Academic literature on the topic 'Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture'

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He directs the Institutional Antiracism and Account- ability Project and is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an associate professor at Indiana University. He recently sat down with Contexts Co-Editor Fabio Rojas and Production Manager Alisha Kirchoff to discuss his career and research.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is the premier center of African American and Afro-diasporic studies. Yet, as the literary scholar Vanessa Valdés argues, we know little of the center’s namesake and his drive to collect and establish a renowned archive that emphasized the history, experience, and culture of African descended peoples and communities. Employing Valdés’s Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, this essay explores the politics of Afro-diasporic collection, archive, visibility, and futurity.

Este artículo presenta la biobibliografía y el trabajo del bibliófilo, archivista y bibliotecario negro Arturo Alfonso Schomburg en la organización y recopilación de recursos informativos que representan la experiencia y el pensamiento negro, africano y de la diáspora africana. Reflexiona sobre la memorabilia negra y la importancia de las colecciones negras para la preservación de la memoria, la historia y la cultura de los pueblos marginados en las sociedades occidentales racializadas. Luego, destaca la acción política de Schomburg en la creación y curaduría de colecciones negras, en particular, su colección privada que fue crucial para el inicio del Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, que incluso hace accesible la información sobre el aporte de la población negra y afrodiaspórica a las futuras generaciones. Se espera que la presente investigación suscite más estudios históricos de la biblioteconomía negra, especialmente en la lucha contra el discurso hegemónico que invisibiliza y hace ausente la contribución de los actores negros en diversas esferas sociales, profesionales y epistémicas.

ABSTRACT By centering the leadership of Jean Blackwell Hutson during her tenure at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, this article offers a glimpse into the unique features of Black women’s approach to leadership in the library and archives professions. Specific biographical moments were selected in order to analyze them through the conceptual lens of intersecting oppressions that Black women in leadership or management positions may experience.

In 1934, Aaron Douglas created an epic four-panel mural series, Aspects of Negro Life (1934), for the branch library on 135th Street in Manhattan, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The panels answered a call, issued by the first major program for federal support of the arts in the United States, to represent “an American scene.” In them, Douglas traced the trajectory of African American history in four stages and across two mass migrations: from Africa into enslavement in America; through Emancipation and Reconstruction; into the modern Jim Crow South; and then northward with the Great Migration to Harlem itself. The narrative Douglas constructed was remarkable in both its historical sweep and as a story of America seen through Black eyes. This essay explores how Douglas's approach to the trenchant and understudied Aspects of Negro Life panels was shaped by rich conversations across a decade-about what it meant to be Black in America, how the “African” in “African-American” was to be understood, and what a distinctly African-American modernism might be-with an interdisciplinary nexus of thinkers, activists, and artists that included W. E. B. Du Bois; a co-founder of the NAACP and co-editor of the Crisis, sociologist Charles S. Johnson; poet-activist James Weldon Johnson; bibliophile Arturo Schomburg; and philosopher-critic Alain Locke. Looking at Douglas's visual narrative in this context offers insight into how parallel practices of archive-building, art making, history writing, and criticism came together not only to shape a vision of America but also to champion a model of Black modernism framed through diaspora.

In recent years anthropologists and literary critics, most importantly George Stocking Jr. (1983), James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986), and Clifford Geertz (1987), have led the way to a closer reading of the writings of early anthropologists and a fuller exploration of the intellectual climates in which they were working. As the founder of African studies in this country, Melville J. Herskovits is of considerable importance in terms of related scholarship in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Although an anthropologist by training, Herskovits had a major impact on the development of African scholarship in many other disciplines—from the history of art to folklore to political and economic history. Herskovits' field research methodologies and orientations thus potentially are of considerable significance. Despite Herskovits' critical role in African studies, there has been relatively little scholarly interest to date in his African research methodologies.Herskovits' unpublished field notes of his Dahomey research provide us with an inside look at the principal field strategies and orientations of this important African scholar. These field materials today are housed in the archives of three different research institutions: The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City; the library of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; and the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The largest grouping of Herskovits' Dahomey field materials (journals, financial records, artifact collection, photographs, correspondence) are at the Schomburg Center. At Northwestern University are found various diary extracts, song transcriptions, and the bulk of Herskovits' early and later correspondence. Recordings that Herskovits made in the course of the Dahomey research are located at Indiana University.

The only traces of Etta Moten Barnett’s 1950s–’60s radio program, I Remember When, exist on well-worn cassette tapes (recently digitized) at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. On these tapes are the only traces of not only Moten Barnett’s own career but also the immense network of activists, educators, and Pan-Africanists with whom she interacted. Many of them are now long forgotten or exist in the footnotes of better-known figures (often their husbands). What could be considered a project of recovery is also a project of tracing the use Black women made of radio broadcasting. I Remember When also provides an intriguing counternarrative to existing scholarship on Cold War radio history, which instead of looking West to East and from the perspective of government propaganda, now traces the networks across the diaspora in the struggle for independence and self-determination. Bringing the focus to Etta Moten Barnett and other Black women in radio raises questions about their stake in citizenship and political solidarity in this period. Through transcribing original broadcast recordings, and reading correspondence and newspaper articles, this paper documents the process of recovery, the cultural connections between women across the African diaspora, and their formation of a global Black community.

The analysis and description of color terms has re-emerged at the center of discussions in contemporary anthropological linguistic research (based on well-established previous studies over the past decades). However, work on color terms is still lacking in most West African linguistic research, particularly in Senegal. Wolof, a lingua franca spoken mainly in Senegal, has three basic colors used with adverbs that are never used in other contexts, namely ñuul ‘black’, ñuul kukk ‘extremely black’, weex ‘white’, weex tàll ‘extremely white’, xonq ‘red’ and xonq coyy ‘extremely red’, around which gravitate other shades of color whose terms are taken from the surrounding vocabulary. The aim of this chapter is first to present the color concepts and their “shades” in Wolof and to discuss the question of the morphosyntactic encoding of color terms in linguistic constructions. We will also consider their classification on the basis of their semantic properties and occurrence in idiomatic expressions. Finally, we will show how the community identifies itself through colors and what symbolic representations of colors exist in the Wolof-speaking community.

Based on extensive interviews with museum curators and directors, this chapter curates the curators. It identifies curatorial networks, strategies, and practices that shape the narratives used in assembling collections and mounting exhibitions. Curatorial networks demonstrate the relevance of a nodal theory of museums and the ways in which curators are able to organize exhibitions. Interviews include representatives of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the Fowler Museum, the Musée de l’Homme, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the African Museum Casa del Rey Moro, the Africa and Beyond Gallery, and independent curators. Museum narratives and curatorial networks coalesce to generate the bureaucratic and art worlds shared by museums at all nodes. The interviews demonstrate outcomes from dynamic museum environments in transition.

Abstract Founder of the Jackson Free Press and the Mississippi Free Press, which both provide in-depth reporting across historical divides, introduces members of different communities to one another, with emphasis onto educating White people about the Black experience. President of LatinoJustice spotlights the legacy of dominance that has denigrated the Latino community’s unique cultural contributions, blurred knowledge of its richness through faulty data collection, and sometimes generated internal tensions. The executive director of IllumiNative presents startling data about how little Americans know about Indigenous people and their rich culture, which has endured despite displacement and genocide. The challenges facing people of Asian descent—often overlooked amidst stereotypes of a monolithic “model minority”—are examined in this chapter as well. Finally, the director of policy and programs at the Transgender Law Center describes the transgender community’s push to influence or lead the research, philanthropy, and policy that affects them.

Abstract The belief that there are intergenerational communal norms, causing the poor to have dysfunctional behavioral traits, has been characterized as the “culture-of-poverty” thesis. In the United States, a repository of these negative stereotypes has been the black community, which has been perceived to lack a strong work ethic and other proper behavioral traits. Courtland Milloy lamented: Not a whole heck of a lot has changed since that 1991 General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center, which found that most whites think blacks are lazy, violence-prone, less intelligent and less patriotic. Even sadder, nearly 30 percent of black people felt the same way about themselves.

Bioethics, the study of moral and social issues rising from advances in medical technology, first entered the academy in the United States with the 1969 founding of the Hastings Center, followed the next year by the establishment of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. At the Hastings Center, a private research establishment, projects in bioethics were conducted by tapping philosophers, lawyers, religious scholars, sociologists, and others from universities across the United States and abroad and disseminating the findings in the Hastings Center Report and similar venues; the Kennedy Institute, housed at Georgetown University, comprises philosophers working in bioethics, and publishes its own Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. Feminist theory, which identifies and criticises the power system of gender that systemically favours the interests of men over women and interacts with other power systems such as race and ableism, also entered the academy in the late 1960s. The two fields of study ran along side by side for over a decade until, in the early 1990s, feminist bioethics was born. This new field drew some of its impetus from the women’s health movement, which encouraged women to take more control over their own bodies, especially in the area of reproduction, and protested the medicalisation and commodification of women’s bodies. It also drew attention to the sexist biases in medical research and practice. Energised by this activism, feminist bioethics critiqued medical and bioethical theory and practice using sex, gender, and other oppressive mechanisms as categories of analysis aimed at dismantling abusive power systems. Feminist bioethicists pointed out that most of bioethics aimed to serve the interests of powerful white men – physicians, medical lawyers, hospital administrators, and the like – rather than looking at medical practice from the patient’s or family’s point of view. But in addition to such criticisms, feminist bioethicists developed theoretical frameworks for curbing practices of oppression in medicine and provided a venue for the neglected and marginalised others who are seldom represented in bioethics. The 1990s saw a steady stream of conferences, monographs, anthologies, and essays in learned journals that examine bioethical issues through a feminist lens. Susan Sherwin’s groundbreaking No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics & Health Care appeared in 1992, as did Helen Bequaert Holmes and Laura M. Purdy, eds., Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics, and Rebecca Dresser’s Hastings Center Report article, ‘Wanted: Single, White Male for Medical Research’. The International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, begun in 1993 by Anne Donchin and Helen Bequaert Holmes, two US feminists, had some 300 members worldwide and has sponsored biannual conferences in conjunction with the International Association of Bioethics. The year 1993 also saw the publication of Mary Mahowald’s Women and Children in Health Care: An Unequal Majority, and Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. In 1995 the prestigious Kennedy Institute of Ethics devoted its Advanced Bioethics Course to feminist perspectives on bioethics, and the plenary lectures of that course were then published in a special issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, edited by Margaret Olivia Little. In 1996 the Journal of Clinical Ethics published special sections in each of its four issues on feminism and bioethics. Laura M. Purdy’s Reproducing Persons appeared that year as well, as did the much-cited anthology edited by Susan M. Wolf, Feminism and Bioethics: Beyond Reproduction, and Susan Wendell’s groundbreaking The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. These were followed in 1997 by the publication of Rosemarie Tong’s Feminist Approaches to Bioethics: Theoretical Reflections and Practical Applications, Dorothy Roberts’s influential Killing the Black Body, and Elizabeth Haiken’s Venus Envy, a feminist history of cosmetic surgery. In 1998 the Feminist Health Care Ethics Research Network published The Politics of Women’s Health: Exploring Agency and Autonomy, while the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy devoted an entire issue to the feminist ethic of care. Anne Donchin and Laura M. Purdy’s anthology, Embodying Bioethics: Feminist Advances, appeared in 1999, along with Eva Feder Kittay’s Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. Textbooks and readers in bioethics now routinely include essays written from an explicitly feminist point of view. Much of that work consisted of feminist critique. It identified the ways in which hierarchical rankings that categorise people by race, sex, disability, age, ethnicity, or subject to genetic disease encourage oppressive discrimination in medical practice, research, and public health. It also critiqued nonfeminist bioethics for its bias in favour of socially powerful doctors, and for the abstract nature of its theory, which produced principles that allow that bioethics to ignore inequities among social groups, in particular, the oppressive burden borne by women in their reproductive and caring roles. A few, such as Mary Mahowald, also applied feminist epistemology to the doctor–patient relationship, showing how, even if physicians’ knowledge is epistemically privileged, patients can know more about how their bodies behave than doctors do. The work of feminist bioethicists gradually gained traction in bioethics textbooks and at conferences such as the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and the International Association of Bioethics. But they were persistently underrepresented on government panels such as the President’s Commission on Bioethics and other bodies formulating public policy. They, and women in general, also continued to be underrepresented in medical research.