This study is a “raciolinguistic genealogy” that theorizes the analytic category white-duplicity , which refers to instances in which Black speakerhood is paradoxically both affirmed and negated. I first trace the problem named by “white-duplicity” within a genealogy of Black thinkers, utilizing the discussion as a springboard to investigating white-duplicity in three discursive contexts: early modern ideologies of language and speakerhood as exemplified in “Enlightenment” origin of language theories, acts of enslavement through deceit, and surveillance of the slave ship. From the initial analysis, I conclude that anti-Black erasure is characteristically attended by the affirmation or recognition of Black speaker/personhood. Afterward, I engage in a “reconfiguration” of the events surrounding Rachel Jeantel’s testimony in the trial of George Zimmerman. The reconfiguration demonstrates how instances of white-duplicity are productive of “illegitimate” subject-positions from which a praxis of “listening from below” can be mobilized to critique the binary oppositions which underwrite “raciolinguistic ideologies of anti-Blackness” and other master narratives of modernity. Overall, the analysis indicates how a response to anti-Black erasure which exploits the conditions for unsettling erasure is preferable to the production of “vindicationist narratives.”
How do Black women’s intersecting racial and gender identities shape their political experiences, relationships with colleagues and constituents, and policy priorities in the Deep South? Drawing on Nadia Brown’s representational identity theory—which links who a legislator is to what she does—I analyze a focus group of five Black women serving in elected and appointed roles in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, supplemented by six months of participant observation. Four themes emerge: interpersonal dynamics governed by controlling images, particularly the Sapphire, or “angry Black woman,” trope; tenuous relationships with authority rooted in patriarchal gatekeeping that operates within Black political networks as well as across racial lines; cultural forces shaped by intergenerational trauma and Southern religious tradition; and structural barriers of racism, classism, and institutional inequality. I argue that these identities function not as background characteristics but as active forces that drive both the barriers participants face and the substantive representation they provide. This study contributes to scholarship on Black women’s political leadership in the American South, where race, gender, and regional conservatism combine to create a distinctly challenging environment for Black women in public service.
Since 2018, global audiences have celebrated the style and esthetics of Afrofuturism as shown in Marvel Studios’ films, Black Panther and Wakanda Forever . However, the artists and scholars who have developed the ideas behind these films are only beginning to receive the acknowledgment for their work. The foundation for the public acclaim about the visionary art of Afrofuturism was presented by the African American Intellectual History Society in 2016 under the title, “The Introduction to the Wakanda Syllabus.” That essay reflected 30 years of scholarly work to interpret the literature of Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, and Dwayne McDuffie through a transformation of the media landscape described in academic settings as “convergence.” Indeed, the phenomenon of Afrofuturism is as old as civilization itself. It is the speculative design process of imagining the continent of Africa and its diasporic people across time and space, defying the disciplinary constraints of the European liberal arts. Using the concept of Sankofa (looking forward and backward through time), Afrofuturist Design combines art, history, and education in a specific study of historic Black communities that destroyed Jim Crow segregation through determined study of law, technology, and economics. The cinematic production of the Wakanda Design Group represents the century-long growth of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the Divine Nine Black sororities and fraternities, and the hundreds of Black Brain Belt communities that created the Information Age around the world.
This introduction to the Special Issue on Africana Digital Technologies offers a popular culture technology survey of the 1980s to the present to capture the average humanistic social scientist’s view of technology. Relying on a methodology that layers autoethnographical data with an applied case study of the subfield of comparative Black literature, this study isolates how Google Books Ngram is a useful technology for revisionist research. Its ongoing digitization of previously uncatalogued, unsearchable, and/or unavailable scholarship is a newer resource for research and revision that permits us to generate more accurate intellectual genealogies. This introductory essay chronicles key technology concerns on the culture’s social radar over the past nearly fifty years, culminating with our contemporary understanding of Africana frameworks of artificial intelligence (AI) and groundbreaking technologies in the digital humanities. This essay acknowledges the new technological landscapes that challenge us to expand our skillset and critical worldview through new curiosities, ambitions, and competencies that will mold Africana Studies into an even more comprehensive discipline. The goal is to ensure that Africana Studies’ sometimes overlooked subject area of science and technology becomes a foundational and integrated part of the discipline’s 21st century’s curriculum, maintained by stable Africana faculty lines in this area and by routinely merging technological practices with the field’s standard, core content.
