1,722,369 research outputs found
"Half Bacchanalian, half devout": white intellectuals, black folk culture, and the "negro problem"
No full textIn the wake of the Civil War, white Americans generated an unprecedented amount of writing about the songs, stories, and “superstitions” of black southerners. This interest was not purely esthetic. In the late nineteenth century, folk culture was commonly conceptualized as a gauge of racial character and potential; in consequence, discourse on black folklore was entangled with the debate on the social and political place of African Americans. A number of scholars have noted the ways in which white supremacy was bulwarked by the work of folklorists, ethnologists, local color writers, and other intellectuals. The variety and contingency of this discourse on race, however, has sometimes been obscured, giving the impression of a static and monolithic racial ideology. Ideas about black folk culture shifted over time, shaped by a range of racial attitudes encompassing a liberal emphasis on uplift, a conservative commitment to stasis, and a radical insistence on regression. Moreover, the racial politics of intellectuals determined not only the ways in which they represented black folk culture, but also the particular cultural forms about which they wrote. Thus, while the Christian content of the “spirituals” suited the agenda of liberal reformers, the supposedly sinister figure of the conjure doctor complemented radical discourse on dangerous racial degeneration
Blue gums, black bodies, white supremacy: narratives of racial contagion in the late nineteenth century
No full textThis article explores the sudden spate of stories concerning the so-called "blue-gum negro" (the Blue Gum) that circulated in the national press from the late 1880s to the late 1890s. These reports concerned purportedly blue-gummed, Black assailants, whose bite was alleged to be poisonous, and of whom African Americans were supposedly terrified. I argue that, although these narratives reinforced white notions of Black criminality and credulity, they marked a particular moment of racialization, in which fears of bodily contagion, generated by the recent revolution in germ theory, were harnessed to notions of embodied racial difference, to express and galvanize White anxieties about racial impurity. Because Blue Gums embodied dysgenic menace, White journalists and writers were often reluctant to disavow their existence, instead capitalizing on the slippage between figurative and literal language that characterized discourse on race. However, in appropriating Black culture and presenting a figure from folklore as a racial type, White writers betrayed not only the essentially superstitious character of racial thought but also the interwoven nature of dominant and subjugated cultures in the United States
Race, reconstruction, and the invention of "Negro Superstition," 1862-1877
No full textThis article traces the postbellum development and dissemination of the notion of “negro superstition.” By the end of Reconstruction, many whites across the nation, both liberal and conservative, shared in the belief that credulity was the keystone of African American culture. The formulation of superstition as innate racial trait served the conjoined causes of sectional reconciliation and white supremacy, eroding white support for black citizenship. As liberal estimations of black Christianity declined and conservative depictions of African American magical beliefs proliferated, “voodoo” gained traction as a potent imaginary, shorthand for racial atavism, unreason, and dangerous sexuality
Rough seas off Dover
No full textMedium: pastelsigned."Rough seas off Dover" [1959.6109.000.000], Cox, DavidArtist and Role: Cox, David,Extent: sheetExtent: sheet (adhered
1965, July-Dec. -- Correspondence, Unsorted -- letter, 1965-10-12
No full textLetter from Cox, David O. to Sabin, Albert B. dated 1965-10-12.Sabin Collection Fair Use Policy</a
Ring out, wild bells [music] : Christmas carol /
No full textB.2056 (Publisher number). For chorus (SATB) and organ.; Caption title.; Pl. no.: B.2056.; Also available online http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn525597; MUS: N, A, MUSM 69974
- …
