bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“To Get to Boeing, We First Had to Take on the Union”
Authors: Cloud Dana L.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter begins with a review of the state of labor unions in the United States. Unionization rates in the United States declined steadily from the late 1940s (when unions represented 36 percent of U.S. workers) until the present economic recession (12.4 percent). Favorability ratings of labor unions fell sharply between 2007 and 2010—years of heightened economic crisis—to an all-time low of 42 percent. There are many factors in this decline, including the postwar pact labor leaders made with American business, the McCarthyist purge from unions of the most progressive activists during the Cold War, and a relentless employers' offensive dating from the 1970s that included rampant union busting alongside the off-loading, subcontracting, and outsourcing of previously unionized work. The chapter then sets out the book's purpose, which is to situate the struggle at Boeing inside broader narrative frames, one about the history of unions and movements for union democracy, and the other about the history of the Boeing Company and its unions in particular. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Combating Mountaintop Removal
Authors: McNeil Bryan T.
Published: May 2017

Drawing on powerful personal testimonies of the hazards of mountaintop removal in southern West Virginia, this book critically examines the fierce conflicts over this violent and increasingly prevalent form of strip mining. Focusing on the grassroots activist organization Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW), the book reveals a turn away from once-strong traditional labor unions and the emergence of community-based activist organizations. By framing social and moral arguments in terms of the environment, these innovative hybrid movements take advantage of environmentalism's higher profile in contemporary politics. In investigating the local effects of globalization and global economics, the book tracks the profound reimagining of social and personal ideas such as identity, history, and landscape and considers their roles in organizing an agenda for progressive community activism.
Fighting Back … Again
Authors: McNeil Bryan T.
Published: May 2017

This chapter introduces Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW) as an organization and describes its formation, organization and growth over the first five to seven years of its existence. The outrage that greeted mountaintop removal coal mining in the late 1990s was by no means new to the Appalachian region. Time and again conditions of social relations and political and economic domination have given rise to reform movements. Author Stephen Fisher argues that for an enduring social movement to achieve substantive change in Appalachia, it must transcend single issues in ongoing, democratic, membership-driven organizations. He cited groups like Save Our Cumberland Mountains in Tennessee, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition as existing examples of the activism he described.
What Are We Fighting For?
Authors: McNeil Bryan T.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses how knowledge of the mountains and getting along in them has taken on renewed importance with the advance of mountaintop removal coal mining and restructuring in the coal industry. For generations, living in the mountains and mining the coal beneath them combined to become the distinctive markers of life in the Appalachian coalfields. The relentless expansion of mountaintop removal mining across the landscape since the late 1980s disrupted this symbiotic relationship between life inside and outside the mines. The spread of mountaintop removal brought a dilemma to dinner tables and living rooms across the region: are they coal people or mountain people? For the first time, many people felt compelled to choose because the two sources of identity, intertwined for so long, now seemed to be in stark opposition.
Strained Solidarities
Authors: McNeil Bryan T.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the dramatic changes within the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)—once the most powerful force in American organized labor. By the end of the twentieth century, the UMWA seemed incapable of organizing nonunion mines, even in the region that once provided its strongest support. Over its lifetime, the UMWA has moved through three distinct eras: confrontational organizing, labor brokerage, and crisis management. John L. Lewis' legacy as union president transformed the union from a fractured organizing body to a streamlined labor broker, negotiating contracts and winning the best possible wages and benefits. However, in Coal River, the community and environmental activism of the late 1990s emerged as a challenge to the leadership of the UMWA, this time demanding a strong stance against mountaintop removal.
The Formation of Gay and Trans Identities
Authors: Ramirez-Valles Jesus
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes how compañeros came to call themselves gay or transgender. As with the Latino label, not all the activists refer to themselves as gay or transgender. Some call themselves queer, while others refer to themselves as either drag queens, women, or simply use female pronouns when talking about themselves. The life histories of these activists show that the adoption and construction of a gay and transgender identity is largely a sociocultural process in which peers, community organizations, and other socializing venues, such as bars and neighborhoods, play a central function. These activists adopt identities as gay or bisexual men and transgender as they meet compañeros: peers who share their experiences, mentor them, and support them to overcome the internalized stigma.
The Road of Compañeros
Authors: Ramirez-Valles Jesus
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter argues that compañerismo is a quality of a type of relationship created through participation in a social-movement organization or a small group that has come together, explicitly or implicitly, for a common cause and against an amorphous yet real enemy. It is a quality that emerges from ties of solidarity among the socially marginalized. This form of relating to others is a cultural code—hence, difficult to decipher to the outsider. In this form of relationship and coexistence rests the possibility for resistance and creative power. Indeed, as a concept, compañeros is more than a source of support and comfort; it can also be a creative force through which one resists assimilation, accommodation, racism, and homophobia. It also enables one to forge alternative ways of being.
What Trumped?
Authors: Malveaux Julianne
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines whether there was one factor that put Obama in office. There were pivotal points along the way to the Obama victory when critical factors—race, class, gender, and generation—impacted the outcome of the election. But in reviewing the factors that were cited and also relevant, it is argued that there was “no trump” in the outcome of the election. In other words, the election of Barack Obama represented a conflation of forces, where the conventional wisdom around matters of race, class, gender, culture, generation, and the economy could only partially explain the Obama victory. Thus no factor dominated, and every factor mattered, as this historic victory unfolded.
Lest We Forget
Authors: Walker Alice
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents Alice Walker's reflections on the America of her youth compared to the promise of the campaign, which reflects the view of many older African Americans who never expected to see the day a Black man would occupy the White House. She says that she is a supporter of Obama because she believes that he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. She expresses deep sadness that many of her feminist white women friends cannot see him and what he stands for. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans—black, white, yellow, red, and brown—choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to her.
The New Negro in African American Politics
Authors: Williams Ronald
Published: May 2017

This chapter raises the question of how Barack Obama, an African American, was able to achieve the support of American whites, enough to win not only his party's nomination, but also ultimately the presidential election by a landslide. It argues that Obama's success in American politics is rooted primarily in his “acceptability” as an African American racial representative in the eyes of American whites. By acceptable to American whites, the point here is that Obama was able to achieve his status as racial representative primarily because of categorical rejection, exclusion, and repression of black leaders with agendas that were understood to be in any way radical or as posing a threat to the existing racial arrangement. Obama was the modern-day representative Negro in that he represented black people most eloquently and elegantly, and because he was the race's great opportunity to re-present itself in the court of racist public opinion.
Carmen Pursifull
Authors: Zimmerman Marc
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at Carmen Pursifull, who, like many of the writers of the first half of the twentieth century, were distanced from the radical politics of community ideologues and dreamers. Intense, erotic, ironic, sometimes embarrassingly direct, flat, uneven, at times evocative and haunting, Pursifull's poetry portrays the full range of her life. Since 1975, Pursifull has published widely in Illinois, Midwestern, and national publications, including a few poems in the literary magazine of the University of Illinois' La Casa Cultura Latina—the campus' Latino student center, of which she became a kind of local poet laureate and matriarch. In 1982, she also self-published the largest volume of poetry by any Illinois Puerto Rican poet, Carmen by Moonlight. Since then, she has added several small volumes to her published opus and has worked on other texts, including a novel.
Scenes and Scenarios
Authors: Mitchell Koritha
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that blacks living during lynching's height accurately read the discourses and practices of their historical moment, and their cultural artifacts reflect their insights. Namely, the plays by black dramatists contain specific characterizations of the nature of lynching, and they inspire black community practices that enable African Americans to continue to interpret their surroundings accurately. In an environment where their extermination was said to make the nation safe, African Americans perceived the truth behind the façade—that lynching was really master/piece theater, designed to reinforce racial hierarchy. African American artists therefore offered scripts that encouraged their communities to continue to rehearse an understanding of themselves as full citizens.
Black Internationalist Feminism
Authors: Higashida Cheryl
Published: May 2017

This book examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left's “nationalist internationalism,” which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat. Exploring a diverse range of plays, novels, essays, poetry, and reportage, the book shows how Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou worked within and against established literary forms to demonstrate that nationalist internationalism was linked to struggles against heterosexism and patriarchy. In examining writing by Black Left women from 1945 to 1995, this book contributes to recent efforts to rehistoricize the Old Left, Civil Rights, Black Power, and second-wave Black women's movements.
Audre Lorde Revisited
Authors: Higashida Cheryl
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that Audre Lorde's essays and poetry from the 1980s develop an overlooked yet significant strand of second-wave Black feminism that reveals continuities with postwar anticolonial internationalism. Lorde's poetry and prose from the mid-1980s on, after the invasion of Grenada, reveal that independent Black nationhood becomes an important political goal for her, one not yet superseded by “free” mobility or exilic diasporic communities. Moreover, it is in Lorde's post-invasion prose and poetry that she most explicitly and consistently explores a nationalist internationalism, positing that African Americans are morally and politically bound to support Third World and indigenous struggles for national sovereignty and that anticolonial struggles illuminate and impact African Americans' situation in the United States as an oppressed people.
Conceptualizing Current Discourses and Writing New Ones
Authors: Jackson Ronald L. , Balaji Murali
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to examine and deconstruct the history and politics of cultured masculinities within the contexts of the cultures from which they have developed. It examines masculinity through the politics of identity, the cultural definitions of masculinity across the globe, and how masculinity is interpreted and practiced through discourse. The book follows three major themes: defining masculinity in the global sphere; mediated representations of masculinity; and the cultural practice of masculinity as both a local and global phenomenon. Drawing from diverse disciplines, the book attempts to answer the question: What makes a man who he is within his culture? An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Postcolonial Masculinity and Commodity Culture in Kenya
Authors: Nyawalo Mich
Published: May 2017

The chapter conducts a sociopolitical analysis of the various symbols of masculinity and political power that have been internalized within Kenyan society by asking the following questions: How have conceptions of masculinity and power been constructed in today's Kenyan society and how (or why) have they “evolved” from their traditional manifestations? What role does the Kenyan and Western media play in constructing new perceptions of manhood and power? And finally, how do these new perceptions participate in the autopoietic economic world system to which Kenya belongs? The chapter answers these questions by first focusing on the multiple facets and definitions of power (both at the macro and micro level) that are manifested in neocolonial societies, before analyzing the ways in which they are represented in the Kenyan media and internalized by the society at large.
3. “There Are Objections to Black and White, but One Must Be Chosen”
Authors: Grivno Max
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores farmers' strategies for recruiting and disciplining a diverse workforce of slaves, free blacks, and hired whites. Regardless of the composition of their workforces, landowners labored under certain imperatives: they needed to eliminate or at least trim the cost of supporting their workers' dependent kin and to rid themselves of surplus hands during slower seasons while guaranteeing a workforce adequate for harvesting wheat. To balance these competing imperatives, employers of free labor winnowed workers they perceived as unproductive from their rolls and crafted economic and legal stratagems to bring hired farmhands to heel. For their part, slave owners grafted the most attractive elements of free labor onto the peculiar institution, such as cash payments and promises of freedom. Thus, when viewed from the perspective of northern Maryland's farmers and planters, the distinction between slavery and free labor appears murky: the seasonal rhythms of wheat production shaped both.
Conclusion
Authors: Grivno Max
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter examines the interplay among the multiple boundaries between slavery and freedom. Northern Marylanders lived on slavery's tattered margin, a circumstance that profoundly influenced how workers experienced both slavery and free labor. Not all of the forces shaping the fault lines were local. Northern Maryland was part of a slaveholding state whose legal and political apparatuses were forged by and for Chesapeake planters. Moreover, residents of the area were inextricably linked to the vibrant slave societies developing along the South's cotton frontier. The tangled intersection where labor systems collided and where local and national forces converged was the setting where the slavery–free labor boundary emerged.
Contredanse and Caribbean Bodies
Authors: Daniel Yvonne
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the varied meanings attached to social dance, with particular emphasis on contredanse-derived practices in the Caribbean islands. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2005–2006, it considers how Caribbean bodies dance sovereignty in front of world powers and the ways that they affirm island and regional integrity in the nonverbal communication of dance performance. After providing an overview of the historical patterns of Caribbean set dancing and the history of the Caribbean from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the chapter turns to practices such as Cuban contradanza and tumba francesa, Puerto rican contradanza and los seises, and Dominican sarandunga. It then discusses dance movement and dance categories; King and Queen pageantry that typically accompanies quadrille practices; and Queen performance. The chapter suggests that historical contredanse forms represent important values that have influenced past and present performers.
Epilogue: Long Shadows
Authors: Lause Mark A.
Published: May 2017

This epilogue examines the lineages of the secret society tradition in America. The lineages of the mid-nineteenth-century American secret societies persisted through the rest of the century and beyond. Certainly, such secret societies—or the idea of them—haunted the closing events of the conflict from Washington to the Rio Grande. Workers and radicals built upon the legacy of groups like the Ourvrier Circle of the Brotherhood of the Union, though they began abandoning secrecy within a generation of the Civil War. Nevertheless, secret societies and conspiracies became an essential feature of the carefully constructed postwar perception that an underlying order had somehow survived the chaos of war.
The Ecology of the Spoken Word
Authors: Uzendoski Michael A. , Calapucha-Tapuy Edith Felicia
Published: May 2017

This book offers the first theoretical and experiential translation of Napo Runa mythology in English. It presents and analyzes lowland Quichua speakers in the Napo province of Ecuador through narratives, songs, curing chants, and other oral performances, so readers may come to understand and appreciate Quichua aesthetic expression. Like many other indigenous peoples, the Napo Runa create meaning through language and other practices that do not correspond to the communicative or social assumptions of Western culture. Language itself is only a part of a communicative world that includes plants, animals, and the landscape. In the Napo Runa worldview, storytellers are shamans who use sound and form to create relationships with other people and beings from the natural and spirit worlds. Guiding readers into Quichua ways of thinking and being—in which language itself is only a part of a communicative world that includes plants, animals, and the landscape—the book weaves exacting translations into an interpretive argument with theoretical implications for understanding oral traditions, literacy, new technologies, and language.
The Iluku Myth, the Sun, and the Anaconda
Authors: Uzendoski Michael A. , Calapucha-Tapuy Edith Felicia
Published: May 2017

This chapter shares the Iluku story and the origin of the sun story, two beginning-times transformations of celestial relations in Upper Amazonian Quichua mythology. In the first story, Iluku, the mother of the twins or culture heroes, is the analogical mother of the Amazonian Quichua community. The sun, by contrast, is a one-eyed anaconda, a being whose presence is analogic of masculine potency and human procreation. The chapter argues that the significance behind these stories is axis mundi relationality and a human condition defined by poetic relations with celestial, ecological, and spirit others. The relatedness among birds, people, rocks, rivers, the wind, the landscape, and various other presences provides people with a deep emotional and social attachment to the ecological world around them. The poetics of these narratives and songs derive from experience of this rich landscape. The stories, as shown through text as well as sound, emphasize the dependence of people on spirit and cosmological others in the larger complexity of life and its varied transformations.
Cosmological Communitas in Contemporary Amazonian Music
Authors: Uzendoski Michael A. , Calapucha-Tapuy Edith Felicia
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes the modern musical genre Runa Paju, a genre that features clever Quichua lyrics, electronic amplification, and eclectic use of instruments and musical styles. It focuses on the social dynamics of the music and its relationship to Quichua cosmology and mythological thought. It argues that, although Runa Paju is a new, modern genre, it follows the same communicative and social assumptions of storytelling as traditional genres. Runa Paju brings into artistic contour the experiences of life's problems and experiences with a larger narrative of cosmological destiny. By targeting the human soul, Runa Paju musicians must “reverse” many of the superficial or apparent relations of modern life and revert destiny to shared cosmology. The threads of Quichua life become newly interwoven into musical pathways of cosmological communitas, a moment of communitywide experience of the circularity and relatedness of all things.
Politics of Practice
Authors: McLeod Jacqueline A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at how Jane Bolin's trajectory in the legal profession suddenly diverged when New York City Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia appointed her to the Domestic Relations Court, making her the nation's first African American woman judge. Even though Bolin was uniquely positioned for this appointment, some dismissed her designation as one of La Guardia's political overtures to the city's black residents at a time when many charged his administration with neglect. However, despite several critics, the fact that Bolin was reappointed to three consecutive 10-year terms by mayors William O'Dwyer, John Lindsay, and Robert Wagner speaks to the quality of her judicial performance.
Epilogue
Authors: McLeod Jacqueline A.
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter explains how women's intrusion into male-dominated professions is usually celebrated, and is often seen as a challenge to male hegemony. As a result, when Jane Bolin scaled the professional ranks of the legal profession to become the nation's first African American woman judge, her appointment was celebrated. The press boldly inscribed this event as a first, not merely because she was a woman but more significantly because she was a black woman, and therefore one who was doubly marginalized in the legal profession. However, for decades, Bolin remained suspended in the headlines of her appointment, divorced from any analysis of who she was or the nature of her professionalism. Ultimately, the book aims to go beyond the signification of headlines that consigned Bolin to vignettes of firsts.
Conclusion
Authors: Armfield Felix L.
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter summarizes the notable events and accomplishments of Eugene Kinckle Jones's life and work, contextualizing them furthermore within a racially charged climate. Jones grew up in a comfortably middle-class family, and was, along with many of his peers, charged with a peculiar responsibility for racial uplift as part of the Talented Tenth. The chapter also considers how Jones and his peers belonged to the group of African Americans whose contributions, had it not been for their race, would have been properly acknowledged long before now. Finally, the chapter reiterates the aims of this volume's overall study in situating Jones as a significant part of black American history long before the civil rights era.
Performing the Real
Authors: Beattie Keith
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes the film career of D. A. Pennebaker. Pennebaker's key word is “interesting.” In numerous interviews, he has referred to events, subjects, and topics that have a certain “attractive” quality, in the sense that they demand attention, as interesting. In this way, he has insisted that a filmmaker “must shoot only what interests you.” His diversity of interesting films encompasses hybrid forms in which components of “documentary” mix with heightened dramatic elements associated with fiction film. These films include Daybreak Express (1953–57), an avant-gardist look at New York City; Jane (1962), a study of the actress Jane Fonda; Depeche Mode 101 (1989), and Only the Strong Survive (2002).
Interview with D.A. Pennebaker
Authors: Beattie Keith
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents an interview with D. A. Pennebaker conducted by Jonathan Marlow in March 2006 during a tribute to Pennebaker at the Documentary Film Institute. Topics covered include his film Daybreak Express as one of the most stunning shorts ever made and at what point he decided to use Ellington as the springboard; the experiences that made him decide to pursue a career as a filmmaker; how he met Robert Drew; how much of his work with Drew, Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles was a matter of being in the right place at the right time; the unconventional editing for Dont Look Back; and the appeal of working with artists during a transitional stage in their careers.
Taking the Long View of Election 2008
Authors: Gidlow Liette
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter examines the political context in which Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin launched their bids for national office, paying attention to the civil rights and feminist movements of the past that has since shaped their 2008 campaigns for president. But all of this history—the centuries of the political exclusion of white women and African American women and men; the struggles and setbacks as they created places for themselves in civic life as citizens, voters, party leaders, and elected officials; shifting political values and the changing fortunes and identities of the Democratic and Republican parties—shaped the conduct and meaning of the 2008 election. Yet the chapter contends that their successes in 2008 were hardly simple American success stories—while these candidates were breaking barriers, they also were juggling the familiar tasks of a presidential bid.
Defining a Maverick
Authors: Gustafson Melanie
Published: May 2017

This chapter assesses the Palin campaign as an exercise in political storytelling. In this media-saturated age in which party labels may not tell us much about a candidate, personal biography has become a key way that the public comes to “know” a candidate. The chapter argues that the most effective storytelling for the Palin candidacy focused on her background as a westerner. By highlighting Palin's big-game hunting on the Alaskan frontier and her “maverick” record of reform in the state house, Republican operatives tried to embed Palin in a long line of stories of presidential candidates and the American West. Attentive as they were to the political possibilities of Palin's identity as a westerner, the chapter shows that the Republican campaign never fully dealt with her identity as a western woman, despite the rich history of women's political advancement in the West.
Bodies and Genres in Transition
Authors: Tasker Yvonne
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how independent women filmmakers use genre. Examining Girlfight (2000) and Real Women Have Curves (2002), it foregrounds strategies by which genres are deployed, combined, and remade in order to tell women's stories. The desire to tell women's stories has been formative for diverse traditions of feminist and feminist-informed filmmaking. Such filmmaking is often driven by a realist impulse, a perception that Hollywood/genre cinema trades in fantasized images of women that bear little correspondence to actual women's lives. In using genre to tell such stories, these films foreground contradictions between realist and generic codes, suggesting a number of questions. For instance, how far can a film shift the presentation of women's lives from those usually associated with a genre before it effectively becomes a parody? Can realist (rather than fantastic) feminist filmmaking itself be understood as generic, defined by its commitment to telling women's stories? How might such a genre relate to the “woman's film,” that mode of Hollywood production defined as much by its intended audience as by content? In addressing these questions, the chapter argues that genre has proved both productive and constraining for women filmmakers.
Homoeroticism Contained
Authors: Ortega Vicente Rodriguez
Published: May 2017

This chapter compares John Woo's Hong Kong and Hollywood films in order to scrutinize the differing representations of gender they offer in relation to the different generic configurations at work in each production context. It seeks to identify which aspects of these representations have passed the test of cultural translatability and which have not. It examines how Woo's generation of a series of action and pathos driven films negotiates generically gendered bodies and how these undergo a radical shift within his Hollywood output. It asks what were the perceived assets of Woo's crossover appeal for Western audiences that led Universal to make him the first ever Chinese director in charge of a multimillion dollar motion picture, and what were the seemingly dangerous aspects of his representational templates that had to be “translated” to the social, sexual, and cultural codes of Western popular culture. In particular, the chapter explores the shift from male-to-male narratives and subordinated femininity to the heterosexual romance that dominates most of his American films.
Shadow and Act
Authors: White Miles
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines minstrel performance as the first construction of an absent black presence in American popular music, signified by the minstrel mask, and as the first sustained project involving the fetishization and commodification of black male subjectivity. Minstrelsy practice required a body at the level of performance, but not a black one; rather, it called for the representation of blackness constructed in the white American racial imagination of the time. After the Civil War, black male performers who began to access the entertainment industry in minstrel troupes, and they did so in large numbers, were required to do so in blackface since the black mask conformed to deeply embedded social stereotypes of black masculine subjectivity.
Race Rebels
Authors: White Miles
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses whiteness, masculine desire, and the animating absent black presence now inverted since its inception in minstrelsy. It shows how the triumph of hardcore rap makes it clear that the transgressive black body, primitivism, and cross-racial desire continue to find value in the marketplace of global popular culture well into the new millennium. The chapter also looks at a number of successful white performers of black music styles, including Elvis Presley, Vanilla Ice, Eminem, and Brother Ali; and addresses whether there are more or less ethical ways in which white and other youth may engage hip-hop culture and appropriations of black male subjectivity.
Between the Cross and the Sword
Authors: Beatty-Medina Charles
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how Christianization became an indispensable tool for Afro-Amerindian rebels seeking political legitimacy and continued autonomy on the frontiers of the Spanish empire and within an African diasporic world. Focusing on the period 1577–1617, it considers how clerical intervention and the discourse of religious conversion shaped colonization over time by looking at the case of Esmeraldas maroons on the coast of early colonial Ecuador. By analyzing aspects of marronage and maroon societies in Spanish America, it elucidates how the colonial state resorted to Christian missionizing and conversion as part and parcel of its pacification campaign. It shows that the Esmeraldas maroons deftly navigated both religious intervention and the discourse of Christian conversion in order to situate themselves as the legitimate lords of Esmeraldas.
Afro-Mexican Saintly Devotion in a Mexico City Alley
Authors: Bristol Joan C.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Afro-Mexicans' level of involvement in colonial society and religious life as well as their desires to gain social power as defined by colonial authorities. An important form of Christian practice for Africans in the Diaspora came through membership in Catholic confraternities, lay groups that were organized around venerating saints and often served as mutual aid societies for their members. This chapter considers the case of a group of black men and women who performed clandestine religious ceremonies in the alleys of late seventeenth-century Mexico City and claimed to be religiosos (clerics) and religiosas (nuns) of Saint Iphigenia. In particular, it analyzes the possible meanings such gatherings held for the congregants. The case demonstrates how Afro-Mexicans asserted their right to worship as Christians on their own terms, deployed their understandings of Christianity around the prescribed tenets of religious orthodoxy, and interpreted the language of hierarchy and power embodied in religious objects and rituals.
Whitening Revisited
Authors: Morrison Karen Y.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the question of whitening as a process that required both family and nation to force ideological and behavioral commitments on individuals. Focusing on race-making behaviors in nineteenth-century Cuba, it interrogates the historical ambiguity of blanqueamiento, or whitening process, using a methodology that emphasizes the social construction of race. More specifically, it proposes the concept of “sexual economy of race” as a means to elucidate the conjunction between reproductive behavior and the social construction of race. It also explores the restriction of interracial marriages in Cuba as part of its whitening agenda, along with the ways in which racialized reproductive choices influenced the standard system of racial classification and fostered whitening in some cases and discouraged it in others. The chapter shows that whitening efforts in colonial Cuba were not as predictable or linear as previously theorized.
Introduction
Authors: Bodroghkozy Aniko
Published: May 2017

This book examines the role played by American network television in reconfiguring a new “common sense” about race relations during the civil rights revolution. Drawing on stories told both by television news coverage and prime time entertainment, it explores the relationship among the civil rights movement, television, audiences, and partisans on either side of the black empowerment struggle. In particular, it considers the recurring theme that America's racial story was one of color-blind equality grounded on a vision of “black and white together.” The book concludes that television had an ambivalent place in the civil rights revolution. More specifically, it argues that network television sought to represent a rapidly shifting consensus on what “blackness” and “whiteness” meant and how they now fit together. Network television premised equality on a largely white definition whereby African Americans were ready for equal time to the extent that their representations conformed to whitened standards of middle-class and professional respectability.
Fighting for Equal Time
Authors: Bodroghkozy Aniko
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the debate over the extent to which network television was giving Southern segregationists and Northern integrationists “equal time” by focusing on audience reception of two controversial news documentaries about civil rights that aired in 1959 and 1961: NBC's report on “massive resistance” to school desegregation and CBS's report on violence against Freedom Riders. The NBC documentary report starred Chet Huntley and the CBS report, Howard K. Smith. This chapter first explores the discord and controversy sparked by the Fairness Doctrine before turning to Huntley and Smith's editorializing about desegregation and Southern race relations in their programs. In particular, it discusses Huntley's suggestion that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People should step out of the school desegregation battle because of its “militancy,” and Smith's commentary about the evils of segregationist violence and those who tolerate it. Drawing on evidence of audience response, the chapter argues that the sectional and political rifts around race were not being assuaged by television coverage.
The Return of Civil Rights Television
Authors: Bodroghkozy Aniko
Published: May 2017

This book has explored how network television mobilized a certain type of image that, when appropriately paired with figures of whiteness, was presumed to make whites less anxious about social change. It has highlighted a common link in these representations of a dignified blackness intertwined with an accommodating and welcoming whiteness. It has considered a number of television shows, including East Side/West Side and Good Times, to emphasize the propensity of networks to tell narratives relating to “black and white together,” the “worthy black victim,” and the aspirational “civil rights subject.” This epilogue examines television news coverage of Barack Obama's historic election as president of the United States. It suggests that networks were returning to the familiar discourse about the civil rights movements during the 1960s as they packaged stories that celebrated black and white voters coming together to put a biracial black man into the White House, to make Americans feel good about their country and its race relations.
Beyond “Extreme”
Authors: Chung Hye Seung
Published: May 2017

Alongside Park Chan-wook (Pak Ch’an-uk), famous for his Vengeance Trilogy of films comprising Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Poksu nǔn na ǔi kǒt; 2002), Oldboy (Oldǔ poi; 2003), and Lady Vengeance (Ch’ingǒlhan Kǔmjassi; 2005), Kim Ki-duk is one of the most acclaimed Korean filmmakers in the Western world. As of 2011, an unprecedented ten of Kim’s seventeen feature-length motion pictures are commercially available in the U.S. home-video market: ...
The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture
Authors: Gardner Jared
Published: May 2017

A transatlantic literary form that refused to break with British cultural models and genealogy, the early American magazine had at its center the anonymous authority of the editor and a porous distinction between reader and author. Esteemed subscribers were treated as magnets to attract other subscribers, and subscribers were prompted to become contributors, giving these early American publications the appearance of public forums. This book reexamines these publications and their reach to show how magazine culture was a multivocal, as opposed to novel, culture. The book describes how those who invested considerable energies in this form—including some of the period's most important political and literary figures such as Charles Brockden Brown and Washington Irving—sought to establish a very different model of literary culture than what came to define American literary history and its scholarship. The book cautions against privileging novels or authors as the essential touchstones of American literary history and instead encourages an understanding of how the “editorial function” favored by magazine culture shaped reading and writing practices. Countering assumptions about early American print culture and challenging our scholarly fixation on the novel, the book reimagines the early American magazine as a rich literary culture that operated as a model for nation-building by celebrating editorship over authorship and serving as a virtual salon in which citizens were invited to share their different perspectives.
The American Magazine in the Early National Period
Authors: Gardner Jared
Published: May 2017

This chapter recounts the struggles of publishers, printers, editors, and contributors to American magazines of the national period. It shows how the magazine occupies a liminal place at best in the history of print in the early republic. The book and the newspaper dominate far more space in the story of the print's rise, and rightly so, as the magazine seems dominated by random posturing, by armchair moralists with neoclassical pseudonyms offering their opinion on everything from fashion to dueling. It is no wonder that modern readers have favored two forms—novel and newspaper—whose genealogies are more immediately traceable into the twentieth century.
The American Magazine in the Early National Period
Authors: Gardner Jared
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the demographics of the early magazine readers as well as reader contributions to these magazines. It emphasizes how deeply collaborative and interactive the periodical space was meant to be, and how very much it worked to collapse the distance between author and reader and create a space where both could converse as equals, overseen by the careful guidance of the editor. Moreover, while magazines would trumpet testimonial letters from high-profile subscribers such as Washington or Adams, the chapter reveals that the range of magazine subscribers during this period are far more complex than mere subscriber lists would reveal alone. to conclude, the chapter also looks into the periodical career of Joseph Dennie, an individual who in many ways was not temperamentally suited to the anonymity, neutrality, and cacophony of the form.
The Early American Magazine in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Gardner Jared
Published: May 2017

This chapter recovers the lost histories of three novel writers of the early national period who have made significant contributions of their own to periodical culture. It first charts Susanna Rowson's writing career and her similarities with that of Brown, given that the both of them are among the leading novelists of the early national period. The chapter next looks at Brown's magazine contributions, before turning to Washington Irving's magazine participation under the pseudonym, “Jonathan Oldstyle”—a nod to Dennie's “Oliver Oldschool.” At the same time the chapter also discusses other facets and challenges which shaped the early American magazine, from the implications which may be drawn from their publication histories (and more often than not their unprofitable runs) to their critiques toward the novel format.
The Island of Bangka
Authors: Kartomi Margaret
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the performing arts of four main musico-lingual groups in Bangka, South Sumatra: the Malays, the Suku Lom forest-dwellers, the Suku Sekak sea-boat-dwellers, and the Chinese Indonesians. According to some performing artists and community elders, today's Malay people are descendants of former Bangka Malay chiefdoms, while the Suku Mapur or Suku Lom people are animists who prefer to live in relative isolation in the forests. The Suku Sekak people are also animists who prefer to live in boats at sea when the weather permits. The Bangka Malays, the Suku Lom, and the Suku Sekak speak varieties of Malay, while the Chinese Indonesians normally speak varieties of Hakka or Hokkien in addition to Malay. To understand how Bangka's four musico-lingual subgroups came into being as well as their musical arts, the chapter examines the history of foreign exploitation of their tin and cash crops by the sultans of Palembang (seventeenth–eighteenth centuries), Britain (1812–1816), Holland (ca. 1817–World War II), and Indonesia (1949 to present).
Changes in the Lament Dances in Aceh
Authors: Kartomi Margaret
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines changes in Acehnese lament dances, with particular emphasis on the ways in which aspects of religion, ethnicity, class, gender, sociopolitical conditions, and the activities of some remarkable individual women have enabled the survival of song-dances such as manoe pocuk, malelang, and phô over the past three to four centuries. It also considers how individual women have transformed the meaning and style of phô to become a symbol of female Acehnese identity. The manoe pocuk, malelang, and phô song-dances are performed at life-event ceremonies such as weddings, baby thanksgivings, circumcisions, and vow fulfillment ceremonies. A shaman assists the host of the feast to engage the services of a group of singer-dancers by uttering invocations before the betel-nut preparations are exchanged with the group's leader. The chapter shows how references to the indigenous religion and Hinduism are made in some performances of all three song-dances, but with phrases and references added that reflect the people's strong adherence to Islam.
The Music Factory
Authors: Caps John
Published: May 2017

This chapter details events following Mancini's employment as a Universal Studios staff composer in 1952. The Universal Studios staff composers were a highly organized, well-oiled team, able to score any sort of film, any story or setting, albeit with fairly generic music and always in a rush. Mancini's daily routine at Universal, studying the clichés of Hollywood storytelling music, was the perfect on-the-job training for his career to come. Among his first assignments was to score the studio's glamorous two-reeler films with titles like The World's Most Beautiful Girls, Fun for All, and Calypso Carnival. The first feature-length film receiving more than a handful of music cues from Mancini was called Willie and Joe Back at the Front (1952). As a sign of growing confidence, conductor Joseph Gershenson gradually gave Mancini a shot at writing the opening main title music for several films, including The Raiders, All I Desire, and City Beneath the Sea. Mancini's first onscreen credit would come as an arranger in 1954 for the Universal bio-pic musical The Glenn Miller Story.
The Curse of the Pink Panther
Authors: Caps John
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes how one chance meeting on the beach with Blake Edwards brought about a sea change in his career and, as a direct result, a return to the famous world of the Pink Panther. Return of the Pink Panther was planned for distribution in 1975, and the public was so very ready to be amused all over again by the Sellers/Clouseau character that the success of that sequel was followed the very next year by The Pink Panther Strikes Again. For Mancini, the task of scoring a Pink Panther movie had changed, too—the first film scored with that sly, sneaking sax theme and a lot of beguiling, equally sly cocktail music; the second film scored a bit more like a cartoon where the clever, plodding, main mystery theme on that wavering pump organ represented Clouseau's dysfunctional focus on the case at hand. Now with large-scale visual jokes taking up more screen space than the character comedy of Clouseau, the scoring needed to serve two masters: it needed scene-setting background tunes for clubs, discos, and resorts, and, more than ever, it needed bigger descriptive music to bolster the increasingly unrealistic and aggressive plot devices.