My Confederate Kinfolk

My Confederate Kinfolk PDF Author: Thulani Davis
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9780465015740
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
An African American novelist recounts her family history, which includes both white and black ancestors who were pioneers, slaves, and Confederate soldiers and lived in such places as Missouri, Mississippi, Alabama, and Virginia.

My Confederate Kinfolk

My Confederate Kinfolk PDF Author: Thulani Davis
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9780465015740
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
An African American novelist recounts her family history, which includes both white and black ancestors who were pioneers, slaves, and Confederate soldiers and lived in such places as Missouri, Mississippi, Alabama, and Virginia.

My Confederate Kinfolk

My Confederate Kinfolk PDF Author: Thulani Davis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781437958331
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
Starting from a photograph and writings left by her grandmother, African-Amer. novelist Thulani Davis goes looking for the ¿white folk¿ in her family, a Scots-Irish clan of cotton planters unknown to her -- and uncovers a history far richer and stranger than she had ever imagined. Along the way she finds tartan plaid, unlikely lovers, a lynching close to home, and Confederate soldiers. Her journey challenges us to examine the origins of some of our most deeply ingrained notions about what makes a family black or white, and offers an immensely compelling, intellectually challenging alternative. ¿A gripping historical tale that is uniquely, tragically American.¿ ¿Underlines a subject that tends to make people uncomfortable -- this nation¿s knotty racial ties.¿ Photos.

The Emancipation Circuit

The Emancipation Circuit PDF Author: Thulani Davis
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478022809
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
In The Emancipation Circuit Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.

Mixed-Race Identity in the American South

Mixed-Race Identity in the American South PDF Author: Julia Sattler
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 179362707X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Get Book Here

Book Description
This interdisciplinary investigation argues that since the 1990s, discourses about mixed-race heritage in the United States have taken the shape of a veritable literary genre, here termed “memoir of the search.” The study uses four different texts to explore this non-fictional genre, including Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family and Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's The Sweeter the Juice. All feature a protagonist using methods from archival investigation to DNA-testing to explore an intergenerational family secret; photographs and family trees; and the trip to the American South, which is identified as the site of the secret’s origin and of the family’s past. As a genre, these texts negotiate the memory of slavery and segregation in the present. In taking up central narratives of Americanness, such as the American Dream and the Immigrant story, as well as discourses generating the American family, the texts help inscribe themselves and the mixed-race heritage they address into the American mainstream. In its outlook, this book highlights the importance of the memoirs’ negotiations of the past when finding ways to remember after the last witnesses have passed away. and contributes to the discussion over political justice and reparations for slavery.

Humanities

Humanities PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education, Humanistic
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description


Monstrous Intimacies

Monstrous Intimacies PDF Author: Christina Sharpe
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082239152X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.

Growing Up with the Country

Growing Up with the Country PDF Author: Kendra Taira Field
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300180527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
The masterful and poignant story of three African-American families who journeyed west after emancipation, by an award-winning scholar and descendant of the migrants Following the lead of her own ancestors, Kendra Field's epic family history chronicles the westward migration of freedom's first generation in the fifty years after emancipation. Drawing on decades of archival research and family lore within and beyond the United States, Field traces their journey out of the South to Indian Territory, where they participated in the development of black and black Indian towns and settlements. When statehood, oil speculation, and Jim Crow segregation imperiled their lives and livelihoods, these formerly enslaved men and women again chose emigration. Some migrants launched a powerful back-to-Africa movement, while others moved on to Canada and Mexico. Their lives and choices deepen and widen the roots of the Great Migration. Interweaving black, white, and Indian histories, Field's beautifully wrought narrative explores how ideas about race and color powerfully shaped the pursuit of freedom.

Life Stories

Life Stories PDF Author: Maureen O'Connor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1610691466
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 768

Get Book Here

Book Description
Memoirs, autobiographies, and diaries represent the most personal and most intimate of genres, as well as one of the most abundant and popular. Gain new understanding and better serve your readers with this detailed genre guide to nearly 700 titles that also includes notes on more than 2,800 read-alike and other related titles. The popularity of this body of literature has grown in recent years, and it has also diversified in terms of the types of stories being told—and persons telling them. In the past, readers' advisors have depended on access by names or Dewey classifications and subjects to help readers find autobiographies they will enjoy. This guide offers an alternative, organizing the literature according to popular genres, subgenres, and themes that reflect common reading interests. Describing titles that range from travel and adventure classics and celebrity autobiographies to foodie memoirs and environmental reads, Life Stories: A Guide to Reading Interests in Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Diaries presents a unique overview of the genre that specifically addresses the needs of readers' advisors and others who work with readers in finding books.

Silence, Feminism, Power

Silence, Feminism, Power PDF Author: S. Malhotra
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137002379
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
An interrogation of the often-unexamined assumption that silence is oppressive, to consider the multiple possibilities silence enables. The volume features diverse feminist reflections on the nuanced relationship between silence and voice to foreground the creative, meditative, generative and resistive power our silences engender.

Civil Wars, Civil Beings, and Civil Rights in Alabama's Black Belt

Civil Wars, Civil Beings, and Civil Rights in Alabama's Black Belt PDF Author: Bertis D. English
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817320695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 592

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reconstruction politics and race relations between freed blacks and the white establishment in Perry County, Alabama In his fascinating, in-depth study, Bertis D. English analyzes why Perry County, situated in the heart of a violence-prone subregion of Alabama, enjoyed more peaceful race relations and less bloodshed than several neighboring counties. Choosing an atypical locality as central to his study, English raises questions about factors affecting ethnic disturbances in the Black Belt and elsewhere in Alabama. He also uses Perry County, which he deems an anomalous county, to caution against the tendency of some scholars to make sweeping generalizations about entire regions and subregions. English contends Perry County was a relatively tranquil place with a set of extremely influential African American businessmen, clergy, politicians, and other leaders during Reconstruction. Together with egalitarian or opportunistic white citizens, they headed a successful campaign for black agency and biracial cooperation that few counties in Alabama matched. English also illustrates how a significant number of educational institutions, a high density of African American residents, and an unusually organized and informed African American population were essential factors in forming Perry County’s character. He likewise traces the development of religion in Perry, the nineteenth-century Baptist capital of Alabama, and the emergence of civil rights in Perry, an underemphasized center of activism during the twentieth century. This well-researched and comprehensive volume illuminates Perry County’s history from the various perspectives of its black, interracial, and white inhabitants, amplifying their own voices in a novel way. The narrative includes rich personal details about ordinary and affluent people, both free and unfree, creating a distinctive resource that will be useful to scholars as well as a reference that will serve the needs of students and general readers.