Shaping the Future of African American Film

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica White Ndounou
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Film ◽  
The Future

“A Ghost of the Future”: Racial (Mis)perception and Black Subjectivity in LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Bunch Davis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Subjectivity ◽  
The Future ◽  
White Femininity ◽  
The Right

This chapter offers a reading of Amiri Baraka's 1964 play, Dutchman, focusing on its use of race icons to engage with white liberal response to racial uplift ideology and its implications for black subjectivity. The chapter considers Rashid Johnson's restaging of Dutchman and his assertion that his project creates an opportunity to find identity somewhere between “the narrative of struggle and the narrative of Negro Exceptionalism,” noting that it resonates in Baraka's (aka LeRoi Jones) contention that the struggle is as much about “the right to choose.” The chapter challenges claims that Dutchman relies upon essentialized blackness and the degradation of white femininity in order to prop up the identity of the African American protagonist, Clay. Instead, it argues that the play unpacks whiteness's investment in uplift ideology by employing a variety of cultural genealogies and practices to sketch identity, thus exposing the vulnerabilities of the African American Freedom Struggle era iterations of uplift ideology.

The Strategies of Coping in Suffering and Caregiving

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen K. Black ◽  
John T. Groce ◽  
Charles E. Harmon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Male ◽  
African American Men ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Future ◽  
Male Caregivers

If an experience is distressful enough to be called suffering, does it truly end, or does residue of the experience continue to assault the person’s wholeness? In this chapter, we offer three themes that that emerged as means to resolve suffering or to protect themselves from experiencing suffering despite distress. They are: (1) having goals, (2) sharing the power of the family story and (3) maintaining friendships with other African-American men. The three themes were often interrelated in men’s accounts. Men interviewed for this research revealed the importance of looking toward the future with hope and plans in hand, keeping previous generations alive through reminiscence and, seeking friendship with other men, particularly during caregiving (Black, 2015; Mattis et al., 2001) and showed older African-American male caregivers to be involved in reciprocal friendships with other men, which one man described as “what keeps me going.”

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