The Historical Progression of African Americans, Annotated Bibliography Example

Balfour, L. (2010). Representative Women: Slavery, Citizenship, and Feminist Theory in Du Bois’s “Damnation of Women” in: Rabaka, R. ed., W.E.B. Du Bois. Surrey: Ashgate. (Peer Reviewed).

In this essay the author contends that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simple acknowledgement of the centrality of race with a national cultural location, toward explicit examination of the legacies of slavery. Drawing upon W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Damnation of Women,” Balfour looks at significant transformations to Americans of African American women’s sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath. Following Mary Dietz, the author situates the study at the interstices of political philosophy where feminism meets classical contract theory. For Balfour, the work confronts traditional dilemmas stemming from disjuncture between ‘rights’ and maternal care. Premise of the critique is founded on three principle arguments: 1) Du Bois builds from the history of black women’s sexual exploitation an expansive notion of sexual freedom; 2) celebration of the economic independence achieved by African American women, making it a model, rather than a cautionary tale, for other women; and 3) advocates inclusion of African American women as full citizens.

The primacy of lexicons of power within “the languages of citizenship” stands at the core of the work, and serves as a vehicle for unpacking intertwined definitions of race and gender, and one could effectively argue the preemptive measures of class as they were mobilized to demarcate black women as ineligible for equitable protections and rights assertions under early U.S. law. Balfour’s reach in explication of Du Bois’s essay is extensive and reveals some of the more subtle tensions at play during the Civil War era. Citing Du Bois’s vacillation between admiration of the resistance of enslaved and poor women and praise of the delicacy and beauty of “a finer type of black woman,” the analysis captures the radicalism of his impulse.

Bosma, U. Giusti-Cordero, A. and Mintz, S. (2010). Sugarlandia Revisited: Sugar and Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 1800-1940 (International Studies in Social History). Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books. (Peer Reviewed).

A compendium on the preeminence of the trade in addictive products derived from the plantation system(s) of the Americas, and pointedly sugar, as the single most valuable bulk commodity traded internationally prior the intransience of oil as the world’s prime resource, the book examines the development of the sugar industry from sixteenth to the eighteenth century with reflection to the present. A central aspect of cane sugar production, the trade in African slave labor and its acceleration in tropical climates in the New World forges a comprehensive insight into the force of King Sugar in the lives of former Africans and their descendants in the United States, and elsewhere in the Atlantic Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil.

An acquired taste in Europe, the export of sugar soon surpassed cacao and tobacco, and created a long-term trade triangle of dependency on slave labor. The manufacturing of rum from sugar furthered this economic possibility for plantation owners, and everything ‘sweet’ became power.  According to the author, sugar’s importance as a labor and capital intensive commodity and its intimate relationship with addiction, colonialism and totalizing violence offers explanation for social and political ills of the past, and the foreseeable problems still present within plantation resource exchange in the current global economy.

Chambers, J. (2006). Equal in Every Way: African Americans, Consumption and Materialism from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement. Advertising & Society Review, 7 (1). New York: The Advertising Educational Foundation, Inc.

A survey on the encounter of African Americans with material goods stretching from the end of the Civil War through the end of World War II, the article examines late capitalist retrospect through the lens of Ebony magazine in a case study toward interpretation of the use of material possessions in crafting tactics of economic and legal equity pre and post the civil rights movement. At the heart of the argument is analysis of the distinction between materialism and a work centric life dedicated to consumption; where goods serve as a vehicle of exhibition and forthright assertion of equality in the everyday life of citizenship. The teleology of goods, then, is a priori to the instantiations of political and organized social activism, and offers much in terms of understanding the management of material objects as symbols longer than all other forms of sovereign challenge.

Chambers looks to storytelling, a foundational device in transmission of African American culture since the days of the plantation – where calls for freedom rang through the fields and forewarned of danger to slaves passing through on the Underground Railroad. Translation of the efficacy of this rich tradition in spoken word soon found new life in aesthetic expression, as definitive elements within material culture where mapped out by African Americans as their own terrain of emancipated difference. Anecdotal stories of the Broadway dandy of the North embellish Chamber’s discussion, and articulate the convergence of the accoutrements of style, and other cultural formations that were to come in the Jazz Era. So dear was the possibility of fashion clothing, for instance, that they would extend themselves at merchants offering a system of credit or barter. Not surprisingly, into the present, African Americans, Chambers argues, are still dedicated brand dandies, with equal affection for chain stores offering multiple purchasing options and services.

Knadler, S. (2002). Sweetback Style: Wallace Thurman and a Queer Harlem Renaissance. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 48 (4), 899-936

During the 1920s, New York City’s neighborhood’s Harlem and Greenwich Village saw a dual modern renaissance, where African American gay and lesbians arose as a recognizable category of social difference. From a racial perspective argues Knadler, the two figures of masculine efficacy—the sweetback and the pansy—stood in as diametric complements of each other as the jazz era approached, and the contemporaneous ‘open secret’ of liberty and everyday life. The literary work of Wallace Thurman drew followers through dedicated public discourse on the ‘Negro Artist’ as urban dandies. Marked by ambiguity not afforded to the distinct classification of the ‘drag queen,’ the image of the sweetback bodied forth as a gendered and sexualized hustler, representative of the new American youth culture emerging in the context of New York’s bohemian enclaves. Interested in the subculture generated largely out of the creative efforts of literary and other artists in a time when black manhood was finding its resource as a site of libertine expression during this time period, the article furthers this discussion and cites that Thurman’s work was not necessarily a radical alternative to heterosexuality that could not be assimilated, but a critical factor in catalyzing black manhood as effective, secure and mainstream even in the context of this new self-authorizing black subjectivity deeply contested as African American’s made their claim in  bourgeois and working-class society.

Manring, M.(1995). Aunt Jemima Explained: the old south, the absent mistress, and the slave in a box. Southern Cultures, 2 (1), 19-44.

The author looks at the evolution of the maple syrup brand image of Aunt Jemima since the product’s introduction in the 1890s. According to Manring, the commercial image of Aunt Jemima as an advertising symbol of a pancake mix, has literally manipulated popular images of blacks in the United States. Reifying the cultural thrust of discriminatory society of the plantation South he argues that the impact of the product extended far beyond a folk image toward crafting an eternal, servant as commodity image within the landscape of American domesticity. Indeed, Aunt Jemima filled with syrup, dressed in a domestic servant outfit replete with kerchief scarf, reminds us of an era when African American women worked in the kitchens, the nanny quarters, and the fields of middle-class and upper-class white women almost exclusively.

Manring’s argument goes so far to say that after the 19^th century, when white housewives of the South often no longer employee domestic staff, that the story of Aunt Jemima extrapolated that hierarchy of imaginary racialized difference from actual economic and social mores; replaced by a relatively inexpensive, sweet and always available grocery product.  Where Manring is perhaps correct, is the function of labor depicted quite narrowly through the product at time of introduction to the market. What is perhaps incorrect is his static interpretation of the life of the product image in the hearts and minds of consumers as American culture transformed post the Civil Rights era. For many consumers raised on the product as children since the 1970s, what could be taken for granted as an obviously maligned 19th-century slave mammy image by a former generation of concerned consumer-citizens, would become merely a grandmother figure associated with alternative hold over tropes stereotyping Aunt Jemima as the purveyor of the ‘sweet’ taste of our weekly church pancake breakfast.

Parfait, C. (2009). The Publication of W. E. B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Rewriting History, 12.

Historiography as an activity amongst African American historians in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century was far more than a proposition to an era. Historians such as W. E. B. Du Bois proffered new strategies as public intellectuals with quite evident stakes in the politics of Reconstruction, and the social formations that were about to come. Du Bois’ early approach to the discussion on the episteme of Black Reconstruction (1935) as a spiritual actualization of the Souls of Black Folk and the legal right to both ethnic and economic authority put the race question into focus in a way in which it had never been considered. Du Bois’ career as a writer stands as a polestar to the African American experience – generating seminal counter polemics to each stereotypical distortion.

If African American men were staking their claim in response to uncertain status as independent citizens African American women challenged the dependent status of the designation “free woman” and reconstructed through insistence to privilege of citizenship and independence. Despite the fact that Antebellum notions of free woman did not apply to AfricanAmerican women during Reconstruction, Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction articulates this radical possibility throughout the discussion.

As Parfait points out, the greatest names—including, and perhaps first and foremost, Du Bois—were naturally more inclined to hold interest in prestige publication of their work with a trade publisher or a university press. Indeed, Du Bois made his claim emphatically and prophetically in a letter to Alfred Harcourt of Harcourt, Brace & Howe Publisher says Parfait, in that the content of Black Reconstruction places African American contribution at the center of Reconstruction of the South, and the efforts of those former slaves as they “accumulated land and property; became effective voters and law makers; gave their efforts to reunite a riven Republic; helped to establish a new social legislation in the South; helped to bring democracy there for white men as well as black, and helped establish the public schools in a region that never before had had any effective system of popular education.”

O’Barr, W. M. (2010). Multiculturalism in the Marketplace: Targeting Latinas, African-American Women, and Gay Consumers. Advertising & Society Review 7(4). DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2000.0101

New fuel for the fodder by William M. O’Barr, this article applies his seminal theories on advertising and American society to the History of the field of mass advertising in the latter half of the 19th century. An interesting approach to class, gender and race studies, the discussion looks at how salesmen directed their pitches to individuals or small groups of consumers, and the shift from universal ‘one size fits all’ pitches to the development of niche marketing into the present. Market mix is also reviewed, and the proliferation of interactive media and its participation in the larger ideological trends forming through dialogue of grass roots folk culture with the corporate information industries in a new model of advertising production. Keenly vested in interchanges taking place in and between new market economies, O’Barr’s query forces us to think out of the box, even when there is a census or survey requesting if we are minority, female or gay.

Pateman, C. and Mills, C.W. (2007). The Contract and Domination. Cambridge, UK: Polity. (Peer Reviewed).

Contemporary contract philosophy is well served by the work in that it offers bold challenge to concepts within the teleologies of thought fundamental to Western political formations, and specifically the location of justice within the late-capitalist state. Based on the earlier works of the authors, Carole Pateman and Charles Mills’ earlier books, The Sexual Contract (1988) and The Racial Contract (1997), the collaborative effort continues the critical confrontation with the early renderings of democratic freedom presented in classical, eighteenth century political treatises of philosophers such as Locke, Mills, and Rousseau. An interdisciplinary alternative to the dry composition of classicist error, the excavation of an explicitly “white” male social compact as it pertains to civil society and especially the elements of common law civil law articulations bespeaks of a vision of radical revisionist tendency toward rectification of the continuance of systems of male and racial domination within the very framework of sovereign ‘right.’