Signs of Race

Volume 1: Writing Race across the Atlantic World: Medieval to Modern

Edited by Philip Beidler and Gary Taylor

This collection of original essays explores the origins of contemporary notions of race in the oceanic interculture of the Atlantic world in the early modern period. In doing so, it breaks down institutional boundaries between “American” and “British” literature in this early period, as well as between “history” and “literature.” Individual essays address the ways in which categories of “race”—black, brown, red, and white, African American and Afro Caribbean, Spanish and Jewish, English and Celtic, Native American and northern European, Creole and mestizo—were constructed or adapted by early modern writers. While not denying the importance of the forced migration of African people to the New World, it demonstrates that the early modern Atlantic world was not simply a “black Atlantic,” but a multiracial and multiethnic interculture of great complexity.

Volume 2: Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip-Hop

By Gary Taylor

When and why did “white people” start calling themselves “white”? When and why did “white slavery” become a paradox, and then a euphemism for prostitution? To answer such questions, Taylor begins with the auction of a “white” slave in the first African-American novel, William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), and contrasts Brown’s basic assumptions about race, slavery, and sexuality with treatment of those issues in scenes of slave marketing in English Renaissance drama. From accounts of Columbus and other early European voyagers to popular English plays two centuries later, Taylor traces a paradigm shift in atttiudes toward white men, and analyzes the emergence of new models of sexuality and pornography in an “imperial backwash” that affected whites as much as blacks. Moving between the English Renaissance and the “American Renaissance” of the 1850s, this original and provocative book recovers the lost interracial history of the birth of whiteness.

Gary Taylor is the former director of the Hudson Strode Program at the University of Alabama, and he is currently a professor at Florida State University.

Volume 3: English and Ethnicity

Edited by Janina Brutt-Griffler, Catherine Evans Davies, Lucy Pickering

This symposium focuses on the way English represents ethnicity as an aspect of sociocultural identity. Our theoretical position is that ethnicity is potentially an aspect of the identity of every person, and that English can be used to signal a wide range of ethnicities in a wide range of contexts. Such a position problematizes certain key notions: the notion of identity must be conceptualized as complex, multifaceted, and socially constructed through a process of situated interpretation; the notion of ethnicity must be conceptualized as both subsuming and transcending earlier notions of “race” as well as including a wide range of perceptions of relevant cultural background; English itself must be conceptualized not as a monolithic linguistic entity with one “standard” form, but as a highly complex linguistic construct with spoken and written forms, and a wide range of dialectal variation that can be conveyed through shifts at all levels of linguistic organization (prosodic, phonological, lexical, morpho/syntactic, pragmatic, discoursal). The symposium will include papers which address regional, national, and international contexts in the exploration of the relationship between English and ethnicity. We would like to attract a diverse audience, including linguists, literary scholars, creative writers, students, educators, psychologists, journalists, film buffs, and local community leaders.

Catherine Davies is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama. Lucy Pickering and Janina Brutt-Griffler were both formerly at the University of Alabama.

Volume 4: Women and Others: Racial and Gender Difference in Anglo-American Literature and Culture

Edited by Celia R. Daileader, Rhoda Johnson, and Amilcar Shabazz
Keynote Speaker: Alice Walker

This symposium focuses on the way English represents ethnicity as an aspect of sociocultural identity. Our theoretical position is that ethnicity is potentially an aspect of the identity of every person, and that English can be used to signal a wide range of ethnicities in a wide range of contexts. Such a position problematizes certain key notions: the notion of identity must be conceptualized as complex, multifaceted, and socially constructed through a process of situated interpretation; the notion of ethnicity must be conceptualized as both subsuming and transcending earlier notions of “race” as well as including a wide range of perceptions of relevant cultural background; English itself must be conceptualized not as a monolithic linguistic entity with one “standard” form, but as a highly complex linguistic construct with spoken and written forms, and a wide range of dialectal variation that can be conveyed through shifts at all levels of linguistic organization (prosodic, phonological, lexical, morpho/syntactic, pragmatic, discoursal). The symposium will include papers which address regional, national, and international contexts in the exploration of the relationship between English and ethnicity. We would like to attract a diverse audience, including linguists, literary scholars, creative writers, students, educators, psychologists, journalists, film buffs, and local community leaders.

Celia R. Daileader was previously Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama. Rhoda Johnson is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies. Amilcar Shabazz is Director of the African-American Studies Program.

Volume 5: Eruptions of Funk

Make It Funky– James Brown (1933-2006)

The English Department at The University of Alabama is pleased to welcome you to this year’s semi-annual symposium on African American culture. The featured speakers this year are Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Mark Anthony Neal, Cheryl Keyes, Kalamu ya Salaam, Tracie Morris, Rickey Vincent, and Thomas Sayers Ellis. Entitled “Eruptions of Funk,” the symposium is intended to provide a forum for cultural workers and enthusiasts of black culture to participate in dialogues about a wide range of artistic forms. In the process, we will engage the concepts implicit and explicit within Afro-vernacular culture, theorizing and historicizing some of the specific features and nuances of what many of us have come to identify as the funk. As suggested by the subtitle of Funkadelic’s 1978 recording of “Lunchmeataphobia (Think, It Ain’t Illegal Yet),” funkativity tends to resist either/or logic, instantiating kinesis as a discreet expression of (organic) intellectuality. The symposium, like African American cultural theory generally, recognizes no binary opposition between criticism and creativity, analysis and performativity. As such, we will attempt to propose an alternative to the one-dimensionality of many academic gatherings. So let’s Jam!!! And get down, knee-deep in the funk!

Volume 6: Race, Nationality, and National Literatures: The Institutionalization of English

Edited by Peter Melville Logan and Stephanie A. Smith

In the year 2001, the study of literature in the academy remains predominantly structured around national categories. The most obvious example is the taxonomic division within English into the genera of British and American literatures. This symposium examines the role of race in the definition of national literatures. Although normative today, the idea that literature could be studied in terms of nations was only established in the nineteenth century, when Hippolyte Taine justified the study of the literature of England as a unique whole, distinct from other European literatures. A national literature, he held, is the expression of a unique cultural essence. Taine defined that cultural essence in terms of race, and so he justified his History as an examination of racial consciousness.

This symposium examines the history of this legacy, and its persistence in the present-day study of literature. Panels will consider the role of race in divisions within both English and foreign language departments, and will address the historical processes that normalized today’s disciplinary boundaries. While this symposium examines the historical role race has played in the construction of disciplinary boundaries, it also seeks to imagine alternate ways of structuring literary study, and so panelists will look at literature departments that have done away with national categories.

Peter Melville Logan was previously Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama. Stephanie A. Smith is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida.

Volume 7: Postcolonial Otherness, and Transnational Capitalism: Contexts, Contests, and Contradictions

Edited by Nirmala Erevelles and Robert Young

This symposium inquires into the historical emergence and contemporary contestations within and over the postcolonial. The symposium aims to highlight the economic, political, cultural, and ideological conditions of possibility for postcolonial discursive practice and foregrounds the postcolonial effects for theorizing questions of subjectivity, nationalism, ecology, ethnicity, race, queerness, feminism, First World/Third World, sexuality, socialism, and capitalism. In addressing these questions, the symposium theorizes a transdisciplinarity space and therefore will include contributions from a range of contemporary theoretical practices, such as Marxism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, cultural studies, queer theory.

Robert Young was previously assistant professor of English, and Nirmala Erevelles is assistant professor of education at The University of Alabama.

Volume 8: Perspectives on African-American Vernacular Culture

Edited by Tony Bolden

African-American music has traditionally provided the primary channel of expression for the majority of African Americans-from the arrival of the slave ships to the great migration to the urban North to the post-Reagan era in the inner cities. The symposium and volume will examine the critical role that black music has served in 20th-century African-American expressive culture. Essays will focus upon any genre of African-American music, emphasizing analyses of the intersections between blues/jazz and literature, dance, and visual art.

In addition, given the centrality of performance in African-American culture, we also seek to dismantle the constructed walls between criticism and creativity, analysis and performativity. Essays will address problems specifically related to creative writing, particularly poetry. Topics may include: The Blues Tradition in African-American Literature; Blues/Jazz and the Harlem Renaissance; The Black Arts Movement; Blues/Jazz Criticism; The Blues/Jazz Aesthetic and African-American Dance; Theorizing Black Performance; Blues/Jazz and African-American Poetry; Representations of Black Musicians in Popular Culture; Representations of Gender in Black Music; Bebop as Black Working Class Resistance; Black Music and the Problem of the Interpellated Subject; Black Nationalism and Avant-Garde Jazz; Hip Hop as a Modality of Postcolonial Agency; The Commodification of Hip Hop; The Political Implications of Graffiti; Black Music and African-American Visual Art.

Tony Bolden was previously Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama.