African American Studies

I propose a rich theoretical understanding on Afro-Latino student development based on critical race theory, culturally responsive pedagogy and practice. Addressing racial disparities is about engaging students thereby making their lives better. I believe that creating Afro-Latino pedagogy will create a community of practice in which inquiry is a cornerstone of continuous student self-redefinition through improvement in culturally responsive systems.
We need educators to get involved with Afro-Latino students, our history and the way we occupy space in the Americas in order to address this gap in education.

Published on Sept 15th, 2014 by The Jewish Daily Forward

Beyond the Wealth of Jewish South Carolina lies a Troubling History - a study of Mordecai and David Cohen of Charleston: Philanthropists and slave owners.  One of their slaves, Jim, escaped and survived to share his life experiences being tortured under their command.

Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, Black Nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement
http://ow.ly/HtWx3066Rh6
Historical Overviews of The Black Arts Movement

Abstract: This essay proffers that African American literature, especially that of the contemporary moment, seeks a non-canonical canon, that is, unlawful laws, unruly rules, reading lists that morph and shake serial listedness. Furthermore, African American literature as theorized here is concerned with three constitutive nodes: first, a certain kind of memory, one that is not simply revisionist or a Morrisonian “rememory” but what I call “memoricity,” that which carries the historicity of moments, the very subjectivity of things not past but deeply contemporary. It denotes the historicity of the contemporary, and simultaneously the contemporaneity of history. Second, the underground, snugly fitting within familiar notions of the underground in African American literature, but here proffered as more than a site of secrecy or dormancy; it is, rather, a liminal, mezzanine space of generative disruption and, too, vibrant, volatile epistemic radicality. Thirdly, seeing: not to be reduced to ocular perception, it is a seeing that encapsulates a more capaciously embodied practice that engages more than simply the eyes, a seeing that is a matter of full corporeality. These three nodes are, in African American literature, characterized under the helm of a Black synesthetic practice—seeing-without-light, knowledges “muzzled to those shores,” a lexicon in the dark, unintelligible to the logic of the light, underground epistemologies. To be examined are six texts: Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (2016), Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines (2016), Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall (2012), Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval (2009), and Joshua Bennett’s The Sobbing School (2016).

Copyright: This work originally appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review 18.1, winter 2018, published by Michigan State University Press.

Using the dual lens of Death Scholar and bereaved family member, this chapter explores the meaning of the R.I.P. T-shirt to African American mourning customs and death material culture. The author examines how race, memory, and material culture affects death and mourning by seeking to understand the function and purpose of R.I.P T-shirts to those in the Black community. The goal of the chapter is to illustrate how African Americans draw solace, comfort, refuge and even heed a call to action in the act of wearing the R.I.P. T-shirt.  The aim of the chapter seeks to understand the shirt’s prevalence within traditional African American mourning. Questions asked and considered are: Why do you wear Willie’s R.I.P. T-shirt and how did wearing it make you feel? How often do you wear it and why?  In my findings I (a) distinguish between official and unofficial R.I.P. T-shirts, different ways family/friend honor and memorialize the decedent; (b) unravel various origin stories of the R.I.P. T-shirt; and (c) unpack and comprehend the use and purpose of R.I.P. T-shirt during and after active grieving.

One of America's most powerful and original dramatists, August Wilson offered an alternative history of the twentieth century, as seen from the perspective of black Americans. He celebrated the lives of those seemingly pushed to the margins of national life, but who were simultaneously protagonists of their own drama and evidence of a vital and compelling community. Decade by decade, he told the story of a people with a distinctive history who forged their own future, aware of their roots in another time and place, but doing something more than just survive. Wilson deliberately addressed black America, but in doing so he discovered an international audience.

In 1997, landscape architect Walter Hood published a monograph called "Urban Diaries" in which he studied the parks and open spaces in West Oakland, redeveloped through the Model Cities Program of 1970. In a period of about twenty years, Hood observed that many of these spaces were already in disrepair. This paper examines Hood’s analyses and proposals, and argues, following George Lipsitz, that Hood’s work reflects a consideration of urban space as immanent to the lives of African Americans in West Oakland. More broadly, it seeks ways of thinking about the redevelopment of Redevelopment through situated practices of urban design.

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate, if possible, whether there is any relation between rap and African-American music. That is to say, if rap directly comes from the music that the first slaves to arrive in North American soil brought with them. For this, characteristics of African music will be first reviewed. After that, a study will be done about the ways that this kind of music lived with the one that predominated at that time among the inhabitants of the emerging United States of America – the majority of them being whites –, as it was deeply bound to religion. Following that, there will be a discussion about whether the latter had any influence on the music of slaves in order for this to survive. With the passing of time, a blend between African and American cultures derived in what we know as African-American culture. As a consequence, new musical styles were set up, till the most current – rap –, which originated as a music to express social protest and wishes to change, to freedom for the black population. However, today rap is fairly linked to an almost obsessive quest for money and success, having freedom and revolution ideals been nearly erased from its lyrics.

During the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West famously interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for "Best Female Video." A year later both performers returned to the VMAs with songs that responded directly to the original incident. In the meantime, the U.S. media and record-buying public had come to interpret the original incident using the stock scripts and characters of what Linda Williams has called “U.S. racial melodrama,” the fact of which both performers seemed aware. In this way, the Swift-West “incident” had come to reflect and mimic larger racial tensions, especially between black men and white women, as they had specifically come to be understood and portrayed during the Obama presidency, which many commentators have hastily and incorrectly identified as a symptom of “post-racialism.” This essay discusses how Kanye West and Taylor Swift reflect on and revise the tropes of racial melodrama, in the latter case to reinforce what Charles Mills calls "the epistemology of ignorance" when it comes to racism in America, and in the former case to challenge it.

The essay that launched Afrofuturism. Introductory essay, in which the term is coined and theorized in depth, followed by interviews exploring the idea with leading African-American cultural theorists. From the collection FLAME WARS, edited by Mark Dery, 01/1994; Duke University Press., ISBN: 0822315408.

Controversy surrounds the origin of the y-chromosome R lineages among Native Americans in the United States. Most researchers assume that the occurrence of this gene among Native Americans is the result of European admixture. This view is not supported by the phylogeography of haplogroup R1 which does not correspond to the former territories of the European colonies with the highest population densities. The
location of this paternal clade, on the other hand, does match the former centers of Black Native American occupation (and the forced migration of Mongoloid and Black Native Americans into the American Southwest), which suggest that the presence of R1 among Mongoloid Native Americans is the result of Mongoloid-Black Native American admixture. This Indian-African admixture would have been between SSA and the Black Native Americans already living here at the advent of the colonial era mating Mongoloid Native Americans. The African specific R-M173 yDNA form a Sub-Saharan African (SSA)
subclade , which in association with the SSA R-M269 subclade in Africa, reveal that there was gene flow from SSA toward mongoloid people in North America, probably during the past 500 years.

Apologia— Several exceptions notwithstanding (e.g., some titles treating the Reconstruction Era), this bibliography begins, roughly, with the twentieth century. I have not attempted to comprehensively cover works of nonfiction or the arts generally but, once more, I have made— and this time, a fair number of—exceptions by way of providing a taste of the requisite material. So, apart from the constraints of most of my other bibliographies: books, in English, these particular constraints are intended to keep the bibliography to a fairly modest length (around one hundred pages). This compilation is far from exhaustive, although it endeavors to be representative of the available literature, whatever the influence of my idiosyncratic beliefs and preferences. I trust the diligent researcher will find titles on particular topics or subject areas by browsing carefully through the list. I welcome notice of titles by way of remedying any deficiencies. Finally, I have a separate bibliography on slavery, although its scope is well beyond U.S. history.

* Or, if you prefer, " self-fulfillment and human flourishing (eudaimonia). " I'm not here interested in the question of philosophical and psychological differences between these concepts (i.e.. self-realization, eudaimonia, etc.) and the existing and possible conceptions thereof, but more simply and broadly in their indispensable significance in reference to human nature and the pivotal metaphysical and moral purposes they serve in our critical and evaluative exercises (e.g., and after Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, in employing criteria derived from the notion of 'human capabilities and functionings') as part of our individual and collective historical quest for " the Good. "

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof opened fire at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In sum, he massacred nine people, including the pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pickney. Several days later at Roof’s first court appearance, relatives of the slain victims had the opportunity to confront the gunman. As many news stories noted, the relatives of the victims offered Roof their forgiveness even while articulating the pain and suffering of their loss. At the hearing, Nadine Collier spoke the powerful words “I forgive you,” to Dylan Roof (Izadi 2015). Collier’s testimony hinted at a theological imperative that is fundamental to Christianity, namely the notion of forgiveness. Forgiveness from the perspective of African American Christianity is composed of both reconciliation and justice. The aim of this chapter is to blend the pragmatic principles of Charles Sanders Peirce and W.E.B. Du Bois to understand the meaning of forgiveness centered on the perspective of Christianity from African Americans.

This article presents a new interpretation of the famous folktale about enslaved Africans flying home, including the legend that only those who refrained from eating salt could fly back to Africa. It rejects claims that the tale is rooted in Igbo culture and relates to suicide as a desperate attempt to escape from slavery. Rather, an analysis of historical documents in combination with ethnographic and linguistic research makes it possible to trace the tale back to West-Central Africa. It relates objections to eating salt to the Kikongo expression curia mungua (to eat salt), meaning baptism, and claims that the tale originated in the context of discussions among the enslaved about the consequences of a Christian baptism for one's spiritual afterlife.

This essay explores the culturally subversive and incredibly unique enigma that is Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism is understood in terms of its inherent delineation from any attempts by a universal cultural modernity to categorise it within the structures of conventional discourse.

Instead, I adopt a deconstructive approach to Afrofuturism’s exploration.
In this essay, I discuss Afrofuturism in relation to theories of Decoloniality, and, in turn, explain the history and rationale behind its subversion to conceptions of a universal modernity. I then explore the methodology and importance of autonomous subjectivity formation in Afrofuturism.

The next chapter discusses Afrofuturism and music, using Detroit techno as a case study. The final chapter covers Afrofuturism in relation to hauntology, with a particular focus on the parallels between Afrofuturist and Intercultural cinema.

The aim of this essay is to broaden the reader’s understanding of Afrofuturism through the contextualisation and explanation of the issues that Afrofuturism seeks to transcend, and the examination of the means with which this transcendence is to be achieved.

In this paper, I watched and analyzed Beyoncé's visual album Lemonade, looking at different visual aspects of her music videos to find the key concepts of Beyoncé’s message of betrayal, forgiveness, and redemption. I analyze visual parallels to other films, the filming locations, the characters featured in the videos, as well as the poetry and how these elements are used to create a cohesive and complex narrative. I also seek to connect the visuals to the lyrics to see how they comment on each other and point to the important cultural and historical sub-texts that go far beyond a tale of infidelity and betrayal. Lemonade is a celebration of Black women, an honest look at their history, and an exploration of the ongoing struggles they face. Beyoncé, most importantly, wants the Black woman to be heard and voiceless no more.

This article will show the role of free women in the San Benito de Palermo sisterhood founded in 1646. This research paper explores the social role in such a corporation: the composition by gender, the organizational structure in the system’s positions, the contribution of its female members -“cofradas”- in alms collection, their attitude and pious, festive and ludic behaviours in festivities, solemn parades and processions. This work is founded on their accounting books, registries and election meeting acts performed during the XVIIIth century. It is its goal to evaluate the role of women in brotherhoods and sisterhoods established by blacks and mulattoes, specifically those ones devoted to San Benito de Palermo, whose main feature is having a larger female membership as in those other found in most of the Hispanic world, where San Miguel el Grande, in New Spain’s Bajío, was not an exception. Current historiography requires more case studies to confront the established premises and give new insights to evaluate, as in this case, the importance of women in the operation of a religious corporation during the Ancien Regime.

This dissertation examines the formation of commodity landscapes that manifested between 1870 and 1930 at the Mann-Simons site, a collection of commercial and domestic spaces in downtown Columbia, South Carolina, owned and operated by the same African American family from the mid-nineteenth century to 1970.  Primary data comes from archaeological excavations at the site.  Through a lens of commodities production and consumption during the period when our current culture of consumption developed, I tell three stories of the family and property using a variety of theoretical tools, including ideas of discourse materialized, hybridity, object mediation, and thick description.  By considering, in turn, the same set of archaeologically-recovered objects from three distinct vantage points – consumption, production, and heritage – the Mann-Simons site illuminates how commodity landscapes shaped, and were shaped by, discourses at myriad scales and how these landscapes mediated practice and knowledges.  The first story is one of production, and tells a story of the social lives of things understood independently of the practices of the family.  I demonstrate how discourses of health and sanitation link objects as diverse as linoleum and brightly-colored walls; how home electrification influenced the materials of which buttons were made; and how the application of the predictive commodity flow model is useful for understanding market access and alternative market interactions.  The second story, one of consumption, is a story of object biographies.  I demonstrate that through an understanding of object mediation and ideas of technology, the Mann-Simons family at the turn of the twentieth century was using the emerging world of commodities to tie themselves into a desired future trajectory, one that would become mainstream by the 1930s: commodities as the path to modernity.  The final story is one of heritage.  I suggest that museums are social-material hybrids that mediate visitors' conceptions of authenticity, knowledge, and history.  At the Mann-Simons site, this hybridity shaped the meaning and significance of this site-turned-house museum over the past forty-years.  I further examine the role of archaeology within and for various publics and present a framework for integrating critical and empirical archaeologies.  I conclude with an examination of my meta-question: what is the value of archaeologies of the recent past?

The stories told by our nation's cemeteries are as diverse as the people buried in them. These plots of earth marked by rock, stone, and marble are more than just memorials to the dead, they are collections of our cultural histories; helping us to tell our stories and to plant our feet firmly into the narrative of history. Unfortunately however, the rich history that is buried within our cemeteries is often forgotten due to negligence or sometimes in the name of progress. As Father Time slowly erodes our memories, human strife takes a physical toll on our heritage in the form of wars fought on battlefields and within communities. All of these things degrade the history we would leave behind for our children.

The late 1980s ushered in a new era of black politics, the socioeconomic transition era. Coming on the heels of the protest era and politics era, the current stage is characterized by the emergence of a new black middle class that came of age after the Civil Rights struggle. Although class still isn’t a strong factor in the external politics of the black community, it is increasingly a wedge issue in the community’s internal politics. Black politics today is increasingly less about the interest of the larger group and more about the interest of smaller subgroups within the community. The author argues that the greatest threat to the social and political cohesiveness of the so-called black community may be the rise of a socially and economically privileged group among the ranks of black America. This rift has affected blacks’ ability to organize effectively and influence politics. Davis traces the changes in economic status, public opinion, political power and participation, and leadership over three generations of black politics. The result is an insightful analysis of black politics today.