Harvard University Press Blog

On Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston

We round out our celebration of Black History Month with an excerpt from Daphne Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award and a Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year. “Vivid, joyful, and heartbreaking in its passionate understanding of soul in all its manifestations,” says Hilton Als, “Liner Notes for the Revolution is itself a new kind of music: propulsive, witty, wise, and true.”

The little women lurk at the very heart of the modern, the place where Zora Neale Hurston and her girl Ethel [Waters] are keeping the beat. And of course, they were friends, that Zora and Ethel. It may have taken some time to meet each other “across the footlights,” as Hurston put it in her memoir, but once they connected through their mutual friend Carl Van Vechten, the bond between this untrained singer and a woman referred to by some as “the Voice of an Era” was strong and intimate. Aesthetically too, they had more in common than one might think. Born in Philadelphia and raised in a multicultural, working-class neighborhood where, as Waters puts it, “whites, blacks, and yellows, were outcasts…together,” she made use of an “elephant memory and gift of mimicry” in school. As feminist blues archivist Rosetta Reitz contends, “It was this magnificent ear and the awareness that there was authority in language, that gave Ethel Waters an edge which she used to empower her life.”

Like Hurston, she mastered the art of multilingual colloquialisms and phrasings, assumed multiple personas in her vocal performances, and finessed the art of deeply performative storytelling as she crafted a distinctly theatrical, vaudevillian style of blues singing that was magnetic and lasting. Only her peer, the passionately adored stage ingenue Florence Mills (whose 1927 premature death rocked Harlem), could match Waters in this regard, having ushered in the 1920s as “the agent of the modern spirit of unmasked feeling.” Of Waters, Hurston would marvel, “She is one of the strangest bundles of people that I have ever met. You can just see the different folks wrapped up in her if you associate with her long. Just like watching an open fire—the color and shape of her personality is never the same twice. She has extraordinary talents which her lack of formal education prevents her from displaying.” Listen to her burning up the scene with her slinky 1926 smash, “Shake That Thing,” and you’ll know what Hurston’s talking about. Dolling out double entendres left and right, Waters shifts personas with the turn of a phrase. She’s the swinging seductress one moment and the cool cultural observer the next. “Now it ain’t no Charleston, ain’t no Pigeon Wing,” she assures,

Nobody has to give you no lessons, to shake that thing
When everybody can shake that thing
Oh, I mean, shake that thing!
I’m gettin’ tired of telling you how to shake that thing!
Oooh, oooh, with this kind of music, who wouldn’t shake that thing?

Ascendant as the queen of Black 1920s vaudeville, Waters knew how to work the drama and suspense in a jook-joint hot number celebrating the joys of carnal movement. Hers is an anthem that condenses the shifting energies of an epoch encapsulating mammoth change: migrated Black peoples spilling into northern cities, bursting with socioeconomic aspiration and artistic ambition, revolting against the norms that had historically sought to violently police their profit as well as their pleasures. In other words, all that “shaking” was evocative of the tumult in Waters’s midst. As Saidiya Hartman points out, she “made music” out of the “noise” all around her in her adopted city of New York, soaking up and translating into her own sonic language “the sounds of life, the loving and fighting and laughter and suffering,” all the while “describ[ing] the deprivation and vitality of cramped living from the inside” of her own Harlem flat.

Both Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston believed that the Black body, that their own kinesthetic bodies, could serve as prodigious and vital instruments in their musical endeavors. While Waters’s massive breakthrough hit “Shake That Thing” (first performed in 1925 at the Plantation Club) would take the sexual energy of the jook (a realm Hurston refers to as the pinnacle of Black theatricality in her 1934 “Characteristics of Negro Expression” essay) to its ludic extreme, Hurston would also put her body to work not only as a narrative device, an instrument to convey big ideas about the dynamism of Black life, but as a form of performative epistemology called on to reference and revivify the cultural and historical memory of the work song archive. And crucial to this epistemology was an emphasis on the beautifully unpredictable idiosyncrasies manifest in her own voice both caught on tape and loudly leaving its imprint on her own indelible, discursive style. Like Hopkins before her, Hurston pursued the preservation and cultivation of voice—but in this case, it was her own rather than a literary character’s that once again revolutionized Black sound writing as well as the relevance, meaning, and value of recording Black women’s vocality.

That Hurston not only theorized the sounds in her scholarship and incorporated them in her folk concerts but also performed them herself makes plain the ways that she embraced the act of singing as an extension of her critical ethnographic work. Zora’s singing traverses the presumptive boundaries between Diana Taylor’s conception of the archive and the repertoire, “the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice / knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).” Zora’s singing intervenes in what she believed to be the so called hegemony of Harlem Renaissance Black concert hall culture with its refined music, sounds that she abhorred for, in her opinion, watering down the voices of the folk.

The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Our third excerpt to celebrate Black History Month comes from Vincent Brown’s award-winning Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, which Cornel West calls “brilliant” and “groundbreaking.” This gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, and America, shook the foundations of empire, and reshaped ideas of race and popular belonging.

Only the plotters truly knew if their plans had called for a general uprising from the beginning. The colonists were guessing based on evidence garnered from torture, and historians have little more to go on than their speculations. Were the events in St. Mary’s, Kingston, St. Thomas in the East, and Westmoreland part of a general insurrection?

Something important is at stake in the answer to this question. Historians sometimes view slave-conspiracy trials as evidence of panic, projections by slaveholders upon hapless victims. Another perspective casts the slaves’ actions as mostly reactive responses to immediate circumstances and opportunities, rather than as the outcome of careful organizing. By contrast, the first named historian to interpret Tacky’s revolt, Edward Long, agreed with his fellow colonists that the rebellion had been carefully planned:

“These circumstances show the great extent of the conspiracy, the strict correspondence which had been carried on by the Coromantins in every quarter of the island, and their almost incredible secrecy in the forming of their plan of insurrection; for it appeared in evidence, that the first eruption in St. Mary’s, was a matter pre-concerted, and known to all the chief men in the different districts; and the secret was probably confided to some hundreds, for several months before the blow was struck.”

For Long, Tacky was the “chief man” at the head of the conspiracy. But Long’s account is an unreliable guide. Most importantly, he offers an erroneous chronology of events. Wanting to show an island-wide conspiracy, he depicted the events in St. Mary’s Parish as simultaneous with later events in Westmoreland, extending the timeline for the St. Mary’s uprising and making it appear to last well beyond the Westmoreland insurrection. At least one detail of the account makes this misrepresentation seem willful. Long states that it was Admiral Charles Holmes who dispatched the naval vessels to the north side of the island, despite the fact that Holmes did not arrive at Jamaica until May 13, weeks after Tacky was killed and the rebels had dispersed. Long surely knew this, but distorting the sequence of events in this way had the effect of making the whole affair seem that it was indeed Tacky’s revolt.

This theory gave the insurrection an identifiable scapegoat, whom Long could blame and belittle all at once. Acknowledging Tacky as a “young man of good stature, and well made,” he called him “handsome, but rather of an effeminate than manly cast.” Mocking and demonizing black sexuality was an important part of establishing racial hierarchy, and Long hastened to add that Tacky “had flattered himself with the hope of obtaining (among other fruits of victory) the lieutenant governor’s lady for his concubine”—that lady being Edward Long’s eldest sister. In Long’s estimation, Tacky’s elevation stemmed not from his leadership abilities or military experience but from his supposed resemblance to “some favourite leader of their nation in Africa.” Most likely, Tacky had himself been a leader in Africa, but for Long this was merely a sign of Coromantees’ credulity. He compared Tacky’s followers to some Africans who had once encountered the bronze statue of a gladiator erected on a local plantation, which “the Coromantins no sooner beheld, than they were almost ready to fall down, and adore it.” With Tacky at the head of uprising, Long had devised an intelligible narrative of the violence that conveniently discounted the strategic implications he most feared. According to him, the uprising resulted from a concerted effort, but it was doomed by Africans’ intrinsic faults. Yet, as he knew, from the attack on Fort Haldane to Tacky’s death in the rocky valley upriver from Downes’s Cove, “Tacky’s Revolt” lasted only a week.

What explains Long’s desire to subsume the entire rebellion within a chronology that elevates the primacy of the events in St. Mary’s? Other sources, too, conspired to highlight the importance of the earliest clashes. The April 14 “Letter from a Gentleman at St. Mary’s” was the first and only coherently plotted account; the ones that followed display the irregularity and confusion of the colonists’ predicament. Dread governed their experience. By May, they were growing wild with fright as they ginned up the docket of African savagery. It is difficult to tell which stories came from captured rebels and which sprang from slaveholders’ imaginations, especially when the specter of cannibalism appeared in print. Colonists read that the rebels at Ballard’s Valley “cut off the Overseer’s Head, put his Blood in a Calabash, mixed gunpowder with it, and [ate] their Plantains dipp’d in it, as they did by every white Man they killed: In short, their savage Barbarity can scarcely be paralleled.” If there had indeed been a blood sacrifice at Ballard’s Valley, this report made it seem as if the rebels were taking some holy communion, with bananas instead of bread. The story made the sacrament all the more heinous by comparing the Coromantees to Catholics—Protestant Britain’s foremost global adversaries—and contributed to the sense that the colony was besieged from within and without by enemies at once familiar and strange. With each successive discovery of new unrest, the slaveholders grew more fearful and bewildered. Suddenly the uprising seemed to be happening everywhere at once. The shocking reminder that power did not guarantee security drove colonists wild with fear.

Over the next several weeks, lasting into July, they discovered several more conspiracies. In the commercial capital, colonial officials deepened their investigation into the circumstances surrounding the war-token mahogany sword. They learned that Kingston’s Coromantees had rallied around a woman named Cubah, whom they elevated “to the rank of royalty” and dubbed the “Queen of Kingston.” Like other Africans, she claimed territory for herself and her followers in the knowledge that the boundaries of her dominion were drawn more by peoples’ loyalties than by land surveyors. At meetings “she had sat in state under a canopy, with a sort of robe on her shoulders, and a crown upon her head,” adopting the “paraphernalia of power” she might have known on the Gold Coast. Upon this intelligence, the government seized Cubah and ordered her to be transported from the island. In the Vale of Louidas in St. John’s Parish, Coromantees belonging to the speaker of the House of Assembly, Charles Price, “had agreed to rise, ravage the estates, and murder the white men there.” Three people familiar with the plan betrayed the rebels, and the “ringleaders were taken up, and upon conviction, executed; others, who turned evidence, were transported off the island thus the whole of this bloody scheme was providentially frustrated.” More plots were afoot in the parishes of St. Dorothy’s, Hanover, and Clarendon, where Edward Long owned his estate. Throughout this time Henry Moore kept martial law in effect, and the military remained on the march all over the island.

Fear transported the slaveholders into a delirious fever dream from which they would not soon recover. Possibly the experience of frightened alarm during the uprising sent some of them into a fugue state, in which linear temporality had lost some of its purchase. They had lost the plot. The narrative they pieced together at the start of the rebellion represented the most linear description they could manage, until Long sat down a decade later in London to reconstruct the sequence. Partly for this reason, and partly because of events that occurred later in the 1760s, the St. Mary’s revolt established an enduring narrative pattern, providing an intelligible origin and knowable characters, with the colonists’ actions bending a discernible story arc from beginning to end.

The slaveholders were paranoid, and their slaves really were out to get them. Sometimes, these two facts could exist independently; the events of 1760 knotted them together. The causes of the insurrection were probably more broadly distributed and far more contingent than Long and the other slaveholders knew. Even so, whether or not these revolts were the result of a single grand design, they were not disconnected from each other nor merely opportunistic. The rebels coalesced around affiliations of language, regional identification, and military verve. If each uprising had its own inspiration, each also took careful account of local conditions, potential connections, and broader opportunities. In St. Mary’s, the path of the insurgency strongly suggests a defined objective: control or destruction of the commercial zone along the rivers. Yet if what happened in St. Mary’s parish could be called Tacky’s Revolt, it was only one conflict within a larger war, an unfolding uprising itself encompassed by wars within wars.

In the cascading series of events initiated by the rebels in St. Mary’s, we see how African militancy derived from the entanglements of empire, trade, and war across the Atlantic. Tacky’s Revolt was smaller and less significant than Long and subsequent historians have supposed only because the slave war it advanced was larger and more consequential. “A more dangerous or troublesome Affair I was never engaged in, in all my life,” wrote Zachary Bayly about the St. Mary’s insurrection. And still the Coromantee War was closer to its beginning than its end.

Traveling Black

All this month we are celebrating Black History Month with excerpts from some of our recent books. In Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 and a book that Ibram X. Kendi calls "extraordinary," Mia Bay provides a riveting, character-rich account of racial segregation in America that reveals just how central travel restrictions were to the creation of Jim Crow laws.

In 1922  Joseph K. Bowler told a reporter for the Chicago Defender that he never ventured to the South without a “Jim Crow traveling kit.” Designed to allow Bowler, a minister who lived in Massachusetts, to travel through segregated states in relative comfort, the kit included “a pair of soiled overalls purchased from an auto mechanic, a miniature gasoline stove and a small table top the size of a scrub board.” The contents of Bowler’s kit vividly illustrate some of the indignities and discomforts that Black travelers could expect to encounter in the “colored” railroad cars of his era. He wore the overalls, he explained, to avoid the expense of “soiling” good clothes in the “dirty Jim Crow coaches.” They protected him from the tobacco juice that white conductors and news vendors often spat on the seats, and were especially useful in “parts of the Mississippi [where] the white farmers use the Jim Crow coaches as luggage cars in which to transport chickens and hogs.” The stove and table top allowed him to prepare and eat meals. They were key components of his kit, given that “the dining car is a closed corporation as far as our people are concerned.” “White people below the Mason Dixon line maintain that we are animals, virtually camels, and can go without food or water fors everal days,” noted the intrepid traveler, who both carried and cooked all the food he consumed on his journey. If he had not, he explained, he would have had to “sneak into the back of some depot like a little poodle and ask for some food,” or “risk being shot to death by invading a dining car to secure my meals.”

Many Black travelers shared Bowler’s concerns—whether or not they chose to wear dirty overalls and carry stoves. African Americans loathed segregated streetcars and railway compartments more than virtually any other form of segregation. In the research for his detailed account of race relations in the American South, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy (1908), journalist Ray Stannard Baker found that “no other point of contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among Negroes as the Jim Crow car.” A third of a century later, Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, in his monumental study The American Dilemma (1944), made the same point: “It is a common observation that the Jim Crow Car is resented more bitterly among Negroes than most other forms of segregation.”

By the 1940s African Americans did not have to travel by train. They had new options to choose from, but they found all of them problematic. The intercity bus lines that first began operating in the late 1920s offered an afford­able alternative to traveling by rail, but during their early years of operation many bus companies refused to serve Black passengers. Even after the courts forced them to, they did so “only grudgingly and in the most uncomfortable seats.” “If you think riding a Jim Crow car out of the South is no fun,” wrote one Black traveler in 1943, “you should try bumping along on the back wheel of a bus, with the odors of the motor keeping you restless.”

Cars initially seemed to offer those who could afford them an escape from the humiliations of Jim Crow travel. But while Black motorists could choose their own seats in their own cars, they could not expect to be treated with respect once they stepped outside their vehicles. “It used to be that black people only took a trip [if] some body died or was dying,” remembered Chicago Tribune columnist Jeannye Thornton in 1972. Driving usually involved a “nonstop trip,” because hotels and motels that accepted Black guests were almost impossible to find. Even rest stops were hard to locate: “Bathrooms were always at the next service in the next town 50 miles down the road and when you finally got there, they were always separate and filthy.” African American travelers ended up driving “all night [and] sometimes traveling to a big city before even considering stopping to stretch.” Not only were road­side accommodations unappealing, driving through the South could be dangerous. “Who knows what could happen to a black family with northern license plates traveling some lonely road?”

Even travel by air was far from free of discrimination. Flying itself was never subject to southern segregation laws, but in the early days of air travel some airlines refused to carry Black passengers, and others assigned them to segregated seats. And when they escaped segregation in the air, Black flyers often encountered it on the ground. Southern airports had segregated waiting rooms, restaurants, and restrooms, and the taxis and ground transportation services that carried passengers to and from airports were divided by race.

American identity has long been defined by mobility and the freedom of the open road, but African Americans have never fully shared in that freedom. Travel segregation began on the stagecoaches and steamships of the North­east—the nation’s earliest common carriers—and moved from there to rail­roads, train stations, restaurants, roadside rest stops, and gas station rest­rooms, all of which were eventually segregated by law in the South. As new modes of transportation and accommodations developed, new forms of segregation followed.

The Origin Story of Black Education

To celebrate Black History Month, we’ve chosen excerpts from our books that reflect varied aspects of the Black experience. Fittingly, our first excerpt comes from a book about historian and educator Carter Woodson, the founder of Black History Month. The Los Angeles Review of Books praised Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis R. Givens, saying it “would make Woodson, the ever-rigorous teacher, proud.”

Before Emancipation, the enslaved had to gain their education by “snatching learning in forbidden fields,” as Woodson characterized it. The black abolitionist and teacher Francis Ellen Watkins Harper explained that some tried “to steal a little from the book. And put words together, and learn by hook or crook.” Acquiring knowledge was a criminal act. As Frederick Douglass’s master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to “running away with himself.” Stealing one’s self in this way meant that the literate slave was a fugitive slave: to secretly acquire literacy—for religious, practical, and intellectual ends (or, perhaps, especially as leisurely activity)—was akin to black flight from the sites of their enslavement.

Antiliteracy laws targeting black people were older than the United States itself. The first law of this kind was a slave code enacted in 1740 in reaction to the Stono Slave Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina. This code, which was meant to improve surveillance of the enslaved, listed writing among other illegal activities. Black people’s disallowance from the realm of educational opportunity anteceded the birth of the nation. This prohibition was absorbed into the dominant ideology of the nation, even as American common schools were established after American independence for the purpose of training a responsible citizenry; thus, conceptions of citizenship emerged as a metonym for whiteness. The antiblack sentiments that justified slavery justified excluding black Americans from citizenship and from schools—this antagonism was not an anomaly but was, in fact, a structural feature.

Antiliteracy laws and the intellectual surveillance that accompanied them left great marks on the politics of black education. They enforced the idea that blacks were outside the social contract of American society—inconceivable as fully human, citizen, or student. Many enslaved and free blacks subverted these legal mandates by acquiring literacy through fugitive tactics—leaving a mark of equal or greater consequence.While the overwhelming majority of blacks were illiterate under slavery, approximately 10 percent learned to read and/or write; suggesting that literate slaves were not so unusual as to be unknown to other blacks. These literate slaves were recognized as leaders with a practical skill set that benefitted their community.

How did the 10 percent of blacks who learned to read and write in the South before Emancipation gain the gift of literacy? As Woodson recounted time and again in his writings: “Negroes themselves…stole away to secret places at night to study.” The historical record documents black Americans climbing into holes in the ground under the cover of night, attending schools run by free blacks, “playing school” with white children, “stealin’ a meetin’” in the woods, and trading food for lessons, among other covert means. In her remarkable narrative of black education in the antebellum South and early in Emancipation, Heather Williams reveals that black people were self-taught and their own biggest advocates for education, in slavery and in freedom.

Frederick Douglass, raised in Maryland between the 1820s and 1830s, represents the best-known example of learning in secret. Left alone to look after the master’s house, he employed his own version of fugitive pedagogy. He spent his time “writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy book, copying what he had written.” Douglass wrote in the margins of the Webster Spelling Book, populating these in-between spaces with words he appropriated and mimicked, turning them toward his own semantic and political ends. Woodson’s nearby home state of Virginia passed laws prohibiting education for enslaved and free blacks as early as 1819. This legal precedent was reinforced through subsequent acts passed in Virginia leading up to Emancipation. In April 1831, for instance, an act was passed declaring “that all meetings of free negroes or mulattoes, at any schoolhouse, church, meetinghouse or other place for teaching them reading or writing, either in the day or night, under whatever pretext, shall be deemed and considered as an unlawful assembly.” The law then authorized whippings “at the discretion of any justice of the peace, not exceeding twenty lashes.” Such legislation, and the sentiments of antiliteracy ideology, became nearly universal in the South. When the Civil War began, black Americans challenged the prohibition of their mental elevation. Their efforts to learn expanded in formal and public ways; they initiated “native schools” in the Contraband Camps, which prefigured the Freedmen’s Bureau schools, and then the first public school system in the US South.

With the end of the Civil War came “jubilee,” as the formerly enslaved described the biblical time of freedom. No longer in bondage, black people across the South performed their first acts of freedom by occupying the classroom. Booker T. Washington recalled a “whole race trying to go to school,” and he noted: “Few were too young, and none were too old, to make the attempt to learn. As fast as any kind of teachers could be secured, not only were day-schools filled, but night schools as well.” The rush to the schoolhouse transcended any single location. Washington’s narrative described blacks’ quest for education throughout all the Southern states.

Once legally permitted to become educated in the postbellum South, black Americans continued to experience violence and other forms of opposition to their efforts. Yet they continued to resist in the best ways they knew how. Even as black education developed institutionally through the endeavors of blacks themselves and also in conjunction with white northern church denominations and philanthropists, black Americans nonetheless pursued critical parts of their educational lives in secret. As a class of political actors, black students and teachers emerged as persuasive advocates in fundraising for their respective institutions. And like black preachers, teachers (or, more expansively, Negroes “who had some learning”) were important leaders in black communities, not just because of their professional status but also as stokers and caretakers of the freedom dreams that helped initiate their escape from bondage. Black Americans shared an “equal rights” vision that remained unfulfilled. This vision fueled the emergence of black equal rights leagues and other organizational entities representative of black life during Reconstruction and the decades to follow. Black teachers’ associations reflected this collective drive on the part of a segment of leaders who signified the living history presented in Carter G. Woodson’s first classrooms.

Black people’s fugitive pedagogy lent itself to an origin story of black freedom. It was a central part of the general strike initiated by the absconded slaves who refused the political economic arrangement of slavery when they fled the plantations during the war. As a framework for learning, it contested ideas of black inferiority, while rejecting the superexploitation and ownership of black people as fungible laborers. The black schools and teachers after the war, by their very existence, symbolized the refutation of a knowledge realm that debased them, educational institutions that excluded them, and curricula that portrayed them as always already subjugated and “narratively condemned.” Fugitive pedagogy framed black educational life from the time of slavery through Jim Crow as a narrative plot that transcended the limited world in which black folks found themselves. It became more than a teaching method—more than utilitarian skills to be learned. Instead teaching and learning themselves continued to be “a means of escape,” as Woodson wrote. Education would guide blacks in pursuit of a new world and a new way of being; it was a total critique of the current order. Black Americans passed this narrative on as a panacea for social ills, and it heavily informed both politics and values after Emancipation. Carried over from slavery, fugitive pedagogy reflected the general story of black people’s shared past and present. In the postbellum era, black Americans continued to live their educational lives through the frame of this origin story. It continued to structure the relationship between education and the black political struggle more broadly. Woodson himself contributed to this long memory of education’s role in black America’s quest for freedom and justice.

Celebrating University Press Week

In celebration of the tenth annual University Press Week, we are sharing the “famous last words” from ten of our most noteworthy books of the last ten years. This listicle represents the depth and breadth, not to mention the surprising variety, of titles we’ve published. Whether in the fields of philosophy, history, economics, art, education, or social science, the words of these authors are the final statement from their critically acclaimed works.

Sianne Ngai / Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) 

“By paying closer attention to the aesthetic categories that speak to the most significant objects and socially binding activities of late capitalist life—our affectively complicated relation to commodities, information, and performing, the ways in which we labor, exchange, and consume—one can at least make a start at closing the gulf between aesthetic theory and practice that began to open in the twentieth century, reenergizing the former by ensuring its continued relevance to the making, dissemination, and reception of culture in the present.”

Sunil S. Amrith / Crossing the Bay of Bengal (2013)

“Oceanic history is itself a kind of cartography. By foregrounding the Bay of Bengal—linked by journeys, memories, and the sinews of power—we can see beyond the borders of today’s nation- states, beyond the borders imposed by imperial mapmakers and immigration officials, to a more fluid, more uncertain world: a world that resembles our own. As the furies of nature grow clamorous, the fortunes of migrants are ever fickle.”

Thomas Piketty / Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)

“To be sure, the principle of specialization is sound and surely makes it legitimate for some scholars to do research that does not depend on statistical series. There are a thousand and one ways to do social science, and accumulating data is not always indispensable or even (I concede) especially imaginative. Yet it seems to me that all social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.”

Pat Shipman / The Invaders (2015)

“We may be more successful at preserving biological diversity and truly wild places as we see more clearly the factors that diminish them. We may be able to envision more accurately humans’ place in nature, for the good of all. I think it is time we recognized ourselves for what we are: the invaders. If one day we can meet the enemy of the earth and he is not us, it will be a triumph. But a big change in our behavior must happen first.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen / Nothing Ever Dies (2016)

“I think back to my father’s father and what happened to his remains. The Vietnamese believe a person should be buried twice. The first time, in a field removed from home and village, the earth eats the flesh. The second time, the survivors must disinter what remains. If they have timed it correctly, there will only be bones. If they have timed it wrong, there will still be flesh. Regardless of what they find, they must wash the bones with their own hands. Then they bury the bones once more, this time closer to the living.”

Mehrsa Baradaran / The Color of Money (2017)

“Modernity will inevitably bring us closer together, which can lead to either greater resentment or greater cooperation. Perhaps more people will realize that what benefits a minority will also benefit the majority. Full racial integration will eventually remove pockets of blight, crime, and deprivation across the country. This will advance the entire American population. Integrated schools will improve education for all students, and increased equality will spur economic growth. We must shed the destructive myths that separate can equal, that a segregated economy will reach prosperity on its own, or that black banks can lead to black prosperity without fundamental economic changes. We cannot deflect the responsibility of economic equality onto black communities alone. W. E. B. Du Bois declared in 1948 that the problem of American democracy was that ‘we have not tried it.’ Perhaps it’s time to try.”

Donna Zuckerberg / Not All Dead White Men (2018)

“Feminists deserve a better internet. And future generations of readers deserve a better kind of discourse about the ancient world: one that is free of elitism and neither uncritically admiring nor rashly dismissive.”

 

 

Anthony Abraham Jack / The Privileged Poor (2019)

“My work at Midtown College and Renowned University provides strong evidence that the differences I have observed between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly Disadvantaged has to do with their disparate precollege experiences rather than with differences between them before high school. This work points out the shortcomings of treating lower-income undergraduates as a homogenous group of at-risk students. Studies that do so cannot properly measure the effects of inequality and poverty on college experiences, and as a result, they lead to biased understandings of how class and culture reproduce inequality in college. I have documented large differences between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly disadvantaged, and both groups are represented in increasing numbers at elite colleges and universities. It is important for scholars to fully explore and document their experiences and recognize their distinctiveness.”

Nicole R. Fleetwood / Marking Time (2020)

“Smith and other artists whose work interrogates incarceration are involved in relational practices that put them in conversation, in connection, in community with Ojore Lutalo, the Fariton collective, Tyra Patterson, Deal Gillispe, Lisette Oblitas, Eddie Kates, Tameca Cole, fathers and mothers, siblings and cousins, friends and activists, and others held in captivity, excluded from civil society, public life, family structures. The works of these artists and activists extend radical imaginaries and relational practices beyond the regulatory and isolating structures of imprisonment to envision and help create a world without human caging.”

Marie Favereau / The Horde (2021)

“There was as much a Jochid way of empire as there was a Roman way, an Ottoman way, and a British way. When we think about the legacy of empires, we of course recognize the cosmopolitan effects of the Mediterranean, European, and Ottoman powers that made the world smaller through practices of tolerance, coercion, exploitation, protection, investment, and conquest. These empires are credited with driving global history. But nomads drove global history, too, and none more so than the people of the Horde.”

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Nicole Fleetwood and Monica Muñoz Martinez Awarded MacArthur Fellowships

Harvard University Press congratulates its authors Nicole Fleetwood and Monica Muñoz Martinez for being named to the 2021 class of 25 MacArthur Fellows. The prestigious no-strings-attached $625,000 awards are given to individuals “who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”

Fleetwood’s book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which won the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, is a powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America’s prison system. In it, she shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions—including solitary confinement—these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender.

Fleetwood also curated a similarly titled exhibition (which includes art that appears in the book) by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists at MoMa PS1 that opened last year.

She’ll use a portion of the award money to bring the exhibition to other parts of the country.

“To me, one of the great gifts for people who go to the show or read the book is that it challenges their assumptions about who’s incarcerated, why they are incarcerated, and what they do with their time,” Fleetwood told the New York Times.

A multiple award-winner, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas by Martinez is a moving account of a little-known period of state-sponsored racial terror inflicted on ethnic Mexicans in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. It details how between 1910 and 1920, vigilantes and law enforcement—including the renowned Texas Rangers—killed Mexican residents with impunity. The full extent of the violence was known only to the relatives of the victims. Martinez turns to the keepers of this history to tell this riveting and disturbing untold story.

The relevance of this history to what has happened at the border during the past couple of years has not gone unnoticed. The Los Angeles Review of Books wrote that the book is “a reminder that government brutality on the border is nothing new.”

“As a historian who studies histories of racist violence, and who studies the long struggle for civil rights and for social justice, it is unsettling every day to see so many of the dangerous patterns from the past repeating,” Martinez said in the same New York Times article.

“We are living in a moment where there are organized efforts to restrict rights: Voting rights, reproductive rights, you could talk about immigration all afternoon. There is so much at stake.”

“Everything I Wanted”: Black Women Listeners and the High Fidelity Culture of Taste-Making

Daphne A. Brooks, author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, praises Hulu’s High Fidelity series, whose main characters are creative, intelligent Black women who are passionate about music and confident in their tastes and opinions. Where are the other shows like it?

Blink and you would’ve missed it. Last year’s short-lived Hulu reboot of High Fidelity, the upstart reimagining of Nick Hornby’s 1995 cult favorite novel and its subsequent year 2000 film adaptation emerged in mid-February 2020, that uncertain period when the whispers of a deadly virus were just beginning to gain traction in the U.S. media. Preoccupied with mourning NBA legend Kobe Bryant’s tragic death just a few weeks earlier, American culture turned its attention toward the winter awards season and then leaped into the tabloid eccentricities of Netflix’s Tiger King as a form of hearty streaming escape once the pandemic reared its head in full that March. Reviews of the remixed High Fidelity, a gender-inverted, millennial version of Hornby’s Gen-X record nerd, breakup-and-wake up adulting tale, arrived right in the run of this storm, and they were decidedly uneven in spite of a strong cast—Zoe Kravitz, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, David H. Holmes, and Kingsley Ben-Adir—anchoring an unprecedented TV series, one which featured, in part, Black women popular music wonks debating and pursuing the musical passions and tastes that rule their world.  Some feminist critics lamented what they read as the unreconstructed masculinist politics of the Fidelity narrative’s core dynamics involving dudes duking it out about the music that matters to them. Others bemoaned a plot structure that seemingly failed to “commit” to more nuanced character development. By summer, the show had been canceled.

I seem to be one of the few who lamented this turn of events as is evident by the fact that I’ve spent the past few months pitching a feature on the history-making elements of the next-generation High Fidelity to no avail. No one, it would seem, wants much to do with this show which is a shame since, in my mind, it brings to life the critical, cultural, and intellectual passions of two vastly different, wildly intelligent, curious, and artistically passionate Black women living by the creed of their nuanced and urgent convictions. No show before it has taken the tastes and opinions of Black women—young, old, of any age—so seriously and matter-of-factly and invites you to live in their universe. Co-produced by Kravitz, who took to Instagram last August to call out Hulu’s decision to cancel the series, particularly in light of its diversity-challenged programming, the series broke barriers by experimenting with a distaff scenario: what if Black women characters could inhabit the original’s white masculinist ideas about contemporary popular music culture and the semi-self-conscious “rock snobbery” sentiments of Hornby’s original novel as well as its slightly more expansive film (the casting of Kravitz’s mom, Lisa Bonet, had to mean something)?

The High Fidelity motion picture starred John Cusack and Jack Black in his breakout role as Barry Judd, a full-on manifestation of record store denizen hyperbole and music wonk excess. As the gender-flipped leads, Ms. Kravitz and Ms. Randolph quietly made history, holding down a show that takes seriously the tastes and passions of their two Black women characters. Fandom matters in High Fidelity 2.0, just as it did in the original, but the fans are now Black women, vastly distinct from one another and yet both deeply invested in music as both a salve and a form of their felt and complicated self-making journeys. As Ms. Randolph put it in a phone interview last August, these “women are allowed to study with each other, to study culture and to have opinions and ideas and convictions about their beliefs about cultures.” The classically-trained vocalist and Yale School of Drama alum who boldly reinvented Black’s original character delivered one of the most ingenious and exhilarating small screen performances of 2020. And she clearly recognized the beautiful and pathbreaking complexities of what she and Ms. Kravitz were given the room to do on the show together. These “conversations about artistry” are vital, she suggested to me. “[W]hen that artist did this at that one part, and that bridge is killer. She’s learning. This is her education. This is her grad school.”

Her Cherise is a marvel of a character, a Black woman, Wesley Morris reminds, “with all of these opinions about art and taste and is conversant in all of these modes of being.” She is a fireball of eclectic pop music knowledge and obsessions and along with Ms. Kravitz’s “Rob,” the heartbroken record store owner who swoons over scoring a rare copy of David Bowie’s classic album, The Man Who Fell to Earth, they exist in a universe in which they each have to tolerate the casual ways in which they are not consistently seen, heard, or taken seriously as cultural intellectuals, and in the case of Cherise, as a real, bonafide, aspiring musician. [Spoiler alert] Rob’s reparative gesture, gifting Cherise with her dream guitar, a Daphne Blue Fender, in the wake of her spat with Cherise is the emotional denouement to a one-season show in which a pair of Black women music lovers, aficionados, critics, and record collectors reconnect with one another through the gift of being seen. “Someone invested” in her artistry, said Randolph, who grew up learning to play guitar by watching Lauren Hill on MTV’s Unplugged and India.Arie, and “it manifests within the guitar, but every time that girl sees that guitar, she knows that someone believes in her. And it urges her to keep on going.”

The capacious inner world of a character like Cherise’s (one that we who watched with great interest were longing to see more of on this show) is the beginning of a way to tell the story of Black women’s relationship to popular music culture from the ground up, and it is a reminder that Black women across the century have been having what artist Carrie Mae Weems describes as “endless conversations” with the music and not just churning it out for the industry Big Machine. High Fidelity joins with Empire’s not-yet-done final season (featuring Cookie and company’s Bossie record label female empowerment narrative and the 2020 Tracee Ellis Ross feature The High Note) in calling our attention to the variety of African American women’s roles, challenges, and ambitions in the business and culture of pop music today. More stories please….

Book Club Spotlight: The Origin of Others

We’re continuing our book club series with a look at one devoted to Toni Morrison. “Toni Morrison’s untimely death in 2019 gave me the idea of a year-long book club dedicated to her, to gather all of her fans and those who still haven’t touched her genius, to pay homage to the gifted writer,” said book club creator Aayushi Jain. “The book club was a success, and we are left with only one book for December and have finished all of her fiction.”

For #NonFictionNovember, the group read The Origin of Others, based on Morrison’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. In it, Morrison reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, and the desire for belonging. She asks questions such as what is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?

We spoke to members of Jain’s book club about the experience they had reading The Origin of Others. Here’s what they told us:

“In The Origin of Others, Morrison discusses the concept of ‘otherness’ by drawing examples from literature and her own personal experiences. She discusses her earlier works and how her thoughts shaped the character and storyline she created in her book. This book gave another significant depth to her earlier works. It is really commendable that in a few pages, she addresses so many powerful and insightful messages. Morrison's writing always makes me think and eventually changes my perspective of the world, and this book was no exception.”

—Shraddha Sen

 

“The Origin of Others was introduced in the Toni Morrison book club for nonfiction November. And I am glad that I got a chance to come a little closer to Morrison through her words. Thinking of her words is to think of the emotional and physical domination the women had to go with. Her stories are all about what it feels like to be a woman and that of being a black woman. The story of not lagging but reigning under the same sky of moon and stars, where there is an assurance of scintillating dawn and a new beginning.”

—Akanksha Kinwaar

 

“Race is the classification of a species, and we are the human race, period. Although a small book, The Origin of Others was an important read for me, all thanks to our book club. Growing up as a Northeasterner in India, I have always been on the receiving end of racism from the mainlanders because of my features. I am the ‘other’ to them, so this book hit close to home. The essays have opened my eyes regarding many international issues, especially in light of the recent BLM movement in the USA. The forward by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a powerful one, too. I am going to reread, reflect, and absorb this book again.”

—Priyanka Elangbam

 

“I perceived this book to be about racism and I couldn’t have been more wrong. It is more about the important role literature plays in perpetuating certain concepts such as racist beliefs in our society. Morrison’s analysis of fictional works by Hemingway and Harriet Beecher Stowe opened my eyes to new perspectives. A key takeaway for me from this book is that a single word choice can have huge ramifications, and it is important for us as readers to also engage in self-examination in how we perceive literature.”

—Vasudha Nukala

 

“As an African American woman, Toni Morrison holds a special place in my heart. Even though I found her work later in life, Morrison’s writings have always spoken to the truth of my existence, and her stories never fail to turn my focus inward and back onto my Blackness and womanhood. In The Origin of Others, Morrison explores themes of race, the desire to belong, ‘othering,’ and society’s preoccupation with color amongst other subjects in the span of six lectures. Morrison’s writing within these lectures speaks to current events while also touching on her novels. As always, the gift of Toni Morrison’s writings stayed with me well beyond me closing the collection.”

—Adira-Danique Philyaw

 

“The title accurately reflects the ideas that would unfold in the book. With acuity that is characteristic of her, Morrison reflects on the germination of the idea of race, the genesis of the vile phenomenon, racism that has firmly spread its roots in our society, and also on the concept of us versus ‘others’ that has created irreparable chasms in humankind.”

—Prerna Mishra

 

“I had only read Sula by Toni Morrison and I loved her then and there. When I saw that Morrison’s nonfiction work had been picked for November, I got curious to know what her personal thoughts would be like. I got to know that she is a prolific essayist, and there are many other essays that I’d like to explore one day. One of the quotes in the beginning gave way to my curiosity about her. And it made me sure that I picked this book for the right reason and Morrison can never fail anyone. The quote says, ‘Race is the classification of species, and we are the human race, period. Then what is this other thing—the hostility, the social racism, the Othering?’”

—Niyati Thakkar

 

“Morrison and many such essayists have called out the Otherization of a race and also gender. The idea of Othering a race because of their color and because they are different is a topic debated across nations. Morrison states one simple thing that what is the need for discrimination when humanity itself is a race? We humans are one entire species among thousands more which are still unidentified. Having read almost all of her work, one thing is similar about Morrison that she believes in digging and re-rooting her history. Her characters have always vouched for her. You cannot separate Africa from America because of their history. You cannot separate the twins.”

—Aayushi Jain

 

Thanks to Aayushi Jain, and the members of the Toni Morrison book club for talking to us. You can follow Aayushi on Instagram at @_penandpapers to learn more about the book club.

Celebrating University Press Week

The week of November 9-15 is University Press Week. This year’s theme is Raise UP, which highlights the role that the university press community plays in elevating authors, subjects, and whole disciplines that bring new perspectives, ideas, and voices to readers around the globe. University Presses were asked to submit titles to a reading list in keeping with this year’s theme, and we chose Racism in America: A Reader, a free ebook we published this summer in response to events roiling the nation. To celebrate University Press Week, we asked a few of its contributors for their thoughts on how the book should be used.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

“I’m hoping teachers will use this book to help the rising generation understand how far we have come and how far we need to go in undoing the legacies of White Supremacy.”

Ned Blackhawk

“I'm glad to see that this anthology has generated such broad interests and am honored to be included with such an incredible range of scholars. From my own perspective, I read Playing in the Dark in my first year of graduate school and am extremely honored to have my own work included in its company, particularly as I open the introduction of Violence over the Land with quotes from Morrison. I would hope that interested readers continue to take interest in the centrality of race and Indigenous dispossession to the making of America and to see the interconnections between the multiplicities of American racial formation over the centuries. I tried in my work to ‘historicize colonialism’ and to assess the multiple phases of colonial disruptions that pervaded western North America, often generations prior to the arrival of Euro-Americans. I believe that within such cycles of violent colonial expansion lie some of the deepest origins of American racism.”

Adriane Lentz-Smith

“I hope complete strangers read this anthology. Family, I can talk to; students, I can teach. The anthology will prove immensely useful to enrich those conversations and lectures. But the events of this past summer revealed how little most white people know about racism in America’s past and present—and, hearteningly, how much many of them wish to learn. I want this anthology to reach them.”

Beth Lew-Williams

“I would love to see Asian Americans pick up this book. Our community would benefit from more open conversations about racism, ideally conversations informed by the history of anti-blackness in America. These essays provide an excellent starting point.”

William Sturkey

“I’d love to see students of all ages read the anthology. The most important reason to study history is not necessarily to honor those who came before us but rather to empower those who come after us.”

Augustus White

“My great hope and enthusiastic recommendation is that all my fellow humans 18 years or older will read this anthology.”

Book club spotlight: The Color of Money

The Vivian’s Door Initiative is inspired by the courage and legacy of the late Vivian Malone Jones. She was the first African American to graduate from the University of Alabama and was responsible for ending the segregation of public universities in the state of Alabama. Vivian’s courage and will power to create change for her brothers and sisters of color inspired the creation of a nonprofit project called Vivian’s Door.

In March 2020, Vivian’s Door started a book club: their first pick was The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap by Mehrsa Baradaran. In June, over 50 people joined the online discussion of the book. Here, some of the members reflect on the impact of reading the book and what it’s taught them.

“This book by Professor Mehrsa Baradaran was the best book we could have chosen, not knowing that we faced many external forces beyond our control, like COVID-19 and racial equality protests throughout the country, the world, and a looming economic recession. The book was a good read, and we had 100 people in the book club all reading along and engaging in powerful conversations during these unprecedented times. It moved, touched, and inspired them to understand their history, reach out to their community, and become more engaged in supporting black businesses. It taught me more black history than I had ever learned from anywhere else and made me a more persuasive communicator and champion for growing strong black businesses to create wealth in marginalized, low-income, and underserved communities.”

—Janice Malone

 

 

 

 

 

“This book is riveting, insightful, and impactful. Every Black man and woman in America should read and beware of the content it holds.”

—Antwan Taylor

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Color of Money was an eye-opening book, and, honestly, I wished I would’ve read it earlier in life. It taught me so much more black history than I ever had in school and motivated me, even more, to keep working hard for my community.”

—JaVaughnae Malone

 

 

“Professor Mehrsa Baradaran totally transformed the way I viewed wealth in America, especially the growing wealth gap in the Black community. I went through a range of emotions as I read her book, The Color of Money. I hate to sound melodramatic, but this book changed the way I look at socioeconomics and Black wealth in our country.”

—Freddie D. Stokes

 

“The Color of Money is a must-read; its historical significance can never be underrated, it delivers an educational guide to understanding the wealth gap between black and white America, how it happened, when, why, and its long-lasting effects on the black community.” —Robert E. Clopton, Sr.

 

 

 

“What I learned from the book that was key to me is how black banking and businesses may not be the answers we think they are due to white flight, redlining, and how these instances of segregation economically impact our community, creating a system where our areas are continuously low in overall wealth and the ability accumulate wealth.”

—Shannon Treadwell

 

 

 

 

 

“In this book, I have learned about money multipliers, motivational factors to bank with black owned banks, and most importantly how every little step in the right direction is securing a better future for my children. A special thank you to the author for this timeless wisdom that will truly enrich all generations, regardless of race.”

—Tiffany Harris

 

 

 

 

Thanks to the members of Vivian’s Door for providing their thoughts and comments.