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This article extends Tiya Miles's study on the Black Cherokee Shoe Boots family by reading the legal documents they submitted to the Cherokee Nation—citizenship applications and land deeds as intergenerational testimonials. These documents, the article argues, constitute intergenerational testimonials because they record how the Shoe Boots family produced their own archive, their own print record across time and for future generations, as one strategy to build a livable world within and on Cherokee lands. As intergenerational testimonials, they transmit histories of unfinished familial claims and materially contain the fragmentary echoes of a collective set of desires. These testimonials refuse a racial and colonial conception of belonging. The article argues that the collaborative political labor of submitting claims captures the plurality of expression in the documents. What appears as an individual claim, the article contends, is instead linked to a network of familial ties. Put another way, the article reads the use of "I" in a family member's citizenship application, for example, as constituting a collective utterance that embeds the desires of family members, whether living, lost, or dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the previous decade, the burgeoning re-imagination of the Greco-Roman canon in an African American context, presently referred to as “Black classicism,” has traversed artistic mediums not only as a cultural transliteration but an active subversion, rejection, and reclamation of the sociological underpinnings of a historically eurocentric area of study. Though modern reception studies are fraught with racial prejudice accusing Black authors of passively imitating—or merely deriving influence from—antiquity, I argue that the neoclassical inventions of Phillis Wheatley, W.E.B. Du Bois, Rita Dove, and Robert Hayden have transposed myth’s most defining elements onto two prominent social narratives: the public reception of African American scholarship and the collective female consciousness. Of these elements, imagery invoking the movement across transitory ‘liminal’ states has been enfranchised to actively subvert the traditionally-eurocentric classical canon while transferring intellectual ownership to African American authorship. Visualizations of the cyclicality of the rhapsodic oral tradition have further been harnessed to defend the female canon, translating myth’s cyclicality onto contemporaneous social dilemmas.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how I grappled with questions about the meaning, purpose, and process of playful writing to represent a dance performance based on the oral history narrative of Sybil Jordan Hampton, the sole African American enrolled in her class at Little Rock Central High in Arkansas from 1959 to 1962. Through the presentation of six moments from the dance that I captured through photographs, I explore the possibilities of writing about dance using graphic art to invoke critical reflection and social justice-oriented action, rather than solely as a representation of the dance performance. I examine the complexities surrounding playful writing, layered representations in writing about dance that represents lived experience, and consider whether nontraditional text presented as graphic art enhances the potential for meaning making about social justice action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we trace the evolution of the connections between Black America and (Black) Europe since the mid-twentieth century and the study thereof. We do so through the lens of 'Black American centrality,' referring to the ways in which perceptions of Black America serve as an outsized reference point in European understandings of race, 'Blackness,' and Black (European) emancipation struggles. This allows for exploring the dilemmas that the, at times overwhelming, visibility of 'Black America' poses to Black Europeans, particularly during the current moment of flourishing Black European culture, politics, and scholarship. In that context, we show how both U.S.- and Europe-based scholars of Black American history and Black European history have approached Black American-European connections differently. The article concludes with suggestions for how these fields can engage with each other to develop academic approaches that account for but do not privilege the position of Black Americans within diasporic exchanges in the North Atlantic region, which is currently an underexplored area in diaspora studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This creative-critical response to Gayl Jones's oeuvre (specifically The Hermit-Woman and Corregidora) seeks to explore a personal and creative identification with Jones's articulations of muted desires, longings, and refusals and the ways this affective tangle emerges from the violated black feminine bodymind. Taking its title from a poem included in the author's debut poetry collection, gossypiin, this essay centers a black feminist poetics of survivorhood and madness that echoes that of many of Jones's embattled protagonists. Thinking through the terrain of Black feminist ontology, disability studies, and autoethnographic reflections on the author's own experiences of intimate partner violence, this exploration of "quiet-crazy intimacies" is an attempt to make sense of the voice inside the author's head that persists even through the scene(s) of their own subjection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on insights from scholarship on religion, race, and affect to understand the affective power of Nat Turner's prophetic religion and critiques of Turner that dismissed him as a "fanatic." It does so through a close reading of The Confessions of Nat Turner and an analysis of diverse newspaper and governmental reports responding to Turner's religious narrative performance. It situates these sources within an antebellum affective economy in which Turner and his detractors sparred over the meaning and morality of the Southampton Rebellion. They did so through diverse appeals to powerful feelings, divine forces, and religious "truth." The language of fanaticism was at the center of this sparring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the links between a contemporary novel The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead and the literary genre of slave narratives, and argues that this popular and critically acclaimed novel bases its narrative structure on the adaptation of slave narrative tropes and the use of speculative realism. The theoretical framework first considers some of the basic tenets of slave narratives as a genre and then places Whitehead’s work within a broader context of African American writing, focusing on the relationship between realism and fantasy in slave narratives and Whitehead’s novel. Furthermore, Whitehead’s narrative is also considered in light of Ramón Saldivar’s terms “speculative fiction” or “historical fantasy” (2011, p. 585) which denote a combination of genres blending fantasy and history in order to come up with a contemporary, fluid and multi-faceted narrative way to tell the artistic truth. The central part of the paper offers a reading of Whitehead’s novel based on the argument that it represents a creative contemporary adaptation of the slave narrative literary genre as well as an example of postrace speculative fiction which problematizes and highlights the issue of race and the legacy of slavery in contemporary American society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the "warring ideals" (Du Bois, Souls of Black Folks) of Black American solidarity with Third World Internationalism and complicity in U.S. imperialism through a reading of Lauren Wilkinson's American Spy (2019). The novel, a spy thriller, centers on the life and experience of Marie Mitchell, a Black woman FBI agent recruited by the CIA to further an assassination plot against Thomas Sankara, the charismatic socialist leader of Burkina Faso. The story puts individual career advancement in the service of American imperialism in direct tension with the larger collectivist goals of Black and Third World liberation. Thus, the novel invites an exploration of the geopolitical implications of Du Bois's famous formulation about Black American double consciousness, a formulation most often considered solely as a matter of individual psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is an exploration of mixed race narratives in postmodern literature, specifically in its iterations of Blasianness. In exploring the literary representation of Blasian individuals, this research does not seek to impose a concrete definition on what it means to exist at the intersection of Blackness and Asianness. Rather, it implores the implications of representing Black/Asian mixedness as it has manifested thus far via literary fiction.Because of the newness of its presence in the popular imagination, we have yet to form a developed vocabulary for thinking about multiraciality as it pertains to Blasianness; a central goal of this study is to extend us towards remedying that epistemological shortcoming. Adding to the burgeoning field of Critical Mixed Race Studies, this paper dissects the limits and possibilities of Blasian representation by interrogating modernity, racialization, and what critical mixed race studies theorist Michele Elam calls the anti-Bildungsroman—an alternative coming-of-age narrative that positions mixed race characters as periphery to an assimilationary arc. Using the resulting framework alongside the narratives of Lisa Countryman from Don Lee’s Country of Origin and Joey Sands from Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, I argue that the representation of Blasians in postmodern literature complicates how we imagine racial being in ways that are both limiting and expansive.

The article focuses on the work and achievements of African-American historian Monroe Fordham and his contributions in the training of historians. It discusses his first book, "Major Themes in Northern Black Religious Through 1800-1860," which focuses on the autonomy, resilience and self-determination of African Americans in ensuring the continuity and stability of the black church. It describes his historical preservation efforts and his role in the promotion and teaching of Black Studies.

The article discusses the achievements and contributions of African-American historian Monroe Fordham to the preservation and promulgation of African-American history. It describes the significance of the historian's African-American local history project and his book "Major Themes in Northern Black Religious Thought." It explores his commitment to the academic study of the African-American experience as indicated by the courses he developed that are offered by the history department.

In 1972, spoken-word artist and poet Gil Scott-Heron published his second novel, controversially titled The Nigger Factory. As the student arm of the Civil Rights Movement started to shift its intellectual concerns from integration to questions of Black Power and self-determination, Scott-Heron's novel burst onto the literary scene like a stick of dynamite. Literary critics and newspapers didn't quite know what to make of the novel, which focused on a student government president and a fringe opposition group both vying for control over a student protest at a fictional historically Black college. Raw, direct, and full of rage, the book eventually went out of print and lapsed into obscurity for decades. Nearly forty years after its debut, the book was reintroduced into the literary scene by British publisher Canongate Books, and has sparked new scholarly conversations about Black student protest and the relationship between HBCUs and their stakeholders. Through literary analysis and notes from past experiences of teaching the novel in the classroom, I examine how the social milieu surrounding Factory has both changed and endured, and how this novel can help us to contextualize protests for racial equity happening currently at both HBCUs and PWIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about why Africa is overlooked in eighteenth‐century literary studies. Africa's neglect is not merely a problem of attention. Neither the parameters of the field nor the tools of the discipline appear particularly suited for engaging Africa as anything other than an invention of the European imagination. In what follows, I seek to bring more clarity to the origins of this paradox and to contextualize some of its governing assumptions not in order to solve it but to show that having already solved it can't and doesn't need to be a prerequisite for scholars of eighteenth‐century literature to face it head‐on. The first section offers a brief account of how this paradox arose from the political and intellectual matrix of the mid‐twentieth century when African Studies was first institutionalized in the West. The subsequent sections highlight the way this history has shaped—both directly and indirectly—the way scholars and teachers of eighteenth‐century literature have understood Africa and their obligations to it and suggests some ways we might begin to rethink Africa's place in the field [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broadly, this article details the imbrication of a Black feminist qualitative researcher's onto-epistemology and data (meta-) analysis process. I theorize Black feminist memory work, then apply this method by returning to data I collected for a completed research project and meshing those data with a curated selection of thematically connected family photographs. By revisiting and reviewing textual and visual data, I demonstrate the function of Black feminist memory work as a visual research method with which to not only describe, analyze, and interpret evocative photographs, but also excavate and make meaning of the sometimes repressed and oftentimes emotion-laden episodic and autobiographical memories that inevitably surface when conducting qualitative research. I conclude by underscoring how this tool creates opportunities for qualitative researchers to address the ontological concerns that connect qualitative inquiry to Black feminists' humanistic hopes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an interdisciplinary collaboration in the Pee Dee region in South Carolina. It describes a concerted effort by faculty and students at Francis Marion University (FMU) to study the history of race and racism both on the campus and beyond. The FMU campus was once two plantations, where people of African descent were enslaved from 1830 to 1865. The "old African American" cemetery on campus is highlighted as a case study of the ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration. Additionally, the Universities Studying Slavery consortium and FMU's decision to join the initiative are discussed. Finally, the authors pontificate on the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations to serve marginalized communities in the Pee Dee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

St. Clair Drake was responsible for a major shift in the way urban sociologists studied cities. While educated by Chicago school scholars in sociology and anthropology, such as Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, Drake was one of many Black doctoral students who veered from the dominant perspective of his White teachers on race. His skills in ethnographic research were indebted not only to Park and Burgess, but also to the work of Black scholars who came before him, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier. His unique personal approach to cities and their racial problems transitioned into a more global focus on the Black diaspora, colonialism and the history of African people, and cultures which connected him to a world of social action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]