‘A milder type of bondage’: Brazilian slavery and race relations in the eyes of American abolitionists, 1812–1888

This article examines how American abolitionists educated themselves about Brazilian slavery and race relations. Beginning with the Iberian–American Revolutions and ending with James Redpath’s 1867 influential exposé on Brazil, this article explores how American abolitionists viewed Brazil and how their understandings about Brazilian slavery and race relations changed over the course of the nineteenth century. These changes were not a progressive march by abolitionists toward a deeper and better understanding of Brazil but, instead, reflect how antislavery writers emphasized various aspects of Brazilian slavery and culture at different periods in order to further their own ideological and political agendas. At the same time, these agendas led abolitionists to pioneer some of the earliest methods for the comparative study of slavery on a global scale.     

Politicizing the spirit: ‘American Africanisms’ and African ancestors in the essays of Toni Morrison

This article is a comparative study of American and Soviet programmes of space/cosmos elaboration in terms of ideological and technological competition during the era of the cold war. It is in a sense a rereading of a book written by Nikolai Nosov for Soviet children called Neznaika on the Moon (1965). This book – which was the most popular among Soviet children in the 1960s and 1970s – helps to uncover ideological and technological paradigms of the time when outer space happened to be the scene of the cold war conflict. The subject of space/cosmos has been studied in many contextual respects. However, there are four key notions – such as technology, ideology, time, consciousness – which make it possible to see similarities and differences between American and Soviet scientific approaches to outer space.     

‘Race War’: Black American GIs and West Indians in Britain During The Second World War

During the Second World War some three million American service personnel came to the British Isles. Among them were more than 130,000 African-Americans who were segregated and subjected to the discrimination that crossed the Atlantic with their white countrymen. However, while many of the British hosts often welcomed the African-American GIs, the American-style Jim Crow was not welcomed. But while it has often seemed that the wartime British were free of race prejudice, treatment of troops and workers from the colonies, particularly the West Indies, suggest that this was not so. This article looks at the response to black GIs and West Indians in order to demonstrate that there was in fact greater continuity between British wartime and post-war race relations than has often appeared to be the case.     

‘Africanisation’, African identities and emancipation in contemporary South Africa

This article problematises the concept of ‘Africanisation’ as a response to colonial conquest and apartheid rule, bearing both political and knowledge consequences. It aims to rescue ‘Africanisation’ from essentialist notions, but at the same time to show how paradigms cannot be simply applied where they derive from quite different experiences. The article introduces modes of differentiating concepts that are dynamic, as opposed to static, singular and unmediated meanings that bedevil any emancipatory project. The tendency to see a moment in the life of a concept as having a settled and finalised meaning renders the qualities of democracy, and other similar liberating concepts, as settled though their meaning is never finally realised. While colonialism marginalised and devalued local knowledges, the national liberation project sought unity/homogenisation, which tended to deny distinct identities, as is largely the case today. There remains hostility to pluralism at a social and political level and a failure to recognise autonomous identities unconnected to the state or the ruling organisation, the African National Congress (ANC). The tendency towards static notions of custom and paradigms that do not derive from the experiences of African women, in particular, has tended to erase the voices of women or prejudice the emancipation of women from patriarchal oppression. Africanisation, the article proposes, must be located through an ongoing dialogue between dynamic local knowledges and a range of other explanatory tools.     

‘It’s Quite Stylish’: Representations of American English and American Culture in English-Training Milieus in Delhi,India

English-training institutes seem to be ubiquitous in India, and they often index the United States through reference to ‘American accent’ training, American teachers, or simply American flags on their storefront signs. Against the broader backdrop of globalization, and through an examination of institute signs and advertisements and interviews with institute students and teachers, I show how ‘America’ is represented, produced, and consumed as a symbolic and cultural category within the cultural domain of English-training institutes.     

Profiles of African American College Students’ Alcohol Use and Sexual Behaviors: Associations With Stress,Racial Discrimination,and Social Support

Though studies show that alcohol use and sexual activity increase during emerging adulthood, few studies examine within–ethnic group differences, particularly among African American college students. This investigation utilized a latent class analytic methodology to identify risk behavior profiles of alcohol use (frequency and amount of alcohol consumed), sexual activity (number of intimate partners), and co-occurring risk behaviors (drinking before sexual intercourse) among 228 African American college students. This investigation also examined whether identified risk behavior profiles were associated with stress (interpersonal, intrapersonal, academic, and environmental), experiences of racial discrimination, and social support (from family, friends, and the college community). Results identified five distinct profiles within this sample: (a) High Sexual Risk—above-average sexual activity; (b) Abstainers—below-average alcohol use and sexual activity; (c) Low Risk—average alcohol use and sexual activity; (d) Alcohol Risk—above-average alcohol use and below-average sexual activity; and (e) Co-Occurring Risk—above-average alcohol use and sexual activity. Identified profiles differed across interpersonal and environmental stress, and self-reported frequency of experiences with racial discrimination. Implications for prevention programs and interventions aimed at reducing alcohol and sexual activity for African American college students are discussed.     

Civil Society in ‘Politics’ and ‘Development’ in African Hybrid Regimes: The Kenyan Case

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Civil society in Gramscian conception is an arena of hegemonic contestations and therefore essentially political....     

African American Women and Power Politics in New York City, 1944–1972

ABSTRACT

Between 1944 and 1972, African American women from New York City ran for all levels of elected office, from City Council to the United States Presidency. In this article, I argue that World War II created unprecedented opportunities for women to enter politics. A study of postwar New York offers an excellent opportunity to examine how black women defied conventions of gender and race, challenging the pervasive image of the urban political operative, to advance in the city's tough electoral arena. They succeeded in overcoming the Democratic Party machine, Tammany Hall's, resistance to running black women. Once inside the system, despite significant obstacles, these women pushed to change the Democratic Party in important ways for women and for African Americans.     

‘A sort of whirlwind’: mapping the changing geography of Presbyterian religious observance in Ireland

Since the European Reformation and the colonisations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ireland has evolved a distinctive religious geography which had profound implications for its political development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leading ultimately to the division of the island along explicitly religio–territorial lines in 1921. Troubled Geographies, a major project funded under the auspices of the Arts and Humanities Research Council's ‘Religion and Society’ programme was the first attempt to seek to understand patterns of change in the island's complex geography of religious settlement in the period since the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century up to the most recent published censuses for both Northern Ireland and the Republic. This paper will present findings from a smaller spin-off project funded by the British Academy, which digitised records of attendance at Presbyterian churches across the island over the last 150 years, enabling us to assess how patterns of practice were affected by the momentous events of the period, including partition, civil war, two world wars, the vicissitudes of the global economy and the Troubles of the more recent past. In addition, the use of new quantitative materials such as those in the Presbyterian records enables us to reflect on how patterns of substantive religious practice reflect those on nominal religious affiliation available from successive censuses from either side of the border.     

‘A disgrace to American enterprise’: Italian labour and the Arabian American oil company in Saudi Arabia, 1944–54

This article examines the recruitment, and employment in Saudi Arabia, of Italian labour by the Arabian American Oil Company in the immediate post‐war (1939–45) years. The Italians, mainly skilled construction labourers and technicians, were recruited from the former Italian colony of Eritrea as an alternative to importing costly American personnel. Discussion focuses on the economic and social discrimination which the Italians experienced, their resulting industrial disputes and the intervention of the Italian, Saudi and American governments.     

Importing Trachoma: The Introduction into Britain of American Ideas of an ‘Immigrant Disease’, 1892–1906

This article examines how the American perception of trachoma as a disease prevalent among East European Jewish migrants was adopted in Britain in the years immediately preceding the passing of the 1905 Aliens Act. Increasingly rigorous immigration law in the United States meant that a proportion of migrants who arrived were refused entry and were subsequently forced to return to Europe. Steamship companies' interests, however, meant that a number of those migrants debarred from America were returned not to European frontiers but to the United Kingdom. One of the most potent ramifications of this was that trachoma, the reason why 87 per cent of migrants were rejected from America on health grounds, was considered in Britain to embody Britain's role as the destination for those migrants not fit for settlement in America. The disease was picked up by the growing anti-immigration lobby, who used it as symbol of the ‘undesirability’ of the immigrant in Britain.     

‘The Sunshine of Manly Sports and Pastimes’: Sport and the Integration of Jewish Refugees in Britain, 1895–1914

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jewish refugees arriving in Great Britain were exposed to an ‘anglicisation’ campaign designed to aid their integration into British society and their assimilation of British character traits and cultural values. Within this campaign, especially the element focusing on the children of the migrants, interest and participation in sport was consciously ‘transferred’ through the medium of youth and sporting organisations in order to help in their ‘anglicisation’. This essaywill show how physical recreation was promoted by the English Jewish establishment and how participation in sport amongst young Jews grew.     

Whose ‘wee country’?: identity politics and sport in Northern Ireland

This article responds to calls in this journal for increased attention to identity, culture, power and sport. It explores, for the first time, the lived realities of identity politics in a divided society, through interviews with 12 self-declared Irish nationalists and republicans that represented Northern Ireland. Important insights are revealed into national eligibility decisions for either Irish team, motivated mainly by ‘shop window’ visibility and being seen as the best of a peer group. Political and sporting nationalisms were not necessarily analogous. A significant original finding is that the lived experiences of being closer to ‘the other’ resulted in an overall reinforcement rather than dissolution of difference. Visual and oral ‘national’ symbols such as flag, and especially anthem, delineated such difference, being symbolic walls of the mind. ‘Our wee country’ was thus a polarised and polarising fantasy shield. The article concludes by reconsidering the role of sport as a lens through which to examine identity and its’ place as part of the ‘problem’ and ‘solution’.     

‘Shooting a line’?: Field sports and access struggles in Britain

With the demise of productivism a new settlement between farmers, landowners and the state is being forged. The new emphasis on the consumption of rural space and the marketing of environmental goods means that access issues are, once again, prominent. The paper seeks to examine the recent history of the relationship between field sports interests and the demand for greater access. Then, drawing upon findings from the Game Management Project, it suggests that such interests do not constitute an especial constraint, whereas increased attempts to commoditise the countryside may, in contrast, be profoundly inimical. The protection and enhancement of particular rights is of more pressing concern than the achievement of a generalised ‘right to roam’.