Browse

In City of Islands, Dr. Tammy L. Brown uses the life stories of Caribbean intellectuals as “windows” into the dynamic history of immigration in New York and the long battle for racial equality in modern America. This is an important book because it is the first interdisciplinary, book-length study of how specific Caribbean intellectuals—Ethelred Brown, Richard B. Moore, Pearl Primus, Shirley Chisholm, and Paule Marshall, used the written, spoken and performed word in the cause of racial equality in the United States and in the Caribbean throughout the entire twentieth century. In the discipline of History, Caribbean immigrants living in the United States is surprisingly understudied. We have only four book-length historical accounts, and they only cover Caribbean contributions to the tradition of black political radicalism during the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast, City of Islands includes original analysis of sermons, speeches, poetry, short stories, novels, and choreography, to provide insights into each individual’s personality and intellectual style of self-presentation.

The Construction of Whiteness is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that examines the crucial intersection between whiteness as a privileged racial category and the various material practices (i.e. social, cultural, political, and economic) that underwrite its ideological influence in American society. In truth, whiteness has rarely been understood outside of academic circles as a problem to be examined, questioned, or interrogated. This is because the ubiquity of whiteness—its pervasive quality as an ideal that is at once omnipresent and invisible—makes it the very epitome of the social and cultural mainstream in America. Yet the undeniable relationship between whiteness and structures of inequality in this country necessitate a thorough interrogation of its formation, its representation, and its reproduction. The essays in this collection seek to do just that; that is, interrogate whiteness as a social construction, thereby revealing the underpinnings of narratives that fosters white skin as the ideal standard of beauty, intelligence, and power. The essays in this collection examine whiteness from several disciplinary perspectives, including history, communication, law, sociology, and literature. Its breadth and depth makes The Construction of Whiteness a standard anthology for introducing the critical study of race to a new generation of scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students. Moreover, the interdisciplinary approach of the collection will necessarily appeal to those with scholarly orientations in African and African American Studies, Ethnic Studies and Cultural Studies, Legal Studies, etc. This collection, therefore, makes an important contribution to the field of whiteness studies, broadly conceived, in its multifaceted connections to American history and culture.

This volume engages post-racial ideas in both their limitations and promise, while looking specifically at the extent to which contemporary church responses to race-consciousness and post-racial-consciousness enable churches to advance an accurate public accounting of the social implications of race. Contributors examine Christian institutional and intellectual frameworks within the U.S. and South Africa, focusing mainly on post-movement contexts within the two countries—meaning essentially since 1968 in the U.S. and since 1994 in South Africa. Central to the inquiry is whether churches operate from analytical frameworks, leadership approaches, and programmatic emphases that realistically and usefully grapple with race. Overall, the volume provides little support for the idea that a post-racial era has dawned, or soon will, within the U.S. and South Africa. The volume does lend support, however, to calls for liberating persons and institutions from imprisoning racial constructions, whether imposed from outside one’s group or from inside, while wrestling with the tensions between racially-grounded approaches that account for black suffering and racially-transcending approaches that point (theologically and anthropologically) beyond the socially-constructed self.

This book examines the public discourse surrounding Curt Flood (1938–1997), the star center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals throughout the 1960s. In 1969, Flood was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. At the time, all Major League Baseball players were subject to the reserve clause, which essentially bound a player to work in perpetuity for his original team, unless traded for another player or sold for cash, in which case he worked under the same reserve conditions for the next team. Flood refused the trade on a matter of principle, arguing that Major League Baseball had violated both U.S. antitrust laws and the 13th Amendment’s prohibition of involuntary servitude. In a defiant letter to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn asking for his contractual release, Flood infamously wrote, “after twelve years in the major leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes.” Most significantly, Flood appeared on national television with Howard Cosell and described himself as a “well-paid slave.” Explosive controversy ensued. The book examines the ways in which the media constructed the case and Flood’s persona. By examining the mainstream press, the black press, and primary sources, including Flood’s autobiography, it exposes the complexities of what it means to be a prominent black American athlete—in 1969 and today.

This book provides an understanding of the inspiring, contradictory, hostile, resonant, and unarticulated ways in which Asian American and African American cultural formation occurs. Through the interpretation of labor department documents, popular journalism, and state discourses, the book historicizes the formation of both the construction of black “pathology” and the Asian “model minority.” Beginning with the Moynihan Report and journalistic reports about Asian Americans as “model minority,” black and Asian men were racialized together, as if “racially magnetized.” Through the concept of racial magnetism, the book examines both dominant and emergent representations of Asian and African American masculinities as mediating figures for the contradictions of race, class, and gender in post-civil rights U.S.A. The post-civil rights era names this specific race for U.S. citizenship and class advantage, when massive Asian technocratic immigration and decline of African American industrial labor helped usher in a new period of laissez faire class struggle and racial realignment. While the state abandoned social programs at home and expanded imperial projects overseas, state discourses posited that the post-civil rights moment was a period of imminent racial danger because Black Power and the Asian American Movement challenged the understanding that social equality through civil rights had been achieved. The book studies both the dominant discourses that “pair” African American and Asian American racialized masculinities together, and it examines the African American and Asian American counter-discourses—in literature, film, popular sport, hip-hop music, performance arts, and internet subcultures—that link social movements and cultural production as active critical responses to this dominant formation.

This book follows the paths of sports figures who were embraced by the general populace but who, through a variety of circumstances, real or imagined, found themselves falling out of favor. The chapters focus on the roles played by athletes, the media, and fans in describing how once-esteemed popular figures find themselves scorned by the same public that at one time viewed them as heroic, laudable, or otherwise respectable. The book examines a wide range of sports and eras, and includes chapters on Barry Bonds, Kirby Puckett, Mike Tyson, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, Branch Rickey, Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, and Jim Brown, as well as an afterword and introduction.

The complicated process of preparing the dead for burial is now the province of funeral industry professionals, but this is a recent development. Until the end of World War II, especially in rural parts of the South and documented here across the Arkansas Ozarks, members of the deceased’s community performed all of the jobs required for a burial. This was done to relieve the family but, in many places, taboos forbid their participation. This book documents death, burial and mourning customs in the Arkansas Ozarks for 1850 to 1950. It examines the traditions that governed sitting up with the sick and dying, laying out the body prior to viewing and burial, building the coffin and digging the grave. It also documents parallels between funerals and the Southern custom of Decoration Day. Preceding these subjects is an examination of the therapies, folk cures and superstitions believed to save or prolong life. Other subjects include maternal and infant mortality, obituaries, as well as the burial customs of African Americans, which generally paralleled those of whites. One chapter is devoted to disenfranchised death, deaths that could not be mourned according to tradition, such as ones occurring during epidemics and wartime. The book concludes with an examination of the ways in which, by the 1950s, the funeral industry had assumed all of the many labor-intensive jobs once performed within the community. The transition was a gradual one, but ultimately succeeded with offering of offering embalming, factory-made caskets, burial insurance and other goods and services.

At a Tex-Mex restaurant in a Minneapolis suburb, customers send Christmas and Hanukkah cards to the restaurant, bring in home-baked treats for the staff, and attend the annual employee party. One customer even posts in the entryway a sign commemorating the life of his dog. Diners and servers alike use the Hungry Cowboy as a place to gather, celebrate, relax, and even mourn. Moments such as these fascinate the author of this book, who worked for the restaurant. Weaving together narratives from servers, customers, and managers, the book explores a type of service work that is deeply embedded in personal relationships and community. Feelings, play, and emotions are inseparable from the market transactions within the restaurant. Based on extensive interviews and two years of working as a waitress, the book provides insights into the ways that people make contact in our society and how they build on the fleeting connections in the service exchange to form more intimate relationships.

Female athletes are too often perceived as interlopers in the historically male-dominated world of sports. Obstacles specific to women are of particular focus in this book. Race, sexual orientation, and the similar qualities ancillary to gender require special exploration of the way they impact an athlete’s story. Central to the book is the contention that women in their role as inherent outsiders are placed in a unique position even more complicated than the usual experiences of inequality and discord associated with race and sports. The contributors explore and critique the notion that in order to be considered among the pantheon of athletic heroes one cannot deviate from the traditional demographic profile, that of the white male. These essays look specifically and critically at the nature of gender and sexuality within the contested nexus of race, reputation, and sport. The collection explores the reputations of iconic and pioneering sports figures and the cultural and social forces that helped to forge their unique and often problematic legacies. Women athletes discussed in this volume include Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the women of the AAGPBL, Billie Jean King, Venus and Serena Williams, Marion Jones, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, Sheryl Swoopes, Florence Griffith Joyner, Roberta Gibb and Kathrine Switzer, and Danica Patrick.

The question of how relations between marginalized groups are impacted by their common and sometimes competing search for equal rights has become acutely important. Demographic projections make it easy now to imagine a future majority population of color in the United States. This book sets forth some of the issues involved in the interplay among members of various racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Robert S. Chang initiated the Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation Project and invited the book's author to collaborate. The two brought together scholars from different backgrounds and disciplines to engage a set of interrelated questions confronting groups generally considered minorities. This collection strives to stimulate further thinking and writing by social scientists, legal scholars, and policymakers on inter-minority connections. Particularly, scholars test the limits of intergroup cooperation and coalition building. For marginalized groups, coalition building seems to offer a pathway to addressing economic discrimination and reaching some measure of justice with regard to opportunities. The need for coalitions also acknowledges a democratic process in which racialized groups face significant difficulty gaining real political power, despite such legislation as the Voting Rights Act.

This collection takes a critical look at athletic celebrity on the part of athletes who enjoy worldwide reputations without necessarily breaking into the more narrowly defined North American sporting terrain. This volume, which chronicles the reputational arcs of athletes in such diverse sports as surfing, motocross, Grand Prix Racing, distance running, and even sumo wrestling, as well as more widespread competitions including tennis, cricket, and world football, to name but a few, are presented as a means to underscore the notion that sport, regardless of type and place, helps foster individual reputations that creates celebrities unique to those games.

This book attempts to shift focus away from why black youth are “problematic” to explore what their daily lives actually entail. The book focuses on the small community of Hamilton, Alabama, to investigate what it is like for a young black person to grow up in the contemporary rural South. What the book finds is that the young people of Hamilton are neither idly passing their time in a stereotypically languid setting, nor are they being corrupted by hip hop culture and the perils of the urban North, as many pundits suggest. Rather, they are dynamic and diverse young people making their way through the structures that define the twenty-first-century South. Told through the poignant stories of several high school students, the book reveals a group that is often rendered invisible in society. Blended families, football sagas, crunk music, expanding social networks, and a nearby segregated prom are just a few of the fascinating juxtapositions. The book uses personal biography, historical accounts, sociolinguistic analysis, and community narratives to illustrate persistent racism, class divisions, and resistance in a new context. It addresses contemporary issues, such as moral panics regarding the future of youth in America and educational policies that may be well meaning but are ultimately misguided.

This book follows Major League Baseball (MLB)’s history as a sport, a domestic monopoly, a neocolonial power, and an international business. MLB’s challenge has been to market its popular mythology as the national pastime with pastoral, populist roots while addressing the management challenges of competing with other sports and diversions in a burgeoning global economy. The author argues that MLB for years abused its legal insulation and monopoly status through arrogant treatment of its fans and players and static management of its business. As its privileged position eroded in the face of increased competition from other sports and union resistance, it awakened to its perilous predicament and began aggressively courting athletes and fans at home and abroad. Using a detailed marketing analysis and applying the principles of a “smart power” model, the author assesses MLB’s progression as a global business brand that continues to appeal to a consumer’s sense of an idyllic past in the midst of a fast-paced, and often violent, present.

This Woman’s Work: The Writing and Activism of Bebe Moore Campbell is a social history and critical biography based on the life of award-winning writer Bebe Moore Campbell. This manuscript examines Bebe Moore Campbell’s life and activism in two periods: first, as a student at the University of Pittsburgh during the 1960s Black Student Movement; and second, as a mental health advocate near the end of her life in 2006. Primarily known as a bestselling novelist, Campbell’s first and final novels, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (1992) and 72 Hour Hold (2005) reveal a direct relationship to her lesser-known activist work. As a writer and activist, Bebe Moore Campbell used frame shifting within each of her works. Her writing thus becomes a powerful vehicle through which subject matter is enlivened and expanded, immersing her readers in relevant historical and sociopolitical phenomena. As a novelist, Bebe Moore Campbell utilized recurring signature themes within each novel to theorize and to connect popular audiences with African American historical memory and current sociopolitical issues. Similarly, Campbell’s bridge leadership, charismatic personality, and writing merge within two social movement organizations as she aids in significant grassroots/local and institutional change.

This book, which follows the collaboration between the author, a performance studies professor, and ethnographic folklorist Elaine J. Lawless, traces the creative development of a performance troupe in which women take the stage to narrate true, harrowing experiences of domestic violence and then invite audience members to discuss the tales. Similar to the performances, it presents real-life narratives as a means of heightening social awareness and dialogue about intimate partner violence. “Troubling violence” refers not only to the cultures in our society that are “troubling,” but also to the authors’ intent to “trouble” perceptions that enforce social, cultural, legal, and religious attitudes that perpetuate abuse against women. Performance, the book argues, enhances ethnographic research and writing by allowing ethnographers to approach both their field studies and their ethnographic writing as performance. The book also demonstrates how ethnography enhances the study of performance. The authors discuss the development of the Troubling Violence Performance Project in conjunction with their own “performances” within the academy.