Making Original Men: Elijah Muhammad,The Nation of Islam,and The Fruit of Islam

Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam converted thousands of African American men to Islam during the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. Muhammad's men neither protested for Civil Rights nor subscribed to the militancy of the Black Power Movement. Indeed, they construed both to be fundamentally flawed routes to justice, freedom, and equality. Nation men, or Fruit of Islam (FOI) as they are more commonly known, believed that through Islam, racial separation, and community building initiatives they could ultimately reclaim their freedom, self-respect, and manhood. The NOI provided men with a newfound sense of self and purpose and in doing so imbued them with a deep-rooted appreciation for Islam, as taught by Elijah Muhammad. Rank-and-file male members of the faith community remain largely overlooked in the extant scholarship on the NOI. This article seeks to recover the stories of rank-and-file FOI. It assesses the organisation's appeal to men, the varied means by which it challenged them and the burdens the community placed on FOI.     

伊罗生与中国民权保障同盟——兼析同盟与中国共产党的关系

本文根据伊罗生档案中所发现的一些材料并结合其他史料,对美国记者伊罗生在20世纪30年代中国民权保障同盟中的活动和作用作了重新述评。伊罗生不仅是中国民权保障同盟的积极参与者,也是最先提出发起中国民权保障运动的人,开展这一运动的建议是他在与中国共产党、宋庆龄及其他人士反对国民党白色恐怖统治斗争中紧密合作的产物。伊罗生的活动也清楚地展示了中国民权保障同盟与中共的直接关系。组织中国民权保障同盟是中共在与国民党较量中,其城市地下工作路线、策略发展过程中的重要一页。伊罗生的参与则丰富了这一斗争的内容。     

The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles

In her 2005 article, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and thePolitical Uses of the Past," Jacquelyn Dowd Hall called on scholarsto complicate the story of civil rights by looking beyond atraditional narrative that begins in 1954, ends in 1965, focuseson the South, and features Martin Luther King, Jr. as the leaderof a single-voiced chorus of interracial activists who overcameracial barriers nonviolently. The recent wave of histories aboutarts movements in African-American communities (e.g., Pointfrom Which Creation Begins: The Black Artists’ Group ofSt. Louis, by Benjamin Looker, 2004,     

“A Different Kind of Theo-Politics: Abraham Joshua Heschel,the Prophets and the Civil Rights Movement”

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the sharp differences in the understanding of the Hebrew prophets by theologians, Jewish and Protestant, in Germany and the United States, with a particular focus on their invocation of prophetic teachings in relation to social and political movements. The sharp denigrations of the prophets – described as ecstatics (Gunkel) or rural naifs (Troeltsch) rendered the prophets useless as figures of inspiration in Germany in relation to racism, colonialism, and WWI. By contrast, the prophets have played a crucial role in American civil thought, especially in the Civil Rights Movement. The distinctive and influential interpretation of prophetic consciousness developed by the German-American Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel is examined for its parallels with the prophetic theology of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the political ramifications of Heschel's link between prophetic revelation and political leadership.     

The Geopolitics of Malcolm X

Geographers and other social scientists have largely neglected Malcolm X as a critical theorist. Unlike the attention accorded to Franz Fanon, the writings and speeches of Malcolm X have remained unexplored for their potential contribution to political geographic thought. As a corrective, in this paper we situate Malcolm X within the rubric of critical geopolitics and postcolonial theory. We contend that Malcolm X, during the last year of his life, was formulating a geopolitics of oppression. We further assert that the geopolitics of Malcolm X were decidedly critical and anti-colonial, and that his discourse foreshadows elements of contemporary social theory. Specifically, Malcolm X instructed his audiences to educate themselves about the relationships between imperial power and he addressed the politics of representation by representing the issues of American racial oppression as one of global oppression.     

Recent developments in social and cultural geography in Spain

Controversy has erupted in Selma, Alabama, over recent efforts to commemorate the career of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate cavalry officer and founding member of the original Ku Klux Klan. More generally, the controversy in Selma is emblematic of an enduring regional pattern in which contests over the future are couched in terms of the past. Relative to other media, monuments appear to be trustworthy and lasting. Despite this appearance of historical consensus and stability, the city's public spaces are the product of and conduit for ongoing politics. The current conflict pits memorial activists associated with the Civil Rights Movement against neo‐Confederates. Interpreted in the context of Selma's increasing promotion of Civil Rights heritage and the recent election of the city's first African American mayor, the Forrest affair highlights the utility of the concept of symbolic accretion for understanding the complexities of commemorating antagonistic histories in the same place. Symbolic accretion describes the appending of commemorative elements onto already existing memorials. The situation in Selma suggests two different types of symbolic accretion, allied and antithetical. More generally, the act of commemoration itself may be understood as a process of accretion in that heretofore anonymous spaces are formally recognized via the grafting of memorial elements.     

The Power of the Future: Prophetic Politics Between Political Crises and Civil Rights

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the political life of Malcolm X in the context of the Black Prophetic Tradition. By exploring historical, literary, and theological considerations of political violence and divine warnings, “Catch on Fire” evaluates Malcolm X’s legacy as one of the iconic figures within more contemporary prophetic politics.     

Pickets,Protests and Purses in the American Civil Rights Movement

At first glance, perhaps nothing seems more mundane and apolitical than a purse. But purses have always been much more than a fashion accessory. This article analyses how southern Black women – both the legendary and the lesser known – in the ‘classical’ phase of the Civil Rights Movement used purses to appear as respectable ladies' when their dress and comportment were under close surveillance. Yet they simultaneously used their purses as private, female-controlled spaces that aided them in achieving a wide variety of social, economic and political objectives. In fact, many southern Black women used their purses to hide critical items needed to prepare themselves and protect their bodies as they voted, sat-in, rode on public transportation and integrated schools. Using oral histories, memoirs, newspaper and magazine stories and photographs, this article argues that Black southern female activists used purses primarily as ‘toolkits’. In the process, it reveals that Black southern women's participation in the armed self-defence movement is far more significant than scholars have appreciated.     

The Diplomacy of Shame

Book reviewed in this article:
Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy     

Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’

An increasing amount of scholarship in critical, feminist, and anti-racist geographies has recently focused self-reflexively on the topics of exclusion and discrimination within the discipline itself. In this article we contribute to this literature by considering citation as a problematic technology that contributes to the reproduction of the white heteromasculinity of geographical thought and scholarship, despite advances toward more inclusivity in the discipline in recent decades. Yet we also suggest, against citation counting and other related neoliberal technologies that imprecisely approximate measures of impact, influence, and academic excellence, citation thought conscientiously can also be a feminist and anti-racist technology of resistance that demonstrates engagement with those authors and voices we want to carry forward. We argue for a conscientious engagement with the politics of citation as a geographical practice that is mindful of how citational practices can be a tool for either the reification of, or resistance to, unethical hierarchies of knowledge production. We offer practical and conceptual reasons for carefully thinking through the role of citation as a performative embodiment of the reproduction of geographical thought.     

Snapshots: Images of Men in the United States Colored Troops

Abstract

This article considers the intertwined impact of two very different developments that emerged during the era of the American Civil War. The first concerned the invention and dissemination of new photographic technology that made it possible for ordinary citizens to sit for portraits and come away with multiple copies of new cartes de visite. The second concerned the revolutionary decision by the federal government to recruit African American men into the Union Army. As a result, in the final two years of the war uniformed African American men were having their portraits taken, and those small images began circulating among friends and family members. This speculative essay considers how these small cultural artifacts might have reflected and shaped a world in transition.     

二战与美国黑人民权运动的兴起

美国黑人民权运动是非洲裔美国人为争取政治、经济和社会的平等权利而发动的一场声势浩大的群众性社会运动。这场社会运动的发生绝不是偶然的,而第二次世界大战的爆发则起到了十分关键的刺激和推动作用。二战使美国黑人有机会更加深刻地认识到美国所宣扬的民主信条同其在国内极力维护的种族主义实践之间的强烈反差,并进一步激发r他们的种族意识、政治参与热情和寻求变革的勇气。向华盛顿进军运动则为美国黑人展示自己的力量与锻炼自已的意志提供了历史舞台。这场没有发生的示威运动大大地增强了黑人的斗争信心。这些因素为美国黑人民权运动的发生做好了最后的思想和组织准备。     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: AN ASPECT OF MAGHRIBI STUDIES: SOME STUDENT PAPERS Gabriel Esquer, Histoire de l'Algérie 1830–1960. Vincent Confer, France and Algeria: The Problem of Civil and Political Reform, 1870–1920. R. V. C. Bodley, Wind in the Sahara. The Autobiography of Malcolm X: with the Assistance of Alex Haley. The Arab Moslems in the United States: Religion and Assimilation, by Abdo Elkholy. Islamic Reform, by Malcolm H. Kerr. The Gift addressed to the spirit of the Prophet, by Dr. A. H. Johns. A Short History of the Near East, by Philip K. Hitti. Russell Pasha, by Ronald Seth. The Kurds by Thomas Bois, trans. (from the French) Malcolm Welland. Ethiopians speak: Studies in Cultural Background, by Wolf Leslau. Islam in Tropical Africa [Studies Presented and Discussed at the Fifth International African Seminar, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, January 1964], ed. with an introduction by I. M. Lewis [Foreword by Daryll Forde]. Al-Haqq by Basilyōs Ishāq. Alexandria, 1964; Hadha Huwa'l-Haqq, by Muh. ^cAbd al-Lat?f Ibn al-Khat?b.     

Forging African American Minds: Black Pragmatism, “intelligent labor,” and a new look at industrial education, 1879–1900

This article examines black thought and black ideas about racial consciousness after Reconstruction in order to rethink the way African American leaders conceived the relationship between work and intellectual achievement in the late nineteenth century. Conventional scholarly accounts of the politics of black knowledge and education – including the still very prevalent paradigm of industrial and classical education – have missed a fascinating transformation of thought among many African American leaders after 1879 who sought to reinvent black identity. At the root of this transformation were shifting ideas about the black worker and a new industrial economy. The leaders who represented the transformation embraced progressive, pragmatist, and very modern approaches to intellectual cultivation – approaches that were more in line with theories of manual training and object-learning than with classical education. In other words, the intellectual rationales for industrial education among black educators were as important as the economic and practical ones. Those rationales were articulated not just by more conservative black voices intent on fitting into a new industrial order, but also by black progressives and radicals who hoped to cultivate black “self-consciousness,” vigorous engagement with the “real world,” and intellectual independence from white norms.     

试析杜鲁门总统民权委员会的活动

为了回应“两难困境”的挑战,杜鲁门总统颁布行政命令,创立了总统民权委员会。委员会对美国的种族关系和民权问题进行了全面的调研和评估,向总统提交了《保障这些权利》的报告。报告体现了战后美国政府和人们对种族问题的反思,也是对解决种族问题的探索和尝试。报告的大量发行和人们的竞相阅读,对增进美国民众的种族正义观念产生了重要的影响。     

The Indigenous Challenge to Westphalian Sovereignty

Indigenous peoples achieved a diplomatic success in 2007 when the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly endorsed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This paper analyses why this occurred, and assesses what the Declaration means for state sovereignty. It highlights two reasons why the Global Indigenous Caucus gained widespread endorsement for a Declaration that strongly affirms Indigenous self-determination. First, as a transnational advocacy network the Caucus used a boomerang pattern of lobbying, by engaging the support of powerful allies. Second, the Caucus understood that the concerns of African states about territorial integrity differed from the concerns of states like Australia about external scrutiny of human rights. The Declaration enhances the likelihood of such scrutiny without threatening the territorial integrity of states.     

Reflections on the Economic-Noneconomic Debate: A Radical Geographical Perspective from the European South

This paper expands upon the economic/noneconomic (cultural turn) debate in economic geography and proposes an alternative radical perspective through the lens of the European South. Based on the experience of Greece, the paper argues that no matter how important the cultural issues might be, the great political economy problems of distorted growth and incomplete development, sociospatial inequalities, and weak, incoherent and contradictory territorial policies continue to have a primary importance. The paper reviews some basic points of the cultural turn debate and then examines the orientations of radical spatioeconomic thought in postdictatorial (post-1974) Greece in arguing that this thought was mostly problem-driven, policy-oriented and focused upon the political economy of Greek socioeconomic and territorial restructuring. It is argued that a southern radical agenda has to be based more deliberately on holistic and inclusive interdisciplinary resyntheses in which cultural issues are given due attention, but not to the detriment of a radical understanding of the territorial workings of economy, society and power relations. The concluding suggestion of the paper is that it is a political turn , rather than a cultural turn, that is best suited to a radical interpretation of South European economic geographies.     

Beyond the Right to the City: Territorial Autogestion and the Take over the City Movement in 1970s Italy

The cry and demand for the Right to the City (RttC) risks becoming a cliché, merely signifying urban rebellion rather than proving its practical content on the ground. I explore the limits of the thesis via its fraught entanglement with private property rights and the state‐form; and through Lefebvre's radical critique of the state, political economy and rights elsewhere. Rights claims, I contend, unintentionally reify the uneven power relations they aim to overcome, while routinely cauterising the hard‐fought collective social force that forces social gains. As a counter to the RttC thesis, I explore the autonomous Take over the City (TotC) movements of 1970s Italy, arguing that these largely neglected eminently immanent forms of territorial community activism, brought here into dialogue with Lefebvre's conception of territorial autogestion, surpassed the RttC thesis in praxis. The experience of “Laboratory Italy” thus provides highly suggestive lessons for a contemporary politics of urban space.     

From resistance to revolution: the limits of nonviolence in Arendt’s ‘Civil Disobedience’

ABSTRACT

Arendt’s work on civil disobedience sets out an optimistic portrayal of the possibilities of such forms of action in re-energising the spirit of American politics in the late twentieth century. Civil disobedience should not simply be tolerated, she argued, but incorporated into the legal structure of the American political system. Her work is usually seen to promote an idea of civil disobedience that is thus bound to existing constitutional principles and essentially nonviolent. However, by looking at Arendt’s discussion and critique of various practices of civil disobedience in 1960s and 1970s America, specifically in relation to the nonviolence movement influenced by Martin Luther King, and on the other side, the more militant Black Power movement, a different idea of civil disobedience emerges. This paper argues that whilst, for Arendt, civil disobedience within America certainly possesses the constitutionally restorative potential she assigns to it, in a broader sense – theoretically, globally, and even in terms of alternative ideologies within America – her conception of civil disobedience is in itself neither necessarily constitutional, nor nonviolent. It is, instead, a form of revolutionary action, whose limits are set only by politics itself, and specifically, Arendt’s criterion of publicity.     

SPECIAL INTERESTS AND THE POLICY PROCESS

Books reviewed in this article:
Jeffrey M. Berry, Feeding Hungry People: Rulemaking in the Food Stamp Program
Peter Navarro, The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues are Stealing America
Richard K. Scotch, From Good Will to Civil Rights: Transforming Federal Disability Policy
Paul Y. Watanabe, Ethnic Groups, Congress, and American Foreign Policy: The Politics of the Turkish Arms Embargo