Folklore and Gay Literature: The Making of a Community
This essay is the third in our series, ‘Literature, Visual Imagery and Material Culture in American Studies’. The series seeks to situate literature, visual imagery and material culture at the heart of American studies, and will explore the varying ways in which written and non-written sources have been created, politicised, exploited, and celebrated by the diverse peoples of the United States and beyond. You can find out more information here.
Continue Reading‘Let Us March On’: Lee Friedlander’s Civil Rights Photography and the Revolutionary Politics of Childhood Publics
This essay is the second in our series, ‘Literature, Visual Imagery and Material Culture in American Studies’. The series seeks to situate literature, visual imagery and material culture at the heart of American studies, and will explore the varying ways in which written and non-written sources have been created, politicised, exploited, and celebrated by the diverse peoples of the United States and beyond. You can find out more information here.
Continue ReadingMexican Migration in the Fiction of William Attaway
This essay is the first in our series, ‘Literature, Visual Imagery and Material Culture in American Studies’. The series seeks to situate literature, visual imagery and material culture at the heart of American studies, and will explore the varying ways in which written and non-written sources have been created, politicised, exploited, and celebrated by the diverse peoples of the United States and beyond. You can find out more information here.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Lives of Frederick Douglass by Robert S. Levine
The Lives of Frederick Douglass is a fascinating collage of images that recreate various facets of the life of Frederick Douglass. Robert Levine demonstrates insight in delving into the complexity of racialised identities and the changing contours of self-definition in a collection that spans the most popular of Douglass’s writings, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), as well as his lesser known My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), along with letters, articles, and speeches.
Continue Reading‘[S]omething to feel about’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of The Last Slave
It is nearly a century since Zora Neale Hurston wrote Barracoon, an ethnography of Cudjo Lewis, the Alabama man believed to be the last living African enslaved in the United States. On May 8 Lewis’ story became widely available to the public for the first time. To mark this historic occasion, and to commemorate the life and works of Zora Neale Hurston – a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, African-American folklorist and ethnographer, and one of the most significant women writers of the twentieth century – USSO has commissioned a series of articles on any aspect of Hurston’s life, her art, her anthropology. This article is the second in the series.
Continue ReadingFrom Lemonade to the Louvre: Beyoncé and Jay Z’s Contestation of Whiteness and Showcasing of Black Excellence in Everything Is Love
On 16 June 2018, Beyoncé and her husband Jay Z released their latest and joint album, Everything Is Love, exclusively to Jay Z’s music streaming service, Tidal [1]. The album quickly became the subject of discussion among cultural commentators and mainstream media around the world, who largely saw it as the final instalment in a trilogy of albums released by the couple between 2016 and 2018 [2]. The first two instalments of this trilogy, Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade (2016) and Jay Z’s 4:44 (2017), were widely considered significant by critics as a result of their exploration of complex and nuanced issues of race, gender and identity within the historical and contemporary contexts of African American oppression [3]. Lemonade in particular was read as a culturally significant text by feminist scholars and cultural critics (Harris-Perry 2016 [4]; hooks 2016 [5]). In Everything Is Love Beyoncé and Jay Z continue to explore the complexities of these issues. The […]
Continue Reading‘Unbelievable Originality’: Lining Tracks and Performativity in Zora Neale Hurston’s Folk Concerts
It is nearly a century since Zora Neale Hurston wrote Barracoon, an ethnography of Cudjo Lewis, the Alabama man believed to be the last living African enslaved in the United States. On May 8 Lewis’ story became widely available to the public for the first time. To mark this historic occasion, and to commemorate the life and works of Zora Neale Hurston – a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, African-American folklorist and ethnographer, and one of the most significant women writers of the twentieth century – USSO has commissioned a series of articles on any aspect of Hurston’s life, her art, her anthropology. This article is the first in the series.
Continue ReadingFag Rag and Gay Radicalism in the 1970s
In the late 1960s and 1970s the radical gay press publications in the United States pushed the boundaries of acceptable journalism. Writing about controversial topics such as the age of consent, incest, bestiality and prostitution, the radical gay press not only horrified heterosexual society, but also alienated vast sections of the gay community.
Continue ReadingZora Neale Hurston: Life and Works
“Of all the millions transported from Africa to the Americas, only one man is left. The only man on earth who has in his heart the memory of his African home; the horrors of a slave raid; the barracoon; the Lenten tones of slavery; and who has 67 years of freedom in a foreign land behind him.”
Continue Reading“Cracking Eggs” in Diana Abu-Jaber’s ‘Life Without a Recipe’ (2016)
This is the third and last post in the series ‘I am Fatima: Negotiating Identities in Contemporary American-Muslim Women’s Writing’ guest-written by Hasnul Djohar. This short series explores American-Muslim women’s writing in the 21st Century, focusing on the negotiation of identities within the works of a specific author in each of the three posts. You can read the introduction to the series here, the first post ‘Women’s Emancipation in Mohja Kahf’s Emails from Scheherazad (2003)‘ here, and the second post ‘Folktales in Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home (2008)’ here. Diana Abu-Jaber is a Jordanian-American professor at Portland State University and the author of two memoirs: The Language of Baklava (2005) and Life without a Recipe (2016), and four novels: The Arabian Jazz (1993), Crescent (2003), Origin (2007), and Birds of Paradise (2011), which won the 2012 Arab-American National Book Award. Abu-Jaber’s memoir Life without a Recipe explores how she establishes her […]
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