Pullman Porters on Screen,

Part 1 (Pre-1960)

By BFC/A

The legacy of Pullman porters and the labor union eventually formed by them  – the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters – is an important one in American and labor history. Correspondingly, Pullman porters have left their imprint on American film in many different ways through the years, though the volume and type of those depictions might be wanting.

Pullman porter Harry Lucas (Margaret Bourke-White/Time and Life)

When George Pullman ventured in to the business of sleeping class accommodation on the railroads after the Civil War, he made a decision to hire only black porters – attendants for all aspects of the sleeping car experience – owing to several factors: a large, newly available labor pool willing to work; the ability to pay lower wages to black men; and to recreate – for the white middle classes who would ride the train – the upper class experience of being waited on by paid servants.  Working conditions were long, tough, and underpaid, and yet it was an available job for black men systematically excluded from much of the labor force, which meant something.  In 1925, under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was formed and, and conditions and pay for the profession began to improve.  The Pullman porters, aided by the BSCP, have been seen as contributors to the black middle class that grew between the 1920s and 1960s in America (excuse my brevity – you can read more in many places, including here, here, here, and here).

The first black film company – the Foster Photoplay Company – was formed in 1909 and put out two shorts The Pullman Porter (1910), and The Railroad Porter (1912), which are often credited as the first films directed by a black director with an entirely black cast.  The slapstick films were generally considered to posit African Americans positively and not in the racist archetypes of the day (these films came out a few years before D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation), and featured Pullman porters in both.  The latter film is also credited with having the first chase scene in film history.

Pullman porters made it into the peripheries of many other films in the silent era, all too often, unfortunately, against a reductive and racist backdrop.  For example, Fast Black (1924), features two white characters, one of whom has his face accidentally blackened by a car’s exhaust pipe, and responds to an ad for a ‘colored Pullman porter.’  According to IMDb, the rest of the film is driven by “mistaken identity due to accidental blackface.”  Unfortunately, many of these films have now been lost – we know, very little, for example, about Roscoe Arbuckle’s 1919 ‘The Pullman Porter’ except that it starred white actors.  Al Jolson, whose relationship to African Americans and race in America was much more complex than initial appearances, used Pullman porter tropes and archetypes in his 1913 album and song Pullman Porter’s Parade, promoting the song with blackface material.

Al Jolson’s promotional photo for Pullman Porter’s Parade

In the Talkies era, the ubiquity of the Pullman porter in American life is perhaps most visible through scanning over the filmography of Dudley Dickerson.   Dickerson, who appeared in around films beginning in 1932, played a Pullman porter (or some type of role on a train) in the following titles:  The Alligator People (1959), The Opposite Sex (1956), Tonight We Sing (1953), Everybody Does It (1949), It’s a Great Feeling (1949), The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949), It Had to Be You (1947), Hold That Lion (1947), I’ll Be Yours (1947), Rolling Down to Reno (1947), The Falcons Adventure (1946), One Way to Love (1946), The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945), A Guy, a Gal, and a Pal (1945), Together Again (1944), His Wedding Scare (1943),  George Washington Slept Here (1942), Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942), Spy Smasher (1942), The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), All-American Co-ed (1941), Knute Rockne All American (1940), On Trial (1939), The Sisters (1938), Broadway Musketeers (1938), The Adventurous Blonde (1937), Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936), and Polo Joe  (1936). A scan of Dickerson’s filmography (here) has him cast in a vast array of servile roles as a minor or supporting actor, and he is often not credited. Below is Dickerson in Hold That Lion (1947), a short with the Three Stooges franchise (Dickerson’s spot begins at 4:05).

However, not all films featuring Pullman porters were consigned to base and stereotypical motifs at the peripheries of films.  For example, Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play The Emperor Jones was adapted twice – in a 1933 screen version directed by Dudley Murphey (starring Paul Robeson), and a 1955 made-for-TV film produced by Kraft Television Theatre (starring Ossie Davis).  The Emperor Jones tells the story of a Pullman Porter who eventually becomes the emperor or a Carribbean island.  The story is certainly not without its criticism – frequent use of the word ‘nigger’ and plays on sexual myths about black men among them – though it certainly cuts against the grain of films featuring Pullman porters at the time.

Still, the imprint of Pullman porters on American film is more than just depictions of Pullman porters on screen.  Oscar Micheaux was a Pullman porter before becoming one of the most successful black directors in the silent and talkie era.  As a porter, Micheaux was able to travel across and see the country, establish relationships with wealthy people who would later finance his films, and learned how to manage business operations.  We’re quite thankful it helped launch his career in film, and the Lincoln Motion Picture Company.

~Jonathan Jenner

Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award Series

Deadline:

February 28, 2013

Entry Fee: 

$30

Website: 

http://www.awpwriter.org/contests

E-mail address: 

chronicle@awpwriter.org

Two prizes of $5,500 each and publication by a participating press are given annually for a poetry collection and a short story collection. In addition, two prizes of $2,500 each and publication by a participating press are given annually for a novel and a book of creative nonfiction. For the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, submit a manuscript of at least 48 pages; D. A. Powell will judge, and the University of Pittsburgh Press will publish the winning collection. For the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, submit a manuscript of 150 to 300 pages; Pam Houston will judge, and the University of Massachusetts Press will be the publisher. For the novel award, submit a manuscript of at least 60,000 words; Charles Yu will judge, and New Issues Press will be the publisher. For the creative nonfiction award, submit a manuscript of 150 to 300 pages; Bernard Cooper will judge, and the University of Georgia Press will be the publisher. Friends and former students of a judge may not enter in the genre their former teacher is judging. The entry fee for each award is $30 ($20 for AWP members). Using the online submission system, submit manuscripts between January 1 and February 28. Send an SASE, e-mail, or visit the website for the required entry form and complete guidelines.

Association of Writers & Writing Programs, Award Series, 4400 University Drive, Mail Stop 1E3, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030. (703) 993-4301.

Dream Horse Press 

American Poetry Journal Book Prize

Deadline:

February 28, 2013

Entry Fee: 

$25

Website: 

http://www.dreamhorsepress.com

E-mail address: 

dreamhorsepress@yahoo.com

A prize of $1,000 and publication by Dream Horse Press is given annually for a poetry collection. J. P. Dancing Bear will judge. Submit a manuscript of 50 to 65 pages with a $25 entry fee by February 28. E-mail or visit the website for complete guidelines.

Dream Horse Press, American Poetry Journal Book Prize, P.O. Box 2080, Aptos, CA 95001-2080. J. P. Dancing Bear, Editor.

cfp: Unofficial Histories Conference

(June 2013, Manchester)

Posted on December 30, 2012 by feministmemory

Saturday 15^th June & Sunday 16^th June 2013- Manchester, UK 

-   Call for Participation -

The Unofficial Histories conference seeks to bring together those who wish to consider the value and purpose of historical engagements and understandings that take place within, on the edges of, or outside “official” sites that produce and transmit historical knowledge and ideas.

After a successful first conference at Bishopsgate Institute, London, in May 2012, Unofficial Histories moves north to Manchester, and this time we’re making a weekend of it:

• Saturday 15^th June 2013 will be a day of papers, presentations and debate at Manchester Metropolitan University, Oxford Road, Manchester.

• Sunday 16^th June 2013 will be a relaxed day of informal activities exploring the theme of  ’Unofficial Histories’ (details TBC).

We now invite presentation proposals for the meeting on Saturday 15^th June 2013 to be held at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Taking its cue from the assumption that history is, as Raphael Samuel put it, “a social form of knowledge; the work, in any given instance of a thousand different hands”, the conference aims to open up to examination the ways in which historians, curators, writers, journalists, artists, film makers, activists and others, seek to represent the past in the public realm, spheres of popular culture and everyday life.

What subjects, ideas and themes are presented? What styles and mediums are used? How is this history produced, transmitted and consumed? Who is producing and consuming it, and why?

We hope to sharpen the awareness of the different sites and forms of historical production and consider how they impact public perceptions and consciousness of history. We are also concerned to understand the interactions between competing and corresponding impulses in history-making: the scholarly and the political; the academic and the everyday; the imperatives of funding, sustainability, ethics and access.

Finally, we would like to consider whether or not such “unofficial histories” have political effects that might serve democratic and emancipatory goals, and/or can be seen as sources of dissent and resistance against conventional, privileged models of historical knowledge.

Presentations of 20 minutes (different approaches to communication are encouraged) are welcomed on any aspect of the above, which may include:

• People’s History & the History of Everyday Life

• TV, Radio and Internet

• Literature, Poetry, Music and Folksong 

• Museums, Heritage and Archives

• Feminist , Women’s and Gender History

• Historical Re-enactment and Living History

• Memory, Myth and Folklore

• Class, Culture and Ethnicities

• Art, Drama and Theatre

• Family History and Genealogy

• Oral History, Testimony, and Biography

• Local, Regional and Community History

• The Role of the Historian

• History Education, Teaching and Curricula

• Uses and Abuses of History

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words by Wednesday 20^th February 2013 to Fiona Cosson, email f.cosson@mmu.ac.uk .

Download Unofficial Histories 2013 CFP as PDF

2013, The Year of the Child

January 1, 2013

By Sokari

I have been thinking a great deal about children lately [I use the term broadly, as a mother and aunt rather than in strictly terms of age] especially about them being killed, raped and harmed in so many ways. We know its true, that public, collective tears are not for everyone. I read recently that here in the US, in Chicago, 260 school children have been murdered in the past three years.

In 2010, nearly 700 Chicago school children were shot and 66 of them died. Last year, Mayor Rahm Emanuel attended a memorial for 260 school children who had been killed in just the previous three years. On several occasions in the past year, tens of people have been shot in a single weekend on the streets of the city. The worst three-day stretch saw 10 killed and 37 wounded in gun fire. But Google the term “Chicago weekend shootings” and the results are far too many deadly weekends to count.

But historically black death, people of colour death, Native American death has never been cause for mourning. On the contrary as Jessie Jackson pointed out after Katrina.. [the US]

..an amazing tolerance for black pain… a great tolerance for black suffering and black marginalization” [Monstrous Intimacies, Christina Sharp]

We witness this not only across cities in the US but well beyond. Technically Chicago is not a war zone – people who live there may feel otherwise, I dont know. But its not the DRC, Palestine or Yemen but still the children of Chicago are being killed and they are not white kids. The children in the DRC along with their mothers are murdered and raped and there are the thousands who are trafficked and forced into armies of war, or labour or sex slaves or all of these. Presidents sit by and deal in arms, African resources and money whilst shedding tears at home. The children in Yemen and Palestine are murdered by drones and missiles on the orders of Presidents, some of who shed tears for some children whilst killing others – it could even be in the same moment.

In an interview with Channel 4, Arundhati Roy is questioned about the gang rape on a bus which led to the death of a young Indian woman on Sunday.   We are told that in India a women  is raped every 20 minutes and that the chance of catching the rapists let alone bringing him to trial is near zero.   Many of those raped are young girls and small children.  But as Roy points out, the army and police routinely use rape as a weapon in places like Manipur and Kashmir and they do this under the protection of the law.  Some say its too much to think of all these children being killed and raped let alone shed tears. And what good are tears anyway? Well its a recognition of their humanity, that they are loved and their death is a suffering. Tears make the connection between your children and other peoples children and that all these children and women are being murdered and raped by guns and other war machines. The international arms trade is very closely connected to the domestic arms trade if not why are the NRA lobbying against the global arms trade treaty?

As Amy Goodman writes in the Guardian

The global treaty shouldn’t be controversial. By signing on, governments agree not to export weapons to countries that are under an arms embargo, or to export weapons that would facilitate “the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes” or other violations of international humanitarian law. Exports of arms are banned if they will facilitate “gender-based violence or violence against children” or be used for “transnational organized crime”.

The treaty deals with international exports of weapons and ammunition, not any nation’s internal, domestic laws that govern the sale or use of guns

Clearly small arms are being traded from the US, most probably from gun fairs where guns are bought and sold freely. Recently Keguro wrote an excellent blog post on Banal Misogyny in which he rightly states

Indeed, the misogyny we inhabit is so pervasive and so unrelenting, that, as I remarked to a friend, Audre Lorde’s essays from the 70s and 80s feel much too present, much too relevant. It is not simply that we are dealing with an ugly remnant that every so often reminds us of an even uglier time. Rather, it is that the ugliness of then, cloaked in masculine benevolence, is too much with us. And we seem to have lost the ability to recognize it, to name it, to respond to it.

I would add that there is a banality about racism and violence so much so that like misogyny, we no longer recognise it and even if we do, every effort is made to belittle the naming and silence our voices. From where I stand misogyny racism and violence are all twisted together by patriarchy .   Jake Appelbaum – founder of TOR and associate of Wikileaks delves further into the bowels of the US patriarchal militarist state as he helps us understand where  they are heading as the age of data retention marks the end of illusionary freedoms. So here’s one example of how it plays out.

The targeting information for the thousands of DRONE killings is fed to the CIA [NSA and all the other members of patriarchal military surveillance state] from surveillance listening points [One is being built in Utah at this moment with relay stations around the US and very possibly overseas in Uganda, Kenya and other AFRICOM friendly states.] and from intelligence factories. In short there is a direct relationship between survelliance and support of straight up murder…..The way the Drone killings are carried out is that the central committee that is those who gets to decide who lives or dies or Obama’s  assassination star chamber – this is just  hop or two away from surveillance. So when you support the surveillance state this is just a stop away from killing children.   [paraphrased]

Just in case readers are unsure that this impacts on their daily lives, Jake reminds us of the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill and I will add the Nigerian Same Sex Marriage  Prohibition Bill – both are wholly reliant on surveillance. Yes they may start with neighbours but sooner or later surveillance technologies will replace people and the reporting neighbour will themselves be under surveillance.  Just imagine London’s millions of CCTV are made available to monitor interactions and behaviour of people  living under the Ugandan or Nigerian AHBs?  Its also important to state that the oppressions Jake is speaking about may be new to white privilege but for Black folks well we have always been under the intimate gaze of the monster!  This is not a dismissal or excuse to do nothing – it is simply a statement of fact.

Because this is New Years Day in the calendar I live my life, I write this in memory of Darren Deslandes, 11th July 1975 – 1st January 2010 – Darren was murdered in the early hours of January 1st in his family pub in South London.  R.I.P. Darren, never forgotten!

__________________________

Interview with Nigerian writer and activist Sokari Ekine at re:publica10 in Berlin on mobile activism in Africa.

The Growing Electoral Clout

of Blacks Is Driven

by Turnout, Not Demographics

 

by Paul Taylor

Overview

Blacks voted at a higher rate this year than other minority groups and for the first time in history may also have voted at a higher rate than whites, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data, election day exit poll data and vote totals from selected cities and counties.

  

Unlike other minority groups whose increasing electoral muscle has been driven mainly by population growth, blacks’ rising share of the vote in the past four presidential elections has been the result of rising turnout rates.

These participation milestones are notable not just in light of the long history of black disenfranchisement, but also in light of recently-enacted state voter identification laws that some critics contended would suppress turnout disproportionately among blacks and other minority groups.

In fact, according to census data and the election day exit polls, blacks made up 12 percent of the eligible electorate¹ this year but accounted for an estimated 13 percent of all votes cast—a repeat of the 2008 presidential election, when blacks “over-performed” at the polls by the same ratio. In all previous presidential elections for which there are reliable data, blacks had accounted for a smaller share of votes than eligible voters.

The candidacy in 2008 and 2012 of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, is no doubt one of the main reasons for these new patterns. But there are other explanations as well, including the increased racial and ethnic diversity of the electorate, and a declining turnout rate among whites.

In 2012, more Hispanics and Asian-Americans voted than ever before, but the turnout rates among these groups (votes cast as a share of eligible voters), while rising, continues to lag that of the general public by a substantial margin. Their growing electoral muscle is mainly due to their rapid population growth.

As for whites, not only has their share of the eligible electorate been falling for decades, but their turnout rate appears to have declined in 2012 for the second presidential election in row.²

Did the turnout rate of blacks exceed that of whites this year for the first time ever? For now, there’s circumstantial evidence but no conclusive proof. And there’ll be no clear verdict until next spring, when the U.S. Census Bureau publishes findings from its biannual post-election survey on voter turnout.

 

Even so, there’s a good bit that’s already known. Overall, about 129 million votes were cast for president in 2012, down slightly from 131 million in 2008. When one factors in a 9 million increase in the age and citizen eligible electorate due to normal population growth between those two elections, the turnout rate among all eligible voters fell by more than 3 percentage points—to about 60% in 2012 from more than 63% in 2008.

The most authoritative measure of turnout by racial and ethnic groups comes from the census survey known as Voting and Registration Supplement, which is conducted in late November after every federal election among a nationally representative sample of about 100,000 adults.

 

While the 2012 finding won’t be made public for several months, a backward look at recent trends from this data set is instructive. In 2008, according to the post-election census survey, the gap between white and black turnout was the smallest on record. Some 66.1% of all age and citizen eligible whites voted that year, compared with 65.2% of blacks, 49.9% of Hispanics and 47% of Asian Americans. The survey found that the white turnout rate had declined by 1.1 percentage points between 2004 and 2008, while the rates for the other groups all rose—by 4.9 percentage points among blacks, 2.7 among Hispanics and 2.4 among Asians.

 

The post-election survey also showed that in 2008, young blacks (18 to 29 year olds) voted at a higher rate than young whites (58% versus 52%) – a difference that was almost certainly related to the historic nature of the Obama candidacy, but that might foreshadow patterns in political engagement among the Millennial generation that could persist throughout adulthood.

The political importance of turnout rates by race was brought into sharp focus by last month’s election, in which Obama won 80% of the non-white vote (including 93% of blacks, 73% of Asian Americans and 71% of Hispanics) and just 39% of the white vote. That constellation of votes by race gave Obama a popular vote victory margin this year of 4.7 million and an Electoral College victory of 332-206.

For comparative purposes, consider the 1988 presidential race between GOP nominee George H.W. Bush and Democrat Michael Dukakis. Bush received the identical share of the white vote that GOP nominee Mitt Romney won this year – 59%. But 24 years ago, that share was good enough to give Bush a popular vote margin of 7 million and an Electoral College landslide of 426-111.

 

The stark difference in those two outcomes is a reflection of the country’s rapidly changing demographic makeup, driven mainly by the population growth among Hispanic and Asian American immigrants and their children.

Blacks, by contrast, have not seen their share of the population grow during this period. But their electoral clout has increased because their participation rates have risen steadily in the three presidential elections from 2000 to 2008.

 

As for 2012, the best available data for now on turnout by racial and ethnic groups are from the National Election Pool, an election day exit survey of more than 26,000 voters conducted by a consortium of major media organizations.

These surveys are best known for enabling an analysis of which groups voted for which candidate. They can also be used to estimate the share of all voters by race and ethnicity (as well as by other demographic characteristics). However, these estimates should be treated with caution. In 2008, as the accompanying tables show, the estimates derived from the election day exit poll were not the same as the estimates derived from the post-election survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. There is no guarantee this will not be the case again in 2012.³

Even with that caveat in mind, the exit poll is instructive. As the tables show, in 2012 blacks and whites both appear to have cast a slightly higher shares of votes (72% and 13%, respectively) than their share of eligible voters (71% and 12%), while Hispanics and Asians cast a lower share of votes (10% and 3%) than their share of eligible voters (11% and 4%).

That still leaves unanswered whether the black turnout rate in 2012 surpassed the white turnout rate. If so, it would be a notable denouement to the charged debate this year between state GOP leaders who pressed for tougher laws to deter voter fraud and black and other minority group leaders who accused them of trying to suppress the minority vote. This fall, black pastors, community leaders and elected officials across the country used these new identification laws as a spur to energize turnout.

In an effort to further explore whether black turnout exceeded white turnout in 2012, Pew Research asked voter turnout expert Rhodes Cook to analyze the number of votes cast in 2008 and 2012 in a sampling of heavily black and heavily white cities and counties across the country. Cook gathered the official counts from state election officials and relied on his extensive knowledge of the nation’s demographic and political characteristics, down to the county level, to select the sample.

His findings are presented in Appendix A. They show a mix of turnout increases and decreases, with no clear pattern. In short, blacks may have achieved an historic turnout milestone at the polls last month – even in the face of what many black leaders said was an effort to suppress their vote. But for now, there’s no conclusive proof.

 

1. For the purpose of this analysis, eligible electorate includes all non-institutionalized citizens ages 18 and older. ↩

2. Readers should note that this report analyzes racial and ethnic turnout patterns in two ways: (1) what share of the total vote was cast by each group; and (2) what share of the eligible electorate in each group voted. The second measure is generally referred to as the group’s turnout rate. ↩

3. There are a number of possible explanations for these differences. Compared with the election day exit survey done by media organizations, the post-election census survey has the advantage of a much larger sample size. On the downside, it is more vulnerable to an over-reporting bias (respondents reporting that they had voted even thought they hadn’t because voting is thought to be a socially desirable activity). In recent elections, as the chart in Appendix Two shows, the over-reporting bias has disappeared. And even if it were to arise again in 2012, it would only affect this turnout share analysis if different racial and ethnic groups were to have a differential tendency to over-report the fact that they had voted. ↩

Images of Emancipation

By MAURICE BERGER

 

GO HERE TO VIEW PHOTO SLIDE SHOW

The portrait for the carte-de-visite of Sojourner Truth, the African-American abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, was taken in Battle Creek, Mich., in the 1860s (Slide 5). She wears an elegant silk dress and shawl. With one hand resting on her hip, the other on the arm of the chair, her pose is majestic and determined. She stares resolutely into the camera.

But it is the object in her lap that remains one of the image’s most revelatory details: an open daguerreotype of her grandson James Caldwell, a soldier during the Civil War.

The daguerreotype’s pride of place speaks not only to Truth’s love for her grandchild but also to her passionate engagement with photography. As Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer write in their groundbreaking new book, “Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery” (Temple University Press), Truth was probably the first black woman to actively distribute photographs of herself.

Those pictures were meant to affirm her status as a sophisticated and respectable “free woman and as a woman in control of her image.” The public’s fascination with carte-de-visites, small and collectible card-mounted photographs, allowed her to advance her abolitionist cause to a huge audience and earn a living through their sale. “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance,” proclaimed the famous slogan for these pictures.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress Susie King Taylor, 1902.

Truth was not alone in her understanding of the power of photography. A host of other African-Americans, both eminent and ordinary, employed the medium as an instrument of political engagement and inspiration. “Envisioning Emancipation” argues that photography was not incidental but central to the war against slavery, racism and segregation in the antebellum period of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s.

The book explores how blacks “positioned themselves and were posed by others” in order to advance, question or alter prevailing ideas about race. It examines the ways the national debate about slavery was played out in photographs, for example, from the standpoint of abolitionists, who published them as proof of the brutality and immorality of slavery, and its supporters, who engaged photographs as visual evidence of its “natural order and orderliness.”

Pseudoscientists, like Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born and Harvard-trained zoologist, adapted the medium to further notions of black aberrance and inferiority. Agassiz employed invasive daguerreotypes of naked slaves — the “pornography of forced labor,” as they have been aptly described — to verify his theory of polygenesis, the separate human origins of Africans and Europeans, and emphasize the relative lowliness of the former.

Abolitionists used photographs to convince Northern whites — for whom the prospect of emancipation elicited responses ranging from skepticism to violence — of the unjustness of slavery. They stirred public sentiment by offering visual evidence of slavery’s abuses as well as of the wholesomeness of an emerging class of freed blacks. Juxtaposing pictures of hapless children, posed barefoot and dressed in ragged clothes, with images of the same children wearing neatly pressed and undamaged garments, for example, abolitionists were able to convey the idea that a formerly enslaved people, now rendered as attractive and healthy, were worthy of liberation.

 

 Augustus Washington, Courtesy of the Library of Congress Urias Africanus McGill, a Baltimore-born merchant, in Liberia. 1854.

As Ms. Willis and Ms. Krauthamer note, freedom for African-Americans was not instantly achieved with the implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863; it evolved fitfully, over many decades. During that time, it was photographs created largely by and for African-Americans that helped an oppressed people to imagine their own freedom. Prominent black leaders, including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, routinely turned to the medium, much as Sojourner Truth did, to further their abolitionist campaigns.

Soon, increasingly inexpensive imaging technology, coupled with a growing national network of black-owned photo studios, permitted African-Americans of all economic classes, even “the servant girl,” as Douglass observed, to construct their own versions of themselves. This affirmative imagery served to countermand destructive and pervasive stereotypes, steeling African-Americans against the ruthless forces of intolerance while simultaneously convincing white people of their shared humanity.

In the end, “Envisioning Emancipation” recounts a dynamic history of black self-possession and self-determination, one that challenges the abiding myth of the crusade against slavery and segregation: that of passive black victims who obtained freedom mostly through the benevolence and generosity of their white saviors.

 

 Henry P. Moore, Courtesy of the Library of Congress Sweet potato planting, James Hopkinson’s plantation, 1862.

That myth does not die easily. It haunts popular culture, no more so than in Steven Spielberg’s just-released film about the 16th president’s epic battle against slavery, “Lincoln.” Despite the nuanced portrayal of its protagonist, “Lincoln” is almost devoid of images of active black resistance and protest, ignoring a wealth of research “demonstrating that slaves were crucial agents in their emancipation,” as the historian Kate Masur wrote last month in this newspaper.

“For my community, the message has been clear,” the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates recently observed, “the Civil War is a story for white people — acted out by white people, and on white people’s terms — in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props.” “Envisioning Emancipation” brilliantly rewrites this story, insisting that we acknowledge the names and faces of people who have been invisible for too long.

 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress Two brothers in arms, 1860s.

---

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York. He is the author of 11 books, including a memoir, “White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness.” Mr. Berger has worked with Ms. Willis on several exhibitions and publications, including an show curated by Mr. Berger, “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights” (Ms. Willis was a senior consultant). More recently, they each contributed essays to “Gordon Parks: Collected Works” (Steidl, 2013).

Follow @MauriceBerger and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.

Radical Black Reading

/Reading Haiti, 2012

By The Public Archive | Published: December 30, 2012

 

 

Easily the most hyped Haiti-related book to come out in the past year was Purpose: An Immigrant Story (It Books), the memoir of rapper-turned-presidential-candidate Wyclef Jean. They say Purpose is actually not that bad, especially if you’re interested in either Clef’s take on the dissolution of the Fugees or his embittered account of his agonized history with Lauryn Hill. But it offers little on his controversial charity efforts or on his political aspirations, though perhaps these issues will be addressed in one of the proposed seven tomes Wyclef plans on writing.  Regardless, the books that interested us in 2012 were not over-marketed and vapid celebrity tell-alls but politically and intellectually engaged tracts – often published by smaller, lesser-known presses, and often overlooked by the mainstream.

One such book, Terre de femmes: 150 ans de poésie féminine en Haïti (Bruno Doucey) we’ve written of before (and it was actually published in 2010). But we were so taken by this strikingly designed volume that we feel compelled to mention it again. Terre de femmes contains poetry from thirty-five Haitian women writers, from early twentieth-century figures Ida Flaubert and Emmeline Carriès Lemaire to contemporary writers Kettly Mars and Elvire Maurouard, many of whom we were introduced to for the first time. The anthology boasts a spectrum of tone, perspective, and style: romantic verse sits alongside odes to Simon Bolivar and invocations of Toussaint Louverture. Terre de femmes is a welcome revelation, as were the contents of two other excellent collections compiling writing by and about Caribbean women. Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2010 (Editorial Campaña), edited by Myrna E. Nieves-Colón, is a bilingual compendium that grew out of the Boricua College Winter Poetry Series, while Ifeona Fulani’s pioneering Archipelagos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities, Women, and Music (Ian Randle) gathers essays on Rhianna, Celia Cruz, Grace Jones, Louise Bennett, and, as it turns out, the incomparable Lauryn Hill.

Problems of distribution and translation (or, less generously, questions of disinterest and Anglophone insularity and provincialism), have kept English-language readers in the dark concerning many of the writers published in Terre de femmes. Similar problems plague our knowledge of books by publishers based in Haiti despite their deep and growing lists. Since May 2011, the Petionville consultancy firm C3 Group has had an admirable output of monographs published under the imprint Editions C3Group. Their first title, 100% Préval, is a wide-ranging assessment of the presidency of Rene Préval that brings together a cross section of Haitian politicians and intellectuals. They have published seven books since including Les 100 premiers jours de Martelly on “Martellisme” and the early days of the Martelly presidency as well as a number of regional studies of Haitian economy and politics. Radical? Probably not. But they are, nonetheless, important interventions and their latest monograph attacks the question of color and racism in Haitian society. Titled La vie et ses couleurs and edited by Lionnel Trouillot it contains contributions in Kreyol and French by writers including Jean-Euphèle Milcé, Emelie Prophète, Evelyne Trouillot, Gary Victor, and Rodney St-Éloi, the latter also the publisher of the fantastic Montreal-based press Mémoire d’encrier.

Having already published the late geographer Georges Anglade’s Le secret du dynamisme littéraire haïtien and Jean Casimir’s Haïti et ses élites. L’interminable dialogue de sourds, among other academic texts, Editions de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti have over the past year issued Robenson Belunet’s important addition to studies of the first US Occupation, La France face à l’occupation américaine d’Haïti (1915-1934), as well as Marie Redon’s ambitious comparative study of frontiers and islands, Des îles en partage: Haïti, République dominicaine, Saint-Martin, Timor Editions, published in collaboration with Presses Universitaires du Mirail. Also published collaboratively, this time with Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, is the collection Haïti, réinventer l’avenir. Edited by Jean-Daniel Rainhorn, Haïti, réinventer l’avenir grew out of a conference in Geneva in January 2011 on Haiti’s reconstruction and is billed as a “trialogue” between more than two-dozen contributors drawn from Haitian civil society, the Haitian diaspora, and the international community. Haïti, réinventer l’avenir should be read alongside a similar volume, Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Quake (Stylus/Kumarian), edited by anthropologist Mark Schuller and NACLA editor Pablo Morales.

Editions de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti also published a path-breaking collection of Caribbean economic history, Histoire économique de la Caraibe (1880 – 1950), edited by scholars Guy Pierre, Gustie Gaillard-Pourchet, and Nathalie Lamaute-Brisson. Focusing largely on the changing fortunes of the sugar industry and the role of banking, debt, and monetary policy in the region’s economic organization and development, Histoire économique de la Caraibe contains contributions from a fantastic set of Caribbean historians including César Ayalá, Alain Buffon, Roberto Cassá, Rebeca Gómez Betancourt, Leslie F. Manigat, Rita Pemberton, Inés Roldan de Montaud, and Oscar Zanetti. Other works of a historical bent published in the past year include Malick W. Gechem’s study of self-fashioning and negotiation within the colonial laws of Saint-Domingue, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge), and a special issue of the Radical History Review, titled Haitian Lives/Global Perspective and edited by historians Amy Chazkel, Melina Pappademos, and Karen Sotiropoulos. The issue includes a micro-history of plantation life in Saint-Domingue, an analysis of Toussaint’s L’Ouverture’s 1801 constitution, an account of the National City Bank in Haiti, and histories of both Guantanamo and Miami’s Krome Detention Center. Unfortunately, the Radical History Review is only available to paid subscribers. Sara E. Johnson’s Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (California) takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of how African people within the greater Caribbean responded to the Haitian Revolution while in Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Chicago), Deborah Jenson examines the texts written by Haitians themselves. Jenson examines the political tracts penned by revolutionary leaders Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines as well as Saint-Domingue’s popular, anonymously written Creole poetry.

The most famous account of the Haitian Revolution is, of course, CLR James’s 1938 history The Black Jacobins. But before he composed his dramatic history of revolution, James rendered the revolution as historical drama. His play was written in 1934, staged in 1936 at London’s Westminister Theatre – with Paul Robeson starring –and lost until a draft was rediscovered in 2005 by historian Christian Høgsbjerg, who unearthed it during his doctoral research. Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History; A Play in Three Acts has been edited by Høgsbjerg and published by Duke. It comes as the first publication of a new series, The CLR James Archives, edited by Robert A. Hill, a scholar best known for his work on the Marcus Garvey and Universal Improvement Association Papers Project. The aim of the series is to recover and reproduce James’s work, and work on James, for a contemporary audience. In another act of recovery, James’s analysis of the economic and political nature of the mid-century Soviet state have been compiled by Scott McLemee as The Dialectics of State Capitalism: Writings on Marxist Theory, 1940-1956 and is due out from Haymarket Press.

The state is at the center of a number of recent monographs that have examined questions of democracy, dictatorship and neo-colonialism in contemporary Haiti. Justin Podur’s Haiti’s New Dictatorship: The Coup, The Earthquake and the UN Occupation (Pluto) scrutinizes the ways in which the international community has choked Haiti’s sovereignty since the 2004 coup while promoting a supposedly benign international occupation of the country. Jeb Sprague’s thoroughly-researched Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti (Monthly Review) examines the growth of right-wing paramilitaries and their role, supported by money and political muscle from the United States and the Dominican Republic, in subverting Haitian grassroots democratic movements. In the 2005 book Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority (Fernwood), Yves Engler and Anthony Fenton, shed light on Great White North’s role in the overthrow of democracy in the Black Republic; a section of Yves Engler’s latest, The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy (Fernwood) pillories Canada’s post-earthquake callousness.

Finally, Revue Noire, the Paris-based journal of Black art, has published The Room of Mario Benjamin, the first monograph on the Port-au-Prince based abstract painter. And if you aren’t able to travel to Los Angeles to see the well regarded exhibit In Extremis: Death and Life in 21^st-Century Haitian Art at UCLA’s Fowler Museum its catalogue, edited by Donald Cosentino, will be published by the University of Washington Press. The exhibit displayed works by artists from Jean-Michel Basquiat to the famous found-object sculptors of Port-au-Prince’s Grand Rue; the catalogue contains essays from Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Edwidge Danticat, Leah Gordon, Claudine Michel, Jean Claude Saintilus, and others.

All told, there’s a depth and richness to these publications that is still missing from Haiti’s coverage and representation in the mainstream press. Support these endeavors. Buy the books.

All best for the new year.

The Public Archive <editor@thepublicarchive.com>

Image: Cédric Audebert, Le marquage architectural et culturel de Little Haiti et la Librairie Mapou. Source: Cédric Audebert, « Les stratégies spatiales de la population haïtienne à Miami », EchoGéo (2007).

Visit Librairie Mapou at 5919 Northeast 2nd Avenue, Miami, Florida, USA 33137 [Map] or buy books about Haiti online at the Haitian Book Center.