{"id":17329,"date":"2011-10-27T18:02:50","date_gmt":"2011-10-27T18:02:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=17329"},"modified":"2011-10-27T18:02:50","modified_gmt":"2011-10-27T18:02:50","slug":"globalizing-a-race-to-publish-an-encyclopedia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=17329","title":{"rendered":"Globalizing a Race to Publish an Encyclopedia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Globalizing a Race to Publish an Encyclopedia<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

American Nineteenth Century History<\/a>
\nVolume 11, Issue 1<\/a> (2010)
\npages 79-94
\nDOI: 10.1080\/14664651003616966<\/a><\/p>\n

Michael Benjamin<\/strong>, Independent Scholar
\nAfrican American Print Culture
\nCleveland, Ohio, USA<\/p>\n

In 1912, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray<\/a> published a prospectus for his \u201cHistorical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race throughout the World.\u201d He promised to publish what literary historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.<\/a>, would describe as the \u201cGrail\u201d for black scholars. As Murray planned his encyclopedia in the first decade of the twentieth century, persons of African descent in the United States were killed and assaulted because of their race, and racial identification was as critical an issue as it was also ambiguous.<\/strong> Moreover, despite its ambiguity, or perhaps, because of it, race, in 1912 and since the Naturalization Act of 1790<\/a>, had everything to do with American citizenship. In Murray\u2019s time, whether a person was identified on the one hand as \u201cwhite\u201d or \u201coctoroon<\/a>\u201d versus an identity as \u201cblack,\u201d \u201cNegro,\u201d \u201cmulatto<\/a>,\u201d or \u201cquadroon<\/a>\u201d influenced whether or not that person could exercise his rights as an American citizen (with her<\/em> rights barely entering the question). However, race, as Murray understood with its skin color codes shading the meaning of American citizenship, was much more a social construction than it was biological evidence of a person\u2019s hereditary origins. Formulating a strategy in support of black American citizenship, Murray developed a global interpretation of the black American experience from a pragmatically ambiguous cultural practice to compose an identity for himself, his people, and his proposed encyclopedia.<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Globalizing a Race to Publish an Encyclopedia American Nineteenth Century History Volume 11, Issue 1 (2010) pages 79-94 DOI: 10.1080\/14664651003616966 Michael Benjamin, Independent Scholar African American Print Culture Cleveland, Ohio, USA In 1912, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray published a prospectus for his \u201cHistorical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race throughout the World.\u201d He promised […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,20],"tags":[2043,8077,8078],"class_list":["post-17329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-american-nineteenth-century-history","tag-daniel-alexander-payne-murray","tag-michael-benjamin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}