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- Volume 27, Issue 3, 2008
European Journal of American Culture - Volume 27, Issue 3, 2008
Volume 27, Issue 3, 2008
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Rewriting memory: ideology of difference in the desire and demand for whiteness
More LessThis article argues that reclamation of the memory of Blacks is the starting point in the liberation of the race. The more Africa is made to remember her place as The Wretched of the Earth, the more she is interpellated to stay in that differentiated space. That space ensures that the African is policed to follow the West. The African's sense of how he is remembered and known in that unlovable memory creates a desire for Whiteness which in/forms the (unconscious) cultural logic of the African. This is a fatal desire though. What this article uniquely asserts is that the notions of development, democracy, modernisation and globalisation reinforce this fatal desire. The article insists that trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism were offshoots of a spirit that continues to differentiate, police and dominate the African trapped into unthinking a destiny other than Whiteness/the West. It posits difference as an ideology and a function of power. However, the onus and power to liberate Africa remain with Africans themselves more than anyone else. The article finally calls for an overthrow of a Structuralism where differentiation of the Black race finds its hotbed. It declares the seemingly innocent discourses of tourism as racist and cautions the postcolonial novel to be wary of partaking in the imprisoning of African liberty. It indeed reproves the well-meaning African writers who fight to liberate Africa while continuing to interpellate her as The Wretched of the Earth. The argument rests on the belief that most of the solutions proffered to heal the wounds of slavery and colonialism tackle consequences more than the cause unless we earnestly rewrite the memory of humanity through a liberation education.
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Love as reclamation in Toni Morrison's African American rhetoric
More LessThere is a long tradition of using the lovehate dichotomy as a rhetorical trope in the African American struggle for emancipation. In an interview with Toni Morrison (The Nation, 24 May 2004) Cornel West points out the peculiar function of African American love as a catalyst for change which takes on subversive status rather than being just a gesture. When, throughout history, a people has been systematically taught to hate themselves (Morrison and West 2004), love the opposite of hatred becomes the most effective means of resistance and of claiming ownership of one's history. Toni Morrison's mission as a writer is to write for and from within the African American community. Whilst one of her major concerns is to rewrite African American history, she takes over this tradition of resistance through love and uses it to forge a writing technique through which she dissents from what she calls the whiteness of the American literary canon. Morrison develops a rhetoric of negatives in which mechanisms of dysfunctional love are turned into political strategies for reclaiming African American history. This article will argue that love is a central trope in Morrison's shaping of an alternative African American, non-WASP narrative rhetoric and will analyse the evolution of this rhetoric in her novels Beloved, Jazz, Paradise and Love.
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Between Exodus and Egypt: Malcolm X, Islam, and the natural religion of the oppressed
More LessMalcolm X's life and career offers a window through which to analyze the interactions between race and religion in the post-slavery experience of African Americans. This essay traces the trajectory of Malcolm's two religious conversions, and his evolving sense that Christianity is the backbone of white supremacy and western imperialism, where Islam is the natural religion of the oppressed. This journey, I suggest, features the eclipse of the Exodus motif that has been so central to much black religiosity since slavery to make way for the centralization of the Egypt metaphor; thus identifications with Jews are displaced by associations with black and Muslim diasporas. However, exploration of this movement from Exodus to Egypt illuminates not a smooth transition but rather a complex and ongoing interaction between the two motifs, interactions that question the notion that any singular religious identity offers an authentic experience for oppressed peoples. I suggest that Malcolm X's negotiation between what emerge as the competing modalities of race, religion and nation offer an insight into those forces that shape expressions of black religion today.
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Changing psychiatric perception of African Americans with psychosis
More LessIn the years before the American Civil War, medical observers deemed psychosis to be rare in slaves, but common in free blacks of the North. After 1865, the prevailing psychiatric perception of African Americans was that psychosis was increasing at an alarming rate. Reasons for the increasing rates were initially ascribed to the effects of emancipation, but as researchers reported rates of psychosis to be on the rise through the first half of the 20th century, the stress of internal migration and social adversity were increasingly invoked as explanatory factors. After 1970, however, attitudes influencing the psychiatric assessment of African Americans changed profoundly. Psychiatrists no longer reported differential rates of psychosis by ethno-racial category. Observed racial differences were attributed, instead, to misdiagnosis with clinician bias emerging as the principal cause. Hence, in the new way of thinking, African Americans were over-diagnosed with psychosis, thereby creating a false impression of high rates. These changes in attitude and perception have taken place in the context of historical trends that have increasingly viewed African Americans as equal to rather than inferior to whites. Links from past to present will uncover racial stereotypes that continue to influence the psychiatric diagnosis and treatment of African Americans today.
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Reviews
Authors: Hazel Hutchison and Richard W IrelandThe Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume Three, Prose Writing 18601920, Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.) (2005) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xi + 813 pp., ISBN 9780521301077 (hbk) 85.00
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Legal Theory, and Judicial Restraint, Frederic R. Kellogg (2007) New York: Cambridge University Press, xiii + 206 pp., ISBN-13: 9780521866507 (hbk) 45.00
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 42 (2023)
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Volume 41 (2022)
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Volume 40 (2021)
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Volume 39 (2020)
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Volume 38 (2019)
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Volume 37 (2018)
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Volume 36 (2017)
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Volume 35 (2016)
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Volume 34 (2015)
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Volume 33 (2014)
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Volume 32 (2013)
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Volume 31 (2012)
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Volume 30 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 29 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 28 (2009)
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Volume 27 (2008)
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Volume 26 (2007 - 2008)
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Volume 25 (2005 - 2007)
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Volume 24 (2005)
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Volume 23 (2004)
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Volume 22 (2003)
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Volume 21 (2002)
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Volume 20 (2001 - 2002)