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In the American world, the presence of African culture is sometimes fully embodied and sometimes leaves only a trace. This book explores this presence, examining Mattel’s world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and Disney World, each of which repackages African visual culture for consumers. Because these cultural icons permeate American life, they represent the broader U.S. culture and its relationship to African culture. This study integrates approaches from art history and visual culture studies with those from culture, race, and popular culture studies to analyze this interchange. Two major threads weave throughout. One analyzes how the presentation of African visual culture in these popular culture forms conceptualizes Africa for the American public. The other investigates the way the uses of African visual culture focuses America’s own self-awareness, particularly around black and white racialized identities. In exploring the multiple meanings that “Africa” has in American popular culture, the book argues that these cultural products embody multiple perspectives and speak to various sociopolitical contexts: the Cold War, Civil Rights, and contemporary eras of the United States; the apartheid and post apartheid eras of South Africa; the colonial and postcolonial eras of Ghana; and the European era of African colonization.

During most of the twentieth century, Archibald J. Carey Sr. (1868–1931) and Archibald J. Carey Jr. (1908–1981), father and son, exemplified a blend of ministry and politics that many African American religious leaders pursued. Their sacred and secular concerns merged in efforts to improve the spiritual and material well-being of their congregations. But as political alliances became necessary, both wrestled with moral consequences and varied outcomes. Both were ministers to Chicago’s largest African Methodist Episcopal Church congregations—the senior Carey as a bishop, and the junior Carey as a pastor and an attorney. Bishop Carey associated himself mainly with Chicago mayor William Hale Thompson, a Republican, whom he presented to black voters as an ally. When the mayor appointed Carey Sr. to the city’s civil service commission, Carey Sr. helped in the hiring and promotion of local blacks. But alleged impropriety for selling jobs marred the bishop’s tenure. Carey Jr., also a Republican and an alderman, became head of the panel on anti-discrimination in employment for the Eisenhower administration, and aided innumerable black federal employees. Although an influential benefactor of CORE and SCLC, he associated with notorious FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and compromised support for Martin Luther King, Jr. Both Careys believed politics offered clergy the best opportunities to empower the black population. Their imperfect alliances and mixed results, however, proved the complexity of combining the realms of spirituality and politics.

This book provides a full-length study of John Edgar Wideman’s entire oeuvre to date. Specifically, it examines the ways in which Wideman engages with three crucial themes—history, myth, and trauma—throughout his career, showing how they intertwine. The book argues that, for four decades, the influential African American writer has endeavored to create a version of the African American experience that runs counter to mainstream interpretations, using history and myth to confront and then heal the trauma caused by slavery and racism. Wideman’s work intentionally blurs boundaries between fiction and autobiography, myth and history, particularly as that history relates to African American experience in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The fusion of fiction, national history, and Wideman’s personal life is characteristic of his style, which—due to its complexity and smudging of genre distinctions—has presented analytic difficulties for literary scholars. Despite winning the PEN/Faulkner award twice, for Sent for You Yesterday and Philadelphia Fire, Wideman remains understudied. Of particular value is the book’s analysis of the many ways in which Wideman alludes to his previous works. This intertextuality allows Wideman to engage his books in direct, intentional dialogue with each other through repeated characters, images, folktales, and songs. In Wideman’s challenging of a monolithic view of history and presenting alternative perspectives to it, the book finds an author firm in his notion that all stories and all perspectives have merit.

Creatively spent and politically irrelevant, the American horror film is a mere ghost of its former self—or so goes the old saw from fans and scholars alike. Taking on this undeserved reputation, the contributors to this collection provide a comprehensive look at a decade of cinematic production, covering a wide variety of material from the last ten years with a clear critical eye. Individual essays profile the work of up-and-coming director Alexandre Aja and reassess William Malone’s much-maligned Feardotcom in the light of the torture debate at the end of President George W. Bush’s administration. Others look at the economic, social, and formal aspects of the genre; the globalization of the U.S. film industry; the alleged escalation of cinematic violence; and the massive commercial popularity of the remake. Some essays examine specific subgenres—from the teenage horror flick to the serial killer film and the spiritual horror film—as well as the continuing relevance of classic directors such as George A. Romero, David Cronenberg, John Landis, and Stuart Gordon. Essays deliberate on the marketing of nostalgia and its concomitant aesthetic, and the curiously schizophrenic perspective of fans who happen to be scholars as well. Taken together, the contributors to this collection make a case that American horror cinema is as vital, creative, and thought-provoking as it ever was.

Situating U.S. governmental and American Indian rhetoric in a colonial context, Native Dualities examines the ways that both the government’s rhetoric and American Indian voices contributed to the policies of Native-U.S. relations throughout the removal and allotment eras. These discourses co-constructed the silhouette of both the U.S. government and American Indian communities and contributed textures to the relationship. Such interactions – though certainly not equal between the two – illustrated the hybrid-like potentialities of Native-U.S. rhetoric in the nineteenth century. That is, both colonizing discourse and decolonizing discourse added arguments, identity constructions, and rhetorical moves to the colonizing relationship. Native Dualities demonstrates how American Indians decolonized dominant rhetoric in terms of impeding the realization of the removal and allotment policies. Likewise, by turning around the U.S. government’s discursive frameworks and inventing their own rhetorical tactics, American Indian communities helped restyle their own and the government’s identities. Interestingly, during the first third of the twentieth century, Native decolonization was shown to impact the Native-U.S. relationship as American Indians urged for the successful passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and the Indian New Deal of 1934. In the end, Native communities were granted increased rhetorical power through decolonization, though the U.S. government still retained a powerful colonial influence over them. This duality of inclusion (controlled citizenship) and exclusion (controlled sovereignty) was built incrementally through the removal and allotment periods, and existed as residues of nineteenth century Native-U.S. rhetorical relations.

This is a study of the terrible racial violence that erupted in four different communities of America during the post World War I years, violence that left hundreds dead or injured and a massive amount of destruction in its wake. Although the igniting incident or event varied somewhat, there was a similarity in the racial climate that existed in each town. The emerging blacks, boosted economically and idealistically by the war effort, were viewed as a threat by some of the whites. The bloody riots described here were grave evidence of the intensity of the fear and hatred that existed between a portion of the races.

The story of the civil rights movement is not simply the history of its major players but is also the stories of a host of lesser-known individuals whose actions were essential to the movement’s successes. Duncan M. Gray Jr., an Episcopal priest who served various Mississippi parishes between 1953 and 1974, when he was elected bishop of Mississippi, is one of these individuals. This book is his story. From one perspective, Gray (b. 1926) would seem an unlikely spokesman for racial equality and reconciliation. He could have been content simply to become a member of the white, male Mississippi “club.” Gray could have embraced a comfortable life and ignored the burning realities around him. But he chose instead to use his priesthood to speak in unpopular but prophetic support of justice and equality for African Americans. From his student days at the seminary at the University of the South, to his first church in Cleveland, Mississippi, and most famously to St. Peter’s Parish in Oxford, where he confronted rioters in 1962, Gray steadfastly and fearlessly fought the status quo. He continued to work for racial reconciliation, inside and outside of the church, throughout his life. This biography tells not only Gray’s story, but also reveals the times and people that helped make him. The book’s question is “What makes a good person?” The book suggests there is much to learn from Gray’s choices and his struggle.

Anywhere But Here: Black Intellectuals, The Atlantic World and Beyond brings together new scholarship on the cross-cultural experiences of intellectuals of African descent since the 18th century. The intent of this book is not to dismantle Paul Gilroy’s thesis but to embrace it and venture “beyond” the traditional organization and symbolism of the “Black Atlantic.” This collection of essays is not organized geographically or historically by era; instead, contributions are arranged into three sections which highlight the motivations and characteristics that connect a certain set of “agents,” thinkers, and intellectuals: 1) Re-ordering Worldviews: Rebellious Thinkers, Poets, Writers, and Political Architects; 2) Crafting Connections: Strategic and Ideological Alliances; 3) Cultural Mastery in Foreign Spaces: Evolving Visions of Home and Identity. These essays are intentionally organized to expand categories and to suggest patterns at play that have united individuals and communities across the African Diaspora. They highlight the self-determined stories of individuals, who from their intercultural, and often marginalized, positioning, challenged the status quo, created strategic (and at times, unexpected) international alliances, cultivated expertise and cultural competency abroad in places that were unfamiliar to them, as well as, crafted physical and intellectual spaces for their self-expression and dignity to thrive. What, for example, connects the 18th century Igbo author, Olaudah Equiano with 1940s literary figure, Richard Wright; 19th century expatriate anthropologist, Antenor Fermin with 1960s Haitian émigrés to the Congo; Japanese Pan-Asianists and Southern Hemisphere Aboriginal activists with Jamaican-born, Marcus Garvey; or Angela Davis with artists of the British Black Arts Movement Ingrid Pollard and Zarina Bhimji? They are all part of a mapping that reaches across and beyond geographical, historical, and ideological boundaries typically associated with the “Black Atlantic.” They reflect accounts of individuals and communities that are equally united in their will to seek out better realities, often, as the title suggests, “anywhere but here.”

The Architecture of William Nichols: Building the South in North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi is the first comprehensive biography and monograph of a significant, yet overlooked, architect in the American South. William Nichols designed three major university campuses: the University of North Carolina, the University of Alabama, and the University of Mississippi. He also designed the first state capitols of North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. Nichols’s architecture profoundly influenced the built of landscape of the South but due fire, neglect, and demolition, most of his work was lost and his legacy was forgotten. Paul Hardin Kapp copiously researched through archives in North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi and produced a narrative of the life and times of William Nichols. This latest book on Nichols’s life and career as an architect is over eighty-six thousand words in length and is richly illustrated with over two hundred archival photographs, drawings from the Historic American Building Survey, current photographs and sketches of architectural details by the author. It is an important and timely contribution to the architecture history of the American South.

How did the average American learn about art in the mid-nineteenth century? With public art museums still in their infancy, and few cities and towns large enough to support art galleries or print shops, Americans relied on mass-circulated illustrated magazines. One group of magazines in particular, known collectively as the Philadelphia pictorials, circulated fine art engravings of paintings, some produced exclusively for circulation in these monthlies, to an eager middle-class reading audience. These magazines achieved print circulations far exceeding those of other print media (such as illustrated gift books, or catalogs from art-union membership organizations). Godey’s, Graham’s, Peterson’s, Miss Leslie’s, and Sartain’s Union Magazine included two to three fine art engravings monthly, “tipped in” to the fronts of the magazines, and designed for pull-out and display. Featuring the work of a fledgling group of American artists who chose American rather than European themes for their paintings, these magazines were crucial to the distribution of American art beyond the purview of the East Coast elite to a widespread middle-class audience. Contributions to these magazines enabled many an American artist and engraver to earn, for the first time in the young nation’s history, a modest living through art. This book examines the economics of artistic production, innovative engraving techniques, regional imitators, the textual “illustrations” accompanying engravings, and the principal artists and engravers contributing to these magazines.

An iconic symbol and sound of the Lucumí/Santería religion, Afro-Cuban batá are talking drums that express the epic mythological narratives of the West African Yoruba deities known as orisha. By imitating aspects of speech and song, and by metaphorically referencing salient attributes of the deities, batá drummers facilitate the communal praising of orisha in a music ritual known as a toque de santo. This book blends musical transcription, musical analysis, interviews, ethnographic descriptions, and observations from his own experience as a ritual drummer to highlight the complex variables at work during a live Lucumí performance. Integral in enabling trance possessions by the orisha, by far the most dramatic expressions of Lucumí faith, batá drummers are also entrusted with controlling the overall ebb and flow of the four- to six-hour toque de santo. During these events, batá drummers combine their knowledge of ritual with an extensive repertoire of rhythms and songs. Musicians focus on the many thematic acts that unfold both concurrently and in quick succession. In addition to creating an emotionally charged environment, playing salute rhythms for the orisha, and supporting the playful song competitions that erupt between singers, batá drummers are equally dedicated to nurturing their own drumming community by creating a variety of opportunities for the musicians to grow artistically and creatively.

Asian Comics is the first book that covers the comics (comic books and magazines, humor/cartoon magazines, newspaper strips, graphic novels, and gag panels) of the continent − 16 countries in all. Broken into parts on East, Southeast, and South Asia, the book carefully surveys the history and contemporary status of comics, both from artistic and industrial perspectives and including main stream and alternative forms and points out trends, issues, and problems cartoonists face. Decades-long (more than 30 years) research was carried out through interviews with more than 400 comics-related individuals during about 60 trips to Asia for that purpose, observation in their studios/offices and homes, participation with cartoonists in many festivals, symposia, workshops, and lectures, and primary scrutiny of archives, government and other data. Interviewees included the fathers and an occasional mother of Asian comic art and the cream of the crop and some young cartoonists. The result is a structured blend of factual data, views of comics people, and fascinating anecdotes about how cartoonists broke in, their working habits and styles, and their contributions. Also interesting is the first chapter discussing the predecessors of contemporary Asian comic art in the form of paintings, sculptures, scrolls, and puppet drama that displayed caricature, wit and playfulness, satire, and sequential narrative. The book is enhanced by many illustrations and supported by a full bibliography and endnotes.

Over the last forty years the comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of considerable complexity and depth. This book offers an assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this genre. It considers eighty-five works of North American and European provenance, works that cover a broad range of subject matters and employ many different artistic styles. Drawing on concepts from several disciplinary fields—including semiotics, literary and narrative theory, art history, and psychology—the book shows that the traditions and formal features of comics provide new possibilities for autobiographical storytelling. For example, the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one’s self necessarily involves an intense engagement with physical aspects of identity, as well as with the cultural models that underpin body image. The comics medium also offers memoirists unique ways of representing their experience of time, their memories of past events, and their hopes and dreams for the future. Furthermore, autobiographical comics creators are able to draw on the close association in contemporary Western culture between seeing and believing in order to persuade readers of the authentic nature of their stories.

This book examines the historical origins and cultural significance of Superman and his fellow American crusaders. It asserts that the superhero seems a direct response to modernity, often fighting the interrelated processes of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and capitalism that transformed the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present. Reeling from the destabilizing forces, Americans turned to heroic fiction as a means of explaining national and personal identities to themselves and to the world. In so doing, they created characters and stories that sometimes affirmed, but other times subverted conventional notions of race, class, gender, and nationalism. The cultural conversation articulated through the nation's early heroic fiction eventually led to a new heroic type—the brightly clad, super-powered, pro-social action heroes that first appeared in American comic books starting in the late 1930s. Although indelibly shaped by the Great Depression and World War II sensibilities of the second-generation immigrants most responsible for their creation, comic book superheroes remain a mainstay of American popular culture. Tracing superhero fiction all the way back to the nineteenth century, the book firmly bases analysis of dime novels, pulp fiction, and comics in historical, biographical, and reader response sources. It explores the roles played by creators, producers, and consumers in crafting superhero fiction, ultimately concluding that these narratives are essential for understanding vital trajectories in American culture.

The Brazilian berimbau, a musical bow, is most commonly associated with the energetic martial art/dance/game of capoeira. This study explores its stature from the 1950s to the present in diverse musical genres including bossa nova, samba-reggae, MPB (Popular Brazilian Music), electronic dance music, Brazilian art music, and more. Berimbau music spans oral and recorded historical traditions, connects Latin America to Africa, juxtaposes the sacred and profane, and unites nationally constructed notions of Brazilian identity across seemingly impenetrable barriers. This book considers the berimbau beyond the context of capoeira, and explores the bow’s emergence as a national symbol. Throughout, it engages and analyzes intersections of musical traditions in the Black Atlantic, North American popular music, and the rise of global jazz. The book is an introduction to Brazilian music for musicians, Latin American scholars, capoeira practitioners, and other people who are interested in Brazil’s music and culture.

For centuries, Spain and the South have existed on the margins of U.S. and European identities—as much for the Francoist and Jim Crow periods as for their “exotic” cultures and sunny beaches attractive to tourists worldwide. Between Distant Modernities theorizes this trans-Atlantic link to show exactly how Spanish and Southern exceptionality became a performance developed as a specific response to modernity, and its perceived threat of homogenization, in the United States and Europe across the twentieth century. Seeing the War of 1898 as a climactic moment, this book begins by exploring the writings of the Nashville Agrarians and members of the so-called Generation of 1898, who each tried to regenerate a “traditional” Spain and South located in an agrarian past. That desire is constantly re-enacted by main characters in cultural production across the twentieth century as these characters simultaneously enact and problematize the issue of self/other, exile/citizen, and tourist/native that dominate both literary traditions.

Between Generations recuperates a tradition of adult-child collaboration in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British children’s literature and culture, charting the emergence of new models of authorship and a growing cultural imperative to recognize the young as active, creative agents. The book examines the intergenerational partnerships that generated pivotal texts from the Golden Age of children’s literature, from “The Pied Piper” to Peter Pan, and in doing so challenges popular critical narratives that read actual young people solely as social constructs or passive recipients of texts. The spectrum of adult-child partnerships included within this book’s chapters make clear that the boundary between fictive collaborations and lived partnerships was not firm but that, instead, imaginative and material practices were mutually constitutive. Adults’ partnerships with young auditors, writers, illustrators, reviewers, and co-conspirators reveal that the agentic, creative child was not only a figure but also an actor, vital to authorial practice. These collaborations were part of a larger investigation of the limits and possibilities of child agency taking place in a range of discourses and cultural venues, from education reform to psychology to librarianship. Throughout, the book considers the many Victorian writers and thinkers, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Friedrich Froebel, who question the assumed authority of adults, who write about children as both passive and subversive subjects, and who self-consciously negotiate, alongside real children, the ideological and ethical difficulties of listening to and representing children’s perspectives.

This book explores the cultural and political exchanges between African Americans, Asian Americans, and Asians over the last four decades. To do so, it examines such cultural productions as novels (Frank Chin’s Gunga Din Highway [1999], Ishmael Reed’s Japanese By Spring [1992], and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle [1996]); films (Rush Hour 2 [2001], Unleashed [2005], and The Matrix trilogy [1999–2003]); and Japanese animation (Samurai Champloo [2004]), all of which feature cross-cultural conversations. In exploring the ways in which writers and artists use this transferal, the author traces and tests the limits of how Afro-Asian cultural production interrogates conceptions of race, ethnic identity, politics, and transnational exchange. Ultimately, the book reads contemporary black/Asian cultural fusions through the recurrent themes established by the films of Bruce Lee, which were among the first—and certainly most popular—works to use this exchange explicitly. As a result of such films as Enter the Dragon (1973), The Chinese Connection (1972), and The Big Boss (1971), Lee emerges as both a cross-cultural hero and global cultural icon who resonates with the experiences of African American, Asian American, and Asian youth in the 1970s. His films and iconic imagery prefigure themes that reflect cross-cultural negotiations with global culture in post-1990 Afro-Asian cultural production.

The first book to critically redefine and reexamine West Indian literature of the 1950s, Beyond Windrush challenges the myth that an elite cohort of male novelists based in postwar London single-handedly produced Anglophone Caribbean literature and broadens our understanding of Caribbean and Black British literary history. Writers of this cohort, often reduced to George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, and Sam Sevlon, are referred to “the Windrush writers,” in tribute to the S.S. Empire Windrush, whose 1948 voyage from Jamaica inaugurated the large-scale Caribbean migration to London. They have been properly celebrated for producing a complex, anti-colonial, nationalist literary tradition, but, as this collection demonstrates, their uncritical canonization has obscured the diversity of postwar Caribbean writers and produced a narrow definition of West Indian literature. The fourteen original essays in this collection here make clear that already in the 1950s a wide spectrum of West Indian men and women—Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean and white-creole—were writing, publishing (and even painting)—and that many were in the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States, rather than London. Moreover, they addressed subjects omitted from the masculinist canon, such as queer sexuality and the environment. The collection offers new readings of canonical authors (Lamming, Roger Mais, and Andrew Salkey); hitherto marginalized authors (such as Ismith Khan, Elma Napier, and John Hearne); commonly ignored genres (such as the memoir, short stories, and journalism); as well as alternative units of cultural and political unity, such as the Pan-Caribbean as well as potentially trans-hemispheric, trans-island conceptions of political identity.

The coal fields of West Virginia would seem an unlikely market for big band jazz during the Great Depression. That a prosperous African American audience, dominated by those involved with the coal industry, was there for jazz tours would seem equally improbable. This book shows that, contrary to expectations, black Mountaineers flocked to dances by the hundreds, in many instances traveling considerable distances to hear bands led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Andy Kirk, Jimmie Lunceford, and Chick Webb, among numerous others. Indeed, as one musician who toured the state would recall, “All the bands were goin’ to West Virginia.” The comparative prosperity of the coal miners, thanks to New Deal industrial policies, was what attracted the bands to the state. This study discusses that prosperity, as well as the larger political environment that provided black Mountaineers with a degree of autonomy not experienced further south. The author demonstrates the importance of radio and the black press both in introducing this music and in keeping black West Virginians up to date with its latest developments. The book explores connections between local entrepreneurs who staged the dances and the national management of the bands that played those engagements. In analyzing black audiences’ aesthetic preferences, the author reveals that many black West Virginians preferred dancing to a variety of music, not just jazz. Finally, the book shows that bands now associated almost exclusively with jazz were more than willing to satisfy those audience preferences with arrangements in other styles of dance music.