African American Communication

The spatial imagination, critics have long contended, is fundamental to literary practice and readerly experience. This topic has been invigorated by the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, propelled in part by the climate emergency, the dazzling explosion of ecocritical approaches, and the development of technologies such as GIS. These two books demonstrate the fruitfulness of the spatial turn for US literary studies.Soto would have much to say about the census’s prominence in contemporary political discourse, given the Trump administration’s efforts to place a citizenship question on the census as evident strategy of racial disenfranchisement. Soto’s book examines the historical power of census data to put African Americans on the map, literally and culturally. In skillfully crafted chapters, he argues that “African American identity as we today understand it solidified” a century ago in response to the US census, which enabled the “conceptual linkage of abstract geopolitical space and racialized social identity” (2). The book establishes the role of the census in engendering the “the ‘Negro’” as both “an enfranchised US citizen and an object of social-scientific concern” (4); Soto highlights W. E. B. Du Bois’s reliance on census data as he aimed to systematize the empirical study of African Americans, incorporating the census prominently into groundwork for “what we now call African American studies” (31). Soto argues further that Harlem Renaissance literature was at once shaped by and complicated the Census Bureau’s “shifting taxonomy of racial difference” (2). Soto foregrounds an argument about place; especially with the introduction of the census tract in 1910, the census anchored racial identity in specific geographic locations, “down to the [ . . . ] city block,” so that “Harlem” became a “metonym” for urban American blackness (2–3).Chapter 1 surveys the racial history of the US Census, starting with slavery, since the founders devised the decennial census partly to adjudicate the Three-Fifths Compromise. Chapter 2 considers census tract data from the 1920s and 1930s documenting a significantly unequal sex ratio in Harlem; arguing that this data illuminates sexual plots in a range of Harlem Renaissance fictions, Soto offers a geostatistical (rather than, say, psychoanalytic) reading of black female desire. Chapter 3 links Harlem Renaissance authors’ robust vocabulary for skin color—and the popularity of “interracial literature” and passing narratives—with the “Census Bureau’s obsession with blood fraction racial identities” (76) at the turn of the century. This kaleidoscope of skin color was enhanced by Harlem’s internationalization, both registered and hidden by census data, which did not separate out Afro-diaspora immigrants from native-born blacks until 1930. Chapter 4 demonstrates that Harlem’s robust internationalization, in tension with the rise of a singular “New Negro” identity, was rendered invisible by the emerging framework of a Great Migration from the South as defining black identity and culture; “the institutionalization of great migration discourse” (101) forged “regionally distinct environments and customs into a singular racial experience” (114). Chapter 5 turns to space, rather than time, to specify the Harlem Renaissance’s modernity. Just as the urban grid epitomized the modernity of New York and made it a reproducible “template for future urban development” (132) elsewhere, it consolidated Harlem’s racial meaning as locus of the “New Negro,” evidencing the black community’s “forward-looking potential” (146) and constituting a portable signifier for modern blackness (144–6). Harlem’s identity as “symbolic center for African American culture” is epitomized by sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s map of Harlem as series of concentric circles (151), promoting Harlem’s “representative” status while obscuring other coordinates of black life (149).Tracking relays between the census and the literary, Soto devises the term the “geostatistical imagination” to designate “fictive” qualities of the census; for example, until 1965 racial identity was determined by the census enumerator, not self-reported, giving free play to the racial gaze. Soto’s overarching argument is that the census makes black life visible (154) but inflicts “one-dimensional status” on its subjects by “tabulat[ing] and objectify[ing]” racial identity (160–61). In assessing this reification of identity, Soto briefly references Benedict Anderson’s classic work on the census, though the import of what Anderson calls the “demographic topography” imposed by the (colonial) census is not elaborated. Given the focus on population, I was surprised by the absence of a biopolitical framework for assessing the census’s political and cultural efficacy. Situating the project in that conversation (for example, the vital existing scholarship on the nineteenth-century census as a biopolitical project) would sharpen the stakes of Soto’s argument and illuminate the significance of the census’s “linkage of abstract geopolitical space and racialized social identity” (2) beyond the problem of delimiting identity (e.g., its role in visualizing Harlem as what Kenneth Clark called a “dark ghetto” and mapping racialized zones of life and death).Greyser’s very different book draws on new materialism and affect theory to specify spatial, material dimensions of sympathy as “grounds for the production of the self”: “sentimentalists evoked sympathy to express a desire for a place that was both territorial and emotional—what I call an affective geography” (1). (Greyser’s cover illustration, a colorful antebellum lithograph imaging a woman’s heart as mappable terrain, strikingly emblematizes this concept.) This “affective geography” is evident in sympathy’s “spatializing figures” (74)—of physical proximity, putting oneself in the “place” of (or being “touched” by) another—a spatial orientation she calls “intimacy across distance” (2). Greyser thus presents the sentimental as a mode of “inter-corporeality” that bridges spaces between bodies, human and otherwise; sentimentalism “blur[s] expression of grief and suffering from those who experience pain” with the feelings of “witnesses who feel for and imaginatively as them” while animating bodies and spaces not usually considered “sensible” at all (31). Geyser turns to affect theory to envision sympathy as an “intensity” that encompasses “our power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it” (4). She also turns to the overlapping body of new materialist theory, which complicates models of human agency and theorizes our bodily continuity with the natural and material world. For Greyser, the material world is indeed “vibrant matter,” charged with affect, and sentimental texts register that vitality. Sentimentalism’s tendency to “slide one subject’s story into another’s” (85) can hazard colonization or exploitation or engender reciprocal, mutually enlivening contact: “the positive ethical bind and the negative exploitative bind are both legible in mixed and at times incommensurate composition of affective geographies” (74).Chapter 1 examines Cherokee and Anglo discourses to consider the “trail of tears” as a lens onto how “removal policy was caught up in sentimentalism over the course of the nineteenth century” (30). The trail’s sentimental “geoaffect” derives in part from Native epistemologies, “Indigenous views of animacy” and “relational kinships” (36) between human and natural worlds. Chapter 2 examines The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) as a collaborative text that reveals interlocutors’ affective investments in Truth and how “white rhetors and rhetors of color co-created the sentimental” (64–65). Affective geography now takes the flavor of feminist ethics; Greyser returns to a familiar scholarly understanding of the sentimental attuned to racialized power relations of female abolitionism, though she employs affect theory to frame this in fresh ways. The intersubjective space of the text becomes a key “ground” of sympathy; Greyser turns to scholarship on book culture to explore “fantasies of communion” mobilized in and by the Narrative (68). Chapter 3, on The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne and its “Custom House” preface, examines how Hawthorne’s physical encounter with the scarlet “A,” recounted in the preface, “draws Hawthorne into Prynne’s story,” and is described in the language of sympathy; “the sentimental turns the sensation of touch into a literary and emotional sense of the touching” (94). Although desired, “sensory immediacy” with Hester threatens to “overwhelm masculine sovereignty and autonomous authorship” (94)—a dynamic that shapes the novel’s charged intersubjective spaces. Chapter 4 turns to emplotment of the “New Southwest,” focusing on the work of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. Both leveraged sentimentalism “to contest US imperialist and settler colonial politics and practices” (126), exposing Anglo constructions of “sympathetic incorporation as heartless eradication and displacement” while figuring lasting affective ties between displaced people and the land (127). Chapter 5 joins longstanding critical debates about the sentimental aspects of Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson (1859); Greyser does not so much present a new argument about the text’s sentimentality as reframe that analysis in new materialist terms. Wilson’s economic appeal to readers construes sympathy as “reciprocal and radically material” (164), while the novel is “deliberate in its considerations of affective flows as enlivening and deadening” (167): the Belmont home is toxic, and Wilson struggles to situate her protagonist (and her text) in environments of replenishment and care. “Dog and book, pen and page, become . . . vital sites of sympathy in an unsympathetic world” (165).Greyser’s training in the history of rhetoric is apparent in her breadth of sources, from literary texts to letters, journals, government and legal documents, newspaper articles, and maps, as well as visual cultural forms. But especially given this impressive range—and the array of theoretical discourses Greyser draws on—greater precision is needed when defining her central categories, especially sentimentalism and sympathy. Sentimentalism seems to characterize any textual passage where feeling is evident; similarly, sympathy seems equated with affect. The effects of the sentimental seem equally fluid; chapter 5, where sympathy is a vehicle of black women’s enforced carework and emotional labor, interprets sympathy biopolitically; while in chapters 1 and 4, sympathy encompasses Indigenous ideas of animism and ecokinship. The book’s larger argument, that sympathy could be put to “ethical” or “exploitative” (e.g. 25, 74) use, is not far removed from Lora Romero’s argument about sentimental biopower decades ago. Greater engagement with related studies (e.g., Kyla Schuller’s careful account of sentimentalism as a mechanism of biopower) would enhance this imaginative study, throwing into relief ways Greyser’s “affective geographies” are truly pathbreaking.

This study organized five black American undergraduate students into a participatory action research (PAR) team to examine Cross and Strauss’ (1998) and Cross, Smith, and Payne's (2002) functions of blackness theory (i.e., bonding, code switching, and individualism) within a sample of black American students, frontline staff (i.e., janitors), and faculty at a predominantly white institution (PWI) or university. The racial-ethnic lived experiences of black Americans at a PWI can reveal outcomes in terms of employee performance and student academic and social experience. Data were collected from four student focus groups (i.e., general student body, students in Greek organizations, student athletes, and student leaders), one frontline staff focus group, five individual faculty interviews, and one individual interview with a female student athlete. Each participant completed a demographic survey. Also, extensive field observations were taken of participants at this particular PWI. Findings revealed how black Americans use bonding, code switching and individualism as functions of a racial identity when navigating a PWI as a mainstream environment. Data suggest very little bonding took place across the three subsamples (i.e., students, frontline staff, and faculty) and bonding practiced by black Americans at this PWI was found to exist most often within subpopulations, specifically within students and frontline staff. Participants, overall, were comfortable with code switching between a professional identity and a more racial, black American and/or social identity. Also, a number of participants understood their individuality to be more salient than a racial or black American identity. Implications for PAR projects with black American college students are also discussed within this article.

Seeing Black Sarah Blackwood (bio) Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. By Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. 248 pages. $35.00 (cloth). Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum. By Bridget R. Cooks. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. 205 pages. $29.95 (paper). Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. By Leigh Raiford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 293 pages. $47.50 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. By Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 400 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). In 1969 the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an exhibition titled “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968.” The exhibition, composed mainly of documentary photographs, stirred controversy. Bringing what the New York Times called “sociology” into an art museum, the exhibition neglected to include any works of art by Harlem artists, and was organized and curated without any input from residents of the neighborhood just a handful of blocks north of the museum. This exhibition raised the ire of the black communities it excluded, who in turn argued that the museum seemed to mistake mere visual representation for social advocacy.1 I open this review of recent work on African Americans and visual culture with this particular exhibition, which the art historian Bridget R. Cooks examines in Exhibiting Blackness, because it distills a number of themes central to the flourishing field of African American visual culture studies. This field links questions about the relationships between photography, art, and racial identity, the place of black artists within and without the canon and white [End Page 927] artistic institutions, and the long history of visual representations of black individuals in the United States. The question of representation has long been vexed for people of African descent in the Americas. Indeed, representation by others and the capacity for self-representation have been at the heart of racial politics. White supremacy founded itself on a belief in the inability of people of color to give form to experience in a manner approaching art. In 1781, for example, Thomas Jefferson declared that “never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.”2 Shorn, by this logic, of this basic human faculty, African Americans were everywhere represented by others in images and narratives that tended to confirm their inhumanity. Not surprisingly, in the nineteenth century, the new and purportedly objective medium of photography reinforced the racial hierarchy—as, for example, in the infamous Louis Agassiz slave daguerreotypes. Jefferson was, of course, wrong about African capacities for representation beyond the utilitarian, as centuries of African American literature, music, and material culture attest. Scholarship over the past century has largely succeeded in bringing these achievements of people of color into full view, if not into the canon. Scholarship on African American participation in the plastic and visual arts, however, has only recently begun to have the same impact.3 The reasons for the delay in scholarly attention to black visual culture are multiple and intersecting. Traditional art historical methods, with their emphasis on artistic training, money, influence, the aesthetic as “common” (and unraced) sense, and mediating systems and institutions such as patronage and museums often exclude a priori the visual art forms most commonly produced (and consumed) by African Americans: craft, vernacular, and popular forms. The rise of what is called “visual culture studies” has been a boon to the study of African American visuality, given the flexibility of this approach.4 The methods of “visual culture” have enabled scholarly work like that under consideration here by attempting to do away with “high” and “low” forms of art, considering vernacular and popular media forms in addition to painting, drawing, and sculpture, and perhaps most importantly, moving the production of meaning away from the solitary artist toward an understanding of the meaning-making collaboration between producer, viewer, and object. Yet traditional art institutions and analytic practices remain...

Looking at the OverexposedVisuality and Race in Harnett’s Attention Company! Christopher J. Lukasik (bio) The last twenty years has seen a number of cultural critics investigating the relationship between race and visuality.1 Michelle Wallace, for example, closed the 1992 Black Popular Culture collection by addressing “the problem of visuality in African American culture” (335). Wallace attributes this problem—what she calls “the history of a mostly invisible black visuality” (335)—to the institutional limitations of a white-dominated art world that restrict or prohibit both the production of and discourse on black visuality. She finds it difficult, for instance, to imagine an African American’s relation to visual practice either as an artist or as a critic, if nearly all the depictions are negative. The historical legacy of negative images (African Americans as objects) plus the historical absence of positive images (African Americans as subjects), contributes to an absence of visual producers which, in turn, produces an absence of critical discourse on the visual.2 Thus, the existence of a mostly invisible black visuality, ironically enough, has little to do with a lack of exposure. In fact, Wallace finds the negative image of the black to be thoroughly overexposed.3 Consequently, she believes that one of the goals of contemporary cultural criticism should be to “begin to understand how regimes of visuality enforce racism, how they literally hold it in place” (Wallace, “Afterword” 344). Like Wallace, Henry Louis Gates also discusses the problem of African American visuality in his introductions to two recent museum exhibition catalogues (“The Face” 11–14). But for Gates, the problem of African American visuality is more about the past than the present. Gates contends that “the hegemony of racist images that dominated the popular arts and infiltrated the fine arts” during the nineteenth century prompted the New Negro movement to use words, and “not the tactics of visual representation, as the tools … used to assert their self-image” (“The Face” xliv). Here, the negative visual representations of African Americans have not only stifled visual production, but they have literally generated textual bodies to take their place. In his introduction to the Black Male catalogue, Gates maintains that “tragically, every African American male who walks down any street in America carries with him the hidden heritage of this negative cultural and psychological legacy, the burden of being perceived through what … Barbara Johnson calls a stereotype—’an already-read text’—the already read text of debasedness and animality” (Preface 13). Like Wallace, Gates draws virtually the same conclusion: African American visuality is problematic largely because of the historical legacy of centuries of negative images. Where Wallace locates “the problem” in the cultural institutions that regulate and maintain the production of visual practice, Gates locates “the problem” in [End Page 723] the historical effects of a cultural conflation between the stereotyped images and the actual people they seek to reductively display. Yet, as both Wallace and Gates discuss the enduring legacy of the production of negative images, and the vexed status that it has subsequently created for the relationship between African American discourse and visuality, there is scarcely any attention paid to how these images themselves might actually participate in the problem outside of their status as an already-read text. In fact, it remains unclear if the representational modalities of images have any bearing whatsoever on what Wallace claims as a “vital” problem for African American discourse. While Wallace hopes to address this problem, her notion of visuality seems confined to “who produces and reproduces vision,” and oddly leaves out interrogating the very material condition for the production of vision in the first place: the image. Similarly, Gates reduces almost the entire history of the relationship between race and representation in American art (1710–1940) to the steady production of images that by and large always exist as “already-read” texts. Although the iconoclasm implicit within such criticism is understandable given the vast corpus of stereotypical images of African Americans within American culture, the implications and limitations of this iconoclasm on African American cultural criticism’s relationship to the problem it seeks to understand warrants further thought as to how African American visuality might...

Something happened to James Baldwin. In an authorial swerve after The Fire Next Time, Baldwin seemed to abandon the literary promise of Go Tell It on the Mountain and produce increasingly blunt, polemical essays and fiction until his writing committed all of the artistic errors he decried in Protest Novel, the essay that launched his career. His writing became sentimental. It abjured the complexities of the private life and traded ambiguity for glib ideological platforms. (1) Whether or not we evaluate Baldwin's later work as period of decline, the trajectory of his career was not reversal. In fact, Baldwin's radicalism descended directly from his aesthetics. The staunch ethnic difference he asserted in his later career was an application of the artistic values he championed in his early career: they were both techniques of separation from the homogenizing effects of mass culture. The seemingly relentless expansion of mass culture in the postwar years suggested to many intellectuals that because cultural differences are endangered, they must be guaranteed by essential differences if they are to endure at all. Yet because the Holocaust and the Third Reich cast pall over biological notions of race, the increasing interest in literary canon formation in the postwar years became more innocuous template for the genetic transmission of people's essence. Artists like Baldwin found ways to substitute the essentialism of race for the essentialism implicit in the New Critics' description of tradition and aesthetic formalism. And when an aestheticized tradition becomes the index for the enduring experience of people, ethnicity becomes version of aesthetic formalism. Even if it did nothing else, Baldwin's career as an essayist would be crucial for its representation of the broad cultural exchange between ethnicity and aesthetics, cultural identity and cultural value, burgeoning in the United States in the decades following World War II. The permutations of his remarkable essays reveal the elements of relationship that would unfold between midcentury formalism and late-century multiculturalism. In the same way that an industry of literary criticism championed literature as canonical lineage formed through the unique wholeness of individual texts, so did Baldwin see African Americans as distinct group whose cultural integrity resides in the unique presence of collective memory distilled within the African American individual. New Critical values underwrote Baldwin's idea of African American identity just as much as they guided his judgment about art and literature. But perhaps the most compelling conflation of ethnicity and aesthetics throughout his essays is the fact that the source of his African American identity also appeared to him as the consummate New Critical art object: the United States South. (2) For Baldwin, the South was not canonical monument because it was an ancestral realm of memory. Rather, it was realm of memory because it was monument. In the end, it was his critique of the region's formalism that shaped his critique of ethnic identity. Protesting Everybody's Novel Baldwin's early career was spirited defense of New Critical aesthetics, which he associated more with Henry James than with the New Critics themselves. (3) The Jamesian tradition of craftsmanship discovered in the details of consciousness and the private life all of the material an artist needs to discern larger cultural phenomena. Henry James spoke of experience as a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue, and when an imaginative artist engages experience, the mind takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations (Fiction 34). Part of what appealed to Baldwin's dissenting spirit was that James identified modern culture itself as threat to the fine sensibility that would discover it. …

Persistent disparities in the burden of breast cancer between African Americans and White Americans have been documented over many decades. Features characterizing breast cancer in the African American community include a 40% higher mortality rate, younger age distribution, greater advanced-stage distribution, increased risk of biologically aggressive disease such as the triple-negative phenotype, and increased incidence of male breast cancer. Public health experts, genetics researchers, clinical trialists, multidisciplinary oncology teams, and advocates must collaborate to comprehensively address the multifactorial etiology of and remedies for breast cancer disparities. Efforts to achieve breast health equity through improved access to affordable, high-quality care are especially imperative in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and its disproportionately high economic toll on African Americans.

For African Americans, the legacy of oral communication within the community is being transferred to online spaces. Blogging provides a platform with features that mirror many of the components of the Black barbershop. The barber and beauty shop symbolize a space of retreat, wherein African Americans have formed alternate publics used to critique the dominant culture, foster resistance, and strengthen African American institutions. Analysis of nine African American–authored blogs using a method of critical technocultural discourse analysis demonstrates that each blog used traditional Black rhetorical strategies while making modifications to contemporary goals. The strategies involve modifications made to traditional Black humor and folktales. The writing style is highly performative, yet relies upon participant interaction. This reliance on orality is a necessary force in the maintenance of cultural traditions that have long worked to assist in group definition and acts of resistance in political power struggles. By utilizing modified song, narrative, and fables to articulate resistance and craft African American identity, African American online oral culture persists as a strategy to house political discourse within the often hidden enclave spaces of the digital barbershop.

This chapter explores many of the verbal and discourse genres and practices which constitute the African-American speech community. Research on African-American discourse, verbal genres, and interactions has been voluminous, covering the fields of linguistics, folklore, anthropology, sociology, psychology, education, and literary criticism. The way African Americans talk to each other not only reveals how languages are socially constructed, but that speech events, activities, participants, and context affect language in complex and often unpredictable ways. Scholarly discussions of verbal performance and discourse are often explorations into how power or status is expressed and negotiated in society. The cultural value attached to how one negotiates both interactive domains provides an exegesis of how individuals communicate culture, identity, and citizen rights. African-American interaction intricately entwines multiple norms and levels of language and style.

How students are taught to think about what is considered "art" and who are "artists" contributes to their sense of self within the world. It can confine them to accept a system that devalues and excludes or it can inspire them to explore the political dimensions of art, to recognize social contradictions, and to contribute to cultural dialogue. The purpose of this study is to provide content for an art curriculum that develops the intellectual capabilities and broadens the critical consciousness of students. The study of aesthetics, art history, and art criticism offer possibilities for understanding the multiple social, historical, and cultural meanings of art. This dissertation adopts feminist approaches to the study of art as a means of exploring how the social reality of racial designation influences African American artistic production and meaning. Consideration is given to the cultural values that have influenced the meaning of African American art, a regional history of African American cultural production in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the experiences and artistic production of several regional African American artists. Throughout history, African American aesthetic values have been inseparable from ideological struggles for assimilation and self-determination. In 19th-century New Orleans, the work of slave and free Black artisans and free artists of color met the needs of a society that had developed a distinct Creole identity. Racial barriers limited the artistic productivity of all African Americans including the fine artists who were considered a third racial caste, had white patrons, and sometimes were trained in Paris. Following Reconstruction, legal restrictions and racial violence severely limited artistic opportunities for African Americans in New Orleans. Contemporary artists still face barriers as race relations change in the city. Interviews with five Black artists revealed the importance they attribute to transmitting African American cultural values to young people and the function of art as a means of responding to the social stereotypes that devalue African American people and culture. Conclusions of this study indicate that issues of racial identity and African American cultural values should be included in the art curriculum.

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Response Daniel Hack (bio) Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2017) recovers and explores an historical phenomenon that I call "the African Americanization of Victorian literature" (1): the recontextualization, reworking, and repurposing of Victorian poems and novels by African American writers and editors to address the historical situation, political concerns, or everyday lives of African Americans. I argue that these practices were widespread in African American print culture from the mid-nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, and were undertaken in particularly sustained and provocative ways by such major figures in the African American literary and intellectual tradition as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Thanks largely to the institutional divide between Victorian and African American literary studies, which this book seeks to bridge, this history of transformative engagement has been little studied and poorly understood, with many of the specific cases I discuss previously unidentified. Victorian literature's role as an important archive for the production of African American literature and print culture, I argue, makes African American literature and print culture an important archive for the study of Victorian literature: recovering African American uses of Victorian literature not only increases our knowledge of its dissemination, mobility, and adaptability but also, and thereby, contributes to our understanding of that literature itself. The responses specific Victorian works garnered—and the uses to which they were put by a readership not envisioned by the works themselves—powerfully defamiliarize those works and force a rethinking of their ideological investments and cultural significance. [End Page 92] I anticipated certain forms of resistance to my work, and while I sought to address these in the book itself, I am not surprised to see versions of them on display in this forum. The first of these objections, which Paul Giles and Irene Tucker make central to their responses, is that my work focuses too much on what Tucker calls "the relatively narrow category of the literary encounter" at the expense of what she terms "other sorts of . . . cultural engagements" (82), and Giles calls "the wider cross-currents of the time" (78). The second major objection, voiced by Tucker and Ivy Wilson, is that my argument presumes and/ or reinforces what Tucker calls the "cultural authority" (85) and Wilson the "canonicity" of Victorian literature (90). For Tucker, these two objections are linked: the "focus on the isolated encounters of literary texts" she criticizes is, she claims, "predicated on the presumption (of both the Victorian authors themselves and the critics who analyze their work . . . that Victorian texts possess an obvious and self-evident cultural authority that makes them worth rewriting, makes the fact that they have been rewritten a matter of historical interest in and of itself," thereby minimizing or obscuring the gap between a British culture confident in its authority and an American one coming into being (85). Wilson, by contrast, commends Reaping Something New for "meticulously illustrat[ing] the ways in which African American writers took up the Victorians for the particular needs of their own political conditions as well as the desires of their aesthetic ambitions" (88), but finds nonetheless that "the book's methodological recursivity produces a metacritical conceit that reifies the canonicity of nineteenth-century English literature," a reification he finds troubling (90). To begin with the literary: I consider my attention to formal structures and textual details a feature, not a bug. Appeals such as Giles's to the ubiquitous "spirit of Dickens" obscure rather than explain the nature and the interest of the many African Americanizations that I analyze throughout the book, which are far more targeted, purposive, and textured than has been previously recognized (78). My approach takes its cue from the writers I study, which is why I dub both the object and method of the book "close reading at a distance": that is, sustained, fine-grained, creative engagement conducted across—and attentive to—geographical, national, and racial divides, as well as a corresponding critical practice of granular textual analysis that renders these divides legible through the lens of a work's geographical dispersal and uptake. At the same time, I do not restrict...

This chapter canvasses the many different ways that African Americans fought to preserve their humanity in the face of the everyday practices that were part of the slavery regime. Frederick Douglass’s famous acts of resistance and then his career as an abolitionist frame much of the chapter’s narrative. Douglass was not the only architect of resistance, however. Denmark Vesey, David Walker, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and others marked different ways to fight white supremacy, organized escape and organized violence chief among them. Of particular concern was the Fugitive Slave Law that made it clear that African Americans could never be confident that their freedom would be respected.

Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schools

This bibliography on African American deathways examines the role of death, dying, and disposal from a variety of different perspectives. Studies focusing on the intersection between death and history survey a wide range of materials, ranging from general histories that contextualize the importance of death culture to more specific studies of prominent burial grounds and cemeteries. Scholars focusing on cemeteries and material culture tend to highlight the importance of burial customs in African American remembrance and mourning, while also examining some of the intellectual divides that archaeological excavations of these cemeteries have created. Additionally, many burial customs and traditions retained markers of identity tying them to West African traditions and pan-African identity, in general. Cemeteries function as signifiers of belonging and exclusivity, with many cemeteries in North America either segregated or unmarked. Cremation, on the other hand, remains a less popular form of disposal in a culture with a deep respect for embodied funeral traditions, even though it is a far more affordable option than burial. Regarding the economic dimension of African American deathways, studies of the funeral home industry highlight its role as a nexus for cementing cultural identity in the African American community, since, historically, funeral homes were one of the few businesses that blacks were allowed and encouraged to run without interference from the white community. The funeral home thus became an important center for commerce, building equity, funding education, creating political action, and providing infrastructural support, causing the funeral home business to prosper. Similarly, funerary traditions often formed an important part of African American culture, and the body was, and remains, the locus of funerary traditions, often with long wakes (in which families and friends sit with the body telling stories and remembering the deceased), and equally long funeral processions, in which entire communities come to pay respect to the dead. Recent research on the dying experience among African Americans reveals disparities between whites and communities of color, with unequal access to medical care and a history of gross abuse and experimentation by medical professionals. Those studies focusing on mourning and culture tend to address larger cultural frameworks of death from a qualitative perspective, while gender-critical analyses of African American deathways examine the role of women and LGBT folk in the funeral business. Unfortunately, like many businesses, women’s roles were diminished as the industry professionalized and men became the primary faces of the business, while death studies in general remained heteronormative in its focus. Finally, the political dimension of death represents a significant area of research within African American death studies. These works examine the politics of mourning and the ways in which death and mourning create agency for the African American community. Death, funerals, and a politics of mourning were all essential to political movements in the United States, and evidenced through collective responses found in both the anti-lynching movement and the civil rights movement. More recently, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has highlighted the continued killing and spectacle of black bodies, and can be viewed as a powerful contemporary resistance against the ongoing oppression of people of color in the United States.

PurposeResearch shows that family is influential to African Americans in college choice (Chapman et al., 2018; Chapman et al., 2020; Freeman, 2005; Hines et al., 2019; Lowry, 2017; Williams, 2018). However, it often overlooks unique, African-rooted characteristics of African American families and culture. This study aimed to explore whether and how these characteristics shape college choice for these students.Design/methodology/approachData were collected through semi-structured interviews with six, first-year African American students at an urban university. The data were analyzed using theoretical thematic analysis.FindingsThe major themes showed the influence of family, community and spirituality in shaping participants’ college choice decisions and perception of higher education.Originality/valueIn addition to identifying specific family members who were influential to African Americans in college choice, this work highlighted the role of communities as a whole in shaping these students’ decisions and creating supportive environments. It also showed the importance of these students’ relationship with God through the college choice process. The work can guide researchers and educators in considering African American families and culture as strengths in helping these students through college choice.