New Podcast Explores Past, Present and Future of Black Studies
John Drabinski and Ashley Newby’s “The Black Studies Podcast” is supported by a $100k grant from the Mellon Foundation.
On Jan. 3, 1867, nearly two years after the end of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass stood before a full house of hundreds of African Americans at Philadelphia’s National Hall. He had been invited to speak in a Black lecture series organized by William Still, famous for his work on the Underground Railroad.
As recounted by the Philadelphia Daily Evening Telegraph, the celebrated African American singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield performed several arias before Douglass’s introduction. Douglass then took the stage to speak on the “Sources of Danger to the Republic.” The Telegraph reported that he “was frequently interrupted by applause, and evidently made the best effort of his life.”
“Anat Zanger’s Jerusalem in Israeli Cinema: Wanderers, Nomads, and the Walking Dead,” Israel Studies Review, Volume 36, Issue 2, Autumn 2021.
Argues that Byzantine accounts of the power and responsibility of language of the ninth- to eleventh-century attributed tremendous gravity to the role of the spoken word (logos prophorikos), regarding it as an active participant in the object of speaking.
Over the past 30 years, early modern studies has been increasingly interested in the emergence of race as a category of identity, one that could variously demarcate groups of people along lines of lineage, nationality, religion, and skin color. Indeed, the varied usages of the term race in early modern texts makes it rich site for examining the complexity and intersections of early modern embodiment, identity formation, representational practices, and power relations. Scholars have uncovered how early moderns understood the causes of bodily difference—skin color and the multiple valences of complexion, for example—between different groups of people. Studies have examined the extent to which early modern English people understood themselves as distinctive and different from the Spanish, the Irish, Africans, Asians, and others. Attention to the rhetorical strategies used to describe non-European peoples and the uncovering of the material practices of staging non-Europeans in drama, for example, have exposed the role of race in the early capitalist enterprises of international trade and the rise of the commercial theatre. Somatic difference, belief, and lineage are now understood by scholars as establishing moral and religious hierarchies that provided a foundation for justifications of colonial enterprises and the slave trade.
This special issue of Spenser Studies turns its attention to the dark side of Spenser’s imagination. Race is a strategy. It essentializes people as objects or instruments of power relations, and naturalizes political, economic, social, and sexual arrangements. Authors examine racialization in Spenser’s works from various methodological and critical vantage points.
ONCE A SPECIALIZED SCHOOL of thought developed in law schools, critical race theory (CRT) has become a favorite wedge issue for the Republican Party. During the final months of his presidency, Trump warned that CRT was infiltrating American schools and ordered a halt to what he claimed was CRT-inspired diversity training in federal agencies. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, regularly refers to CRT as a Marxist plot to undermine the nation, and Christopher Rufo, director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the conservative Discovery Institute, terms it “a grave threat to the American way of life.”
Read Frederick Douglass and the Trouble with Critical Race Theory
When Andrew Johnson rose to the presidency after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, African Americans were optimistic that Johnson would pursue aggressive federal policies for Black equality. Just a year earlier, Johnson had cast himself as a “Moses” for the Black community. Frederick Douglass, the country’s most influential Black leader, increasingly doubted the president was sincere in supporting Black citizenship. In a dramatic meeting between Johnson and a Black delegation at the White House, the president and Douglass came to verbal blows over the fate of Reconstruction. Their animosity only grew as Johnson sought to undermine Reconstruction and conciliate leaders of the former Confederate states.
On 25 March 2017 at 9:17 in the morning Ross Goodwin sat down behind the wheel of his pen to begin driving his novel. This essay reads 1 the Road, a 20,000-word token of narrative fiction produced by digital sensors affixed to an automobile driven from New York to New Orleans (the route taken by Jack Kerouac), whose outputs are filtered through an artificial intelligence technology called a neural net to produce the text. "It was nine-seventeen in the morning, and the house was heavy," it begins. Later, it produces this utterance: "It was a strange thing." This strange thing, which is to say this strange text, is, I argue, a boutique literary exemplar of the most widely read (and written) category of texts in the world today, as algorithms perform not speech acts but speculative or "spec" acts--what Felix Guattari forecast three decades ago as "machines speaking to machines." What happens when we listen in, as Goodwin's novel permits us to do? I propose ways of reading these spec acts through new formalist alternatives to historicism, old and new.
ABSTRACT: The mass digitization of nineteenth-century periodicals and keyword-based searching algorithms have produced new ways of read-ing Pauline E. Hopkins in the twenty-first century. Our essay brings an experiment in digital stylistics together with traditional methods of authorial analysis to investigate an unexplored facet of Hopkins’s authorship and com-positional style. Hopkins is well-known for her penchant for pseudonyms. She contributed many unsigned editorials to the Colored American Magazine, and it was not unusual for issues to feature her work alongside articles and fiction that she penned as Sarah A. Allen and J. Shirley Shadrach. Might Hopkins have also published under other, as yet unattributed pen names? This essay takes as its case study a writer identified as S. E. F. C. C. Hame-doe or Hammedoe, a purported Professor of “F.G.S.I.,” who remains one of the most enigmatic of regular Colored American Magazine contributors.