African and African American Studies

Chapter 8 of "The Cool Kawaii". Abstract: Like cool and kawaii, dandyism uses ironical forms of resistance to fight bourgeois society up to the point that it produces a cultural situation that comes close to New World Modernity. Cornel West’s culture of alienation, combined with an eccentric pride derived from a past of oppression and the belief in a “decadent American civilization at the end of the twentieth century”, was anticipated by Baudelaire who wrote that “dandyism is the last spark of heroism within an age of decadence”

The pervasive contention in scholarship on contemporary Zimbabwe is that the quintessence of the post-independence Zimbabwean experience consists in unchecked political dictatorship and unprecedented economic regression. This contention derives from the fact that with the advent of independence in 1980, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) regime that replaced the Rhodesia Front (RF) in the corridors of power embarked on a campaign to achieve political hegemony through the entrenchment of patronage, violence and corruption. However, this is not all that there is to the post-independence Zimbabwean narrative. As this article makes clear, the post-independence Zimbabwean experience also speaks to a pro-democracy struggle in which the authors of the Zimbabwean debacle are confronted on various platforms, particularly the protest songs of musicians such as Thomas Mapfumo, Hosiah Chipanga and Leonard Zhakata. Since the late 1980s, these musicians have been relentless in their criticism of the ZANU-PF establishment, its strong-arm tactics and self-image as the indispensable guardian of Zimbabwean interests. This article maintains that through euphemism, ridicule and overt criticism, Mapfumo, Chipanga and Zhakata forge an aesthetic of resistance that exposes and contests the institutionalisation of patronage, violence and corruption in post-independence Zimbabwe.

Convocation Address at Bethel University, August 29, 2016 about recent troubles in Minnesota, particularly the shooting of Philando Castille, and our responsibility as followers of the Gospel. There is an audio link also available. After you click the link, it's the first one in the queue; fast-forward to 15:00:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/2016-2017-chapel-college-arts/id1148681753?mt=10

June 6, 2021 The genocide in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region has been going on for seven months now. The UN is doing nothing and the slaughter continues. To understand events there one must examine the context in which they were created.
The past 500 years of colonialism and even world politics today are very easy to understand. Euro-American colonialists are inherently white supremacist to give them a unifying bond, uniformly amoral and totally capitalist. Over time they realized its easier to get the “colored savages” to fight each other rather than waste good white boys on the effort so they became masters at dividing indigenous groups within the Americas, Asia and Africa, setting them upon each other, then rolling in later on to “clean up the mess” and totally take over while congratulating themselves on their kindness.
The First Italo-Ethiopian War 1895 – 1896 in which the Italians claimed the entire country of Ethiopia as their own was bad enough, but then the Second Italo-Ethiopian War from 1935 – 1937 saw 200,000 Italian soldiers invade proving what a totally ineffectual entity the League of Nations (1920 - 1946) truly was, precisely the same as the modern so-called United Nations.
What the foreign invaders were really after was a solid base in East Afrika, and specifically the Ethiopian Highlands, the largest continuous elevated area on the continent, sometimes called the “Roof of Africa.” The highlands mountain areas extend from central and northern Ethiopia north into Eritrea. Those are deliciously cool and beautiful lands far better suited to the more delicate European constitutions than the deserts, Savannah and tropics found elsewhere in Afrika along with all manner of fearsome wildlife including those horrid malaria carrying mosquitos.
Jumping forward in time a bit we find the USA with an urgent “existential need” of some kind to rule the entire world forever that looks upon the ancient land of Ethiopia with distain. Myopically addicted to fragmenting and dominating all nations of the earth in perpetuity, the clever but not wise directors of American foreign policies have decreed Ethiopia needs a good war to break it down some more, as if the droughts and endemic poverty brought about by predatory Euro-American aggression in Afrika weren’t enough.
So, the ever-so-clever but avaricious American foreign policy makers locked the former dominant political party called the TPLN located in the northern ancient holy Tigray region into power for an overly long time while feeding their corruption, and at the same time fed anger and resentment towards them from all directions, Eritrea to the north, and the other Ethiopian political parties to the south.
- This short brutally honest satire is an alternative introduction to the much more detailed and analytic article I posted on Academia.edu yesterday titled: Made in Amerika - Genocide in Ethiopia - A four-part article series. That the UN does nothing is not surprising, however it's astonishing to me that so few people seem to even care about another genocide. Is only 20,000 innocents slaughtered too insignificant to call your Congressional representatives and demand the UN send in peacekeepers?

The issues of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ have been with us since the founding of our august republic. Unfortunately, they are perniciously still with us today. They were the reason we fought the Civil War (1861-1865) and have mired our history throughout. There is no period in our history, the history of the United States, when ‘race’ has not been significant in some profound way. For many reasons too, the American Civil War is still with us today. It is still with us in every racial conflict we have had since. It is still being fought, perhaps unknowingly by many African-Americans, who have experienced ‘structural violence’ in some way, whether in terms of wanting better education, better housing, or a better job, or even rights for a normal life. And it is still with us today when African-Americans are targeted unfairly by law enforcement.

The mission and goal of Africana Studies is the development of cultural grounding, academic excellence, and social responsibility. Building the Basics: A Handbook for Developing Academic Excellence in Africana Studies focuses on the goal of developing students academically. Throughout students’ academic career, they will take a variety of courses and learn the course content. Many students enter higher education at different levels of preparation. Regardless of content or preparation, students should always build and develop the basics.

Building the Basics provides students with strategies, tips, and approaches to maximize learning. The handbook discusses the basics of working at home, critical thinking and questioning, skilled and critical reading, scholarly writing, working collaboratively in groups, and studying for quizzes and examines. Each chapter begins with guiding questions and key terms to prime students for what is to come in the chapter. In addition, each chapter concludes with activities for students. Building the Basics offers pragmatic strategies and approaches to master the fundamentals every student needs to enhance student learning in pursuit of academic excellence. 

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This book presents a provocatively new interpretation of one of New Orleans' most enigmatic traditions, the Mardi Gras Indians. By interpreting the tradition in an Atlantic context, Dewulf traces the " black Indians " back to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and its war dance known as sangamento. He shows that good warriors in the Kongo kingdom were per definition also good dancers, masters of a technique of dodging, spinning and leaping that was crucial in local warfare. Enslaved Kongolese brought the rhythm, dancing moves and feathered headwear of sangamentos to the Americas in performances that came to be known as " Kongo dances. " By comparing Kongo dances on the African island of São Tomé with those in Latin America, the Caribbean and Louisiana, Dewulf demonstrates that the dances on New Orleans' Congo Square were part of a much broader Kongolese performance tradition. He links that to Afro-Catholic mutual-aid societies that honored their elected community leaders or " kings " with Kongo dances. While the public rituals of these brotherhoods originally thrived in the context of Catholic procession culture around Epiphany and Corpus Christi, they transitioned to carnival as a result of growing orthodoxy within the Church. Dewulf's groundbreaking research suggests a much greater impact of Kongolese traditions and of popular Catholicism on the development of African-American cultural heritage and identity. His conclusions force us to radically rethink the traditional narrative on the Mardi Gras Indians, the kings of Zulu and the origins of black participation in Mardi Gras celebrations.

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What is at stake, here, is the quest for equilibrium versus disequilibrium in a society that marginalizes human beings into substandard racial groups. Identifying and counteracting the biopsychosocial and behavioral consequences of actual or perceived racism, gendered racism, and racial battle fatigue is a premier challenge of the twenty-first century. The term “racial microaggressions” was introduced in the 1970s to help psychiatrists and psychologists understand the enormity and complications of the subtle but constant racial blows faced by African Americans. Today, racial microaggressions continue to contribute to the negative experiences of African American boys and men in schools, at work, and in society. This chapter will focus on the definition, identification, and long-term effects of racial microaggressions and the resultant racial battle fatigue in anti-black misandric environments.

During the global BlackLivesMatter protests of 2020, many called upon the United States to finally face its painful past. Tim Gruenewald's new book is an in-depth investigation of how that past is currently remembered at the national museums in Washington, DC. Curating America's Painful Past reveals how the tragic past is either minimized or framed in a way that does not threaten dominant national ideologies. Gruenewald analyzes the National Museum of American History (NMAH), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).

The NMAH, the nation's most popular history museum, serves as the benchmark for the imagination of US history and identity. The USHMM opened in 1993 as the United States' official Holocaust memorial and stands adjacent to the National Mall. Gruenewald makes a persuasive case that the USHMM established a successful blueprint for narrating horrific and traumatic histories. Curating America's Painful Past contrasts these two museums to ask why America's painful memories were largely absent from the memorial landscape of the National Mall and argues that social injustices in the present cannot be addressed until the nation's painful past is fully acknowledged and remembered.

It was only with the opening of the NMAAHC in 2016 that a detailed account of atrocities committed against African Americans appeared on the National Mall. Gruenewald focuses on the museum's narrative structure in the context of national discourse to provide a critical reading of the museum. When the NMAI opened in 2004, it presented for the first time a detailed history from a Native American perspective that sought to undo conventional museum narratives. However, criticism led to more traditional exhibitions and national focus. Nevertheless, the museum still marginalizes memories of the vast numbers of Indigenous victims to European colonization and to US expansion. In a final chapter, Gruenewald offers a thought experiment, imagining a memory site like the recently opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Montgomery, Alabama) situated on the National Mall so the reader can assess how profound an effect projects of national memory can have on facing the past as a matter of present justice.

Please find the preface and chapter 1 attached.
Please see here for ordering the book:
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In two studies, this thesis depicts the relationship between minority group status in the United States, perceived discrimination, and coping with stress. Past literature on coping and its types – problem-focused versus emotion-focused – is inconsistent in terms of differences between minority status groups and majority groups. It remains unknown whether or why Black Americans and lesbian or gay Americans may demonstrate coping patterns that differ from White Americans and heterosexual Americans, respectively. What is altogether absent from the literature is the possible mediating factor of perceived discrimination experienced by these minority groups. That is, differences in internal, stable coping processes that manage stress may have been molded by one’s experience with discrimination. Study 1 examines the relationship between race (Black versus White) and coping, mediated by perceived discrimination. Study 2 examines the relationship between sexual orientation (lesbian or gay versus heterosexual) and coping, mediated by perceived discrimination. Both studies confirm the thesis that minority group members exhibit maladaptive, emotion-focused coping more than majority group
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members – but that this difference is explained by the minority group members’ perceived discrimination. Historical and political relevance, social implications, and possible limitations in design and interpretation are discussed.

Why is support for marijuana legalization among African Americans notably modest given that such a policy would drastically reduce the number of African Americans arrested annually for nonviolent drug offenses? In this article I assess whether the urban frustration argument is an adequate explanation for Blacks’ generally low levels of support for marijuana legalization. I analyzed merged Supplemental Homicide Report and Drug Arrest data and General Social Survey data to determine the extent to which race-specific murder victimization rates and race-specific drug arrest rates in U.S. cities are predictive of support for marijuana legalization among Blacks and Whites between 1990 and 2000. Findings indicate that Blacks’ level of support for marijuana legalization is greatest in those cities with the highest Black drug arrest rates. Consequently, these findings provide no support for the urban frustration argument.

The choice for a particular narrative architecture has been a major concern for the literary writer and to the African American literary writer, the use of African oral literary elements has been a resourceful option. The present study hypothesizes that August Wilson uses the dilemma tale as a narrative architecture in his The Piano Lesson play and argues that this narrative style helps Wilson to frame the dialogic surrounding what legacy is to the African American. The study reveals that tradition is problematic for the African American to conceive. The conclusion is that the dilemma tale type as a narrative style helps to understand that tradition or, legacy is a complex phenomenon for the African American to fathom.

Commentators have suggested that Nella Larsen’s Passing rejects the view that there is some sort of black essence. I want to challenge this reading. Since Irene is the most vocal advocate of an essence in respect to which all blacks are homogeneous, much of the evidence for thinking that Passing is skeptical about such an essence amounts to evidence for not trusting Irene’s judgment in general, and for not trusting her judgment on this matter in particular. My arguments, then, will often involve explaining why Passing is not leading the reader to mistrust Irene’s judgment on this matter. Now, what exactly is meant by a black essence is, explicitly in this book, mysterious. Nevertheless, I hope to shed some light on how Passing understands the nature of this something, this je ne sais quoi, peculiar to blacks. My tentative interpretation is that this something is an intangible and indefinite manner of being that is neither a conscious choice nor an inborn fact of biology, but rather a given of culture. I take this, in effect, blackness manner to be, so Passing seems to indicate, a function of one’s belief that one is black in a milieu of pervasive anti-black prejudice. Passing, as I see it, thus has something to offer those of us today who struggle to adjudicate between a pull towards essentialism and a pull towards constructionism. What Passing emphasizes in this discussion is the possibility that, in addition to biological and societal influences, one’s mind state is a crucial ingredient to one’s racial identity.

As an advocate of the dictum which states that a literary work is always part and parcel of the cultural background from which it was created and as part of my reading and teaching Elizabethan drama at tertiary level, I find the personalities of Shylock, Iago and Barabbas most fascinating and challenging but well situated and analyzed within the background of Renaissance studies. However, teaching Renaissance Literature and literary concepts in the 21 st century raises pertinent questions as to the validity of application of today's standards of morality to dramatic works produced from a Renaissance perspective with its attendant principles and concepts. I have, therefore, always been intrigued about an analysis of these characters from modern day concepts of good and evil. The culmination of my urge is this paper titled: The Jew as racial "Villain": A historico-generic interpretation of Shylock, Iago and Barabbas as victims of circumstances in Elizabethan drama." The paper attempts to look at these characters from a modern perspective and to see if they remain as villains in our minds today as they were conceived of in Elizabethan parlance. My findings are that the characters, if analyzed from modern day perspectives appear as complex characters whose actions are misunderstood and thus they can be seen simply as victims of racial circumstances whose punishment is unjustified. Quote:Fear is the most crippling of all the emotions and there are many things in life and in the world to make us afraid. We lack integrity because we are afraid to be ourselves Harold Winestone; The Jew is himself and refuses to be any other

In 1972 Guyanese historian and activist Walter Rodney (1942-1980) published his famous work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. 50 years later, his views on history and black power are still important, and can be fruitfully read in the 21st century as well. A collection of contributions discussing Rodney's works, his political and intellectual legacy, and the value of his thoughts for modern societies shall therefore be published in 2022.

Historical criticism attempts to read texts in their original situations, informed by literary and cultural conventions reconstructed from compara- ble texts and artifacts. African American interpretation extends this approach to questions about race and social location for the ancient text, its reception history, and its modern readers. It arose as a corrective and alternative to white supremacist use of the Bible in moral and political arguments regarding race, civil rights, and social justice.

Lauryn Hill was twenty-three years old when her 1998 solo debut album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, burst upon the global music market and swiftly became one of the most acclaimed and popular hip hop albums in history. Heralded by a hip hop beat, crooning love songs and rally cries, beaming black pride, and clamoring womanist wisdom, Hill scaled the treacherous summit of global pop stardom and was hailed as genius and prophetess. However, within four years Hill fell from the favor of much of the mainstream market. To have many pundits tell it, she veered across the thin line that supposedly separates genius from madness and prophecy from lunacy. This essay explores how various publics and pundits impute madness to Lauryn Hill and--most centrally--how Hill herself produces, mobilizes, and brandishes madness for radical art-making and self-making. Toward these aims, I closely examine her 2002 Unplugged 2.0 live album, as well as other performances, interviews, and media accounts. Her voice tuned to a mad pitch, Hill speaks truth to power and issues a sound that sometimes booms, sometimes sputters. Ultimately, this meditation upon Hill's life and work yields rich insights on black womanhood, performance, protest, and madness in American popular culture and beyond.

African Americans, who are descendants of slaves forcibly brought from Africa to America hundreds of years ago, and contemporary voluntary African migrants to the USA do not form a single “black community”. This statement contradicts the claims of many Black Nationalist movements from the nineteenth century onwards, which argued that all black people are “brothers and sisters” because they share common spirituality and have a common cause that demands their joint action all around the world. However, based on evidence collected in seven states in 2013 – 2015, African Americans and contemporary African migrants appear to have different historic memories of pre-slave trade and pre-colonial Africa. Furthermore, the two groups identify different events as key to its history. Many members of both groups do not feel that they share a common “black history”. To some extent, the idea of a shared history acts to unite Africans and African Americans as victims of long-lasting white domination. However, in the final analysis, the collective historic memory of both groups works more to separate them from each other by generating and supporting contradictory or even negative images of mutual perception. In general, the relations between African Americans and recent African migrants are characterized by simultaneous mutual attraction and repulsion of two magnets. While they understand that among all ethno-racial communities in the country, they, as well as African Caribbeans, are the closest to each other, myriads of differences cause mutual repulsion. This attraction-repulsion effect is, in significant part, due to the differences in historic memory of African Americans and recent African migrants in the USA.

In David Bindman, Suzanne Blier, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art, vol. 6 of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., The Image of the Black in Western Art (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017)

In this moment, we, the daughters of the African diaspora, Chamurro African American, Hawaiian African American, African American Samoan, African American Kiribati and African American move from being peoples characterized by loss and dispersion to people defined by convening our own reunions.

Through multi-media, harmful and imprecise depictions of women of African descent are rapidly crisscrossing the planet, shaping popular perceptions of their intellectual capacity in their absence. These stereotypes are simply imprecise. You see, for quite some time women of African descent have been frequently misrepresented in music and culture as being irrational, shallow, and unkind, especially when we are challenged by each other in heated debates. In fact, one of the most insidious circulated and internalized stereotypes is that women of African descent are given to same sex rivalry along the lines of hue, color, mixed race parentage, socio-economic status and education status, mental and personality disorders. Yet, here we are in the US territory of Guam to affirm that Black Lives Matter around the globe.

We submit our lives to explore the complexity of our myriad identities and connections as practitioner-scholars, whose lives have been inscribed and are read for the tensions surrounding post-colonialism. Therefore, it is a transgressive, political, and pedagogical act for women of the African diaspora to be visible as we invite each other to sharpen, to borrow from Anna Julia Cooper, “in the quiet, undisputed dignity of our womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage” in intellectual spaces and conference settings such as the joint Pacific History Association (PHA) conference and International Council of Traditional Music (ICTM) symposium.

In the ethnomusicology of Africana music and sound, the discourse has been conceptually organized around diaspora or the forced migration of people of African descent, with a focus on their routes across one body of water, commonly referred to in the African diaspora literature as the Black Atlantic.  This Black Atlantic emphasis further isolates our already scattered communities of African descent that have extended beyond the Atlantic into the Pacific through both voluntary and forced dispersions. This imagined isolation and distance works to disjoint the body politic of Africana people who are catching hell around the globe along gender, sexuality, and hued lines. And thus, these fragmented communities are less likely to implicate the hegemonic powers that be, which oppress women as well...

To begin with, I do not use the phrase “race traitor” in its negative or pejorative sense, but instead I use it as an emblem of a certain kind of selfless artistic heroism that honors an individual white filmmaker’s sacrifice of immediate commercial interests in the effort to shift narrative focus from whites to African-Americans within a film. In the analysis that follows I am primarily concerned with white filmmakers who have taken it upon themselves, so to speak, to explore universal humanist themes by shifting narrative focus from whites to African-Americans.  This deliberate choice that goes beyond the commercial considerations of the film reveals that the auteur of the film is using the work as a means of personal expression and not just as a means of generic entertainment.  Moreover, in my analysis of the form of the films we will see that how these filmmakers break familiar and conventionalized film grammar is how they actually establish their authorial voice and express themselves within the medium of film beyond just the content and the shift of narrative focus from whites to African-Americans.  Two films from two White filmmakers will be the major focus of this study: John Cassavetes' SHADOWS (1959) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's WHITY (1970).  I will also discuss perhaps the first genuine race traitor filmmaker in American Film History, King Vidor and his film HALLELUJAH, as well as, a more recent race traitor filmmaker, Lance Hammer and his film BALLAST (2008).  Yet the overall aim here is not to separate out friend from foe in regards to racial sympathies throughout the canon of highly regarded auteurs, but rather to examine the strength of particular auteurs to surmount certain ideological, political and financial obstacles as they made the narrative shift of racial focus.  This is a chapter from my book: Slave Cinema: The Crisis of the African-American in Film 2nd Ed.

In 1877, the African American musical ensemble known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers traveled to Germany to raise money for their university.  The choir’s ten-month tour provided German listeners with one of their first significant and sustained encounters with African Americans and African American culture in the nineteenth century. As listeners throughout Germany heard the ensemble perform, they began to debate the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ musical, cultural, and ethnic origins. At the heart of their growing ethnomusicological and anthropological interest in the Jubilee Singers’ music lied the question of whether or not African Americans were fulfilling the powerful promise of the civilizing mission: were they proof that people of the black diaspora were capable of accepting “Western” art music and cultural values? This article illustrates how African American music contributed to global conversations on the civilizing mission in the nineteenth century.

Most sociological research on racial discrimination has had an “inter-racial” focus. That is, researchers have been principally concerned with the disparate treatment that people of color receive relative to Whites in different social contexts. However, recent theoretical work emerging from legal studies sug- gests that an alternative conception of “intra-racial” discrimination exists that extends beyond colorism. This theory of intra-racial discrimination stipulates that many organizations in the “post-racial” era desire some measure of racial diversity. Yet, in their efforts to achieve this racial diversity they screen people of color based on their degree of racial salience. Whether a given person of color is hired, promoted, or in the case of college admissions, accepted, is a function of whether or not Whites within the organization consider them racially palatable, or not overly concerned with race. This creates an incentive for people of color to work their identity to allay any concerns among Whites that they may be too racially salient. In this paper I critically review this work and attempt to further buttress its claims by highlighting how this process has clear historical precedent. I conclude by showing how the audit method can be used to empirically examine this practice contemporarily.

Incarcerated by the invisible but omnipresent prison of racism, the African-American people can hardly get the scope of self-realization. They are always "represented" as inferior, barbaric, uncivilized by the White America which is characterized by its superior opposites.

Somalia is generally thought of as a homogenous society, with a common Arabic ancestry, a shared culture of nomadism and one Somali mother tongue. This study challenges this myth. Using the Jareer/Bantu as a case study, the book shows how the Negroid physical features of this ethnic group has become the basis for ethnic marginalization, stigma, social exclusion and apartheid in Somalia. The book is another contribution to the recent deconstruction of the perceived Somali homogeneity and self-same assertions. It argues that the Somalis, just like most societies, employ multiple levels of social and ethnic distinctions, one of which is the Jareer versus Jileec divide. Dr. Eno successfully portrays another Somalia, in which a mythical homogeneity masks the oppression and social exclusion suffered by some ethnic groups in the country

Published in the exhibition catalogue "Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens," published in 2009. This chapter examines practices by photographers from the Stieglitz circle to the Harlem Renaissance that demonstrate the range of interest in African objects and the diversity of approaches taken in translating them into Modernist photographic expressions. These photographs illustrate what Roland Barthes calls the rhetoric of the image, the embedded messages and significations that inflect the way we read and understand photographs. Also demonstrated in these examples is the manner in which issues about race, gender, identity, and difference were inextricably interwoven into the many faces of American Modernism, ultimately contributing to perceptions of and shifting attitudes toward African art.

Modern racial ideologies are inseparable from the production of hierarchical differences giving shape to what Frantz Fanon characterized as a "division of the species". The process has historically accompanied European imperial and colonial expansion and the conceptualization of whiteness as a self-conscious project of global supremacy along political, economic, and epistemic lines. Drawing on long-standing images casting blackness or darkness as the opposite of morality, progress, and civilization, the globalization of White supremacy sought legitimacy in definitions of humanity that defined the Black as its inhuman other. Violent Black enslavement and the Middle Passage turned the division of the species into a principle of organization, unity, and value for White/Human civil society.

Personal narrative and storytelling have always been key features of Critical Race Theory, that body of legal scholarship focused on the role that structural and institutional racism play in the alienation of persons of color from the protections of the legal liberal order.  As Critical Race Theory has expanded from legal theory into philosophy, it has carried with it an openness to interdisciplinary approaches to grappling with the societal problems of race and racism, including using personal narrative, fiction and literature to provide insight into the human cost of these phenomena.  Michael Boylan explains the usefulness of fiction to philosophy in his theory of “fictive, narrative philosophy.”  Boylan’s Georgia is an instantiation of this theory.  Through telling the tale of a racialized male trying to survive in the oppressively racially stratified American landscape of 20th century America, Georgia operates within the critical race theory tradition and at the same time explores philosophical questions such as the nature of racialized identity and the effects of the social construction of race and institutionalized, systemic racism on the quality of life of the racialized.

Siraaj 'l-Ikhwaan

The Guiding Light of the Brethren Concerning the Most Important Things That Are Needed in This Age

by SHEHU Uthman Dan Fodio


Section One: An Explanation of the Distinction Between the Muslims and the Disbelievers.

Section Two: An Explanation of the Distinction Between the Scholars of the Religion, the People of the Reminder, the Helpers of the Merciful and the Evil Scholars, the People of Heedlessness, the Helpers of Satan.

Section Three: On the Legal Judgment of Making the Jihaad Against the People Who Only Make the Verbal Pronouncement of the Words of the Shahaada Out of Custom But Who Do Not Do Any of the Act of the Behavior of Islam.

Section Four: On the Legal Judgment of Making the Jihaad Against the People Who Only Make the Verbal Pronouncement of the Words of the Shahaada and Do Acts of Islam However They Intermix This With Acts of Disbelief.

Section Five: On the Legal Judgment of Making the Jihaad Against the Scholars, Students and Common People Who Help the Disbelievers.

Section Six: On the Legal Judgment of Fighting Muslims Who Remain By Themselves Who Have Not Entered Under the Oath of Allegiance of Any of the Amirs of the Muslims.

Section Seven: On the Legal Judgment of Fighting the Warmongers Among the Muslims.

Section Eight: On the Legal Judgment of Fighting the Oppressors Among the Rulers of the Muslims.

Section Nine: What is Obligatory Upon the Amirs of the Islam in Establishing the Legal And Religious Rites of Islam, Taking Care of the Welfare of the Countries and Transforming Those Things Which Are Reprehensible in the Countries

Section Ten: An Explanation of the Reality of the Permissible, the Forbidden and the Dubious: and the Sources of the Permissible.

The goal of this study is to determine the applicability of pluralist, elitist, plural-elitist, Marxist class analysis and protest theory for explaining African-American political participation from 1940 to 2000. The significance of this study lay in the need to associate African-American politics with a major theoretical model. For theory has a great effect on the society at large, as it can influence public policy and the perceptions that policy makers have of target populations.

A sociohistorical qualitative analysis was conducted by analyzing African-American political participation from the perspective of the tenets of each of the five competing models. A time series analysis was conducted to determine the impact of
violent and nonviolent protests, the percentage of Democrats in congress, the percentage of African- Americans in the total voter population, the percentage of former Asian and African colonies gaining independence, the percentage of African-American in congress and the African-American poverty rate on the enactment of civil and social rights legislation from 1940 to 2000.

The qualitative findings showed that pluralist theory had the greatest explanatory power when confined to the nature of state and
group interaction, and the efficacy of democracy, while the other theories had some limited utility. In the areas of economics Marxist theory was of limited utility, whereas the other theories lacked
significant explanatory power. Protest theory was at its strongest when explaining social change and social movements with regards to African-American political participation during the time period under investigation.

None of the theories provided and adequate explanation of race relations or succinctly delineated the contours of the African-American historical political participation. The time series analysis found nonviolent protest, violent protest and Asian and African decolonization to have the greatest impact on the enactment of civil and social rights policies and showed that the control of congress for the majority of the period by the democratic party was not statistically nor substantively significant in accounting for the development of civil and social rights policies.

The article interrogates why African American Philosophy matters. The notion of the ‘Black philosopher’ continues to be an enigma. African descendants are not generally associated with the revered location and status of ‘the philosopher’ and with doing philosophy.

Thus, in a celebration of the sustained work of the Black philosopher-practitioner, who continues to suffer a fate of deliberate academic ‘invisibility’ and historical erasure, this article supports the expansion of philosophical categories, philosophical conversation and philosophical inclusivity.

This work contends that the significance of African American philosophy can be mined in understanding how a synthesis of Foucault’s thesis of “subjugated knowledge” and Black venerated philosopher Lewis Gordon’s explanation of “subverted realization’ (Hartman, 1992; Gordon, 2014), is built-in to ‘white’ modern thought, and thus helps locate the problem interrogated here.

Foucault is important, because he sheds light on how certain discourses are routinely disqualified by dominant ones. This illumination matches well with what Karenga refers to as the ‘white stream’ in the racialized hierarchy of disciplines and the academy, wherein what is reported as a ‘mainstream’ is really a white-catered system.

This overcurrent of the ‘white (main) stream’ of philosophy, by its deliberate omission and exclusion of African American philosophy disqualifies it.

The principle of communality is denoted as the ability of the originally and essentially communal worldview, consciousness, behavioral pattern, socio-political norms and relations to spread on all the levels of societal complexity including, though in modified or sometimes even corrupted form, sociologically supra- and non-communal. As a pivotal socio-cultural foundation, the principle of communality has a direct impact on all subsystems of the African society at all the levels of its being throughout its whole history. Precisely this is what can explain to a large extent the originality of African culture. In the embodiment of the principle of communality it can also make sense to seek the roots of specificity of the historical process in sub-Saharan Africa.

In his first book. Race, Rhetoric and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, Adam Banks evaluates America's technology sector and its perpetuadon of racial inequality. Building on some of those themes, he now gives us a backstory of sorts in Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Mulümedia Age. Banks develops and synthesizes a series of argimients surrounding African Americans' pardcipadon in, and resistance to. Western controlling technology narradves. Emplojáng Hip Hop as metaphor and DJs as muld-generadonal storytellers, he guides readers through a text structured as musical elements, beginning with the SCRATCH.