Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2021.2003627
M. Presswood
Jazz provided the soundtrack for Chinese modernity. To be modern in the Republican era (1919–1949) China, specifically in treaty port cities such as Shanghai, meant listening and dancing to American jazz music. It also engendered and embodied an alternative, nontraditional social space for the interaction of multiracial groups centered-around improvisational music. Mediated through African American jazz music, musicians from around the world collaborated, learned, listened, and played jazz in China. Whether the music heard originated directly from Black musicians themselves or entered the Shanghai soundscape through movies, radio, or the play of white or Asian musicians, the imprint of music created by Black creatives was ever-present. This paper addresses the understudied topic of Black musicians and entertainers in Shanghai during the Republican era. African American jazz musicians and their Black musical aesthetics and traditions engendered and became constitutive of Chinese modernity. This paper argues that the Black cultural production of jazz musicians not only helped fuel the cultural industry of Jazz Age Shanghai, it created alternative social spaces for the practice of a global internationalism and cosmopolitanism, and extended the Black Radical Tradition to Asia. The ubiquity of African Americans in Shanghai also exposed a manifestation of Chinese anti-Blackness from both Chinese Nationalists and Communists elements that would reveal racial fissures that would negatively impact the latter’s relationship with Blackness at the inception of the Sino-Black solidarity movement from the 1930s onward to its collapse in the 1970s.
{"title":"Sonicated Blackness in Jazz Age Shanghai, 1924–1954: Jazz, Community, and the (In)visibility of African American Musicians in the Creation of the Soundtrack of Chinese Modernity","authors":"M. Presswood","doi":"10.1080/10999949.2021.2003627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2021.2003627","url":null,"abstract":"Jazz provided the soundtrack for Chinese modernity. To be modern in the Republican era (1919–1949) China, specifically in treaty port cities such as Shanghai, meant listening and dancing to American jazz music. It also engendered and embodied an alternative, nontraditional social space for the interaction of multiracial groups centered-around improvisational music. Mediated through African American jazz music, musicians from around the world collaborated, learned, listened, and played jazz in China. Whether the music heard originated directly from Black musicians themselves or entered the Shanghai soundscape through movies, radio, or the play of white or Asian musicians, the imprint of music created by Black creatives was ever-present. This paper addresses the understudied topic of Black musicians and entertainers in Shanghai during the Republican era. African American jazz musicians and their Black musical aesthetics and traditions engendered and became constitutive of Chinese modernity. This paper argues that the Black cultural production of jazz musicians not only helped fuel the cultural industry of Jazz Age Shanghai, it created alternative social spaces for the practice of a global internationalism and cosmopolitanism, and extended the Black Radical Tradition to Asia. The ubiquity of African Americans in Shanghai also exposed a manifestation of Chinese anti-Blackness from both Chinese Nationalists and Communists elements that would reveal racial fissures that would negatively impact the latter’s relationship with Blackness at the inception of the Sino-Black solidarity movement from the 1930s onward to its collapse in the 1970s.","PeriodicalId":44850,"journal":{"name":"Souls","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44817584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2021.2003630
Melissa N. Stein
In 1985, Philadelphia police responded to a stand-off with Afrocentric environmental group MOVE* by dropping a firebomb on their home, killing eleven MOVE members, five of them children. Highly critical of the bombing, the media and the Investigative Commission grieved for the “true victims,” the children who perished alongside adults whose radicalism seemingly made them unworthy of grief. Yet the focus on the children functioned to deflect larger ethical questions—chiefly, if there were no children present, should the state be permitted to bomb its own citizens? Such questions about race, policing, racialized understandings of innocence, and the meaning of childhood, continue to resonate today.
{"title":"“The Blood of Innocent Children”: Race, Respectability, and “True” Victimhood in the 1985 MOVE Police Bombing","authors":"Melissa N. Stein","doi":"10.1080/10999949.2021.2003630","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2021.2003630","url":null,"abstract":"In 1985, Philadelphia police responded to a stand-off with Afrocentric environmental group MOVE* by dropping a firebomb on their home, killing eleven MOVE members, five of them children. Highly critical of the bombing, the media and the Investigative Commission grieved for the “true victims,” the children who perished alongside adults whose radicalism seemingly made them unworthy of grief. Yet the focus on the children functioned to deflect larger ethical questions—chiefly, if there were no children present, should the state be permitted to bomb its own citizens? Such questions about race, policing, racialized understandings of innocence, and the meaning of childhood, continue to resonate today.","PeriodicalId":44850,"journal":{"name":"Souls","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48199921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2021.2003622
J. Howard
This essay takes up the fundamental tension in black study between black life and black death, and forwards the idea of black ambivalence as a way of theorizing this tension. But given recent conceptions of the scope of black death as total and constitutive of what has generally come to be thought under the rubric of the “antiblack world,” this essay also asks what room is left for the thought of black life, not as a meager or even primarily defiant feat, but a veritable abundance. In the effort to actually think what Christina Sharpe has called “the largeness that is black life,” without flinching from the sense of antiblackness as indeed constitutive of a world, I propose a practice of black study that holds open a critical distinction between the world and what the poet Ed Roberson has alternatively called "the Earth." Ultimately, I argue that even if the world is totally defined by antiblackness, blackness is not totally defined by that world; and has further to be appreciated as a relationship to the Earth. It’s when a sense of the larger Earth enters black study that we are able to appreciate black life as a veritable largeness.
{"title":"To See the Earth before the End of the Antiblack World","authors":"J. Howard","doi":"10.1080/10999949.2021.2003622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2021.2003622","url":null,"abstract":"This essay takes up the fundamental tension in black study between black life and black death, and forwards the idea of black ambivalence as a way of theorizing this tension. But given recent conceptions of the scope of black death as total and constitutive of what has generally come to be thought under the rubric of the “antiblack world,” this essay also asks what room is left for the thought of black life, not as a meager or even primarily defiant feat, but a veritable abundance. In the effort to actually think what Christina Sharpe has called “the largeness that is black life,” without flinching from the sense of antiblackness as indeed constitutive of a world, I propose a practice of black study that holds open a critical distinction between the world and what the poet Ed Roberson has alternatively called \"the Earth.\" Ultimately, I argue that even if the world is totally defined by antiblackness, blackness is not totally defined by that world; and has further to be appreciated as a relationship to the Earth. It’s when a sense of the larger Earth enters black study that we are able to appreciate black life as a veritable largeness.","PeriodicalId":44850,"journal":{"name":"Souls","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48032046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2020.1804805
A. Rice
A central concern of the Black Intellectual Tradition (BIT) since the close of the nineteenth century has been the explicit connection between the historical and structural development of the world capitalist economy on the one hand, and on the other, freedom struggles forged by African descendants. This dynamic, interwoven relationship, according to some critical observers of history, illuminates a key dimension of the modern Black experience.1 While Black Studies inherited this distinct political economic tradition, the status of political economy frameworks in the field is marginal. Because Black communities have produced a unique political economy tradition borne from necessity, study, and an incessant will toward freedom, this tradition must occupy a greater role in the work and practice of Black Studies. As a contribution toward that vital goal, I will introduce and analyze several key concepts, theories, and debates that have animated the radical Black political economy tradition. Based on my brief reflections on the lives, work, and politics of several radical Black scholar-activists within and beyond the U.S., I conclude by discussing how their ideas can serve the transformationalist vision of Black Studies.
{"title":"Political Economy and the Tradition of Radical Black Study","authors":"A. Rice","doi":"10.1080/10999949.2020.1804805","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2020.1804805","url":null,"abstract":"A central concern of the Black Intellectual Tradition (BIT) since the close of the nineteenth century has been the explicit connection between the historical and structural development of the world capitalist economy on the one hand, and on the other, freedom struggles forged by African descendants. This dynamic, interwoven relationship, according to some critical observers of history, illuminates a key dimension of the modern Black experience.1 While Black Studies inherited this distinct political economic tradition, the status of political economy frameworks in the field is marginal. Because Black communities have produced a unique political economy tradition borne from necessity, study, and an incessant will toward freedom, this tradition must occupy a greater role in the work and practice of Black Studies. As a contribution toward that vital goal, I will introduce and analyze several key concepts, theories, and debates that have animated the radical Black political economy tradition. Based on my brief reflections on the lives, work, and politics of several radical Black scholar-activists within and beyond the U.S., I conclude by discussing how their ideas can serve the transformationalist vision of Black Studies.","PeriodicalId":44850,"journal":{"name":"Souls","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10999949.2020.1804805","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44219377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2020.1811592
S. Wynter, Joshua Bennett, J. Givens
{"title":"“A Greater Truth than Any Other Truth You Know”: A Conversation with Professor Sylvia Wynter on Origin Stories","authors":"S. Wynter, Joshua Bennett, J. Givens","doi":"10.1080/10999949.2020.1811592","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2020.1811592","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44850,"journal":{"name":"Souls","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10999949.2020.1811592","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42443455","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2019.1711566
S. Balakrishnan
In the 1990s, the political tradition of Afrocentrism came under attack in the Western academy, resulting in its glaring omission from most genealogies of Black thought today. This is despite the fact that Afrocentrism had roots dating back to the 15th century, shaping movements like Pan-Africanism and Négritude. It is also despite the fact that the tradition resulted in important cornerstones of Black American life: the holiday of Kwanzaa, the discipline of Black Studies, and independent Afrocentric schools. This essay revisits Afrocentrism as a foundation for the Black Radical Tradition. It argues that Afrocentrism presupposed the relationship between Blackness and Africa to be the central problem for emancipatory thought. Re-embracing Africa not only meant resistance; it targeted the originary thread of political modernity itself–that is, the separation of Blackness from Africa.
{"title":"Afrocentrism Revisited: Africa in the Philosophy of Black Nationalism","authors":"S. Balakrishnan","doi":"10.1080/10999949.2019.1711566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2019.1711566","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1990s, the political tradition of Afrocentrism came under attack in the Western academy, resulting in its glaring omission from most genealogies of Black thought today. This is despite the fact that Afrocentrism had roots dating back to the 15th century, shaping movements like Pan-Africanism and Négritude. It is also despite the fact that the tradition resulted in important cornerstones of Black American life: the holiday of Kwanzaa, the discipline of Black Studies, and independent Afrocentric schools. This essay revisits Afrocentrism as a foundation for the Black Radical Tradition. It argues that Afrocentrism presupposed the relationship between Blackness and Africa to be the central problem for emancipatory thought. Re-embracing Africa not only meant resistance; it targeted the originary thread of political modernity itself–that is, the separation of Blackness from Africa.","PeriodicalId":44850,"journal":{"name":"Souls","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10999949.2019.1711566","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42589623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2020.1822724
R. Allen
{"title":"Personal Reflections on the Road to Black Awakening in Capitalist America","authors":"R. Allen","doi":"10.1080/10999949.2020.1822724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2020.1822724","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44850,"journal":{"name":"Souls","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10999949.2020.1822724","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45028564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2020.1822725
H. Spillers
A speech delivered as the keynote address at Brandeis University's AAAS 50th Anniversary, where Hortense Spillers received Brandeis University's Alumni Achievement Award on February 11, 2019.1
{"title":"“A Moment of Protest Becomes a Curricular Object”","authors":"H. Spillers","doi":"10.1080/10999949.2020.1822725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2020.1822725","url":null,"abstract":"A speech delivered as the keynote address at Brandeis University's AAAS 50th Anniversary, where Hortense Spillers received Brandeis University's Alumni Achievement Award on February 11, 2019.1","PeriodicalId":44850,"journal":{"name":"Souls","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10999949.2020.1822725","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46274586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2019.1712128
Linette Park
The following article thinks together concepts of the hold and disinheritance through the work and anti-lynching activism of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. In doing so, the paper extends what Wells-Barnett already illuminated on the ways in which the State benefitted from the sexual politics of anti-black lynching violence. The article contends Wells-Barnett’s work and pedagogical implications continue to be critical and relevant in and to the horizons of Black Studies given the radical nature of not only her rhetorical analysis on lynching, but also in her ability to write and stand in her own dangerous mode of thought against the profundity of anti-black violence.
{"title":"Whence Disinheritance Holds: On Ida B. Wells and America’s “Unwritten Law”","authors":"Linette Park","doi":"10.1080/10999949.2019.1712128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2019.1712128","url":null,"abstract":"The following article thinks together concepts of the hold and disinheritance through the work and anti-lynching activism of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. In doing so, the paper extends what Wells-Barnett already illuminated on the ways in which the State benefitted from the sexual politics of anti-black lynching violence. The article contends Wells-Barnett’s work and pedagogical implications continue to be critical and relevant in and to the horizons of Black Studies given the radical nature of not only her rhetorical analysis on lynching, but also in her ability to write and stand in her own dangerous mode of thought against the profundity of anti-black violence.","PeriodicalId":44850,"journal":{"name":"Souls","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10999949.2019.1712128","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46123419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2020.1804804
Jovonna Jones
In this paper, I revisit the thought-world of nineteenth century black photography between two of its most important practitioners: Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. In the history of black photography, and increasingly in Black Studies writ large, these two figures drive discourses on visuality and freedom. Typically leading with Douglass’ own lectures on pictures, we study both Douglass and Truth as figures who understood the stakes of representation, its utility for abolitionist movement, and its possibilities for black self-image. While its critical to hold Douglass and Truth together, I aim, in this paper, to linger in the differences between their approaches to photography as a realm of thought and practice. I argue that Douglass pursued a comportment of dignity reliant on a gendered presentation of dominance and revolutionary leadership, while Truth, in a different vein, enacted an image-body politic that was intentionally entangled with the visual logics of property and objectification particular to black women’s bodies within slavery. By foregrounding Truth rather than Douglass in this intellectual genealogy of the visual, I want to gesture toward a black feminist vision that can open up the work of photography in Black Studies as we continue to think about what kinds of subjects and subjectivities photographs produce, complicate, and unravel.
{"title":"Troubling Dignity, Seeking Truth: Black Feminist Vision and the Thought-World of Black Photography in the Nineteenth Century","authors":"Jovonna Jones","doi":"10.1080/10999949.2020.1804804","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2020.1804804","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I revisit the thought-world of nineteenth century black photography between two of its most important practitioners: Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. In the history of black photography, and increasingly in Black Studies writ large, these two figures drive discourses on visuality and freedom. Typically leading with Douglass’ own lectures on pictures, we study both Douglass and Truth as figures who understood the stakes of representation, its utility for abolitionist movement, and its possibilities for black self-image. While its critical to hold Douglass and Truth together, I aim, in this paper, to linger in the differences between their approaches to photography as a realm of thought and practice. I argue that Douglass pursued a comportment of dignity reliant on a gendered presentation of dominance and revolutionary leadership, while Truth, in a different vein, enacted an image-body politic that was intentionally entangled with the visual logics of property and objectification particular to black women’s bodies within slavery. By foregrounding Truth rather than Douglass in this intellectual genealogy of the visual, I want to gesture toward a black feminist vision that can open up the work of photography in Black Studies as we continue to think about what kinds of subjects and subjectivities photographs produce, complicate, and unravel.","PeriodicalId":44850,"journal":{"name":"Souls","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10999949.2020.1804804","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42710533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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