Decolonizing our gaze of Arturo Schomburg in the twenty-first century involves acknowledging and refining our transnational framing of his contributions to the African diaspora's intellectual history, especially in light of his pan-Caribbean life experiences, projects, and collaborations. This essay proposes we explore Schomburg's legacy as a figure whose ideas inform contemporary Caribbean and Caribbean American philosophy, whose activities in the 1930s in some crucial ways pivot around the Cuban intellectual scene of the era, and whose work poses an urgent challenge to transcend the usual conceptual silos intrinsic to teaching and research in American studies.

Reviewed by: Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation ed. by David Blight and Jim Downs, and: Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps by Amy Murrell Taylor, and: Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery by Joseph P. Reidy Granville Ganter David Blight and Jim Downs, eds. Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2017. 208 pp. $24.95. Amy Murrell Taylor. Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2018. 368 pp. $34.95. Joseph P. Reidy. Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2019. 520 pp. $39.95. The three books reviewed here reflect a powerful change over the past thirty years in Civil War historiography concerning the "freedom paradigm." [End Page 154] As surveyed in the Introduction to the concise and fascinating collection, Beyond Freedom, the meaning of emancipation has been a fraught term since the early twentieth century. Some historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, typically influenced by the Dunning school (named after William Archibald Dunning, 1857-1922), described emancipation as a disaster, characterizing the government's Reconstruction efforts as misguided and badly informed. The Dunning school also perpetuated the idea that the newly freed slaves were fundamentally ignorant and passive. Other historians, however, engaged in the recovery of black social agency successfully challenged this verdict. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (1935) passionately illustrated that African Americans worked toward freedom and were not simply the helpless wards of governmental assistance. Fifty years later, Eric Foner's landmark 1988 work, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, defined Reconstruction in terms of the aspirations toward different and contested modes of freedom, resituating African American agency in more complex contexts than simply black-white relations. (I remember reading Foner's book in the early 1990s, awestruck at his ability to clear away the decades of prejudice that clouded his topic to that point.) For the editors of Beyond Freedom and their colleagues who presented at the 2011 Gilder Lehrman conference on Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, there are still problems with a focus on freedoms. As the conference collection makes clear, rhetorics of "freedom" are complicated and undermined by understanding the simultaneous motives of global imperialism, gender dynamics, national economics, and relations of local dependence and coercion. The cynical expression "free to be exploited" comes to mind. Beyond Freedom looks carefully at many aspects of "freedom" that get missed with a triumphalist focus on the term. For many undergraduates and novices to the field of African American history or the Reconstruction period, freedom seems like a pretty intuitive thing to grasp, and as a result, this revisionary history-work might initially seem puzzling. With titles like Beyond Freedom, Embattled Freedom, and Illusions of Emancipation, the books surveyed here seem pretty skeptical about the simple goodness of freedom. Why? In many ways, they reflect a contemporary pessimism about our own historical moment. Slavery ended over 150 years ago in the United States, and yet African Americans still face severe challenges to social equity as well as racism. As Harriet Jacobs poignantly asked after describing the depressing aspects of a poor black section of Washington, D.C. after the Civil War, "Is this freedom?" (Blight and Downs 1). These books attempt to open up historical explanations for how we got here. Beyond Freedom cogently establishes the theoretical base of all three books, illustrating such paradoxes as the way in which the emancipation from slavery was reframed in negative ways to justify national segregation and international imperialism. The principal value of this collection is found in its broad scope, including its discursive analyses of the rhetoric of emancipation (Richard Newman); the consequences of emancipation for creating new relationships to state power (Chandra Manning); the difference between equity and emancipation (Kate Masur); and the interpretive dangers posed by the archive of the Freedmen's Bureau, which provided the basis for much progressive social history of the twentieth century (Jim Downs). Jim Downs's essay on the subtle effects of...

Reviewed by: The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America by Nicholas Buccola Stephen Schryer Nicholas Buccola. The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2019. 530 pp. $29.95. In the 1950s and '60s, the American conservative movement was fractured into ideologically incompatible groups: libertarians, traditionalists, and anticommunists. Those divisions should have torn the movement apart, destroying it in its infancy. That movement, however, was held together by a powerful solvent, which became key to its popular appeal: its opposition to civil rights. Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is Upon Us is a superb exploration of that opposition. The book makes a case for the importance of a sometimes-overlooked media event: a televised 1965 debate that took place at the University of Cambridge between James Baldwin, the civil rights movement's most famous literary spokesperson, and William F. Buckley, Jr., America's leading conservative intellectual and the founding editor of National Review. The book traces the career of these two writers up to this event, showing how a confrontation between them became inevitable as they fashioned their ideas and intellectual personas in response to the demands and strategies of the civil rights movement. It culminates in a detailed analysis of the debate, rooted in interviews with students who attended it and a newly discovered reel-toreel recording that includes portions of Buckley's speech edited out of the original BBC broadcast. The transcript is reprinted in the book, and readers can listen to the audio recording on Princeton University Press's website. The debate addressed the motion that "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro," which Baldwin affirmed through a rhetorically masterful recapitulation of his recently published The Fire Next Time (1963). Baldwin won the debate by a vote of 544 to 164 among the audience's mostly white, male students. However, in Buccola's account, Buckley won a strategic victory that would have momentous implications for the future of American race relations. Rehearsing a critique of The Fire Next Time first developed by National Review contributor Garry Wills, Buckley argued that the praise that the American literary establishment lavished on Baldwin was ironic proof that a new kind of reverse racism had emerged in the United States. By lauding Baldwin's "flagellations of our civilization," by neglecting to take his "charges against America" seriously, that establishment was refusing to treat Baldwin "other than as a Negro" (457-58). Baldwin, in other words, was the first beneficiary of affirmative action, an undeserving writer too readily excused for his intellectual failings because of his race. By voting for Baldwin by an overwhelming margin, the Cambridge audience, in Buckley's view, proved his point. The debate marked an important shift in conservative arguments about race. Buccola meticulously documents the magazine's position on segregation, which remained consistent up until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This position was an elitist one, marked by Buckley's antidemocratic belief that mass suffrage was responsible for many of America's problems, and that whites were culturally, if not genetically, superior to blacks. Buckley deplored some of the violent excesses of white segregationists; at the same time, he excused those excesses as the predictable reaction of a people who felt their communities to be under assault by Northern radicals. "Let us try, at least, to understand" white Southerners, Buckley wrote in a 1960 essay about mob violence against the Freedom Riders; "[t]hey feel that their life is for them to structure" (qtd. in 153; emphasis in original). For Buckley, the best of the South was represented by the Southern intellectuals whom he [End Page 148] encouraged to write for the journal, figures like Richard Weaver and James Jackson Kilpatrick, and by middle-class white supremacist organizations like the Citizens' Councils. These writers and organizations embodied the civilization of the South, which had to be defended against "Negro backwardness" (115). Searching for a constitutionally defensible way to ensure black disenfranchisement, Buckley called for the institution of color-blind educational tests for all Southern voters...

Reviewed by: Raised Right: Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism by Jeffrey Dudas Stephen Schryer Jeffrey Dudas. Raised Right: Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2017. 224 pp. $24.95. With the exception of a handful of critics, literary studies has not had much to say about American conservatism. Since the late 1960s, the discipline has been dominated by left-of-center perspectives apparently stuck in a time warp, [End Page 64] still fighting '60s-era battles between radicals and liberals while ignoring their shared enemy: the politically and culturally ascendant New Right. For cogent analysis of the phenomenon of conservative ascendance literary critics are forced to turn to other disciplines, especially history and political science, which have never downplayed conservatism as a cultural and political force in American life. Jeffrey Dudas's Raised Right: Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism is an especially welcome, albeit partial addition to the ever-expanding field of conservative studies. Although the project comes out of the fields of law and political science, its methodology is largely literary, drawing on psychoanalysis and masculinity studies. Through a series of biographical case studies, Dudas explores the political appeal of three conservative icons: William F. Buckley, Jr., Ronald Reagan, and Clarence Thomas. Dudas addresses the central paradox of conservative studies: the extraordinary unity of the American conservative movement, a fractured coalition of libertarians, traditionalists, Christian conservatives, and neoconservatives. This coalition shouldn't be able to act in unison, or fashion a dominant political ideology; somehow, for the past fifty years, it has. Dudas locates that unity in a "paternal rights discourse" (3) shared by his three icons: a discourse that emphasizes submission to paternal authority as a mechanism for creating self-governing, rights-bearing citizens. Conversely, this discourse maligns families with "weak or absent fathers and neglectful or domineering mothers" (12), which tend, so the thinking goes, to produce other kinds of citizens in need of strict discipline by the state. This discourse shapes conservative rhetoric on welfare, taxes, and other topics. Self-governing citizens don't need welfare, and they shouldn't be taxed to support those who do. Critical analysis of paternal rights discourse has been a mainstay of African American studies since the backlash that followed the Moynihan Report. This critique has informed some of the field's central texts, from Hortense Spillers's "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" (1987) to Roderick Ferguson's Aberrations in Black (2003); these works have illuminated the American state's use of heteronormative discourse to police nonwhite populations. Dudas's originality lies, first, in his identification of an inherent contradiction between conservatives' simultaneous appeal to "the timeless dictates of the fathers" and "the self-determination rights of the children" (15). Second, the book's originality lies in its analysis of the biographical anxieties that underlie its three icons' articulation of paternal rights discourse. Buckley, Reagan, and Thomas all had abusive fathers and childhoods "characterized by instability, chaos, and above all, fear" (137); the strong fathers they invoke in their biographies and speeches are phantasmatic figures, substitutes meant to fill a personal lack. In particular, all three icons revere the founding fathers and envisage the constitution they established as a paternal force that will "achieve order and repress the chaos associated with the maternal realm" (105). This account of conservatism is both essential and incomplete. As Loïc Wacquant argues in Punishing the Poor (2009), any good theory of political ideology must simultaneously embrace two perspectives: a materialist one that focuses on the system of production, and a symbolic one that focuses on the social categories that political elites use to manipulate and produce social reality. Critics, in short, must synthesize Marx and Durkheim. Dudas neglects the first perspective, ignoring the material interests of those who espouse conservative ideology and those who embrace it. His psychosocial account, indebted to the political demonology of cultural critics such as Michael Rogin, explains how conservatives have used familial discourse to appeal to white suburbanites anxious about racial minorities encroaching on their traditional prerogatives; it doesn't explain how those anxieties arose in the first place. As such, Dudas's book should be supplemented with accounts of the conservative movement that focus...

An American Diptych, and: Amid Interruptions, Samuel A. Cartwright Pontificates about Drapetomania to a Friend over Fine Dining, New Orleans, June 1851 Julie L. Moore (bio) An American Diptych The way to right wrongs is to shine the light of truth on them. —Ida B. Wells 1.after a broadside ad for a runaway slave on August 4, 1853 Everything Emily owns in the worldshe wears on her 17-year-old backor carries in her northbound sack:one gingham bonnet with a red cord, one dark calico, one blue and white dress,one pair of slippers, one white-striped shawl.Tho’s H. Williams, in his Kentucky drawl,dictates her belongings to me at his desk, saying he’ll give $100 to anyone who bringsmy Black Woman and her well grown hips home(although we both know she kicks like a coltwhen forced to do something she doesn’t want to doand shrieks like a barn owl at the moon). 2.after an untitled photograph of a Klan March in Gainesville, Georgia, September 5, 1992 When my boy toddled down the street,marching in stride with us Winder Knights,robed in white, wearing his proud hat,cape down his back like Batman(that’s what I told him when he foughtme this morning—at first, tied up in knots,then fidgeting, face turning beet red,whining he couldn’t catch his breath), I saw him—Josh, the son I pushed like hellto get out of me (all that blood on pastelsheets!)—approach a cop (black dressed in bluelike a bruise, watching his every move),then spot his own small face in the riot shield,and (he couldn’t resist) touch it, for real. [End Page 334] Amid Interruptions, Samuel A. Cartwright Pontificates about Drapetomania to a Friend over Fine Dining, New Orleans, June 1851 Ah, yes, I’m so glad you asked about that. We do sharecommon interests, don’t we? Probably because you and Iboth know the good Lord made the Negroes to bend their knees to us in obedience to the Word.And we, in turn, feed and clothe them, offer fuelfor their fire, and provide a place for them to live. The work we give them helps them feel a senseof purpose. We cannot defy the Almighty by lettingthem think more highly of themselves than they ought. Amen? Amen. (no, no more wine. that’ll be fine, thank you.)As I was saying, we must not encourage them to dreamabout working their own fields, or, God forbid, to read and write. When we do, I hypothesize, we inspire flights (peach pie?how can I refuse?) of, of, yes, there’s the word, fancythat confuse them cruelly, since they have a nature not unlike that of a new-born infant of the white race.1So we allow them evenings with their families, yes, we do.We push them hard, true, but they bear the rays of the sun better than we. We whip them before they raisetheir voices in protest, but only then—for that cancure dysaesthesia aethiopica, too, and stir the skin into the sensitivity it lacks. (right you are, good sir, my scienceis sound. indeed—this is no germ theory! ha!)Where was I? Ah, yes, so our moderation—borne of love— casts a preventative spell. Otherwise, the impulse to wanderoverruns them like miasma poisons the night air,spreading disease everywhere. (oh, very good to see you this balmy evening as well!) And then, then they deceivethemselves into believing liberty affordssomething more than the hunger and helplessness that’d await them. But I agree with you: the worstof the rascals do run, afflicted as they are with this unnaturalvagabondage. So what can we do? (yes, indeed, tomorrow and tomorrow, I will—first thing!) When the patrol returnsthe fugitives to your hands, remedy the illness permanently:Cut off their big toes. That will foil their frustration forever. Julie L. Moore Julie L. Moore is a Best of the Net and six-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of four poetry...

Reviewed by: Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé by Beyoncé Knowles and Ed Burke Sheila Liming Beyoncé Knowles and Ed Burke, dirs. Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé. Netflix, 2019. Beyoncé’s history-making appearance at the 2018 Coachella music festival was about spectacle—in particular, about seizing the right to star at the center of it. But Homecoming, the Netflix film that documents making of her two Coachella concerts, is not just about the carefully honed image of a pop superstar but also the idea of the university community. Homecoming sets Beyonce’s image against the backdrop of the HBCU, and explores the kinds of campus culture that HBCUs have the power to foster. In this regard, it is both a provocation and a rarity: It chronicles a vital strain of university life that is usually deemphasized and viewed as simply a complement to sports and football, and it reenacts the historical spectacle of that culture in the service of bringing it to mass audiences. In an immediate sense, I’m referring to the culture of marching bands, drum lines, majorettes, step teams, and the like—that is, all of the attendant features of the “ritual,” as the film repeatedly calls it, that is HBCU college football, minus the actual football. But the history of African American campus culture (some of the most recognizable features of which were, incidentally, introduced by Kwame Nkrumah) extends into deeper thematic territory in the film, with one of Beyoncé’s costumes featuring the letters BΔK (a play on her own initials, but with a nod to [End Page 348] Greek-named fraternities and sororities) and signaling her self-authorized induction into a milieu that she admittedly declined to join. She explains early in the film that Destiny’s Child, the singing group she was in from age nine in 1990 (when it was called Girl’s Tyme) through 2006, “was my college, my college was traveling around the world and life was my teacher” (18:50). It’s a comment that celebrates, on the one hand, the cherished American mythos of self-making, à la the “School of Hard Knocks.” At the same time, it provides some context and explanation: Like many Americans, Beyoncé never attended college, but that did not prevent her from feeling drawn to the idea of the American university as a spectator, if not perhaps as a participant. That idea of spectatorship, as the film goes on to demonstrate, grows out of the incubation of unique cultural forms that lend definitive shape to the college experience and thus nurture the specific kinds of communities whose spirit and energy Beyoncé laments having missed. Homecoming foregrounds the history of these communities for Netflix audiences who may know little about HBCUs while also drawing attention, in very subtle ways (this is a festival, after all), to some of the problems that continue to plague them today. Over the past few decades, the subject of institutional endowments has been an increasingly crucial one for most American colleges and universities. Concerns about inbuilt as opposed to tuition-generated capital have grown along with the pre-pandemic demand for more lavish campus facilities, on the one hand, and declining revenue from other sources, including state funding, on the other. As sources like Bloomberg report, the endowments of even the most well-funded HBCUs amount to a mere fraction of those enjoyed by their Ivy League and other private peers. This situation leaves HBCUs with fewer options for investing and growing their comparably meager endowments, and thus fewer resources over the long term. To that end, Beyoncé’s Homecoming serves the dual purpose of strategically highlighting this more neglected sector of American university education. Shortly after Homecoming premiered on Netflix, Beyoncé announced a scholarship program that would award $25,000 scholarships to individual students at four HBCUs (Xavier, Wilberforce, Tuskegee, and Bethune-Cookman) for the 2018-19 academic year. The aesthetics of the film, meanwhile, gesture insistently toward the collaborative qualities of Beyoncé’s onstage performances and to the very fact of her celebrity as well. While much of the live show relies on luridly colored, professional Steadicam footage, there are also sections that appear grainy and...

This article traces the tradition of posthumous civil rights autobiographies: life narratives written in the first-person and published after the deaths of their subjects. Examples include works by Malcolm X, Lorraine Hansberry, Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, and James Baldwin. Each is a posthumous collaboration with a coauthor and together the tradition points to a key means of extending the legacy of civil rights icons into the present.

Reviewed by: Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground by Kinohi Nishikawa Valerie Babb Kinohi Nishikawa. Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2018. 288 pp. $27.50. Pimps and prostitutes, dealers and dope fiends, gangsters and gamblers, all manner of street denizens. For a moment in the 1960s and ’70s, these were the models for characters peopling the novels of writers such as Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck), Donald Goines, and Odie Hawkins. Their books told brutal, often ugly stories—and rose in popularity alongside the civil rights and Black Power movements to the chagrin of those advocating for equality and asserting the beauty of blackness. With content antithetical to positive racial representations, these novels codified narratives of Black pathology while justifying governmental neglect. Initially they satisfied the prurient interests of a primarily white male gaze, but as the genre developed and became known by various names—Black pulp, street lit, urban lit, ghetto novels among them—as they were sold at newsstands, corner stores, liquor stores, barbershops, distributed via mail order, and passed from hand to hand, they became something more than just dirty books. As Kinohi Nishikawa elucidates in Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground, they lay the foundation for a literary movement. Nishikawa’s work places itself in conversation with other examinations of the evolution of pulp fiction, such as Megan Honig’s Urban Grit: A Guide to Street Lit (2011), Justin Gifford’s Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing (2013), and my own History of the African American Novel (2017; chapter 11). This well-researched study opens by noting the global legacy of Black pulp. Citing the reminiscences of Scottish novelist and playwright Irvine Welsh, as well as African American rapper, actor, and record producer Tracy Marrow (better known as Ice-T) as both recall reading Iceberg Slim novels. Nishikawa reveals the cosmopolitan nature of Black pulp and its ability to resonate with multiple working and ethnic classes. Black pulp’s portrayal of the street both as a site for personal discovery and as a rite of passage resonated with a British writer who would turn addiction into the novel Trainspotting and a musician whose lyrics used pulp forms to make a lingua franca of street life. The book’s eight chapters chart the impact of Holloway House publishers on the evolution of Black pulp. Founded by Ralph Weinstock and Bentley Morris, and producing erotic paperbacks and male-oriented adult magazines, Holloway became an equal opportunity conveyer of erotica when it debuted Players magazine. Modeled along the lines of Playboy magazine and designed for a Black male reader-ship, it profiled the likes of Dick Gregory, James Earl Jones, Chester Himes, and numbered Ishmael Reed and Stanley Crouch among its contributing writers while also featuring nude pictures of Black women. Holloway’s cross-marketing of their own pulp novels in their sex magazines expanded the books’ exposure and vivified notions of Black male power via Black female sexual commodification. Street Players maps how Weinstock and Morris went from producing works that catered to white male prurient interests to hiring Black writers to appeal to Black male readers. Perhaps unexpectedly to Holloway House, but no less welcome, “black sleaze” (a term Nishikawa uses to denote the white-oriented pulp that used spectacle and [End Page 339] unrealistic language to sensationalize Black life) birthed a hugely popular Black pulp genre that depicted “authentic” Black life on ghetto streets, one that resonated with a previously unacknowledged readership and seeded a “For Us By Us” literary underground. Along its thoughtful journey, Street Players examines the role of sleaze in manifesting desires to contain emerging feminisms, the transformation of sleaze once Black writers revised the form, and the Black pulp that emerged from their revisions. Nishikawa’s examination of Black pulp engages many complex questions. In a section titled “Lose Your Mother” (allusion to Saidiya Hartman’s contemplation of enslavement’s familial ruptures and the resulting alienation discussed in her 2008 book Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave...

Inspired by Toni Morrison's admission in 1989's "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" that "trees have always seemed feminine to me," I argue that the profusion of tree imagery in Morrison's Beloved does indeed exhibit a feminine character—but one infused with a presence unique to the wounded and neglected past of African Americans. Tracing a pattern through Morrison's earlier novels, and drawing on scholars from a range of disciplines, I suggest Morrison's use of trees and their imagery advances a larger project to reclaim symbolic territory previously off-limits to African Americans, identifying an encumbered, complex, and distinctly African American femininity.

Sunrise Vedna Lacombe-Heywood (bio) Sunrise You made usremember laughter.And beauty,And peace,So wrapped in your lovely faceAs yousleepdreamand smileNever knowing of the othersWho were here, before you.You made usRemember laughterthe tears still facing forwardLulling me to darknessSo deep andtwice overButyoumadeus,rememberlaughteryour voiceso sweetand strongly spiritedIn imagination and wonder,flying high on swingshand and handguiding us in your journey.Yougaveus,the laughter,we buriedso long agowiththeothers. [End Page 199] Vedna Lacombe-Heywood Vedna Lacombe-Heywood is a trauma nurse, community organizer, and bereavement specialist who uses writing as her catharsis. She's been writing short stories and poems for years, with "Sunrise" being her first submission and publication. She currently lives in Plymouth, Massachusetts with her family and their dog Meeka. Copyright © 2019 Vedna Lacombe-Heywood