Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 198-202
Author(s):  
Hannah Durkin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Film History ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Black Female ◽  
American Film ◽  
Black Arts

The conclusion summarizes the book’s key arguments. It reflects on the significance of Baker and Dunham’s memoirs and films in revealing the limitations of their roles as midcentury Black women artists and also their authorship despite such restrictions and their important contributions to literature and cinema. Baker and Dunham’s memoirs show how they each used dance to engage self-reflexively with pseudo-ethnographic tropes and to contest dehumanizing attitudes to Black Atlantic cultures and identities. Such texts reveal the origins of their antiracist philosophies and call attention to their international contributions to the civil rights and Black Arts movements. Equally, their screen careers expand our understanding of African American film history by revealing key moments of early Black female stardom and authorship beyond the realm of Hollywood.

“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.”

The Postblack Ethos in “Texts Out of Time”: Rosa Parks and the African American Freedom Struggle in Cultural Memory

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Bunch Davis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
African American Identity ◽  
The 1960S

This book challenges the cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle era that hinges on a master narrative focused on the “heroic period” of the Civil Rights Movement. It argues that this narrative limits the representation of African American identity within the Civil Rights Movement to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest leadership in the segregated South and casts Malcolm X's advocacy of black nationalism and the ensuing Black Power/Arts Movement as undermining civil rights advances. Through an analysis of five case studies of African American identity staged in plays between 1959 and 1969, the book instead offers representations that engage, critique, and revise racial uplift ideology and reimagine the Black Arts Movement's sometimes proscriptive notions of black authenticity as a condition of black identity and cultural production. It also posits a postblack ethos as the means by which these representations construct their counternarratives to cultural memory and broadens narrow constructions of African American identity shaping racial discourse in the U.S. public sphere of the 1960s.

The “Batty” Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body

Hypatia ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 87-105
Author(s):  
Janell Hobson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Feminist Disability Theory

I assess representations of black women's derrieres, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, I revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the “unmirrored” black female body.

Black and More than Black

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Individual

This book analyzes twenty-first century African American fiction through the proliferation of post categories that arose in the new millennium. These post categories—post-black, post-racialism, post-Soul—articulate a shift away from the racial aesthetics associated with the Black Arts Movement and argue for the individual agency of Black artists over the meaning of racial identity in their work. Analyzing key works by Colson Whitehead, Alice Randall, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paul Beatty, Jesmyn Ward, and Kiese Laymon, this book argues that twenty-first century African American fiction highlights the push and pull between claims of post-civil rights progress and the recognition of the entrenchment of structural racism. The book contextualizes this shift through the rise of, and presidency of, Barack Obama and the revision of Du Boisian double consciousness. It examines Obama through an analysis of the discourse surrounding his rise, Obama’s own writings, and his appearance as a character. The book concludes that while the claims of progress associated with Barack Obama’s presidency and the post era categories to which it was connected were overly optimistic, they represent a major shift towards an individualistic conception of racial identity that continues to resist claims of responsibility imposed on Black artists.

The African American Female Elite: The Early History of African American Women in the Seven Sister Colleges, 1880–1960

1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 718-757 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Perkins
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
African American Female ◽  
American Women ◽  
University Archives ◽  
Successful Women

The Seven Sister colleges are well known for producing some of the nation's most successful women. At the turn of the century, they were recognized as the leading institutions for elite White women. In this article, Linda Perkins outlines the historical experiences of African American women attending the Seven Sister colleges from the institutions' founding to the civil rights era of the 1960s, a period during which approximately five hundred Black women graduated from these institutions. Through an exploration of university archives, alumni bulletins, and oral interviews with alumnae, Perkins shows that the Seven Sister colleges were not a monolithic entity: some admitted African American women as far back as the turn of the century, while others grudgingly, and only under great pressure, admitted them decades later. Perkins illustrates how the Seven Sister colleges mirrored the views of the larger society concerning race, and how issues of discrimination in admissions, housing, and financial aid in these institutions were influenced by, and had an influence on, the overall African American struggle for full participatory citizenship.

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.

The 2008 Election, Black Women’s Politics, and the Long Civil Rights Movement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Women's Power ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
2008 Election ◽  
Women's Politics

This chapter uncovers the significance of African American women's high voter turnout in the 2008 election. It argues that black women's power as voters in 2008 originates in their political activism in the first half of the twentieth century. Here the chapter offers a major new synthesis of African American women's politics by arguing that their efforts evolved from the “politics of association” (1900–1920) to the “politics of citizenship” (1920–30) to the “politics of community” (1930–40) to the “politics of protest” (1940–50). Barack Obama's victory, then, is in part the result of long-term efforts by black women to undo the damage inflicted by disfranchisement more than a century ago.

Prefiguring Postblackness

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Bunch Davis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Arts

This book explores the tensions between cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle and representations of African American identity staged in five plays between 1959 and 1969 during the civil rights era. Through close readings of the plays, their popular and African American print media reviews, and the cultural context in which they were produced, the book shows how these representations complicate narrow ideas of blackness, which often limit the freedom struggle era to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest and cast Malcolm X's black nationalism as undermining the Civil Rights Movement's advances. These five plays strategically revise the rhetoric, representations, ideologies, and iconography of the African American freedom struggle, subverting its dominant narrative. This revision critiques racial uplift ideology's tenets of civic and moral virtue as a condition of African American full citizenship. The dramas also reimagine the Black Arts Movement's restrictive notions of black authenticity as a condition of racial identity, and their staged representations construct a counter-narrative to cultural memory of the freedom struggle during that very era. In their use of a “postblack ethos” to enact African American subjectivity, the plays envision black identity beyond the quest for freedom, anticipating what blackness might look like when it moves beyond the struggle. Finally, the book discusses recent revivals, showing how these 1960s plays shape dimensions of modern drama well beyond the decade of their creation.

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