BLACK SCHOLARPub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1932369
L. Chude-Sokei
{"title":"Vaccines, Antidotes, Cures","authors":"L. Chude-Sokei","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1932369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1932369","url":null,"abstract":"By now you must have grown tired of the easy poetics articulating racism and Covid-19 as “twin diseases” or dual pandemics; or perhaps as “mutual infections” or symbiotic viruses. Such talk has been rampant over the last year, suggesting a desire to link concurrent phenomena in the language of mutuality, of ongoing social illness or catalytic metastasis. It is also the case that in times when mundane reality faces the pressure of social contradiction as well as the hot breath of literal violence, metaphor becomes a way of containing the incommensurable and of expressing the inexpressible and the incomplete. Understandably this particular set of metaphors works in more direct ways. For example, they operate to delink these phenomena of racism and the pandemic from a state-sponsored narrative of pure happenstance or randomness, which renders them as opportunistic infections instead of chronic illnesses. Historians, however, are likely to flinch at this casual blending of phenomena given their awareness of a history in which race and cultural differences are ever framed in terms of infections, disease and contagion. A notable example of this would be how Chinese immigrants were linked to the “miasmic theory” of disease or germ transmission in the nineteenth century and so everything from smallpox to “Mongolian leprosy” to cholera and typhus became reasons to restrict immigration from Asian countries as the country would in 1924. Of course, that particular reading of race and disease has not left us, indeed it was barely dormant before being violently relaunched by the antiChina, anti-immigrant virus of Trumpism. It is this latter reawakening of the deployment of the two phenomena that should alert those of us in/around Black Studies that it is more than a predictable and exhausted collusion of symbols and metaphors. They are enduring elements in the arsenal of moral panic and racial power. This poetic parallel is worth some attention, though, not for what it assumes but for what it can do. Such easy synthesis can do more than just allow narratives to authorize themselves around tropes of illness, foreignness and of cultural influence framed as moral contagion—as mentioned above, these associations are historically quite familiar. Yet even if we now blend racism and disease in putatively anti-racist ways, such as to point out what has long been chronic about white supremacism and, for example, how it and healthcare are no strange bedfellows, the ease with which we do so depends on the former legacy of rendering race and infection equivalent. But that’s a minor quibble. Far more troublesome is how powerful the poetic parallel can be in mobilizing a depleted and ravaged body to generate enthusiastic if not cathartic response. In other words, far more dangerous is the promise of a cure. Let me be extremely clear before being suspected of Coronavirus denialism or of being an anti-vaxxer. It’s the other side of the parallel I’m thinking about here—the par","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"1 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46101413","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}
BLACK SCHOLARPub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1929044
A. B. Adwetewa-Badu
{"title":"1919","authors":"A. B. Adwetewa-Badu","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1929044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1929044","url":null,"abstract":"Eve L. Ewing, a professor of sociology at University of Chicago, is an academic, a comic book writer, and a poet. Her first collection of poetry, Electric Arches, was a whimsical and dynamic foray into Black life: aliens abound, descending upon neighborhoods filled with Black youth asking questions of their origins; basketball players reimagined as poetic narrators; there is a manifesto for shea butter; and Erykah Badu appears in an epigraph. Yet, with 1919, Ewing shows an increased depth with her poetry. Divided into three sections titled “Before,” “What Happened,” and “After,” Ewing presents Black life in Chicago before, during, and after the 1919 race riots. Taking as her starting point a report from 1922 written by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relation and a Race Riot, Ewing presents a case study of Black life as it was experienced and as it was documented. Ewing’s academic work is repurposed in this wellresearched poetry collection. The intertextuality of each poem opens a space for deep engagement with the archive and its absences, ultimately enabling Ewing to develop her own critical fabulations of the time period. “Sightseers,” from the second section, begins with an epigraph from the 1922 report. In the first stanza, the speaker states","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"80 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43134956","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}
BLACK SCHOLARPub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1932372
L. Chude-Sokei
{"title":"A Conversation with Cover Artist Abu Qadim Haqq","authors":"L. Chude-Sokei","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1932372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1932372","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"72 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48365691","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}
BLACK SCHOLARPub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1929042
P. J. Edwards
{"title":"Book Review: Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women; Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance; Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora","authors":"P. J. Edwards","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1929042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1929042","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"74 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41344783","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}
BLACK SCHOLARPub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1929043
Channon S. Miller
{"title":"A Black Women’s History of the United States","authors":"Channon S. Miller","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1929043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1929043","url":null,"abstract":"In A Black Women’s History of the United States, Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross provide readers a telling of the nation’s history by way of the writings, testimonies, and cultural expressions of Black women——as well as the often buried and fragmented traces of their voices in the archives. This retelling is, as described by the authors, a “richly textured portrait” (xi). It sits within a gallery comprised of works like Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Sharon Harley’s The Afro-American Woman, Paula Giddings’ When and Where I Enter, Darlene Clark-Hine’s Hine Sight, and Deborah Gray White’s Too Heavy a Load —a formative body of literature that chronicles Black women’s history through time and across place. The present work’s engravings not only reintroduce and integrate the herstories gathered by the existing literature, but its brushstrokes also broaden and thicken the historiography. This book was released shortly after the conclusion of 2019. Months before, in August, Black communities and public institutions commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of the disembarkment of Jamestown, Virginia’s first human cargo—“20. and odd Negroes” from West Central Africa. 1619 has become widely regarded as the year the United States and its dependency on Black slavery was established. The year and the African peoples forced to tend to the soil of the nascent country also bore African America. Yet, distinctly, Berry and Gross locate the inception of Black women’s lineages in America a century earlier. These foregrounding women were the daughters of “African male explorers and indigenous, Spanish, or Mexican women,” traversing present-day Southwest America in the mid to late 1500s (12). Moreover, they were free. “The first Black women who stepped foot onto what we consider American soil,” Chapter 1 asserts, “were not enslaved” (10). Although most go unnamed, documents such as the travel journals and ship registers of Spanish and Portuguese explorers, allude to the presence of Black women within their expedition parties. As these crews traversed and invaded indigenous occupied land in search of riches, trade routes, and territory, Black women acted as “interpreters, explorers, and servants” (11, 15). Coupled with long periods without water, physical exhaustion, volatile cultural clashes, and death—they often endured sexual assault at the hands of the men they traveled with.","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"83 - 86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42453110","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}
BLACK SCHOLARPub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1932383
J. Sexton
{"title":"Antidoting","authors":"J. Sexton","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1932383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1932383","url":null,"abstract":"the main effects? The issue is explored in the homeopathic literature and hypersensitivity in patients discussed. An outline of a method for antidoting the bad effects of overdosing is presented with two case examples.","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"5 - 24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45640103","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}
BLACK SCHOLARPub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1932379
M. Krishnan, Christopher E. W. Ouma, Laura Chrisman, M. Ngugi
{"title":"What Was African Fiction?","authors":"M. Krishnan, Christopher E. W. Ouma, Laura Chrisman, M. Ngugi","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1932379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1932379","url":null,"abstract":"Mukoma Wa Ngugi was born in 1971 in Evanston, Illinois, and grew up in Kenya. He may be the son of worldrenowned and iconic African writer Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o, but in his own right has made a huge impact as both writer and scholar. For example, in 2013,New Africanmagazine named him one of the 100 most Influential Africans. He is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University and the author of the novels Mrs. Shaw, Black Star Nairobi, Nairobi Heat, and two books of poetry, Logotherapy and Hurling Words at Consciousness. His most recent work of fiction, Unbury Our Dead with Song, is forthcoming from Cassava Republic Press. The Rise of the African Novel is his first extended work of literary scholarship and criticism, but it comes from a long-standing participation in the literary life of the continent and its diaspora. For example, he is a member of the African Literature Association’s Executive Council, and the cofounder of the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature. A former co-editor of the open access, pan-African site Pambazuka News he’s also been a political columnist for the BBC’s Focus on Africa Magazine. His literary and public work has also appeared in numerous international venues including, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, Ebony.com, Chimurenga, Los Angeles Times, The LA Review of Books, The South African Labour Bulletin, Wasafiri, Africa is a Country among many others. He has been a guest on Democracy Now, NPR, Al Jazeera, and the BBC World Service amongst others. We thank him for his patience as we organized this roundtable and thank our esteemed guests for responding to his important work.","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"39 - 71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46136998","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}
BLACK SCHOLARPub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1929036
Amy O. Yeboah
{"title":"Howard University & the Challenge of the Black University","authors":"Amy O. Yeboah","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1929036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1929036","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"25 - 38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41833955","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}
BLACK SCHOLARPub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1889887
L. Paravisini-Gebert
{"title":"Caribbean Archipelagos and Mainlands","authors":"L. Paravisini-Gebert","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1889887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1889887","url":null,"abstract":"I n the Caribbean region, an archipelago that Edouard Glissant once described as “fissured by histories,” resilience has been wrought out of the ebb and flow of intellectual and physical currents that have moved peoples and ideas across the sea, its islands, and continental shores. Given its colonial foundations and postcolonial vicissitudes, Caribbean reality has always been protean, hybrid, mercurial—a fluid ecology in endless dynamic transformation—yet one rooted in a geographic environment and in socioeconomic configurations determined by shared historical markers: a fateful European encounter, the Middle Passage and the triangular Atlantic trade, slavery, the plantation, a troublesome economic dependence on tourism, the slow violence of environmental mismanagement, never-ending cycles of diasporan departures and returns. For the nations sharing the archipelago, where no place or person is ever very distant from the sea, resilience—“the magnitude of shock the system can absorb and remain within a given state ... and the degree to which the system can build capacity for learning and adaptation”—has been elusive and contested, particularly now as the region faces the threats that come from rapidly changing environmental conditions that are the result of climate change. For the region, the threat of climate change —the product of global conditions it has had little role in producing—manifests itself in three very specific and immediate forms: rising sea levels, looming biodiversity losses, and an increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. These threats challenge our understanding of the meaning of resilience, raising questions about “the magnitude of shock” our ecologies and populations can absorb and survive, and the degree to which they can continue to adapt and thrive in rapidly changing circumstances. These circumstances deeply exacerbate the archipelago’s already serious challenges, the product of centuries of exploitative extractivist colonial practices that assessed the region’s natural and human resources solely in terms of their value as commodities for production and exportation. RobNixon, in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), has offered us a guide to understanding how the slow violence perpetrated on Caribbean islands as “resource extraction nations”—a violence he defines as one that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”— has compromised the region’s environmental health and, by definition, its capacity for rebounding. In the discourse of Caribbean resilience, Haiti has emerged as a symbol of a nation in environmental crisis, an ecological revenant warning of the direst consequences facing Caribbean nations not engaging in a concerted effort to reverse ecological degradation and biodiversity collapse. The concern is not misplaced, as in spaces as","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"51 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00064246.2021.1889887","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42541502","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}
BLACK SCHOLARPub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1889883
Angela Davis
{"title":"Reflections on Haiti","authors":"Angela Davis","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1889883","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1889883","url":null,"abstract":"Haiti remains the most significant site of historical freedom struggles in the Western Hemisphere. It is the location not only of the greatest slave rebellion in the Americas, but also of the only historical declaration of democracy untainted by racism. For many of us, Haiti has always served as an important marker of anti-imperialist solidarity. To be an active supporter of justice and democracy in the global arena has involved standing in solidarity with the Haitian people. As long as I have been politically conscious, I have felt a strong kinship with the Haitian people and their struggles against state repression. But precisely because of the US-supported reign of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier—and later his son —and the unleashing of the feared Tonton Macoutes on progressive individuals and movements, those of us who participated in international solidarity efforts with the Haitian resistance were effectively barred from visiting the country. Therefore, when I was invitedme to participate in the 2016 conference of the Caribbean Studies Association in Haiti, I welcomed this opportunity not only to be able to appreciate the scholarly, cultural, and activist contributions of the many participants in the conference, but also to fulfill a very old dream of touching the ground where Black people proclaimed the possibility of life after slavery, of freedom and democracy untarnished by racism. I will never forget that the most welcoming person I met during my very first trip to Paris, at the age of 18, was a young Haitian man, who, like myself, was hanging out in the cafés on Boulevard St. Michel. He did not seem to be particularly bothered by my halting French, which I very much needed to improve since I had recently made the decision to major in French literature. I remain thankful to him not only for helping me with my spoken French but also for alerting me by his very presence in Paris that I could not in good conscience study French literature in isolation from an awareness of the devastation produced in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands by the French colonial empire. This encounter helped me to realize that in order to create framework encouraging a deeper understanding of writers I loved like Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Zola, Proust, and Aragon, I would have to read Senghor, Cesaire, and—at the height of the Algerian Revolution—Frantz Fanon. It was in the context of seeking out Black francophone literature that I encountered the work of the Haitian writer Jacques Roumain and as soon as I began to readGouveneurs de la Rosée, I understood that the reverberations of my decision to study French Literature were much more far-reaching than I had realized at the time. I remember being fascinated by the beauty of Roumain’s language and imagery: “Nous ne savons pas encore que nous sommes une force, une seule force: tous les habitants, tous les nègres des plaines et des mornes réunis” (We do not yet know that we are a powerful force","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"51 1","pages":"8 - 10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00064246.2021.1889883","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47868850","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}