Proms and Other Racial Ephemera: The Positive Social Construction of African Americans in the “Post”-Civil Rights Era

During the 2008 Presidential election, one of the key questions was whether the ascendancy of Barack Obama means that we now live in a post-racial world. Or, for those who remain skeptical of this claim, what, exactly, does the first African-American presidency mean for race and racial politics? Rebecca Wanzo\u27s Article, Proms and Other Racial Ephemera: The Positive Social Construction of African Americans in the Post -Civil Rights Era, tackles this question. Part of the obstacle facing cultural critics and policy analysts alike, Wanzo contends, is that we are most familiar with racism manifest in negative terms—discrimination, violence, and their accompanying discursive trope, negative representations of African Americans. This has left us perplexed by Obama\u27s ascendancy. Yet Wanzo contends that Obama manifests what she calls positive social construction of African Americans, which operates by displacing racial anxieties onto safer objects, thereby disabling material analyses of racist structures and behavior. Assessing events in the public sphere ranging from Don Imus\u27s racial epithets against the Rutgers Scarlet Knights; to segregated proms; to speeches by Eric Holder and Condoleezza Rice; to debates over Obama\u27s health care proposal, Wanzo unpacks the increasing complexity of racial discourse in the United States. Using the psychoanalytic concept of affective displacement, she elegantly demonstrates how positive and negative racial representations operate synthetically to affect public policy discourse, constructing racial progress narratives while disabling empathy for other racially suffering subjects

Black Love is Not a Fairytale

In 2009, the public witnessed an upsurge in media discussions about the lower marriage rates of professional black women. In the Unmarriageable Professional Black Woman discourse, the alleged pathological behavior of black men or black women causes marriage disparities, despite the fact that demographic data that can largely account for differences in marriage rates. This paper explores articulations of a heterosexual, and somewhat heteronormative, black female romantic imagination in the twenty-first century, and unpacks how the ideals and pathologies that subjects with various agendas attach to this imagination reveal the complex interplay of western romantic love narratives, black feminism, legacies of the Moynihan Report, and liberal individualism. Through discussions of three prominent examples representing the romantic desires of ambitious and successful black women in popular discourse, I explore how the heterosexual African American woman’s romantic imagination has been idealized and derided, with the idealization reflecting the ways in which feminism has done significant work in updating the romantic fantasy even as patriarchy’s presence is transparent, and the derision illustrating the disciplinary work of patriarchy and a broader national ideology that suggests that individuals are always responsible for not attaining their heart’s desires

Apocalyptic Empathy: A Parable of Postmodern Sentimentality

This essay analyzes the relationship between feelings and politics in Octavia E. Butler\u27s novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Comparison of the sentimentalism approach used by the author and Harriet Beecher Stowe in the novel Uncle Tom\u27s Cabin ; Characteristics of Butler\u27s novels which are categorize as postmodernism; Significance of feeling of the novels\u27 heroines to political activism

African American acafandom and other strangers: New genealogies of fan studies

Because scholars have paid insufficient attention to race in fan studies, a new genealogy of fan studies is needed, one that includes different kinds of primary and secondary texts that have explored responses of black fans. There is a rich history of black fan criticism and acafandom that has never been seen as such but that both complements and complicates current definitions and paradigms in fan studies. Discussions of fan otherness, antifandom, and fan ambivalence explore the difference that the inclusion of African American cultural criticism would make to both canonical scholarship and more recently published work in the field

African American acafandom and other strangers: New genealogies of fan studies

Because scholars have paid insufficient attention to race in fan studies, a new genealogy of fan studies is needed, one that includes different kinds of primary and secondary texts that have explored responses of black fans. There is a rich history of black fan criticism and acafandom that has never been seen as such but that both complements and complicates current definitions and paradigms in fan studies. Discussions of fan otherness, antifandom, and fan ambivalence explore the difference that the inclusion of African American cultural criticism would make to both canonical scholarship and more recently published work in the field

Evolutionary relationships within a subgroup of HERV-K-related human endogenous retroviruses

For many Americans, the world of sports occupies a unique place in American society. To much of the public, the arena of sports is viewed as model for meritocracy and integration. It is a space, at least in certain sports, in which racial minorities are well represented among the ranks of professional athletes, whether it is Latinos in Major League Baseball or the Blacks in the National Basketball Association. It is the place where players of all races work together on teams to achieve the goal of winning a game, a title, or a championship. It is a race that many children of color truly believe that they can win if they try hard enough. Sports fans can hardly turn on the television or radio without hearing the tale of another person of color who has crossed the color line in athletics. Whether it is Tiger Woods in golf, Venus Williams in tennis, or Juan Pablo Montoya in NASCAR, minority athletes represent, in the eyes of many Americans, the achievement of the American dream and a vision of “true” meritocracy