":"Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights","authors":"Margarita Rosa","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1972401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1972401","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"56 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42853718","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":"Sex and the Future of History","authors":"Melissa A. Wright","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1972393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1972393","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last 15 years, scholars have compellingly argued that Sutton E. Griggs’ 1899 novel Imperium in Imperio is an important precursor to Afrofuturism. Mark Bould, for example, posits that Griggs and other turn-of-the-century African American authors—including W.E.B. Du Bois, Pauline E. Hopkins, Roger Sherman Tracy, George Schuyler, and others—anticipated Afrofuturist texts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"32 - 46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44663891","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}