Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Presidential relations with judicial power have often been characterized as either departmentalist or judicial supremacist. However, this dichotomy fails to recognize variation within these doctrines. Presidential assertions of authority to interpret the Constitution are contingent on changes in how presidents view the role and value of judicial power, and attention to this variation may usefully connect constitutional development with political development. By investigating how Van Buren and Lincoln interacted with judicial authority and rhetorically justified their actions, this paper argues that the strategic value of judicial power stems from a set of ideas regarding the legitimacy of opposition and of party organizing—both elements of antebellum republicanism—that changed over time, eventually giving way to pluralist assumptions by the 1860s. As opposition and political parties were legitimized through the early to mid nineteenth century, presidential relations with judicial power shifted such that assertions of presidential authority to interpret the Constitution became more attenuated over time, as judicial power could be more legitimately harnessed rather than confronted. As such, an interest in judicial authority is shown to be contingent on a set of underlying ideas regarding the legitimacy of opposition and political party organizing, and that motivation behind early attacks on judicial power does not stem from questions about the democratic legitimacy of judicial review but rather the legitimacy of opposition.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: Malawi has little in the way of a media industry. Local film and television production are strictly limited, with all viewing conducted on small televisions in communal “video shows,” while local musicians usually require a second job to make ends meet. Usually through pirated means, though, American, Nigerian, and South African media texts abound. Eighties action films, Nigerian soaps, and rap, hip hop, easy listening, and country music predominate. But how are we to make sense of such foreign texts in Malawi? What, for instance, do Dolly Parton, Jean-Claude Van Damme, or Nigerian tales of love and witchcraft mean in Malawi? In 2008, I went to Malawi with these questions, and here will reflect upon the methodological and theoretical issues that intervened, and upon the plurality of questions that supplemented and replaced them.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: One of the most important vehicles of democratic mobilization in America, the Voting Rights Act, comes up for reconsideration in 2007. This paper will focus on the dynamics between Congress—specifically racial minorities and Democrats in the House—and the Supreme Court over the scope and intent of the VRA since it was last amended in 1982. These dynamics are characterized by competing and often contentious approaches to race, representation and districting. Since the early 1990s, the Court has adjudicated key provisions of the VRA in a majoritarian manner that is completely at odds with Congress’ intent for the 1982 revisions. This paper will argue that Congress is compelled to rein in the Court by strengthening both the race-conscious and the outcome-oriented provisions of the Act. The Congressional Black Caucus was instrumental amending the VRA in 1982 and promises to be a major player again in 2007. Of key interest this time will be the role of Latinos in Congress. The fate of the VRA will depend on the ability of blacks and Latinos to coalesce into a unified front. This in turn will depend the extent to which Latino legislators can resolve amongst themselves competing conceptualizations of minority political power, equality and democracy.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores the impact of Van Orden v. Perry and McCreary v. ACLU on attitudes toward public displays of the Ten Commandments. I analyze original panel survey data and find understanding the cases increases the probability of attitude change.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The political agenda of American race relations in the late 1960s fell into the hands of “the brother on the block,” the dispossessed young people who appeared on the nation’s television screens night after night, sweeping through the depressed interiors of Detroit, South Central, and Washington D.C. Emergent within this televised reality was a new genre, as Thomas Cripps tells us, “waiting to be teased out by a black filmmaker with the vision to discern a new black politics of the screen.” Following a stint as a sixteen millimeter “cineaste” who had financed his short films by selling his car, Melvin Van Peebles stepped up to the task, providing a revolutionary and transnational dimension to the often politically flaccid history of African American film.

During the same period when African Americans were barred from employment as Hollywood studio writers and directors, Van Peebles had received French public money to produce films in Paris. Evoking the rage of contemporary black political resistance, his breakthrough “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadsssss Song” (1971) employed the nouvelle vague’s radical experiments with visual style, editing, and narrative that Van Peebles had informally studied in Paris. Despite its humble opening, “Sweetback” was an explosively popular success and is widely creditied with inaugurating the blaxploitation film movement. A kind of dissident, everyday political culture—the age-old “hidden transcript” of oppressed communities—and, ironically, a hyper-visible commercial form, this short-lived genre was characterized by action, violence, and vulgar stylization. Yet for white audiences, blaxploitation proved sufficiently arcane. “Sweetback’s” theme and style constituted—according to Van Peebles—“a new kind of foreign film.”

This paper analyzes the historical emergence of Van Peebles’s “Transnational Cinema Aesthetics” by engaging popular film with problems of genre, style, and racial difference. Rather than simply “domesticating” Van Peebles’s work, I take up methods of analysis from social geography to resituate the cultural production of an itinerant postwar expatriate African American figure in transatlantic, multilingual contexts. Questioning modes of analysis that have confined Van Peebles’s innovative film aesthetics to nation-bound audiences and race-bound viewing practices, this paper locates a set of ongoing diasporic interrelationships that produce a new model for African American film history, challenging the overtly “American exceptionalist” orientation of current black film studies.