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Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”
The Case for Reparations
Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: The Case for Reparations is an inspired contribution to the scholarship on one of the most influential American novels and novelists. The author positions this contemporary classic as a meditation on historical justice and argues, finally, that this novel’s first concern is justice, and its chief aim is to serve as a clarion call for material—and not merely symbolic—reparations.
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Black Women and/in the Shadow of Romanticism
This essay argues that the study of Blackness in Romanticism centers on the spectacularity of violence to Black men and on work by white abolitionists. The result is the marginalization of Black women in Romantic studies proper.
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Making whiteness visible: transgender, race and the paradoxes of in/visibility in Orlando (1928), The Passion of New Eve (1977) and Sacred Country (1992)
This essay aims to identify and examine a recurring but overlooked motif in twentieth-century literary representations of transgender: namely, the ways in which gender identity is achieved, confirmed or normalised through the construction of ‘others’ whose experiences – mediated through discourses o…
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“Song from the Soil”: The Role of Nature in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Poetry
Raised in the American South during the political and social upheavals of the Civil Rights era, poet Yusef Komunyakaa came of age at a time when his identity as an African American cast him constantly and self-consciously as a second-class citizen.
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Violence, Gender, and the Politics of She-Tragedy in British Abolitionist Literature
British abolitionist literature, much like abolitionist politics generally, struggled to imagine a post-emancipationist world in which freed Africans and former white slave owners could co-exist peacefully within the British Empire.
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Old Boys and Badmen: Private Security in (Post)Colonial Jamaica
Racial profiling by the police is a common occurrence in many countries, and the racialized constructions of threats underlying such policing practices can often be traced to histories of colonialism and slavery.
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Screaming “Black” Murder: Crime Fiction and the Construction of Ethnic Identities
A significant segment of crime fiction is concerned with the representation of ethnic identities and may to some extent be considered paradigmatic of the participation of literary texts in discourses on race and minorities.
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Postcolonial Belgium
Belgium recently celebrated a number of major anniversaries related to its colonial history. This coincides with great societal interest in the Congo and the appearance of an abundance of new books.
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Queer Home-Making and Black Britain: Claiming, Ageing, Living
This essay enriches current black queer British and black queer diasporic scholarship by foregrounding the relevance of home-making, affect, and queer ageing for these contexts.
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Negotiating the ship on the head: Black British fiction
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On Being And Not Being Brown/Black-British: Racism, Class, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Post-imperial Britain
This essay focuses on the forces that have been transforming ethnic identities in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.
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Mixed, Blended Nation, and the politics of multiraciality in the United States
How do visual narratives of multiraciality shape, reflect, reinforce, and challenge discourses of race? In this essay, I consider the function of photographic narratives that seek to bring visibility and legitimacy to multiraciality.
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On African-American Rhetoric
On African-American Rhetoric traces the arc of strategic language use by African Americans from rhetorical forms such as slave narratives and the spirituals to Black digital expression and contemporary activism.
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The Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party in American Visual Culture
This book examines a range of visual expressions of Black Power across American art and popular culture from 1965 through 1972. It begins with case studies of artist groups, including Spiral, OBAC and AfriCOBRA, who began questioning Western aesthetic traditions and created work that honored leaders, affirmed African American culture, and embraced an African lineage.
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Activism and Rhetoric
Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement
Chapter 1: Borders of Engagement: Rethinking Scholarship, Activism, and the Academy
Chapter 6: Recognizing and Saving Black Lives, Recognizing and Saving Palestinian Lives: The Power of Transnational Rhetorics in Locating the Commonality of Liberation Struggles
Chapter 13: Speaking the Power of Truth: Rhetoric and Action for Our Times
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Publishing, the Curriculum and Black British Writing Today
This essay begins with two linked questions. First, to what extent is contemporary black and Asian British writing understood as British by British readers? And, second, which forces, especially in publishing and education, shape those opinions? Why would, say, Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) be more readily prescribed on an A-level syllabus than Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe (2001), even today, in 2019?
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Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Performing Arts Workforce
Chapter 1: Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Performing Arts Workforce
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Violence from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter
African American History and Representation
Violence from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter brings together perspectives on violence and its representation in African American history from slavery to the present moment. Contributors explore how violence, signifying both an instrument of the white majority’s power and a modality of black resistance, has been understood and articulated in primary materials that range from slave narrative through "lynching plays" and Richard Wright’s fiction to contemporary activist poetry, and from photography of African American suffering through Blaxploitation cinema and Spike Lee’s films to rap lyrics and performances.
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Black Acting Methods
Critical Approaches
Chapter 7: Remembering, rewriting and re-imagining: Afrocentric approaches to directing new work for the theatre
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British Dance: Black Routes
Appendix 2: Timeline of significant events 1946–2005 for British-based dancers who are Black
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Listening to the Land/Playing off the Crowd: Black Public Performance Interventions in Artmaking and Placemaking
In his leadership in the Free Movement Project,1 public artist, Rend Smith brilliantly considers how Black people have not always been able to walk the streets free and are policed for their presence and movement through neighborhoods and streets where they are presumed not to be local. The corporeal restriction, to which his work points, is fastened to U.S. policing practices.
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From Spray Cans to Minivans: Contesting the Legacy of Confederate Soldier Monuments in the Era of “Black Lives Matter”
On June 17, 2015, 21-year old white supremacist Dylann Roof opened fire during a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine parishioners, including pastor and South Carolina state senator Clementa C. Pinckney. In the weeks that followed, the Charleston shooting sparked a national conversation connecting recent events with the United States' history of race-based slavery and violence.
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Advertising images as social indicators: depictions of blacks in LIFE magazine, 1936–2000
One of the most important prerequisites for building a more visual social science is demonstrating that visual data provide answers to research questions, which are not addressed satisfactorily by the use of more conventional, non‐visual, methods.
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Made, laid and paid: photographic masculinities in a black men's magazine
Glossy men's magazines are frequently vilified for their overt visualising of gender stereotypes.
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Living Legacies
Literary Responses to the Civil Rights Movement
In this timely and dynamic collection of essays, Laura Dubek brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the literary response to the most significant social movement of the twentieth century.
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Black and Asian Theatre In Britain
A History
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A Face Like Mine: An Artist Self-Reflects on Her Identity against the Backdrop of South Africa's Transitions
In South Africa, there is still a dearth of recognised contemporary art led by black women.
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Being called to ‘By the Rivers of Birminam’: the relational choreography of white looking
In this article, I offer the idea of relational choreography as a way of understanding white positionality as responsible for, as well as resistant to, racialising practices.
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Casting a Movement
The Welcome Table Initiative
Chapter 2: Playing with 'race' in the new millennium by Justin Emeka
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The Newtonian slave body: Racial enlightenment in the Atlantic World
This essay examines an influential treatise on the causes of African skin color published by the Virginia-born physician John Mitchell in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions in 1744.
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Cultivating Racial and Linguistic Diversity in Literacy Teacher Education
Teachers Like Me
Chapter 1: Being the “Only One”: The Importance of Teacher Diversity for Literacy and English Education
Chapter 2: Teacher Educator by Day, Homeschooling Parent by Night: Examining Paradoxes in Being a Black Female Teacher Educator
Chapter 3: So-Called Social Justice Teaching and Multicultural Teacher Education: Rhetoric and Realities
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A case of hidden genocide? Disintegration and destruction of people of color in Napoleonic Europe, 1799–1815
Migration, social mobility, and integration of new populations in late eighteenth-century Europe resulted in an expansion of diversity, which contributed to abolition and culminated in full civil rights between 1791 and 1799.
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The Illusion of Inclusion
This special issue of Wasafiri – ‘Black Britain: Beyond Definition’ – focuses on writers who are of black and mixed heritage. Labelling us in this way can, of course, be problematic. The badge ‘black writer’ or ‘Black British writer’ or ‘postcolonial writer’ isn't one many of us deliberately choose to wear. It has a homogenising, ghettoising effect.
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The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance
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A Conversation with Linton Kwesi Johnson
Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Chapelton, Jamaica. He came to London in 1963 and joined the Black Panthers at school. In 1977 he was awarded a C Day Lewis Fellowship, becoming the writer-in-residence for the London Borough of Lambeth. He went on to work at the Keskidee Centre, the first home of black theatre and art. Johnson's poems first appeared in the journal Race Today.
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From Manenberg to Soweto: race and coloured identity in the black consciousness poetry of James Matthews
The Black Consciousness poetry of James Matthews, internationally recognised Coloured writer from the Cape Flats, reflects the growing popularisation amongst politicised Coloured people during the 1970s of the idea that racial distinctions in general, and Coloured identity in particular, had histori…
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“Come Out to Show Them”: Speech and Ambivalence in the Work of Steve Reich and Glenn Ligon
The Black Consciousness poetry of James Matthews, internationally recognised Coloured writer from the Cape Flats, reflects the growing popularisation amongst politicised Coloured people during the 1970s of the idea that racial distinctions in general, and Coloured identity in particular, had histori…
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Lost in reading: The predicament of postcolonial writing in Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation
Kamel Daoud’s novel The Meursault Investigation (first published in Algeria in 2013 as Meursault, contre-enquête) has sparked controversy. In 2014 it won awards in France and was nominated for the Prix Goncourt, and won the 2015 Goncourt First Novel Prize.
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ATLANTIC CROSSING
The Atlantic is a space through which racialized identities are dynamically produced and are re-produced by particular practices, in particular places, at particular times.
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“Remember the ship”: Narrating the Empire Windrush
Despite the ubiquity of the SS Empire Windrush as a symbol of post-war Caribbean migration to Britain, there are few literary evocations of its journey and arrival, and, of those, the majority are literary commissions from 1998, the year in which the ship was to become legendary.
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Hair politics in the blogosphere: Safe spaces and the politics of self-representation in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah
This article studies the way hair politics are explored in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and the novel’s representativeness within the “third wave” of the hair movements. The focus is on the reconfiguration of counter-discursive “safe spaces” as defined by Patricia Collins.
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Nation and contestation: Black British writing
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ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SLAVERY REPARATION
This essay draws on the theories of Melanie Klein and others in the British object relations school to explore the psychological dynamics of the slavery reparations debate in Africa, Britain, and the USA.