“All That You Can’t Leave Behind”

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (S1) ◽  
pp. 255-278
Author(s):  
Daphne A. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Female ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Level ◽  
Original Title ◽  
Early Twenty

Abstract As numerous scholars have shown, Hurricane Katrina exacerbated the already-ongoing precarity of African American communities in New Orleans. The crisis demanded a reckoning with the afterlives of slavery at the national and global level. This article focuses on the work of Black women popular music artists whose early twenty-first century recordings and stirring performances addressed the traumas, the challenges, and the spectacular subjugation of Black women who fell victim to brutal disenfranchisement in the midst of the disaster. Beyonce’s B-Day album and Mary J. Blige’s history-making Katrina telethon performance are central to this discussion. The original title of this article was “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe.”

ABC’s Scandal and Black Women’s Fandom

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen J. Warner
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Prime Time ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
Early Twenty

This chapter analyzes the ways Black women fans have reacted to not being visible in the dominant spaces of fandom. It offers the fandom of ABC's Scandal—a program with Black women in central positions both behind and in front of the camera—as a primary example of the ways Black women fan communities work toward reinscription. Premiering on ABC in April 2012, the prime-time dramatic series produced by Grey's Anatomy showrunner Shonda Rhimes and starring African American actress Kerry Washington became a literal embodiment of the type of labor Black women practice in fan spaces. In this case, Black female fans have transformed the central Black lead, canonically drawn as normative and racially neutral, into a culturally specific Black character. This is commonplace labor for non-White fans—particularly in the early-twenty-first-century's so-called postrace moment.

“I Just Wanted a World That Looked Like the One I Know”

2018 ◽  
pp. 83-107
Author(s):  
Ralina L. Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Black Female ◽  
First Century ◽  
Strategic Ambiguity ◽  
The Press ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The One

Chapter 3 examines showrunner Shonda Rhimes’ twenty-first century Black respectability politics through the form of strategic ambiguity. Joseph traces Rhimes’ performance of strategic ambiguity first in the pre-Obama era when she stuck to a script of colorblindness, and a second in the #BlackLivesMatter moment when she called out racialized sexism and redefined Black female respectability. In the shift from the pre-Obama era to the #BlackLivesMatter era, this chapter asks: how did Rhimes’ careful negotiation of the press demonstrate that, in the former moment, to be a respectable Black woman was to perform strategic ambiguity, or not speak frankly about race, while in the latter, respectable Black women could and must engage in racialized self-expression, and redefine the bounds of respectability?

“Katrina is the Mother We Will Remember Until the Next Mother”

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-90
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Social ◽  
Long Division

This chapter analyzes representations of Hurricane Katrina in African American literature to argue that the storm served to illustrate the entrenchment of structural racism and the importance of a specifically racialized tradition in African American literature. Adopting the theoretical framework of “slow violence,” the chapter analyzes two novels which depict both the storm and its aftermath: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and Kiese Laymon’sLong Division (2013). In the context of the early twenty-first century, these representations of Katrina do not displace the social advancements of African Americans but instead force recognition of the incompleteness not only of specific political battles but also of ongoing race, gender, and class-based narratives, thereby questioning the optimism of a rhetoric of post-Blackness. In particular, the novels establish continuity between Civil Rights Era traumas and struggles and Hurricane Katrina to push against a rhetoric focused on the transcendence of the past.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne Pitre Soileau
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
The Internet ◽  
White Children ◽  
Play Elements ◽  
Jump Rope ◽  
South Louisiana ◽  
Changing Society

This chapter covers the timeline from 1960 when New Orleans integrated its public schools, to 2011, the age of computers and the Internet. Integration had an immediate impact on children and their folklore – African American and white children began to communicate on the playground, sharing chants, jokes, jump rope rhymes, taunts, teases, and stories. Through the next forty-four years, schoolchildren of South Louisiana were able to conserve much traditional schoolyard lore while adapting to tremendous social and material changes and incorporating into play elements from media, computers, smartphones, and the Internet. As time passed African American vernacular became trendy among teenage whites. Black popular music became the music of choice for many worldwide. This is a story about how children, African American and “other” have learned to fit play into their rapidly changing society.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Tyrone McKinley Freeman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
First Century ◽  
Voluntary Action ◽  
American Life ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
Twenty First Century

The conclusion brings together the lessons and insights provided by examining Walker’s philanthropic life. After summarizing the origins, evolution, and character of Madam Walker’s gospel of giving, it underscores the historical importance of black women’s philanthropy in undermining and resisting Jim Crow and its enduring role in ultimately dismantling the institution. Further, it suggests an approach to theorizing black women’s generosity as being based on five characteristics: proximity, “resourcefull-ness,” collaboration, incrementalism, and joy. It also affirms philanthropy as a powerful interpretive and analytical lens through which to examine African American life in general and black women in particular. It urges collaboration between scholars interested in philanthropy and black women to mutually strengthen intellectual inquiry and understanding of who counts as a philanthropist and what counts as philanthropic giving. It contends that Walker’s gospel of giving is more accessible as a model of generosity than the prevailing examples offered by today’s wealthiest 1 percent. It is certainly the direct inheritance of African Americans today, but relevant to all Americans, regardless of race, class or gender, interested in taking voluntary action in the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals When Cars Become Churches: Jesmyn Ward's Disenchanted America. An Interview

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA HARTNELL
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
South African ◽  
American Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Us South ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Us

This interview with Jesmyn Ward, conducted in November 2013, takes as its starting point the publication of her memoir, Men We Reaped. It explores the role of her writing in the context of Hurricane Katrina, the US South, African American culture and identity, and new trends in twenty-first-century US writing.

scholarly journals Differences in post-disaster mental health among Vietnamese and African Americans living in adjacent urban communities flooded by Katrina

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. e0255303
Author(s):  
Mengxi Zhang ◽  
Mark VanLandingham ◽  
Yoon Soo Park ◽  
Philip Anglewicz ◽  
David M. Abramson
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Housing Stock ◽  
Short Form ◽  
Vietnamese Americans ◽  
Disaster Mental Health ◽  
Post Disaster

Some communities recover more quickly after a disaster than others. Some differentials in recovery are explained by variation in the level of disaster-related community damage and differences in pre-disaster community characteristics, e.g., the quality of housing stock. But distinct communities that are similar on the above characteristics may experience different recovery trajectories, and, if so, these different trajectories must be due to more subtle differences among them. Our principal objective is to assess short-term and long-term post-disaster mental health for Vietnamese and African Americans living in two adjacent communities in eastern New Orleans that were similarly flooded by Hurricane Katrina. We employ data from two population-based cohort studies that include a sample of African American adults (the Gulf Coast Child and Family Health [GCAFH study]) and a sample of Vietnamese American adults (Katrina Impacts on Vietnamese Americans [KATIVA NOLA study]) living in adjacent neighborhoods in eastern New Orleans who were assessed near the second and thirteenth anniversaries of the disaster. Using the 12-Item Short Form Survey (SF-12) as the basis of our outcome measure, we find in multivariate analysis a significant advantage in post-disaster mental health for Vietnamese Americans over their African American counterparts at the two-year mark, but that this advantage had disappeared by the thirteenth anniversary of the Katrina disaster.

Negro Heroines

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-76
Author(s):  
Khary Oronde Polk
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Yellow Fever ◽  
Equal Treatment ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
Cuban American ◽  
Women Volunteers ◽  
The Law

This chapter examines the role Black women volunteers played as immune nurses in the Spanish-Cuban-American War. To enlist black women’s care labor in the Cuban conflict, army physicians relied on the myth of the plantation nurse, a figure whose biological and thus racial immunity from yellow fever recalled forms of gendered subordination and sacrifice ritualized in U.S. slavery. Black leaders like Namahyoka Curtis helped to recruit immune nurses in New Orleans in the hope that their performances of patriotic service would secure greater citizenship rights for the greater African American community. The experiences of the nurses before, during, and after the conflict offer a counter historiography of the war, and shows how Black women self-consciously presented themselves as matrons of respectability whose labor and sacrifice entitled them to fair and equal treatment under the law.

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