Kerry Pimblott When I talked with Illinois-based scholars and activists about Black Power they would often mention Reverend Charles Koen and the United Front organization of Cairo, Illinois, as an important but forgotten local struggle.
Religion and the Black Power Movement: 7 Questions for Kerry Pimblott
On Transitioning Out of the Academy: 7 Questions for Kelly Baker
Kelly J. Baker I don’t really define religion in relation to my work in this, but rather I write about the field of religious studies and the problem of contingent labor that religious studies and other scholars in the humanities face.
Eddie Glaude on Race and The American Soul: Part 1
Beginning with a distinction between African American religions and African American religious life, Professor Glaude explains how black religious life and thought have historically entered public discourse to mediate matters of race and justice.
7 Questions for André M. Carrington
André Carrington Ritual, pilgrimage, and ecstasy are not only metaphors when it comes to people’s devotion to cultural texts—these terms are really useful in theories of the practice of making genre traditions.
Staking Monsters: Killing the Racist Trope in Horror and Reality
Kelly J. Baker How do we create monsters? And ultimately, how do we destroy them?
“Cannot tell Aught but the Truth”: Photography and Birth of a Nation (1915)
Rachel McBride Lindsey Through plot device, camera technique, and historical conceit, Griffith’s epic story of the triumph of racially defined and providentially guided national unity out of racially contrived sectional chaos leans heavily on the early history of American photography.
Literary Antecedents and Contemporary Reflections of Thomas Dixon’s “The Clansman”
Carolyn M. Jones Medine As The Clansman demonstrates, the Ku Klux Klan was a structure within which white men acted out their vision of southern society and through which they used terror to enforce those visions. The KKK may have been the United States’ first cellular terrorist structure: it was and is covert, local and de-centered, mobile, and opportunistic, multiplying by opportunity and interpersonal connections.
A Dreadful and Improbable Creature: Race, Aesthetics, and the Burdens of Greatness
Judith Weisenfeld The plot of The Birth of a Nation features two intertwined narratives: a political story that moves from national unity to division in war and back to unity, and a romance in which a couple unites despite the obstacles the war presents. The Birth of a Nation is also, of course, a story about the subjugation of people of African descent, a process director D. W. Griffith frames as carried out by honorable white men who had no choice in the face of social chaos.
Cutting up “The Birth of a Nation”
S. Brent Plate Cut up D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and it bleeds a little. Rearrange the pieces, as Griffith so expertly cut up film sequences, and put them together in new ways. Splice it into histories, the stories of photography, race, literature, the KKK, bodies, film technique, and it comes out looking different. But it’s gonna bleed. The following articles, are such cuts, such incisive interventions.
Birth of the Klan’s Nation
Kelly J. Baker At midnight on November 25, 1915, seventeen men climbed to the top of Stone Mountain in Georgia with a large wooden cross. On that Thanksgiving night, they lit the cross on fire and pledged allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, American ideals, and “the tenets of the Christian religion. Read More…