Archiving Oakland

Book Review| October 01 1994 Review: A History of African Americans in North Carolina, by Jeffrey J. Crow, Paul D. Escott, and Flora J. Hatley A History of African Americans in North CarolinaJeffrey J. CrowPaul D. EscottFlora J. Hatley Spencer Crew Spencer Crew Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (1994) 16 (4): 79–80. https://doi.org/10.2307/3378013 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Spencer Crew; Review: A History of African Americans in North Carolina, by Jeffrey J. Crow, Paul D. Escott, and Flora J. Hatley. The Public Historian 1 October 1994; 16 (4): 79–80. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3378013 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1994 Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Reviews61 Style. Several ofNew England's Chapel Style FMHs have cornerpilasters attached to a frieze, providing a regional distinctive touch. Gothic versions of the type date to the 1895-1910 era, and a single example of the Akron Plan was constructed at Oak Grove, Maine. Twentieth century FMHs (1920-2000) display little architectural cohesion. Since the book's publication, people have forwarded additional information to Silas, fueling the possibility of a second edition. Silas has also been in contact with other historians ofQuaker architecture. As a result, an expanded version would undoubtedly use the emerging typology rather than using terms from residential architecture (Georgian, Cape). Whether or not a new version materializes, New England Quaker Meetinghouses is an excellent resource for Friends historians, genealogists, architectural historians, and libraries. Seth B. HinshawDowningtown, Pa. First City: Philadelphia and the Forging ofHistorical Memory. By Gary B. Nash. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. 383 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth $34.95. When Independence National Historical Park recently revealed its plans to build a new home for the Liberty Bell on the site of the slave quarters built by George Washington, Gary Nash led the charge of historians and community leaders who forced the Park Service to review and rework the interpretation of the site in order to recognize and remember Washington's slaves. Anything less, according to Nash, would be "murdering historical memory." Nash lives on the "cutting edge" of the field. He was among the first historians to challenge the old guard and their monochromatic approach to history, with its emphasis on great white Protestant males, by emphasizing the contributions oflittle-known people: African Americans, Native Americans , women, and other minority groups. His grass-roots approach, which once made him an outsider among the ivory tower establishment, has, today, made his work popular with those museum educators, public historians, and scholars who want to redefine the field in ways that go far beyond the dry, vocabulary-controlled interpretations of academics to a more engaging and inclusive approach. First City: Philadelphia and the Forging ofHistorical Memory is Nash's most recent gift to public history. Nash makes a compelling argument that Philadelphians, beginning in 62Quaker History the late eighteenth century, actively "participated in transmitting historical memory from one generation to another." Some were members of elite cultural institutions, such as historical societies and museums. Others belonged to relatively anonymous groups, such as women, blacks, and laborers. Regardless of their social and/or economic background, they engaged in memory-making in ways that "carried our their own ideological , cultural, and politically-informed agendas." (Page 8). Nash proves his case by exploring key eras in Philadelphia's eighteenth - and nineteenth-century past—early colonization, the American Revolution, early Republic, antebellum reform, Civil War, and Reconstruction —synthesizing a broad body ofsecondary literature, including his own scholarship. Just as insightful is Nash's familiarity with and interpretation of the artifact and manuscript collections of such institutions as the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, the Pennsylvania Academy ofthe Fine Arts, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Perhaps the finest illustration ofdifferences in the construction ofPhiladelphia 's historical memory are the contrasting approaches of John Fanning Watson and George Lippard. Watson, the patrician founder of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, sought to glorify the most prominent figures of the past by collecting their personal belongings, paintings, and manuscripts. For Watson, William Penn's Bible, a gateleg table from his country estate at Pennsbury, and the wampum belt presented to the Pennsylvania proprietor by a Lenape chief at the Shackamaxon treaty gathering , became engaging portholes to view Penn's almost mythological attempt to create a utopia in the wilderness for the persecuted peoples of Europe. But Watson's approach delivered the message that "great men make history and ordinary people follow their lead." (Page 18). On the other hand, Lippard, founder of the socialist Brotherhood ofthe Union, gave such "polite history" a bad name by celebrating the radical antecendents of Industrial Philadelphia and the common man's contributions to shaping the past. (Page 216). In Washington andHis Generals; or Legends ofthe American Revolution (1847), Lippard presented the War of Independence as a poor man's war...

Reviewed by: Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas ed. by Max Krochmal and J. Todd Moye Steven Rosales Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas. Edited by Max Krochmal and J. Todd Moye. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 469. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4773-2379-3; cloth, $105.00, ISBN 978-1-4773-2378-1.) Coalitional politics is a complicated and sometimes messy undertaking laden with varying degrees of rivalry, defensiveness, and hierarchy. Such complications have arguably assumed a new level of significance in the partisan politics of the modern day and in the efforts to interrogate the nation's past more critically. This anthology steps into this turmoil, and this Chicano historian of Chicanx history is impressed. The state of Texas, with its dual southern and southwestern identities, is a logical place to demonstrate the overlapping nature of "everyday acts of resistance" and institutionalized racism (p. 61). An overarching subdivision does exist in this volume, with African Americans in the spotlight for Part 1, followed by Chicanx struggles in Part 2. Coalitions in metropolitan areas become the focal point in Part 3. A fourth and final installment highlights the statewide Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project (CRBB), from which this work stems. Indeed, the power of oral history and its ability to capture moments often unseen and unheard through documentary evidence are clearly on display. Over five hundred video narrations were collected over two summers, with interviewers and other logistical support provided by multiple institutions throughout the state. The result is a "people's history" of statewide civil rights activism digitized using clever and modern methods on a website accessible to a wider general audience (p. 306). The CRBB and this anthology are a veritable dream for anyone involved in public history, oral history, and the digital humanities. A quick overview of the first two sections offers powerful examples of variance (rural versus urban, "leaders" versus everyday folk, and so on), with individual chapters tackling a variety of topics including segregation, student movements, and racialized violence within both communities. An additional [End Page 806] significant point for me is the willingness to tackle the legacy of Dr. Hector P. García and his off and on leadership of the American GI Forum, a post–World War II civil rights organization largely composed of Mexican American veterans. The literature surrounding both García and the organization is vast and hagiographic, and the determination to confront the long shadow of García and his many complexities is long overdue and refreshing. It is the third section where the theme of coalitional politics and behavior is confronted most vigorously, with the cities of San Antonio and Austin offering the most compelling examples. Young Black and Brown radicals in San Antonio forged ties of solidarity that included biracial support for Angela Davis, César Chávez and the United Farm Workers' grape boycott, as well as electoral cooperation to promote a mixed platform of Black and Brown candidates for city offices. Biracial efforts in Austin also included young radicals as well as formal legal efforts by more mainstream organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund to sue for local redistricting to promote better electoral representation. My fear, however, is that the few examples of intersectionality found within the third section are structurally overwhelmed by the first two sections, which clearly illustrate separate trajectories of civil rights activism that seldom overlapped. Moreover, obvious sources of tension, such as the embrace of whiteness by some in the Mexican American community, a powerful point of debate within Chicanx historiography, need a fuller examination than what is offered here. Furthermore, the present-day context of these struggles in the wake of George Floyd's murder, including vocal elements of the Black Lives Matter movement that posit Black emancipation as the source of emancipation for all marginalized communities, could have been addressed. All of this is to say that on a case-by-case basis Black and Brown intersectionality did (and does) exist...

Reviewed by: The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State Miles Orvell The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State. Edited by Casey Nelson Blake. Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. What is the role of the arts in promoting a democratic culture? The Arts of Democracy, which originated in a conference at the Woodrow Wilson Center, attempts to answer that question in a dozen essays on subjects relating to the competing claims of "the public" and the free expression of individuals and communities. Editor Blake would like to see the volume affirming "on balance … the notion of a democratic public sphere as a regulative ideal and a resource for political criticism," (3) but the collection itself demonstrates the real contradictions and tensions in the practice of public art, which emerges, inevitably, as a contested zone. The term itself—"the public"—is anything but simple, and what is in one instance idealized as the shared democracy of the "public sphere" can also, in other circumstances, be seen as a beast fed and nurtured by the media and the state, as when considerations of public interest (e.g., the preservation of aesthetic integrity) are used to repress freedom of speech in places such as the Washington Mall (see Leslie Prosterman's essay). The concept of "public art" is equally complex. Thus, Michele Bogart reads Norman Rockwell as a great "public artist," by reason of his giving the public what it wanted. That point is implicitly countered by Casey Blake's examination of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which celebrates the liberal-modernist project (from 1969 to 1989) of giving the public, not what it wanted but what it needed—namely, great works of sculpture in public spaces. The dismantling of Serra's Tilted Arc signaled the turn away from that policy, and Blake decries the current popularity of neo-patriotic public sculpture (NEA running as far away from Mapplethorpe and Serrano as it can go). More controversially he argues that the "community arts movement" achieves local participation, but "at the cost of any aspiration to a cosmopolitan, democratic culture for the nation as a whole." (214) The history of the NEA is also central to Michael Kammen's essay, "Culture and the State," which compares it to the National Endowment for the Humanities, with its [End Page 113] increasingly emphasized state-based dissemination programs. Kammen argues importantly for what he calls "cultural federalism," government support for the arts and humanities based on collaboration rather than the earlier New Deal model, with its top-down supply of the arts to the passively consuming public. Standing somewhat apart from these historical studies is the more theoretical argument of Kenneth Cmiel, who holds that we must not confuse the whimsy of postmodernist art with the everyday need to create order and coherence in our lives; instead, we must separate the public sphere from the aesthetic, for otherwise we perpetuate the disconnect between politics and people. Other chapters can only be noted: Neil Harris (on music festivals), Vera L. Zolberg (comparing France and America), Laura A. Belmonte (art as Cold War propaganda), Penny M. Von Eschen (on Duke Ellington as cultural ambassador) Donna M. Binkiewicz (on the NEA), Paul DiMaggio and Bethany Bryson (on public attitudes toward the arts), and Sally M. Promey (on public display of religion). Covering the period from the late nineteenth century to the recent past, The Arts of Democracy is illustrated (basic B & W) and would be a valuable resource for interdisciplinary courses in Public Art, Public Space, and Public History. Miles Orvell Temple University Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

Notes on Contributors

For African American historians of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the goal of writing history was as evident as the stakes were great. Amateur, and later professional, historians dedicated themselves to the proposition of writing African American history into mainstream American history, to instilling pride in the African American community and its roots, and to correcting popular misrepresentations while also addressing the issues and problems specific to their time and place. It was most emphatically history with an agenda. The role played by African American historians, whether amateur or professional, in the historiography of the field has been well charted in works such as August Meier and Elliott Rudwick's Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 (1986). * Part of the story remains largely untold, however, since little research has been undertaken by scholars from the perspective of book history.2 How did these historians find publishers for their works? What type of publishing houses issued them? How were they promoted and received, and what was their readership and influence on the field of American history? Most specifically, how does the publishing history of such works help account for their impact or lack thereof on the historiography of a given period? In this article, I offer a case study of one particular work by W. E. B. Du Bois, a seminal figure in African American studies best known of course for his 1903 essay collection, The Souls of Black Folk. Yet his monumental Black Reconstruction, published in 1935 by the important New York commercial firm of Harcourt, Brace, redefined the terms by which the history of Reconstruction was analyzed, a redefinition that appeared at a time when mainstream historians presented a very different picture of the post-Civil War period. I propose to begin with a brief reminder of the historiographical debate over Reconstruction. I will then look at the type of publishing houses

The Model Cities Program was launched as a part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty in 1968; its purpose was to provide increased financial resources and improve living conditions to urban communities. The Model Cities Program intended to bring city officials and local communities together to discuss unresolved issues that had been affecting city neighborhoods. Los Angeles became a participant of the program, particularly its eastern neighborhoods that contained a significant Latinx/Hispanic population. However, the efforts to improve East Los Angeles’s Latinx neighborhoods failed due to the poor organization and lack of centralization in leadership. Public projects were not completed and never received the entirety of proposed funding grants. My research intends to explore the progression of the Model Cities Program in East Los Angeles in the years 1969 to 1973. In particular, I will analyze the consequences of its flawed organization and local community members' perception of the program’s failure. I draw on media publications and city records ranging from the period. These sources reveal how the program gradually shifted away from productive planning and became ineffective; this prompted community criticism. I argue that the issues of Los Angeles’s Model City Program encouraged local Latinx communities throughout the city’s eastern neighborhoods to reconsider their relationships with institutional organizations. These communities instead chose to focus their efforts on community-established services and projects.

Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia is a collection of documentations, reflections, and illustrations of the collectively authored urban art research project known as Monument Lab. Like the project itself, the book resists easy disciplinary categorization and serves as an illustrated catalog of an important public art exhibition, a scholarly resource on the role of public art in political and social discourses, and as a manual that prefigures future creative research projects engendered by its precedent. Throughout, the diverse texts are written with a general audience in mind.According to the primary organizers/curators Paul M. Farber and Ken Lum, Monument Lab is a “public art and history studio based in Philadelphia that comprises a team of curators, artists, scholars, and students [that] ask open research questions about the ways publicly sited art, memorials, and monuments operate.” A central question, “What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?,” served as a foundation for a variety of activities that reached over a quarter of a million participants in culminating events held between September 16 and November 19, 2017 (x). These included an exhibition of twenty artists who created their own prototype monuments that were sited in different neighborhoods, institutions, and historic locations across the City of Philadelphia; the operation of staffed outdoor research labs housed in shipping containers that encouraged citizens to contribute their own ideas for appropriate monuments through sketches and answers to simple questions on forms; and the compilation of 4,500 of these proposals as data into a Report to the City, much of which can now be accessed online at proposals.monumentlab.com.The book, which documents all of these activities, is organized into the following four sections: “Essays,” three introductory essays by organizers and collaborators Paul M. Farber, Ken Lum, and Jane Golden; “Artists Reflections,” basic descriptions of each artist's project followed by a longer literary or scholarly reflection on it written by others, followed by high quality color photographs of the artwork; “Research,” a reflective essay on the research findings by librarian and Monument Lab research director Laurie Allen; and “Monumental Exchanges,” transcriptions of three public conversations held by various interlocutors in September and November 2017. Throughout, and interspersing these four sections are approximately seventy-five quarter-page reproductions of samples of the 4,500 citizen-submitted monument proposals. The accompanying essays throughout the book are generally short but rich resources of academic contextualization, personal and poetic responses to different artworks or the city itself (such as Ursula Rucker's love letter to Philadelphia, Epic Poem), and artists' interviews.As a collection, the book chronicles through practice-based creative research, the timely and urgent resurrection of a foreboding sense of a crisis of identity for many Americans; one that has only come more clearly into focus over the last two years as the fractious internal politics of the United States continue to ideologically divide citizens also ravaged by climate, health, and economic disaster. Despite these ongoing challenges and the searing loss of human life from COVID-19, the radical spirit of the Constitution retains its potency in the urban centers of the United States. The American Dream of prosperity can be found embedded in the vibrant communities of African Americans, Native Americans, and generations of immigrants who live in cities like Philadelphia. The latter will forever be marked by the geographic and discursive legacies of its special history as the home of American independence, which makes the city arguably the best place in the country to embark on a long-term research project about what monuments erected to honor local and national histories actually represent and for whom. The book seems to ask: What is at stake for the future in one's honoring of the past?Indeed, the many documents that comprise Monument Lab testify to the complex narrative threads that depict the work-in-progress of American democracy. Sculptor Karyn Olivier's The Battle Is Joined consisted of a twenty-foot high mirrored shell enclosing the 1903 Battle of Germantown Memorial (also known as the Soldier's Monument) in Vernon Park. Olivier hid architect Frank Miles Day's commemoration of a 1777 battle between American and British soldiers behind the mirrored reflections of trees and local residents, the latter often delighted to see themselves reflected in its surface.On the banks of the Delaware River, on the site of an ancient Lenape village called Shackamaxon, and near where William Penn and Lenape Chief Tamanend met to negotiate a peace treaty in the 1680s, Omaskeko Ininiwak artist Duane Linklater mounted a red neon sign in the form of his daughter's handwriting that said “as long as the rivers flow, and the sun, moon, and stars endure” (127). According to oral tradition this is a phrase taken from Tamanend's response to Penn in the famous “Treaty of Friendship”: “We will live in love with William Penn and his children as long as the creeks and rivers flow, and the sun, moon, and stars endure” (127). The poetic words of friendship, now understood as a broken promise to the Lenape people, illuminated the landscape with an eerie red glow.In Center City, another testimonial to historic erasures could be found in Rittenhouse Square. Sharon Hayes placed a number of figureless cast concrete monument pedestals in a group (If They Should Ask, 2017). Inscribed text on the pedestals offered up the many names of women who have been almost entirely excluded from representation in monumental form in Philadelphia. These platforms holding up the absence of female accomplishments also acted as sites for impromptu activation by passersby who climbed up on them to give voice to current issues.What is clear from this research lab and its book-form is that our public monuments are so far woefully inadequate to the task of representing the diversity of American life in the twenty-first century and are instead predictably weighted toward Colonial Euro-American master narratives of power and conquest. Many of the public's proposals submitted to the Monument Lab reflect these omissions, such as an anonymous proposal to erect a “plaque & tour of the rich cultural history of Washington Square as it was shaped and influenced by the African American community in Philadelphia” (125), as well as proposals to honor the lives or work of Billie Holiday, Sun Ra, Rufus Harley, Joel Embiid, and Joe Frazier, among many others.Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia might be compared to Creative Time's multifaceted national traveling exhibition and series of events in 2008 collectively titled Democracy in America, which resulted in the publication A Guide to Democracy in America. Organized parallel to the 2008 presidential campaign that resulted in Barack Obama's election, the Democracy in America events focused on artwork that questioned “the nature of war, freedom, justice and how we define democracy.”1 While the latter included an overview of more than 100 artist and activist projects across nine cities and numerous states, Monument Lab is distinguished by its emphasis on the particularity of Philadelphia's monuments as markers and producers of collective meaning, and through its ongoing and inclusive research methods. As such, this book will be of significance to anyone interested in the history of the city of Philadelphia, American public art, and the ongoing national debate about the relevance and management of historic monuments in the twenty-first century.

Bridging Solidarity is a digital map that fosters exploration of Pittsburgh’s long labor history. This project introduces audiences to fourteen strikes or strike-related conflicts across Allegheny County from the early nineteenth century to today, by combining secondary literature, newspapers, digital and physical archival material, visual media, and historic maps. Hosted in the platform HistoryPin, Bridging Solidarity promotes engagement with strikes across time and space, inspires an appreciation for local places, and highlights many diverging experiences within Pittsburgh’s labor movement. The article contextualizes this work within three historic subfields: digital humanities, place-based public labor history, and diverse local labor history. This project’s digital inception influenced its design, preservation, and writing, as informed by the insights of digital historians. Place-based history helps audiences better understand local labor history, grounding its interpretation in relevant sites that are publicly accessible and likely familiar to audiences. Additionally, this project centers marginalized people and the ambiguities of strikes past, presenting a complicated narrative that increases public awareness of how women and African Americans have influenced and experienced Pittsburgh’s history. Last, future expansions of this project will prompt further engagement with these historical subfields.

Dedication Acknowledgements Series Editor's Foreword 1. Introduction, Jeanette R. Davidson Part I: History and Theoretical Perspectives in African American Studies 2. African American Studies: Discourses and Paradigms, Perry Hall 3. Afrocentricity and Africology: Theory and Practice in the Discipline, Molefi Kete Asante Part II: Community Service, Social Activism and the Academy 4. Town and Gown: Reaffirming Social Responsibility in Africana Studies, Charles. E. Jones and Nafeesa Muhammad 5. Reflections on the Journey: Interview with Danny Glover, Jeanette R. Davidson 6. Black Studies for the Public: Interview with Manning Marable, Jeanette R. Davidson Part III: International Perspectives 7. Africa and its Importance to African American Studies, Ambassador Tibor P. Nagy Jr. 8. Black Studies in the UK and US: A Comparative Analysis, Mark Christian Part IV: Selected Areas of Scholarship 9. Africana Studies and Oral History: A Critical Assessment, Leslie M. Alexander and Curtis J. Austin 10. African American Philosophy: Through the Lens of Struggle , George Yancy 11. Song and Dance Nexus in the Africana Aesthetic: An Approach, Melanie Bratcher 12. Perspectives on Womanism, Black Feminism, and Africana Womanism, Maria D. Davidson and Scott Davidson 13. Theorizing African American Religion, Victor Anderson Part V: Commentary 14. African American Studies: Vital, Transformative and Sustainable, Jeanette R. Davidson and Tim Davidson Notes on the Editor, Contributors and interviewees Index.

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

Misinformation and misbeliefs in the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis fuel mistrust in the healthcare system.

In Your Average Nigga, Vershawn Ashanti Young uses his own experiences to examine how masculinity is shaped by identity performances of racial authenticity, academic literacy, class mobility, and sexuality. Moving between autobiography, autoethnography, and scholarly analysis, Young critiques proponents of code-switching whose solution to the requires inner-city youth to adopt white English vernacular at school and to reserve English vernacular for home. Your Average Nigga exposes the factors that make racial identity incompatible with literacy for blacks, especially males. Drawing on scholarship in both performance theory and African American literary and cultural studies, Young argues that exaggerated perceptions of the gap between and white linguistic performances harm inner-city blacks by requiring them to choose between abandoning their customary ways of speaking and behaving at the risk of alienating themselves from their families and communities and retaining their speech and behavior as a marker of racial authenticity while isolating themselves from mainstream society. Young also shows that exaggerated perceptions of the gap between and white racial identities leave blacks in the impossible position of either trying to be white or forever struggling to prove that they are black For men, this also becomes an endless struggle to prove that they are masculine enough. Ultimately, Young argues that far from denaturalizing supposedly fixed identity categories, as many theorists have contended, racial performance only reinscribes the essentialism that it is believed to subvert. Scholars and teachers of rhetoric, performance studies, and African American studies will enjoy this insightful volume.

It is widely acknowledged that Latinos are quickly becoming the largest minority group in the United States. Still, the term Latino encompasses a wide range of diverse experiences related to nationality, language, religion, history, immigration status, and, of course, race. The term Afro-Latino aims to call attention to the unique experiences and challenges of Latinos of African descent in the United States. Although scholarship about Afro-Latinos has flourished in recent years, Afro-Latinos have long written about their experiences and histories in the United States. Many of these autobiographical writings as well as subsequent academic analyses placed much emphasis on the “invisibility” of Afro-Latinos in the United States, where blackness is often assumed to be aligned with the US African American experience and Latinidad (or Latino identity) is assumed to be racially mixed. As research on Afro-Latino identity has developed, many scholars have critically examined racism within Latino communities, as well as the ways that assumptions about a whitened Latino identity have foreclosed conversations about blackness and Afro-Latinos. To that end, some scholars intervene by filling in historical gaps through highlighting the contributions of Afro-Latinos to American life and culture. Other scholars underscore the importance of literature and music not only as important Afro-Latino cultural practices, but also as sites where many Afro-Latino artists have theorized their experiences. In the realm of politics, researchers have explored historical and contemporary political alliances between African American, Afro-Latino, and other African diasporic populations in the United States. One central theme in Afro-Latino studies is transnational flows of information and ideas about blackness between the United States and Latin America via immigration and the advent of new technologies that foster cultural exchange. Generally, scholarship on Afro-Latinos thus presents the complex realities of race and ethnicity, realities that have broader implications for scholars interested in Latino studies, Latin American studies, African American studies, and race relations more generally.

What communicative experiences are particular to African Americans? How do many African Americans define themselves culturally? How do they perceive intracultural and intercultural communication? These questions are answered in this second edition of African American Communication: Exploring Identity and Culture. Informing multiple audiences interested in African American culture, from cultural researchers and practitioners to educators, policymakers, and community leaders, this innovative and invaluable resource examines the richness and depth of African American communication norms and patterns, as well as African American identities. Positive and healthy African American identities are centrally positioned throughout the book. Applying the cultural contracts theory and the communication theory of identity, authors Michael L. Hecht, Ronald L. Jackson II, and Sidney A. Ribeau explore relationships among African Americans, as well as between African Americans and European Americans, while highlighting the need for sensitivity to issues of power when discussing race, ethnicity, and culture. This wide-ranging volume provides an extensive review of the relevant literature and offers recommendations designed to encourage understanding of African American communication in a context extending beyond Eurocentric paradigms. Considering African American identity with a communicative, linguistic, and relational focus, this volume: *Defines African American identities by describing related terms, such as self, self-concept, personhood and identity; *Explores Afrocentricity and African American discourse; *Examines the status of African Americans in the United States using census statistics and national studies from other research agencies; *Considers identity negotiation and competence; and *Features a full chapter on African American relationships, including gendered, familial, intimate, adolescent and adult, homosexual, friendship, communal, and workplace relationships. African American Communication: Exploring Identity and Culture begins an important dialogue in the communication discipline, intercultural studies, African American studies and other fields concerned with the centrality of culture and communication as it relates to human behavior. It is intended for advanced students and scholars in intercultural communication, interpersonal communication, communication theory, African American/Black studies, social psychology, sociolinguistics, education, and family studies.