Mixed Race Studies

Fredi Washington and Her Defining Role in Imitation of Life

Blog
Amistad Research Center
2018-07-02

The Fredi Washington papers at the Amistad Research Center highlights the life of the African American actress, dancer, and activist known for her stage and screen rolls from the 1920-1940s. She was born Fredericka Carolyn Washington in Savannah, Georgia on December 23, 1903, and was one of nine children of Robert T. and Harriet Walker Ward Washington. Fredi’s mother died when she was young, and she attended St. Elizabeth’s Convent in Cornwell Heights, Pennsylvania with her sister Isabel. Fredi moved to Harlem in 1919 to live with her grandmother. She left school and soon entered show business. She began her career in the early 1920s as a chorus dancer in Nobble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along. She adopted the stage name Edith Warren in 1926 when she acted in the lead role opposite Paul Robeson in Black Boy…

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Selected Writings on Race and Difference

Duke University Press
April 2021
376 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1166-8
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-1052-4

Stuart Hall (1932–2014)

Edited by:

Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities
Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences; Professor of American Studies
Graduate Center, City University of New York

In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, editors Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore gather more than twenty essays by Stuart Hall that highlight his extensive and groundbreaking engagement with race, representation, identity, difference, and diaspora. Spanning the whole of his career, this collection includes classic theoretical essays such as “The Whites of Their Eyes” (1981) and “Race, the Floating Signifier” (1997). It also features public lectures, political articles, and popular pieces that circulated in periodicals and newspapers, which demonstrate the breadth and depth of Hall’s contribution to public discourses of race. Foregrounding how and why the analysis of race and difference should be concrete and not merely descriptive, this collection gives organizers and students of social theory ways to approach the interconnections of race with culture and consciousness, state and society, policing and freedom.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race Is the Prism / Paul Gilroy
• Part I. Riots, Race, and Representation
  • 1. Absolute Beginnings: Reflections on the Secondary Modern Generation [1959]
  • 2. The Young Englanders [1967]
  • 3. Black Men, White Media [1974]
  • 4. Race and “Moral Panics” in Postwar Britain [1978]
  • 5. Summer in the City [1981]
  • 6. Drifting into a Law and Order Society: The 1979 Cobden Trust Human Rights Day Lecture [1982]
  • 7. The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media [1981]
• Part II. The Politics of Intellectual Work Against Racism
  • 8. Teaching Race [1980]
  • 9. Pluralism, Race and Class in Caribbean Society [1977]
  • 10. “Africa” Is Alive and Well in the Diaspora: Cultures of Resistance: Slavery, Religious Revival and Political Cultism in Jamaica [1975]
  • 11. Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance [1980]
  • 12. New Ethnicities [1983]
  • 13. Cultural Identity and Diaspora [1990]
  • 14. C. L. R. James: A Portrait [1992]
  • 15. Calypso Kings [2002]
• Part III. Cultural and Multicultural Questions
  • 16. Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity [1968]
  • 17. Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities [1998]
  • 18. Why Fanon? [1996]
  • 19. Race, the Floating Signifier: What More Is There to Say about “Race”? [1997]
  • 20. “In but Not of Europe”: Europe and Its Myths [2003]
  • 21. Cosmopolitan Promises, Multicultural Realities [2006]
  • 22. The Multicultural Question [2000]
• Index
• Place of First Publication

Book Review: A Cosmologist Throws Light on a Universe of Bias

Undark
2021-04-16

Joshua Roebke

Top: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an award-winning physicist,⁠ feminist, activist, and the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in the field of theoretical cosmology. Visual: Courtesy Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

In “The Disordered Cosmos,” Chanda Prescod-Weinstein contemplates the exclusionary culture of physics.

EVERY COMMUNITY GUARDS a creation story, a theory of cosmic origins. In much of sub-Saharan West Africa, for the past few thousand years, itinerant storytellers known as griots have communicated these and other tales through song. Cosmologists also intone a theory of cosmic origins, known as the Big Bang, albeit through journal articles and math.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a cosmologist who is adept with both equations and “the keeper of a deeply human impulse” to understand our universe. In her first book, “The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred⁠,” Prescod-Weinstein also admits she is a griot, one who knows the music of the cosmos but sings of earthbound concerns. She is an award-winning physicist,⁠ feminist, and activist who is not only, as she says, the first Jewish “queer agender Black woman⁠” to become a theoretical cosmologist, she is the first Black woman ever to earn a Ph.D. in the subject.

Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and a core faculty member in the department of women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She thus enjoys a unique frame of reference from which to appraise science and her fellow scientists. She is an insider whom others nonetheless cast as an outsider, because of her identity, orientation, and the tint of her skin. From the outside, however, she admits a fuller view of her field. She perceives the “structures that were invisible to people,”⁠ and reveals them…

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