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The article explores Russell Atkins's innovative Poetry-Drama "The Corpse" and his theory of Psychovisualism, which integrates music, physics, and literature. Atkins's avant-garde approach challenges traditional boundaries between sound and sight, creating a unique aesthetic experience. Through the use of lighting, costumes, and music, Atkins creates a synesthetic effect that engages the audience in a dynamic and immersive performance. His experimental approach to scenography design marks a significant milestone in the development of poetry and drama, bridging modernism to postmodernism. Atkins's work deserves expanded attention and appreciation for its originality and prescience in the arts. [Extracted from the article]

This essay articulates Amiri Baraka's relationship to humanist universalism through his work as a theatermaker, in particular through his play A Black Mass. Baraka's Black nationalist writings are infused with humanist assumptions despite the apparent contradiction between humanist universalism and nationalist separatism. The essay nominates as poietic the form of humanism that Baraka values, meaning that, for Baraka, humans imagine new worlds into existence from materials taken by the world as it is. This poietic humanism values contingency, invention, and impermanence and refuses essentialisms. The essay begins by drawing from Baraka's essays on theater the claim that the work, or action, of revolutionary art is to set into motion a doubling, to produce oppositions that remain unsettled. Next is an extended reading of Baraka's play A Black Mass, first staged in New Jersey in 1966, which he uses to settle philosophical scores with the Nation of Islam. Although the play borrows its plot from the Nation of Islam's myth of Yakub, which casts the white race as fundamentally monstrous, A Black Mass resists a vision of history as racial destiny. It does so, first, by staging the production of the human as a category of exclusion and so critiquing the process of racialization, and second, by rooting its tragic plot structure in a break between the expressive self and the poietic community. The essay's conclusion briefly contextualizes Baraka's poietic humanism within late 1960s debates among nationalist and Negritude thinkers, suggesting Frantz Fanon as an important influence and reasserting a dynamic approach to racial difference in Baraka's vision of Black art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Republicans are divided on the question of whether domination is best understood in terms of capacities to act intentionally or of certain structural aspects of society. I offer a model combining each aspect derived from Frederick Douglass's philosophy. Douglass referred to slavery in both interpersonal terms (to individuals) and structural (to the community), focussing on the unique and pervasive role played by social prejudice which distorts public reason thereby disabling the functioning of republican institutions. While Douglass's insights constitute a significant contribution to neo-republican theory in their own right, they also offer a slave's perspective on the central republican concept of domination and shows how historic African American writers made innovative theoretical contributions to republicanism. Both of these have long been overlooked by republican scholars to the philosophical detriment of the tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the examination of American literary institutions around 1900, particularly through the lens of Sinclair Lewis's critiques of the institutionalization of literature. Topics include the coercive nature of literary institutions and their impact on writers, the historical emergence and evolution of these institutions, and the experiences of marginalized voices, particularly Black writers, within these structures.

The article discusses the relationship between migration, race, and borders. It argues that race is not a natural attribute but a socio-political construct that has been used to justify inequalities and hierarchies. The author emphasizes the importance of understanding migration within the context of racialization and the legacies of colonialism and racism. They also highlight the need to challenge the distinction between migrants and refugees and the racialized discourses surrounding migration. The article concludes by asserting that borders and nationalism are inherently prone to racialization, further reinforcing the artificial divisions created by race. [Extracted from the article]

Traditional book publishing has a pronounced and unjust deficiency of Black and African American voices. White culture, thoughts, and rules are the standard in traditional publishing. Black and African American authors are not typically picked up by white-dominated publishing companies. In traditional publishing, mostly white literary agents are gatekeepers and acquisition editors shut the doors too frequently to non-white authors. Aspiring Black authors then resort to hybrid or vanity press companies that often use unscrupulous practices, charge exorbitant fees, accomplish little or low-quality work, and deny authors' agency and full rights in the final disposition of a book. Because a majority of traditionally published children's books featuring Black or African American stories or characters are written by or illustrated by non-Black people, the wide possibilities of adventure, celebrations, discovery, and friendship stories are not published for Black children. Instead, publishers favor stories about slavery, the civil rights movement, famous Black people, and hair tales as well as racially ambiguous characters. Regrettably, Black and African American culturally relevant stories written and illustrated by Black or African Americans are not readily available to children in school and library settings consistent with schools' community or student demographics. This article shares research findings and viewpoints of Kathy Anderson and Karen Bowlding, two Black children's book writers and publishing consultants who are also parents. Black and African American students encounter education and cultural injustice because of the practices of traditional publishing companies, educators, and librarians. Parents and guardians can ameliorate these issues with discernment and action. Foremost, publishing company decision-makers must acknowledge their own racial biases that deny representation and authenticity to all children in our US classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While debates about 'Eurocentric' versus 'Afrocentric' theories of history have driven previous studies of Du Bois's writings on ancient Africa, I read his account of African antiquity in Black Folk Then and Now in the context of the moral and educational projects articulated within both Greco-Roman and African American historiography. I pay special attention to conventional ancient views of history that Diodorus expresses in his Bibliotheke , which treats history as a source of morally instructive examples and 'universal history' as especially educational because it synthesizes different historical narratives: these concepts of history were broadly influential into the nineteenth century, including among African American writers. An ancient model of universal history allows Du Bois to tell the story of a distinct human community and nevertheless insist on the unity of peoples, a principle which is central to his philosophy of race and of human history writ large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of global decolonization, nationalist movements, and civil upheavals in the early and mid-20th century, a renewed form of cosmopolitanism emerged through the intercultural encounters between African American and Chinese intellectuals. This cosmopolitan ideal was cultivated and embodied by these two historically, culturally, and geographically distinct communities and ultimately exerted lasting influences on a global scale. Despite initially perceiving China as a distant Other, African American authors such as Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois made their journeys to China in search of cultural inspiration for literary creations and social endeavors. While actively promoting the works of African American authors in China, the Chinese intellectual community in turn viewed the African American people as the Other Self and potential allies in international affairs. Mutual understanding and appreciation were pursued from both sides, leading to a co-reinvention of cosmopolitan ethos. By delving into the interconnected narratives, this article seeks to elucidate the nuanced dynamics and reciprocal influences that characterized the Sino–African American intellectual relationships in the context of international solidarity, decolonization, and the quest for social justice in the early and mid-20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the approach to editing Dusé Mohamed Ali's African American serial novel "Ere Eoosevelt Came: The Record of the Adventures of the Man" and tackles the limits of African American and Nigerian literary history. Topics discussed include classification challenges posed by the novel's transnationalism, relationship between U.S. empire and its Black subjects in the novel, and colonial censorship and surveillance in the analysis of African American setting and protagonists.

The article "I Took My Babies and Put Them Where They'd Be Safe": African American Women and the Continuum of Reproductive Justice Activism by Shelby Pumphrey explores the historical context and contemporary relevance of reproductive justice activism among African American women. The author discusses the impact of overturning Roe v. Wade on the design of a course focused on African American women's reproductive history. Through projects like the Reproductive Justice Community Altar and the Community Herbal Gathering, students engaged in communal practices to envision a just reproductive future. The article emphasizes the importance of looking back to the past to inform a collective vision for the future of reproductive autonomy. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the study of early African American literature and challenges two common practices: reliance on the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and prioritization of authorized versions of Black-authored texts. The author argues that focusing on "fluid texts," or literary works with multiple versions, can offer new insights and improve scholarship and instruction. The article also explores the concept of the Black Atlantic as a countercultural response to anti-black modernity, emphasizing the hybridity and fluidity of African Atlantic texts. Using examples from John Marrant, Phillis Wheatley, and Lemuel Haynes, the author illustrates the connections between fluid texts, the African Atlantic encounter with modernity, and the paradigm of the Black Atlantic. The text concludes by advocating for the recognition and support of this type of editorial and scholarly work, drawing inspiration from Dorothy Porter's influential anthology, "Early Negro Writing." [Extracted from the article]

Although identity politics dates back to the 1960 s, it has acquired a new urgency since the ascendance of Black Lives Matter in the late 2010 s. And while identity politics, as a critical framework, was developed in the United States, its rhetoric has since been taken up in much of the rest of the world. This article argues that the terminology of US-style identity politics is especially ill-suited to Germany, a country in which race does not exist as a legal category, and discrimination and inequality do not revolve around a Black/white axis. It points out, moreover, that the German appropriation of certain words and concepts – such as diversity, political correctness, cancel culture, woke, intersectionality, and others – clashes both with their usage and meaning in the US and with the demographic changes that have transformed post-Second World War German culture. In order to illustrate this clash, this article compares Michael R. Jackson's Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning musical A Strange Loop (2019) with Yael Ronen's Slippery Slope (2021), a critically acclaimed musical performed in English at Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theater. It critiques Slippery Slope's appropriation of the buzzwords of identity politics and notes with regret that German theatres are ill-equipped to perform the plays of the most important playwrights working in the US today, a new generation of African American writers, including Jackson, whose work is steeped in the performance traditions of Black American cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Intersecting Aesthetics: Literary Adaptations and Cinematic Representations of Blackness" is a groundbreaking book that explores the intersection of Black literature and film adaptations. The collection of essays focuses on twentieth-century Black film adaptations and examines how these adaptations negotiate between dominant and resistant perspectives in racialized societies. The book provides case studies that highlight both successful and unsuccessful adaptations, shedding light on the studio decisions and cultural dynamics behind these projects. The essays also explore the representation of race and gender in adaptation, offering a nuanced understanding of the complexities of Blackness in film. Overall, this book contributes to the field of adaptation studies by expanding the discussion beyond canonical texts and challenging the dominant norms of whiteness in cultural production. [Extracted from the article]

Octavia Butler is a pioneer in the field of speculative fiction as one of the few African American female writers who have managed to secure a stable position among the ranks of famous SF authors. The current paper is an attempt to provide a contemporary feminist reading of “Bloodchild” – her most-anthologized short story, produced in the middle of the 1980s and made the focal point of a larger short-story collection. The main character Gan needs to decide whether he is ready to submit his body to the immediate enemy as a tool for procreation. In the process, he starts to understand his family, his community, and the world around him in a better way, becoming an adult prematurely. The aim of the current examination is to trace Gan’s maturation through his encounter with various bodily experiences and states in order to see how maturity influences bodily autonomy. Some of the aspects of interest include short story writing and its evolution in the African American literary tradition, pregnancy and birth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the life, career and legacy of African American writer and poet Amiri Baraka. Topics discussed include the role of Howard University in reshaping Baraka as an intellectual, Baraka's exploration of the development of African descendants into African Americans in his book "Blues People," and his role in the Black Arts Movement.

An interview with American poet and writer Amiri Baraka is presented. Topics discussed include Baraka's use and definition of the word digging in his book "Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music," comedian Bill Cosby's devotion to music and the music in Baraka's household and childhood. Also discussed are Baraka's schoolmates at Howard University and his encounter with professor, poet, folklorist and literary critic Sterling Allen Brown.

Mother-daughter relations have been an ongoing discussion within gender studies since the second wave of feminism, yet the character of this debate is very much dependent on the generation and the ethnicity of the people involved. This paper is part of a larger project devoted to the research of the female ancestor's role, specifically grandmothers and mothers, in ethnic women's writing - mostly Latinx and African American authors. Cherrie Moraga, along with Ruth Behar and Sandra Cisneros among Latina writers, or Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Toni Morrison as African American representatives, all belong to the same generation of authors, who in their early years tended to be in the opposition to their mothers and grandmothers as the "gatekeepers for patriarchy," but who at the later stages of their creation (re)discovered the cultural significance of this intergenerational bond. The article analyzes the recent publication by Cherrie Moraga, her memoir Native Country of the Heart (2019), in which she decided to record her mother's life within Mexican American history in the US and more broadly within "an impossible patriarchy" (20) to "hold one thickly braided cord as a story - my queer self and my writer self, and each would bring me home to my Mexicanism" (3). In that sense intergenerational storytelling plays a representative role of not only an individual's biography but becomes the "conscious historical connection" between generations in a diaspora and a path to identity formation. The mothers' stories serve as a beginning of a journey towards ethnic writers' self-discovery and personal growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of EU-topías: A Journal on Interculturality, Communication & European Studies is the property of Universite de Geneve, Global Studies Intitute and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article offers literary criticism on temporality and slavery in novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Topics include the deprivation of time for slaves, Stowe's depiction of slave temporality in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the shift in scholarly views toward the novel's significance in understanding slavery's impact on humanity.

The article explores the concept of Southern Gothic, which is a catchall term for the peculiarities of the South and how it is understood. While the Southern Gothic has traditionally focused on white experiences, there is also a Black Southern Gothic that challenges stereotypes and explores the experiences of Black people in the South. The Black Southern Gothic draws on the region's history of racial violence and oppression, offering a different perspective on the South's dark realities. The article highlights various examples of the Black Southern Gothic in literature, music, and other forms of art. The Southern Gothic, both white and Black, serves as a way to understand and discuss uncomfortable truths about the South. [Extracted from the article]

An interview is presented with author Charles Johnson. Topics discussed include the primacy of perception in African American biofiction, his book that the interviewer considers biofiction, "Dreamer," which features Martin Luther King Jr., as well as comparing "Dreamer" to one of his other books, "Middle Passage."

This paper seeks to explore the techniques and strategies used by African and Afro-American writers to disseminate a sense of Black interdependence and solidarity on a global level. It will examine how Black authors are unceasingly using a planned strategy in their literary works to encourage Black people to envision a sustainable future for themselves. We contend that Black authors and critics are incessantly using the literary medium to inspire Black audiences to self-heal themselves from the trauma associated with European colonization of Africa in the bygone days and this issue is yet to receive a noteworthy observation in the literary field. Hence, this paper will examine various dimensions associated with the Black literary genre to explore more about the philosophies and strategies imbibed by Black writers to encourage their people to self-heal from their past while comprehending the significance of mutual interconnectedness. The select works this paper seeks to study comparatively are Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart (2010), Alice Walker's epistolary novel The Color Purple (2014), Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes's fantasy fiction The Deep (2020), and Nnedi Okorafor's science fiction Lagoon (2014). The frameworks used for this study are Postcolonialism, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, and African feminism which are treated as the vantage ground for this reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Cullen Gruesser's biography of Sutton E. Griggs sheds light on the life and work of the Black novelist, Baptist minister, and activist, emphasizing his ties to Texas. The book delves into Griggs's family history in Texas, exploring the impact of slavery and segregation on his literary themes. Gruesser's detailed research highlights Griggs's commitment to addressing important issues facing African Americans and the nation, urging a reevaluation of his overlooked writings for their relevance today. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the origins of mass-market American romance novels. Topics include a brief history of the mass-market romance genre, the role of African American writers Vivian Stephens and Veronica Mixon in altering American romance, and African American relationships in 1980s scholarship and cultural discourse.

This article explores how religion appears and disappears within the work of disability history. It focuses on representations of Eliza Suggs, an early-twentieth-century African American preacher and author, and argues that scholarly preference for a particular kind of subject—one often defined in terms of identity and oppositional agency—obscures accounts of the past. The article returns to Suggs's 1906 memoir Shadow and Sunshine as an incitement to think more carefully about how practices of devotion have shaped experiences of embodied difference and how they might inform and unsettle scholars' engagements with disabled persons in the past. Resumen: Este artículo explora cómo la religión aparece y desaparece dentro del trabajo de la historia de la discapacidad. Se centra en las representaciones de Eliza Suggs, una predicadora y autora afroamericana de principios del siglo XX, y sostiene que la preferencia académica por un tipo particular de tema (a menudo definido en términos de identidad y agencia de oposición) oscurece los relatos del pasado. El artículo regresa a las memorias de Suggs, Shadow and Sunshine , de 1906, como una incitación a pensar más detenidamente sobre cómo las prácticas de devoción han dado forma a las experiencias de diferencia encarnada y cómo podrían informar y perturbar los compromisos de los académicos con las personas discapacitadas en el pasado. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 47 Rogers Melvin L. "Between Pain and Despair: What Ta-Nehisi Coates is Missing." Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 38 Moore Jason W. "The Capitalocene Part I: On the Nature and Origins of our Ecological Crisis." Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 24 Haraway Donna, et al. "Anthropologists Are Talking - About the Anthropocene." Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 30 Keane Patrick J. "Beauty and Fear: Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me", Salgamundi 190-91 (Spring-Summer 2016): 10 - 23. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens is the property of Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the concept of Black natural law and its relationship to the African American tradition. It discusses how African American leaders have appealed to a higher law in their critique of slavery and segregation. The article also examines the role of reason, emotion, and community in the African American natural law tradition. It suggests that Catholic natural law thinkers can learn from the Black natural law tradition and engage in a dialogue with other wisdom traditions. The text provides insights into Aquinas' perspective on topics such as moral blindness, mercy, power, wealth, anger, justice, and political prudence. It also discusses the connection between natural law and religion, particularly in the context of the Black churches and the virtue of hospitality. [Extracted from the article]

This study expounds on African American women writers' fidelity to their ancestral legacy, and manipulation of the White master to the blacks in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker, and Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison. For this purpose, this study claims that these writers create a space, very much similar to the postcolonial space, where their characters exercise freedom, reshape their independent identities, inscribe their brutal experiences, and rebuttal to White masters. This textual analysis takes the postcolonial dimension with the significant perspectives of Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone's Postcolonial Spaces, interlinked with Homi K. Bhabha's Third Space Theory. The study sums up that it was the keenness of the Afro-American women writers that they, through the postcolonial space, wrote about the dark legacy of the past, for the socio-political changes, to regain their identity, and liberated themselves through their stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African American author Colson Whitehead embraces cosmopolitanism in his multi-themed writing, calling on people to liberate themselves from the mindset of a particular nation or country and build a community society beyond narrow nationalism. His creative nonfiction The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts, which focuses on 13 New York City profiles, creates an urban community through the mobility of building, population and time, and build the community of shared future through the postmemory media of illustration and the stream of consciousness narration. Whitehead presents the human fear of disappearing in the "broken" urban landscape in the post-9/11 era and conveys his vision of deconstructing the West-centrism and constructing a community-like society of "one world, one family". Transcending its imagination, community becomes a self-evident truth in world literature debates in Whitehead's creative nonfiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pasajes: Revista de Pensamiento Contemporáneo is the property of Publicacions Universitat de Valencia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article explores the concept of identity and the notion of transgressing the color line in Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half. Racial passing, in which light-skinned African Americans lived their lives as white people, is a trope present in numerous African American novels, notably Nella Larsen's Passing. Brit Bennett's novel returns to the once-popular trope of transgressing the color line in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States. Although Bennett subverts the trope as no tragedy befalls those who cross the line of the racial divide, the novel presents how one's race, circumstance, and choices shape not only one's own identity but also how they impact the next generation. Through the return to the past, Bennett's novel emphasizes the continued divide within American society. Based on the historical and cultural backdrop of the United States, as well as through the application of affect theory, the article explores to what degree one's race, choices, experienced violence, and society's stereotypes and prejudice impact how characters feel, behave, and define themselves. The focal point of the analysis is the exploration of two generations of women from one family and the examination of how differently their racial identities have been shaped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internalized racial oppression is a multi-dimensional interdisciplinary phenomenon that plagues many ethnic groups in America. However, little attention has been given to this race-based issue. The aim of this research paper is to highlight internalized racial oppression as a socio-psychological phenomenon in the novel of the African American writer Teresa Ann Willis’ Like A Tree Without Roots which is a story of suffering as well as of healing. In this young adult fiction, the protagonist is subjected to an internalized set of values that creates its own cycle of victimization leading to feelings of self-hatred, self-doubt and disrespect for her race and herself. An integral part of this culture is the White standards of beauty. The paper unravels the severe psychological effects of the internalization of Western beauty standards on the identity formation of African American teen girls. The paper focuses on oppression theory in relation to sociology and psychology to analyze the novel understudy. In addition, Liberatory/critical consciousness will be tackled as a concept in the educational system that proves to be highly important to fully comprehend this phenomenon of internalized racial oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many Black intellectuals that came of age as apartheid was tightening its grip in the 1950s, Lewis Nkosi (1936–2010) left South Africa on a one-way ticket. Although he outlived apartheid and returned to his native land on and off after 1991, he lived abroad in the United States in the 1990s and in Europe in the 2000s. Although allied with the African National Congress in exile, he wrote skeptically about emphatic anti-apartheid writing. His essays from the 1950s on reflect his preference for cosmopolitan and experimental authors from Dostoyevsky to Kafka, in other words for modernism broadly speaking, and his creative writing reflects this preference in the ironic and satirical rather than the usual earnest treatment of the struggle. While several critics have noted this modernist preference, none have examined the influence of Black American authors on Nkosi's writing. This omission demands attention, as Nkosi's creative writing, especially drama for stage and radio, draws deeply from Black Americans, even when he steals themes, phrases, and characters without acknowledging sources. The Rhythm of Violence written and performed during his first US sojourn 1960–61, borrows style and phrasing from Black Beat poet Ted Joans, the radio drama "We Can't All Be Martin Luther King," broadcast on BBC 4 in 1971, lifts title and tone—unacknowledged—from activist-writer Julian Bond's ironic poem responding to expectations that all Black intellectuals emulate Dr. King, and The Black Psychiatrist borrows from the decidedly unironic Black nationalist Amiri Baraka. Like Bond and essayist James Baldwin, Nkosi balanced a commitment to struggle—in his case, presenting Black African and Caribbean writers to the BBC and to readers abroad—with an ironic attitude to what he called the absurdity of apartheid and other forms of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the figuring of Black voices in literature, specifically addressing the grotesque sonority of Anglophone and Francophone African writing. The analysis focuses on the Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera's stuttered speech in the semi-autobiographical short fiction The House of Hunger (1978) and the Congolese Sony Labou Tansi's tropical sounds in the dictator novels La vie et demie (1979) and Les septs solitudes de Lorsa Lopez (1985). The article argues that the authors reprise colonial misconceptions of Africa as a noisy continent and parody racist mishearings of Black voices as illegible or dissonant in order to establish a literal and conceptual proximity of voice to violence. Marechera and Sony Labou Tansi thus identify the truly grotesque brutality of colonialism, including its sounded modes of bodily regulation, racist accent policing, ableist speech norms, and inimical linguistic control. The authors reject notions of proper speech and beautiful sound altogether. Instead, they turn to screaming, stuttering, and other postlingual utterances to cast doubt on the governability of sounded language in both graphic and phonic iterations. The article contributes to postcolonial literary criticism and sound studies by revising approaches to orality in African writing and racialized sound in literature more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Black writers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a critical knowledge of how legal documentation functions to produce racialized structures of power and Black vulnerability at law. In literature that reckons with slavery's legal afterlife, particularly antebellum slave narratives, post-Reconstruction novels, and neo-slave narratives, Black authors frequently represent legal documents as pivotal to legal personhood and theorize how these documents produce vulnerability to violence and dispossession. The adversarial relationship with contract law that Black people have experienced throughout US history has uniquely positioned Black writers to produce a critical knowledge of law's structures of power. These writers reveal the mechanisms by which legal authorities manipulated the legal contracts that as texts stipulated protections for Black subjects yet in practice failed to accomplish those protections when white legal authorities refused to carry them out. Building on critical race theory and law and literature scholarship, this article proposes a heightened awareness for how race interacts with legal procedure, particularly during the material processes involved in a document's creation and execution. Focusing on law's materiality, this article uncovers an understudied literary vein in which Black authors represent documents as materially fragile and vulnerable to destruction in order to theorize law as a series of practices enacted by persons inhabiting bodies marked by race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It's common in both academic and popular discourse to think of a strong sense of identity as rooted in one's relationship to a personal and collective past, but what are the pitfalls of this presumption, especially when it comes to the relevance of the Black past for Black (and for white) Americans? This article pursues this question by way of a look back at a hundred-year-old play, Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones , alongside its production and reception histories, and in the broader context of early twentieth-century efforts by African American writers to reclaim and rewrite their past. Reading the play in these contexts enables a critique of the contemporary impulse to cordon off the Black past as morally relevant only for Black Americans as well as a discovery of the possibilities and limits of shared recognition and responsibility for that past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a prolific African American author and activist whose writing centered primarily on race, sexuality, and religion. Baldwin's lived experiences and breadth of knowledge provided him with a unique perspective of the Black experience in America, a theme he frequently revisited in his work and the impetus for his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement Method: This article presents a psychobiographical application of Queering Black Racial Identity Development to conceptualize the life story of James Baldwin. Results: This study explores the life of James Baldwin, highlights his influence as a historical figure and agent of social change, and explores the "why" of his life and behavior. Specifically, his decision to return to the United States during the Civil Rights Movement and possible reasons he avoided politicizing his sexuality in the same way he did his racial identity. Conclusion: As an African American, nonheterosexual, male author and Civil Rights activist, Baldwin's intersectional identities played a significant role in his decision to dedicate his life to writing and activism. Limitations of the study are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]