Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles: Critical Perspectives on Blackness, Belonging, and Civil Rights(3 FORECAAST (Forum for European Contributions to African American Studies))

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles interrogates Blackness and illustrates how it has been used as a basis to oppress, dismiss and exclude Blacks from societies and institutions in Europe, North America and South America. Employing uncharted analytical categories that tackle intriguing themes about borderless non-racial African ancestry, “traveling” identities and post-blackness, the essays provide new lenses for viewing the “Black” struggle worldwide. This approach directs the contributors’ focus to understudied locations and protagonists. In the volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern city “bulwarks” of the civil rights movement; diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many facets of negotiating belonging, long articulated by examples from the Greensboro Woolworth counter sit-in or the Montgomery Bus Boycott; unknown men in the British empire, who inverted dying confessions meant to vilify their blackness, demonstrate new dimensions in the story about race and religion, often told by examples of fiery clergy of the Black Church; and the theatres and studios of dramatists and visual artists replace the Mall in Washington DC as the stage for the performance of identities and activism.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements List of Contributors List of Illustrations INTRODUCTION 1. Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles - Violet Showers Johnson, Gundolf Graml and Patricia Williams Lessane DIASPORA, DISPLACEMENT, MARGINALIZATION AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES 2. Josephine Baker’s Routes and Roots: Mobility, Belonging and Activism in the Atlantic World - Katharina Gerund 3. Beyond the Ethnographic Other: Pan-African Activism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Thomas Smith 4. Black Sojourners in “La Métrople” and in the Fatherland: Challenges of Otherness in Calixthe Beyala’s Le Petit Prince de Belleville and Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s Juletane - Philip Ojo PERFORMING IDENTITIES, RECLAIMING THE SELF 5. Staging the Scaffold: Criminal Conversion Narratives of the Late Eighteenth Century - Carsten Junker 6. The Plays of Carlton and Barbara Molette: The Transformative Power of African American Theatre Silvia Pilar Castro Borrego MOVED TO ACT: CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISM IN THE US AND BEYOND 7. “Together We Can Build a Nation of Love and Integration”: The 1965 North Shore Summer Project for Fair Housing in Chicago’s Northern Suburbs - Mary Barr 8. Redrawing Borders of Belonging in a Narrow Nation: Afro-Chilean Activism at the Hinterlands of Afro-Latin America - Sara Busdiecker 9. Lowcountry, High Demands: The Struggle for Quality Education in Charleston, South Carolina - Jon Hale and Clerc Cooper Index

About the Author :
Violet Showers Johnson is Associate Dean and Professor of History in the College of Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University. She is author of 'The Other Black Bostonians: West Indians in Boston, 1900-1950' (Indiana University Press, 2006); co-author of 'African & American: West Africans in Post-Civil Rights America' (NYU Press, 2014); and co-editor of 'Western Fictions, Black Realities: Meanings of Blackness and Modernities' (Lit Verlag and Michigan State University Press, 2012). Gundolf Graml is Associate Professor and Director of German Studies at Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia, USA. Patricia Williams Lessane is Executive Director of The College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, and tenured librarian at Addlestone Library.