bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
From Pearl White to White Rose Woo
Authors: Bao Weihong
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the mediated cultural encounter between the American serial queen adventure and nüxiapian, a subgenre of Chinese martial arts films. The nüxiapian genre, featuring a female knight errant, first appeared on the 1920s silent screen and had a lasting influence in Chinese cinema. The chapter first provides an overview of the theoretical and historical underpinnings of the word “vernacular” as well as the cultural essentialist aspects of the martial arts films. It then considers the local as the site of irreducible heterogeneity that enabled active and plural modes of cultural translation, resulting in the “vernacular” body of nüxia. In analyzing the interaction between American serial queen films and the Chinese entertainment world of the 1910s and 1920s, the chapter underscores the dual promise of the May Fourth Vernacular Movement and its implication for Chinese cinema. It also highlights the rise of a particular configuration of the female body on Chinese silent films.
Abolition
Authors: Bontemps Arna
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the abolition of slavery in Illinois after the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 marked the beginning of the end of the struggle for emancipation. Many of the settlers of southern Illinois had come from the slave belt. These men brought with them their outlooks and habits of life, and southern Illinois, later known as “Egypt,” became a stronghold of pro-slavery sentiment. With the opening of the Erie Canal, New Englanders, New Yorkers, and immigrants direct from Europe settled in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. These pioneers, too, “packed their beliefs in their traveling bags.” It has been contended by some that the construction of the Erie Canal was more influential in freeing the Southern slaves than were such abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison. This chapter looks at some of the leading Illinois abolitionists, including Owen Lovejoy, Ichabod Codding, Edward Beecher, Zebina Eastman, Hooper Warren, Benjamin Lundy, and Lyman Trumbull. It also considers the Fugitive Slave Law and the reaction of Chicagoans to it.
Recreation and Sports
Authors: Bontemps Arna
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes Negro recreation and sports in Illinois in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1847, a ten-mile foot race in Chicago was witnessed by more than 1,000 spectators. The event was won by a Canadian. Nine years later, a Negro represented Cook County at the Alton Convention of Colored Citizens of Illinois. In 1854, a skating match took place on the canal at Elmira between Patrick Brown and George Tate, a colored man. In 1874, the Chicago Evening Journal announced that “the Napoleons, a colored baseball club of St. Louis, are coming to this city to play the Uniques, also colored, for the colored championship.” Pedestrianism also interested the Negroes in the early days of Illinois. This chapter looks at Negro participation in various sports and recreational activities such as racing, cycling, cricket, baseball, football, tennis, and boxing.
Music
Authors: Bontemps Arna
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Negro music as well as musicians such as singers, instrumentalists, directors, and composers in Illinois in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It begins with a discussion of various Negro musicians in Illinois, from piano prodigy “Blind Tom” Wiggins and the Hampton Singers to the Fisk Jubilee Singers and choral groups known for singing spirituals. Among them were the Chicago Choral Study Club, one of the first to perform the works of black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The chapter also considers the emergence of organized music schools among Chicago Negroes, including the Coleridge-Taylor Music School and the National Conservatory of Music, as well as church choirs, musical clubs and associations.
Rhythm
Authors: Bontemps Arna
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the history of ragtime, blues, boogie woogie, jazz, and gospel music in Illinois. Itinerant Negro musicians considered Chicago a good town on the circuit. The district which welcomed them first was located on State Street between the edge of the Loop and 35th Street. The two biggest places in the district were Pony Moore's and the Everleigh Club. In 1911, Emanuel Perez's Creole Band came to town. This chapter considers three occurrences that highlight the story of jazz in Chicago: King Oliver's arrival, Louis Armstrong's origination of “Scat” singing, and the recording of Clarence “Pine Top” Smith's Boogie Woogie piano, in March 1928. It also looks at other Negro musicians who performed in Chicago and other parts of Illinois during the period, including Cab Calloway, Sidney Bechet, Jimmy Noone, Erskine Tate, Charley Cook, Clarence Jones, Sammy Stewart, Willie Bryant, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Lionel Hampton, Jack Ellis, and Johnny Dodds.
Life After Incarceration
Authors: Nichols Nikki H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter draws upon in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated women to examine the kinds of support they most appreciated, or would like to have received, while transitioning from prison back to free society. As the interviewees demonstrate, the notion of freedom is complicated, for even after incarceration the women's sense of self is impacted heavily by their experiences in prison. The evidence in this study suggests complex layers of identity that defy the unidimensional stigma of “convict” that is often imposed on women who have been incarcerated. The women's personal stories convey their perceptions of themselves, their perceptions of how they are viewed by society, and the kinds of resources they need for a successful return to their communities.
Challenging the Media-Incarceration Complex through Media Education
Authors: Yousman Bill
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that the United States faces a crisis of representation, for while crime rates remain stable, the TV and other corporate-controlled mass media bury viewers beneath an avalanche of fear-based spectacles in which crime and violence are portrayed as escalating, even life-threatening crises. It then outlines a new program of media education that enables consumers of mass media to develop more informed and empowering views of the complexities of crime and violence. Focusing on prime-time dramatic television as the most prevalent source of fictional images of violence, crime, and incarceration, the chapter addresses the distorted narratives and images that saturate popular television dramas. Drawing upon interviews with ex-prisoners, it also shows how media representations of imprisonment, though inaccurate and misleading, shape the perceptions even of those who have themselves been incarcerated.
Why States Act
Authors: Bosia Michael J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter studies how the state when challenged is served by homophobia, what challenges homophobia addresses, and what problems it seeks to resolve. These phenomena are referred to as “state homophobia.” While “state” to some suggests law and policy, the chapter considers state homophobia as the totality of strategies and tools, both in policy and in mobilizations, through which holders of and contenders over state authority invoke sexual minorities as objects of condemnation and targets of persecution. The chapter examines the motif of governance in terms of sexuality, and considers political homophobia as embedded in forms of sexual governance and personhood. The framework follows three dimensions, focusing on purpose and will to target agency even when constrained, and on the work done by homophobia in periods of instability or uncertainty.
The Italian American Table
Authors: Cinotto Simone
Published: May 2017

Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, this book recreates the bustling world of Italian life in New York City and demonstrates how food was at the center of the lives of immigrants and their children. From generational conflicts resolved around the family table to a vibrant food-based economy of ethnic producers, importers, and restaurateurs, food was essential to the creation of an Italian American identity. Italian American foods offered not only sustenance but also powerful narratives of community and difference, tradition and innovation as immigrants made their way through a city divided by class conflict, ethnic hostility, and racialized inequalities. Drawing on a vast array of resources including fascinating, rarely explored primary documents and fresh approaches in the study of consumer culture, the book argues that Italian immigrants created a distinctive culture of food as a symbolic response to the needs of immigrant life, from the struggle for personal and group identity to the pursuit of social and economic power. For generations of Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Calabrese immigrants in New York, Italian American cuisine was much more than a remnant of the home country; the book shows how the Italian American table we now celebrate emerged as the outcome of years of selective incorporations of cultural fragments, resources, and meanings available to the immigrant community. Adding a transnational dimension to the study of Italian American foodways, the book recasts Italian American food culture as an American “invention” resonant with traces of tradition.
“Sunday Dinner? You Had to Be There!”
Authors: Cinotto Simone
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how, during the period 1930–1940, Italian immigrants in East Harlem articulated new food-based strategies aimed at controlling the mobility of immigrant children by delaying their embrace of middle-class values. It considers how the family table became a place for negotiating generational conflicts between immigrant parents and their American-born children by expounding on the so-called generational contract, whereby children were granted much greater autonomy in public in exchange for showing allegiance to the family through regular participation in the gatherings centered on ritual food consumption that brought families together. The chapter asks why immigrants insisted on such family food rituals in exchange for relinquishing control of their children's public life, and why younger Italian Americans agreed. It shows that the Italian American family's ritual Sunday dinner was not only about eating but also about the discursive articulation of nation and ethnic identity in the diasporic private sphere.
Introduction
Authors: Cinotto Simone
Published: May 2017

This book explores the centrality of food in the Italian American community of East Harlem in New York City between the 1920s and 1940s. It examines why the food of immigrants and their children has continued to serve as a powerful means of identification across different generations of Italian Americans; why, and how, Italian food and foodways have come to define Italian America; and what the persistence of Italian foodways tells us about the character and meaning of the Italian experience in America and, more generally, about the role of consumption in the production of race, ethnicity, and nation. The book is organized in two parts: the first focuses on the role of food in the Italian American family and community in East Harlem in the 1920s and the 1930s, while the second analyzes the Italian American food trade and market in New York, along with their national and transnational ramifications. This introduction provides an overview of the historical literature on consumption, class, and ethnicity and the book's structure.
Germany’s Great Love vs. the American Fortress: Home Front Melodrama
Authors: Heins Laura
Published: May 2017

This chapter compares Hollywood and Nazi uses of melodrama during World War II and demonstrates that the American home front film portrayed the war effort as a defense of middle-class domesticity, while the Nazi home front melodrama suggested that war provided a means to intensified erotic experience. Home front melodramas featuring female main protagonists, contemporary settings, and a thematization of the war were produced in Hollywood and in Babelsberg, but the form and extent of this treatment was not identical in the two cinemas. The chapter considers the approaches to cinematic propaganda advocated by the leadership of both sides, by looking at the paradigmatic Hollywood home front films Mrs. Miniver and Since You Went Away (1944) in detail. It then examines Nazi home front melodramas in relation to conventions established by these Hollywood films.
The Creole Synthesis in the New World
Authors: Smith Christopher J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the musical, cultural, and sociological elements of blackface minstrelsy's “creole synthesis” throughout the Caribbean and the British colonies of North America. It argues that the conditions for the creole synthesis were present virtually from the first encounters of Anglo-Europeans and Africans in the New World. The chapter discusses the riverine, maritime, and frontier social contexts that shaped the music of blackface's African American sources and their Anglo-Celtic imitators. In particular, it considers creole synthesis in the Caribbean and in frontiers such as New Orleans and the Ohio. It also looks at a preliminary example of iconographic analysis that reflects the riverine and maritime creole synthesis: James Henry Beard's 1846 painting Western Raftsmen. The chapter contends that blackface minstrelsy was pioneered by George Washington Dixon and Thomas Dartmouth Rice in the 1830s and codified by Joel Walker Sweeney and Daniel Decatur Emmett (and the blackface troupes they founded) in the early 1840s, and thus represents the earliest comparatively accurate and extensive observation, description, and imitation of African American performance in the New World.
Isolating Citizen Dissidents
Authors: Tamura Eileen H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter details Kurihara's time in the Moab isolation camp. After their arrest in the wake of the Manzanar revolt, Kurihara and the other members of the Committee of Five were taken to the jail in Bishop, and after a few days, to Lone Pine. Their prosecution was held at bay, however, since WRA officials were able to secure a temporary isolation camp near the town of Moab, Utah. The Moab camp was designed specifically for Nisei, who, as U.S. citizens, could not be transferred to the enemy alien internment camps operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Within several months after the Manzanar sixteen had entered the Moab camp, other dissidents arrived from the Gila, Manzanar, and Tule Lake camps. No formal charges were made against any of these men either. Rather, they were sent at the discretion of the WRA camp project directors.
Turmoil at Tule
Authors: Tamura Eileen H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the Tule Lake concentration camp. Construction of the camp began in April 1942; in late May, five hundred Japanese American volunteers from the temporary detention camps at Portland and Puyallup arrived to help set up the camp. They were soon joined by Nikkei assigned to Tule Lake in the original peopling of the concentration camps. Within months, discontent over poor food and substandard living and farm-working conditions led to protests and strikes. This early discord escalated into a crisis during the loyalty-questionnaire fiasco of February 1943, which caused “fear, confusion, and utter chaos” among the Nikkei and resulted in the label of “disloyal” for those who gave “no” answers to one or both of the two contentious questions about their national loyalties or who refused to answer the questions.
A Presidential Musician
Authors: Warfield Patrick
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the first part of John Philip Sousa's tenure as leader of the United States Marine Band and shows how he worked to stabilize that ensemble's membership and modernize its repertoire. The following day after Sousa and his wife arrive in Washington in 1880, he enlisted in the Marine Corps for the third time, now as the band's seventeenth director, its youngest leader, and its first American-born conductor. Given the nature of Sousa's later fame, his appointment to the Marine Band seems only natural. But at this stage of his career he had never led a band or military ensemble. He was a published composer, but very little of his music was for ensembles of winds alone, and marches were not yet an important part of his output. Despite this lack of experience, Sousa's new appointment was little more than a fine-tuning of his career.
Racial Interstitiality and the Anxieties of the “Partly Colored”
Authors: Bow Leslie
Published: May 2017

This chapter studies the debates about Asian Americans' near-white status in popular and scholarly discourse. It forwards the idea of “racial interstitiality” as a method of reading the excess of racial formations within the context of the Black/White binary. Cultural documents across disciplinary boundaries reveal the ways in which both “colored” and “white” become enmeshed within the interplay of other oppositions that construct American norms, particularly those regarding class advancement: progressive vs. regressive; modern vs. feudal; and prosperous vs. indigent. The context of Asian racial indeterminacy in this context highlights the emergence of subjects whose values and beliefs were either recognized as potentially worthy of incorporation—hence, “near whiteness”—or, conversely, unworthy.
Segregation, Exclusion, and the Chinese Communities in Georgia, 1880s-1940
Authors: Bronstein Daniel
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the impact of various state apparatuses, including exclusion laws, on the little remarked but fascinating Chinese American merchant communities in Atlanta, Augusta, and Savannah, Georgia. Federal Chinese Exclusion laws established a highly selective exemption system designed to prevent most Chinese from entering and reentering the United States. The law explicitly barred the first-time entry of laborers but allowed Chinese to come over as merchants, students, government officials, teachers, and U.S.-born citizens. Since most Chinese in Augusta were in the grocery business, they were allowed to travel under the exempted merchant category and their wives and children as merchant dependents. As such, Augusta's Chinese community grew in size and became one of the largest Chinese communities in the South before 1965.
“American” Individualism, Variations on a Theme
Authors: Keating AnaLouise
Published: May 2017

This chapter investigates and revises conventional models of individualism and personal selfhood. Given the central roles Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau have played in constructing an “American” self and an “American” literary tradition, canonical transcendentalist texts like Emerson's “Self-Reliance” and Thoreau's Walden offer a useful point of departure for this investigation. This chapter redefines individualism—including canonical versions of individualism—in more relational terms. When we (re)read mainstream versions of “American” individualism and self-reliance through the work of contemporary U.S. women of colors, all parties are transformed: self-reliance becomes a highly democratic, relational endeavor that simultaneously extends canonical interpretations of personal freedom outward to include previously ignored groups and redefines “American individualism” by reconfiguring the relationship between personal and communal identities.
Pedagogies of Invitation
Authors: Keating AnaLouise
Published: May 2017

This chapter calls for and attempts to enact alternatives to critical pedagogy. More specifically, it explores the implications of positing interconnectivity as a framework for invitational pedagogies and relational models of identity. Language, belief, perception, and action are intimately interwoven. All too often, however, we (educators and students) assume that our perceptions and beliefs accurately reflect the entire truth about reality and ourselves; such assumptions narrow, limit, and restrict our worldviews and inhibit our actions. After examining the crucial role self-enclosed individualism plays in sustaining racism and other forms of social injustice, this chapter uses indigenous science and womanist thought to develop transformative pedagogical models, or “pedagogies of invitation;” invitational pedagogies are nonoppositional and require intellectual humility, flexibility, and an open-minded attitude.
A Contest of Ideas
Authors: Lichtenstein Nelson
Published: May 2017

For more than thirty years the author of this book has deployed his scholarship—on labor, politics, and social thought—to chart the history and prospects of a progressive America. This book collects and updates many of the author's most provocative and controversial essays and reviews. The book links the fate of the labor movement to the transformations in the shape of world capitalism, to the rise of the civil rights movement, and to the activists and intellectuals who have played such important roles. Tracing broad patterns of political thought, the book offers important perspectives on the relationship of labor and the state, the tensions that sometimes exist between a culture of rights and the idea of solidarity, and the rise of conservatism in politics, law, and intellectual life. The book closes with portraits of five activist intellectuals whose work has been vital to the conflicts that engage the labor movement, public policy, and political culture.
“The Man in the Middle”
Authors: Lichtenstein Nelson
Published: May 2017

The study of frontline supervisors—in the factory, office, hospital ward, and academic workplace—is once again making waves. The quest for a more efficient, and perhaps more humane, workplace all too often begins with advice and admonition directed toward those who are charged with supervising the daily work lives of the dozen or so individuals who fall under their direct authority. However, much the discussion, especially that in even the most sophisticated business journals as well as in the sociological and industrial relations literature, has had an ahistorical quality that assumes that the traditional role played by foremen and other frontline supervisors has been determined exclusively by either the technology of production or the structures of management. These have been important, but they cannot be divorced from either the larger politics of production or the changing consciousness of foremen and supervisors in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter seeks to uncover a slice of this complex history by emphasizing how cultural and political forces, as well as structural changes in the organization of work, shaped the role foremen played in the factory hierarchy.
Introduction
Authors: McKillen Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

This book explores the corporatist alliance between President Woodrow Wilson and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and how it sparked debates over his foreign policy programs within labor circles. During World War II, Wilson pledged to make the world “safe for democracy.” For Wilson, the cooperation of the United States and international labor movements was critical to achieving this goal. To win domestic and international labor support for his foreign policies, Wilson solicited the help of AFL's conservative leaders. This book traces the origins of the partnership that developed between the Wilson administration and AFL leaders to promote U.S. foreign policy, from its tentative beginnings during policy deliberations over how the United States should respond to the Mexican revolution, through World War I, to its culmination with the creation of the International Labor Organization (ILO). It details the significant opposition to the Wilson–AFL collaboration that arose among U.S., transnational, and international labor, Socialists, and diaspora Left groups and how this opposition affected Wilson's efforts to create a permanent role for labor in international governance.
The Outbreak of World War I and the Socialist “War on War”
Authors: McKillen Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the role played by the Socialist Party in shaping the political debate over Woodrow Wilson's neutrality and preparedness policies following the outbreak of World War I. It considers how the Socialist Party sought to create a viable working-class antiwar movement, declaring “war on war” as it strongly contested the Wilson administration's definitions of U.S. national security, preparedness, and citizenship duties. It also also looks at the different personalities involved in early national Socialist Party policy formulations as well as U.S. foreign policy debates, including Allan Benson who sought to make foreign policy more subject to democratic checks and balances by leading a campaign for a national referendum on war.
The Making of World Flutes
Authors: Olsen Dale A.
Published: May 2017

All cultures have their specific ways of constructing their flutes, which fit within their particular and usually unwritten music theories, aesthetics, and practices. Folktales and mythology, like music iconography, however, offer very little reliable descriptive information about flute construction techniques or even flutes as material objects; artistic license, such as exaggeration, understatement, ambiguity, hyperbole, deception, exists in both the narrative and visual arts. To understand why cultures construct their flutes in the ways they do, the narrative arts with their use of metaphor, symbolism, double entendre, and other ways of saying (and writing or singing) things often provide indigenous perspectives about processes, including flute construction. This chapter discusses the construction of some world flutes in three case studies: the Warao of Venezuela, the Buganda of Uganda, and the Japanese.
Flutes and Gender Roles
Authors: Olsen Dale A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents numerous short folktales that pertain to the topic of gender, and includes analysis of gender sub issues, such as flute playing and the reversal of social order, flute playing and gender specificity, and flutes and gender specificity. In most world cultures during modern times, traditional flute playing is limited to men rather than women; North American concert music traditions are an exception, however. This has not always been the case. According to what we can learn from mythology, women at one time were the original flute players, but they had their flutes taken away from them by the men. In anthropology, this is known as a reversal of social order.
Flutes and Nature
Authors: Olsen Dale A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses how flutes are used by humans for the fertility of animals, the growing and harvesting of crops, controlling weather, and metaphorically, such as riding the winds of longing. Animal and vegetal fertility are closely related in many cultures, and flutes are often the power intermediary between them and supernatural assurance for procreation and bountiful harvests. For example, among the Usarufa in New Guinea, pigs and plants are included in the same sentence when talking about the fertility power of their secret flutes. Among the Q'eros in the southern Peruvian Andes, a vertical notched flute known as pinkuyllu is played by men with singing by women during two animal fertility rituals, Aqhata Ukyachichis for male llamas and Phallchay for female llamas and alpacas.
Flutes and Death
Authors: Olsen Dale A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the negative aspect of how flutes and flute players are able to cast musical charms that may lead to death, including the flutists' own deaths. It discusses various theories of magic in order to contextualize some of the narratives. It describes stories such as “The Rat Catcher of Korneuburg”, where the main character charms the rats and magically causes them to follow him while playing his black, wooden transverse flute. After receiving no payment, he charms the children and magically causes them to follow him while playing a golden transverse flute. In other stories, the playing of a flute can sometimes lead to an undesirable end, such as death for the flutist, as in the Bulgarian folktale “The Shepherd and the Samodivi.”
The Demilitarization of Germany, 1945–2010
Authors: Lockenour Jay
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that the Berlin Republic remains demilitarized in significant ways, despite maintaining its armed forces and deploying those forces into combat. Germany's security policy is based on multilateralism, a preference for non-military instruments of diplomacy, and a defense strategy based in equal measure on deterrence and reassurance. Germany wields military power only with great difficulty, as seen in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Germany's military budget and its armed forces are also shrinking. Only at the margins of German society could one claim to encounter strains of a classical militarism or the glorification of military values. Because the lessons of Germany's past coincide with trends in the European environment to stigmatize large-scale violence, it is reasonable to see Germany moving toward a lasting demilitarization.
Secret Agents
Authors: Tucker Veta Smith
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the gendered schema at the core of enslaved black women's abolitionist resistance and the scholarly neglect it received by examining the multiple and varied forms of resistance to labor and sexual abuse that four enslaved women engaged in: Mary Elizabeth Bowser, Margaret Garner, Harriet Tubman, and Mary Ellen Pleasant. In all cases, black women manipulated the stereotype of the hapless, deficient, enslaved black woman and used it as camouflage for their anti-slavery and anti-patriarchy insurgency. Either momentarily or permanently, Bowser, Garner, Tubman, and Pleasant became agents of their own or others' liberation. They exercised tactical ingenuity and rare insight into the illogic of both slavery and patriarchy. Ultimately, the success of these women's gendered resistance mystified antagonists, supporters, and scholars alike.
Enslaved Women’s Resistance and Survival Strategies in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio” and Toni Morrison’S Beloved and Margaret Garner
Authors: Yohe Kristine
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's 1857 poem “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, and Morrison's 2004 libretto Margaret Garner. Through examining the various interpretations of Margaret Garner's history in the poem, novel, and opera, it becomes clear that her rebellious act resulted in metaphorical cultural survival even though her daughter did not literally survive. In other words, through the sacrifice of her child, Garner transcended her bondage, exerting her claim for maternal power over the tomb of institutional subjugation. Moreover, through asserting her right to decide what happened to her children, Garner defied slavery by surrendering the physical flesh in order to allow the metaphysical spirit to survive. Through these different genres, Harper and Morrison reconfigure the circumstances of Garner's decision, with powerful effect.
Black Chicago
Authors: Horne Gerald
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Patterson's arrival in Chicago. After operating semiclandestinely in Europe and coordinating the Scottsboro campaign, being deployed to Chicago almost seemed like a demotion for Patterson. Surely, the Second City was no backwater, and given its steel mills teeming with proletarians, it was more eye-catching for a self-respecting Marxist-Leninist than a relatively less-endowed Manhattan. Still, the abjectly horrible conditions faced by the Negro working class—including many abodes bereft of water or even toilets—were suggestive of the fact that there was much work to do. Indeed, Patterson was dumbfounded by what he found in black Chicago: 60 percent of Negroes were unemployed, which was “reflected in the terribly dilapidated houses, the crowded kitchenettes, the gambling and vice.” Thus, he said, “We need scores of housing projects that exceed the Ida B. Wells project in scope and in provision” since “the Negro ghetto is an eyesore to democracy.”
“I Am a Political Prisoner”
Authors: Horne Gerald
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at Patterson's imprisonment in Danbury, Connecticut. He estimated that “30 percent of the prison population is Negro” in Danbury, and they, along with those who were Jewish, were segregated. What particularly agitated him was the overrepresentation of Negroes behind bars. The plight of his fellow inmates presented Patterson with an immediate dilemma. The high-court ruling had yet to trickle down to this federal facility, so Jim Crow reigned. If he spoke out, “especially against segregation,” then that “would surely be un-American-subversive. I am not afraid to speak out,” he assured, “but I don't seek further victimization.” During his time of imprisonment, his mail was censored, then he was barred from writing anyone other than his spouse and his daughter. He was also subjected to “quarantine,” shielded from others, though not in solitary confinement. This meant no visitors and seven letters per week.
Fighting Back
Authors: Horne Gerald
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses Patterson's struggles in reaching the international community. Thanks to Morris Childs, the FBI reported gleefully that “Party leaders have advised [Patterson] that he is not authorized to represent the CPUSA in discussions abroad.” This was not only a stiff rebuke to one of the CP's leaders with probably the most extensive background in global affairs stretching over decades, it was also a rebuff to an African American leader, who was basically instructed to steer clear of that which had been a most potent ally for his people for centuries—the weight of the international community. This was even more unfortunate because Patterson was still negotiating with Eastern European leaders, seeking to forge business ties with Negro entrepreneurs. Moreover, he had gone further and “asked members of the Czechoslovakian diplomatic corps in the United States for funds for Negro work in the United States.” Thus, blocking Patterson's influence abroad was a real victory for the FBI faction.
Introduction
Authors: Horne Gerald
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of William L. Patterson's ultimate vision, his socialist project. Patterson was a self-proclaimed revolutionary who sought to abolish capitalism and install socialism in a step-by-step process that involved the continuous struggle for expansion of democratic rights. As he saw things, capitalism as it evolved in the United States had been grounded in a racist slavery and Jim Crow and in order for justice to arrive for the beleaguered Negro, this system had to be extirpated root and branch. The chapter then argues that the nation might be better off today if Patterson's path of amity toward Moscow had been followed. Though Patterson was never accused of espionage, U.S. patriots need to acknowledge that just as Nelson Mandela's African National Congress owed no allegiance to an illegitimate apartheid state and was justified in collaborating with Moscow, Jim Crow was similarly illegitimate and certainly required a like amount of obeisance.
Aprosba
Authors: Williams Erica Lorraine
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the racial and class dynamics of Aprosba (Association of Prostitutes of Bahia), the only organization in Bahia run by and for sex workers, as well as its impact on the lives of some of its members. It first provides a background on Aprosba's history and activities and goes on to describe its place in state, regional, and transnational networks of sex workers' associations. It then considers the ethnography of Aprosba members in relation to the theoretical and political distinctions related to terms such as prostitute and sex worker as well as into the debate regarding whether sex work can be understood as a practice or an identity. It also explores the activism and organizing efforts of grassroots Brazilian sex workers on the local, national, and transnational scenes, focusing on Aprosba's training initiative called Projeto sem Vergonha (Without Shame Project). The chapter highlights the racial politics of sex work in Salvador, and especially the politics of naming in Aprosba's preference for the term prostituta (prostitute) over profissional do sexo or trabalhadora do sexo (sex worker).
Moral Panics
Authors: Williams Erica Lorraine
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how state and nongovernmental organizations' campaigns in Brazil construct sex tourism as a problem to be eradicated in part by conflating it with trafficking, along with the questions it raises about the possibilities of transnational mobility for socioeconomically disadvantaged Brazilian women. The chapter begins with a historical overview of the concept of trafficking and of global antitrafficking movements as well as the ways in which “trafficking” has been confused and conflated with “sex tourism.” It then considers how trafficking and sex tourism have been constituted as objects of knowledge before discussing the campaign activities of Aprosba and CHAME (Humanitarian Center for the Support of Women). It shows that CHAME's anti-trafficking educational campaign materials constitute an “archive of racialized sexuality” that creates “moral panics” about interracial sex and transnational border crossings that reinforces notions of who is worthy of the privileges of transnational mobility.
Against Dogmatism
Authors: Yadlapati Madhuri M.
Published: May 2017

Many contemporary discussions of religion take an absolute, intractable approach to belief and nonbelief that privileges faith and dogmatism while treating doubt as a threat to religious values. As this book demonstrates, however, there is another way: a faith (or nonfaith) that embraces doubt and its potential for exploring both the depths and heights of spiritual reflection and speculation. Through three distinct discussions of faith, doubt, and hope, the book explores what it means to live creatively and responsibly in the everyday world as limited, imaginative, and questioning creatures. It begins with a perceptive survey of diverse faith experiences in Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Protestant Christianity and then narrows the focus to Protestant Christianity and Hinduism to explore how the great thinkers of those faiths have embraced doubt in the service of spiritual transcendence. Defending the rich tapestry of faith and doubt against polarization, the book reveals a spiritual middle way, an approach native to traditions in which faith and doubt are interwoven in constructive and dynamic ways.
Making the Magazine
Authors: Duffy Brooke Erin
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces the history of women's magazines that spans 300 years. Drawing upon four decades of scholarship on women's magazines, it examines the defining properties of the genre, and particularly the consideration that these periodicals are created exclusively for and targeted to female audiences. It also discusses the ways in which editors-in-chief create and maintain the identity of their publications while establishing the magazine as an intimate imagined space, and how consumerism and citizenship became intertwined in women's magazines. The chapter shows that the history of women's magazines has been defined by the creation of imagined communities of interest, the increasing specialization of titles, and the symbiosis of the magazine and advertising industries.
Conclusion
Authors: Duffy Brooke Erin
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter returns to the guiding question “What is a magazine?” used by the book to explore the industry transformations associated with digitization and participatory culture by revisiting the concepts of organizational identity, professional identity, and gendered identity. It also discusses the many different ways in which contemporary producers of women's magazines are redefining their processes and products. It shows that the evolution from magazine as object to magazine as brand represents a conundrum for magazine publishers as they struggle to reach a consensus about “who we are as an organization.” While contemporary threats to the magazine industry are very real, the chapter argues that the actual shifts taking place are much more nuanced than universal accounts about media convergence suggest. As some traditional media boundaries collapse, others are being remade to preserve historical and cultural identity articulations.
Muzak Incorporated
Authors: Vanel Hervé
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the history of Muzak. The Oxford English Dictionary defines Muzak as “the proprietary name of a system of piped music for factories, restaurants, supermarkets, etc.; also used loosely, with small initial, to designate recorded light background music generally.” Muzak “proper” owes its name to General George Owen Squier (1865–1934), a chief signal officer in the United States Army who, in 1922, founded Wired Inc., a company “employ[ing] electric power lines to transmit news programs, music, lectures, general entertainment and advertising directly into private homes.” In 1934, inspired by the catchy, popular brand name of Kodak, Squier himself renamed his company Muzak. Since then, the brand name Muzak has eased itself into the vernacular language to become a common name denoting an entire genre of music known for being bad. Despite the company's relentless efforts to improve or simply to correct its image, the reputation of Muzak remains frankly disastrous.
Intelligently Designed
Authors: Caudill Edward
Published: May 2017

Tracing the growth of creationism in America as a political movement, this book explains why the particularly American phenomenon of antievolution has succeeded as a popular belief. Conceptualizing the history of creationism as a strategic public relations campaign, the book examines why this movement has captured the imagination of the American public, from the explosive Scopes trial of 1925 to today's heated battles over public school curricula. The book shows how creationists have appealed to cultural values such as individual rights and admiration of the rebel spirit, thus spinning creationism as a viable, even preferable, alternative to evolution. In particular, the book argues that the current anti-evolution campaign follows a template created by Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, the Scopes trial's primary combatants. Their celebrity status and dexterity with the press prefigured the Moral Majority's 1980s media blitz, more recent staunchly creationist politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, and creationists' savvy use of the Internet and museums to publicize their cause. Drawing from trial transcripts, media sources, films, and archival documents, the book highlights the importance of historical myth in popular culture, religion, and politics and situates this nearly century-old debate in American cultural history.
The Contrarian and the Commoner
Authors: Caudill Edward
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan's contrasting worldviews of science and religion. Bryan and Darrow personified two major, antagonistic streams of thought in American society. Bryan believed religion informed all walks of life, including politics and science, whereas Darrow saw it as an impediment to enlightenment. Bryan had unshakable faith in the common man; Darrow called himself a pessimist, apparently with little faith in humanity, but he fiercely defended the rights of the common man. This chapter first discusses Bryan's background as “The Great Commoner,” focusing on his views on religion and politics and especially on Darwinism and evolution. It then describes Darrow's life and career as a public intellectual, a contrarian who was sympathetic to the cause of socialism. It also looks at the clash between Bryan and Darrow over the subject of literalism. The chapter concludes with a detailed analysis of the two men's arguments at the Scopes trial.
Legacy
Authors: Caudill Edward
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the legacy of the Scopes trial as well as Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan with respect to creationism. The Scopes trial earned a special place in modern America's science versus religion controversy. It defined terms and tactics that have endured into the twenty-first century for the antievolution movement. Bryan appealed to national myths of egalitarianism and individualism, whereas Darrow drew on the ideals of individual rights and a rebel tradition that put individual dignity above a monarch's comfort, materially or philosophically. This chapter discusses the arguments of Bryan and Darrow as well as four myths that are appropriate to creationism/intelligent design: the garden, the frontier, progress and science, and individualism and egalitarianism. It also considers the creationists' use of symbols, myths, and a powerful poetic tradition to counter science and concludes with an assessment of the paradox of creationism and intelligent design: the fight to win intellectual respectability by assuming the trappings of science itself.
Caribbean/American
Authors: Davies Carole Boyce
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents the author's account of how she came to consciousness as a Caribbean American subject. Her story begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King was killed during her freshman year in university. It was in a university in Eastern Shore, Maryland, in a close-knit community of African American students from the D.C./Maryland/North East Corridor that she came to a full understanding of herself as a black political subject in the U.S. racial context in the middle of the Black Power movement. King's passing in many ways captured the transition to a youth movement through which one could actually make tangible political claims beyond the meaning of civil rights.
Spirit Scapes
Authors: Davies Carole Boyce
Published: May 2017

This chapter pursues the idea of “spirit scapes.” It argues that thinking about Caribbean space and Caribbean identity means engaging a series of movements. It means coming to terms with how much both the relatively new Caribbean nation-states and the Caribbean diaspora have been fundamental sites of the creation of Caribbean cultural identities, and the extent to which global economic and political forces have also shaped these experiences. The Caribbean has in common with Brazil an already-identified history, including the destruction of the full presence of indigenous peoples, the wretchedness of enslavement on sugar plantations, colonialism, and the struggles for self-possession and independence but also for re-creation.
“Changing Locations”
Authors: Davies Carole Boyce
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes literary examples of issues of migration. Capturing the dynamics of migration via song, poem, play, film, or novel has been consistently a theme in the Caribbean experience and is perhaps one of its central aesthetic features. Just as movement is a central component of the blues aesthetic in the African American cultural field, the chapter proposes that the assumption of space in the Caribbean be read as similarly potent. Although there are several literary movements, the chapter focuses on two visible largely Anglophone locations, two pathways among a variety of possible entry points to this discussion. It begins by considering the work of Claude McKay, the signature writer of the Caribbean encounter with the United States and the beginning of Caribbean diaspora formation.