Search results
rather than Hunt’s work itself. 5 The chapter will bring together Hunt’s various forms of narrative – namely his mining treatises, poetry and folklore collection – to illustrate how particular rocks serve to distinguish ‘Celtic’ regions and nations from a more ‘sedimentary’ England, and to distinguish the ‘Celtic race’ from the more ‘civilised
In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin argues that the American dream is far from being a reality in part because there is much Americans do not wish to know about themselves. Given the current political climate in the United States, this idea seems just as timely as it did in the 1960s. Baldwin’s politics and thinking about race and religion are informed by an optimistic belief in the human capacity to love and change for the better, in contrast with Ta-Nehisi Coates, the heir apparent to Baldwin’s legacy. Considering current events, it seems particularly useful to turn back to The Fire Next Time. Not only does Baldwin provide a foundation for understanding racism in the United States, but more importantly, he provides some much-needed hope and guidance for the future. Baldwin discusses democracy as an act that must be realized, in part by coming to a greater understanding of race and religion as performative acts that have political consequences for all Americans. In this article, I examine the influence of pragmatism on Baldwin’s understanding of race and religion. By encouraging readers to acknowledge race and religion as political constructs, Baldwin highlights the inseparability of theory and practice that is a hallmark of both pragmatism and the realization of a democratic society. Furthermore, I argue that Baldwin’s politics provide a more useful framework than Coates’s for this particular historical moment because of Baldwin’s emphasis on change and evolving democracy.
4 Race, empire and The Swimming-Pool Library John McLeod In ‘Saved by Art’, Alan Hollinghurst shapes a compelling and considered appreciation of the novels of Ronald Firbank. He juxtaposes their baroque, attenuated plots, treasured inconsequentiality and exquisite bon mots with the expansive and forensic writing of Marcel Proust and Henry James. ‘Firbank achieved his highly complex originality’, Hollinghurst writes, ‘not by expansion but by a drastic compression: instead of putting more and more in, he left almost everything out’.1 William Beckwith, the narrator
diversity of races coming together, anxieties of ‘conversion’, and ‘post-race’ erasures of difference, True Blood champions a multiplicity of ‘racial types’ and critiques those who are intolerant of difference, whether of race or of sexual orientation. Figure 12.1. Promotional image of Sookie
15 ‘A race to leave alone’: Kipling and the Jews Bryan Cheyette When first by Eden Tree The Four Great Rivers ran, To each was appointed a Man Her Prince and Ruler to be. But after this was ordained (The ancient legends tell), There came dark Israel, For whom no River remained. (Rudyard Kipling, ‘Song of the Fifth River’, 1906) Israel is a race to leave alone. It abets disorder. (Kipling, Something of Myself, 1937) Kipling knew something of the things which are underneath, and of the things which are beyond the frontier. (T.S. Eliot, 1941)1 Introduction: the
3 ‘Confusion turns to fear’ – race in the 1940s and 1950s In 1956, J. W. Milam told Time magazine that ‘Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government’.1 Milam and those who shared his views used violence and intimidation to prevent the enfranchisement of black citizens; he was one of the two men who murdered fourteen-year-old Emmet Till in 1955 after Till interacted with a white woman.2 Milam was not necessarily representative of white Americans at the time, but his assertion makes overt a recurring anxiety in national
7 ‘We are a species that fears itself most of all’ – race in the 1960s and 1970s During the 1940s and 1950s, as previously established, people of colour were underrepresented in comics. In the 1970s, publishers, who had once readily evoked racist stereotypes, were now cautious of causing offence but uncertain as to how to reach new, and retain old, markets. They thus tended either to approach the question of race through allegory or simply to omit people of colour from their works. While many comics publishers were broadly opposed to overt racism, they
Delamotte examines the representation of race in Pauline Hopkins‘s Hagar‘s Daughter (1901/2). She argues that the novel provides a revision of the Female Gothic and also exploits narrative devices familiar from detective fiction. The solving of the ‘mystery’ that lies at the heart of the novel is one which explodes the ideological ‘mystery’, and the national crime of slavery, which separates Black and White, masculine and feminine, home and state, and African American and Euro-American families.
“Interventions” was the organizing term for the presentations of three Baldwin scholars at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago in January of 2019. Baldwin’s travels and activities in spaces not traditionally associated with him, including the U.S. South and West, represent interventions of a quite literal type, while his aesthetic and critical encounters with these and other cultures, including twenty-first-century contexts of racial, and racist, affect—as in the case of Raoul Peck’s 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro—provide opportunities to reconsider his work as it contributes to new thinking about race, space, property, citizenship, and aesthetics.