Dark Continent

Maids and Madams

2012-02-12T18:21:00.000-05:00

This discussion of TheHelp, has gotten me really interested in a comparison between domesticservants and race in the US and South Africa. First, I turned to Zanele Muholi’s work on what she calls domesticatedlabor. This first photo is from her "'Massa' and Mina(h)" project. Thanks to Ellen for helping me find these.

For her interesting statement on the project, click here.

And one of our favorites:

From interview-with-zanele-muholi/

For an extra delight, see this blog piece on Zanele’s workby the brilliant Columbia University professor Hlonipha Mokoena from the Africa is a Country blog: http://africasacountry.com/2010/12/06/anybody-can-be-a-maid/

I also asked my South African friend, Jabu Pereira, if shehad seen the film. She had many insightsabout the problem of having the film set from the white woman’s viewpoint that echoedmany of our concerns over here.

Then we turned to the experience of seeing the film in a largelywhite audience. She said that she wasone of three black people in the theater. The white folks were quiet both throughout the film and whenit was over. They didn’t even laugh atthe things that were meant to be obviously funny. She said that she and her friends werecracking up but noticed how uncomfortable the rest of the people were. They must have thought: "Has this happened to me? Have I thought I was eating a delicious piewhen I was eating s**t?" What I thoughtwas over-the-top humor really hit home for some people. Who knew?

The audience Ellen and I were in was also largelywhite. The black people seemed verymoved by The Help and were not readyto leave when it ended. We both noticed,however, that the white people laughed really loudly at any of the humor andthey cleared out of the room quickly at the end. But Elle and I had different interpretationsof their laughter. I thought they experiencedthe humor as a kind of comic relief that allowed them to escape from thetensions of the movie and dis-identify with the white racists. Ellen, on the other hand, felt that thelaughter had a darker origin—most white people’s custom of laughing at blackpeople’s ‘antics’ on screen.

Again, what I find most interesting are the contrasts. If I were starting out in my career, I’d loveto do a historical study that compares domestic workers, race and class in theUS and SA. There are so manysimilarities that the differences would illuminate so much in each culture.

A Cultural Studies Response to the Movie, The Help

2012-02-09T19:58:00.000-05:00

I finally got a chance to see The Help. The Newark (DE)Free Library showed in Friday night and Ellen and I went. Having seen so much criticism by people whomI respect but also having heard positive reviews from a few other people I alsorespect, I wanted to see for myself what I thought. [Here’s a thoughtful review that includes alist of other great reviews Critique]As is typical of me, I come down somewhere in the middle. But this isn’t because I’m beingwishy-washy. I just think that theproduct, like most popular culture products, can elicit contradictory and evencompeting interpretations.

At heart, the movie is a film about race that is intended fora largely white, mass audience. Nomatter how well intended or potentially progressive a project is, this goalinevitably creates certain well-known problems. Kathryn Stockett’s book, The Help, on which the movie was based, must have appealed to the film’sproducers precisely because it had a white woman at the center with whom a massaudience could identify. Since thecontrasting behavior of the white people was central to the film’s narrative, therehad to be so many white people in it that there was little room for blackcharacters. The two main maids, Aibileenplayed by Viola Davis and Minny played by Octavia Spencer, had to represent virtuallyall black women. The Minny characterparticularly suffered from this problem; she had to be funny, sassy, lovable, mean,domestically abused, brave, and more. Only a great actor could carry all that off as well as Spencer.

We all know that, usually, race movies designed to attractwhite audiences are to be avoided. But amovie about black maids: we had to gosee it! Our mothers and grandmothers scrubbedand bowed so we could become black intellectuals. Someone more poetic than I has to say whatthose women mean to us. I can’t resistthe desire to proudly proclaim that my mother worked as a maid from time totime, even though that was not her primary identification when I was growingup. I was lucky to get my first job cleaninga store at 14 because my aunt who was a well-respected domestic workerrecommended me. These women are close tomy heart.

I don’t know about my colleagues and friends; but I hadmixed emotions as I watched The Help. There was something so appealing about theway Viola Davis played her part that even people who hated the film wanted herto get best actress awards. That so manypraised her performance made me feel that I wasn’t the only one who hadconflicting emotions about the movie. Howcould she be so separated from the rest of the movie? Was there something about the contrastbetween her role and that of Cecily Tyson’s that has meaning for us? I know I wanted to hide in a hole when Tysonwas on the screen.

I’ve seen my sister scholars complain that too manyrealities about black maids’ lives were left out. Where was the reference to sexual harassment,they demand. To me, that seems more likea criticism that should be made of a documentary than a feature film. More troubling is the charge that The Help downplays the dangers andsystematic oppressiveness of the Jim Crow South. I hope my sister scholars will allow me theroom to present an alternate view.

By focusing on the relationships between black and whitewomen, the movie is able to show the daily, bitter humiliations that womenfaced. In fact, the film is unusual forits emphasis on white women’s racist pasts and the horrors of the domesticsphere. And, it was very clear thatthose women were ready to resist Jane Crow wherever and whenever theycould. Those old segregated, rattle-trapbuses that delivered women from the ghettoes to the white areas were meant to remindus of Rosa Parks’ heroic deeds. Theshooting of Megar Evers was suppose to indicate how dangerous life was forblacks in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi. The state was there to enforce white women’s policing of black women’sbehavior. The domestic worker who endedup in jail—whose name, ironically, I can’t seem to find online—represented thatstory.

While I was writing this post, a South African friend SkypedEllen and asked if we had seen the TheHelp. She and her girlfriend hadjust been to see it and wanted to know what we thought of it. This is a woman who grew up with a live-indomestic worker as a mother. The mother’s ‘liberal’ employers were relativelygenerous but seemed blissfully unaware of the toll that umama’s absence took on her own children. Our friend cried during the movie; it touchedsomething deep inside her.

I’m not trying to legitimate my view of the film bypresenting an ‘authentic’ response to TheHelp. I’m sure the reasons the filmtouched our friend are as complex as the reasons that make us have conflictingemotions and responses to it. I mentionit because it reminds me of what Stuart Hall teaches us: the meanings ofcultural products are never fixed as good or bad or positive or negative.

2012-01-09T03:22:00.000-05:00

I wanted to love the film, The Iron Lady. I knew thatMerle Streep would be superb as Maggie Thatcher. She was spectacular; and I rarely use thatword. Unfortunately, her greatperformance makes the film more problematic than had a lesser actor played thePrime Minister. Streep makes Thatcher adorableand lovable. Through at least half ifnot more of the movie, one wonders how the opposition to her atrocious policieswould ultimately be presented. In brief decontextualizedsnippets, we see riots, rebellions, terrorism, and liberal opposition to herpolicies.

Then, most distressingly, the Falklands War was presented asa triumph for Thatcher. There was asight intimation that the war was a disaster for a weakened economy and no hintthat it was a nationalist cover for the Iron Lady’s shameful policy ofsacrificing the poor and working class for the benefit of what we now call the1%. Any hope that the movie would explain the furybehind the opposition to her vanished. We learn more about the impact of her hard work on her family life thanwe do of her policies’ impact on the poor and working class. We learn virtually nothing about Britain’sdecline as an empire. Indeed, the‘triumph’ in the Falklands made it seem as if Thatcher had restored theempire. Now, there’s a fantasy for you.

I suspect that the focus on what it means for a powerfulwoman to age will appeal to many of my fellow baby boomers. That’s a hard narrative to resist. And, if we know nothing about the increasingdivide between the wealthy and the poor and the displacement of the Britishinternational supremacy with the American empire, the Thatcher story is simply abouta bourgeois and narrow feminist triumph over a male dominated institution. And, as the coopted feminist narrative goesthese days, the real cost of her achievements were to her children andhusband.

Dispatch From Angola: Faith-Based Slavery in a Louisiana Prison - COLORLINES

2011-12-26T15:33:00.001-05:00

Dispatch From Angola: Faith-Based Slavery in a Louisiana Prison - COLORLINES

updated CV

2011-12-19T15:01:00.003-05:00

e. FRANCES WHITE

Work Home
Gallatin School of Individualized Study
New York University
1 Washington Place, Room 503
New York, New York 10003

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Boston University, 1978
Major Field: African History
Minor Field: African American History

M.A., Boston University, 1973
Major Field: History

B.A., Wheaton College (MA) 1971
cum laude and with departmental honors in Urban Studies

EMPLOYMENT EXPERIENCE

ACADEMIC
Professor of History, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU July 1998 to present

Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Faculty of Arts and Science, NYU, 2010 to present

Professor of History and Black Studies, Hampshire College, 1990 to 1998

Five Colleges Graduate Faculty, 1986 to 1998
• Supervised MA and PhD theses in anthropology and history departments at U. Mass-Amherst

Associate Professor of History and Black Studies, Hampshire College, 1983 to 1990

Assistant Professor of History and Black Studies, Hampshire College, 1980 to 1983

Assistant Professor of African History, Departments of History and Pan African Studies, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, September 1978 to June 1980

Instructor, History Department, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone Freetown, Sierra Leone, November 1975 to June 1976

ADMINISTRATIVE
Vice Provost for Faculty Development, New York University, September 2008 to 8/2009

• Supervise Office of Faculty Resources, Center for Teaching Excellence; Faculty Resource Network; Office of Equal Opportunity;
• Oversee university-wide faculty diversity efforts
• Chair, Special Council on Faculty Diversity

Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, New York University, September 2005 to August 2008

• Advised provost on faculty appointments, tenure, and policies
• Member of President’s Senior Team of 12 people
• Supervised Office of Faculty Resources, Center for Teaching Excellence; Faculty Resource Network; Office of Academic Appointments; Office of Equal Opportunity; Scholars at Risk Network
• Oversaw university-wide faculty diversity efforts
• Act as provost’s liaison to the Faculty Senator’s Council, the School of Social Work, and the humanistic social sciences in the School of Faculty of Arts and Science

Dean of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU, July 1998 to June 2005

• Chief academic, administrative, and fiscal officer of a school with 1200 undergraduates, 200 masters students, and a $20m budget
• Increased the school’s visibility and reputation both in the university and throughout the country; greatly increased the applicant pool (over 30% in the last year alone)
• Raised over $25m in last two years for major capital campaign
• Led the school to build a stronger, more diverse faculty and a more coherent curriculum; retention steadily improved

Dean of Faculty, Hampshire College (Amherst, MA.), July 1994 to June 1998

• Chief academic officer for the college with four schools and approximately 90 faculty members and 1200 students
• Supervised the library, academic computing, admissions and financial aid, registrar, advising, and more
• Managed major restructuring of the faculty from four schools to five
• Significant improvement of faculty diversity
• Substantial growth in admissions applications

Dean of the School of Social Science, Hampshire College, July 1991 to June 1994
Chief academic officer of a school with approximately 40 faculty members

OTHER HIGHER EDUCATION EXPERIENCE (selected)

Manuscript Reviewer
Routledge
Cornell University Press
Syracuse University Press

Co-chair of the Executive Committee, Metro New York/Southern Connecticut Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC), 2006 to 2009

Participant, Institute of Management and Leadership in Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Summer 2006

Chair, NYU Council of the Deans, 2001 to 2005

Chair, Review Committee for Proposed Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies Program, Louisiana State University, 2001

Series Editor, Critical Studies in Racism and Ethnicity, Temple University Press, 1997 to present

President’s Commission, Wheaton College, 1997 to 2003

College of Arts & Sciences Advisory Board for Adelphi University, 1997 to 1999

Planning Committee, Black Women and the Academy Conferences, 1994 and 1997

Selection Committee, Frederic W. Ness Book Award, 1995

History Department Visiting Committee, Amherst College, 1995

Chair, Five Colleges Black Studies Executive Committee, 1981 to 1982

Visiting Research Scholar, Institute of African Studies, Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1975 to 1977

FELLOWSHIPS, PRIZES AND HONORS

Kidder-Peabody Grant for research in The Gambia, Spring 1989

Letitia Brown Memorial Publication Prize of the Association of Black Women Historians for the best book in 1987 on Black Women (Sierra Leone's Settler Women Traders), Fall 1987

Catherine T. & John D. MacArthur Professor, Hampshire College, 1985 to 1988

Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in Sierra Leone and The Gambia, Fall 1983

Mellon Scholar, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women program on integrating women into the humanities, Spring 1983

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend for research in South Carolina, Summer 1982

A.W. Mellon Faculty Development Grant for research in Sierra Leone, 1980 to 1981

Roothbert Fellowship, The Roothbert Fund, 1977 to 1978

Kent Fellowship, The Danforth Foundation, 1975 to 1978

African American Scholars Council Grant for research in Sierra Leone, 1975 to 1976

BOOK PUBLICATIONS

Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability, Temple University Press, 2001

With Iris Berger. Women in Sub-Saharan Africa: Restoring Women to History. Indiana University Press, 1999. Reprinted in Japanese in 2004

Sierra Leone's Settler Women Traders: Women on the Afro-European Frontier. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Women and Culture Series. 1987. (Winner of the Letitia Brown Memorial Publication Prize of the Association of Black Women Historians, 1987)

OTHER PUBLICATIONS (Selected)

Review of Jackie Ormes: The first African-American Woman Cartoonist by Nancy Goldstein, forthcoming.

“Adelaide Casely Hayford.” “Constance Cummings-John.” and “Race: Overview.” Contributions to Encyclopedia of Women in World History. Oxford University Press, 2007

“The Evidence of Things Not Seen: The Alchemy of Race and Sexuality” in James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays. Lovalerie King and Lynn Orilla Scott (eds.) Palgrave Macmillan 2006

"Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse and African American Nationalism." Journal of Women's History. Vol. 2 No. 1 (Spring 1990). Reprinted in Expanding the Boundaries of Women’s History: Essays on Women in the Third World. Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Margaret Strobel, (eds.), Indiana University Press, 1992; in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, (ed.) The New Press, 1995; and in Is it Nation Time?: Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., (ed.) The University of Chicago Press, 2002

"Women of Western and Western Central Africa." Restoring Women to History: Teaching Packets for Integrating Women's History into Courses on Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Margaret Strobel (eds.) Organization of American Historians, 1988

"Racisme et sexisme: La confrontation des feministes noires aux formes conjointes de l'oppression." Les Temps Modernes. Vol. 42, no. 485, December 1986

"Women, Work and Ethnicity: The Sierra Leone Case." Women and Work in Africa. Edna Bay (ed.) Westview Press, 1982

LECTURES, PAPERS AND CONFERENCES ORGANIZED (Selected)

“Market Women in Sierra Leone and South Carolina.” The Sierra Leone-Gullah Link Series. Smithsonian Anacostia Museum. June 23, 2011.

“Connecting Diversity and Globalization: Immigration and Access.” The Future of Diversity and Opportunity in Higher Education: A National Forum on Innovation and Collaboration, Rutgers University, December 3-5, 2008.

“Faculty Diversity in the (Post) Obama Era.” Making Excellence Inclusive: Promoting Diversity in Higher Education—a conference organized by a coalition of Higher Education Recruitment Consortia, November 7, 2008.

Beyond Michigan. A summit organized with Professor Susan Sturm of Columbia University. Invited guests included diversity vice provosts from Brown, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Penn, and Yale; legal counsels Jonathan Alger, Rutgers University, Anurima Bhargava, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Sheila O’Rourke, U.C.-Berkeley. June 2008.

“Black Feminist Theory and Black Masculinity.” Invited panelist for the Scholars Network on Masculinity and the Well Being of African American Men. Funded by the Ford Foundation. Duke University, March 15 and 16, 2008.

Plenary Panel Member, Strategies for Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling. Faculty Resource Network National Symposium on Advancing Women and the Underrepresented in the Academy, Johnson C. Smith University, November 16, 2007.

“The Suppression of Slave Trade Memories.” Keynote address at Slavery, Anti-Slavery and the Road to Freedom, conference held by Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. May 2007.

“Teaching and Research at Fourah Bay College before the (Sierra Leonean) Civil War.” Lecture delivered at the Institute of African Studies, FBC, University of Sierra Leone, February 2005

“Liberal Education in a Research University.” Lectured delivered at the Ministry of Education, Freetown, Sierra Leone, February 2005

“Liberal Education and the Contested Meanings of Freedom.” Paper delivered at the Smith College Symposium, “What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts Today?” May 2002

“Marking Race: Race, Respectability, and Nationalism.” Lecture delivered at Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University at New Brunswick, October 2001

“Race and Gender in Hiring in American Higher Education.” La Universidad de Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, August 1999

“Evidence of Things Not Seen: The Alchemy of Race and Sexuality.” Paper presented at Princeton University Conference, Race Matters, May 1994

“Gender, Sexuality and Nationalism.” American Historical Association annual meeting, San Francisco, CA., January 1994
“Who Represents the Race?” University of Oregon at Eugene, October 1992

"Black Feminist Voices." University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, March 1991

"Theories and Societies Structured in Dominance—Black Feminist Interventions." Lecture delivered at Hampshire College as part of the Five Colleges 25th Anniversary Lecture Series, February 1991

"Gender, Counter-Discourse, and Afrocentric Thought." Williams College, February 1990

"Africa on My Mind: Searching for the African Roots of African-American Women." Paper delivered at Clark University conference, Women on the Frontiers of Research: An Interdisciplinary Conference, March 1988

"Black Feminism and the Politics of the Black Family." Williams College, February 1987

"The Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Constructing Race and Womanhood in the 19th Century." University of California at Santa Cruz, February 1987. Also delivered at the National Women Studies Association meetings, June 1987; and Simons Rock at Bard College September 1987

"Race, Gender and Science." Conference organized at Hampshire College with Ann McNeal; participants included Evelynn Hammonds, Venessa Gamble, Darlene Clark Hine, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Rita Arditi and Allan Brandt, January 1987

CURRENT INTERESTS

Learning to play jazz piano

Stuart Hall Syllabus

2011-01-26T13:10:00.016-05:00

Required Texts:

Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). [N.B.: Buy on-line]

Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). [Also sold as Between Camps: Nations, Culture and the Allure of Race.]

Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage Publications, 1996).

David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge 1996).

Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

With the exception of the Carby book, all texts are available at the NYU Bookstore. All other texts are available either on Blackboard [Bb] or as an article in an e-journal through Bobst Library [Bobst e-journal].

Schedule of Readings, Assignments, and Screenings

January 25 Introduction to the course and each other
Screening: Race: The Floating Signifier.

February 1 Context and History
Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain.
ASSIGNMENT: Response Paper

February 8 Understanding the Crisis
Hall, “The Meaning of New Times,” in Stuart Hall.
Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Stuart Hall.
Hall, “For Allon White: Metaphors of Transformation,” in Stuart Hall.
Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed, Stuart Hall et al., (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 184-227. [Bb]
Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1978), 3-28. [Bb]
ASSIGNMENT: Thesis Statement

February 15 Feminist interventions
Charlotte Brunsdon, “A Thief in the Night: Stories of Feminism in the 1970s at CCCS,” in Stuart Hall.
Angela McRobbie, “Looking Back at New Times and Its Critics, Stuart Hall.
Angela McRobbie, “The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text and Action.” Feminist Review 12 (1982): 46-57. [Bobst e-journal]
Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17: 4 (Summer 1991): 773-797. [Bobst e-journal]
Women’s Studies Group, “Relations of Production, Relations of Re-Production,” Eds. Ann Gray et al., CCCS Selected Working Paper Volume 2 (London: Routledge, 2007), 464-433. [ebrary]
Hazel V. Carby, “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, eds. Houston Baker et. al. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 61-86. [Bb]
ASSIGNMENT: Response Paper

February 22 More on Althusser and Gramsci
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus: Notes toward an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85-126 (recommended), 95-120 (required). [Bb]
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, eds. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, (London: ElecBook, 1971), 445-449, 506-507, and 558-563. [ebrary]
Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, ed. Unesco, (Paris: Unesco, 1980), 306-345. [Bb]
Hall, “Reflections on ‘Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,’” in Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, eds. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg, (Malden Ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 449-454. [Bb]
Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” in Stuart Hall.
Recommended:
Jennifer Daryl Slack, “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies,” in Stuart Hall.
ASSIGNMENT: Thesis Statement

March 1 Race and New Identities
Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall.
Hall, “What is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” in Stuart Hall.
Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” in Questions of Cultural Identity.
Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” Framework 36 (1989): 68-82. [Bobst e-journal]
Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities.” New Left Review 209 (1995), 3-14. [Bobst e-journal]
ASSIGNMENT: Response Paper

March 8 Interrogating Identity
Zygmunt Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist—or a Short History of Identity” in Questions of Cultural Identity.
Homi K. Bhabha, “Culture’s In-Between.” in Questions of Cultural Identity.
Lawrence Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies—Is That all There is?” in Questions of Cultural Identity.
Read any other essay from Questions of Cultural Identity that you feel will enrich our class discussion.
ASSIGNMENT: Thesis Statement

March 15 Spring Break

March 22 The Critics
ASSIGNMENT: Class Presentations on the Critics with outline uploaded to Blackboard before class.

March 29 Race and Gender
Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood
ASSIGNMENT: Thesis Statement
The last part of the class is designed for students to discuss possible final project topics.

April 5 Race and Gender 2
Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire
ASSIGNMENT: Response Paper
The last part of the class is designed for students to discuss possible final project topics.

April 12 The Allure of Race
Paul Gilroy, Against Race
ASSIGNMENT: Thesis Statement
The last part of the class is designed for students to discuss possible final project topics.

April 19 The Critics and the Next Generation
Simon Gikandi, “Race and Cosmopolitanism,” American Literary History 14:3 (Fall 2002): 593-615. [Bobst e-journal]
Tavia Nyong’o, “Racial Kitsch and Black Performance,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 15:2 (Fall 2002): 371-393. [Bobst e-journal]
Nyong’o, “Do You Want Queer Theory (or Do You Want the Truth)? Intersections of Punk and Queer in the 1970s,” Radical History Review 100 (Winter 2008): 102-119. [Bobst e-journal]
Nyong’o, “Punk’d Theory.” Social Text 3-4 (2005): 19-34. [Bobst e-journal]
ASSIGNMENT: Response Paper
All students will present their thesis statements and likely bibliographies to the class.

April 26 Race and Sexuality
Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, “De Margin and De Centre,” in Stuart Hall.
TBA

May 3 Final Class
All students will present their final projects to the class.
Papers due on Blackboard.

STUART HALL: RACE & NEW IDENTITIES

2011-01-08T18:47:00.008-05:00

This semester (Spring 2011), I'm teaching a new graduate seminar on Stuart Hall and people he has influenced. I'd love some feedback on my reading list. Any advice? Thoughts? Additions? Subtractions?

Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain
Hall et. al., Policing the Crisis
Chen and Morley, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies
Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood
Stephens, Black Empire
Gilroy, Against Race

We'll also read essays by Hall, Tavia Nyong'o, Kobena Mercer, Isaac Julien, Angela McRobbie, and a few others. I'm particularly interested in critiques of Hall and cultural studies. Any suggestions?

Udated CV

2010-05-30T17:00:00.003-04:00

Since I haven't updated this blog in a long, long time, I thought I ought to at least add an updated CV. Since my last post, I left my position as a Vice Provost. I am still at NYU but am now a full time faculty member with a joint appointment in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Faculty of Arts and Science.

E. FRANCES WHITE

Gallatin School of Individualized Study
New York University
715 Broadway, Room 503
New York, New York 10003
212-998-2192
f.white@nyu.edu

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Boston University, 1978
Major Field: African History
Minor Field: African American History

M.A., Boston University, 1973
Major Field: History

B.A., Wheaton College (MA) 1971
cum laude and with departmental honors in Urban Studies

EMPLOYMENT EXPERIENCE

ACADEMIC
Professor of History, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU July 1998 to present

Professor of History, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Faculty of Arts and Science, NYU Spring 2010 to present

Professor of History and Black Studies, Hampshire College, 1990 to 1998

Five Colleges Graduate Faculty, 1986 to 1998
• Supervised MA and PhD theses in anthropology and history departments at U. Mass-Amherst

Associate Professor of History and Black Studies, Hampshire College, 1983 to 1990

Assistant Professor of History and Black Studies, Hampshire College, 1980 to 1983

Assistant Professor of African History, Departments of History and Pan African Studies, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, September 1978 to June 1980

Instructor, History Department, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone Freetown, Sierra Leone, November 1975 to June 1976

ADMINISTRATIVE
Vice Provost for Faculty Development, New York University, September 2008 to 8/2009

• Supervised Office of Faculty Resources, Center for Teaching Excellence; Faculty Resource Network; Office of Equal Opportunity;
• Oversaw university-wide faculty diversity efforts
• Chair, Special Council on Faculty Diversity

Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, New York University, September 2005 to August 2008

• Advised provost on faculty appointments, tenure, and policies
• Member of President’s Senior Team of 12 people
• Supervised Office of Faculty Resources, Center for Teaching Excellence; Faculty Resource Network; Office of Academic Appointments; Office of Equal Opportunity; Scholars at Risk Network
• Oversaw university-wide faculty diversity efforts
• Act as provost’s liaison to the Faculty Senator’s Council, the School of Social Work, and the humanistic social sciences in the School of Faculty of Arts and Science

Dean of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU, July 1998 to June 2005

• Chief academic, administrative, and fiscal officer of a school with 1200 undergraduates, 200 masters students, and a $20m budget
• Increased the school’s visibility and reputation both in the university and throughout the country; greatly increased the applicant pool (over 30% in the last year alone)
• Raised over $25m in last two years for major capital campaign
• Led the school to build a stronger, more diverse faculty and a more coherent curriculum; retention steadily improved

Dean of Faculty, Hampshire College (Amherst, MA.), July 1994 to June 1998

• Chief academic officer for the college with four schools and approximately 90 faculty members and 1200 students
• Supervised the library, academic computing, admissions and financial aid, registrar, advising, and more
• Managed major restructuring of the faculty from four schools to five
• Significant improvement of faculty diversity
• Substantial growth in admissions applications

Dean of the School of Social Science, Hampshire College, July 1991 to June 1994
Chief academic officer of a school with approximately 40 faculty members

OTHER HIGHER EDUCATION EXPERIENCE (selected)

Co-chair of the Executive Committee, Metro New York/Southern Connecticut Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC), 2006 to 2009

Participant, Institute of Management and Leadership in Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Summer 2006

Chair, NYU Council of the Deans, 2001 to 2005

Chair, Review Committee for Proposed Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies Program, Louisiana State University, 2001

Series Editor, Critical Studies in Racism and Ethnicity, Temple University Press, 1997 to present

President’s Commission, Wheaton College, 1997 to 2003

College of Arts & Sciences Advisory Board for Adelphi University, 1997 to 1999

Planning Committee, Black Women and the Academy Conferences, 1994 and 1997

Selection Committee, Frederic W. Ness Book Award, 1995

History Department Visiting Committee, Amherst College, 1995

Chair, Five Colleges Black Studies Executive Committee, 1981 to 1982

Visiting Research Scholar, Institute of African Studies, Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1975 to 1977

FELLOWSHIPS, PRIZES AND HONORS

Kidder-Peabody Grant for research in The Gambia, Spring 1989

Letitia Brown Memorial Publication Prize of the Association of Black Women Historians for the best book in 1987 on Black Women (Sierra Leone's Settler Women Traders), Fall 1987

Catherine T. & John D. MacArthur Professor, Hampshire College, 1985 to 1988

Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in Sierra Leone and The Gambia, Fall 1983

Mellon Scholar, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women program on integrating women into the humanities, Spring 1983

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend for research in South Carolina, Summer 1982

A.W. Mellon Faculty Development Grant for research in Sierra Leone, 1980 to 1981

Roothbert Fellowship, The Roothbert Fund, 1977 to 1978

Kent Fellowship, The Danforth Foundation, 1975 to 1978

African American Scholars Council Grant for research in Sierra Leone, 1975 to 1976

BOOK PUBLICATIONS

Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability, Temple University Press, 2001

With Iris Berger. Women in Sub-Saharan Africa: Restoring Women to History. Indiana University Press, 1999. Reprinted in Japanese in 2004

Sierra Leone's Settler Women Traders: Women on the Afro-European Frontier. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Women and Culture Series. 1987. (Winner of the Letitia Brown Memorial Publication Prize of the Association of Black Women Historians, 1987)

OTHER PUBLICATIONS (Selected)

Review of Jackie Ormes: The first African-American Woman Cartoonist by Nancy Goldstein, Winter 2010.

“Adelaide Casely Hayford.” “Constance Cummings-John.” and “Race: Overview.” Contributions to Encyclopedia of Women in World History. Oxford University Press, 2007

“The Evidence of Things Not Seen: The Alchemy of Race and Sexuality” in James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays. Lovalerie King and Lynn Orilla Scott (eds.) Palgrave Macmillan 2006

"Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse and African American Nationalism." Journal of Women's History. Vol. 2 No. 1 (Spring 1990). Reprinted in Expanding the Boundaries of Women’s History: Essays on Women in the Third World. Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Margaret Strobel, (eds.), Indiana University Press, 1992; in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, (ed.) The New Press, 1995; and in Is it Nation Time?: Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., (ed.) The University of Chicago Press, 2002

"Women of Western and Western Central Africa." Restoring Women to History: Teaching Packets for Integrating Women's History into Courses on Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Margaret Strobel (eds.) Organization of American Historians, 1988

"Racisme et sexisme: La confrontation des feministes noires aux formes conjointes de l'oppression." Les Temps Modernes. Vol. 42, no. 485, December 1986

"Women, Work and Ethnicity: The Sierra Leone Case." Women and Work in Africa. Edna Bay (ed.) Westview Press, 1982

LECTURES, PAPERS AND CONFERENCES ORGANIZED (Selected)

“Connecting Diversity and Globalization: Immigration and Access.” The Future of Diversity and Opportunity in Higher Education: A National Forum on Innovation and Collaboration, Rutgers University, December 3-5, 2008.

“Faculty Diversity in the (Post) Obama Era.” Making Excellence Inclusive: Promoting Diversity in Higher Education—a conference organized by a coalition of Higher Education Recruitment Consortia, November 7, 2008.

Beyond Michigan. A summit organized with Professor Susan Sturm of Columbia University. Invited guests included diversity vice provosts from Brown, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Penn, and Yale; legal counsels Jonathan Alger, Rutgers University, Anurima Bhargava, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Sheila O’Rourke, U.C.-Berkeley. June 2008.

“The Suppression of Slave Trade Memories.” Keynote address at Slavery, Anti-Slavery and the Road to Freedom, conference held by Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. May 2007.

“Teaching and Research at Fourah Bay College before the (Sierra Leonean) Civil War.” Lecture delivered at the Institute of African Studies, FBC, University of Sierra Leone, February 2005

“Liberal Education in a Research University.” Lectured delivered at the Ministry of Education, Freetown, Sierra Leone, February 2005

“Liberal Education and the Contested Meanings of Freedom.” Paper delivered at the Smith College Symposium, “What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts Today?” May 2002

“Marking Race: Race, Respectability, and Nationalism.” Lecture delivered at Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University at New Brunswick, October 2001

“Race and Gender in Hiring in American Higher Education.” La Universidad de Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, August 1999

“Evidence of Things Not Seen: The Alchemy of Race and Sexuality.” Paper presented at Princeton University Conference, Race Matters, May 1994

“Gender, Sexuality and Nationalism.” American Historical Association annual meeting, San Francisco, CA., January 1994
“Who Represents the Race?” University of Oregon at Eugene, October 1992

"Black Feminist Voices." University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, March 1991

"Theories and Societies Structured in Dominance—Black Feminist Interventions." Lecture delivered at Hampshire College as part of the Five Colleges 25th Anniversary Lecture Series, February 1991

"Gender, Counter-Discourse, and Afrocentric Thought." Williams College, February 1990

"Africa on My Mind: Searching for the African Roots of African-American Women." Paper delivered at Clark University conference, Women on the Frontiers of Research: An Interdisciplinary Conference, March 1988

"Black Feminism and the Politics of the Black Family." Williams College, February 1987

"The Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Constructing Race and Womanhood in the 19th Century." University of California at Santa Cruz, February 1987. Also delivered at the National Women Studies Association meetings, June 1987; and Simons Rock at Bard College September 1987

"Race, Gender and Science." Conference organized at Hampshire College with Ann McNeal; participants included Evelynn Hammonds, Venessa Gamble, Darlene Clark Hine, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Rita Arditi and Allan Brandt, January 1987

CURRENT INTERESTS

Learning to play jazz piano

Soweto!

2009-05-07T15:58:00.044-04:00

--From the Freedom Charter

Dateline: April 38, 2009

The one thing I really wanted to do in Jo-burg was have a good tour of Soweto. After lots of searching, Ellen found one on the internet, JMT Tours [http://www.jmttours.co.za/index.html]. They are a family-owned business and the tour guide, one of the sons, was very knowledgeable and political. He wanted to make sure that we understood the class differences within Soweto. So, he started at the upper income homes--places you never see in the news about the township.

The highlight was at the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum. It is one of the finest museums I've ever seen. Lots of old photos and videos. Just being in the surroundings helped me understand the 1976 uprising. We were very moved.

We asked to be taken by Winnie Mandala's house--felt like a pilgrimage.

These photos are from that last day.

Middle class housing

The Infamous Hostels

The hostels with new replacement houses in background

"Informal" Housing

Houses designed to replace slums

These gold mine dumps dot the Jo-burg landscape:
reminders of the past

Obama/Mandela t-shirts

Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum

Inside the museum, there's a great photo of a teenager carrying a sign that says:
"No More Uncle Toms"
Then, outside, Uncle Tom's Community Center is part of the memorial

Winnie's well-protected house

Mandela's House

Kids singing Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika
note the hands on their hearts

Last Day in Cape Town

2009-05-07T14:43:00.014-04:00

Dateline April 26, 2009

This is our last night in Cape Town. It's off to Jozi (Johannesburg) in the morning. I don't think I've been someplace for just under 3 weeks and been so sad to leave. We were so lucky to meet such a warm and political group of women our first full day here at a party hosted by Evelyn Bester. We decided we should throw a party for them last night. We had so much fun laughing and telling stories. The last people didn't leave until 5AM!

Today, Mercia and Shirley picked us up with Aunty Flori, whom we met at the beginning of the trip. Remember, she was first person Ellen interviewed and was deeply involved in the anti-apartheid movement as a labor organizer. She insisted that she wanted to see us one more time to show us Breakwater Prison. We're so glad she did. This prison's notoriety goes back to the 19th century when indigenous people were just rounded up and put in prison to better exploit their labor. This was also where the anti-apartheid activists were placed before Robben's Island.

The weird thing about the prison is that it serves as a hotel and business school today. I think the hotel is some kind of new form of historical tourism. "Stay in the lap of luxury while you tour the infamous treadmills that prisoners were forced to run on for hours at a time". Meanwhile the people who work there try real hard not to know anything about the history. Real weird.

Here's what they say in their literature:

It [the Treadmill] was a cruel invention and was the customary penalty for laziness and petty jail offenses. The prisoners had to keep a steady pace and if the men slackened off, the rotating planks would then lacerate their shins. A man could spend a day from 9AM to 5PM climbing these endless stairs with only 5 minutes rest every half hour. The Treadmill can still be viewed today and is located at the end of the row of isolation cells in the upper parking area.

What a way to advertise a hotel!

But Aunty Flori wanted us to see the prison because her people had been imprisoned there. She wanted us to understand how savage the initial conquest of the people was. I also got to see what a pan-Africanist she was. She kept saying to me quietly that Black Americans must come to South Africa and learn about the struggles. She inscribed a book, "The future belongs to us."

Book of punishments from 1890s. If one had a dirty bed, you lost the "privilege" of having a bed for a month. Taking coffee when not entitled: 2 days solitary confinement. Refusing to take porridge: 3 days solitary confinement.

Misc. photos from Cape Town:

The 2 Eveyln's and Elle at Willie and Evelyn Bester's artistic house

Table Mountain at sunset

Up-Country with Diana Ferrus

2009-05-04T19:03:00.020-04:00

Dateline April 24, 2009

We took a trip up-country to Worcester with Diana Ferris. It's a couple hours drive up into beautiful mountains. Diana is the woman most responsible for bringing Sarah Bartman's bones back to South Africa from France. [Check out http://www.sarahbartmanncompetition.co.za/project.asp#] She wanted us to see the gorgeous valley in the Du Toitskloof Mountains. There is this amazing tunnel, the longest I've ever been in, through the mountain. I can just imagine what the cost of lives was in building this thing!

Here's Diana's poem:

I've come to take you home -
home, remember the veld?
the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees
the air is cool there and the sun does not burn.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white
and the water in the stream chuckle sing-songs
as it hobbles along over little stones.

I have come to wretch you away -
away from the poking eyes
of the man-made monster
who lives in the dark
with his clutches of imperialism
who dissects your body bit by bit
who likens your soul to that of Satan
and declares himself the ultimate god!

I have come to soothe your heavy heart
I offer my bosom to your weary soul
I will cover your face with the palms of my hands
I will run my lips over lines in your neck
I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you
and I will sing for you
for I have come to bring you peace.

I have come to take you home
where the ancient mountains shout your name.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white -
I have come to take you home
where I will sing for you
for you have brought me peace.

Diana Ferrus on the way to her home town

Agro-business, SA Style [This is what the fighting was about.]

The Du Toitskloof Mountains

Du Toitskloof Mountains

The mountain almost swallows Ellen

The tunnel entrance

Diana with her beloved niece, Joy

Townships and Sexuality

2009-05-04T13:11:00.009-04:00

Dateline April 21, 2009
Yesterday, we got to go into Gugulethu Township again. This time we went to learn about lesbian life in the township. We had a connection through our friend Zanele to a very courageous woman, Ndumie Funda of Luleki'Sizwe, whose fiance was raped and consequently infected with the virus. She died of AIDS a couple of years ago.

Ndumie has taken as her raison d'être supporting lesbians in the townships who have been raped or beaten because of their sexuality.. There have been a spate of murders of lesbians--particularly butch-looking lesbians--and there was very little outcry. We know that South Africa has a wonderful constitution that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientations and a same-sex civil marriage law. But things are still not safe.

I'm reminded of the Combahee River Collective that organized when several black women were killed in Boston with little outcry. That organization led to some of the best black feminist activism and theory.

Ndumie in fron of her cabin in Gugulethu township

We Finally Meet some Young People

2009-05-04T10:43:00.012-04:00

Pam, Liesl, and Musa took us in hand on Saturday and showed us a great time. We were excited because we were going to get to spend some time in a township, Gugulethu. Along the way, we picked up a young transperson who is a refugee from Zimbabwe. We stuffed six people in this little tiny car.

We started at a famous braai [barbecue place] called Mzoli's. You walk in and come face to face with lots of different kinds of meat and you have to choose what you want. Elle and I both got mutton. Then they put the meat for the group on a platter or in a bowl and you take it to the cooks-- mostly men with red jumpsuits and sometimes white aprons and/or blue t-shirts. How they keep track of everyone's orders on the long pits, I don't know.

It's true, vegetarians would hate this place. But I loved it. The meat was sooo sweet, the music was jumping, and we were with great company. We were there before the rush, there was going to be lots of beer drinking and dancing but we didn't stick around for that.

We were joined there by Unathi Sigenu from the Gugulective, an arts collective in Gugulethu that our friends Zanele and Gabi turned us on to. They are a group of seven artists who do challenging conceptual art. Their space is behind a shebeen [township bar], a place they have chosen to challenge the image of shebeens. This shebeen is what they consider a respectable place. Right next door is a not so respectable. There you could see the ravages of apartheid on people sitting in alcoholic stupors in the middle of the day.

I know that Cape Town isn't typical of all of South Africa. But here is where you see one of the main reasons that white people were fighting to keep power. The country is so very beautiful. They kept the best spots for themselves--the coast and the mountain. Coloured people were forced down on the Cape Flats and blacks, herded in the townships, both moved around at the seeming whim of the government. The police are not as ever present in the townships as they were before independence but it isn't hard to imagine them cruising up and down the streets and illuminating entire areas with bright lights.

This is not an oppression you wipe away in 15 years or 20. The 90% at the bottom still live in crushing poverty and limited opportunities. Alcoholism makes perfect sense to me. I've looked at people sitting in the shebeens or stumbling down the street who were f**ed up. They remind me of my relatives from my parents' generation--thwarted at every turn, liquor was a blessing and a refuge.

Liesl, Musa, and Pam

Artist Madoda Fani

Cape Town is Exhausting

2009-05-02T23:48:00.016-04:00

Many of my friends suggested that I take time to rest while I'm in Cape Town; but there really isn't time. There's so much to see and so many people to meet.

We were introduced to Florence de Villiers by Mercia and Shirley, whom we had met at the Friday night party of fierce women. Aunty Flori is a truly radical woman who told us stories about her anti-apartheid work. We were so lucky to be in her presence.

Attached to this note is are pictures from the V&A Waterfront--a beautiful tourist attraction-- Aunty Flori and our wonderful hosts, Mercia and Shirley. You'll see that the Obama T- shirts were a big hit! Oh yeah, there's also a photo of a figure who looks strikingly like a mammy doll. I wonder if it has the same connotation.

V&A Waterfront

Is this the South African Mammy?

Mercia, Aunty Flori, and Shirley

Amandla!

Day 2 in Cape Town

2009-05-02T17:28:00.017-04:00

Yesterday was such an exciting day that I'm just trying to recover from it. We started out at around 11:30 with our old friend from the States, Judyie Al-Bilali, who brought with her a guide, Mary Hegarty, who took us on a great ride from Cape Town to Hout Bay then up the the east side of Table Mountain to Bloubergstrand and Table View. During the trip, we saw lots of lovely coastline, Table Mountain from many views, and had lunch at a winery.

Judyie is someone who Ellen and I met through our friend Terry Jenoure but at very different times. Judyie, who unfortunately for us, leaves for the States on Tuesday, has done wonderful things for us here like make sure we got picked up at the Cape Town airport and get Mary to give us a tour. Mary is an American who moved here for love about 10 years ago. She makes a living as a CranioSacral Therapist, what ever that is. It reminds me of craniology.

Judyie saved the best for last. We went to a party of women artists that was hosted by Evelyn Bester. We had a fabulous time and didn't get home until about 2AM. They were all women of color: some "Black Afrikaans," some mixed Indian and San, and some mixtures that I couldn't guess at. The energy in the room was exciting. There were both straight and bisexual women there and they were all so open to me and Ellen. More on some of the formidable women later.

Table Mountain

Atlantic Coast

Vinyard

Evelyn Bester's Party

Only Half the Picture

2009-01-31T12:49:00.010-05:00

We have wonderful guests here this weekend. All are artists and all are well worth paying attention to. Thursday afternoon, our dear friend, Clarissa Sligh, came by to stay until Sunday. She’s based in Philadelphia and North Carolina and has had quite a distinguished career as an art photographer. She’s done so many different kinds of projects, from documenting Jake in transition, to the Masculinity Project to an exposé on incest, Reframing the Past. She has a great website here. Note that the opening photo was taken by my girl, Ellen Eisenman [http://ellenfoto.blogspot.com/ ].

Second on the scene was Zanele Muholi, a new friend and a fantastic young photographer from South Africa. Google her and check her out here. We have had very intense discussions about being a black lesbian in South Africa and the recent history of black feminism here in the US. Her book, Only Half the Picture, published by Michael Stevenson in 2006, can be found on Amazon.com.

In the book, Pumia Dineo Gqola writes a moving essay, “Through Zanele Muholi’s eyes: Re/imagining ways of seeing Black lesbians.”

Paying attention to Muholi’s images requires grappling with the competing and nuanced meanings highlighted in the represented subjects. They underline the importance of seeing the agency—life choices, decisions, failures, confusions, discoveries, rejections—of the Black lesbian in the picture…. These images are shaped by, respond to, and sometimes start off from circulating ideas about Black South African lesbians. Muholi’s vision holds challenges for all of us who claim to see (Black) lesbian sexuality regardless of whether we do so in the interest of transformation or oppression…. Muholi’s work contains new insights for all audiences who respond to her invitation to think about lesbian lives seriously” [p. 84].

The series [“Period”] normalizes Black lesbians as women. It positions the most reviled women through images of the most abhorrent—albeit normal—aspect of women’s lives. It shows Black lesbians bleeding uncontrollably, messily and stickily, like the rest of ‘us’. Muholi’s normalizing of Black lesbian sexuality positions it as part of the continuum of women’s sexuality at the same time that she plays with notions of what is ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ [p. 86].

I find myself looking at only bits and pieces of the book at a time because nearly every photo causes me to think and feel so much.

Finally, Gabi Ngcobo showed up after 12AM. Our weekend guests had all arrived. More on her in the next entry.

Andrew Wyeth and James 'Dick' White

2009-01-17T15:12:00.008-05:00

Learning that Andrew Wyeth died this week made me nostalgic for my father. In one of his many extra jobs, my father was a deliveryman for a pharmacy near where Wyeth lived and Dad used to make deliveries to him. Wyeth said he wanted to paint him. I remember first being very disappointed that my father didn’t want to follow up on this. He’d have a kind of fame.

Later, I was glad Dad didn’t pursue this. I came to think that he would look like some generic old black man. I didn’t think that Wyeth could capture the Dick White I knew. I’d like to put in a picture here from Wyeth for comparison. But here are just three photos of my father the way I like to think about him and here's a link to some Wyeth portraits. [Scroll down about 2/3rds]

Dick at 18 in his Howard High School Class of 1929 photo

Dick with his roses in the backyard

Dick with his young brother

There They Go Again!

2009-01-10T13:11:00.002-05:00

I just laughed when I saw the Times headline Trying to Change Its Face, G.O.P. Weighs a Black Chairman [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/us/politics/11gop.html?hp]. It seems the Republicans are playing the Race Card again.

But it also got me thinking as I often have about the meaning of the Race Card in this society. I had similar thoughts when I saw that Illinois’ disgraced Gov. Blagojevich appoint Roland W. Burris to replace Obama in the Senate. That was a pretty cynical use of the card; but Burris was right in there playing his own version of the card, too.

Here are just a few of my questions:

Who gets to play the race card most often—blacks or whites? Let’s admit it, we all use the race card at some point. Sometimes it’s appropriate, isn’t it? For example, if we see someone being excluded from a position because people don’t understand their own blind racism, shouldn’t we play the race card to intervene in such a racially prejudiced situation?
Of course, one can use the Race Card for racist ends. The RC was played to get on the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas, a man who is willing to cover up the negative impact of racism by showing his black face as a supporter of racism and the enemy of justice. Don’t we have to ask who is playing the race card and why?
Is charging someone with playing the RC sometimes a way to actually play the card?

If I’m right that we all play the race card sometime and that it can be used for good or evil, shouldn’t we question the context in which the RC is played? It is not the playing of the Race Card that is in and of itself bad; perhaps it is how we use that it that matters.

Eartha Kitt

2009-01-02T12:01:00.001-05:00

I’ve been in discussion with my younger family members, Ashley and Burgess, about Eartha Kitt (1927-2008). I think she is a fascinating person and deserves serious study. Her life spanned important decades and her career, the rise of TV and the crumbling of segregation. The New York Times obituary called her “among the first widely known African-American sex symbols” [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/arts/26kitt.html?_r=1&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink]. The Times compares her to Lena Horne; but she was a very different kind of persona. There’s much to learn about black poverty, gender, and complexion. My quick search of electronic sources has not revealed any major studies. Someone should go for it!

New Course

2009-01-02T12:00:00.001-05:00

I think I’ve finally come up with a course to teach next spring: Independence! The Transition from High Colonial Rule to the Post Colonial World in Africa. Through film, literature and historical documents and theory, we explore the evolution of post colonial societies in Africa. This is primarily a history course but we will use a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to this history. Works we explore may include the films and writings of Ousmane Semebene, the literature of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, and the theories of Mahmood Mamdani.

Now all I have to do it learn the history. ;-)

January 1, 2009

2009-01-01T13:47:00.003-05:00

Back to Blogging

2008-12-27T15:06:00.006-05:00

Now that I’ve started my sabbatical, I thought I’d see if I can keep my blog going for a decent time. I’ve rarely commented on current events because of my position as a dean and then as a full time Vice Provost. I think I have greater license to speak for myself without others thinking I am speaking officially for NYU or that I am insisting that others have my viewpoint. I speak here only as a tenured professor with the normal free speech traditions behind me.

I have to comment about the troubling connection between Obama, Rev. Wright and Rick Warren. [See Richard Cohen from Washingtonpost.com. Also, my dear Elle, of ellenfoto.blogspot.com, says that we should add to the list of mysteries about Obama—such as how can this clean cut guy smoke—his bad taste in men of the cloth.] I’m far from giving up on Obama for choosing to have an open homophobe speak at his inauguration. That’s only because I never drank the Kool Aid. My support of Obama was cold eyed—I think that’s a saying. There will be many things [particularly around foreign policy] about which I will disagree with him deeply; some of those things have preceded his choice to replace his connection to Rev. Wright with Rick Warren.

I believe that, by far, Obama is the best we can do. I don’t mean this as he’s the best of the bad. More, I mean that his positives far outweigh his negatives for me so far. I am deeply excited about Barack’s election and even wish I could be transported to the inauguration by some kind of transponder. But I am angry about his coziness with Rick Warren and the apparent decision to ignore the protests of gay and gay-friendly supporters. This is one of the most important civil rights issues of today, and, Obama has sorely disappointed me.

The Suppression of Slave Trade Memories

2007-08-05T14:22:00.001-04:00

I attended the commemoration for the 200 anniversary of the Suppression of the Slave Trade Act in Nova Scotia in June. It was conference that included both academics and community people. My last post discussed looking forward to the event. Looking back, I had a positive experience as one of the three keynote speakers. My talk was on Sierra Leone and 4 central ironies involving the suppression of the slave trade. Here, I’ll excerpt the beginning and the end of the talk. The full talk is linked on my Google Pages.

In January 1999, Freetown, Sierra Leone descended into hell. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) invaded Freetown, bringing a civil war fueled by blood diamonds to the capital city for the first time. The Big Market, a covered market that I will discuss today, was razed to the ground as the RUF retreated a week later. The atrocities that followed this invasion are too horrible to describe during lunch. But let me say this, the descriptions of the invasion of Freetown call up memories of the Atlantic slave trade.

This afternoon, I shall link that invasion with the Suppression of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which we are here to commemorate. I will argue that a troubling and ironic consequence of the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade was the escalation of slave trading and slavery itself within Africa. Throughout my talk, I will emphasize a number of distressing contradictions that emerge as we narrate the history of resistance to slavery—what I call four troubling ironies….
…
As I make a few concluding points, let me return to 1999, the year rebels burnt down the Big Market. First, I don’t think it was a random act that the market was burnt down; the rebels were striking at one of the most significant landmarks in Sierra Leone’s history. Remember I spoke earlier about the way the market fit in the imagination of Freetownians, many of whom thought the market women were so powerful that they need not lock the marketplace at night—this belief persisted despite the huge padlocks that could be found at either end of the building. Imagine, rebels so fierce that they could burn down a marketplace that didn’t even need to be locked from thieves. The market was a complex target: the home of settler women traders who became known for their powerful trading tactics and medicine but also, as I have suggested, a central market that helped spread, first, plantation-like slavery in the region and, second, colonial rule.

So my second point is that we shouldn’t forget or suppress the memories of internal African slavery. We, here, in the New World know how long the shadow of slavery falls across a culture. Slavery lasted in West Africa well into the 20th century—often under the cloak of colonial rule. [Indeed, forms of slavery have re-emerged.] When I read accounts of Sierra Leone’s recent civil war, I feel like I’m reading archives from the internal African slave trade.

Now, there are many reasons for Sierra Leone’s vicious civil war—greed for diamonds, government corruption, globalization. But we can’t forget the impact of a long-lasting slave trade and the central irony that, as the Atlantic slave trade and New World slavery were suppressed, slavery began to flourish inside Africa.

For photos of the old and new Big Market, see my blog entry of April 1, 2007.

Africadia

2007-05-29T14:10:00.000-04:00

I was worried that I messed up. I agreed to speak this June at a conference at St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, that will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, Britain’s official decision to suppress the slave trade. [See http://www.commemoration2007.ca/]. I was beginning to think I had done the wrong thing. Sure, I wanted to be part of a commemoration of this landmark move. But I was beginning to worry about the quality of this particular conference. Then I discovered the work of one of the other keynote speakers, George Elliot Carke, and I decided that just getting to know about his work is worth my being associated with the conference. And I now have higher hopes for the quality of the entire conference.

My pleasant surprise came when I ‘googled’ Clarke, a poet and academic of African and Mi’kmaq Amerindian heritage from Nova Scotia who now teaches at the University of Toronto. Besides reading his biography at http://www.athabascau.ca/writers/geclarke.html, I read his essay, “Must all Blackness Be American?: Locating Canada in Borden’s ‘Tightrope Time,’ or Nationalizing Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic” at http://www.athabascau.ca/writers/geclarke_essay.html. It was extremely helpful to read a take on the African diaspora from a Canadian. He critiques African Americans for just assuming that African Canadians, whom he calls Africadians, are just like us. Ironically, Euro-Canadians—to maintain a mythological self-image of themselves as the ‘real’ Canadians—also viewed Africandians as Americans before the major migrations from the Caribbean disrupted that view. Clarke calls this tendency to ignore the reality and specificity of Afro-Canadians, “the denial of African Canadianité.”

He tells us,

Given the gravitational attractiveness of Black America and the repellent force of a frequently racist, Anglo-Canadian (and Québécois de souche) nationalism, African-Canadian writers feel themselves caught between the Scylla of an essentially U.S.-tincted cultural nationalism and the Charybdis of their marginalization within Canadian cultural discourses that perceive them as 'alien'. Hence, African-Canadian writers are forced to question the extent and relevance of their Canadianness (that notoriously inexpressible quality).

“Yet,” he reminds us, “African-Canadians cannot avoid assimilating African-American influences, for both African Canada and African America were forged in the crucible of the slave trade, an enterprise the British aided, abetted, and affirmed, then suppressed, then finally abolished in 1833.”

While I've written on the 18th century roots of the black community in Nova Scotia in my first book, it’s certainly helpful for me to get an informed contemporary view from the African diaspora in Canada before I go there to talk.

More later on how the slave trade still flourishes despite this bicentennial.

RACE SUICIDE

2007-05-14T00:51:00.000-04:00

I got the copy-edited version of an encyclopedia entry that I’ve written on race suicide for the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History. Race suicide is a concept that represents fears of being overwhelmed by another race because of the low birth rate of one’s own race.

I love writing encyclopedia entries. They are kind of like puzzles. You have to know the topic well enough to know what belongs in a 400- to 3500-word article. The race suicide entry is about 1500 words. Especially when you want to write entries that cover global issues, it’s a real challenge to write coherently about a topic in that kind of short form. In this case, I was able to show how the term worked in the U.S., among both blacks and whites, Europe, and Australia.

Among my favorite “factoids”: Theodore Roosevelt, who popularized the term in the early 20th century, called white middle- and upper-class women who limited their family sizes, “race criminals.” Margaret Sanger, feminist advocate for birth control, wanted to limit the fertility of the “unfit.” And, in 2006, Pat Roberson, host of the conservative 700 Club, warned, “Europe is right now in the midst of racial suicide because of the declining birth rate.” Race suicide is one of those concepts that just won’t die!

When Race and Gender aren't parallel

2007-04-22T20:41:00.000-04:00

I have lots of things in my portfolio as vice provost for faculty affairs. Among the most interesting is the work I do to help diversify NYU’s faculty. I’m particularly intrigued that dealing with racial and ethnic diversity, on the one hand, and gender diversity, on the other, calls for different strategies. I also get vastly different reactions to the work I do in each arena. When it comes to issues of gender, I have lots of support and allies. I’m sure there are people who look askance at the recent seminar that I co-sponsored with the Faculty of Arts and Science Women’s Faculty Caucus on women and negotiations. But no one raised an issue. Plans for a conference on women and leadership at NYU, planned for the fall has garnered great support from around the campus. When the provost and I hosted discussions for women faculty in the sciences last year on gender climate issues, most showed up. I suspect that women who don’t want to be identified by their gender simply ignore such events.

Lately, I’ve decided to work on environmental issues for faculty of color. I have had a number of faculty of color, especially but not limited to junior faculty, express how isolated they feel teaching at NYU. There are more minority faculty here then many suspect but we are spread out across the university. This place is very large and some long for the camaraderie and support that comes from knowing other people who share minority identity. I began to see that making these connections influences whether faculty stay at NYU. In response, I decided to have two receptions for faculty of color this spring. I especially wanted to target untenured faculty. I asked the provost to join me in this effort. Without hesitation, he agreed and we sent out email invitations.

But who is a faculty of color and how do we find them? What do we do about those faculty of color who do not want to be identified by race or ethnicity? I decided to cast as wide a net as possible by using the racial and ethnic codes used by Academic Appointments. I was hopeful that those who did not want to attend such a reception would simply ignore the invitation, just as many women ignored the Women’s Faculty Caucus workshop on negotiation. By in large, most of those uninterested must have simply deleted the email invitations; one person accused me of being ‘misguided’ and out of date. Personally, I’m not so allergic to identity politics; but I do recognize many of the pitfalls of racial solidarity. As someone who is invested in diversifying the NYU faculty, I’m trying to create a culture here that is broad enough to appeal to faculty of color on all sides of this issue. I believe that NYU is a complex enough community to accommodate those differences.

It is also interesting that non-faculty of color have felt comfortable raising questions about the receptions. One group asked me how were people of color supposed to relate to the larger faculty. I was a little surprised by this question. The receptions were not meant to be prescriptive—to create segregation within the faculty. Similar questions had not been directly raised about any of the gender diversity initiatives coming out of the provost office. This is just another instance in which the analogies between race and gender, which are often helpful, breakdown.

THELONIOUS MONK - DON'T BLAME ME(1966)

2007-04-21T15:06:00.001-04:00

I grew up in a house full of music. One of the favorite tunes that my uncles and cousin used to play on our piano was a ragtime version of Don't Blame Me. I couldn't resist putting this on my blog.

Memories of Sierra Leone

2007-04-01T15:37:00.000-04:00

Source: http://www.sierra-leone.org/HistoricPostcards/

Over the last two weeks, I've gone down memory lane about my first trip to Sierra Leone, 1975-77. First I spoke to the Albert Gallatin Scholars at Gallatin. Then I had a conversation with a Ph.D. history student who plans to work on Sierra Leonean visual culture at the turn of the 20th century. Some of my photos:

The picture above is of me around 1976 in front of the Big Market in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the main subject of my dissertation. It was taken in the evening after the market had closed. The Big Market was the central market of a wide-spread trading network that included many Krio women traders.

The second picture is of a market woman who had a stall at the Big Market. This was at the side of the market. She’s with her grandson and is wearing traditional Krio clothes, even though she was not herself a Krio.

Finally, this is the picture I took of the new Big Market when I visited Freetown in 2005. The old market had been burnt down during the civil war and this was its replacement.

For the official story on the rebuilding of the Big Market, see http://www.statehouse-sl.org/big-mark-feb10.html.

Half of a Yellow Sun Review

2007-03-11T20:41:00.000-04:00

Here's my review that I just sent off to Women's Review of Books.

5. The book: The World Was Silent When We Died

He writes about starvation. Starvation was a Nigerian weapon of war. Starvation broke Biafra and brought Biafra fame and made Biafra last as long as it did. Starvation made the people of the world take notice and sparked protests and demonstrations in London and Moscow and Czechoslovakia. Starvation made Zambia and Tanzania and Ivory Coast and Gabon recognize Biafra, starvation brought Africa into Nixon’s American campaign and made parents all over the world tell their children to eat up. Starvation propelled aid organizations to sneak-fly food into Biafra at night since both sides could not agree on routes. Starvation aided the careers of photographers. And starvation made the International Red Cross call Biafra its gravest emergency since the Second World War (237).

This excerpt from a clever book within Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, confronts the reader with one of the novel’s central ironies: enforced starvation, the very tactic that crushed Nigeria’s break away southeastern region, briefly independent and known as Biafra, also brought it the international attention that sustained its rebellion for three years. Those who are old enough to remember will recall that the first images of starving African children to pierce the consciousness of the west came from Nigeria’s 1967 to 1970 civil war. Adichie’s successful historical novel manages to capture many complexities and ironies of one of Africa’s first post-colonial conflicts.

Adichie, who won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and Hurston/Wright Legacy Prize for her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, is skilled at drawing her readers into the daily terror and brutality wrought by war. We watch as the seemingly genteel world of academia disintegrates and tugs at our own senses of security; we see both the silent killer of children, kwashiorkor, and bombs drive men and women to heroics, cowardice, and craziness. Adichie has done her homework well. Importantly, she writes into a rich tradition—virtually every major Nigerian writer has felt compelled to address this devastating civil war. Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, and Wole Soyinka have wade in. Given Nigeria’s lively tradition of feminist writers, Adichie is fortunate to follow in the footsteps of Buchi Emecheta and Flora Nwapa, each of whom unveiled the particular horrors women face during war. Moreover, Half of a Yellow Sun represents an entry by Nigeria’s new crop of wonderful writers, such as Helon Habila, Chris Abani, and Sefi Atta, into a necessary confrontation with Nigeria’s bloody past. To paraphrase Toni Morrison from Beloved, this is clearly not a story for Nigerian writers to pass on.

Ugwu, the character who writes the book within Half of a Yellow Sun with which this review opens, undergoes tremendous transformations that are wrought by coming of age during this civil war. The book begins when he arrives from up country as a 13-year old to be the ‘houseboy’ of Odenigbo, a math professor and armchair revolutionary at University of Nigeria at Nsukka, the intellectual center of the Biafran independence movement. Indeed, until the war breaks out, precocious Ugwu seems to be following in Odenigbo ‘s footsteps, whom he calls Master. Both come from largely Igbo villages and adapt well to western style education. Their relationship is complex and at times problematic—allowing the Adichie to explore class conflicts in the post-colonial era. Ugwu arrives at Odenigbo’s house during peacetime when the false promises of independence—granted in 1960 were just beginning to reveal themselves. The house becomes a setting for passionate but friendly-at-first debates that express arange of intellectual positions in the run up to the war.

Odenigbo and Ugwu are a fascinating pairing. As Nigeria descends into its bloody civil war, naive Ugwu’s experiences help him find his voice. He takes up writing as a way of dealing with his bewildering and disturbing experiences, including facing both the shortcomings and value of his Master; participating in atrocities as a child soldier, and sustaining serious physical damage during battle. The war’s most harrowing experiences are seen through his eyes. On the other hand, Odenigbo becomes more and more mute, as his idealism is dashed along with Biafra’s hopes. He begins the book as a man sure of his opinions and place in the world. By war’s end, his narrow ethnic nationalism seems empty and, with no defenses against slights to his manhood, he sinks into alcoholism. Yet, Ugwu dedicates his book to Odenigbo. But for Odenigbo, Ugwu would never have learned to read and write and to challenge many of the injurious values taught in school.

The book’s central pair is the twin sisters, Olanna and Kainene. Many readers might recall from having read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that twins had special significance among pre-colonial and colonial Igbo-speaking peoples. Since twin infants had been seen as abominations and bad omens for an entire village, they were left out in the forest to die. As Achebe, whose praise for Half of a Yellow Sun can be found on its back cover, illustrated, Christian missionaries used that tradition to convince some members of Igbo societies of the inhumanity of their own customs and, thus, to convert them to Christianity. The tensions between Christian and indigenous beliefs may, indeed, be another pairing in this book. Surely, it is no accident that Olanna and Kainene are twins. They are daughters of Nigeria’s new, corrupt elite; their parents even try to prostitute them to gain economic and political advantages. Their closeness strained at the beginning of the novel by their perverse relationships with their parents, they both rebel against their parents’ values but cannot recognize their own similarities to each other.

Their conflicts symbolize the civil war between Nigeria and Biafra and are a warning to present-day Nigerians to look beyond their differences before they descend into final destruction. The pointlessness of the twins’ disagreements represents the futility of Nigeria’s ethnic nationalism. Part of the book’s chilling quality comes from the almost seamless way people move from thinking of themselves as Nigerians to thinking of themselves as Biafrans. How quickly the word Nigerian shifts from self-identity to epithet; comrades become vandals; and neighbors become saboteurs. People no longer see how their destinies are intertwined. Olanna and Kainene learn through the terror and shocks of wartime that nothing—neither sexual infidelity nor personal jealousy—should estrange them.

Also coupled in Adichie’s novel is Richard, a British expatriate who falls in love with Kainene, and Madu, an officer in the Biafran army who also loves her. Richard moves to Nigeria with plans to write about what he sees as exotic art, 9th century Igbo-Ukwu art, which is just then being rediscovered in Nigeria and known in the West. He often seems like a lost soul. At the beginning of the book, he finds himself out of place in the expatriate community. In an act of rebellion against her parents, Kainene rescues him from that world and takes him as a lover. He gets caught up in the Biafran effort for independence and tries to become the literary voice of the Igbo people, a role that only Ugwu could fulfill. As his confusions grow, it becomes clear to the reader that he has exoticized both the Igbo-Ukwu pots and Kainene. Ultimately, Richard discovers that there is very little room for him in post-colonial Nigeria. Meanwhile his rival for Kainene’s affections, Madu, emerges as a man of integrity, resilience and fortitude and represents the best of Biafra’s culture despite the missteps of Biafra’s politicians.

It is appropriate to end this review with the epilogue from Ugwu’s book, “The World Was Silent When We Died”. After all, many people stood by while children starved and over one million people died. World powers, including Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, protected their interests in oil by arming the federal government. The book’s critique of our complicities is painful to read.

“WHERE YOU SILENT WHEN WE DIED?”

Did you see photos in sixty-eight
Of Children with their hair becoming rust:
Sickly patches nestled on those small heads,
Then falling off, like rotten leaves on dust?

Imagine children with arms like toothpicks,
With footballs for bellies and skin stretched thin.
It was kwashiorkor—difficult word,
A word that was not quite ugly enough, a sin.

You needn’t imagine. There were photos
Displayed in gloss-filled pages of your Life.
Did you see? Did you feel sorry briefly,
Then turn round to hold your lover or wife?

Their skin had turned the tawny of weak tea
And showed cobwebs of vein and brittle bone:
Naked children laughing, as if the man
Would not take photos and then leave, alone (375).

_____________
e. Frances White is a professor in the Gallatin School and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at New York University. Her most recent books include, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability and Women in Sub-Saharan Africa: Restoring Women to History with Iris Berger.

Biafra's Half a Yellow Sun

2007-02-19T16:28:00.000-05:00

I'm writing a review for the Women's Review of Books by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun. The book is quite moving and sent me off to relearn the Nigerian history that I experienced as current events in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I first learned of the Nigerian Civil [Biafran] war from shocking television news images. For the first time, I saw images of African children with extended bellies and enlarged eyes suffering from kwashiorkor. I clearly identified with these children; but I couldn't figure out whom to blame for these atrocities. To further confuse me, we had a Nigerian exchange student staying with an extended family member and he was from a minority tribe within the Igbo area. He was distraught because the news seemed to be siding with the Igbo people who had formed Biafra despite the wishes of some of the minority ethnic groups in its region. I believe this was the first African I met and I was completely entranced by him. Of course, now I cannot remember any name or identifying information I could use to Google him. But he the impact of making all stories about Africa more complex for me.

When I went off to Wheaton College (MA), I met a classmate who was Igbo and who suffered greatly from the atrocities visited on the civilians during that led to some 2 million deaths. I suspect that my conflicting loyalties led me to avoid reading too closely about the Biafran/Nigerian Civil War until I was asked to do this review. After many years, I finally read Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra and Flora Nwapa's Never Again. I discovered that Adichie wrote into a very fertile literary territory in which many Nigerians had ventured to explain their cataclysmic civil war. Nigeria has produced so many great writers and and many of them had lived through the war at home, like Nwapa, or abroad, like Emecheta. I will have to place Half a Yellow Sun in this context. Well I better get to a write this review now. It was, after all, due on February 10!

Here's a good summary of the war and the lead up to it from Irem Szeman, Zones of Instability : Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation. Baltimore, MD, USA: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. p 120.

The Federation of Nigeria gained independence from Britain in 1960. A federal system of highly autonomous regions divided primarily along ethnic lines (Northern Region: Hausa-Fulani; Western: Yoruba; Eastern: Ibo) was established with the aim of making the country of Nigeria a workable whole. This close association of region and political party with ethnicity (one of the problems faced by many federations around the world) generated immediate difficulties for the new country: given the structure of the federal government, each election would inevitably result in one political party— and therefore one region and ethnic group— being effectively excluded from government (forming neither the official opposition or the government itself ). The inevitable ethnic tensions produced as a result were further heightened by the ethnic composition of the military: the officer corps were primarily Ibo, while the enlisted men were drawn mainly from the north.

A military coup led by Ibo officers in January 1966 constituted the last straw for the north and led to the eruption of violence against Ibo living in the north. A countercoup led by northern elements of the army led to the brief restoration of the federal system under the leadership of General Yakuba Gowon. This countercoup led to a mass exodus of Ibo from the north to the Eastern Region, and to the secession of the Eastern Region early in 1967 as the independent ‘‘Republic of Biafra.’’ An incursion by Biafran troops into the Western Region in an effort to capture Lagos led to all-out war on Biafra by the remaining regions of the federation; a blockade of Biafra by both land and sea contributed to the death of up to two million Biafran civilians, mainly by starvation, before the surrender of Biafra in January 1970. Only now is Nigeria beginning to emerge from this dark period that has effectively constituted the entire short history of the nation.••

The Biafran flag on which Adichie's
title is based:

Curriculum Vitae

2006-07-15T13:15:00.000-04:00

Welcome to my new blog. Here is my CV:

e. Frances White, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Professor of History and Black Studies, New York University

Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs
New York University
70 Washington Square South—1225
New York, NY 10012
1-212-998-2192

EDUCATION

1978 Boston University, Boston, Mass.
Ph.D. in African History

1973 Boston University, Boston, Mass.
M.A. in History

1971 Wheaton College, Norton, Mass.
B.A. cum laude and with departmental honors in Urban Studies

FELLOWSHIPS, PRIZES AND HONORS

Spring 1989 Kidder-Peabody Grant for research in The Gambia

Fall 1987 Letitia Brown Memorial Publication Prize of the Association of Black Women Historians for the best book in 1987 on Black women (Sierra Leone's Settler Women Traders)

1985 to 1988 Catherine T. & John D. MacArthur Professor, Hampshire College

Fall 1983 Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in Sierra Leone and The Gambia

Spring 1983 Mellon Scholar, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women program on integrating women in to the humanities

Summer 1982 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend for research in South Carolina

1980 to 1981 A.W. Mellon Faculty Development Grant for research in Sierra Leone

1977 to 1978 Roothbert Fellowship, The Roothbert Fund

1975 to 1978 Kent Fellowship, The Danforth Foundation

1975 to 1976 African American Scholars Council Grant for research in Sierra Leone

EMPLOYMENT HISTORY

9/2005 to present Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, New York University

7/98 to present Professor of History, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU

7/98 to 7/2005 Dean of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU

7/94 to 6/98 Dean of Faculty, Hampshire College (MA)

7/91 to 6/94 Dean of the School of Social Science, Hampshire College

7-80 to 6/98 Hampshire College: Professor of History and Black Studies (appointed 7/1990); Associate Professor of History and Black Studies (appointed 7/1983); Assistant Professor of History and Black Studies, (appointed 7/1980)

9/78 to 6/80 Assistant Professor of African History, Departments of History and Pan African Studies, Temple University

10/75 to 6/76 Instructor, History Department, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, (Freetown, Sierra Leone)

1986 to 1998 Five College Graduate Faculty

9/78 to 6/80 Assistant Professor of African History, Departments of History and Pan African Studies, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA

10/75 to 6/76 Instructor, History Department, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone Freetown, Sierra Leone

OTHER APPOINTMENTS AND SERVICE

2001 to 2005 Chair, NYU Deans’ Council

2001 Chair, Review Committee for Proposed Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies Program, Louisiana State University

1997 to present Series Editor, Critical Studies in Racism and Ethnicity,
Temple University Press

1997 to 2003 President’s Commission, Wheaton College

1997 to 1999 College of Arts & Sciences Advisory Board for Adelphi University

1994 and 1997 Planning Committee, Black Women and the Academy Conferences

1995 Selection Committee, Frederic W. Ness Book Award

1995 History Department Visiting Committee, Amherst College

1981 to 1982 Chair, Five College Black Studies Executive Committee

1975 to 1977 Visiting Research Scholar, Institute of African Studies, Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone

BOOK PUBLICATIONS

Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability, Temple University Press, 2001.

With Iris Berger. Women in Sub-Saharan Africa: Restoring Women to History. Indiana University Press, 1999. Reprinted in Japanese in 2004.

Sierra Leone's Settler Women Traders: Women on the Afro-European Frontier, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, Women and Culture Series. 1987. (Winner of the Letitia Brown Memorial Publication Prize of the Association of Black Women Historians, 1987).

OTHER PUBLICATIONS (Selected)

Review of Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel. The Women’s Review of Books. March/April 2006.

“Adelaide Casely Hayford.” “Constance Cummings-John.” and “Race: Overview.” Contributions to Encyclopedia of Women in World History. Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2007.

Review of Having It All? Black Women and Success by Veronica Chambers and Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem by bell hooks. The Women’s Review of Books. October 2003.

"Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse and African American Nationalism." Journal of Women's History. Vol. 2 No. 1 (Spring 1990). Reprinted in Expanding the Boundaries of Women’s History: Essays on Women in the Third World. Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Margaret Strobel, eds. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992; Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ed. New York, The New Press, 1995; and Is it Nation Time: Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

"Women of Western and Western Central Africa." Restoring Women to History: Teaching Packets for Integrating Women's History into Courses on Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Margaret Strobel (eds.) Bloomington: Organization of American Historians, 1988.

"Racisme et sexisme: La confrontation des feministes noires aux formes conjointes de l'oppression." Les Temps Modernes. Vol. 42, no. 485 (Dec. 1986).

"Women, Work and Ethnicity: The Sierra Leone Case." Women and Work in Africa. Edna Bay (ed.) Boulder: Westview Press, 1982.

LECTURES, PAPERS AND CONFERENCES ORGANIZED (Selected)

2/05 “Teaching and Research at Fourah Bay College before the (Sierra Leonean) Civil War.” Lecture delivered at the Institute of African Studies, FBC, University of Sierra Leone.

2/05 “Liberal Education in a Research University.” Lectured delivered at the Ministry of Education, Freetown, Sierra Leone

5/02 “Liberal Education and the Contested Meanings of Freedom.” Paper delivered at the Smith College Symposium, “What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts Today?”

10/01 “Marking Race: Race, Respectability, and Nationalism.” Lecture delivered at Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University at New Brunswick.

8/99 Race and Gender in Hiring in the American Higher Education.” Invited lecture delivered at la Universidad de Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

5/94 “Evidence of Things Not Seen: The Alchemy of Race and Sexuality” Paper presented at Princeton University Conference, Race Matters.

1/94 “Gender, Sexuality and Nationalism” at the American Historical Association annual meeting, San Francisco, CA.

3/93 “Race and Gender Entwined: The Anita Hill Clarence Thomas Affair” Paper presented at University of Havana Conference of Developments in Women’s Studies.

10/92 “Who Represents the Race?” Paper presented at Women’s Studies, University of Oregon at Eugene.

3/91 "Black Feminist Voices." Lecture delivered at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of the series, "Race, Class and Ethnicity in the Americas."

2/91 "Theories and Societies Structured in Dominance--Black Feminist Interventions." Lecture delivered at Hampshire College as part of the Five College 25th Anniversary Lecture Series.

2/90 "Gender, Counter-Discourse, and Afrocentric Thought." Paper delivered at Williams College conference on African-American Scholarship, Williamstown, MA.

3/88 "Africa on My Mind: Searching for the African Roots of African-American Women." Paper delivered at Clark University conference, Women on the Frontiers of Research: An Interdisciplinary Conference.

2/87 "Black Feminism and the Politics of the Black Family." Paper delivered at the Williams College conference on the Black Family, Williamstown, MA.

2/87 "The Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Constructing Race and Womanhood in the 19th Century." Women's Studies, Santa Cruz University, Santa Cruz, CA. [Also delivered at the National Women Studies Association meetings (6/87) and Simons Rock at Bard College (9/87).]

1/87 "Race, Gender and Science," Conference organized with Ann McNeal; participants included Evelynn Hammonds, Venessa Gamble, Darlene Clark Hine, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Rita Arditi and Allan Brandt.

10/81 "Sierra Leonean Women and Nitida Kola: The Organization of a Nineteenth Century Trading Diaspora." Paper delivered at the African Studies Association Meetings, Philadelphia, PA.