Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: The Souls of Black Folk was first published in 1903, just two years before the founding meeting of the Niagara Movement in 1905. Approximately, sixty years later, Dr. Du Bois’ classic and most popular book emerged as an inspirational reference and resource for the modern Civil Rights Movement. This paper will attempt a critical examination of The Souls of Black Folk as a protest statement in prose and song and as an example of the theory and praxis of protest strategies used by African Americans during the twentieth century. Particular attention will be given to essays number 1, 3, 9, and 14; these are “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” “Of the Sons of Master and Man,” and “The Sorrow Songs,” respectively. In “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” Dr. Du Bois candidly criticized Mr. Washington’s leadership. That essay, like all fourteen essays, is headed by lines of poetry and bars of music to a traditional spiritual or sorrow song. That essay in protest of Mr. Washington’s leadership, the founding of the Niagara Movement as part of an effort to challenge that leadership, and the use of songs to give voice to that protest, links the protest strategies of the early twentieth century to those used during the 1950s and 1960s.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: My paper examines the ways in which Japanese folk singers and activists localized American topical songs and folk songs of protest in the 1960s and the 1970s. Songs that were “topical” in the U.S. and those that protested against U.S. domestic and foreign issues were reinterpreted and remade into songs that addressed the issues in Japan. Drawing sources from testimonies and memoirs of Japanese folk singers and fans and activists, recordings, song lyrics, and newspaper and magazine articles on the issues and the music, this paper reveals the process by which Japanese folk singers and activists made meanings of American folk songs and used them in their social movements.
American folk songs were imported to Japan in the early 1960s, and they soon became popular mostly among middle-class young men and women. During the early period of the importation, American folk songs were primarily commercial, depoliticized music that were consumed as part of American popular culture; newly emerged Japanese folk singers copied and imitated American “originals.” Toward the late 1960s, however, Japanese folk singers began to focus on political songs and started making songs in Japanese; folk songs were both politicized and localized by the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s.
The paper is directed by two major questions. First, how did Japanese folk singers and fans make American topical songs “topical” and relevant to them? For example, among the songs that were translated into Japanese and widely appreciated in Japan were “Little Boxes,” “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” and “Masters of War.” Testimonies and memoirs will reveal how Japanese folk singers and audiences understood the American topical songs that had initially emerged from U.S. issues, and adapted them to fit their ideas of the Japanese situations. Japanese’ memories of World War II will also be discussed particularly in regard anti-Vietnam War songs.
Second, why did the Japanese activists pick American folk music as opposed to other genre in expressing their dissent? In particular, the role of the image of “protesting American folk singers” as exemplified by widespread image of Joan Baez attending a demonstration will be discussed in relation to the Japanese activists’ ways of borrowing American idioms in their struggle for the anti-nuclear, anti-military, and student movements (especially concerning the ratification of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security). Altogether, this study not only clarifies the localization process of American folk music in Japan but also serves as a case study to underscore the flexibility of the meanings of cultural products as they cross borders.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: I came to Berlin in the mid-70s as part of a women's studies network to teach texts like Toni Morrison's Sula--an extraordinarily obscure book for most of my students. I had no theory at all about "internationalization" and the like. I just wanted to bring the word about African-American women writers to students who were unlikely to have encountered them. When I returned, after the Wall had fallen, I was lecturing to an auditorium filled with teachers and the idea was still to bring to them ideas about minority writers in the US and a little theory--about canon formation, not internationalization, transnational flows of ideas, American hegemony, and the like. Yet, in both situations I was well aware of the politics of American power--after all, I had been in a leadership position in the anti-(Vietnam) war movement, had been a peace secretary for the American Friends Service Committee, and had written the SDS pamphlet encouraging young men to be conscientious objectors. What I want to talk about is the disconnect between what I knew about power and international politics, on the one hand, and my teaching practice, on the other.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper considers Harry Belafonte’s music career in the period when he was most popular, the ‘50s and ‘60s. I argue that while Belafonte was a crossover star who was seen as an exemplar of the black bourgeois produced by the nation's embrace of the Civil Right Movement, his concert repertoire and albums critiqued the exploitation of workers that continued even under the most liberal ideals of U.S. democratic capitalism.
Belafonte’s political work has been largely forgotten. When he criticized the Bush Whitehouse’s plan to invade Iraq, many people thought it was incongruous for the “King of Calypso” to comment on government policy. He described Colin Powell’s work in making a case for war as “service in the master’s house.” Newspaper editorials focused less on his criticism of the U.S. invasion and occupation as empire building and more on his reference to slavery in our “Post-Civil Rights” moment. When critics demanded that he apologize to Colin Powell for using a “demeaning” epithet, Belafonte responded:

Why are references to slavery demeaning? . . . Slavery is an important part of this nation's history. An absolutely critical part of any analysis that is done in defining black Americans. Not only the oppression and degradation of it. But our character, our courage, our spirit, our language, our songs and our culture are all born in that environment.
This nation has never really confronted, debated or had any fair exchange on this issue of slavery. We went from the strict confinement of physical slavery -- with chains, shackles and whips -- to the spiritual and psychological chains of slavery in the following century of legal segregation in this country. (“Belafonte Won’t Back Down.” Vancouver Sun 23 October 2002)

Like his critique of Powell, the songs Belafonte performed, including “Cotton Fields,” “John Henry,” and “The Banana Boat Song,” made mainstream audiences confront the history of U.S. slavery and the continued subjugation of workers of color. Belafonte recorded over thirty albums in the ‘50s and ‘60s. His music presented a range of diasporic black music including call and response spirituals, work songs, chain-gang songs, and calypsos (West Indian work songs.)

In Historical Capitalism, Immanuel Wallerstein argues that capitalism sustains itself by recycling the myth that capitalism represents progress over all previous economic systems. Wallerstein doesn’t argue that people were better off under, say, feudalism, but that the progress myth, as expressed by the culture industries, often obscures how working people suffer the same brutal exploitation under capitalism that they experienced in previous systems. This paper will look closely at how Belafonte was used by the music industry to perpetuate the myth and how he used the industry to critique the myth.