bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
What Becomes a Nation?
Authors: Fraunhar Alison
Published: January 2020

Using marquillas cigarreras, the small printed papers in which bundles of cigarettes were sold, as case studies, this chapter analyzes the development of nationalist sentiment and the iconography of national identity through the visual imagery of commodities. Marquillas cigarreras featured a virtually encyclopedic array of imagery: from natural history, architectural monuments, almanacs, serials, military uniforms and insignia, some of the most memorable marquilla series depicted costumbristic scenes of Cuban life and types, including mulatas, blacks, proverbs, literary figures and social satire.
The chapter discusses the significance of cardinal Cuban products—tobacco and sugar—in the context of economic, cultural and ideological conditions, and analyzes the ways they are presented and consumed through commodity consumption. These products were crucial to the economy and the symbolic products linked to national identity, as evident on marquillas. Furthermore, their production is inextricably linked to the colonial system, including African slavery, European mercantilism and European immigration.
Performing the Mulata, Performing Mulatas
Authors: Fraunhar Alison
Published: January 2020

Chapter II explores the development of forms of Afro-Cuban spirituality and religion, conflating Catholic saints with Yorbuban deities as the entry point to a discussion of formal and informal performative practices: house dances and popular theatrical performance.
The chapter provides an extended discussion of women’s’ lives in nineteenth century Cuba. Within the highly restricted and coded social life of colonial Cuba, paradoxical liberties were enjoyed and folded into the narrative of the proto-nation. White women were (supposedly) secluded and invisible, and women of color moved around freely in the streets and were highly visible, but socially invisible; yet both were “seen” as well as performed. These real-life practices engaged with tropic or stereotypical identities that were not only depicted on marquillas among other forms of imagery, but also activated through dance, popular theatrical forms and prostitution. In this chapter, the convergence or intersection between lived life and its representations is parsed.
Screening the New (Wo)Man of the Revolution
Authors: Fraunhar Alison
Published: January 2020

Images of mulatas and the performance of mulataje (the quality of being or performing like a mulata) have been woven through Cuban culture since European slavery introduced Africans onto the island and Europeans and Africans produced mixed-race offspring. As the island reached toward and eventually achieved independence, tropic characters helped the nation to define its identity.
The so-called triumph of the revolution in 1959 sought to overturn the negative aspects of these stereotypes of identity and replace them with a pedagogy of citizenship. The mulata, as characterized in revolutionary cinema, protagonized this process. One of the first achievements of the revolution was the establishment of a national film institute, and it was through this institution, films that reframed Cuban history, and films that revised the future were produced. These films, along with other ambitious revolutionary campaigns, sought to recuperate marginalized people, especially women and Afro-Cubans, and integrate them into the new society.
From There to Here
Authors: Fraunhar Alison
Published: January 2020

With the onset of the period of intense economic deprivation that followed in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, Cubans turned to improvised as well as officially endorsed modes of expression and strategies for survival. With the reintroduction of tourism as a vital industry, tourist desire for both hetero- and homosexual (symbolized by sexy mulatas and drag performers embodying them) stimulated suppressed identities and demanded a reframing of discourses of prostitution and sexuality. Mulata, prostitute, and cross dressed and transgendered bodies were no longer the symbolic domain of representation and performance, but instead became embodied, lived reality. These took place among the preeminent sites for debates about the post-revolutionary era, which began in people’sconsciousness well in advance of state recognition. These suppressed but increasingly visible identities and subject positions were documented in the work of photographers and filmmakers as well as cabaret performance by drag artists.
From the Seventies On
Authors: Loza Steven
Published: January 2020

This chapter highlights Wilson's consistent, progressive development during the second part of his career that encompassed various phases and explorations, including active work in media and education. From the early 1970s, Wilson's musical culture and impact have diversified. During this time, his role expanded well beyond that of bandleader, arranger, and composer, as he entered the realms of symphonic composition, radio, and education while all the time maintaining his principal vocation of composing, arranging, recording, concertizing, and keeping his orchestra together. During the early years of the decade of the 1970s, Wilson was offered an opportunity for a commission to compose a piece for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He also began to teach courses on the history of jazz at a number of different universities in the Los Angeles area.
From a Musical Point of View
Authors: Loza Steven
Published: January 2020

This chapter presents a diverse selection of musical profiles reflecting Wilson's evolution in musical style, composition, and arranging. One of the most salient features of Wilson's music is that of innovation. His innovative character was not limited to his constantly evolving musical style but also to his creative relationships to cultural traditions (many outside the jazz world, to the media), racial integration, education, and the performance context. For many years, Wilson made it clear that his band did not rely on rehearsals, and that when he recorded he wanted to keep the music as spontaneous as possible. This certainly did not equate into his recordings matching his live performance in experience, effect, or executions, for better or worse; however, he had always felt that he came close.
Modern Chicago Blues: Delta Retentions
Authors: O’Neal Jim
Published: January 2020

This chapter discusses the retentions of the Delta blues in modern Chicago blues today and the new status of Mississippi vs. Chicago in the blues world. The blues of the Delta was a major influence on the way blues developed in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. Many of the great blues artists of that period were either born in the Delta or were performing there before they came to Chicago. The songs of these men are still carried on in the repertoires of almost every blues band working in Chicago today. However, Chicago blues has changed over the years as it has incorporated other musical trends. Whereas Delta blues was at one time the primary basis of Chicago blues, it is now just one of several elements that make up the modern Chicago sound.
Mississippi Blues Today and Its Future
Authors: Evans David
Published: January 2020

This concluding chapter addresses the Mississippi blues today and its future. Most of the great Mississippi blues artists have been replaced largely by blues artists in a new category, namely revivalists. The blues revival, characterized by an interest in and support for the music by people outside the traditional black community, was certainly a factor in Mississippi blues already in the mid-1980s in respect to research, recording, and the sponsorship of festivals and other performance venues, but at that time the revival more or less took artists as they had been performing in Mississippi black communities and presented them in new settings for new audiences. Now, thirty years later, there are many blues artists, both black and white, who have begun their performing careers with an orientation toward the blues revival audience. Another new factor is the appearance of blues families, that is, blues artists whose parents or grandparents were also blues artists.
Alan Moore and Anarchist Praxis in Form
Authors: Gifford James , Kidder Orion Ussner
Published: January 2020

By privileging anarchism as a movement, a philosophy, and a methodology, these scholars extend its operation as an organizational concept across Alan Moore’s oeuvre, particularly to his later works, which often do not contain explicit anarchist content or for which critical consensus has been elusive. Moving from V for Vendetta to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier both demonstrates the continuity of anarchist thought in Moore’s work and emphasizes a shift from explicit thematic contents to implicit formal and stylistic traits.
Truth, Justice, and the Socialist Way?
Authors: Bevin Phil
Published: January 2020

Bevin argues that Grant Morrison’s contribution to DC’s New 52 presents readers with a Superman who starts his career as a partisan social activist fighting for the rights of the most vulnerable in society but who transitions to a superhero who defends “everyone” as his story progresses. Bevin places his analysis in the context of Morrison’s earlier work to argue that his tenure on Action Comics follows his well-established thematic preoccupations and that Superman’s development throughout mirrors the writer’s own political evolution from a critic of Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing United Kingdom government to a popular philosopher suspicious of any strict political dogma, conservative, liberal, or otherwise. Bevin also applies the theories offered by cultural materialist Alan Sinfield in Faultline (1992) to suggest that, as a result of his political development, Morrison is now suspicious of moral absolutes and clear binary divisions.
Marvel’s Shamrock
Authors: Knopf Christina M.
Published: January 2020

This chapter considers the interplay of gender, nationality, powers, and vocations in the character of Molly “Shamrock” Fitzgerald, one of the most fascinating superheroines to appear in the Marvel Universe. A reluctant superhero, Shamrock served as a voice for the voiceless: women, children, workers, and the dead. Spiritually connected to a war she disavowed, she stayed modestly in the background when possible and took on maternal responsibilities of educator and caretaker – low-profile, emotionally-draining roles that would necessitate her working odd jobs through retirement. With strengths found through feminine agency, Shamrock’s intermittent appearances throughout the Marvel Universe between 1982 and 2015 are strikingly representative of the complicated history of women in society, war, and work.
“Open to Me. Maybe I Can Help”
Authors: Donner Mathieu
Published: January 2020

After millennia of eugenic planning, Doro’s supremacy is challenged by a young telepath named Mary in Octavia Butler’s Mind of My Mind. Matthieu Donner argues that Mary’s transition as described by Butler reframes adolescence as an ethical awakening, a violent rupture that transitions from singularity to plurality, solipsism to interdependence, boundaried to vulnerable. Mary is able to network with other telepaths, training them and centering them, accomplishing quickly and sensitively what Doro failed to do—establish a community of telepaths who are free from societal interference. Butler’s ideas are understandably fraught with contradictions, but nevertheless revolutionary.
Information Disembodiment Takeover
Authors: Hervey Shannon
Published: January 2020

Focusing on four YA novels-—#16thingsithoughtweretrue,
The Future of Us, Feed, and The Unwritten—Shannon Hervey describes how adolescent anxiety results from the realization that teens are not just addicted to the Internet; they are tech-human hybrids. Social media demands self-commodification with the capitalistic return of followers and readers, feeding the fear that the virtual self seems to create or at least control the material self. Three of the novels offer unsatisfactory endings, as withdrawal from social media is the only answer. The Unwritten, though, tries to work through the process of actualization and the acceptance of posthumanist subjectivities.
“Superpowers Don’t Always Make You a Superhero”
Authors: Kennon Patricia
Published: January 2020

Michael Grant’s popular Gone series, as Patricia Kennan argues, is mostly a failed attempt at exploring posthuman possibilities. As characters under the age of 15 are trapped under a city-wide dome to fend for themselves, having to deal with mutations that make many of them superhuman, they regress to acting out the worst of human traits. The few who are generous and social-minded are heroic in their intentions but are overrun by those whose powers are fed by greed. Grant seems to delight in describing monstrous mutations, while characterizing homosexuality, special needs children, and nonwhite races or ethnicities as less than human.
Posthumanism in The House of the Scorpion and The Lord of Opium
Authors: White Donna R.
Published: January 2020

In her The House of the Scorpion and The Lord of Opium, Nancy Farmer narrates the story of Matt, a clone created to extend the life of El Patrón, ruler of the autonomous country of Opium between the U.S. and Mexico. Donna White explains how Farmer employs epigenetics to show that genes do not determine one’s destiny, and every clone of El Patrón is different. At first Matt learns to acknowledge himself as human, but eventually he learns to accept his multiple subjectivites of animal, monster, saint, drug lord, clone, human, and even El Patrón. Even though El Patrón uses posthumanist biotechnologies to maintain his position, he thrives on the power humanist beliefs give him. Matt, meanwhile, retains some of these humanist values while moving to embrace his multiplicity.
Coming of Age and the Other
Authors: Schmeink Lars
Published: January 2020

Paolo Bacigalupi, known for his eco-fiction, sets his Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities in dystopias of flooded environments controlled and exploited by huge corporations. Everything is commodified, including children’s bodies. Lars Schmeink demonstrates how the adolescent protagonists Nailer and Mahlia resist genetic determinism and find hope as they create alternative value systems. The animal-human hybrid Tool, common to both novels, also resists his supposed DNA-determined behavior as mindless warrior and frees himself to become tool to no one. Critical, or ethical, posthumanism offers a vision for creating subjectivities that embrace the Other and forge paths to a better future.
Posthuman Potential and Ecological Limit in Future Worlds
Authors: Chen Phoebe
Published: January 2020

Phoebe Chen analyzes three representative YA dystopic novels in which characters face ecological disaster and finds them lacking, inadequate to address posthumanist possibilities. Ecological posthumanism stresses connections—between self and Other, human and environment, present and past—erasing borders that constitute liberal humanism. Earth Girl, Of Beast and Beauty, and Orleans all feature female protagonists living in ruined eco-systems whose subjectivities are massively influenced by their environments. Jarra, as an archaeologist on Earth, heals through recovery of the past; Isra reclaims the human traits of compassion and sacrifice to embrace the Other; and Fen survives (for a while) in the flooded streets of Orleans by embedding herself into the environment, thus losing her posthuman dignity. Chen describes such novels as being an “imaginative platform” for speculating about being human in ruined environments, a likelihood we all will face.
Negotiating the Human in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus
Authors: Caeners Torsten
Published: January 2020

Using psychoanalytic theories, Torsten Caeners places the film Prometheus squarely in the canon of YA literature. The characters Elizabeth and the android David are “ciphers for young adult concerns of coming of age.” The crew of the spaceship Prometheus discovers the Engineers, superhuman aliens who created humans. Elizabeth, obsessed with origins, believes they have found the source of humanity, but because of her refusal to let go of her belief paradigms (represented by her father, God, science, and finally the Engineers) she remains in stasis and even moves backward from transitioning in her development. David, though, is the true adolescent, in-between human and nonhuman, moving on and changing, experiencing transformations—the hallmark of posthumanism—serially. Caeners argues that posthumanism is adolescence, as both are liminal conditions, fluid, boundary-less, marked by the angst of transformation and new possibilities.
The Decline of Know Nothingism: 1856–57
Authors: Carriere Marius M.
Published: January 2020

This chapter discusses the continued Know Nothing election setbacks in the mid to late 1850s. However, the chapter emphasizes the belief that only the Know Nothings, according to many members, could avoid the sectional tension of the 1850s. While the state elections proved futile for the Know Nothings, the party continued to do well in Greater New Orleans. The chapter also continues to describe how Louisiana Democrats branded the Know Nothings as proscriptionists and abolitionists. The presidential election of 1860 is highlighted in this chapter with sectional stress assuming more importance than native Americanism. The ultimate failure of the Know Nothings in the state follows the party’s 1860 presidential election defeat and its gubernatorial defeat in 1857. Finally, the chapter summarizes how inexperience and lack of Know Nothing unity adversely affected the Know Nothings in these elections, as well as in the state legislature.
Nativism Struggles: 1858–60
Authors: Carriere Marius M.
Published: January 2020

Chapter 5 discusses how some Know Nothing felt the American party’s candidates’ inaction and the lethargy of the party’s leaders led to the party’s defeat in 1857. Some Know Nothings continued to oppose the Democrats and the Democrats’ radicalism, but the party witnessed its strength reduced to the New Orleans area. The party did remain successful in New Orleans and many old Whigs and Know Nothings continued to resist the Democrats. This chapter discusses the 1859 state election when an “Opposition” ticket appeared to replace the Know Nothings. In 1860, remnants of Know Nothings, Whigs, and a few Democrats refused to support Breckinridge and hoped to avoid a national disaster. These conservative men supported the Constitutional Union party, with a few old Know Nothings deciding not to “accept Unionism at any price,” and going with Breckinridge. In May 1862, Know Nothingism disappeared with the Know Nothing mayor of New Orleans surrendering the city to the Union forces
Connection, Separation, and Mediation
Authors: Bernhard Carrie
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines interstitial spaces in traditional New Orleans architecture and how these in-between spaces interconnect to form a matrix of systems that surrounds and sometimes perforates a building in order to amend it to its surroundings, tempering the otherwise harsh relationship between a building and the hot, humid climate of southern Louisiana. Not only do interstitial systems fulfill crucial functional requirements, but they also help to modulate formal, spatial and experiential qualities, and mediate the nature of a building’s habitation and its urban relationships. This chapter proposes that interstitial systems were vital to the original success of New Orleans traditional house types, developing concurrently as indispensable constituents of the three distinct house types that eventually regularized here (the Creole Cottage, the Creole Townhouse and the Shotgun House) and, today, constituting a significant part of their enduring relevance and appeal.
Airportness in New Orleans
Authors: Schaberg Christopher
Published: January 2020

This chapter lingers in the Louis Armstrong International Airport outside of New Orleans, and discovers possibilities for regional identification as well as postmodern paradoxes of non-place and hyper-reality. The essay considers the New Orleans airport not just as a generic point of transit, but as a uniquely situated interstitial zone, a proxy for the city that also trembles at the edge of oblivion, as it is scheduled to be demolished and replaced with a new terminal. Looking at what gives the space its “airportness,” as well as what tethers the terminal to farther flung objects and destinations, to travel tourism, this chapter ponders the idiosyncrasies and ecotones of Louis Armstrong International.
Interspace Seven
Authors: Clark John P.
Published: January 2020

In highlighting the political stakes of using interstitial space as an interpretive lens on New Orleans, John Clark’s manifesto reveals many of the aesthetic, social, and historical concerns that weave throughout this collection. All the essayists are drawn to the idiom of spatial in-betweenness as a distinctive way of describing, analyzing, criticizing, or celebrating different relations of freedom and constraint, inclusion and exclusion, tradition and change, and fantasy and reality, located in New Orleans. At the same time, while elaborating on Clark’s notion of the antistitial, these essays also offer other senses of how in-between spaces relate to the city’s history. If sweet spots can press toward radical destruction, they can also dynamically exploit, amend, and transform the conditions between which they stand. Why is it that New Orleans always seems about to end yet never does? For Mac Heard, as for our contributors, this elusive but ongoing interplay between the city’s in-between spaces and the multiple responses that they evoke may be one factor that helps to account not only for New Orleans’s complex attraction but also for the city’s historically striking ability to reinvent and adapt itself to natural and social challenges. In this still evolving post-Katrina moment, the question for all of us may not be, When will densely human spaces like New Orleans implode? but rather, What long-standing cultural strategies can be newly mobilized to reimagine their futures?...
“I Was Born Too Quick”: Archival Contributions and Limitations in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings
Authors: Rutter Emily Ruth
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that William Brashler’s novel The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1973) and the 1976 filmic adaptation directed by John Badham subvert the image of the archetypal baseball hero as a WASP figure who raises himself up to become a national star. Instead, these works apotheosize black players, such as the slugger Josh Gibson and the pitching ace Satchel Paige. Yet, while black figures and experiences once absent from or pushed to the margins of baseball archives are brought to the fore, they remain shrouded by dominant cultural understandings of “otherness.” Moreover, Brashler’s and, in turn, Badham’s emphasis on male camaraderie and comic levity tend to undercut the trauma of de jure segregation for both the men and women who lived through it, revealing some of the limitations of this first wave of white-authored black baseball literature.
Black Baseball Novels and White Redemption
Authors: Rutter Emily Ruth
Published: January 2020

Chapter 2 contends that Jay Neugeboren’s Sam’s Legacy (1974), John Craig’s Chappie and Me (1979), and Jerome Charyn’s The Seventh Babe (1979) extend William Brashler’s and John Badham’s work by bringing black baseball out of the shadows. However, at the same time that these novels honor the achievements of black ballplayers, they draw on tropes of the “magical negro” and/or the “white savior.” Ultimately, this chapter and the previous one demonstrate the implicit ways in which white privilege works its way into literature, as these novelists redress the absence of black baseball in our national consciousness (and our archives), while choosing not to make the humanity of the players their chief concern.
The Third Wave
Authors: Rutter Emily Ruth
Published: January 2020

In the second wave of black baseball works, African American playwrights, poets, and novelists uncovered an archive of feelings replete with the particular pains and pleasures of segregated life. The contemporary writers in the third wave place similar faith in literature as a way of knowing marginalized histories, while more deliberately foregrounding their own roles as mediators and curators of these histories. In ...
Good Citizens, Ambivalent Activists, and Macho Militants in Forrest Gump and The ’60s
Authors: Hoerl Kristen
Published: January 2020

This chapter looks at how the motion picture Forrest Gump and the ABC miniseries The ‘60s contributed to heteronormative and gendered meanings about the counterculture and anti-Vietnam War movements. The interpersonal conflicts portrayed in this movie and miniseries metaphorically represent the nation divided by disagreement over the Vietnam War and changing family structures. Through a discussion of three recurring character types—the good citizen, the ambivalent activist, and the macho militant—, this chapter argues that Forrest Gump and The ‘60s constructed narratives of national reconciliation and white masculine redemption. These narratives contributed to the backlash against feminism that animated political campaign and policy rhetoric during the mid-to-late nineties.
The Criminalization of Late Sixties Militancy in Television Police Procedurals
Authors: Hoerl Kristen
Published: January 2020

This chapter analyses episodes from three television police dramas that were inspired by the publicity surrounding radical militant groups including the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Episodes of Law and Order, Life on Mars, and The Chicago Code integrated political rhetoric and journalism coverage of radical militants with the generic conventions of the television police procedural. The chapter argues that these programs conflate radical ideology with violent criminal activity. This conflation cultivates norms of democratic citizenship that call for uncritical assent to law enforcement and suspicion toward dissidents and has troubling implications for contemporary protest movements.
Deadpan Irreverence with Cosmic Proportions
Authors: Soper Kerry D.
Published: January 2020

In this chapter the explores the comedic devices and themes on display in The Far Side. First, he looks into Larson’s working methods as a comedian, charting his process from free associative brainstorming into strategies of refining and clarifying his jokes, and finally receiving critical feedback from editors. Second, using specific cartoons as examples, he analyzes the humor of Larson’s work in relation to basic theories of what makes us laugh: surprising incongruities, irreverent treatments of taboo subject matter, and comic depictions of violence or misfortune that evoke in the reader mingled emotions of sympathy and schadenfreude. He then explores a number of the comedic devices commonly used in The Far Side, considering ways that Larson modified or combined them in original ways: wordplay that literalized figurative speech or tested the logic of clichéd maxims; in medias res (in the middle of the action) vignettes that required readers to complete a narrative; cross-overs between animal and human worlds; gothic or morbid deconstructions of comforting social myths; and cheeky parodies of a variety of genres, mediums and discourses. Throughout the chapter the author periodically breaks away from close readings of Larson’s cartoons to paint in broad strokes the larger philosophical meanings circulating around The Far Side, suggesting ways that his comedy often became pointedly satiric, borrowing from the philosophical traditions of naturalism, absurdism, and the carnivalesque.
Blandly Drawn, Myopic Pinheads
Authors: Soper Kerry D.
Published: January 2020

In this chapter the author explores the art of The Far Side. To begin, he looks at Larson’s cartooning style with fresh eyes, unbiased by traditional frames that would readily dismiss his approach as simplistic or deficient. Using a more foundational set of objective questions as a starting point—Does it work? Is it funny? —he considers how his self-taught aesthetic effectively became a strength within those focused goals. As a support in this exercise, the author borrows ideas from Scott McCloud that highlight the underappreciated strength of highly distilled cartoon imagery. The author also describes influences on, and precedents to, Larson’s crude and intentionally unprofessional aesthetics: alternative magazine cartoonists like B. Kliban, minimalistic animation styles that emerged in the 1960s, and figures within the underground comix movement. The chapter concludes with an application of ideas borrowed from semiotics to understand the shifting connotations of a number of Larson’s key aesthetic devices and symbols: affectless linework, a variety of eyeglasses, beehive hairdos, flat-eyed brows, pinheaded craniums and schlumpy physiques.
The Accidental Cartooning Auteur
Authors: Soper Kerry D.
Published: January 2020

In this chapter the author looks at the business side of Larson’s career, considering how he navigated the challenges of working in this highly competitive and intensively mediated field. Using a qualified version of the auteur theory as a starting point, he posits that Larson’s success as a highly original cartoonist was contingent on his ability to protect his rights as an artist and satirist. He then assesses how Larson almost accidentally stumbled into the role of the iconoclast, but then effectively exerted the clout and independence of a genuine sateur (a satirically-minded auteur) with relative degrees of effectiveness as he negotiated contracts; interacted with syndicate bosses, newspaper editors, and reporters; made decisions about merchandising; and negotiated the pressures of celebrity. The author illustrates that it was often Larson’s lack of “professionalism” that ironically helped him—often intentionally, but sometimes unknowingly—to make decisions or enact strategies that would both protect the integrity of his work and amplify the popularity of his cartoon.
“True Doll Stories”
Authors: Vaz-Deville Kim
Published: January 2020

Resa Bazile is an important voice in the current Baby Doll tradition. Cinnamon Black is an entertainer, a queen in the Fi Yi Yi Mandigo Warriors Mardi Gras Indian tribe, a Voodoo practitioner and reader at the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum in New Orleans, and a cultural consultant for documentaries, film industry projects, and media outlets. With her finger on the pulse of New Orleans’ past and present spiritual and cultural heritage, this interview with Resa, who is best known as “Cinnamon Black,” delves into the meaning of the Baby Doll tradition, her group, the Treme Million Dollar Baby Dolls, about the modern revival of the tradition, about the impact of white women maskers on the tradition, and what she sees as the future of the practice.
Fighting for Freedom
Authors: Johnson Jessica Marie
Published: January 2020

Since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enslaved and free women of African descent have been central to New Orleans’ culture and black community formation. Enslaved women of African descent who secured manumission—or legal documentation of their freedom—laid the foundation for the vibrant and politically savvy black community that would emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fight for freedom, however, would be long and winding, with complicated successes and failures reflecting diversity and conflict within and among women of African descent, as well as the changing geopolitical terrain the city was founded on and remained situated in throughout its long history. Recovering the voices of these early, founding women—the political and cultural ancestors of the Baby Dolls—is crucial to developing a history of women of African descent’s defiance and resistance to both racial and gendered oppression across New Orleans history.
Is the Unruly Woman Masker Still Relevant?
Authors: Vaz-Deville Kim
Published: January 2020

The Baby Doll tradition remains relevant because it continues to excite women who mask and the new audiences that are embracing them. The practice resonates with sacred ritual traditions of Guede, Rara and the Eleusinian mysteries that involve satire. The tradition provides an accessible means of participation in a topsy-turvy tradition where unruly women control the spectator’s gaze though they may not in their everyday lives.
How the Baby Dolls Became an Iconic Part of Mardi Gras 1
Authors: Vaz-Deville Kim
Published: January 2020

This chapter traces the history of the Baby Dolls through their connection to songs, bands, and musical genres. Reflecting its African influence, black music is made in response to those who will be dancing to it. The varying groups of Baby Dolls of New Orleans can be distinguished to a certain extent by the music and the musicians they are connected to.
In Memory: Uncle Lionel Batiste (February 11, 1932–July 8, 2012)
Authors: Brock Jerry
Published: January 2020

The chapter “In Memory: Uncle Lionel Batiste,” traces the life of popular New Orleans musician and cultural activist Uncle Lionel Batiste (born Feb. 11, 1932) in the context of his family, community, music, baby dolls, Dirty Dozen Kazoo Band, Mardi Gras, second line parades, Spiritual churches and ancestry. The experience and enrichment of African American music and cultural traditions, expressions and lifestyles are presented in relationship to social and economic oppression and the Civil War, Reconstruction and the movement for equality, equity and justice. The author challenges the monophonic and repeated reckoning that the practice of Black women masking as Baby Dolls was originated solely by a group of prostitutes from Black Storyville in 1912. The work attempts to define the ambiguous term “baby doll” in historical, social, cultural and political context and traces “baby doll” inclusions in popular music and theater. Uncle Lionel’s mother Alma Batiste started the Batiste baby dolls and was active in community organizing and rose to the position of Reverend Mother Alma Batiste in the Spiritual church. The beginnings of the Dirty Dozen Kazoo Band and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band along with research into the origination of the second line parade tradition as it relates to Uncle Lionel, his family and neighborhood is advanced. It concludes with Benny Jones and the Treme Brass Band whom Uncle Lionel performed with the last two decades of his life (death July 8, 2012).
Baby Doll Addendum and Mardi Gras’49
Authors: Brock Jerry
Published: January 2020

A brief addendum illustrating the end of the national trend to use the term “baby doll” in popular music in the late 1920s including in songs by Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters. While in New Orleans the practice of masking baby doll continued as demonstrated by the advertised performance “Baby Dolls of 1949” at the Caldonia Inn during Carnival season. Relative to this performance is the reign of Louis Armstrong as King of the Zulus, Professor Longhair’s early career and first recordings including “Go To the Mardi Gras.” Henry Youngblood is quoted about the Baby Doll Gloria Lopez and brief mentions and biographical information is included on the other performers; Sumter “Cha Cha” Hogan, Albert Bellvue, Lloyd Ignicious, Mattie Campbell and Alma “Lollypop” Jones.
Reinvention
Authors: Carrico Rachel
Published: January 2020

Antoinette Dorsey Fox K-Doe (1945-2009)—known to most New Orleanians as Miss Antoinette—played an important role in the history of the Baby Doll tradition. In the last years of her life, she fostered a Baby Doll revival when many feared that the practice might become relegated to memory. On Mardi Gras Day, 2004, she debuted the interracial and inter-generational Ernie K-Doe Baby Dolls, named in honor of her late husband, rhythm-and-blues singer Ernie K-Doe. This essay summarizes Miss Antoinette’s contributions to the Baby Doll tradition as a community pillar dedicated to cultural preservation and innovation. Long before she donned a Baby Doll dress, Miss Antoinette constructed many effigies, tributes, and monuments as part of her unique form of community organizing. Her Baby Doll revival can be seen in this context, as a revival that both preserved the past and (re-)invented a present.
The World That Antoinette K-Doe Made
Authors: Florence Rob
Published: January 2020

This chapter consists ofRob Florence’s personal impressions and experiences on his life as a member of K-Doe’s circle and many of these involve the people who masked as Baby Dolls.
Sass and Circumstance
Authors: Gair Daniele
Published: January 2020

This chapter offers an up close and personal view of the Baby Doll tradition, through the eyes of a native New Orleanian joining the Baby Dolls and costuming as a Baby Doll for the first time. Taking place on Mardi Gras Day 2015, this account follows an intrepid masker and two friendsas they wind their way from the Marigny to the famous Mother-in-Law Lounge, though the Tremé and to the French Quarter. Mardi Gras is already an exciting and sometimes challenging experience, even for a veteran. Yet the idea of partying with the Baby Dolls, at first intimidating, proves to be both welcoming and exhilarating, and offers invaluable insight into this unique New Orleans tradition, and into New Orleans culture itself.
Introduction
Authors: Lechtreck Elaine Allen
Published: January 2020

The introduction includes Bible verses cited by ministers to defend segregation and verses to oppose segregation. There are slices of the history of the United States, the Civil Rights Movement, and African American history. The southern states, where white ministers confronted segregation, are identified. The term “minister” is explained as well as the variety of labels given these ministers ranging from “Liberal,” Progressive,” “Neo-Orthodox,” “Evangelical Liberal,” “open conservative,” ‘Last Hurrah of the Social Gospel Movement” to “Trouble Maker,” “Traitor, “ “Atheist,” “Communist,” “N_____ Lover.” Rachel Henderlite, the only woman minister mentioned in the book, is identified. Synopses of the book’s seven chapters are included. Comments by historians David Chappell, Charles Reagan Wilson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ernest Campbell, and Thomas Pettigrew are cited.
The Heart of the Movement
Authors: Lechtreck Elaine Allen
Published: January 2020

The chapter reveals the violence associated with the Civil Rights Movement, the courage of African American activists (Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers) and the small minority of southern white ministers who joined them. In Montgomery, Alabama, Robert Graetz provided taxi service for demonstrators. Andrew Turnipseed paid the salary of James Love, who signed the Mobile bus petition, when his parishioners would not. No southern white minister would participate in freedom rides, but John Morris organized a Freedom Ride after the violence subsided. The group was arrested. Joseph Ellwanger was harassed in Birmingham. Hundreds of black protestors were arrested and tortured. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Edwin King was arrested and tortured. The Klan and other white supremacist groups flourished. Black activists and some whites were murdered in Mississippi. As Edwin King commented, “Good white people could do nothing in the face of madness.”
Church Visitations
Authors: Lechtreck Elaine Allen
Published: January 2020

During the Civil Rights Movement, many white churches in the South issued closed-door policies that prevented black people from entering their sanctuaries. Many white ministers who attempted to admit African Americans lost their churches. This chapter relates crisis incidents in three Alabama churches, First Presbyterian, Tuscaloosa, First Presbyterian, Tuskegee, and First Baptist, Birmingham; two Baptist churches in Georgia, Tattnell Square in Macon, and Plains Baptist in Plains, three churches in Jackson, Mississippi, Galloway Memorial Methodist, First Christian, and Capitol Street Church of Christ The chapter also includes an account of the sustained campaign in Jackson by black students from Tougaloo University who suffered pain and rejection. William Cunningham, one of the ministers forced to leave Galloway Memorial Methodist Church, commented, “There was agony for the churches outside and agony within…. The church could not change the culture; but the culture changed and carried the church along with it.”
New Directions
Authors: Lechtreck Elaine Allen
Published: January 2020

This chapter depicts directions far removed from the nonviolent civil rights movement. It includes the rhetoric and actions of New Leaders such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, and James Forman, descriptions of incendiary riots, ministerial responses to the riots, the efforts of Rev. Frank McRae to end the Sanitation Workers Strike in Memphis, King’s assassination, and the dramatic Demand for Reparations. Significant were the responses to the events from Episcopal Bishop John Hines, Rev. Dr. Ralph Sockman, John Morris of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU), W. W. Finlator, Rev. Ed King, and Rabbi James Wax. Also significant were the transformation of Roman Catholic Bishop Joseph Durick, the changes in the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC), and the new directions of Will Campbell who began to see that the racist was perhaps the greatest challenge of the day.
Conclusion
Authors: Lechtreck Elaine Allen
Published: January 2020

This conclusion asks questions: Does a minister remain silent in the face of injustice? What happens to important ministerial concepts such as “freedom of the pulpit”? Can a pastor balance the prophetic with pastoral duties? Can he/she ignore the inclusive message of the Christian Church for fear of losing a pulpit? These ministers did not remain silent in the face of injustice. They believed in “freedom of the pulpit.” They did not ignore the inclusive message of Christianity. Many lost their pulpits and some were never given pulpits. As James Wall, a southern white minister who served as editor of The Christian Century magazine expressed, “These ministers carried a heavy burden and many were truly prophets without honor in ‘their own country. In answering a questionnaire, ministers responded that faith in the Christian message and their witness to racial atrocities were the two most important factors influencing their actions.
Introduction
Authors: Scodari Christine
Published: January 2020

The introduction narrates the author’s experiences with and practices of family history that led to her decision to critically investigate genealogy media and culture from the perspective of race, ethnicity, and intersected identities. It details the relevant research questions and critical objects, supplies theories and concepts appropriate to the task, outlines the methods used to examine associated institutions, media texts, and audiences/participatory cultures of genealogy, and previews upcoming chapters.
Unraveling Genealogy Culture
Authors: Scodari Christine
Published: January 2020

Chapter Two gauges hegemonic and/or resistive meanings, readings, or outcomes in or related to traditional and digital institutions, tools, texts, practices, participatory cultures, and identities associated with taking up and/or performing genealogy. It scrutinizes issues of privacy, race, ethnicity, class, gender, age, and intersected identities in such terms. The chapter highlights genealogical tourism and family reunions in light of the racial/ethnic dimensions of the author’s auto-ethnographic sojourns. It also elaborates existing theory and research on social and digital media and situates these insights in terms of day-to-day practices of genealogy.
Loose Ends, Conclusions, and Critical Trajectories
Authors: Scodari Christine
Published: January 2020

The seventh chapter melds findings from throughout the study with over-arching auto-ethnographic insights. It dissects and contextualizes in terms of the issues and theoretical framework of the study collected genealogical information and mementos such as family photographs. The author attempts to envision and narrate a cultural moment in her grandmother’s immigrant family and the lives and identity-intersected experiences of her four Italian great-grandmothers according to general and, to the extent possible, particular knowledge, pivoting between details known and unknown. The chapter presents its resolutions concerning digital/social/convergent media and suggests amendments to existing theory. It examines the volume’s relatively unexplored issues such as LGBT identities and intersections, adoption and other forms of family building that might be racially transgressive, and wrong turns and unexpected or sensitive revelations. It also contemplates and recommends study of genealogy media and culture in international contexts.
The Genteel Tradition and the Emergence of the African American Sonnet
Authors: Müller Timo
Published: January 2020

This chapter traces the emergence of the sonnet in African American literature to the pervasive influence of genteel conventions. These conventions have widely been regarded as conservative or even stultifying, but they provided black poets with various opportunities for self-assertion in the public sphere. The sonnet was a favourite genre among the genteel establishment, and poets pushed the boundaries of black expression by appropriating the form to subvert racial stereotypes, develop a black poetic subjectivity, and participate in the debate over the memory of the Civil War. In tracing these developments, the chapter repositions the outstanding poets of the period, Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson, alongside their less-known contemporaries, Samuel Beadle, William Stanley Braithwaite, Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr., T. Thomas Fortune, and Henrietta Cordelia Ray.
The Sonnet and Black Transnationalism in the 1930s
Authors: Müller Timo
Published: January 2020

While the transnational dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance are widely acknowledged, scholarly accounts often suggest that the Great Depression narrowed the scope of African American writing to localized concerns such as social improvement and folk expression. The chapter complicates this assumption by drawing attention to the little-known sonnets Claude McKay and Countee Cullen wrote in the 1930s, some of which remained unpublished until the early twenty-first century. These sonnets show that African American poetry sustained a range of transnational conversations throughout the 1930s. The chapter examines two such conversations: the negotiation of black travel around the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and the Pan-Africanism incited by the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935/36. Besides McKay and Cullen, the chapter considers sonnets by the neglected poets J. Harvey L. Baxter, Alpheus Butler, and Marcus Bruce Christian.
Poetics of the Enclave
Authors: Müller Timo
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines the previously neglected role of the sonnet in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Leading theorists of the movement denounced the sonnet as a paradigmatic “white” form that constrained black self-expression and had to be excluded from the black nation. The demand for an oral, authentic, collective poetry led poets to dismantle the traditional sonnet structure and adapt the form to cultural nationalist demands. The chapter reviews the role of traditional poetic forms in the black aesthetic and discusses strategies of camouflaging or demarcating the sonnet in the work of June Jordan, Joe Mitchell, Conrad Kent Rivers, Quincy Troupe, and Margaret Walker. These strategies confirm the view in recent scholarship that the Black Arts movement exerted both a confining and a creative influence on poets of the time.