Pub Date : 2019-07-06DOI: 10.5325/RECEPTION.11.1.0004
Mary I. Unger
abstract:This article offers a case study of the Book Circle, a black women’s reading group on Chicago’s South Side, from 1943 to 1953. It demonstrates how the group recruited literary reception—specifically middlebrow taste—as a way to lobby for racial equality in the postwar era. In doing so, the Book Circle makes visible a group of twentieth-century black readers historically rendered invisible, as Elizabeth McHenry and others have shown. In this way, this article argues, recovering the Book Circle helps us further document the legacy of black women readers—from nineteenth-century literary clubs to black feminist consciousness-raising groups in the 1960s through the 1980s—who turned to reading as a strategy for social transformation.
{"title":"The Book Circle: Black Women Readers and Middlebrow Taste in Chicago, 1943–1953","authors":"Mary I. Unger","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.11.1.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.11.1.0004","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article offers a case study of the Book Circle, a black women’s reading group on Chicago’s South Side, from 1943 to 1953. It demonstrates how the group recruited literary reception—specifically middlebrow taste—as a way to lobby for racial equality in the postwar era. In doing so, the Book Circle makes visible a group of twentieth-century black readers historically rendered invisible, as Elizabeth McHenry and others have shown. In this way, this article argues, recovering the Book Circle helps us further document the legacy of black women readers—from nineteenth-century literary clubs to black feminist consciousness-raising groups in the 1960s through the 1980s—who turned to reading as a strategy for social transformation.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"59 1","pages":"20 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84211594","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-30DOI: 10.5325/RECEPTION.10.1.0050
Laura Jeffries
abstract:Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem "The White Man's Burden" is frequently invoked in the online postings of white supremacists making various arguments about contemporary race relations. Many follow Senator Ben Tillman's early appropriation of the text as an argument for racial separatism and isolationism, while others advocate a new imperialism. This article examines how Kipling's poem takes on the special qualities of a meme, allowing a loosely affiliated community of authors and audiences to signal their identities through transmission of a shared text even as they stray in multiple directions from its original meaning. Newly examined primary sources draw from a range of so-called "alt-right" spokesmen and obscure Internet users to demonstrate how the concept of the "white man's burden" has adapted to survive in a cultural environment more than a century removed from its origin, and how Kipling himself has been adopted by a twenty-first century subculture.
{"title":"The White Meme's Burden: Replication and Adaptation in Twenty-First Century White Supremacist Internet Cultures","authors":"Laura Jeffries","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.10.1.0050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.10.1.0050","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem \"The White Man's Burden\" is frequently invoked in the online postings of white supremacists making various arguments about contemporary race relations. Many follow Senator Ben Tillman's early appropriation of the text as an argument for racial separatism and isolationism, while others advocate a new imperialism. This article examines how Kipling's poem takes on the special qualities of a meme, allowing a loosely affiliated community of authors and audiences to signal their identities through transmission of a shared text even as they stray in multiple directions from its original meaning. Newly examined primary sources draw from a range of so-called \"alt-right\" spokesmen and obscure Internet users to demonstrate how the concept of the \"white man's burden\" has adapted to survive in a cultural environment more than a century removed from its origin, and how Kipling himself has been adopted by a twenty-first century subculture.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"155 1","pages":"50 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76472240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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