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Created by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward and sung by generations of black performers,Porgy and Besshas been both embraced and reviled since its debut in 1935. In this comprehensive account, Ellen Noonan examines the opera's long history of invention and reinvention as a barometer of twentieth-century American expectations about race, culture, and the struggle for equality. In its surprising endurance lies a myriad of local, national, and international stories.For black performers and commentators,Porgy and Besswas a nexus for debates about cultural representation and racial uplift. White producers, critics, and even audiences spun revealing racial narratives around the show, initially in an attempt to demonstrate its authenticity and later to keep it from becoming discredited or irrelevant. Expertly weaving together the wide-ranging debates over the original novel,Porgy, and its adaptations on stage and film with a history of its intimate ties to Charleston,The Strange Career of Porgy and Bessuncovers the complexities behind one of our nation's most long-lived cultural touchstones.

Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African–descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition.

Disparity in consumer ethics reflects cultural variations; these are differences in the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes one culture from another. This study explores the differences in consumer ethics across cultural dimensions using Hofstede's (in Culture's consequences: international differences in work-related values, Sage, Beverly Hills, 1980) model (collectivism, masculinity, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance) and Muncy and Vitell (in J Bus Res 24(4): 297-311, 1992) consumer ethics model (i.e., illegal, active, passive, and no harm). This is the first study to empirically explore consumer ethics using these two major constructs. Seven hundred sixty one African American consumers were used to test the four major hypotheses developed in this study. Current research has revealed that there are significant differences in ethics between consumers who score high and consumers who score low on Hofstede's four cultural dimensions. In general, this research revealed that consumers who score high on collectivism, high on uncertainty avoidance, low on masculinity, and low on power distance scales reject questionable activities more than consumers who score low on collectivism, low on uncertainty avoidance, high on masculinity, and high on power distance. This study should prove valuable to international marketers because the Hofstede cultural model allows managers to identify differences in consumer ethics across different cultures and thus provides a theoretical base for designing effective marketing strategies.

Loving, hating, pitying, or pining for mammy became a way for Americans to make sense of shifting economic, social, and racial realities. Assertions of black contentment with servitude alleviated white fears while reinforcing racial hierarchy. McElya's stories expose the power and reach of this myth, not only in advertising, films, and literature about the South, but also in national monument proposals, child custody cases, New Negro activism, anti-lynching campaigns, and the civil rights movement.

This pathbreaking study of region, race, and gender reveals how we underestimate the South's influence on the formation of black masculinity at the national level. Many negative stereotypes of black men-often contradictory ones-have emerged from the ongoing historical traumas initiated by slavery. Are black men emasculated and submissive or hypersexed and violent? Nostalgic representations of black men have arisen as well: think of the philosophical, hardworking sharecropper or the abiding, upright preacher. To complicate matters, says Riché Richardson, blacks themselves appropriate these images for purposes never intended by their (mostly) white progenitors. Starting with such well-known caricatures as the Uncle Tom and the black rapist, Richardson investigates a range of pathologies of black masculinity that derive ideological force from their associations with the South. Military policy, black-liberation discourse, and contemporary rap, she argues, are just some of the instruments by which egregious pathologies of black masculinity in southern history have been sustained. Richardson's sources are eclectic and provocative, including Ralph Ellison's fiction, Charles Fuller's plays, Spike Lee's films, Huey Newton's and Malcolm X's political rhetoric, the O. J. Simpson discourse, and the music production of Master P, the Cash Money Millionaires, and other Dirty South rappers. Filled with new insights into the region's role in producing hierarchies of race and gender in and beyond their African American contexts, this new study points the way toward more epistemological frameworks for southern literature, southern studies, and gender studies.

African American culture is often considered expressive, dramatic, and even defiant. InThe Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores quiet as a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person's desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears. Quiet is a metaphor for the inner life, and as such, enables a more nuanced understanding of black culture.The book revisits such iconic moments as Tommie Smith and John Carlos's protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Elizabeth Alexander's reading at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Quashie also examines such landmark texts as Gwendolyn Brooks'sMaud Martha, James Baldwin'sThe Fire Next Time, and Toni Morrison'sSulato move beyond the emphasis on resistance, and to suggest that concepts like surrender, dreaming, and waiting can remind us of the wealth of black humanity.

In this article, Django Paris and H. Samy Alim use the emergence of Paris's concept of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) as the foundation for a respectful and productive critique of previous formulations of asset pedagogies. Paying particular attention to asset pedagogy's failures to remain dynamic and critical in a constantly evolving global world, they offer a vision that builds on the crucial work of the past toward a CSP that keeps pace with the changing lives and practices of youth of color. The authors argue that CSP seeks to perpetuate and foster linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling and as a needed response to demographic and social change. Building from their critique, Paris and Alim suggest that CSP's two most important tenets are a focus on the plural and evolving nature of youth identity and cultural practices and a commitment to embracing youth culture's counterhegemonic potential while maintaining a clear-eyed critique of the ways in which youth culture can also reproduce systemic inequalities.

Reiss uses P. T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the race relations in the antebellum North. Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Heth was an enslaved woman said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. The newly emerging commercial press turned her act into one of the first media spectacles in American history.

The historical novels of Manuel Zapata Olivella and Ana Maria Gonçalves map black journeys from Africa to the Americas in a way that challenges the Black Atlantic paradigm that has become synonymous with cosmopolitan African diaspora studies. Unlike Paul Gilroy, who coined the term and based it on W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness, Zapata, in Changó el gran putas (1983), creates an empowering mythology that reframes black resistance in Colombia, Haiti, Mexico, Brazil, and the United States. In Um defeito de cor (2006), Gonçalves imagines the survival strategies of a legendary woman said to be the mother of black abolitionist poet Luís Gama and a conspirator in an African Muslim–⁠led revolt in Brazil’s “Black Rome.” These novels show differing visions of revolution, black community, femininity, sexuality, and captivity. They skillfully reveal how events preceding the UNESCO Decade of Afro-Descent (2015–2024) alter our understanding of Afro-⁠Latin America as it gains increased visibility.  Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Seventeen years ago Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) published the landmark article \"Toward aTheory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,\" giving a coherent theoretical statement for resource pedagogies that had been building throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I, like countless teachers and university-based researchers, have been inspired by what it means to make teaching and learning relevant and responsive to the languages, literacies, and cultural practices of students across categories of difference and (inequality. Recently, however, I have begun to question if the terms \"relevant\" and \"responsive\" are really descriptive of much of the teaching and research founded upon them and, more importantly, if they go far enough in their orientation to the languages and literacies and other cultural practices of communities marginalized by systemic inequalities to ensure the valuing and maintenance of our multiethnic and multilingual society. In this essay, I offer the term and stance of culturally sustaining pedagogy as an alternative that, I believe, embodies some of the best research and practice in the resource pedagogy tradition and as a term that supports the value of our multiethnic and multilingual present and future. Culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling. In the face of current policies and practices that have the explicit goal of creating a monocultural and monolingual society, research and practice need equally explicit resistances that embrace cultural pluralism and cultural equality.