This article explores the battles over “Americanism” and “un-Americanism” that swirled around the People's Bicentennial Commission (PBC) – a radical, populist organization that sought to promote fundamental economic change during the mid-1970s. Although it was founded by 1960s veterans, the PBC was sharply critical of what it saw as the New Left's abandonment of Americanism. As the nation prepared to celebrate its two-hundredth birthday, the PBC sought to present itself, and its radical programme, as representing the “true” spirit of the American Revolution. For its conservative critics, though, the PBC's patriotism was little more than a ruse, designed to trick ordinary Americans into supporting what was, essentially, a dangerous (and un-American) force.

This essay is the foreword to an artistic inquiry into immigrant Chinese life in rural nineteenth-century California – a communal life that was itinerant, vulnerable, preyed upon, resilient, and centrally important in the state's and the nation's history. The project integrates new photographs of the remnants of Chinese settlements in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Sacramento delta areas into a forgotten governmental account of Chinese immigrants, made by D. D. Beatty in Downieville, c.1894. The result is a remade book, part document, part poetic archaeology.

This article traces and analyzes the missionary photography of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the most important independent black American institution that began to operate in colonial South Africa at the onset of the politics of racial segregation in the 1890s. It argues that AME missionary photography presents a neglected archive, from which a history of black photographic encounters and a subaltern perspective on the dominant visual cultures of European imperialism and Christian missions in Africa can be retrieved. Focussing in particular on how AME missionaries deployed tropes of the culturally refined “New Negro” and the US South in their visual description of South Africa, this article demonstrates that photography was an important tool for black subjects to define their image beyond the representations of black inferiority that established visual traditions constructed.

In a powerful but frequently overlooked passage in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes expressive culture as a register of incipient social relations. He maintains that long before liberation struggles assume organized political form, perceptive observers will detect the emergence of unusual kinds of expression popping up to summon the people to view the status quo as both unreal and unacceptable.1 The essays in this special issue dedicated to the theme of Inhabiting Cultures display precisely this evidence of incipient critique and transformation. They demonstrate that tomorrow is today; that the reigning cultural forms authored and authorized by domination, exclusion and oppression have become exhausted and obsolete; and that the stirrings of a new world in the making are already here.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013) might seem an unlikely candidate for intervening in Hollywood's civil rights genre, given both its nationalistic ending and its recuperation of iconic styles and images. This paper argues, however, that the film's pastiche interrogates past cinematic tropes for race and space; in this sense, it proves counterhistorical, a term indicating not a lack of accuracy but a commitment to illuminating the role of visual media in shaping contemporary understandings of history and to encouraging fresh perspectives on the past. Examining the many forms of constraint produced by iconic images of black and gendered personhood, the film also takes on the spatial icon with which many of these figures are associated – the southern plantation. Both exposing and challenging the ways in which spectacular accounts of southern racism occlude the geographic and political reach of African American movements against oppression, the film inconsistently insists on the importance of thinking across conventional demarcations of space and time. At these moments, it suggests possibilities for how even commercial cinema might contribute to new conceptions of black political history and possibility.

The longevity of the lyric belies persisting difficulties in terms of its definition and categorization, particularly given the form's evolution in the face of philosophical, sociopolitical and cultural transformations. In Claudia Rankine's Citizen, the lyric is powerfully refashioned in response to the historical and contemporary tribulations of being a black citizen in America. Rankine's keen awareness of how linguistic injury caused by microaggressions registers in the body leads her to an adoption and adaptation of the lyric form, with Citizen aptly subtitled “An American Lyric.” Citizen is an urgent and timely book that sustains America's conversation on race and racial injustice on a level of national grief, even as Rankine brings it to the level of personal intimacy by asking, “How do you make a body accountable for its language, its positioning?” I contend that Citizen is a work that extends the lyric's possibilities through creating a hybrid text containing lyric essays, photography, public art and video scripts, which are juxtaposed for intertextual and polyphonic effects. I argue that Rankine uses lyric hybridity to create a poetics of racial trauma that meditates on the effects of racial injustice as it manifests in the bodies of traumatized individuals. Lyric hybridity appears crucial to Rankine's project, since it allows for complex subjectivity and intimate address amidst a clarity of language that enables the reader to perceive how we easily we fail one another in our daily pursuit of relationality, community and citizenship.

This article reconsiders Richard Wright's Native Son by comparing divergences between the published novel and an earlier typeset manuscript. It argues that such revisions render protagonist Bigger Thomas an icon of global class conflict rather than a national figure of racial tension. By revealing the continuities among critical essays that bookend the writing of Native Son, this essay also reveals how the novel's restructuring further elaborates Wright's globalism – highlighting his desire to produce work that transcended both national and racial categories. Finally, it considers Native Son as a work of “world literature” and a model for global minoritarian discourse. By examining “translations” of the novel into postcolonial contexts, it argues that the global afterlife of Native Son is no departure from the localized vision of the novel, but rather the recapitulation of its explicit globalism. This article thereby challenges critical convention dividing Wright's career cleanly into two phases: his American period and later self-exile. It emphasizes rather that Wright's worldliness should be traced back through his revision of Native Son and earlier critical essays – ultimately finding his globalism not a late-stage development, but actually the single theme that unifies his oeuvre.

This article looks at the published reports on visits made to interwar Germany by prominent black journalists Robert S. Abbot, J. A. Rogers and Lewis McMillan. Drawing on their own experiences as well as their engagement with German-based blacks, the reporters contrasted the oppressive conditions black people faced in the US with the apparent lack of colour prejudice in Germany. Their coverage serves as a critique of race relations in the US, while also providing snapshots into the conditions under which black Germans lived as well as an insight into the writers’ own perceptions of a broader black diaspora in development.

Envisioning Harlem's future served as a particularly vivid means of addressing the dilemmas posed by the prospect of desegregation. Should black peoplehood – in part a legacy of oppression and racialization – persist in a post-segregation era? This article calls for greater attention to be paid to the visions of future existence that animated, and were animated by, the black freedom struggles of the 1960s. It explores contrasting architectural reimaginings of Harlem and argues that ideas about existing black places and the nature of their built environment were important factors in shaping commitments to, and idealizations of, both integrationist and black nationalist futures.

Since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling in 1973 made abortion legal in the United States, it has consistently been subject to attempts to limit its reach, to make abortions harder to access, and thus to restrict their availability or frequency. In recent years, both pro-life and pro-choice groups have been reenergized, through calls to defund Planned Parenthood in Congress in 2015, and the 2016 Supreme Court ruling which prohibited a Texas “clinic-shutdown” law, for obstructing women's legal access to abortion under Roe. An era where this law was particularly contested, however, was the 1980s, which saw the Christian right crystallize and rally together to support the election of Ronald Reagan as President, in the hopes that he would promote their goals. Though extra-governmental pro-life groups and antiabortion individuals within the federal government were not ultimately able to do away with Roe, and would eventually become disappointed with Reagan's efforts in securing this, a series of measures over the course of the administration saw abortion access limited for one group of women in particular: teenage girls. This essay follows these legislative moves over the course of the 1980s, which include the first federal abstinence-only education bill, the Adolescent Family Life Act, a series of laws that allowed states to enact parental notification or consent clauses for minors’ abortions, and a “squeal rule” for doctors who treated sexually active teenagers. It analyses the discourse of and around each of these measures in order to understand how young women's sexual conduct mobilized abortion policy in this era. In doing so, it offers new perspectives on the significance of adolescent female sexuality to Reagan, to the Christian right, and to progressives involved in the heated debates over abortion and related battles of the 1980s culture wars.

The Bethune Memorial, in Washington, DC's Lincoln Park, was erected to celebrate the life and achievements of civil rights leader and educator Mary McLeod Bethune. When it was dedicated in 1974 it became the first monument to an African American, and the first to a woman, on federal land in the capital. This article interprets the monument and its accompanying discourses. It examines how race and gender are constructed in the memorial, and what this suggests about the creation of a collective memory and identity. Bethune was remembered as an American, a black American, and a black American woman. The article explores the racial and gendered tensions in the commemoration, and how the statue both reinforced and challenged a national American memory.

This essay analyses the later fiction of Nobel Prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer through the prism of his vegetarianism. Singer figured his adoption of a vegetarian diet in 1962 as a kind of conversion, pronouncing it a “religion” that was central to his being. Here I outline Singer's vegetarian philosophy, and argue that it was the underlying ethical precept in the fiction written after the conversion. I demonstrate the way in which that ethic informs the presentation of both Judaism and women in Singer's later writings. The piece concludes with the suggestion that this vegetarian ethic was the mainspring of the critique of humanism found in Singer's final novels.

This project scrutinizes the law and its relation to violence. It reassesses the parameters for discerning a state of emergency. It investigates state violence, crisis production and enemy designation, to elucidate implicit and coded state violence enacted in African American communities in the contemporary US. Specifically, this text considers states of emergency that are not exceptions to the rule, but rather integral to the ideology behind, and the formation of, the rule (i.e. the legal, economic, educational and political institutions of the nation).

This article explores the role of Ebony magazine as a key staging ground for competing political and ideological debates over Martin Luther King Jr's legacy, and the struggle for a national holiday in his name. In doing so, it provides an important case study into the contestations between what Houston Baker has described as “black critical memory” and “black conservative nostalgia.” In response to attempts by Ronald Reagan and other politicians to reimagine King as an advocate for color-blind conservatism, Ebony’s senior editor, Lerone Bennett Jr., sought to situate King's legacy within a radical “living history” of black America. However, the magazine's broader coverage of the King holiday movement betrayed underlying tensions within its discussion of King's legacy, and fed into the magazine's role as an inadvertent frame for color-blind ideologies during the 1980s.

This essay adopts an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of Disney's representations of the American founding in television and movie productions as secondary works; that is, as works of historical interpretation. “The Liberty Story” (1957), Johnny Tremain (1957) and The Swamp Fox (1959–60) are analysed in the context of contemporaraneous historiographical trends. The essay demonstrates that despite certain flaws and weaknesses, Disney's representations sometimes presented innovative themes and insightful interpretations, which at the height of the Cold War influenced popular understanding of the American founding and the society that it produced.

American fraternities have long engaged in hazing, subjecting their prospective members to curious and painful ordeals. Many fraternities also appear to incorporate planned failure within their inductions: near-impossible tasks where failure is punished with hazing. This paper provides evidence for the widespread use of planned failure in fraternities, describing its application in a modern hazing fraternity and presenting evidence of planned failure in other fraternities using interviews and decades of scholarly and non-scholarly accounts of hazing. Discussion is focussed on possible explanations for the existence and persistence of this ostensibly core feature of fraternity inductions.

Evangelical rap may sound like an oxymoron, but it was one of the most important trends in evangelical America as the Christian right rose to new levels of power in the 1990s. The trio DC Talk sold millions of album and dominated the Christian charts from the early 1990s and into the early 2000s. This was more than pure entertainment. Popular culture, and especially popular culture targeted at teens, is an important venue for disseminating values and sustaining religious identities. The artists promoted by the Christian music industry have to reflect the ideas and values that parents and central evangelical institutions wish to teach their children. In the 1990s, racial reconciliation was one of the most important issues to evangelical America and DC Talk were poster boys for a multiracial and multicultural America. Therefore this article takes DC Talk as a starting point to discuss evangelical engagement with race issues in the 1990s. DC Talk wrapped up evangelical individualism and color-blind conservatism in hip-hop garb, trying to reinvent a group with a checkered past when it comes to race relations as the hope of a racially harmonious America.