Lauren Kientz Anderson - blog post on (S-USIH) U.S. Intellectual History: "Prove it on ... - 0 views
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critical thinking intellectual history U.S. History women's history New Negro Ma Rainey Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham African-American women's rights blog history women
shared by Randolph Hollingsworth on 04 May 12
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Randolph Hollingsworth on 04 May 12From H-Women (5/3/2012) From: "Lauren Kientz Anderson" Subject: Re: bourgeois vacuity In one of my previous blog posts, I wrote about the claim that the black middle class was vacuous during the 1920s. In the comments, I was challenged to update my historiography on the politics of respectability. This gave me the chance to read Erin Chapman's excellent new work, *Prove it on Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s. *Her prose is gorgeous and dense. Many of the things I was feeling instinctually, she articulates with precision." Here's Chapman's challenge to Anderson.
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two major camps. There were those who sought to modernize and professionalize established ideologies of racial advancement, solidarity, and uplift through a New Negro progressivism.... Others.. questioned, if not the very idea of racial solidarity itself, then at least the obligation of racial allegiance and respectability, and instead touted a radical individualism and independence from all but the most personal allegiances to 'art' or 'self' or some other self-generated ideal."
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After reading Chapman's introduction, I can see how much the women I study straddle that line, sometimes evoking the one and sometimes evoking the other.
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Together, they rendered black women largely invisible, their subjectivity flat and inhuman, for the greater part of that century