"Ready to shoot and do shoot": black working-class self-defense and community politics in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, black people in New York City encountered white violence, especially police brutality in Manhattan. The black community used various strategies to curtail white mob violence and police brutality, one of which was self-defense. This article examines blacks’ response to violence, specifically the debate concerning police brutality and self-defense in Harlem during the 1920s. While historians have examined race riots, blacks’ everyday encounters with police violence in the North have received inadequate treatment. By approaching everyday violence and black responses—self-defense, legal redress, and journalists’ remonstrations—as a process of political development, this article argues that the systematic violence perpetrated by the police both mobilized and politicized blacks individually and collectively to defend their community, but also contributed to a community consciousness that established police brutality as a legitimate issue for black protest.     

Social and Spiritual Capital: Building ‘Emotional Resilience’ In Communities and Individuals

Abstract

The article examines the relationship between mental health, mental health promotion, religious communities and general issues of public health. It begins with an exploration of what is meant by mental health drawing a distinction between it, mental illness and mental health promotion, and argues that mental health can have a profound impact on physical health. The relationship between religious communities and the mentally ill is analysed next. Despite the attitudes of many in mental health provision, religious communities can offer a supportive environment for the mentally ill. The article avoids a ‘faith communities—good’, ‘mental health services—bad’ dichotomy, recognizing that religious communities can be excluding and discriminatory. The ambiguity of some experiences is recognized: are they forms of religious experience or symptoms of psychosis? The article highlights the inceasing advocacy of the user/survivor movement. In the final section, the relationship between mental health and public health is explored. It is suggested that religious communities can be places for the promotion of mental health. Mental health promotion is understood as aiming to strengthen both individuals and communities; its value is explored in relation to public health issues. It is suggested that those who are socially excluded are at a greater risk of some form of mental illness and that this may well impact on their physical health. Related to this are the beneficial effects of opportunities for participation in decision making, be it in the workplace or the local community. The article ends by arguing that service providers and service users need to be involved in decisions and planning. Further, some elements of mental health promotion will need to involve those outside the statutory sector.     

Nineteenth-century planned industrial communities and the role of aesthetics in spatial practices: the visual ideologies of Pullman and Port Sunlight

In the 1880s British and American planned industrial communities revealed a distinct shift in spatial practices as two discrete architecture and landscape architectural aesthetics were applied to community design: Beaux Arts, and Arts and Crafts. Two of the most extensive planned industrial communities during this decade received aesthetic attention: Pullman, Illinois near Chicago (1880), established by George Pullman, and Port Sunlight, near Liverpool (1888), established by William Lever. Both Pullman and Lever believed that by applying a distinctive aesthetic they could establish a cohesive visual ideology for social control. Lever and Pullman believed that by creating “beautiful” spaces, this would encourage and/or constrain worker attitudes and behaviors, what Henri Lefebvre calls “means of control” (1991, p 26). In addition, both Pullman and Port Sunlight became central to establishing and maintaining each company's brand identity. This paper explores the visual ideologies these two industrialists used to produce a distinctive sense of community while also revealing the inherent tensions and limitations of those aesthetics. Not only do Pullman and Port Sunlight reflect an important shift in spatial practices during the 1880s, their architects and landscape architects became influential leaders in the visual ideologies of the City Beautiful and Garden City planning movements.     

Public-making in a pandemic: The role of street art in East African countries

Street artists around the world have been prominent in depicting issues concerning COVID-19, but the role of street art in public-making during the pandemic is unexplored. Despite burgeoning street art scenes in many African countries since the early 2000s, African street art is relatively neglected in critical street art scholarship. In response, this paper examines street art created during the pandemic in East African countries, principally Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania, and explores the ways in which it is engaged in highly distinctive forms of public-making. Drawing primarily on qualitative online interviews with East African artists creating street art, and image analysis using online search tools, the paper argues that street art in urban areas is attempting to create knowledgeable publics through countering disinformation about the pandemic, to responsiblize publics through public health messaging and, through community activism, to build resilient publics. The paper concludes that street art is potentially an important tool in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic in East African countries due to the proximity, and mutual constitution of, creative practices and publics, which emerge from the embedding of street art within the social spaces of cities and everyday experiences of the pandemic.     

African immigrant women’s transition and integration into Canadian society: expectations,stressors, and tensions

This article contributes to an emergent body of research that explores African immigrant women’s experiences in Western destination countries. Foregrounding these immigrant women’s voices in this research, we aim to better understand the challenges they grapple with as newcomers to Canada. Specifically, our study sought to explore the stressors they faced within and outside the family and how these stressors mediate their transition and integration into Canadian society. We conducted, audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analyzed two focus groups with twenty African immigrant women in Alberta, a Western province among Canada’s ten provinces. Three main themes emerged from our study: (1) Participants felt ill prepared to face the challenges of starting life anew in Canada, which included in particular navigating changes in economic wellbeing and gender roles; (2) Participants experienced a lack of community support, which was reflected in both mental/emotional health and parenting issues; and (3) Participants expressed frustration with the manner in which Canadian socio-legal systems manage immigrants’ family issues. Our findings underscore the need to actively engage African immigrant women and men in the development of policies and practices that mediate their everyday lives in Canada. Such policies and practices should consider the changing gender relations, cultural knowledge, and informal support channels within African immigrant communities.     

‘Writing’ Black Womanhood in the Early Cuban Republic, 1904–16

This article explores the intersection of race, class and womanhood during the early years of the Cuban Republic. It focuses on the writings of elite women who published in the black press between 1904 and 1916. While legal reforms and the expansion of the educational system facilitated new gender expectations, racial ideologies positioned upper‐class white women as the standard of ideal womanhood. I argue that elite women of African descent employed modernising gender norms in order to counter anti‐black racism and to affirm their identification with upper‐class whites. In particular, they published articles that promoted the dominant values regarding marriage, education and public comportment. They disparaged unmarried unions and the practice of African cultural traditions among the labouring poor. Elite black women's writings drew from the model of the enlightened caretaker also to engage broader debates regarding feminism and black civic unity. Yet their emphasis on ideals that promoted white superiority helped reinforce the anti‐black tenets of Cuban citizenship they hoped to undermine. By analysing elite black women's articles, poetry and letters, the article demonstrates the importance of understanding how women of African descent forged an intellectual trajectory, and thus contributes to the historiography of gendered racial ideologies in Latin America and the Caribbean.     

"Abortion will deprive you of happiness!": Soviet reproductive politics in the post-Stalin era

This article examines Soviet reproductive politics after the Communist regime legalized abortion in 1955. The regime's new abortion policy did not result in an end to the condemnation of abortion in official discourse. The government instead launched an extensive campaign against abortion. Why did authorities bother legalizing the procedure if they still disapproved of it so strongly? Using archival sources, public health materials, and medical as well as popular journals to investigate the antiabortion campaign, this article argues that the Soviet government sought to regulate gender and sexuality through medical intervention and health "education" rather than prohibition and force in the post-Stalin era. It also explores how the antiabortion public health campaign produced "knowledge" not only about the procedure and its effects, but also about gender and sexuality, subjecting both women and men to new pressures and regulatory norms.     

The "cradle of glass": incubators for infants in late nineteenth-century France

This article examines the development of the incubator for premature infants in fin-de-siècle France. During a period of widespread anxiety in France regarding infant mortality and its implications for population growth, physicians in Paris developed and widely promoted the lifesaving technology. This article explores the ways in which the incubator reflected new scientific and symbolic approaches to creating hygienic spaces as well as how it reflected new scientific and symbolic approaches to the traditionally feminine project of infant care. By creating such an isolating and protective milieu around premature infants—an entirely new population of patients—the incubator, I argue, heralded a renegotiation of the boundary between motherhood and medical authority.     

James Cone’s Legacy for White Christians

ABSTRACT

This article explores James Cone’s lesson and legacy for white Christians. Specifically, it analyzes Cone’s claim that whites can “become black.” Cone insists that a process of conversion to blackness “means that white people are prepared to deny themselves (whiteness), take up the cross (blackness), and follow Christ (black ghetto).” In this essay, I will draw upon Cone’s writings and original interview material to construct an outline of these three steps of becoming black. Making sense of what it means to convert to blackness begins with first analyzing his specific challenge to white theology, then his concepts of blackness and the Black Christ, and finally, the praxis of these three steps – that is, what does it look like, practically, to follow the black Christ as a white person.     

Charitable collaborations in Bronzeville, 1928-1944: the "Chicago Defender" and the Regal Theater

In the twentieth century, race-based residential and commercial segregation that supported racial oppression and inequality became an elemental characteristic of urban black communities. Conflict-ridden, black-white relationships were common. However, the Chicago Defender Charities, Inc., the entity that sponsors the largest African American parade in the country and that emerged in 1947, embodied a tradition of charitable giving, self-help, and community service initiated in 1921 by Chicago Defender newspaper founder and editor, Robert S. Abbott. The foundation of this charitable tradition matured as a result of an early and sustained collaboration between Chicago’s white-owned Regal Theater and the black-owned Chicago Defender newspaper. Thus, in segregated African American communities, black and white commercial institutions, under certain conditions, were able to find important points of collaboration to uplift the African American communities of which they were a part.     

Constructing Community: Experiences of Identity, Economic Opportunity, and Institution Building at Boston’s African Meeting House

The African Meeting House in Boston became a center of the city’s free black community during the nineteenth century. Archaeological excavations at this site recovered material from the Meeting House backlot and a neighboring apartment building occupied by black tenants. These artifacts reveal strategies the community used to negotiate a place for themselves, create economic opportunities, and build community institutions. The Meeting House helped foster community success and became a powerful center for African American action on abolition, educational equality, and military integration. The present study argues that the archaeological and historical evidence from the African Meeting House demonstrates the power of the actions of individuals in the black community to counter widespread racial inequality with personal and community success.     

‘I am also doing research’: Engaging mental illness and precarity in Ouagadougou

Narratives about mental health in Africa often present people with mental illness in situations of extreme precarity, such as in chains or on the street. In this article, the author argues that such representations should not become the only story regarding mental illness in Africa. The article focuses on the story of Joseph, a man who is an outpatient of a psychiatric ward in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and reflects upon his experience of mental illness in relation to the ongoing story of his life. His confident statement ‘I am also doing research’ provides an entry point for understanding his engagements with life and mental illness as acts of experimentation that are not necessarily rooted in precarity. His story shows how precarity and possibility can evolve alongside each other. It also shows the role that psychiatry already plays in (some of) the lives of people with mental illness in an African context, interacting with other narratives of mental troubles and healing.     

‘They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men’: Violence,Non‐Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era

This article explores how peaceful protest and armed resistance reflected and shaped certain gender identities in the southern US civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, and reveals much about the significance of violence for ‘marginalised masculinities’ within the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. In the Deep South, civil rights organisers found that their non‐violent strategy's connotations of effeminate submissiveness hampered attempts to win over black men to the movement's cause. Conversely, those African Americans who decided to use armed force to protect the movement against racist attacks were proud of their ability to defend themselves and their communities. A comparison of armed resistance efforts in southern civil rights campaigns with those of post‐1965 Black Power groups such as the Black Panther Party shows both commonalities and differences with regard to the inter‐relationship between self‐defence and gender. In the southern movement, the affirmation of manhood remained a by‐product of the physical imperative to protect black lives against racism. Among Black Power militants and their black nationalist precursors, self‐defence, while initially intended to stop police brutality and other racist oppression, ultimately became mainly a symbol of militant black manhood. The Black Power movement's affirmative message countered stereotypes of black male powerlessness and instilled a positive black identity into many activists, but the gendered discourse it produced also tended to perpetuate black women's subordination.     

“From the cradle to the grave”: Jim Williams,black manhood,and militia activism in Reconstruction South Carolina

The life of Jim Williams, an African American militia captain hanged by the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina in 1871, illuminates the history of martial black manhood during Reconstruction. Service in state militias seemed to afford black men the opportunity to assert a new kind of manhood, grounded in a desire to defend black communities and exercise political rights gained after emancipation. But conservative white southerners met these assertions of black manhood with a campaign of vigilantism. Racist violence by conservative white southerners worked to reverse the support militias had received from white Republicans, and the militias were disbanded and blamed for the very violence they suffered. This article explores Williams’s story, analyzes both officers and troops of black militia companies in the South Carolina upcountry, and charts how real and rhetorical violence silenced the militias’ assertions of a new form of black manhood and freedom.     

Responding to the second ghetto: Chicago's Joe Smith and Sin Corner

World War Two and its aftermath transformed Chicago's African American community. The Great Migration entered a second and more intense phase as black migrants flooded into Northern cities. This massive relocation of Southern blacks resulted in the expansion and reformulation of Chicago's ghettoes on both the West and South Sides of the city. The question of a response to this Second Ghetto from African Americans themselves presents itself. White politicians, cultural elites and businessmen still controlled the city and could impose their will on its neighborhoods simply redrawing ghetto boundaries to reflect the new realities of the postwar era. The strange case of Joe Smith and Sin Corner sheds some light on black agency in the 1950s. The African American middle class had resources it commanded to try and protect itself from racial injustice. These resources, however, were based on class privileges not enjoyed by most in the African American community.     

Ceremony and Citizenship: African American Weddings, 1945–60

Following the Second World War, many Americans embraced the white wedding – an event marked by conspicuous consumption, gendered roles and responsibilities, and welcoming of ‘traditions’ such as formal dress, proper vows and post‐ceremony reception. For aspiring, middle‐class and elite African Americans, the wedding served a dual purpose. Through the ceremony, they demonstrated adherence to the ideals of post‐war American citizenship while preserving distinct cultural practices and values. Focusing primarily on the upwardly mobile black community of Indianapolis between 1945 and 1960, this article emphasises the wedding as a site of both personal and public significance. Adoption and enactment of the white wedding reinforced the strength of the black family and declared African Americans’ rightful belonging to the American middle‐class community.     

"A man among men": gender, identity and power in South Africa's Marashea gangs

This article explores gender and power relations in a South African criminal society through an examination of the legend surrounding a prominent leader. Tseule Tsilo achieved a degree of notoriety in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. Tsilo's legend lives on in the lore of the Marashea, the criminal organisation to which he belonged. However, rather than being embraced by the entire Marashea, Tsilo is a hero only to men. The legend was created, and is sustained, by men and for men, a discursive development that mirrors the gendered nature of power within the Marashea.     

Bastard Spice or Champagne of Cinnamon? Conflicting Value Creations along Cinnamon Commodity Chains in Northern Vietnam

In upland northern Vietnam ethnic minority farmers are cultivating what some global retailers refer to as the ‘champagne of cinnamon’. However, a closer examination reveals that this spice is not ‘true cinnamon’ but cassia, with the exact species remaining uncertain. Drawing on commodity chain literature and debates over the creation of value and quality, the aims of this article are twofold. First, it investigates the making of ‘Vietnamese cinnamon’ as it moves from the hills of northern Vietnam to supermarket shelves in the global North, and the actors and livelihoods involved. Second, it explores how different actors define ‘Vietnamese cinnamon’ and infuse it with often-contradictory values. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork over a four-year period, the study finds that the state and cooperating non-government organizations tend to ignore ongoing taxonomic confusion while creating a geographical indicator to highlight the uniqueness of this commodity. Yet, concurrently, exporters and retailers in the global North focus on other distinctions as key marketing tools including remoteness, ethnicity, taste and health benefits. The article thus calls for an expanded analytical focus on competing value creation for agro-food products and on the impacts for commodity producers, in this case ethnic minority farmers in the global South.     

Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson

While all individuals have a story, not all individuals’stories offer great insights about American history. This accountof Junius Wilson's life (1908–2001) provides a devastatingcritique of North Carolina social norms and policies (especiallyattitudes to the deaf and to African Americans), court operations,state institutionalization and treatment of the insane, andaccess to justice. Mr. Wilson was "incarcerated in an insaneasylum merely because he was deaf, black, and poor, and bureaucraticinertia and staff paternalism helped keep him there for [morethan] sixty-five years" (129). Not only was he imprisoned physicallybut also he was isolated culturally since he was denied access     

Imperial reproductions: The circulation of colonial images across popular genres and media in the 1920s and 1930s

The Fascist phase of the Italian colonial experience was characterized by the diffusion of colonial discourses and imagery across Italian culture. Significantly, it was frequent for the same people to produce texts belonging to diverse genres, often cutting across different media and irrespective of distinctions between elite and popular audiences. Concentrating on representations of the East African territories which were eventually to constitute the Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI) , the article analyses the way in which a selected number of images of the colonies spread across different genres and media, arguing in favour of an interdisciplinary approach to colonial processes of representation. Textual and visual mappings of Africa inscribed its territories with European symbols, value systems and signifiers. Geographers and travel writers, in particular, had a fundamental role in creating not only the physical but also the mental space for colonization. They enacted the transformation of East Africa from the dangerous and unmapped setting of the heroic acts of individual explorers to the stage for a collective colonial effort. In their footsteps there followed the discourse of tourism and the tourist industry, which was meant to integrate the image of the colonies with that of the peninsula.