Download or read book Medicalizing Blackness written by Rana A. Hogarth and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, "There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever." Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery. Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy.

Download or read book Distributed Blackness written by André Brock, Jr. and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2021 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given by the Popular Culture Association Winner, 2021 Nancy Baym Annual Book Award, given by the Association of Internet Researchers An explanation of the digital practices of the black Internet From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how “blackness” gets worked out in various technological domains. As Brock demonstrates, there’s nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation. Drawing on critical race theory, linguistics, rhetoric, information studies, and science and technology studies, Brock tabs between black-dominated technologies, websites, and social media to build a set of black beliefs about technology. In explaining black relationships with and alongside technology, Brock centers the unique joy and sense of community in being black online now.

Download or read book Who s Afraid of Post Blackness written by Touré and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we make sense of what it means to be Black in a world with room for both Michelle Obama and Precious? Tour , an iconic commentator and journalist, defines and demystifies modern Blackness with wit, authority, and irreverent humor. In the age of Obama, racial attitudes have become more complicated and nuanced than ever before. Americans are searching for new ways of understanding Blackness, partly inspired by a President who is unlike any Black man ever seen on our national stage. This book aims to destroy the notion that there is a correct or even definable way of being Black. It’s a discussion mixing the personal and the intellectual. It gives us intimate and painful stories of how race and racial expectations have shaped Tour ’s life as well as a look at how the concept of Post-Blackness functions in politics, psychology, the Black visual arts world, Chappelle’s Show, and more. For research Tour has turned to some of the most important luminaries of our time for frank and thought-provoking opinions, including Rev. Jesse Jackson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Malcolm Gladwell, Harold Ford, Jr., Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Chuck D, and many others. Their comments and disagreements with one another may come as a surprise to many readers. Of special interest is a personal racial memoir by the author in which he depicts defining moments in his life when he confronts the question of race head-on. In another chapter—sure to be controversial—he explains why he no longer uses the word “nigga.” Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? is a complex conversation on modern America that aims to change how we perceive race in ways that are as nuanced and spirited as the nation itself.

Download or read book The Boundaries of Blackness written by Cathy J. Cohen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Last year, more African Americans were reported with AIDS than any other racial or ethnic group. And while African Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for more than 55 percent of all newly diagnosed HIV infections. These alarming developments have caused reactions ranging from profound grief to extreme anger in African-American communities, yet the organized political reaction has remained remarkably restrained. The Boundaries of Blackness is the first full-scale exploration of the social, political, and cultural impact of AIDS on the African-American community. Informed by interviews with activists, ministers, public officials, and people with AIDS, Cathy Cohen unflinchingly brings to light how the epidemic fractured, rather than united, the black community. She traces how the disease separated blacks along different fault lines and analyzes the ensuing struggles and debates. More broadly, Cohen analyzes how other cross-cutting issues—of class, gender, and sexuality—challenge accepted ideas of who belongs in the community. Such issues, she predicts, will increasingly occupy the political agendas of black organizations and institutions and can lead to either greater inclusiveness or further divisiveness. The Boundaries of Blackness, by examining the response of a changing community to an issue laced with stigma, has much to teach us about oppression, resistance, and marginalization. It also offers valuable insight into how the politics of the African-American community—and other marginal groups—will evolve in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Sporting Blackness written by Samantha N. Sheppard and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sporting Blackness examines issues of race and representation in sports films, exploring what it means to embody, perform, play out, and contest blackness by representations of Black athletes on screen. By presenting new critical terms, Sheppard analyzes not only “skin in the game,” or how racial representation shapes the genre’s imagery, but also “skin in the genre,” or the formal consequences of blackness on the sport film genre’s modes, codes, and conventions. Through a rich interdisciplinary approach, Sheppard argues that representations of Black sporting bodies contain “critical muscle memories”: embodied, kinesthetic, and cinematic histories that go beyond a film’s plot to index, circulate, and reproduce broader narratives about Black sporting and non-sporting experiences in American society.

Download or read book Born in Blackness Africa Africans and the Making of the Modern World 1471 to the Second World War written by Howard W. French and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history. Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity? In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa. Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history. While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day. “Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.

Download or read book The Condemnation of Blackness written by Khalil Gibran Muhammad and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-22 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize A Moyers & Company Best Book of the Year “A brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.” —Darryl Pinckney, New York Review of Books How did we come to think of race as synonymous with crime? A brilliant and deeply disturbing biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America, The Condemnation of Blackness reveals the influence this pernicious myth, rooted in crime statistics, has had on our society and our sense of self. Black crime statistics have shaped debates about everything from public education to policing to presidential elections, fueling racism and justifying inequality. How was this statistical link between blackness and criminality initially forged? Why was the same link not made for whites? In the age of Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump, under the shadow of Ferguson and Baltimore, no questions could be more urgent. “The role of social-science research in creating the myth of black criminality is the focus of this seminal work...[It] shows how progressive reformers, academics, and policy-makers subscribed to a ‘statistical discourse’ about black crime...one that shifted blame onto black people for their disproportionate incarceration and continues to sustain gross racial disparities in American law enforcement and criminal justice.” —Elizabeth Hinton, The Nation “Muhammad identifies two different responses to crime among African-Americans in the post–Civil War years, both of which are still with us: in the South, there was vigilantism; in the North, there was an increased police presence. This was not the case when it came to white European-immigrant groups that were also being demonized for supposedly containing large criminal elements.” —New Yorker

Download or read book Spatializing Blackness written by Rashad Shabazz and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-08-30 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 277,000 African Americans migrated to Chicago between 1900 and 1940, an influx unsurpassed in any other northern city. From the start, carceral powers literally and figuratively created a prison-like environment to contain these African Americans within the so-called Black Belt on the city's South Side. A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous--and ordinary--ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, he investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive Era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with--and resist--spacial containment. A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, Spatializing Blackness examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.

Download or read book Uncontrollable Blackness written by Douglas J. Flowe and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early twentieth-century African American men in northern urban centers like New York faced economic isolation, segregation, a biased criminal justice system, and overt racial attacks by police and citizens. In this book, Douglas J. Flowe interrogates the meaning of crime and violence in the lives of these men, whose lawful conduct itself was often surveilled and criminalized, by focusing on what their actions and behaviors represented to them. He narrates the stories of men who sought profits in underground markets, protected themselves when law enforcement failed to do so, and exerted control over public, commercial, and domestic spaces through force in a city that denied their claims to citizenship and manhood. Flowe furthermore traces how the features of urban Jim Crow and the efforts of civic and progressive leaders to restrict their autonomy ultimately produced the circumstances under which illegality became a form of resistance. Drawing from voluminous prison and arrest records, trial transcripts, personal letters and documents, and investigative reports, Flowe opens up new ways of understanding the black struggle for freedom in the twentieth century. By uncovering the relationship between the fight for civil rights, black constructions of masculinity, and lawlessness, he offers a stirring account of how working-class black men employed extralegal methods to address racial injustice.

Download or read book The Predicament of Blackness written by Jemima Pierre and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the meaning of blackness in Africa? This title tackles the question of race in West Africa through its post-colonial manifestations. Pierre examines key facets of contemporary Ghanaian society, from the pervasive significance of 'whiteness' to the practice of chemical skin-bleaching to the government's active promotion of Pan-African 'heritage tourism'.

Download or read book Publishing Blackness written by George Hutchinson and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-02-08 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first of its kind, this volume sets in dialogue African Americanist and textual scholarship, exploring a wide range of African American textual history and work

Download or read book Performing Female Blackness written by Naila Keleta-Mae and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Female Blackness examines race, gender, and nation in Black life using critical race, feminist and performance studies methodologies. This book examines what private and public performances of female blackness reveal about race, gender, and nation and considers how the land widely known as Canada shapes these performances. By exploring Black expressive culture in familial, literary, and performance settings, Naila Keleta-Mae theorizes that “perpetual performance” forces people who are read as female and Black to always be figuratively on stage regardless of cultural, political, or historical contexts. Written in poetry, prose, and journal form and drawing from the author’s own life and artistic works, Performing Female Blackness is ideal not only for scholars, educators, and students of the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts but also for artists and the general public too.

Download or read book Translating Blackness written by Lorgia García Peña and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-29 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Translating Blackness Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force. Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, García Peña argues that Black Latinidad is a social, cultural, and political formation—rather than solely a site of identity—through which we can understand both oppression and resistance. She takes up the intellectual and political genealogy of Black Latinidad in the works of Frederick Douglass, Gregorio Luperón, and Arthur Schomburg. She also considers the lives of Black Latina women living in the diaspora, such as Black Dominicana guerrillas who migrated throughout the diaspora after the 1965 civil war and Black immigrant and second-generation women like Mercedes Frías and Milagros Guzmán organizing in Italy with other oppressed communities. In demonstrating that analyses of Black Latinidad must include Latinx people and cultures throughout the diaspora, García Peña shows how the vaivén—or, coming and going—at the heart of migrant life reveals that the nation is not a sufficient rubric from which to understand human lived experiences.

Download or read book Film Blackness written by Michael Boyce Gillespie and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.

Download or read book Afro Dog written by Bénédicte Boisseron and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The animal-rights organization PETA asked “Are Animals the New Slaves?” in a controversial 2005 fundraising campaign; that same year, after the Humane Society rescued pets in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina while black residents were neglected, some declared that white America cares more about pets than black people. These are but two recent examples of a centuries-long history in which black life has been pitted against animal life. Does comparing human and animal suffering trivialize black pain, or might the intersections of racialization and animalization shed light on interlinked forms of oppression? In Afro-Dog, Bénédicte Boisseron investigates the relationship between race and the animal in the history and culture of the Americas and the black Atlantic, exposing a hegemonic system that compulsively links and opposes blackness and animality to measure the value of life. She analyzes the association between black civil disobedience and canine repression, a history that spans the era of slavery through the use of police dogs against protesters during the civil rights movement of the 1960s to today in places like Ferguson, Missouri. She also traces the lineage of blackness and the animal in Caribbean literature and struggles over minorities’ right to pet ownership alongside nuanced readings of Derrida and other French theorists. Drawing on recent debates on black lives and animal welfare, Afro-Dog reframes the fast-growing interest in human–animal relationships by positioning blackness as a focus of animal inquiry, opening new possibilities for animal studies and black studies to think side by side.

Download or read book The Blackness of Black written by William David Hart and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-10-16 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the relations among blackness, antiblackness, and Black people within the discourse of the blackness of black. This critical discourse developed during the last two decades as scholars explored what Saidiya Hartman describes as the afterlife of slavery. Hartman’s concept, which argues for a troubling continuity between the status of enslaved and emancipated Black people, is the pivot between discursive tributaries and trajectories. Tributaries of the discourse of the blackness of black comprise five foundational concepts: Frantz Fanon’s “phobogenic blackness,” Orlando Patterson’s “social death,” Cedric Robinson’s “racial capitalism and the black radical tradition,” and Hortense Spillers’ “flesh.” The book traces three trajectories within the afterlife of slavery: Frank Wilderson’s “ Afropessimism,” Fred Moten’s “generative blackness,” and Calvin Warren’s “black nihilism.” This ensemble of concepts enable us to understand what is at state in how we understand the relations among blackness, antiblackness, and Black people.

Download or read book Spectacular Blackness written by Amy Abugo Ongiri and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the interface between the cultural politics of the Black Power and the Black Arts movements and the production of postwar African American popular culture, Amy Ongiri shows how the reliance of Black politics on an oppositional image of African Americans was the formative moment in the construction of "authentic blackness" as a cultural identity. While other books have adopted either a literary approach to the language, poetry, and arts of these movements or a historical analysis of them, Ongiri's captures the cultural and political interconnections of the postwar period by using an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from cinema studies and music theory. She traces the emergence of this Black aesthetic from its origin in the Black Power movement's emphasis on the creation of visual icons and the Black Arts movement's celebration of urban vernacular culture.