Black History Month (13) — Blacks and Food Justice: A Guide to Resources

Our posts of bibliographies and brief reading guides in recognition, honor, and celebration of Black History Month comes to a close with this—our thirteenth—post on Blacks and Food Justice: A Guide to Resources. 

If you have been unable to keep up with our postings or by way of making it easy to view the material in our posts for the month, I have listed the bibliographies and guides below (in alphabetical order, thus not the order in which they appeared here throughout the month of February) with embedded links. I hope at least a few of our readers have found (or will find) them helpful. For what it’s worth, I was disappointed that, at least at the law and other blogs I read routinely, there was, unlike in past years, comparatively little or nothing deliberately posted for Black History Month. Sartre memorably wrote: “[Marxism] remains [...] the philosophy of our time. We cannot go beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which engendered it.” One might analogously state that we cannot transcend Black History Month until we have gone beyond the circumstances that indirectly (because unintentionally) engendered it (e.g., slavery, spontaneous and systematic violence against African-Americans, job and other forms of discrimination, segregated schooling and housing, Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, and so forth), including the recalcitrant and seemingly intractable racism that still—unconsciously, subconsciously, and consciously—rules the minds of far too many individuals, groups, and institutions in this society. The formal and informal historical knowledge of a disturbing number of people in the U.S. has yet to sufficiently come to epistemic, moral, and political terms with Black history such that the qualifying word is no longer necessary, in other words, so as to render the adjective “Black” redundant because it has become an integral and well understood part of our country’s grand historical narratives, having assumed the form of common knowledge. Until such time, it will be necessary for us to enlist a variety of means and methods equal to the task of recognizing, honoring, and celebrating Black History Month.

The links from our posts (thus not the posts themselves, for a few of them contained more than one link) for the month:

• Africana & African American Philosophy
• After Slavery & Reconstruction: The Black Struggle for Civil Rights, Freedom, and Equality in the U.S.
• The Black Athlete and Sports
• Blacks and Food Justice: A Guide to Resources
• Blacks on the (Radical) Left
• The Black Panther Party
• Detroit: Labor & Industrialization, Race & Politics, Rebellion & Resurgence
• Frantz Fanon
• The Haitian Revolution
• L.R. James: Marxist Humanist & Afro-Trinidadian Socialist – A Basic Reading Guide
• Jacob Lawrence and the Haitian Revolution: Exemplifying the Values and Purposes of Art
• Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965) – A Basic Reading Guide
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism
• Philosophy & Racism
• Slavery
• South African Liberation Struggles

Images:

• (at top of post) Rev. Floyd D. Harris Jr., founder (2015) of the Freedom School in West Fresno.
• (immediately above) Freedom School Fresno’s demonstration farm, located behind New Light for New Life Church of God.

Black History Month (12): South African Liberation Struggles

Our twelfth and next to last post in recognition, honor, and celebration of Black History month is a bibliography titled South African Liberation Struggles. In addition to the fight against apartheid, these emancipatory struggles encompass the pre- and post-apartheid periods insofar as they incarnate not only the quest for social justice and thus the triune motto of the French Revolution, namely, liberté, égalité, and fraternité, but represent as well the individual and collective effort of blacks in South Africa and elsewhere on the African continent for (meaningful or true) self-determination, self-realization, and fulfillment (or eudaimonia).

(You can see larger images of the books pictured here if you click individually on the respective photos.) 

Black History Month (11): Malcolm X – A Reading Guide

Today’s post—our eleventh—in recognition, honor, and celebration of Black History Month, is a comparatively short reading guide for Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), né Malcolm Little, and after his pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca, also known as Malik el-Shabazz.

• “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”
• “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.”
• “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it’s for or against.”

• “I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man’s problem just to avoid violence.”
• “If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.”
• “I don’t favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I’m also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people.”

• “The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.”
• “Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds. I have always kept an open mind, a flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of the intelligent search for truth.”
• “I am not a racist. I am against every form of racism and segregation, every form of discrimination. I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.”

• “Envy blinds men and makes it impossible for them to think clearly.”

Black History Month (10): Frantz Fanon … and Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, and Black Cosmopolitanism

Two compilations today mark our tenth installment in recognition, honor, and celebration of Black History Month: Frantz Fanon and the bibliography for Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism.  
                                         

Black History Month (9): Philosophy and Racism

Our ninth post in recognition, honor, and celebration of Black History Month covers titles on Philosophy and Racism.

Therapies of Desire: Introspection in Buddhist and Psychoanalytic Psychologies

Characterized, roughly speaking, as similar “therapies of desire,” Freudian psychoanalysis and Buddhist meditation techniques (which do not exhaust the kinds of such therapies, as the Stoics attest) have interesting commonalities and significant overlap, although of course the Buddhist worldview emerged as an Indic śramaṇa tradition “sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE,” while psychoanalysis began at the end of the nineteenth-century in the cultural climate of European modernity. A fair number of books, largely but not exclusively from Buddhists (some of whom are psychotherapists) have sought to address the various constructions of similarities and differences. I’m inclined to believe this subject has yet to be explored with the kind of philosophical and psychological depth and complexity it deserves, a judgment which is not intended to detract from the otherwise significant contributions and insights of this literature, which began, it appears, with Erich Fromm, D.T. Suzuki, and Richard De Martino’s Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (1960) and is perhaps best recently exemplified by Padmasiri de Silva’s Buddhist and Freudian Psychology (4^th ed., 2010). 


For now I want merely to highlight one conspicuous common feature, namely, the respective methods of introspection in Buddhism and psychoanalysis (in the latter it is technically termed free association): paying, as it were, close attention to one’s mind … and body; although in psychoanalysis, it is typically the analyst who is observing the analysand’s bodily comportment, while in Buddhism, the practitioner herself can do this. I was reminded of this when reading George Makari’s Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (2008). In an introduction to Freud’s early thoughts on the practice of dream analysis as “a kind of trained introspection,” Makari writes that in according “close attention to their inner life, their fleeting thoughts and feelings,” avoiding all temptation to edit or censor their “observations,” Freud’s patients “were not to criticize or delete, but simply report.” This, in effect, is an attempt to combine first- and third-person points of view (similar if not identical to what J. David Velleman terms “the reflexive guise” or reflexive mode of presentation of facets of one’s individual identity or ‘sense’ of self in a temporal sense, or as past, present, and future ‘selves’). The same injunction or instruction, more or less, is given to one first learning to meditate in Buddhism.

In Buddhism, one is of course sitting (in one of several possible postures, all of which involve sitting straight—‘but not stiffly’—and still) when engaged in “trained introspection” or meditation (of which there are several kinds, ideally used in combination), while in psychoanalysis the analysand is, traditionally, lying on a couch (in Freud’s office, on a Turkish divan!). In psychoanalysis one may be asked to close one’s eyes, while in Buddhism one’s eyes should remain open, focused downward (partly to avoid falling asleep!). What is common here is the attempt to more or less dispassionately observe (what devotees of the Gītā or Patañjali’s Yoga system would describe in English as acting or meditating with ‘non-attachment’) one’s thoughts and feelings (one might, as a manner of speaking, call this self-examination, as long as it is clear that one is not examining a ‘self’ as such) sans any judgment, moralistic or otherwise. We are referring here to only the barest beginnings of self-examination, of introspection, of meditation. All the same, I think it is rather quite remarkable that we may (philosophers would say arguably) possess such a power or capacity for impersonal or “detached” observation or inner attentiveness, that is, that we may be able to observe or take note of our thoughts and feelings, however chaotic, forbidden, confused, deceptive, painful, what have you, as if watching a roll of film picturing a stream-of-consciousness the contents of which are our sensations and intuitions, our imaginings, our thoughts and feelings. Of course such impartial or objective introspection or meditation, insofar as it may be possible, does not occur automatically or easily, and in fact it is often said that strenuous effort or the deliberate attempt or simply the sheer act of willing to bring about this kind of introspection is self-defeating (there needs to be some effort after all, but one should avoid acting ‘self-consciously’ as we say, with regard to this effort, thus it is believed that over time one becomes adept at introspecting without thinking about the act of introspection, which is very difficult to do, as any beginning meditation student or analysand might inform us), in which case it amounts to what Jon Elster—after the psychiatrist Leslie H. Farber—terms the (psychological or existential) fallacy of “willing what cannot be willed” (exemplified by the attempt, say, to ‘be natural’ or ‘act spontaneously’).


As is well known, the aim of psychoanalysis is not identical to the “spiritual insight” sought in Buddhism (although a conception of ‘insight’ is no less intrinsic to the former, as Ilham Dilman’s writings on psychoanalysis have made plain), and yet their therapeutic methods, at least in the beginning stages are, as we have seen, grounded in introspection (which, we might point out, is only one-third of the Eightfold Path in Buddhism), and these philosophical and psychological therapies are animated by a shared concern for the relief of sundry forms of suffering (Buddhism holding out the promise of the absolute cessation of suffering).

In a future post I hope to better clarify what introspection is and is not in this instance. For example, at least in psychoanalysis and Buddhism, it is not equivalent or reducible to thinking or perceiving in the epistemic sense, or indeed to any of our cognitive and cogitative powers or sensations, emotions, moods and so forth. Rather, it is the process of observing these mental and bodily powers and capacities as if they are reflected onto a mirror (a metaphor for meditation and consciousness or mind found in several Asian philosophies). We can of course reflect on these in the conventional sense, in other words, think about or ruminate on them, but that is not the sense of reflection we are speaking about with introspection, although things get a bit complicated or tricky when we address the topic of “analytic” meditation in Buddhism, for that does, most assiduously, entail applying the powers of reason to these mental contents! As Jeffrey Hopkins has said, “With one voice all the Mahāyāna masters proclaim that analysis of objects, and not mere withdrawal of the mind from them, is the path to liberation.” Introspection or meditation is thus a necessary yet not sufficient condition of the therapeutic process, as “psycho-analysis” likewise presumes the prior presence of the mental “objects” of introspection. In short, both Buddhist meditation and psychoanalytic therapy begin with introspection, the contents of which are then subject to various kinds of “analysis,” the point at which reason, among other things (including the roles of the guru or spiritual teacher and analyst), enters the therapeutic picture.


In the end, therapeutic practices that begin with meditation or introspection may culminate in an “empty mind,” at least in Patañjali’s Yoga, Daoism, and Advaita Vedānta (in the last, nirguṇa Brahman is the simultaneous immanent and transcendent indeterminate state of mystical awareness about which nothing can be affirmed, hence the via negativa or apophatic tradition of mysticism is germane). In Buddhism, the experience of nibbāna is, in the words of Miri Albahari, “none other than the mind in its pure mode of percipience or witnessing,”“[s]o nibbāna must be embedded in the principle of percipience [or introspection?] itself, with the full percipience of nibbāna implying the witnessing mind to be completely free from objects of awareness (whether attended to or not).” Nibbānic consciousness is therefore best characterized as “in itself,” both subjectless and objectless. The end or ends of psychoanalysis are more modest and therefore less elusive: while psychoanalytic therapy may prove successful in the relief of certain kinds of suffering (that arise, say, from deep dissatisfaction of one kind or another, from unmet emotional or psychological needs, from profound feelings of helplessness, from oppressive anxieties, from bad habits or addictions, etc.) in the amelioration of its conditions, it does not claim to provide the absolute transcendence of suffering as such.

The paths of therapeutic praxis in Buddhism and psychoanalysis might both be considered long-lasting, circuitous and arduous (at least in comparison to purely cognitive, behavioral, biomedical or pharmacological approaches), which is not surprising given our prior comments about the folly of “willing what cannot be willed” in these matters. Finally, introspection need not assume in any strong or reified sense that these mental objects, so to speak, are simply “inner” in nature, even if this process is largely solitary and personal (leaving aside for the moment the roles of the spiritual teacher or guru and analyst), as it involves a metaphorical kind of looking inwards, observing what is in or on our minds in this peculiar intertwining or fusion of the first- and second-person perspectives.
Relevant Bibliographies:

• Buddhism
• Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
• Dreams and Dreaming
• Emotions
• Freudian and Post-Freudian Psychoanalytic Psychology
• Human Nature and Personal Identity

Black History Month (8): The Haitian Revolution—In History … and Art

Today’s post—our eighth—in recognition, honor, and celebration of Black History Month, provides a link to a reading guide on the Haitian Revolution as well as material from a prior post on that revolution in the art of Jacob Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000), an African-American painter, storyteller, and professor of art at the University of Washington in Seattle.
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We seek only to bring men to the liberty that God has given them, and that other men have taken from them only by transgressing His immutable will. — François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (20 May 1743 – 7 April 1803) 

From [Frederick] Douglass’s time to ours, events in Haiti have continued to inspire African American responses in various genres, including journalism, oratory, music, and poetry. Far from fading, the Haitian Revolution has remained significant and has taken on new meanings during the twentieth century, as contemporary events unfolded. From the response of the NAACP to the American occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934, through the poetry of Langston Hughes and the art of the painter Jacob Lawrence, to the personal connection felt with Touissant L’Ouverture by Ntozake Shange’s protagonist in the 1975 play For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, many African Americans have been inspired by Haiti’s history to create responses that link past and present, providing inspiration as well as spurring continuing activism for contemporary Haitians and for people of color throughout the world. — Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon 

I like to think I’ve expanded my interest to include not just the Negro theme but man generally and maybe if this speaks through the Negro I think this is valid also ….  I would like to think of it as dealing with all people, the struggle of man to always better his condition and to move forward….  I think all people aspire, all people strive towards a better human condition, a better mental condition generally. — Jacob Lawrence

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“The Haitian Revolution (French: Révolution haïtienne) was a successful anti-slavery and anti-colonial insurrection by self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign nation of Haiti. It began on 22 August 1791 [most historians use this date in August, although it may have actually begun a few hours before the 22^nd, the preceding day] and ended in 1804 with the former colony’s independence. It involved blacks, mulattoes, French, Spanish, and British participants—with the ex-slave [François-Dominique] Toussaint Louverture [also known as Toussaint L’Ouverture or Toussaint Bréda] emerging as Haiti’s most charismatic hero. It was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery, and ruled by non-whites and former captives. It is now widely seen as a defining moment in the history of racism in the Atlantic World.

Its effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. The end of French rule and the abolition of slavery in the former colony was followed by a successful defense of the freedoms they won, and, with the collaboration of free persons of color, their independence from white Europeans. It represents the largest slave uprising since Spartacus’s unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Republic nearly 1,900 years earlier. It challenged long-held European beliefs about alleged black inferiority and about enslaved persons’ capacity to achieve and maintain their own freedom. The rebels’ organizational capacity and tenacity under pressure inspired stories that shocked and frightened slave owners in the hemisphere.”

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“The traditional account of the value of artworks is that they have their value through their beauty, and the experience of a work’s beauty is still a prime determinant of our valuing it.…  [T]he notion of beauty is not to be construed merely in terms of pleasure in sensory presentations, but has to allow for the possibility of the beauty of objects and traits, such as moral ones, which cannot be perceived directly. The existence of moral beauty means that a work’s moral character can be a beauty in the work. One of the most influential modern accounts of the value of art is the cognitive one, which holds that works of art have their artistic value in part through their cognitive merits. … [T]hrough linking cognition to imagination, art can teach about ethical values, as well as about other matters; and … this cognitive merit can be an aesthetic merit too. Finally, an important aspect of our valuing works of art is the way that they move us emotionally, and this aspect of our experience [in light of the question of value, occurs once more in assessing] … whether the responses prescribed are merited. And this notion of merit … is sensitive to moral considerations. Thus, if one examines some of the central grounds on which art is valued—its beauty, its cognitive role, its affective dimension—each of them involves an ethical aspect. It is in this sense that the ethical evaluation of art is inescapable, since it is inextricably intertwined with some of the central grounds on which we value art.” – Berys Gaut, Art, Emotion and Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2007)

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Jacob Lawrence & the Haitian Revolution: Exemplifying the Pedagogical, Ethical, and Spiritual Purposes of Art

“[Jacob] Lawrence [September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000] is one of the first American artists trained in and by the black community in Harlem, and it is from the people of Harlem that he initially obtained professional recognition. He was also the first African American artist to receive sustained support from mainstream art museums and patronage outside of the black community during an era of legalized and institutionalized segregation. [….]

… Lawrence developed a philosophy regarding art and the role that it can play addressing social issues, particularly as they pertain to race. Though much of his career coincides with a period in which artists attempted to strip all narrative and literary references from their work, he has always maintained that art, as one of the highest forms of human endeavor, is too significant a communicative medium to be simply reduced to formal experimentation. For over sixty years and with intentionally limited means (water-based paints on boards or paper), he has harnessed the seductive power of semi-abstract forms to address many of the great social and philosophical themes of the twentieth century, especially at they pertain to the lives and histories of African Americans: migration, manual labor, war, family values, education, mental health, and creativity. He made visible a side of American history that includes the contributions of African Americans; has presented scenes of daily life that provide a compassionate counterpoint to stereotypical images of African Americans; and painted poignant social commentary on the effects of racism and bigotry in American culture. His ability to distill the essence of these subjects into elemental shapes is unparalleled and one of the defining aspects of his work.” — Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, eds., Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (University of Washington Press, in association with Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonné Project, 2000): 11.

“Lawrence painted not just what he saw, but also what he heard from the oral historians of Harlem. Lectures on aspects of American and African-American history and culture given at the 135^th Street library (history previously unknown to Lawrence since the topic was not part of the New York City public education curriculum) sparked his interest in these subjects. He, along with many other artists, heard lectures by Joel C. Rogers, Richard B. Moore, and the carpenter-cum-scholar ‘Professor’ Charles C. Seifert. These lectures were part of a community-wide effort in Harlem to learn and value the history of African Americans and their contribution to American history. Lawrence was so impressed after having heard one of Seifert’s lectures that he was inspired to research the history and political struggles of his people. Motivated by the courageous events he studied, he was compelled to create, in rapid succession, a series of paintings on the important African American heroic narratives: The Life of Toussaint L’Overture (1938), The Life of Frederick Douglass (1939), and The Life of Harriet Tubman (1940). The stories and struggles of these monumental freedom fighters became icons of survival and hope.”—Leslie King-Hammond, “Inside-Outside, Uptown-Downtown:  Jacob Lawrence and the Aesthetic Ethos of the Harlem Working-Class Community,” in Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, eds. Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (University of Washington Press, in association with Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonné Project. 2000): 77-78.

“It was … [at the New York Public Library that Lawrence] might have read John W. Vandercook’s book Black Majesty: The Life of Christophe, King of Haiti, published in 1928. The book included drawings by Mahlon Blaine of scenes of the [Haitian] revolt and of Christophe and other leaders, which served as inspiration for Lawrence’s later work on Toussaint.

Lawrence was also influenced by W.E.B. Du Bois. Lawrence was an American, but he also was an African American and an African American artist. He knew that he had to define himself, and as a painter he came to be known as a social realist, abstractionist, and visual narrator of the American black experience and the struggle of blacks for freedom from oppression. Lawrence told of seeing a W.E.B. Du Bois play on the life of Toussaint Louverture in the mid-1930s and assumed it had been written by the man he admired, since Du Bois had written about Haiti in his doctoral thesis and other works. According to Du Bois’s biographer David Levering Lewis, however, the play was written not by the African American W.E.B. Du Bois, but by a white playwright named William DuBois. Inspired nonetheless, Lawrence decided to paint on the subject.

In 1938, at the age of twenty-one, Lawrence completed and exhibited a series of paintings on the life of Toussaint. He felt that one painting would not do the job, so he decided to do a series, and it became known as the Toussaint L’Ouverture series of 1937-1938. Lawrence’s works consisted of forty-one paintings, “gouache paintings on paper,” outlining the history of the Haitian Revolution, each telling a unique aspect of the story. It was funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Arts Project (FAP). Lawrence wrote, ‘I’ve always been interested in history, but they never taught Negro history in the public schools…. It was never studied seriously like regular subjects. My first real introduction to Negro history was when I was very young—thirteen, I imagine—when a Mr. Allen spoke at Utopia House. He spoke about Toussaint L’Ouverture.’ At the same time, Lawrence noted, ‘most of my information came from Charles Beard’s book, Toussaint L’Ouverture. I read other books—there were more novels than anything else. One book—I don’t even remember its name—told me of conditions on the island, and its resources. It gave a short sketch of the Haitian Revolution.’ Lawrence concluded, ‘I’m not a politician; I’m an artist just trying to do my part to bring this thing about. I had several reasons for doing this work and these are some of them. Someone had to do it. Another reason is that I have great admiration for the life of such a man as Toussaint L’Ouverture.’ [….]

As the art history Ellen Wheat has written, ‘The Toussaint series focuses on the mistreatment of the Haitian natives by the colonial farmers and military leaders and on Touissant’s heroic struggle to educate himself, fight the military leader’s occupational forces and achieve the independence of Haiti.’” – Maurice Jackson, “No Man Could Hinder Him: Remembering Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in the History and Culture of the African American People,” in Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon, eds., African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents (Routledge, 2010): 141-164.

“Influenced by storytelling techniques derived from film, the Toussaint L’Ouverture series unfolds episodically and kaleidoscopically, presenting scenes at various locations, during various times, and from various points of view. Each scene was carefully orchestrated for content; before picking up his brushes, Lawrence spent several weeks poring over biographies of Toussaint’s life, as well as historical and socioeconomic accounts of Haiti. Like a screenwriter, the artist emphasized, condensed, or omitted narrative details in order to underscore his overriding message. For Lawrence, Toussaint’s prominent roles in commandeering the Haitian Revolution and drafting the country’s new constitution epitomized the ability of an authoritative individual to bring about major social change.

Evident throughout the series is Lawrence’s strong acumen in manipulating shapes and colors to communicate with clarity and emotion. Demonstrating his penchant for dynamic yet cohesive patterning, the artist repeated colors and motifs in order to unify the sequence across its individual images. By employing flat shapes bereft of shading and cast shadows, he eliminated extraneous detail and strove for greater legibility. A pronounced sense of graphic design predominates throughout, so when viewed in their totality the 41 images generate a cumulative visual power, an upshot rendered even more forceful by the intimate spaces of our prints and drawings gallery.

Created in 1937–38, when Lawrence was just 20 years old, the Toussaint L’Ouverture series launched the artist’s career on a national stage, and its success provided momentum to further elaborate his aesthetic vision. For the next six decades, Lawrence continued to harness the power of abstracted forms to address significant social issues, and a host of gallery and museum exhibitions amplified his fame. At the time of his death at the age of 82, he was among the most distinguished artists in the nation.” — Mark Cole, curator of American painting and sculpture at the Cleveland Museum of Art since 2006.
References and Further Reading:

• Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. New York: Verso, 1998.
• Brown, Gordon S. Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
• Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 2010 (1997).
• Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.
• Dubois, Laurent and John D. Garrigus. Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin, 2^nd ed., 2017.
• Dun, James Alexander. Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
• Eller, Anne. We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
• Forsdick, Charles and Christian Høgsbjerg, eds. The Black Jacobins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Forsdick, Charles and Christian Høgsbjerg. Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions. London: Pluto Press, 2017.
• Geggus, David Patrick, ed. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
• Geggus, David Patrick and Norman Fiering, eds. The World of the Haitian Revolution. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.
• Girard, Philippe R. The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801–1804. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2011.
• Girard, Philippe. Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Basic Books, 2016.
• Horne, Gerald. Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015.
• Hunt, Alfred. Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.
• Jackson, Maurice and Jacqueline Bacon, eds. African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents. New York: Routledge, 2010.
• James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 2nd ed., 1963/1989 (1938).
• Kaisary, Philip. The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2014.
• Kennedy, Roger G. (an illustrated documentary by David Larkin) When Art Worked: The New Deal, Art, and Democracy. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2009.
• L’Ouverture, Toussaint (Nick Nesbitt, ed.) The Haitian Revolution. London: Verso, 2008. [A collection of Louverture’s writings and speeches]
• Meltzer, Milton. Violins and Shovels: The WPA Arts Projects. New York: Delacorte Press, 1976.
• Morgan, Stacy I. Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004.
• Munro, Martin and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, eds. Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006.
• Musher, Sharon Ann. Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
• Nesbett, Peter T. and Michelle DuBois, eds. Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, in association with Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonné Project, 2000.
• Nesbett, Peter T. and Michelle DuBois (with assistance from Stephanie Ellis-Smith) Jacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings, and Murals (1935-1999)—A Catalogue Raisonné. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, in association with Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonné Project, 2000.
• Nesbitt, Nick. Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2008.
• Oldfield, J.R. Transatlantic Abolitionism: The Age of Revolution, 1787-1820. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Popkin, Jeremy D. You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Ros, Martin. Night of Fire: The Black Napoleon and The Battle for Haiti. New York: Sarpedon Publishers, 1994.
• Stewart, Whitney Nell and John Garrison Marks, eds. Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Stinchcombe, Arthur L. Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Taylor, Nick. American-Made — The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR put the Nation to Work. New York: Bantam Dell, 2008.
• West, Michael O., William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds. From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Black History Month (7): The Black Panther Party and Blacks on the Left

For today’s post—our seventh—in recognition, honor, and celebration of Black History Month, we are sharing two related bibliographies: the Black Panther Party, and Blacks on the Left.

Images: (above) The provision of medical care and service at one of the Black Panther Party’s free medical clinics (People’s Free Medical Clinic/PFMC).* (below) Bill Whitfield of the Black Panther chapter in Kansas City serves free breakfast to children before they go to school, April 16, 1969. (Photograph by William P. Straeter, AP) 

* See Alondra Nelson’s Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Black History Month (6): C.L.R. (Cyril Lionel Robert) James — cricketing Marxist, urbane revolutionary, Afro-Trinidadian socialist … and humanist

Today’s post (our sixth) in recognition, honor, and celebration of Black History Month is the “basic reading guide” for the life and work of C.L.R. James.

Psychoanalysis and Culture in the Weimar Republic

I recently finished reading Veronika Fuechtner’s Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond (University of California Press, 2011) and want to share some material from her conclusion which, I suspect (or hope), may interest those of you sympathetic to, if not convinced of the unique psychological, social psychological and political value of, psychoanalytic theory and praxis. 

Without going into specifics, we can characterize “Berlin Psychoanalytic” as a diverse network of people, discourses, and a corresponding cultural praxis. In particular, the psychoanalytic theory and practice that emerged from the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (BPI) after WW I can be distinguished by the prominence of the following elements: “the preoccupation with war neurosis that for some analysts and artists also translated into an investment in social change through psychoanalysis; the institutional or intellectual openness to other social movements and theoretical approaches of the time, such as socialism, feminism, and sexual science; the agenda to popularize psychoanalysis and, the confidence that media such as the daily press and film would not dilute what this ‘new science’ was about; the understanding of psychoanalysis as a highly topical practice of intervention connected to more than high bourgeois culture [this is largely owing to its overall Leftist orientation]; the desire to implement psychoanalysis in other social and cultural practices and theories and, conversely, the openness to engage with psychoanalysis in forms deemed nonscientific—that is, novels.” 

Berlin Psychoanalytic is best viewed “as a form of psychoanalytic modernism, and as such it also shares historical characteristics and aesthetic strategies with the psychoanalytic modernisms in Vienna, Paris, and London.” Regarding the last, “[o]n the level of personal relationships, the London Bloomsbury Circle is closely connected to the Berlin Psychoanalytic and, in its specific form of psychoanalytic modernism, most akin to it.”

Finally, and perhaps not surprisingly, Fuechtner notes that “there is still a lot to be said about the influence of race theories, Social Darwinism, and eugenics on the development of psychoanalytic theory in the German context.”

Further Reading:

• Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
• Arato, Andrew and Eike Gebhardt, eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1990.
• Blau, Eve. The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
• Blum, Mark E. and William Smaldone, eds. Austro-Marxism—The Ideology of Unity, Vol. 1: Austro-Marxist Theory and Strategy. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books (reprint), 2017 (Brill, 2016).
• Blum, Mark E. and William Smaldone, eds. Austro-Marxism—The Ideology of Unity, Vol. 2: Changing the World: The Politics of Austro-Marxism. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
• Bottomore, Ted and Patrick Goode, eds. Austro-Marxism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1978.
• Danto, Elizabeth Ann. Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
• Ferenczi, Sandor, Karl Abraham, Ernst Simmel, and Ernest Jones. Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses. Vienna: The International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1921.
• Forrester, John and Laura Cameron. Freud in Cambridge. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• Frank, Claudia (Sophie Leighton and Sue Young, trans.; Elizabeth Spillius, ed.) Melanie Klein in Berlin: Her First Psychoanalyses of Children. New York: Routledge, 2009.
• Fromm, Erich (Barbara Weinberger, tr. and Wolfgang Bonss, ed.) The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
• Gruber, Helmut. Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Jacoby, Russell. The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
• Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996 (1973).
• Kaes, Anton, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.
• Killen, Andreas. Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006.
• Leed, Eric J. No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
• Lerner, Paul. Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.
• Makari, George. Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
• Marcuse, Peter, “A Useful Installment of Socialist Work: Housing in Red Vienna in the 1920s,” in Rachel G. Bratt, Chester Hartman, and Ann Meyerson, eds. Critical Perspectives on Housing. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986.
• Meisel, Perry and Walter Kendrick, eds. Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
• Micale, Mark S., ed. The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880-1940. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.
• Nicholson, Virginia. Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living, 1900-1939. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
• Rabinbach, Anson, ed. The Austrian Socialist Experiment: Social Democracy and Austro-Marxism, 1918-1935. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985.
• Robinson, Paul. The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969.
• Wiggershaus, Rolf (Michael Robertson, trans.) The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 (German edition, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1986).
• Winter, Jay and Antoine Prost. The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Zaretsky, Eli. Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.
• Zaretsky, Eli. Political Freud: A History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Relevant Bibliographies:

• Freudian and Post-Freudian Psychology
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Marxism
• Marxism (or ‘the Left’), Art & Aesthetics
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Toward a “Realist” Political Psychology

Black History Month (5) Detroit: Labor and Industrialization, Race and Politics, Rebellion and Resurgence

“In 1968, John Watson was selected as editor of Wayne State University’s Daily Collegian, which he changed to ‘The South End,’ in recognition of Wayne State’s location south of General Motors. He turned the newspaper into a resource for radical causes, tackling race and class issues on a daily basis. This included reporting on the wildcat strikes of DRUM and other similar revolutionary actions.” Source: Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University 

Today’s post in honor and celebration of Black History Month is the compilation, Detroit: Labor & Industrialization, Race & Politics, Rebellion & Resurgence.