Africana Theory, Policy, and Leadership

Jr. Conyers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351533584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Africana Theory, Policy, and Leadership is an eclectic work that examines Africana issues from multiple angles, including literature, ethnography, gender, aesthetics, and diversity. The contributors to this volume add unique and insightful works to the collection of research and writing documenting the pan-African experience. Conyers offers the reader an interdisciplinary approach to the study of people of African descent with special emphasis on the black population of the United States.

This collection addresses a wide range of topics. "Africana Literature as Social Science" reviews the scholarship of August Wilson and Suzan Lori-Parks. "How Homeland Eritrea Monitors Its American Diaspora" analyses Eritrean government-diaspora tensions. "Toward Theorizing Gender without Feminism" and "Are Black Women the New Mules of the Prison Industrial Complex?" illustrates the double burden of race and gender borne by black women. "Africana Aesthetics" documents black life in post-Civil War Texas with photos. "Africana Studies and Diversity" explores the struggle to maintain athletic programs at historically black colleges. "The Africana Idea in Leadership Studies" offers an Afrocentric approach to the study of critical theory in leadership.

This volume presents examples of Africana scholarship in major areas of work, including literature, politics, feminist studies, criminology, history, and sports studies, and is the most recent volume in Transaction's Africana Studies series.

1

Africana Literature as Social Science: Applying the Demographic Literary Standard (DLS) to the Works of August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks

Christel N. Temple

Introduction

Literary study engaged within the discipline of Africana Studies embraces the objective of demonstrating literature’s value and function as a tool of liberation. The discipline aims to create and to foster the engagement of knowledge that transforms consciousness and inspires a shift toward positive attitudes, behaviors, and activism on behalf of the people of African descent. Yet, many of the practices of literary criticism used to decipher and illuminate the meaning of the world’s literatures rely on frameworks and theories that deny, minimize, or ignore the practical applications of the art form. Even in progressive approaches to textual analysis, most frequently used in postcolonial, postmodern, comparative literature, cultural, and anthropological studies, literary analysis rarely intersects with social science research in direct and functional ways. Maulana Karenga observes the problem of the “privileging of literature over social science data” and notes, “literature, even as fiction and personal imagination, is used as an alternative to a social science understanding of Black life rather than as a contribution to a holistic understanding of it. In other words, personal subjectivity is privileged over social science study and a novel or short story becomes the most important and at times only way one understands Black life.” ¹ The analytical processes in academic work related to people of African descent require a balance, and James Stewart, transversely, warns against failing to balance social science work with measures to clarify the interpretive narratives of Black life.² He recommends that “a knowledge generation strategy focused around increasing cross-dialogue between artistic/humanistic and social science modes of investigation would seem to be preferable to a unidimensional emphasis on enhancing perceptions of scientific rigor.”³ Defending his suggestion from “conventional wisdom that scientific research should be uncontaminated by political considerations and that theoretical work is superior to applied research because it requires more intellectual acumen,” Stewart emphasizes that “the potential benefits from experimentation with alternative approaches to knowledge generation that reflects the field’s multiple missions have not been explored aggressively.” ⁴ Guided, then, by Karenga’s and Stewart’s suggestions and responding to the challenges of new Black literary formats and Black liberation needs, I offer suggestions for social science follow-through in Black literary study based on an approach I describe as the demographic literary standard

The DLS model radically amends the engagement of the “sociology of literature,” wherein literature increases “social awareness and social responsiveness” ⁵ from its late-nineteenth-century exploratory period and its 1990s rearticulation as cultural studies, both waves that were and are philosophically concerned with relationships between literature and history as well as concerns over to what extent society influences the artist and vice versa.⁶ The DLS is also a point of information for literary purists who suggest that culture “can no longer take literary studies where it needs to go.” ⁷ Their arguments completely overlook Black cultural and Afrocentric criteria of literature, much of which is taught directly through or as cross-listings of literature disciplines.⁸ Instead, the DLS is an Afrocentric tool that emphasizes the fonction of enhancing literary analysis with quantitative and qualitative explorations of a text’s collective elements and meaning. The DLS model encourages the following procedural treatment of literature.

Procedural Elements of DLS Method of Literary Analysis

Confirmation that it is possible to demarcate the line(s) between fiction and social science realism presented by and inspired by the text in order to determine that DLS is a compatible tool for textual analysis and application

Awareness of demographics, generally understood as typical group or population characteristics expressed invariables that should be Afrocentrically formulated beyond the standard national categories of age,sex, race, ethnicity, education, geographic residence, employment, income, marital status, religion, dwelling, language, mobility, or generation cohort

Creation of an exhaustive list of all documentable and verifiable topics, themes, situations, predicaments, historical and contemporary events and figures, proper names, streets, addresses, cities, locales, social movements, eras, businesses, and economic references that are based on the various demographic conditions introduced in the text

Attention to historical-biographical contexts of the work wherein knowledge of author biography, experience, and influence, date/era of publication, and historical setting are even more meaningful than prescribed by conventional literary analysis

Interpretation of literature as an integrated art form with aesthetic and structural conventions as well as social science implications

Attention to determining the functionality of the narrative based on comparisons of the text’s thematic and causal variables against quantitative and qualitative social science data sets generated through research, polls, surveys, interviews, and statistics

Willingness to refine or create conceptual and content categories that are not adequately represented or measured in data sets, as a means of generating ideas for new areas of quantitative and qualitative research that could better inform conditions of Black life

Attention to the cycles of tradition and innovation⁹ in Black literature to ensure that literary analysis regards advances and shifts in creativity in the context of the historical continuum of the Black literary tradition

Attention to the text’s location in time and space¹⁰ with respect to prioritizing an interpretation of chronology and geography, especially for literature structured based on measurable units of time (eg., Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365 Plays/365 Days, August Wilson’s ten plays representing the twentieth century viewed as an Afrocentric Decalogue, or texts structured as journals, diaries, or dated letters)

Attention to the text’s relationship to ethics and values¹¹ with respect to its usefulness in inspiring solution-seeking discourse by encouraging critical thinking for the benefit of contemporary social change

Attention to literature study’s need for scientific application ¹² concerning especially the use of technology in research and training of content expertise, which also has implications for literary classroom technology and grant funding for community center technology

Revision of research directives and evidence categories in order to systematically expand literature’s function beyond the humanities, which will permit a reliance on research beyond Modern Language Association bibliography for literature analysis and enable a functional multidimensional layering of knowledge that increases the social value of literary analyses

Opportunities to suspend the format of prose narrative of literary analysis in favor of listing and short description.

The following applications of the DLS will be generally applied to Parks’ single volume 365 Days/365 Plays (2006)¹³ and specifically applied to Wilson’s twentieth-century cycle of plays.

Parks’ 365 Days/365 Plays

Historical-Biographical Context

Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, on May 10, 1964, and attended college at Mount Holyoke college in Massachusetts and graduate school at Yale University in Connecticut. She lived in six states before graduating from high school, spent time in Germany and London, and has lived most of her adult life in Manhattan. She is African American, and her plays have been performed all over the country and the world. Demographically speaking, she is Black, female, wealthy, educated, married in a mixed-race relationship, nonreligiously affiliated, multilingual, and geographically affiliated primarily with the northeast. The data sets related to her personal/regional experience would illuminate more about the author.

Concepts and Themes in 365 Days/365 Plays

In one year’s worth of plays—from November 13, 2002, to November 13, 2003—Parks addresses a diverse mix of social, political, historical, and cultural topics ranging from citizenship and nationalism, war, family, gender roles and reversals, heroics, infidelity, the south, class, religion, criminal justice, homicide, death penalty, aesthetics, African American and American historical narratives and their creative reversal, police power, tradition and censorship, masculinity, literature and literary history, marriage, world history and leadership, human rights, language and language acquisition, drama aesthetics, Black music traditions, popular culture and fame, mythology, storytelling, media, White supremacy, race and racism, mental health issues, enslavement and holocaust, literacy, commemoration and holidays, space and alternate universes, urban life, blues, poverty, US. presidents, stolen elections and natural disaster, love relationships, unemployment, drug addiction, and failures of legislation, The power of Parks’ play is that she offers a profound critical observation or a set of observations about every day in the year, to suggest that the average person is a critical being who is attentive to the multiple realities of a single day—including individual, local, national, and international realities—and how the past intersects with this single day. Parks’ plays differ from what we have come to expect from the dramatic form because they are more like vignettes or scenes that help to define the most pressing concerns of the average person in America. The brief, presentational form functions as a reminder of the need for readers/Americans to spend longer moments philosophically reflecting on the stimulus offered in the play. The result of such reflection on many pressing sociopolitical and humanistic topics is that citizens will be agents of changes, just as Parks’ plays are catalysts for inspiring change. This context of her art form implies a shift in behavior, and the social science and research data that correspond to Parks’ subject matter become evidence and tools that support the change readers should be inspired to advocate. Every day, members of society have a fleeting moment of inspiration about making the work a better place to be in. Parks captures this inspiration with her collection of daily meditations.

A significant portion of 365 Days/365 Plays responds to America’s, in particular, and the world’s, in general, dependency on war, and the plays representing March-April, 2003, are deeply saturated with discussions of Afghanistan, George W. Bush, male and female soldiers, patriotism, and lessons from the world’s wars. This topic, in particular, is reminiscent of the polls, surveys, and data sets representing American satisfaction with US. foreign policy, Christianity, ageism, violence, abuse, immigration and enslavement, and more.

Traditional Literary Analysis

Traditional literary analysis of Parks’ 365 Days would entail a survey of the published articles and reviews of the play, drawn from academic journals as well as newspapers and Internet sources. Ph...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Africana Literature as Social Science: Applying the Demographic Literary Standard (DLS) to the Works of August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks
• 2 Africana Ethnography: How Homeland Eritrea Monitors Its American Diaspora
• 3 Africana Gender Studies: Toward Theorizing Gender without Feminism
• 4 Africana Aesthetics: Creating a Critical Black Narrative from Photographs in South Texas
• 5 Africana Perspectives in Criminal Justice: Are Black Women the New Mules of the Prison Industrial Complex?
• 6 Africana Studies and Diversity: All Shapes, Sizes, and Colors of HBCU Athletic Programs: The Sporting HBCU Diaspora—Cultural Convergence and Politics of Divergence
• 7 The Afrocentric Idea in Leadership Studies
• Notes on Contributors
• Index