Browsing by Subject "African American studies"

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    Black History, Islam, and the Future of the Humanities Beyond White Supremacy
    (Duke University, 2016-02-16) Curtis, Edward E., IV
    Interpreting Islam as a form of Black history offers a scholarly framework for reimagining the humanities beyond white supremacy. This paper theorizes such a framework first by showing how modern Black people in Africa and the African diaspora constructed Islam as a religion and civilization of resistance to Euro-American imperialism and anti-Black racism. Second, and more importantly for the future of the humanities as a whole, it argues that reading Islam as Black history undermines regnant disciplinary maps of global culture and civilization that locate human normativity in white chronoscapes. Philosophy, comparative religion, and general education courses on Western civilization are in need of emancipation from their nineteenth-century racialist ontologies. Islam as Black history offers one means to free these fields from their white supremacist bonds. The final half of the paper provides humanities instructors with African and African diasporic primary and secondary sources that can help to inspire a humanities renaissance beyond white supremacy.
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    “A New Vocation before Me”: Frederick Douglass's Post-Civil War Lyceum Career
    (Taylor & Francis, 2018) McKivigan, John R.; History, School of Liberal Arts
    This article examines the oratorical strategies adopted by Frederick Douglass in the late 1860s and early 1870s when he joined the ranks of professional lyceum speakers. Douglass's speaking shifted away from the long-established topics of slavery and civil rights to appeal to a broader audience. Douglass also shifted from a spontaneous speaking style, honed in years of abolitionist campaigning, to rely upon written texts prepared in advance and delivered repeatedly. A close analysis of those lyceum addresses, newspaper reports of their delivery, and Douglass's personal correspondence reveal that he retained many elements of his older performance style and facilely adapted his topic, sometimes in mid-lecture, to suit many audiences' demand to hear him address the “race question.”