African American Theatre and The S Street Salon
This article is adapted from a presentation given at the London Arts and Humanities Partnership postgraduate conference, 21st January 2022 During the Harlem Renaissance period, 1461 S Street, Washington D.C., the home of Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877-1966), represented an important hub of creativity and community for African American women writers. ‘Saturday nighters’ at the S Street Salon, as they came to be known, inspired and informed landmark literary works of the period. The salon established what scholar Treva B. Lindsey describes as ‘an African American women-centred counterpublic,’ also highlighting the under-acknowledged role that Black women in Washington D.C. played in energizing and shaping the Harlem Renaissance period as a whole.[i] While celebrated male writers of the early twentieth century such as W.E.B Du Bois and Countee Cullen certainly participated, these sessions represented a critical space where African American women playwrights such as Marita Bonner, Mary Burrill, and of course the host, Georgia Douglas […]
Continue ReadingThe People v. Ossian Sweet
In the first decades of the twentieth century, no northern city drew more southern migrants than Detroit, ‘City of Tomorrow’.[i] As one Free Press reporter noted in 1917, ‘Detroit’s unexampled prosperity is the lodestone that is attracting thousands of Negroes’.[ii] Between 1910 and 1920, Detroit’s Black population increased almost eightfold, and then threefold again between 1920 and 1930.[iii] Over the same two decades, however, the geographical area into which these migrants were herded, ‘a densely populated, sixty-square-block section of the city’s Lower East Side’ called Black Bottom, did not grow at all.[iv] Those who lived in this segregated slum were crowded into dilapidated housing, and they suffered the ill-health that such conditions typically produce. According to the same Free Press reporter, residences in Black Bottom were ‘unspeakably vile’.[v] While the wages new migrants earned at Ford and other factories were relatively high, few had the means to challenge the deepening […]
Continue ReadingBlack Girl Magic, Community and Celebration in Contemporary American Culture
This article is adapted from the keynote presentation given at BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 4th December 2021. The ‘Black Girl Magic’ movement is an opportunity both to celebrate what is means to be a Black woman and also challenge the oppressional practices and contemporary issues that affect them and their community. In her 2016 speech at Essence Festival, American filmmaker Ava DuVernay stated that “Black Girl Magic is a rallying call of recognition” and suggested that “embedded in the everyday is a magnificence that is so easy to miss because we’re so mired in the struggle and what society says we are”.[i] Black Girl Magic has created the opportunity to celebrate the heritage and achievements of Black women that are often ignored or rendered invisible within wider Western society. The movement first began on social media in 2013 when Twitter user CaShawn Thompson tweeted that “black girls are magic”. […]
Continue ReadingWilla’s Maternal Ethics of Care in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills
This article is adapted from a presentation given at BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 4th December 2021. Among the many subplots in Gloria Naylor’s 1985 novel Linden Hills is the story of Willa, who finds herself imprisoned in the basement of her house with her son because her husband, Luther Needed, is convinced the child is not his. After the child dies and she prepares his body for a funeral, she unearths the forgotten stories of the previous Mrs. Neededs. Portraying Willa’s mourning practice, based upon a responsiveness to the needs of others and an understanding of autonomy as a capacity to reshape and cultivate new modes of relations, or what I term her ‘maternal ethics of care,’ Naylor’s novel not only humanizes black lives. [i] It also rewrites our ‘genre-specific’ (i.e., Western bourgeoise) narrative of the human as a bio-economic subject, providing a way to unthink the ontological constraints that […]
Continue ReadingGatekeeping Country: An Ethnographic Study of Female Country Music Performers in the 21st Century
This article is adapted from a presentation given at BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 4th December 2021. In December 2021, I was delighted to have the opportunity to present a paper on my ongoing PhD research at the BAAS Postgraduate Symposium. Sitting at an intersection of ethnomusicology, American studies, and the sociology of music, my PhD is the first ethnomusicological study of female country performers in the 21st century. It examines how gender, or the perception of gender, has shifted in the genre, and how it has been influenced by socio-economic and technological advancements since 2000. In this short article, I will provide an overview of my approach and of the historical background and contemporary developments which have led me to embark on this important study. Gender roles in country music are long established, with ‘a rigid male/female binary’.[i] Gendered double standards are common, with male managers ignoring ‘indiscretions’ by their […]
Continue ReadingTowards an intersectional theory of news selection in US-based broadcast journalism
This article is adapted from a presentation given at BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 4th December 2021. This paper argues that by re-thinking ideas of how journalists decide what is and is not news through an intersectional lens, scholars will be better placed to evaluate journalism’s ability to accurately represent the communities it covers and serves, using US-based broadcast journalism as an example. Recent research indicates that American television newsrooms have grown more diverse in over the last three decades in respect to both race and gender identity, but broadcast journalism still faces growing criticism from anti-racist campaigners who argue that it typically fails to accurately represent and serve people of colour. Viewing journalism through an intersectional lens may then also allow us to evaluate and demonstrate the actual value of diversity initiatives, and begin to determine best practice for decolonising our newsrooms. News Values News selection is often described using a […]
Continue Reading‘Now You’re The Only One For Me Jolene’: Queer Reading and Forging Community in Country Music
When Nadine Hubbs wrote an additional verse to Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ with the lyric: ‘It’s true that my man found you first / You awakened such a thirst / Now you’re the only one for me, Jolene’, the song’s homoerotic and queer subtext became explicit. [i] This was one example of queer reading where ‘contrary use of what the dominant culture provides’ can be a way for an ‘oppressed group [to] cobble together its own culture’.[ii] Perhaps in no other place is this more necessary than the country music industry that continues to marginalise and exclude Black and LGBTQ+ artists. [iii] [iv] [v] Yet as the work of Nadine Hubbs and Francesca Royster remind us, it is important to separate country music as an aesthetic genre from the country music industry and avoid reinscribing homophobia and racism back into the genre, furthering these impulses within the industry and contributing to […]
Continue Reading“Your Name is Safe”: The Ladder as lesbian literary community
This article is adapted from a presentation given at BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 4th December 2021. In the second issue of the Ladder – the San Francisco-based lesbian literary magazine that circulated between 1956 and 1972 – Ann Ferguson published an article intended to reassure nervous subscribers, titled ‘Your Name is Safe.’ Ferguson acknowledged readers’ fears that “names on our mailing list may fall into the wrong hands.”[1] This was a euphemistic reference to the FBI, and lesbian subscribers had reason to be cautious. The first issue of the Ladder appeared three years after Dwight D. Eisenhower barred queer workers from federal employment, initiating a nationwide anti-gay witch hunt known as the Lavender Scare. Members of the Ladder’s parent organisation, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) had been under state surveillance since DOB’s founding in 1955. Accessing their FBI files in 1981, DOB founders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were surprised to […]
Continue ReadingCall for Reviewer: BAAS Postgraduate Symposium 2021
U.S. Studies Online are seeking conference reviewers for the upcoming PG BAAS Conference: Visibility / Invisibility: Representation and Community Formation in American Studies. USSO is the postgraduate and early-career website, network, and blog for the British Association for American Studies, committed to publishing new work in and related to the field. We are looking for a short, 700-1200 word review of this event. You can get a good idea of what this looks like from our most recent conference reviews, which can be found here: http://www.baas.ac.uk/usso/category/reviews/conference-reviews/ Promoting and recording the lively field of American Studies is a key role of USSO’s, as such we are always on the lookout for attendees of seminars, conferences, and all other related external events to review them for our website. Not only does this promote and celebrate the hard work of those organising the events, but it allows those who couldn’t attend to still benefit […]
Continue ReadingEyes on Events – Maria Manning & Janice Deitner, IAAS PG 2021
The next episode in our series Eyes On Events, this week we are interviewing Maria Manning and Janice Deitner about the upcoming Irish Association of American Studies Postgraduate Symposium -The (Hi)stories We Create: Narratives of Exceptionalism, Ideology, and Resilience. The event is taking place virtually via Zoom, on the 5th/6th November 2021. Any queries should be emailed to: postgrad@iaas.ie A link to the event can be found here: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/iaas-postgraduate-virtual-symposium-2021-the-histories-we-create-tickets-193549119627 If you are organising an upcoming or past event and would like to share your experience, please contact usso@baas.ac.uk
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