By Maurice E. Stevens
This interdisciplinary and inventive research examines how African American tradition is gifted in American movies and different media, and is a provocative re-reading of the historiography of black tradition. the writer examines and translates a couple of cultural texts deriving reminiscence as interpreted through Freud and through Franz Fanon, combined with Black Liberation Theology and Islamic mysticism.
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Additional resources for Troubling Beginnings: Trans(per)forming African American History and Identity (Studies in African American History and Culture)
Example text
At the same time that performing origin stories in the service of bringing individuated selves together under the banner of community can provide groups with a sense of “the unity of meaning” around a “body of cultural knowledge,” such performances have their dangers. 21 Reading how Sankofa, Malcolm X, and Panther function to delimit the identificatory possibilities described by the signifier blackness, and highlighting other performances that expand the expressive possibilities for telling stories about history and being-incommunity, resists the ways in which authenticity discourses threaten to wash away the traces of their own academic performance through claims on the real and the practical.
What aught to concern us is the way in which hope and redemption as a discourse of surprise salvation was transformed into a narrative of redemptive suffering in the context of African-American social action. This transformation, in itself, was not entirely problematic for it conditioned the possibility for the development of African-American social institutions of survival and liberation, and even set the stage for a resurgence of Black Power and Black Nationalist ideology. However, this ideological transformation, for itself, was produced by, was an apology for, and was productive of dominant racialized power relations.
Why Race Matters: Racialization and Knowledge Production In When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away,12 Ramon Gutierrez figures race as a category that promotes a cultural self/other binary. In this dichotomous relation he suggests, and without dependence upon phenotypic criteria, the self in question can be considered among gente con razon, while “other” signifies identities without reason, without calidad, with neither a priori sacred worth nor tradition. Read alongside concepts of race and racial formation that locate the sources and effects of racialized discourse within the bounds of material social relations and social movement, race as social construction with material effects can be evaluated without reducing the complexity of its constitution and the ubiquity of its operation.