Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles: Critical Perspectives on Blackness, Belonging, and Civil Rights (FORECAAST (Forum for European Contributions to African American Studies))

"Deferred dreams, defiant struggles interrogates Blackness and illustrates how it has been used as a basis to oppress, dismiss and exclude Blacks from societies and institutions in Europe, North America and South America. Employing uncharted analytical categories that tackle intriguing themes about borderless non-racial African ancestry, 'traveling' identities and post-blackness, the essays provide new lenses for viewing the 'Black' struggle worldwide. This approach directs the contributors' focus to understudied locations and protagonists. In the volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern city 'bulwarks' of the civil rights movement; diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many facets of negotiating belonging, long articulated by examples from the Greensboro Woolworth counter sit-in or the Montgomery Bus Boycott; unknown men in the British empire, who inverted dying confessions meant to vilify their blackness, demonstrate new dimensions in the story about race and religion, often told by examples of fiery clergy of the Black Church; and the theatres and studios of dramatists and visual artists replace the Mall in Washington DC as the stage for the performance of identities and activism"--Publisher's website Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles: Critical Perspectives on Blackness, Belonging and Civil Rights examines the construction of blackness within shifting post-civil rights, post-colonial and neo-colonial contexts. It examines understudied locations and protagonists, and it articulates the necessarily ambiguous aspirations, goals, protest rationales and strategies associated with the reclamation of agency and the affirmation of self. In this volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern "bulwarks" of the civil rights movement; and diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many-faceted struggle for recognition and belonging. The essays assembled in Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles are salient and timely. The volume helps to contextualize the contemporary political vicissitudes of the Black experience and the ongoing struggle for agency, belonging, and civil rights. By critically reading and connecting different Black experiences in various global regions, cultures, and communities, this volume pushes beyond the usual case studies of the American Civil Rights struggle. In doing so, it offers fresh perspectives on familiar concepts such as activism and belonging, suggesting more innovative approaches for the study of African diasporic experience in the 21st century. Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 7 List of Illustrations......Page 9 Acknowledgments......Page 10 List of Contributors......Page 11 1 Introduction: Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles......Page 15 Diaspora, Displacement, Marginalization, and Collective Identities......Page 23 2 Josephine Baker’s Routes and Roots: Mobility, Belonging, and Activism in the Atlantic World......Page 25 3 Beyond the Ethnographic Other: Pan-African Activism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century......Page 47 4 Black Sojourners in the Métropole and in the Homeland: Challenges of Otherness in Calixthe Beyala’s Loukoum: The “Little Prince” of Belleville and Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s Juletane......Page 71 Performing Identities, Reclaiming the Self......Page 89 5 Staging the Scaffold: Criminal Conversion Narratives of the Late Eighteenth Century......Page 91 6 The Plays of Carlton and Barbara Molette: The Transformative Power of African-American Theater......Page 108 Moved to Act: Civil Rights Activism in the US and Beyond......Page 129 7 “Together We Can Build a Nation of Love and Integration”: The 1965 North Shore Summer Project for Fair Housing in Chicago’s Northern Suburbs......Page 131 8 Redrawing Borders of Belonging in a Narrow Nation: Afro-Chilean Activism in the Hinterlands of Afro-Latin America......Page 151 9 Lowcountry, High Demands: The Struggle for Quality Education in Charleston, South Carolina......Page 168 Index......Page 189 'Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles' examines the construction of blackness within shifting post-civil rights, post-colonial and neo-colonial contexts. It features understudied locations and protagonists, and articulates the necessarily ambiguous aspirations, goals, protest rationales and strategies associated with the reclamation of agency and the affirmation of self This volume sheds light on how to construe the contemporary political vicissitudes of the Black experience and the ongoing struggle for agency, belonging, and civil rights. It offers a fresh look at familiar concepts such as activism and belonging and models innovative approaches for studying the African diasporic experience in the 21st century.