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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies
In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the Talented Tenth in an
influential essay of the same name. The concept exalted
college-educated Blacks who Du Bois believed could provide the race
with the guidance it needed to surmount slavery, segregation, and
oppression in America. Although Du Bois eventually reassessed this
idea, the rhetoric of the Talented Tenth resonated, still holding
sway over a hundred years later. In Rethinking Racial Uplift:
Rhetorics of Black Unity and Disunity in the Obama Era, author
Nigel I. Malcolm asserts that in the post-civil rights era, racial
uplift has been redefined not as Black public intellectuals lifting
the masses but as individuals securing advantage for themselves and
their children. Malcolm examines six best-selling books published
during Obama's presidency-including Randall Kennedy's Sellout, Bill
Cosby's and Alvin Poussaint's Come on People, and Ta-Nehisi
Coates's Between the World and Me-and critically analyzes their
rhetorics on Black unity, disunity, and the so-called "postracial"
era. Based on these writings and the work of political and social
scientists, Malcolm shows that a large, often-ignored, percentage
of Blacks no longer see their fate as connected with that of other
African Americans. While many Black intellectuals and activists
seek to provide a justification for Black solidarity, not all
agree. In Rethinking Racial Uplift, Malcolm takes contemporary
Black public intellectual discourse seriously and shows that
disunity among Blacks, a previously ignored topic, is worth
exploring.
Divided by the Word refutes the assumption that the entrenched ethnic divide between South Africa’s Zulus and Xhosas, a divide that turned deadly in the late 1980s, is elemental to both societies. Jochen Arndt reveals how the current distinction between the two groups emerged from a long and complex interplay of indigenous and foreign born actors, with often diverging ambitions and relationships to the world they shared and the languages they spoke.
The earliest roots of the divide lie in the eras of exploration and colonization, when European officials and naturalists classified South Africa’s indigenous population on the basis of skin color and language. Later, missionaries collaborated with African intermediaries to translate the Bible into the region’s vernaculars, artificially creating distinctions between Zulu and Xhosa speakers. By the twentieth century, these foreign players, along with African intellectuals, designed language-education programs that embedded the Zulu-Xhosa divide in South African consciousness.
Using archival sources from three continents written in multiple languages, Divided by the Word offers a refreshingly new appreciation for the deep historicity of language and ethnic identity in South Africa, while reconstructing the ways in which colonial forces generate and impose ethnic divides with long-lasting and lethal consequences for indigenous populations.
This book challenges long-accepted historical orthodoxy about
relations between the Spanish and the Indians in the borderlands
separating what are now Mexico and the United States. While most
scholars describe the decades after 1790 as a period of relative
peace between the occupying Spaniards and the Apaches, Mark
Santiago sees in the Mescalero Apache attacks on the Spanish
beginning in 1795 a sustained, widespread, and bloody conflict. He
argues that Commandant General Pedro de Nava's coordinated
campaigns against the Mescaleros were the culmination of the
Spanish military's efforts to contain Apache aggression,
constituting one of its largest and most sustained operations in
northern New Spain. A Bad Peace and a Good War examines the
antecedents, tactics, and consequences of the fighting. This
conflict occurred immediately after the Spanish military had
succeeded in making an uneasy peace with portions of all Apache
groups. The Mescaleros were the first to break the peace,
annihilating two Spanish patrols in August 1795. Galvanized by the
loss, Commandant General Nava struggled to determine the extent to
which Mescaleros residing in ""peace establishments"" outside
Spanish settlements near El Paso, San Elizario, and Presidio del
Norte were involved. Santiago looks at the impact of conflicting
Spanish military strategies and increasing demands for fiscal
efficiency as a result of Spain's imperial entanglements. He
examines Nava's yearly invasions of Mescalero territory, his
divide-and-rule policy using other Apaches to attack the
Mescaleros, and his deportation of prisoners from the frontier,
preventing the Mescaleros from redeeming their kin. Santiago
concludes that the consequences of this war were overwhelmingly
negative for Mescaleros and ambiguous for Spaniards. The war's
legacy of bitterness lasted far beyond the end of Spanish rule, and
the continued independence of so many Mescaleros and other Apaches
in their homeland proved the limits of Spanish military authority.
In the words of Viceroy Bernardo de Galvez, the Spaniards had
technically won a ""good war"" against the Mescaleros and went on
to manage a ""bad peace.
Since the early 1800s, the violent exploits of "El Indio" Rafael
through the settlements of northern New Spain have become the stuff
of myth and legend. For some, the fabled Apache was a hero, an
indigenous Robin Hood who fought oppressive Spaniards to help the
dispossessed and downtrodden. For others, he was little more than a
merciless killer. In Son of Vengeance, Bradley Folsom sets out to
find the real Rafael-to extract the true story from the scant
historical record and superabundance of speculation. What he
uncovers is that many of the legends about Rafael were true: he was
both daring and one of the most prolific serial killers in North
American history. Rafael was born into an Apache family, but from a
young age he was raised by Spanish chaplain Rafael Nevares, who
took his indigenous prodigy out on patrol with local soldiers and
taught him to speak Spanish and practice Catholicism. Rafael's
forced assimilation heightened the tension between his ancestry and
the Hispanic environment and spurred him to violence. Sifting
Spanish military and government documents, church records,
contemporary newspapers, and eyewitness accounts, Folsom reveals a
three-dimensional historical figure whose brutality was matched and
abetted by great ingenuity-and by a deep, long-standing hostility
between the Spanish and the Apaches of New Spain. The early years
of tutelage under Nevares also, perversely, contributed to Rafael's
brutal success. Rather than leading to a life of Christian piety
and Spanish loyalty, the knowledge Rafael gained from his mentor
served instead to help him evade his pursuers and the law, at least
for a time. In Son of Vengeance, we see the real El Indio Rafael
for the first time-the man behind the cultural myth, and the
historical forces and circumstances that framed and propelled his
feats of violence.
Communication plays a critical role in enhancing social, cultural,
and business relations. Research on media, language, and cultural
studies is fundamental in a globalized world because it illuminates
the experiences of various populations. There is a need to develop
effective communication strategies that will be able to address
both health and cultural issues globally. Dialectical Perspectives
on Media, Health, and Culture in Modern Africa is a collection of
innovative research on the impact of media and especially new media
on health and culture. While highlighting topics including civic
engagement, gender stereotypes, and interpersonal communication,
this book is ideally designed for university students,
multinational organizations, diplomats, expatriates, and
academicians seeking current research on how media, health, and
culture can be appropriated to overcome the challenges that plague
the world today.
Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 recodified the state's
long-standing racial hierarchy as a more rigid Black-white binary.
Then, Virginia officials asserted that no Virginia Indians could be
other than legally Black, given centuries of love and marriage
across color lines. How indigenous peoples of Virginia resisted
erasure and built their identities as Native Americans is the
powerful story this book tells. Spanning a century of fraught
history, Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia describes the
critical strategic work that tidewater Virginia Indians,
descendants of the seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan
chiefdom, undertook to sustain their Native identity in the face of
deep racial hostility from segregationist officials, politicians,
and institutions. Like other Southeastern Native groups living
under Jim Crow regimes, tidewater Native groups and individuals
fortified their communities by founding tribal organizations,
churches, and schools; they displayed their Indianness in public
performances; and they enlisted whites, including well-known
ethnographers, to help them argue for their Native distinctness.
Describing an arduous campaign marked by ingenuity, conviction, and
perseverance, Laura J. Feller shows how these tidewater Native
people drew on their shared histories as descendants of Powhatan
peoples, and how they strengthened their bonds through living and
marrying within clusters of Native Virginians, both on and off
reservation lands. She also finds that, by at times excluding
African Americans from Indian organizations and Native families,
Virginian Indians themselves reinforced racial segregation while
they built their own communities. Even as it paved the way to
tribal recognition in Virginia, the tidewater Natives' sustained
efforts chronicled in this book demonstrate the fluidity,
instability, and persistent destructive power of the construction
of race in America.
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