Bianca Project - Frederick Douglass and Santo Domingo

            My project will involve looking at Frederick Douglass's role in President Grant's attempt to annex Santo Domingo in 1870-1871.  Douglass, one of the most famous abolitionists of his time, became one of Grant's greatest allies in his Santo Domingo project. Many former abolitionists and other civil rights activists were strongly against Grant's project because they felt it would just become another place where the United States would oppress blacks.  Grant's attempt occurred at the same time that circumstances in the South forced him to pass the Enforcement Act of 1871.  Rampant violence covered the South, and Grant passed the act in order to suppress the Klan.  It was in this moment that Douglass was appointed Secretary to the Santo Domingo Commission, a commission that was intended to bring back information to the American public about whether annexation would be the best thing for Santo Domingo.

            This paper will look at why and how Douglass defended his decision to support Grant.  It will explore Douglass's situation as an educated, successful African American in a time when much of the country was trying to find a scapegoat to explain the fractured internal politics of America.  It will look at how Douglass was attempting to balance his individual life with his broader civil rights goals.  Douglass's role in Grant's project was particularly important because he was the person Grant depended on to sell the idea to African Americans.  The tension that arose from his individual aspirations and the situation for African Americans as a whole will be  one of my major focuses in the paper, because I believe this is one of the major issues Douglass had to come up against in his relationship with racial identity.  I also want to look at Douglass to compare his northern life with the devastation in the South in order to explore how this would have influenced his relationship to the annexation issue.   

3 secondary sources:

Foner, Philip S. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Volume IV - Reconstruction and After.  New York: International Publishers, 1955.

McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991.

Smith, Jean Edward. Grant. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002.

3 Primary sources:

Douglass, Frederick. "The Future of the Colored Race." The North American Review, May 1866.

Frederick Douglass letters to Charles Sumner, 1869-1871

Frederick Douglass's speech about Santo Domingo, found at the Library of Congress

Final Paper Topic

For my final paper, I will focus on the growing tension that arises between blacks and Jews post World War II.  I hope to discuss not only the viewpoints of blacks (other than James Baldwin in “Blacks Are Anti-Semitic Because They Are Anti-White”) who may or may not have shared similar anti-Semitic sentiment but also any discriminatory or racist feelings Jews may have felt for blacks.  I hope to put both sides in conversation with each other.  How did blacks view the racial identity of Jewish-Americans? How did they engage and discuss whiteness and negotiate the demands of the greater white society?  How did Jews respond to black anti-Semitism?  How did Jews view their own racial, ethnic, and religious identity?  From the articles I have read so far, I have noted that blacks tend to view Jews as solely white based on the economic privileges their skin tone has afforded them, while Jews responsively view themselves as separate from Christian whites because of their religious and historical differences.  Though leaders from both sides effectively voice the anger and frustration of their respective communities, tension arises from the growing miscommunication over white identity. 

Primary Sources

James Baldwin, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White”

Earl Raab, “The Black Revolution and the Jewish Question”

Rabbi Jay Kaufman, “‘Thou Shalt Surely Rebuke Thy Neighbor’”

Walter Karp and H.R. Shapiro, “Exploding the Myth of Black Anti-Semitism”

Julius Lester, “A Response”

Secondary Sources

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century”

Jennifer Lee, “From Civil Relations to Racial Conflict: Merchant-Customer Interactions in Urban America”

Milton D. Morris and Gary E. Rubin, “The Turbulent Friendship: Black-Jewish Relations in the 1990s”

Final Paper Topic: Black Internationalism through Claude McKay's Literature

Rough Introduction: The problem of the “color line,” as W.E.B Du Bois explains, was never only an issue in US debates and civil rights struggles that are commonly taken to be its arena, but in the much broader sphere of modern civilization as a whole. Western imperialism and colonialism was something that was universal to the transnational Black experience in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Black intellectuals within the Diaspora during the early 20^th century such as Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and Leopold Senghor led efforts to thrust “Negro social thought into an international arena” to unite subaltern voices against Western colonialism (Edwards 2). However, writer Claude Mckay’s literary contributions to the Black Internationalist movement are seldom discussed. In this paper, I will be exploring the Black Internationalist movement by highlighting Claude McKay, his novel Banjo and the important role McKay played in connecting Harlem Renaissance writers in the United States with Negritude writers in Imperial France. 

Section 1: Context

Paragraph 1: Racial and literary milieu of McKay’s career

Paragraph 2: McKay’s upbringing

Section 2: Banjo Analysis

Paragraph 1: Importance of setting and audience

Paragraph 2: Interactions between Ray, Banjo and the Senegalese

Paragraph 3: Black Nationalist discourses in the text

Paragraph 4: Influence of Banjo internationally

Section 3: McKay’s other works in conversation with Harlem Renaissance and Negritude writers

Paragraph 1: Influence of McKay’s Banana Bottom in rethinking modernism and primitivism when it comes to Black cultural identity

Paragraph 2: McKay in conversation with Zora Neale Hurston

Paragraph 3: McKay in conversation with Leopold Senghor

Section 4: McKay as a centerpiece of transnational exchange for ideas of Black identity

Conclusion

Primary Sources:

Hurston, Zora Neale., and Cheryl A. Wall. Sweat. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1997. Print.

McKay, Claude. A Long Way from Home. New York: Arno, 1969. Print.

McKay, Claude. Banjo. S.l.: André Dimanche Ed., 1999. Print.

McKay, Claude. Banana Bottom. Chatham, NJ: Chatham eller, 1970. Print.

Secondary Sources:

Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black

Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003. Print.

Ford, Richard. Racial Culture: A Critique. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Print. 

Platt, Len. Modernism and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.

Wilder, Gary. The French Imperial Nation-state: Negritude & Colonial Humanism between the

Two World Wars. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005. Print.

Final Paper

Okay, so I'm kind of swimming in research and ideas at this point, so forgive the following incoherent expression of ideas:

I am interested in the role of racialization in political campaigns. I am interested in this subject as a way of exploring how racial discourse occurs in popular media in coded ways, as well as in exploring the question of who has incentive to perpetuate racism. The political sphere potentially offers the most formal expression of one group gaining from the perpetuation of racism, and it has its origins in the racialization of slavery in order to align poor whites with wealthy whites rather than for wealthy whites to have to face general uprising from poor whites banding together with slaves.

This is a huge topic, and so I am going to hone in on the period of the 60s to 80s, and hopefully I'll be able to bring it into the present a little bit, though that is not where my research will focus. I am going to focus on the evolution of the Southern Strategy, and in particular I am going to focus on the role of class-race associations in its evolution.

I specifically want to explore the development of class-race associations and how that supported or undermined or transformed the Southern Strategy. The intuitive picture that is emerging (though I need to research this much more) is that coded racism was persisted within the Southern strategy by the factioning of two types of poor people: 1) the hard-working blue collar white that "
"puts into the system" (Atwater) and 2) Reagan's "welfare" queen i.e. the non-contributing poor person.

It is a very muddy issue to try and tease out the sequential order of motives and associations, so through this research paper I really want to hone in on how the political sphere transformed through the 60's and 80's a setting where race was THE issue, explicitly, to a setting where race was not allowed to be the issue, but was coded. Who were the players? What are the incentives? Who is acting consciously? Who is acting subconsciously?

I am definitely not going to be able to answer this thoroughly, that would take a book, so I am going to work hard to hone in on something that I can argue and carefully explore.

Primary Sources:

Lee Atwater interview
Statements from Nixon's campaign manager
Reagan's speeches
Probably many others, though I am worried that in trying to piece together a puzzle, that I will dilute the  type of close reading that was emphasized on the midterm paper.

Secondary Sources:

The New Jim Crow (michelle alexander)
The Problem of Race in the 21st Century (Thomas Holt)
Witness to Power: The Nixon Years (John Erlichman)

Final Paper

Still working through this so please bear with me J

For the final paper, I’m interested in exploring common tropes around comedy and racial experiences. I would like to discuss the sort of coming of age narratives surrounding comedians’ interactions with their racial identities. This was partially inspired by my interest in children/young people’s first lessons in race, so to speak (when do we find out what race is, or specifically how we are racially identified/othered by outsiders?). By examining the works of several comedians, I hope to uncover the key sites where race and comedy collide as well as identify possible universal experiences with race. I want to see how comedians take moments that might otherwise be painful or isolating and turn them into comedy. Hopefully by the time I’ve finished I will have learned what allows certain groups to participate in racial/ethnic comedy successfully while others cannot.

Possible Primary Sources:

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? – Mindy Kaling

Pryor Convictions, And Other Life Sentences – Richard Pryor

Russell Peters clips, Chris Rock clips

Possible Secondary sources:

Children’s Developmental Understanding of Ethnicity and Race – Stephen M. Quintana

Stand-Up Comedy as a Social and Cultural Mediation – Lawrence E. Mintz

Final Paper Topic

Final Project - The corrido as a tool of expression

Intro
The corrido is a time-transcending phenomenon that is capable of expressing the substance and style of an individual or, on a grander scale, an entire race of people. Like other genres of music, it welcomes the intermingling of personal, social, and political aspects of life. Consequently, through singing and listening to the corrido, a person(s) is able place themselves into cultural narratives and relive past experiences in the mindset of those the song is about (Sanchez Pg. 7). Though some of these facts hold true for other various genres of music, the corrido relies on these truths more heavily and could not exist without them. For this reason, I contend corridos should not merely be seen pure entertainment, but rather as a tool of expression used by Mexican immigrants to record their struggles and perspective on assimilation into American culture.

Body
From here I'll go into a brief overview of the corrido, such as its formal definition and what separates a corrido from other genres (instrumentation, rhythym, subject matter) and some of its variations. Next I will explain how it was created out of the need for immigrants to express their feelings, more specifically, their angst toward the dominant culture and the injustices immigrants must face on a daily basis.

I'll then analyze the corrido "Somos Mas Americanos" and explain how its language and subject matter point to an angry Mexican immigrant population, who feel they have been subjected to injustices and have been cheated of their land/status.

I then will go on to state why this corrido and band are so significant to the development of the genre itself.

Next, I will explain how the corrido "Contrabando y Traicion" shows the versatility of the corrido and how this has allowed the Mexican immigrant population an outlet to express their new concerns and values.

Lastly, I'll discuss how these corridos (Somos in 2001, Contrabando 1974, El Deportado 1930)
And how they are all relatively similar, proving the strength of the corrido and reinforcing its effectiveness in telling the immigrants perspective.

Conclusion
Restate my claim, and explain the importance of the corrido being seen as a historical/cultural artifact.


Bibliography

Primary
Somos Mas Americanos - El Tigres Del Norte
Contrabando y Traicion - El Tigres Del Norte
El Deportado - Los Hermanos Banuelos

Secondary
Lost Tigres
http://www.starpulse.com/Music/Los_Tigres_Del_Norte/Biography/

Corrido genre
http://latinmusic.about.com/od/genres/p/PROCORRIDO.htm

Illegal Aliens
Impossible subjects: Illegal Aliens and The Making of Modern America. Mae Ngai

Andrew -- Final Paper

My final paper will analyze the use of Native Americans as sports and university-related mascots. I decided that I wanted to analyze an aspect of racial identity that “hits close to home” (i.e. Jewish American identity or Native American identity since I live approximately 45 minutes from the Navajo Reservation). After our class discussion during the week where we read Playing Indian, I thought that this concept would be an interesting topic to delve into.

The topic of Native American mascots also conveniently fits into the history of Stanford. During the period from 1930 to 1972, the official mascot of Stanford University was the Indian. Many people still do not know this aspect of the history of the university (including the librarian who helped me at Green Library). After completing this research paper, I hope to answer the following questions: What is the history of using Native Americans as mascots, and why are they symbolized in this way? Where and how does Stanford fit in to the broader story?

I first explored the resources located in Green Library related to this subject. I was able to find numerous articles on microfilm from the Stanford Daily in the 1970s (when the issue of the Native American mascot was brought to a head). 1972 was a particularly vivid year for this mascot controversy, as a proposal from 55 students sought to relinquish the Indian mascot in February, and by April of 1972, President of Stanford Richard Lyman revealed that the mascot would be dropped. These articles will serve as my primary sources where I hope to explore both sides of the argument and to connect Stanford to the thoughts and concerns of using Native Americans as mascots as a whole.

My secondary sources include Playing Indian by Philip Deloria, a book I found in Green Library entitled Team Spirits: The Native American Mascots Controversy (serving as a collection of essays people have written about Native American mascots for sports teams), The Jazz Singer (1927), and possibly other scholarly articles. Deloria’s book will provide historical context for using Indian “dress-up” as a way of exploring themes like aggression, violence, and otherness. Team Spirits serves as a historical comparison of the mascot issue across a wide range of institutions and sports teams. I would like to tie The Jazz Singer into the idea of escaping from oneself and acting in the stereotypical way of another.

Overall, I seek to understand Stanford’s role in the Native American mascot controversy and whether or not Stanford’s mascot change affected the nation’s overall thought toward this issue.

Primary Sources

Numerous Stanford Daily articles from 1972

Secondary Sources

Deloria Jr, Vine. Team Spirits: The Native American Mascots Controversy. Eds. C. Richard King, and Charles Fruehling Springwood. University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Deloria, Philip J. Playing indian. Yale University Press, 1999.

The Jazz Singer. Dir. Alan Crosland. Perf. Al Jolson, May McAvoy, Warner Oland, and Cantor Rosenblatt. Warner Bros., 1927. Film.