Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles: Critical Perspectives on Blackness, Belonging, and Civil Rights

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.

Violet Showers Johnson is Professor of History and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Texas A&M University.

Gundolf Graml is Associate Professor of German at Agnes Scott College.

Patricia Williams Lessane is Executive Director of the Avery Institute of Afro-American History & Culture at the College of Charleston.