Poetry

“Pride”, “Security”, and “Blossoming

Technicolored

From early sitcoms such as I Love Lucy to contemporary prime-time dramas like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, African Americans on television have too often been asked to portray tired stereotypes of blacks as villains, vixens, victims, and disposable minorities. In Technicolored black feminist critic Ann duCille combines cultural critique with personal reflections on growing up with the new medium of TV to examine how televisual representations of African Americans have changed over the last sixty years. Whether explaining how watching Shirley Temple led her to question her own self-worth or how televisual representation functions as a form of racial profiling, duCille traces the real-life social and political repercussions of the portrayal and presence of African Americans on television. Neither a conventional memoir nor a traditional media study, Technicolored offers one lifelong television watcher's careful, personal, and timely analysis of how television continues to shape notions of race in the American imagination

A Language of Song

In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters—one of the pioneering collectors of African American music—writes of a trip to West Africa where he found “a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression [he] encountered everywhere . . . from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana and the great churches of Harlem.” In this book, Charters takes readers along to those and other places, including Jamaica and the Georgia Sea Islands, as he recounts experiences from a half-century spent following, documenting, recording, and writing about the Africa-influenced music of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Each of the book’s fourteen chapters is a vivid rendering of a particular location that Charters visited. While music is always his focus, the book is filled with details about individuals, history, landscape, and culture. In first-person narratives, Charters relates voyages including a trip to the St. Louis home of the legendary ragtime composer Scott Joplin and the journey to West Africa, where he met a man who performed an hours-long song about the Europeans’ first colonial conquests in Gambia. Throughout the book, Charters traces the persistence of African musical culture despite slavery, as well as the influence of slaves’ songs on subsequent musical forms. In evocative prose, he relates a lifetime of travel and research, listening to brass bands in New Orleans; investigating the emergence of reggae, ska, and rock-steady music in Jamaica’s dancehalls; and exploring the history of Afro-Cuban music through the life of the jazz musician Bebo Valdés. A Language of Song is a unique expedition led by one of music’s most observant and well-traveled explorers

Relational Life through an African Lens: A Theological Exploration of Ubuntu in a Western Contemporary Church Context

This research explores the origins and usage of the term ubuntu in sub-Saharan Africa and the applied ubuntu theology developed by Desmond Tutu in order to consider what, if anything, a theologically applied concept of ubuntu might offer to a Western contemporary church context as it seeks to grow in its relational life. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the research, offering the primary thesis statement, definitions, scope and an outline of chapter content. Chapter 2 provides some background to ubuntu through an exploration of its historical, contextual and linguistic development, its system of values and practice, and its subsequent understanding of personhood. This acts as a base from which the ubuntu theology of Desmond Tutu is overviewed in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. Chapter 3 outlines the ontology, methodology and methods chosen to explore the interface between the paradigmatic frameworks that govern the social sciences and theology. This includes a reflection on the nature of epistemology in the discipline of practical theology in which this research is located, and upon the characteristics of group interviews as the selected method of gathering qualitative data about ubuntu and the experience of relational life, both in urban Britain and in sub-Saharan Africa. Chapter 4 takes a thematic analytical approach to the qualitative data generated from two group interviews and extrapolates four correlative themes to bring into discussion with previous my exploration of ubuntu, in order to illuminate any transferrable aspects that might offer transformative resonance in relational life as experienced in a Western contemporary church context such as urban Britain

Children and objects: affection and infection

This paper considers young children’s (aged 3–5 years) relations with objects, and in particular objects that are brought from home to school. We begin by considering the place of objects within early years classrooms and their relationship to children’s education before considering why some objects are often separated from their owners on entry to the classroom. We suggest that the ‘arrest’ of objects is as a consequence of them being understood as ‘infecting’ specific perceptions or constructs of young children. We further suggest that a focus on the dichotomy between affection/infection for and of certain objects may offer new possibilities for seeing and engaging with children, thus expanding the narrow imaginaries of children that are coded in developmental psychology, UK early years education policy and classroom practice

Technicolored

From early sitcoms such as I Love Lucy to contemporary prime-time dramas like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, African Americans on television have too often been asked to portray tired stereotypes of blacks as villains, vixens, victims, and disposable minorities. In Technicolored black feminist critic Ann duCille combines cultural critique with personal reflections on growing up with the new medium of TV to examine how televisual representations of African Americans have changed over the last sixty years. Whether explaining how watching Shirley Temple led her to question her own self-worth or how televisual representation functions as a form of racial profiling, duCille traces the real-life social and political repercussions of the portrayal and presence of African Americans on television. Neither a conventional memoir nor a traditional media study, Technicolored offers one lifelong television watcher's careful, personal, and timely analysis of how television continues to shape notions of race in the American imagination

The Short Happy Life of Black Feminist Theory

Advocating for the applicability of black feminist theory to the study of all literature, Ducille uses “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” as her test case. Surveys critical opinion on the story, noting the lack of interest in its racial dimensions. Contends that while Margot may be a victim of white patriarchy, she is also actively engaged in and benefits from that system of oppression. Concludes that Hemingway’s story of the rich, idle, and brutal is “an ugly example of what white privilege can do to those who waste it.