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English
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American culture has stereotyped black Americans for centuries. Equally devastating, the late Marlon Riggs argued, have been the definitions of "blackness" African Americans impose upon one another which contain and reduce the black experience. In this film, Riggs meets a cross-section of African Americans grappling with the paradox of numerous, often contradictory definitions of blackness.
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English
Description
Four prominent African-American writers each narrate a period in the life of the sociologist and author W.E.B. Du Bois, and describe his impact on their work. They chronicle Du Bois' role as a founder of the NAACP, organizer of the first Pan-African Congress, editor of Crisis, a journal of the black cultural renaissance, and author of a series of landmark sociological studies. Anathematized during the McCarthy years, Du Bois immigrated to Ghana,...
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"Most Americans would agree that devoted wives and mothers make families strong and that strong families are the bedrock of society. Yet, throughout this nation's history, black women have managed to become model mothers and wives, but their doing so has not kept them from being mistaken for "welfare queens" and "baby mamas," the stereotypes that most consistently shape U.S. public policy. In this book, Koritha Mitchell shows the evolving connections...
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Description
In the wake of the Kennedy era, a new kind of ethnic hero emerged within African-American popular culture. Uniquely suited to the times, burgeoning pop icons, such as Muhammad Ali, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Pam Grier, projected the values and beliefs of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and reflected both the possibility and the actuality of a rapidly changing American landscape. In Black Camelot, William Van Deburg examines the...
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"When Zandria Robinson returned home to interview African Americans in Memphis, she was often greeted with some version of the caution "I hope you know this ain't Chicago." In this important new work, Robinson critiques ideas of black identity constructed through a northern lens and situates African Americans as central shapers of contemporary southern culture. Analytically separating black southerners from their migrating cousins, fictive kin, and...
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Committed to the struggle for civil rights, in the late 1950s Joan Steinau marched and protested as a white ally, a young woman coming to terms with her own racism. She soon fell in love with and married the Black writer Julius Lester, establishing a partnership that was long and multifaceted but not free of the politics of race and gender. Over time, as the women's movement dawned, feminism helped Lester find her voice, her pansexuality, and the...
Language
English
Description
Moving beyond the familiar territory of blackface and minstrelsy, these essays present a fresh look at the history of African Americans and mass culture. With subjects ranging from representations of race in sheet music illustrations to African American interest in Haitian culture, Beyond Blackface recovers the history of forgotten or obscure cultural figures and shows how these historical actors played a role in the creation of American mass culture....