In the United States miscegenation is not merely a subject of literature and popular culture. It is in many ways the foundation of contemporary imaginary community. The Romance of Race examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of our modern American multiculturalism. The national identity of the United States was transformed between 1880 and 1930 due to mass immigration, imperial expansion, the rise of Jim Crow, and the beginning of the suffrage movement. A generation of women writers and reformers-particularly women of color-contributed to these debates by imagining new national narratives that put minorities at the center of American identity. Jane Addams, Pauline Hopkins, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), Maria Cristina Mena, and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) embraced the images of the United States-and increasingly the world-as an interracial nuclear family. They also reframed public debates through narratives depicting interracial encounters as longstanding, unacknowledged liaisons between white men and racialized women that produced an incestuous, mixed-race nation. By mobilizing the sexual taboos of incest and miscegenation, these women writers created political allegories of kinship and community. Through their criticisms of the nation's history of exploitation and colonization, they also imagined a more inclusive future. As Jolie A. Sheffer identifies the contemporary template for American multiculturalism in the works of turn-of-the century minority writers, she uncovers a much more radical history than has previously been considered.

Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 examines early modern English actors' impersonations of black Africans. Those blackface performances established dynamic theatrical conventions that were repeated from play to play, plot to plot, congealing over time and contributing to English audiences' construction of racial difference. Vaughan discusses non-canonical plays, grouping of scenes, and characters that highlight the most important conventions - appearance, linguistic tropes, speech patterns, plot situations, the use of asides and soliloquies, and other dramatic techniques - that shaped the ways black characters were 'read' by white English audiences. In plays attended by thousands of English men and women from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, including Titus Andronicus, Othello and Oroonoko, blackface was a polyphonic signifier that disseminated distorted and contradictory, yet compelling, images of black Africans during the period in which England became increasingly involved in the African slave trade.

This collection of essays examines the relationship of women of color's armed resistance to their aesthetic struggles, tension and transformation in feminist practice, and the impact of the gender-based design of state-sponsored terror, human rights debates, and the economic development for women of color. Athey brings together new scholarship testing the possibility of transnational feminist action and theorizing historical and contemporary aspects of resistance for women of color. Included are essays by and about women of Africa, India, and the Americas, including women of African American, Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Yaqui origins. Essays examine regional and historical contexts to demonstrate the central role of women of color in armed resistance struggle and in sustaining cultures of resistance, despite the fact that the agency, speech, and writing of women of color have received the least attention in studies of resistance. Contributors challenge thinking across many disciplines: sociology, literary and cultural studies, history, political science, and education. Resistance struggles examined include women in armed struggle for national self-determination, political and economic struggle for human rights and against state-sponsored repression; and women sustaining political and cultural resistance against specific religious, feminist, or nationalist doctrines, and against the repression of multiple forms of political, sexual, intellectual, and artistic expression.

The more citizens trust their government, the better democracy functions. However, African Americans have long suffered from the lack of equal protection by their government, and the racial discrimination they have faced breaks down their trust in democracy. Rather than promoting democracy, the United States government has, from its inception, racially discriminated against African American citizens and other racial groups, denying them equal access to citizenship and to protection of the law. Civil rights violations by ordinary citizens have also tainted social relationships between racial groups-social relationships that should be meaningful for enhancing relations between citizens and the government at large. Thus, trust and democracy do not function in American politics the way they should, in part because trust is not color blind. Based on the premise that racial discrimination breaks down trust in a democracy, Trust in Black America examines the effect of race on African Americans' lives. Shayla Nunnally analyzes public opinion data from two national surveys to provide an updated and contemporary analysis of African Americans' political socialization, and to explore how African Americans learn about race. She argues that the uncertainty, risk, and unfairness of institutionalized racial discrimination has led African Americans to have a fundamentally different understanding of American race relations, so much so that distrust has been the basis for which race relations have been understood by African Americans. Nunnally empirically demonstrates that race and racial discrimination have broken down trust in American democracy.

"Informative . . . Ross has opened some important doors"
--"American Historical Review"

"a]offers an interesting recitation of the on-again-off-againparticipation of blacks in the early years of pro football."
"--The Baltimore Sun"

"An important analysis for all who care about the African American experience in professional sports. Significant not only for the history it tells, but for the questions it raises about race relations in football as an industry and as a United States institution ."
--Michael E. Lomax

"Charles Ross' stellar research clearly demonstrates that the African American struggle for merit and equality not only extends to the playing field but has, in fact, long defined the game of professional football. A must read for students of the game, from casual gridiron enthusiasts to scholars alike."
--C. Keith Harrison

Outside the Lines traces how sports laid a foundation for social change long before the judicial system formally recognized the inequalities of racial separation. Integrating sports teams to include white and black athletes alike, the National Football League served as a microcosmic fishbowl of the highs and lows, the trials and triumphs, of racial integration.

Watching a football game on a Sunday evening, most sports fans do not realize the profound impact the National Football League had on the civil rights movement. Similarly, in a sport where seven out of ten players are black, few are fully aware of the history and contributions of their athletic forebears. Among the touchdowns and tackles lies a rich history of African American life and the struggle to achieve equal rights.

Although the Supreme Court did not reversetheir 1896 decision of "separate but equal" in the "Plessy v Ferguson" case until more than fifty years later, sports laid a foundation for social change long before our judicial system formally recognized the inequalities of racial separation. Integrating sports teams to include white and black athletes alike, the National Football League served as a microcosmic fishbowl of the highs and lows, the trials and triumphs, of racial integration.

In this chronicle of black NFL athletes, Charles K. Ross has given us the story of the Jackie Robinsons of American football.

Why do students who belong to racial minority groups-particularly black students-fall short in school performance? This book provides a comprehensive and critical examination of black identity and its implications for black academic achievement and intellectualism. No other group of students has been more studied, more misunderstood, and more maligned than African American students. The racial gap between White and African American students does exist: a difference of roughly 20 percent in college graduation rates has persisted for more than the past two decades; and since 1988, the racial gap on the reading and mathematics sections of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) has increased from 189 points to 201 points. What are the true sources of these differences? In this book, psychology professor and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Black Psychology Kevin Cokley, PhD, delves into and challenges the dominant narrative regarding black student achievement by examining the themes of black identity, the role of self-esteem, the hurdles that result in academic difficulties, and the root sources of academic motivation. He proposes a bold alternate narrative that uses black identity as the theoretical framework to examine factors in academic achievement and challenge the widely accepted notion of black anti-intellectualism. This book will be valuable to all educators, especially those at the high school through undergraduate college/university level, as well as counselors associated with academic and community institutions, social service providers, policy makers, clergy and lay staff within the faith-based community, and parents. Uses African American identity as the framework to understand academic achievement and to expose the biases of "deficit thinking" that presumes that under-achievement among black students is related to deficiencies in motivation, intelligence, culture, or socialization Presents information and viewpoints informed by empirical research in a manner that is accessible to general readers and non-specialists Uses personal anecdotes and examples from popular culture to connect with readers and better illustrate the validity of the author's strengths-based approach rather than the conventional deficit-based approach Challenges the idea that black students are inherently anti-intellectual and do not value school as much as their non-black peers

View the Table of Contents. Read the Foreword.

"The thirteen essays in this important collection examine grass-roots struggles for racial justice throughout the United States from 1940-1980...Read together, these essays remind us that activism changes people as much as society."
--"Journal of American History"

"The essays in "Groundwork" assert individually and collectively that at the root of any national movement for change are local activists working from the bottom up to change their communities first, then the world. This excellent and invigorating collection is crucial reading in an election year."
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and author of "America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans"

"A major contribution to the ever expanding historical literature of the modern African American freedom struggle. This book brings together outstanding examples of detailed and thoughtful studies of northern as well as southern local movements."
--Clayborne Carson, Professor of History and Director, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, Stanford University

"Brilliantly conveys the vibrancy and creativity of community-based movements that transformed America's racial and civic landscape in the decades following World War II."
--Patricia Sullivan, author of "Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years"

"Required reading for anyone who wants to understand what the Civil Rights Movement actually was - a national movement conceived and executed by local people in cities and towns across this country. They are the people who made the movement that madeMartin Luther King, Jr.--not the other way around."
--Julian Bond, Professor of History, University of Virginia, American University, and Chairman of the NAACP

"This work demonstrates again and again how local movements complicate the standard civil rights narrative of nonviolence, black power, busing, and the nature of leadership."
--Tracy E. K'Meyer, Associate Professor US History, University of Louisville

"These essays enrich understanding of the valiant struggles to make real the promise of a more democratic US."
--"CHOICE," highly recommended

Over the last several years, the traditional narrative of the civil rights movement as largely a southern phenomenon, organized primarily by male leaders, that roughly began with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and ended with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has been complicated by studies that root the movement in smaller communities across the country. These local movements had varying agendas and organizational development, geared to the particular circumstances, resources, and regions in which they operated. Local civil rights activists frequently worked in tandem with the national civil rights movement but often functioned autonomously from--and sometimes even at odds with--the national movement.

Together, the pathbreaking essays in Groundwork teach us that local civil rights activity was a vibrant component of the larger civil rights movement, and contributed greatly to its national successes. Individually, the pieces offer dramatic new insights about the civil rights movement, such as the fact that a militant black youth organization in Milwaukee was led by a white Catholic priest and in Cambridge, Maryland, by amiddle-aged black woman; that a group of middle-class, professional black women spearheaded Jackson, Mississippi's movement for racial justice and made possible the continuation of the Freedom Rides, and that, despite protests from national headquarters, the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality staged a dramatic act of civil disobedience at the 1964 World's Fair in New York.

No previous volume has enabled readers to examine several different local movements together, and in so doing, Groundwork forges a far more comprehensive vision of the black freedom movement.

From the time of his birth in California in 1972 to the present, author Bryant G. Parrish has experienced an eventful and colorful life. In this memoir, he narrates the many details of an existence marked by racial prejudice and discrimination.

"In The Last African Amerik.k.k.an Slave, i/>, Parrish shares events from his childhood when he was the only black child in his California neighborhood, coming of age in his sexuality, being charged with his first felony at age fourteen, earning money both legally and illegally, and spending time in prison.

But more than a recollection of the highlights of his life, "The Last African Amerik.k.k.an Slave" addresses how Parrish believes the Ku Klux Klan, to this day, keeps a stronghold over the country by carrying out white power propaganda through the American judicial system. Parrish contends that everyone in that system- from the court appointed public defenders to the judges to the Department of Corrections-carries out an agenda against people of color, and he offers his firsthand experiences as examples.

In the 1930s, John Steinbeck published "In Dubious Battle." a novel based on union organizing and anti-union sentiment in the rich central valleys of California. He followed that with a series of articles in The San Francisco News about poverty and starvation among the migrants in California. In 1939, he published "The Grapesof Wrath," which became an instant American classic and the premier moral vision of the 1930s. The themes were: homelessness; joblessness; poverty; starvation and the greed of the banks. Now, 73 years later, it is all back. Lost jobs, and lost homes by the hundreds of thousands, poverty, starvation and the greed of the banks. Steinbeck's vision of the 1930s is with us again,

This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series (general editor: Victor H. Mair). Conversant in critical and creative modes of thought, this book examines the uses of translation in Asian and Anglophone literatures to bridge discontinuous subjectivities in Eurasian transnational identities and translingual hybridizations of literary Modernism. Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations focuses on the roles of mysticism and language in Dictee's poetic deconstruction of empire, engaging metaphysical issues salient in the history of translation studies to describe how Theresa Cha and four other authors--Sui Sin Far, Chuang Hua, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Virginia Woolf--used figurative and actual translations to bridge discontinuous subjectivities. The author Karen Lee's explorations of linguistic politics and poetics in this eclectic group of writers concentrates on the play of innovative language deployed to negotiate divided or multiple consciousness. Over the past decade, emerging scholarship on transnationalism and writers of Asian heritage has focused primarily on diasporic Asian literary production on American soil. For instance, Rachel Lee's seminal publication, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (1999), examines how Asian American feminist literary criticism is shaped by global-local influences in the United States. Additionally, Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (2006), edited by Shirley Lim, et al., explores the transnational aspects of Asian literature in America, analyzing a discursive globalized imaginary as American writers Asian of heritage move within and across national boundaries. Following Lim's anthology, Lan Dong's Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine (2010) concerns the representations of women transposed from Asian oral traditions of "women warriors" to the United States. However, less scholarship on the Anglophone literatures of Asia and the Americas has focused on Asian writers within broader comparative frameworks of global perspectives outside Asian American literature and in comparison to Asian British literature, or aside from the parameters of specific Asia-to-America tropes such as the aforementioned "woman warrior," as in Sheng-mei Ma's Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998), or Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa's Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001). Uniquely situated among these discussions, Lee's book extends current lines of inquiry by including the oeuvres of diasporic Asian writers in Asia, America, and abroad, presenting their works within the contexts of transnationalism via the dual lenses of translation and translingual migration. As new scholarship, this book foregrounds literary transnationalism and translingual migrations in a context of East to West as a study of representative Anglophone literatures in the Asian diaspora. Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations is highly relevant to university teaching audiences in postcolonial literature, Asian American studies, Anglophone writers of the Asian diaspora, cultural feminism, Eurasian studies, and translation studies.

A comprehensive bibliographic survey of the West Indian presence in the United States, this book covers over 500 articles, books, and other studies on the West Indian immigrant experience. The primary goal is to cite titles examining both the impact of the immigration experience on West Indians and the way West Indians have changed the nature of many communities in the United States. The work outlines the long history in the United States economic life, education, ethnicity and race relations, family relationships, health care, patterns of immigration and settlement, and political expression.

Drawing on books, scholarly journal articles, dissertations, research reports, and significant articles from general interest magazines and newspapers, the book's goal is to lead interested students to material that examines how the United States does and does not meet the hopes and dreams of Caribbean immigrants of African descent. Providing bibliographic leads for exploring new avenues of research on West Indian Americans, the book will be especially valuable for those seeking to expand their knowledge base on this major component of our country's urban landscape.

After Haiti's 2010 earthquake, over half of U.S. households donated to thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in that country. Yet we continue to hear stories of misery from Haiti. Why have NGOs failed at their mission?
Set in Haiti during the 2004 coup and aftermath and enhanced by research conducted after the 2010 earthquake, "Killing with Kindness" analyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient NGOs and their relationships with local communities. Written like a detective story, the book offers rich enthnographic comparisons of two Haitian women's NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention, one with public funding (including USAID), the other with private European NGO partners. Mark Schuller looks at participation and autonomy, analyzing donor policies that inhibit these goals. He focuses on NGOs' roles as intermediaries in "gluing" the contemporary world system together and shows how power works within the aid system as these intermediaries impose interpretations of unclear mandates down the chain--a process Schuller calls "trickle-down imperialism."

Black Soundscapes White Stages explores the role of sound in understanding the African Diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic, from the City of Light to the islands of the French Antilles. From the writings of European travelers in the seventeenth century to short-wave radio transmissions in the early twentieth century, Edwin C. Hill Jr. uses music, folk song, film, and poetry to listen for the tragic cri negre. Building a conceptualization of black Atlantic sound inspired by Frantz Fanon's pioneering work on colonial speech and desire, Hill contends that sound constitutes a terrain of contestation, both violent and pleasurable, where colonial and anti-colonial ideas about race and gender are critically imagined, inscribed, explored, and resisted. In the process, this book explores the dreams and realizations of black diasporic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, and it poses questions about their legacies for us today. In the process, thee dreams and realities of Black Atlantic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, such as the poetry of Leon-Gontran Damas-a founder of the Negritude movement-and Josephine Baker's performance in the 1935 film Princesse Tam Tam. As the first in Johns Hopkins' new series on the African Diaspora, this book offers new insight into the legacies of these exceptional artists and their global influence.

Is jazz a universal idiom or is it an African-American art form? Although whites have been playing jazz almost since it first developed, the history of jazz has been forged by a series of African-American artists whose styles caught the interest of their musical generation--masters such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker. Whether or not white musicians deserve their secondary status in jazz history, one thing is clear: developments in jazz have been a result of black people's search for a meaningful identity as Americans and members of the African diaspora. Blacks are not alone in being deeply affected by these shifts in African-American racial attitudes and cultural strategies. Historically in closer contact with blacks than nearly any other group of white Americans, white jazz musicians have also felt these shifts. More importantly, their careers and musical interests have been deeply affected by them. The author, an active participant in the jazz world as composer, performer, and author of several books on jazz and Latin music, hopes that this book will encourage jazz lovers to take a rhetoric-free look at the charged issue of race as has affected the world of jazz.

A work about the formulation of identity in the face of racial difference, the book considers topics such as the promotion of black Southern culture and inner-city styles like rhythm and blues and rap as a means of achieving black racial solidarity. It discusses the body of music fostered by an identification to Africa, the conversion of black jazz musicians to Islam and other Eastern religions, and the impact of a jazz community united by heroin use. White jazz musicians who identify with black culture in an unsettling form by speaking black dialect and calling themselves African-American is examined, as is the assimilation of jazz into the wider American culture.