Nancy Cunard's English Journey

Southern Cultures, 2014

De Gruyter eBooks, 2021

First of all, Iwant to thank the ANGB editors for includingmybook in the Anglia Book Series. Iw ould alsol ike to thank my PhDa dvisors Ulla Haselstein and Sabine Schülting, as wella sY ogita Goyal, for their invaluable feedback, encouragement,a nd mentorship. Thank yout ot he GSNAS administration for their ceaseless assistance and especiallyt om yc ohort,G SNAS 2014.Y ou're radical and youa re what made this fun. My gratitude goes alsotoZenoAckermann, JustusK.S. Makokha, and Jo Malt for saying the right thingsatthe right time and making me see thatthis was possible. And, of course, to my family: Thank youf or everything. OpenAccess. ©2 021D ominique Haensell, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeC ommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Archivaria, 2006

Le but de ce texte est de mettre en évidence les méthodes et les ironies de la recherche des histoires noires dans un contexte britannique. Il tente d'exposer les tensions entre la présence des personnes de race noire à Londres, leur présence matérielle dans les archives disponibles pour les chercheurs, et les complexités des histoires britanniques dans lesquelles leur présence est exprimée.

2014

African American Review, 2023

I n 1898, African American freedom fighter and prison reform activist D. E. Tobias published a groundbreaking pamphlet in London titled Freed. .. But Not Free, the Grievances of the Afro-American. Born to parents who had been enslaved, Tobias had traveled to Britain to investigate the English prison system, compare it with the convict lease system in the United States, and expose the unjust incarceration of thousands of Black women, men, and children on American soil. He declared that abolition had "not made the coloured race a free people" and that the convict lease system was "a true relic and consequence of the old system of slavery with ten times its severity" (Tobias 12). 1 After years of research, and much like his contemporary Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Tobias meticulously recorded how such a system came into being after the end of the American Civil War in 1865. He wrote: the South adopted the deplorable and disgraceful practice of convicting thousands of blacks on the most flimsy charges, and farming them out to the highest bidders for human flesh.. .. The downfall of the old régime of slavery by no means eradicated that idea. The cruelty of wringing profits from the sweat and muscles of the coloured race, as slaves, was abolished, but it is still carried on in disguise by sending them to prison, which is done in the South on the slightest provocation. (25-26) With blistering rhetoric, Tobias railed against institutionalized violence, injustice for, and oppression of people of color and connected racism and poverty with a white desire for profit. Abolition had done little to challenge white oppression and the convict lease system was a "disguise" to mask the lack of progress made. Careful to differentiate between enslavement and this new barbaric system, Tobias emphasized his point by noting that, in 1879, 350 Black men and women in Georgia were leased "for state profit" for a period of twenty years, but after two years this number had doubled, with "fifteen coloured [incarcerated] to one white prisoner" (29-30). As Angela Y. Davis has summarized as recently as 2020, despite the efforts of many activists who fought to abolish enslavement, "there were those who did recognize early on that slavery could not be comprehensively eradicated simply by disestablishing the institution itself, leaving intact the economic, political, and cultural conditions within which slavery flourished." These activists understood well that abolition was a vision that "would require a thorough reorganization of US societyeconomically, politically, and socially-in order to guarantee the incorporation of formerly enslaved Black people into a new democratic order" (Davis, "Why Arguments"). While African American freedom fighters across the centuries may have faced various challenges and experienced a range of contexts, their desire for a "new democratic order" that recognized their lives, humanity, citizenship, and testimony more broadly remained the same. Black activists have always been at the forefront in pushing the United States to accept the ideals it was founded on and wereare-unrelenting in their groundbreaking campaigns for abolition, equality, and social justice. In this article, I argue that, to add nuance and a greater understanding 9

I look to deploy the readers' lens as a tool through which we might exact material from the spaces where the Africanist presence ruptures, shapes, and contributes to the narrative. We know, as Hughes makes clear, that the Negroes knows rivers. I want to make an attempt at locating, as reader, then, the spaces in literature where the Negro speaks of them as well, in doing so, we will “[chart] new worlds out of black, wet infinity.”

2021

Modernism/modernity, 2006

In Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay, "Unpacking My Library," he remarks that There is no living library that does not harbor a number of booklike creations from fringe areas. They need not be stick-in albums or family albums, autograph books or portfolios containing pamphlets or religious tracts; some people become attached to leaflets and prospectuses, others to handwriting facsimiles or typewritten copies of unobtainable books; and certainly periodicals can form the prismatic fringes of a library. 1 winkiel / nancy cunard's negro and the transnational politics of race 509 often racially hierarchical-initiatives of white cosmopolitanism and an increasingly powerful and organized black transnationalism. Negro is a document of war against imperialism and capitalism. It does not deconstruct the color line, but rather seeks to make clear the stakes involved for the underdeveloped world in a situation of ongoing capitalist development and bourgeois forms of nationalism. At first glance, Negro does indeed appear to be a byproduct of modernist cosmopolitanism, offering from the standpoint of European universalism a collection of artifacts from "primitive" and "modern" cultures. 8 The anthology-with its 200 entries by some 150 contributors (two-thirds of whom were black) and 385 illustrations-contains poetry, manifestos, history, ethnography, photographs, and rant. It traverses Europe, the United States, South America, the West Indies, and Africa, and includes hate mail, a confidential French military circular, advertisements, French children's comics, folk songs and scores, ethnographic maps, and reproductions of African art. Its contributors

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, 2024

Frederick Douglass' brilliant prose and soaring oratory pricked the conscience of a nation in the nineteenth century. Today that same nation may arguably have no soul, let alone a conscience. Douglass was unequivocally the most influential Black man in nineteenth-century America. He wrote 1,200 pages of autobiography, one of the most impressive performances of memoir in the nation's history. Yet for many, while the name Frederick Douglass rang in our ears, Douglass remained like an antique family photo relegated to a wall that you rarely, if ever, touch. We know that these figures are important, we memorialize them in placards, street signs, and statues recounting their histories, but ultimately, we shelve them because we cannot connect them to our present reality. In some respects, one might not be far off point in suggesting that the mythbuilding around Douglass contributed to the notion that the institution of slavery, with all of its inhumanity, was a condition which could be overcome. Of course, such speculation would need to be both ignorant and blind to the true horrors of human bondage and the toll that it took on Douglass' life, as well as that of his family. This two volume epic work and historical collective provides a rich and vibrant woven tapestry of the pain, suffering, blood, sweat, and tears of many transatlantic sojourners in the US and the UK, some known, some unknown. It seeks not, as many historians have done with Douglass, to atomize these individuals as lone heroes defending themselves from an amorphous and transhistorical force, such as White Supremacy, anti-Blackness, or racism. Rather, it provides a rare glimpse into a virtual treasure trove of voices and lived experiences that would otherwise have been erased from our historical archives and stands in protest to America's and the UK's original sin. This thing called "Race", for both countries is like the thing in mythology that you have to do for the kingdom to be well. And it's always something you don't want to do. And it's always that thing about you confronting yourself, that it's tailor-made for you to fail dealing with it. And the question of your heroism and of your courage and of your success in dealing with this trial, is can you confront it with honesty, and do you confront it and do you have the energy to sustain an attack on it. The degree to which you're willing to fight against it really . . . is based on your ability to accept the pain of fighting against it. Celeste-Marie Bernier and Hannah-Rose Murray have in these two volumes provided us with a splendid look at what true love and commitment looks like. A desire for truth telling that challenges the heart and soul to find substance when no one before had even glimpsed possibilities. A belief system and understanding of how struggling people all over the world are interconnected spiritually and how that energy manifests in every oppressed person and in every insubordinate space. These two volumes are revolution at its finest. A testament that those unnamed and unmentioned in historic annals remained adamant in their insistence to always revolt, regardless of the medium and of their enslavers attempts to reduce them to a state of complete abjection. These bold women and men, embodying the essence of the Black Radical tradition, embrace an international legacy of resistance that continues until the present. In his 1924 essay, Enter the Negro, Alain LeRoy Locke states, "The old Negro had long become more of a myth than a man." 1 The Old Negro, in addition to his persecution, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy. He had been a stock figure perpetrated as an historical fiction, partly in innocent sentimentalism and partly in deliberate reactionism. So, for generations upon generations, in the minds of Americans and Great Britons, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being. He was something to be bandied about in argument, humiliated and kept in his place, condemned, helped up, worried over, patronized, and exterminated when necessary. While Locke, Jean Toomer's Cane, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, 2 are superb sources for understanding early twentieth-century Black America and its relationship to White America, these instant volumes provide a lens to eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Blacks which is fresh, bold, and exciting. It links us to the freedom fighters that we never knew but whose deeds created a fear in supporters of the institution of slavery that is resonant today. These voices and narrative stories in the two volumes are inextricably linked to earlier rebellion against oppressive forces worldwide. They were bound by blood and took inspiration from those who were condemned as "Black" and "unifiers." The case of Kimpa Vita and the Kingdom of Kongo in the 1600s informs us that European invaders/colonizers met with resistance on the African continent. Her story also underscores the leading role of women in resisting exploitation and colonization in Africa. Even though they tried to nail Kimpa Vita to the stake, her ghost haunted Europe for centuries to come. 3 In fact, less than 50 years after Kimpa's death by fire, Great Britain and Ireland were to have a queen whose origins on both sides of her family were deep in African ancestry -the Sousa and Vandal families. Queen Charlotte, who reigned from 1761 to 1818 as the wife of King George III, would have possessed a bloodline similar to Kimpa Vita's by virtue of her Sousa and Angola origin. (In Africa, the name Sousa

Journal of Social Issues, 1973

This paper presents an overview of the major intellectual forces affecting black scholars in the past and an outline of what will occur in the future. The role of the white researcher is discussed in relationship to the concept of scientific objectivity, with an illustration of how the very concepts employed by researchers ("integration" versus "liberation") channel their energies in one direction as opposed to another. Discussion of black behavior is grounded in a consideration of African behavior. Black Americans are viewed as fundamentally African, not European; the difference between these two provides the legitimate epistemological foundation for a distinctive Black Studies.