bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Once upon a Cyborg
Authors: Insenga Angela S.
Published: January 2020

Angela Insenga investigates how Marissa Meyer retells the story of Cinderella as a victim of the ideological battle between transhumanists (pushing technological advancement) and bio-conservatives (expressing posthumanist anxiety). Always and still a story of embodiment, Cinderella here is a cyborg who confronts multiple subjectivities as she learns more of her history and contemplates her future. Cinder learns to appreciate her “loosely coupled entities” of human, mechanic, young woman, cyborg, Prince Kai’s love interest, Lunar princess, revolutionary, and savior of humankind against the Letumosis pandemic—thus breaking down anthropocentric binaries that separate human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic. Cinder, as cyborg, is the new human, the posthuman.
“Those Maps Would Have to Change”
Authors: Matlock Maryna
Published: January 2020

Using feminist theories, Maryna Matlock examines Leigh Bardugo’s Tsarpunk trilogy that lays bare the binaries between humanism and posthumanism, anthropocentrism and feminist multiplicity. Cartographer Alina becomes a Sun Summoner, a hybrid being yoked with magical antlers that amplify her extra-human powers but also put her under the control of the enigmatic, seductive Darkling. Matlock shows how Alina joins other female characters who resist humanist hegemony by means of self-aware gender performance. The border wars play out on land as well as on the bodies of these characters who embrace posthuman possibilities.
Posthumanist Magic
Authors: Vinci Tony M.
Published: January 2020

Tony Vinci explains how Lev Grossman’s The Magicians suggests a new way of reading YA fantasy, not just as a privileged anthropocentric human reading escapist literature, reifying the boundary between reality and fantasy. Since the now-commodified set of expectations for fantasy to be unsettling are no longer as effective for readers, Grossman’s meta-fiction enables readers to view all realities as linguistic constructs. Thus when Quentin Coldwater and his magicians-in-training friends cross over into Narnia-like Fillory, they are encouraged to acknowledge the porous border between reality and fantasy, to recognize the “posthumanist ethics of vulnerability and radical openness to the Other, within and without.” But Quentin resists, even as a magical animal-human, clinging to traditional humanist values, and refuses to experience “becoming-with Otherness.”
Early Political Nativism in Louisiana: 1832–49
Authors: Carriere Marius M.
Published: January 2020

This chapter discusses the ethnic and religious politics in Louisiana that began in the 1830s that came out of the Creole-American rivalry of the early days following the Louisiana Purchase. Louisiana became more democratic with an influx of native (Anglo) Americans and this led to political turmoil. The chapter discusses foreign immigration, mainly Irish immigration that further heightened nativism in the state during the 1830s and 1840s. The chapter describes how the nativist sentiment affected politics in the state, both in local and national elections, and which, at times, led to third party movements that exploited the nativism. Violence and fraud became more commonplace in the state.
Know Nothingism at Its Peak: 1854–55
Authors: Carriere Marius M.
Published: January 2020

Chapter 3 discusses how the Know Nothing party affected the entire state with several election victories. The chapter stresses Know Nothing resolve to affect reform and native-American control of the political system. The chapter also demonstrates how Know Nothings have been incorrectly characterized by earlier historians of the party in Louisiana. The chapter points out how the influence of northern Know Nothings’ opposition to slavery placed a heavy burden on the creditability of southern and Louisiana Know Nothings in the South and in Louisiana. For Louisiana, this chapter confronts the anti-Catholicism and secretiveness of the national party that embarrasses the party in the state and how Louisiana Americans stressed their conservatism and devotion to the Union as a way to avoid the slavery issue.
Epilogue
Authors: Carriere Marius M.
Published: January 2020

The Epilogue chapter summarizes nativism in Louisiana from the 1830s to the 1850s. This chapter discusses how foreigners and Catholics became a part of the political climate of the time and how the Know Nothings seemed to be a permanent fixture to oppose the Democrats. The summary reviews how Know Nothings’ anti-Catholicism was a serious handicap in heavily Catholic South Louisiana and confirms that many old Whigs made up a large part of the Know Nothing party. The chapter refutes older views of the Know Nothings being primarily large, wealthy slave-owning aristocrats or well-to-do town businessmen. The chapter reiterates that Louisiana Democrats and Know Nothings were often from a similar socio-economic background. It concludes with the view that Louisiana Know Nothings were different and unique in many ways from Know Nothings elsewhere. Louisiana Know Nothings attempted to preserve the Union while, at the same time, defend southern rights. In the end, they failed.
Interstitial Urban Space
Authors: Bernhard Scott
Published: January 2020

The street grid of New Orleans is uniquely configured relative to its unusual geography and 19th century settlement patterns. The method for creating an ordered street system adjacent to the dramatic undulations of the Mississippi River is as intricate and variable as the landscape itself. A combination of factors from the land-use patterns of plantations to the conflicting geometries of orderly grids and irregular curves conspired to produce the intelligible though complex urban landscape of New Orleans and a unique urban morphology. The order of streets and avenues in New Orleans produces nearly as many urban anomalies as it does regular ones and the building stock of the city often struggles to adapt to the irregularities of the “system.” These unique urban conditions were formed over the course of a century, yielding useful slivers of accidental public space and secret, interstitial worlds of compact living.
Degas’s New Orleanian Spaces
Authors: Brown Marilyn R.
Published: January 2020

In Degas’s representations of New Orleans, in-between, interstitial spaces like the veranda of his uncle’s rented Esplanade house, where he portrayed his cousin Mathilde Musson Bell, and the back steps, where he painted a scene of a black nanny and white children, not only visualize certain desired relations of race, class, and gender, but also indicate the instability at the heart of such fixed categories. His well-known painting of A Cotton Office also depicts a literal and metaphorical middle space that similarly alludes to and destabilizes social hierarchies of difference. Degas’s New Orleans paintings and drawings simultaneously expose and mask local anxieties about race and labor, as well as the ways social and spatial relations, whether public or private, were linked to broader historical forces of global capitalist exchange.
John Galsworthy’s “That Old-Time Place”
Authors: Toulouse Teresa A.
Published: January 2020

This essay offers an interpretation of English novelist, John Galsworthy’s sketch, “That Old Time Place,” that examines the symbolic meanings of his descriptions of interstitial spaces in New Orleans’ St. Louis Exchange Hotel. The author demonstrates how a range of the hotel’s in-between spaces—from its stairways, to its high-ceilinged dome, flooded hallways, and vaulted auction block—express and shape a repetitive, unrepentant fantasy of racial mastery underlying the South’s nostalgic version of history—the myth of the Old South. Drawing on the concept of Freudian “uncanny” as the “return of the repressed,” the essay argues that the English narrator’s overwhelming encounter with these in-between spaces of the South reveals his own unconscious attraction/repulsion for a race and class-based British “tradition.”
Where Women Live
Authors: Willinger Beth
Published: January 2020

The years of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were defined in part by a national obsession with domesticity and respectability and a redefinition of public/private spheres. Beginning with the efforts of the Christian Woman’s Exchange, and continuing with the work of the Traveler’s Aid Society, the Catholic Woman’s Club, the Catherine Club, and the Young Women’s Christian Association, reform-minded women in New Orleans organized to promote white women’s economic security and provide respectable and affordable residences as alternatives to prostitution. This essay considers women’s organizing and institution-building as creating an unchartered, interstitial spatial territory situated in-between the geographically-defined private household and the public boarding houses and brothels of Storyville.
Congo Square as a Lieu de Souvenir in New Orleans
Authors: Parham Angel Adams
Published: January 2020

This essay uncovers the ways that Congo Square in New Orleans can be read as a lieu de souvenir: an interstitial space for remembering the rich, diverse strands of African diaspora identity and practice that are sometimes hidden beneath the overarching category of “Blackness” in the United States. The word “souvenir” comes from combining the Latin words “sub”—under—and “venire”—to come. To “souvenir” is, therefore, to invite issues, experiences or practices, to come up from under the place where they have been buried. This kind of disaggregating remembrance helps us to uncover and appreciate the complexity and hybridity that underlie many taken-for-granted identities and practices and is particularly important when it comes to the politics of race and place. The discussion examines cycles of oppression and resistance that that have occurred in Congo Square over the course of its history.
Carnival at the Edge of the Abyss
Authors: Clark John P.
Published: January 2020

New Orleans is the apocalyptic city and the interstitial city par excellence. It lies at the edge of the abyss of non-being, that is, complete destruction, and the abyss of becoming, that is, radically creative transformation. The interstitial consist of that which lies in the gaps between the “stitial,” that which “stands,” the dominant reality. The antistitial is that within the interstitial which challenges this reality and has the utopian potential to overturn it. Apocalyptic New Orleans as a symptom of an ominous global future is the bad conscience of civilization. Yet, it in its carnivalesque antistitiality, it is perhaps also the liberatory unconscious of what comes beyond civilization.
Archival Interventions: Black Baseball and Imaginative Literature
Authors: Rutter Emily Ruth
Published: January 2020

This chapter provides a brief account of black baseball history, while underscoring the disjuncture between the meticulous records of organized white baseball and the comparatively scant documentation of baseball behind the color line. This chapter also delineates the central questions that the monograph addresses: How do playwrights, novelists, poets, and filmmakers fill in the absences in the archives of the national pastime? In what ways do writers subvert the myths about baseball as an athletic manifestation of the American dream, and what are the sociopolitical implications of the countermythologies that black baseball literature propagates? Moreover, how do all of these authors (white and black, men and women) grapple with the androcentrism that is endemic to baseball narratives and the game itself? In pursuing these questions, this chapter maps out a model for a comparative, archival-focused analysis of literary accounts of marginalized experiences within and beyond the national pastime.
Black Baseball’s Archive of Cultural Nationalist Feeling
Authors: Rutter Emily Ruth
Published: January 2020

This chapter and the subsequent one examine the second, African American-authored wave of black baseball literature, illuminating both the pain of social exclusion and the pleasure of communal solidarity. In chapter 3, August Wilson’s play Fences (1985) and Gloria Naylor’s novel Bailey’s Café (1992) evince the residual trauma of being systematically denied the opportunity to compete on a national stage, while firmly rejecting the racial progress that Jackie Robinson signifies for many Americans. Suggesting a homology between black baseball and the blues, Wilson and Naylor particularly evince the affective residue of segregation, sifting through what theorist Ann Cvetkovich terms an “archive of feelings.” Moreover, not unlike a jazz contrafact, these black baseball works riff on and revise standard narratives of baseball history, redirecting our attention to the African American players barred from the Major Leagues, as well as the complex feelings bound up in their relationship to the national pastime.
“Let’s Play Two”: The Affective Resonances of Black Baseball in African American Poetry
Authors: Rutter Emily Ruth
Published: January 2020

As with August Wilson and Gloria Naylor (chapter 3), chapter 4’s poets—Yusef Komunyakaa, Michael S. Harper, Quincy Troupe, and Harmony Holiday—view black baseball as a vehicle for exposing racial degradation on the one hand and maintaining collective pride on the other. While they hold distinct vantage points and Holiday is of a younger, post-Civil Rights generation, these poets are all invested in shedding light on the paradoxical emotions educed by the memory of black baseball, illuminating what it felt like to be systematically excluded from the national pastime and, ultimately, mainstream civic life. In the process, Komunyakaa, Harper, Troupe, and Holiday continue to mine and enrich an “archive of feelings,” which includes the resonances and ephemera that are not housed within museums or captured in statistical records but are nonetheless vital resources for reconstructing the interior lives of marginalized people.
Crossing the Color Line in Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues and Kevin King’s All the Stars Came Out That Night
Authors: Rutter Emily Ruth
Published: January 2020

Framed by Jacques Derrida’s reading of the archive as a vehicle for social control, this chapter and the following one consider the epistemological pressure that contemporary authors put on baseball history and mythology. Chapter 5 thus examines Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues (1996) and Kevin King’s All the Stars Came Out That Night (2005), novels that narrativize interracial play before Jackie Robinson’s 1947 start for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Casting doubt on the reliability of their white first-person narrators, both of whom are reporters, Winegardner and King imply the mediated nature of all historical knowledge. Moreover, The Veracruz Blues and All the Stars Came Out That Night represent a more socially progressive wave of black baseball fiction, devoid of heroic white male protagonists and/or teleological tales about the transition from segregation to integration—strategies that compromise the cultural work of the white-authored novels published during the 1970s (chapters 1 and 2).
Educating the Next Generation: Black Baseball Children’s Books
Authors: Rutter Emily Ruth
Published: January 2020

Chapter 6 examines the ways in which Carole Boston Weatherford’s A Negro League Scrapbook (2005), James Sturm and Rich Tommaso’s Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow (2007), and Kadir Nelson’s We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball (2008) invite young readers to excavate the black baseball archive, engaging a millennial audience statistically disinterested in the national pastime. The visual components of these children’s books are especially crucial, as they animate the images of black players and communities from a bygone era for young readers, who will ultimately be responsible for keeping the memory of black baseball alive. Further, while all of the contemporary authors in this third wave of black baseball literature are deeply committed to accuracy, they make it clear that theirs is a, not the, historical representation, suggesting congruence with Jacques Derrida’s critique of the instability of archival truths.
An Archive of Feelings Revisited: Fences on Screen
Authors: Rutter Emily Ruth
Published: January 2020

This brief Coda turns to the 2016 filmic adaptation of August Wilson’s play Fences, directed by and starring Denzel Washington as the ex-Negro Leaguer Troy Maxson with Viola Davis cast as his wife Rose. While remaining faithful to Wilson’s script, Washington uses the medium of film to bring distinct affective valences to the fore, thereby filling in new archival gaps about black baseball’s afterlife. Bringing this tale to the screen, Washington’s Fences also resists cultural amnesia about black baseball, ensuring that the indelible stains of racial discrimination are not airbrushed away by asseverations of equity and fairness.
Growing Up from the Counterculture in Family Ties and The Wonder Years
Authors: Hoerl Kristen
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that the television programs Family Ties and The Wonder Years advanced the neoconservative politics of the eighties even as they appeared to evince halting nostalgia for sixties-era dissent. The caricature of the hippie-turned-yuppie in eighties era television teaches viewers that radical beliefs, countercultural lifestyles, and women’s liberation were forms of youthful indiscretion that the baby boomer generation learned to outgrow. These programs recentered the family as the site of individual agency and moral activism, giving televisual form to the ideas undergirding neoliberalism and postfeminism.
Contestation over Sixties Memory in the New Millennium
Authors: Hoerl Kristen
Published: January 2020

The conclusion discusses the implications of Hollywood’s selective amnesia regarding late sixties dissent for the 2016 presidential election campaign and contemporary social movements. It explains that while several recent television programs including the award-winning series Mad Men have provided caricatured portrayals of the counterculture, anti-war, and Black Power movements, independent films such as Cesar Chavez and Chicago 10 have celebrated collective protest. The chapter concludes that these recent portrayals of sixties-era activism reveal ongoing contestation about the decade, its legacy, and the role of dissent in contemporary politics. While the bad sixties endures in popular culture, other memories of dissent are resources for imagining empowering models of social justice organizing.
Introduction
Authors: Soper Kerry D.
Published: January 2020

In this chapter the author introduces the cultural climate and media landscape in which The Far Side first appeared and thrived. Reestablishing that historical context helps to explain why Larson’s comedy elicited such intense and varied reactions from early readers: some loathing it, to the point of sending indignant letters to editors, the syndicate, and Larson himself, and others adoring it, feeling compelled to clip out, post, reread, collect, and share their favorite installments. The introduction concludes with a brief summary of each chapter that follows.
The Accidental Cartoonist
Authors: Soper Kerry D.
Published: January 2020

Chapter one is about Gary Larson’s life and career. First, the author looks into Larson’s childhood in Tacoma, Washington, tracing the connections between his unconventional upbringing and the themes and jokes in his later cartoons. He then charts Larson’s circuitous route towards a career in newspaper cartoons through a number of diversions and dead ends; the story of his ultimate break into comics in 1980 is especially fascinating since it was achieved with so little awareness on Larson’s part of what kind of profession he was pursuing. The author continues by tracing the initially slow, but eventually exponential growth of the panel’s popularity, highlighting along the way many of the accolades, controversies, and stand out cartoons of Larson’s career. I addition, the chapter highlights his arrival as a culturally significant figure through several key achievements: the ubiquity of his book collections and merchandising material, the unprecedented amount of fan and hate mail he received, and the way his work was embraced so avidly by niche reading communities such as scientists and academics. The chapter concludes with a description of how Larson decided to retire The Far Side after only a fifteen-year run (while it was still popular) in order to go out on a high note and preserve his own sanity.
Absurdly Naturalistic
Authors: Soper Kerry D.
Published: January 2020

In this chapter the author assesses the cultural significance of Larson’s work within the closing decades of the twentieth century. To do this, he does the following: questions traditional views of newspapers cartoons as ephemeral gags that lacked semiotic weight; speculates on the level of emotional and intellectual investment of Far Side fans that collected, shared, clipped out, and posted favorite installments—and often proudly purchased and displayed Far Side paraphernalia like t-shirts and coffee mugs; and considers ways of thinking about The Far Side as a sprawling, micro-serialized, years-long text that included over 4,300 installments. He concludes by highlighting the satiric bite and philosophical depth of Larson’s work as a whole, suggesting that his most devoted to readers were prompted to develop critical ways of perceiving society, human behavior, and other mainstream cultural texts through the worldviews of naturalism, absurdism and the carnivalesque. Recollections from comedy professionals and every day fans are highlighted to support these conclusions.
I Know My Ancestors Are Happy”
Authors: Holt Megan
Published: January 2020

Megan Holt interviews Merline Kimble, founder of the current incarnation of the Gold Digger Baby Dolls. The name of the group pays homage to the original Gold Digger group, founded by Kimble’s grandparents and disbanded during World War II. Kimble discusses her family’s place within the Baby Doll tradition and the resurgence of interest in that tradition in recent years. Kimble acknowledges the link between masking and freedom, stressing that a sense of freedom is particularly important for the women who participate in Baby Doll culture. She notes that baby dolls are not defined by age or gender--men and women, children and elders, all have a place in the masking tradition, a tradition she hopes will live on through the next generation.
Geographies of Pain, Geographies of Pleasure
Authors: Simmons LaKisha Michelle
Published: January 2020

In this chapter, LaKisha Simmons argues that the Jim Crow streets in New Orleans were sites of racial violence for black women and girls. By exploring cases of assault and police brutality on the city streets during segregation, the chapter contends that bodily vulnerability defined black womanhood. Yet despite the violence and trauma of Jim Crow life, black women went out on the streets in search of pleasure. Simmons contends that the Million Dollar Baby Dolls declared their humanity and reclaimed their bodies by seeking out pleasure. Simmons analyzes Ralston Crawford photographs of black women dancing and partying to better understand pleasure geographies and black female performance culture in New Orleans during segregation.
Operationalizing “Baby” for Our Good
Authors: Bratcher Melanie
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores lyrics from early twentieth century songs about women as Baby, Doll, and Baby Doll; and locates links between survival aesthetics and social controls. Evidence is presented that describes African cultural inheritance and its appropriation as part of sexism and stereotyping. Liberatory practices by Black women are also identified and levied against overwhelming economic and social oppression. While implicit, a call to reconcile inter and intra-racial sexism is made. Critical cultural commentary provides contours for relating continental African female iconography to African American ideas of tangible and intangible beauty.
Dancing Women of New Orleans
Authors: Honora DeriAnne Meilleur
Published: January 2020

This chapter defines Mardi Gras Baby Dolls of the Seventh Ward. It begins with a definition of the Seventh Ward and its geographical location. It then touches on the epitome of a Baby Doll, who they were as people, as well their alter ego when they masked. These women were regular New Orleanians who defied gender norms and tested boundaries of the time. These women were both liked and disliked by many throughout the city. This chapter also highlights the Mardi Gras Skeletons and their significance. Also included is a host of interviews of New Orleanians and their variety of perceptions of these colorful women.
John McCrady’s “Southern Eccentric” Regionalism
Authors: Beauchamp-Byrd Mora J.
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines a 1948 lithograph entitled Negro Maskers by New Orleans-based Southern Regionalist painter John McCrady (1911-1968), who produced the image for Mardi Gras Day, a book project completed with fellow artists Ralph Wickiser and Caroline Durieux. It documents McCrady’s conception of the southern US, in the decade following the Depression, as a site of singular “folk” distinction, rendered unique by picturesque scenery, African American cultural expressions, dockside scenes along the Mississippi, and carnivalesque traditions such as the Baby Doll masqueraders. Negro Maskers’ stylistic references to EI Greco, Mannerism, American Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, and dream-like Symbolism will be discussed, charting how the image fits snugly into McCrady’s cultivation of a “Southern Eccentric” aesthetic. Above all, McCrady's print will be examined within the context of other sentimentalized, yet often subversive, images of southern, vernacular U.S. culture that distinguished his work from that of Midwestern-centered American Regionalist painters.
Culture-Building and Contemporary Visual Arts Practice
Authors: Bechet Ron
Published: January 2020

The significance of a call out for artists for the exhibit Contemporary Artists Respond to the New Orleans Baby Dolls is the opportunity it provides for artists to come outside of themselves as painters or textile designers and address their art from a different point of view. The significance of the exhibit is the opportunity to demonstrate how the community is an important part of grassroots culture and how this culture is surviving by adapting and evolving in response to contemporary conditions. The chapter offers an exploration of the unfolding of this process through the interactions of artists and those who mask as Baby Dolls.
Beyond Objectification and Fetishization
Authors: Clunis Sarah Anita
Published: January 2020

This Chapter is about the aggressive female sexuality and defiance of restrictions and values demonstrated by the feminist performativity of the New Orleans Baby Dolls and the contemporary art that references this performance. Utilizing criticism from scholars such as LuceIrigay, Judith Butler, and Mikhail Bakhtin the ways that, for women, artifice and display have come to represent the “real” in gendered performance is discussed. The specific contemporary art works discussed in this chapter posit the Baby Dolls as bodies of political action and criticism in both their traditional and contemporary manifestations and demonstrates how the Baby Doll continues to be a figure of political agency that in the process of her revelry, offers us a paradoxical performance which combines issues of age, sexuality, innocence, vulgarity, and the commodification, objectification and fetishization of the Black female body.
School Desegregation
Authors: Lechtreck Elaine Allen
Published: January 2020

On 17 May 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled unanimously in Brown v The Board of Education that segregated public schools are unconstitutional. This chapter describes massive resistance organized by politicians and white supremacist groups throughout the South. Crises are described at Clinton High in Tennessee, Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Universities of Mississippi and Alabama, Tuskegee High School in Alabama, and Clemson University in South Carolina as well as the courage of the Reverends Turner, Boggs, Cartwright, Ogden, Campbell, Gray, Davis, Sellers, Morris, Cousins, Lyles, Jackson, and Webster at these locations. It includes statements in support of the decision by the governing boards of major religious denominations, twenty-eight young ministers of the Mississippi Methodist Conference, and contributors to South Carolinians Speak, a booklet on moderation. Later the Supreme Court backed away from enforcing school integration. Scholars Wright, Jacoway, Wolters, Bell, Higgins, and Snider comment.
The Movement Continues
Authors: Lechtreck Elaine Allen
Published: January 2020

This chapter depicts the continuing non-violent Civil Rights Movement and the continuous efforts of southern white ministers. In Washington, D.C., Randolph Taylor opened his church doors to participants in the March on Washington. In Chapel Hill, demonstrations led by Charles Jones, Clarence Parker, Robert Seymour and students from the University of North Carolina challenged restaurants and businesses that refused to serve and admit African Americans. In Louisville Thomas Moffett, Gilbert Schroerlucke, George Edwards, Grayson Tucker, and Bishop Charles Marmion marched and demonstrated for open housing. Demonstrations in Selma focused on voting rights, not an issue in Chapel Hill or Louisville, but in Selma, where brutality and murder occurred, it was dangerous to protest for anything. Both Chapel Hill and Louisville were locations of major educational institutions, which guaranteed the presence of liberal minded white sympathizers, but hundreds of outside sympathizers arrived in Selma to help demonstrate for voting rights.
The Witness Does Not End
Authors: Lechtreck Elaine Allen
Published: January 2020

This chapter presents accomplishments of southern white ministers who witnessed for racial justice before and after the rise of black nationalism. Clarence Jordan”s cooperative interracial farm in Americus, Georgia, could have failed because of the bombing of its roadside stand and refusal of businesses to supply its needs, if not for the generosity of church groups and the success of Jordan’s writing and oratory. The South Carolina Christian Action Council established by Howard McClain as an interracial, interdenominational ministerial association dedicated to civil rights still exists. W. W. Finlator spoke from the pulpit of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, for school desegregation, civil rights demonstrations, and equality for African Americans until his forced retirement after he sent a provocative telegram to President Carter. The tormenting experiences of Joseph Sanderson, David Moose, and Travis Frank in Eastern Arkansas did not discourage them from continuing to help African Americans.
Origin Stories of Pinhook
Authors: Lawrence David Todd , Lawless Elaine J.
Published: January 2020

This chapter contains stories told to the authors by George Williams, Aretha Robinson, and Larry Robinson, as well as parts of an older interview with Jim Robinson, Jr, the son of Jim Robinson, Sr., one of the five men who first came to Pinhook from Tennessee, which was recorded by Will Sarvis of the Missouri Historical Society in 1998. Interviews with other former residents add important perspectives on what they know and remember about the establishment of the town.
Tubular Genealogy I
Authors: Scodari Christine
Published: January 2020

The third chapter interprets discourses of post-identity, race/ethnicity, and intersections with gender and class in terms of salient issues and historical contexts such as slavery, Jim Crow, internment, and similar circumstances represented in 21st century family history TV and its reception. Reception is analyzed via ethnographic (including virtual-ethnographic) investigation. The chapter incorporates auto-ethnographic experiences and insights with regard to the processes, tools, and outcomes of genealogical practices, considering their bearing on the investigation’s critical trajectory, as well as the implications of racial, ethnic, and intersected modalities of identity as inferred from genealogical documents.
Tubular Genealogy II
Authors: Scodari Christine
Published: January 2020

The fourth chapter examines discourses of post-identity, race/ethnicity, and intersections with gender and class in terms of the historical context of immigration as represented in 21st century family history TV and its reception. Representations of major immigrant groups and relevant policies, controversies, and oversights are critiqued, with the portrayal of the Italian-American migration story epitomizing crucial lapses in the media treatments as determined based on the author’s genealogical journey to learn about and contextualize her own ethnicity and ancestral history and origins.
Tubular Genealogy III
Authors: Scodari Christine
Published: January 2020

Chapter Five interrogates genetic ancestry texts and practices in terms of genealogy television portrayals and other traditional media treatments in such media as books and documentaries. It assesses issues related to race/ethnicity and their intersected identities, hybridity, definitions of kinship, and racism and racialization. It also considers the unique “brick walls” facing descendants of slaves in tracing their genealogy, and how and genetic ancestry operates in these circumstances.
Tubular Genealogy IV
Authors: Scodari Christine
Published: January 2020

Chapter Six explores digital media’s role in genetic ancestry discourses in terms of issues related to race/ethnicity and their intersected identities, hybridity, definitions of kinship, and racism and racialization. It addresses the rhetoric of testing service providers, YouTube videos, and the virtual interplay of participants. The author’s auto-ethnographic experiences with genetic ancestry are also provided, helping to reveal how connections can be made with genetic kin through social media, and how testing providers participate in the construction of racial categories as they present “ethnic ancestry” results to patrons.
Introduction: Troubling Spaces
Authors: Müller Timo
Published: January 2020

When Albery Allson Whitman, a minister and former slave, published his first collection of poetry in 1877, he inaugurated an unlikely genre: the African American sonnet.1 This was an altogether remarkable event. An ethnic group that had largely been excluded from intellectual life was beginning to appropriate one of the most venerable traditions in Western literature. A group whose capabilities had widely been disparaged was demonstrating its mastery of one of the most complex poetic forms in the language. A group whose cultural heritage had mainly relied on oral transmission was turning to one of the most durable genres in written literature. It was a development few were prepared to acknowledge or accept—as June Jordan, herself a writer of sonnets, would put it many years later, it was “not natural” (...
New Negro and Genteel Protest
Authors: Müller Timo
Published: January 2020

Scholarly accounts of the Harlem Renaissance often foreground its politically radical and aesthetically innovative aspects. This tends to obscure the continuing strength of genteel ideas in African American writing of the period. This chapter traces the productivity of the sonnet during the Harlem Renaissance to its productive revisions of the genteel tradition. Drawing on a range of previously neglected poems, it situates Claude McKay’s epochal “If We Must Die” against the gradual transformation of the protest sonnet over the 1910s. In a second step it shows how genteel conventions shaped the subversive variety of protest that Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, and Helene Johnson explored from the mid-twenties. The ambivalent position of the sonnet in between gentility and protest, the chapter argues, is behind the difficulties that scholars like Houston A. Baker have faced in assessing the interplay of formal mastery and deformative self-assertion in the Harlem Renaissance sonnet.
The Vernacular Sonnet and the Afro-Modernist Project
Authors: Müller Timo
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s previously ignored blues sonnets from the early 1940s, which open up a new perspective on the trajectories of African American modernist writing. In these little-known sonnets, Hughes revived the formal experimentation of the twenties by bringing together high-modernist and vernacular elements. The chapter traces the transformations of this “synthetic vernacular” (Matthew Hart) in the work of the outstanding poets of the post-war period, Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden. It shows how these poets made the sonnet a crucial—if overlooked—laboratory for the Afro-modernist project that shaped African American literature from the 1940s into the 1960s.
“They Probably Got Us All on the News”: Unsettled Filming in Trouble the Water
Authors: Horigan Kate Parker
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s 2008 documentary film Trouble the Water. The filmmakers use unique documentary techniques that incorporate narrators’ engagement with the processes of their story’s publication. The film includes survivor Kim Roberts’ own footage, shot during Katrina on her handheld camera. Kim’s role as documentarian is foregrounded, and in some striking scenes she expresses her awareness about the value of her story and its likelihood of circulating among particular kinds of audiences. The filmmakers successfully integrate survivors’ own critiques of the discourses that typically represent them, and through this and other methods, create what Dominick LaCapra calls “empathic unsettlement.” However, the film’s optimistic conclusion evokes a dominant narrative of racial uplift, with a neoliberal twist that undermines the powerful work the film is otherwise performing.
China: East Is East . . .
Authors: Marlow Eugene
Published: January 2020

This chapter discusses the history of jazz in China. Jazz has been a presence in China since the late 1910s, especially in Shanghai, and following Mao's demise in 1976, this musical genre has returned to China. Since the early 1990s, jazz performance by indigenous musicians and jazz players from all over the world has expanded to many of China's cities. However, the question is this: given that jazz is a democratic form of music that enhances individual freedom of expression enjoyed not only by indigenous and international musicians, but also by a growing number of Chinese audiences in many urban centers, and given that China has become the world's second largest economy, has fostered an inexorable entrepreneurial drive, and has brought hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty into the middle class, how can China maintain a one-party rule that appears to be increasingly rigid in this kind of social environment?
The Influence of Mid-Twentieth-Century Technologies on the Expansion of Jazz in China
Authors: Marlow Eugene
Published: January 2020

This chapter discusses jazz in China in the second half of the twentieth century. During this period, jazz traveled to China in one of two ways (or both): (1) electronically by several means; and (2) by air, that is, by plane. All manner of electronic and filmic media—such as radio, television, movies, CDs, DVDs, satellites, teleconferencing, computers, and the Internet—and transcontinental modes of transportation such as the plane supplanted the steamship, the locomotive, the gramophone, and early movies as technologies influenced the growth of jazz in China. The characteristics of the above-mentioned technologies cannot be underestimated in terms of their cultural impact, not only on the spread of jazz globally, but also on the spread of information and knowledge generally around the world.
The Beijing Jazz Scene
Authors: Marlow Eugene
Published: January 2020

This chapter discusses the jazz scene in Beijing. While Shanghai has been the main focus of the evolution of jazz in China, the jazz scene in Beijing has also evolved since the late 1980s. As in Shanghai, one can find jazz in some large venues, hotel bars and food courts, and especially in a few small clubs dedicated to jazz performance. The Beijing jazz scene over the last several decades has clearly evolved. As diplomat Martin Fleischer reports, when he arrived in Beijing in the late 1980s there were no jazz clubs in China's capital. It was not until the early 1990s that jazz becomes a public presence in Beijing with the emergence of the Beijing International Jazz Festival created and curated by German entrepreneur Udo Hoffman.
Beijing’s Leading Indigenous and Expat Jazz Musicians
Authors: Marlow Eugene
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on jazz musicians in Beijing. While Shanghai owned China's jazz history spotlight in the first half of the twentieth century, Beijing is not without its own indigenous leading lights, musically speaking. Some have been trained in classical music in China and in the United States and have returned to Beijing to perform; others are self-taught. Many are young; some have been around before and after Mao. All are devoted to the music. In Beijing, saxophonist Fan Shengqi is by all accounts the most enduring jazz musician who performed before, during and after Mao. His involvement in the contemporary Chinese music scene is reflected in his participation in China's first guitar festival, held in August 2005 on what is described as “scenic Hainan Island” located in the South China Sea.
Jazz in China in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Marlow Eugene
Published: January 2020

This chapter addresses the question of whether there is jazz in twenty-first century China. The answer is that there most certainly is, quite literally. And it seems reasonable to assert that once you open a society to the world at large, even though the motivation to do so is primarily economic, it may be difficult if not impossible to reverse course. In all likelihood, China will continue to emerge as a major economic player on the world stage, and, to re-reference Kabir Sehgal's Jazzocracy, perhaps what will evolve is more equity, more conversation, more negotiation, and more reconciliation within China itself, and between China and the world community.
Theoretical and Historical Sketches of Guyana and Trinidad
Authors: Ramsaran Dave , Lewis Linden F.
Published: January 2020

This chapter presents theoretical and historical sketches of Guyana and Trinidad. Both countries share a similar colonial history and ethnic makeup, with people of Indian descent representing 39.3 percent of the total population in Guyana and 35 percent in Trinidad. The focus on Trinidad and Guyana, then, stems from the social and political significance of the Indian communities in these countries. The problematic coexistence of the dominant African creole culture and Indian culture in the Caribbean is central to explaining the location of Indo-Caribbean populations within their particular socioeconomic, political, and gendered spaces. In addressing the notion of “Indian identity,” both Indo-Trinidadians and Indo-Guyanese ask whether their respective identities reflect the “purity” of their Indian ancestry. In both spaces, the Indian community must determine the extent to which they want to associate their “Indianness” with India, or with the nation-state in which they were born.
Indo-Guyanese Men
Authors: Ramsaran Dave , Lewis Linden F.
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on the lived, everyday experience of masculinity in Guyana. Indian men in Guyana, like other men in the region, have long lived with stereotypes about who they are and how they behave. Even as Indo-Guyanese men define their own masculinity, they are often viewed in different ways by society. In constructing their masculinity, men of Indian descent in Guyana are often forced to confront these stereotypes, which become embedded as racial markers in the context of a multiracial society, ultimately assuming political implications which in turn separate communities. Indeed, defining Indo-Guyanese masculinity necessarily occurs in a racially charged environment in which race plays an inevitable role in how men view themselves and what claims and expectations society places on them. Any consideration of Indo-Guyanese masculinity operates on a mindscape of the perceived hegemony of African Guyanese and, more generally, African Caribbean masculinity.
Conclusion
Authors: Ramsaran Dave , Lewis Linden F.
Published: January 2020

This concluding chapter argues that creolization is not a linear process that leads to a more homogeneous society but rather a dialectical process that is negotiated along lines of race, class, and gender. The fact that Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadians are expressing their differences does not negate the creolization process. Many see creolization as a movement toward one homogeneous culture that has elements of all previous cultural influences. However, creolization is a dialectical process whereby multiple changing cultures exist side by side, each reformulating elements within their respective contexts. This ultimately highlights the much broader question of not just how the Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadian communities define themselves within their respective societies, but how they define themselves vis-à-vis the broader Caribbean region and how one goes about analyzing Indo-Caribbean identity within the broader context of a “Caribbean identity.”
“Yeah, I Think There Is Still Hope”
Authors: Gibson Mel
Published: January 2020

Ms. Marvel originally formed part of the All-New Marvel Now! comic book branding of 2015 aimed at attracting new readers to Marvel titles. As such the comic is able to offer new ways of thinking about the character Ms. Marvel, while also maintaining links with the longer history of the character. Kamala is a complex and nuanced character who, even before gaining superpowers, is caught between the two worlds of her Pakistani and Muslim family background and her New Jersey teenage peers, thus making the narrative, in part, about issues around assimilation and integration.
Intersectional Feminism in Bitch Planet
Authors: Urcaregui Maite
Published: January 2020

Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick’s and artist Valentine De Landro’s comic Bitch Planet (2014-present) offers readers an absurd yet familiar reminder of the ways that society and state institutions continue to uphold patriarchal and racist values at the expense of women, queer folks, and communities of color, among others. Its hyperbolic investigation into the depths of patriarchy and racism draws from and expands the superhero narrative’s exploration of power and oppression.
“Curiouser and Curiouser”
Authors: Perdigao Lisa K.
Published: January 2020

The modern elegy bears a distinctive mark: it “suggests both the negation of received codes (‘modern’) and their perpetuation (‘elegy’)” as its writers “make it new but make it old, rebel against generic norms but reclaim them through rebellion.” This is suggestive of what is at work in Greg Rucka, JH Williams III, and Dave Stewart’s comic Batwoman: Elegy (2010). At its center, Batwoman: Elegy introduces the tensions that Ramazani argues are inherent to the genre. Batwoman: Elegy remembers a character once erased from DC Comics. However, the elegiac gesture of the comic extends further: Batwoman: Elegy provides a unique perspective on the passing of the Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages of Comics as well as the three waves of feminism.