Long-term Research Fellowships at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
FAIN: RA-259339-18
New York Public Library (New York, NY 10016-0109)
Kevin Young (Project Director: August 2017 to April 2020)
Brent Hayes Edwards (Project Director: April 2020 to present)
18 months of stipend support (2-3 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.
The Schomburg Scholars-in-Residence Program (SIR) is one of The New York Public Library’s (NYPL) landmark research Fellowship programs. This project will bring three Fellows annually to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture during the 2019-2022 academic years. During 6-month residential fellowships, these SIR Fellows will have the opportunity to use the Schomburg’s renowned collections in their research into the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora, fostering the creation of new humanities publications in the fields of African, African American, and African Diaspora studies. NYPL is requesting National Endowment for the Humanities support from the FPIRI program to support 18 months’ worth of Fellowship stipends each year, totaling 54 months of support over the grant period, along with selection expenses for the 2019-2020, 2020-2021, and 2021-2022 cohorts.
Associated Products
Educating Harlem A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community (Book)Title: Educating Harlem A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community
Author: Ansley T. Erickson
Editor: Ernest Morrell
Abstract: Over the course of the twentieth century, education was a key site for envisioning opportunities for African Americans, but the very schools they attended sometimes acted as obstacles to black flourishing. Educating Harlem brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to provide a broad consideration of the history of schooling in perhaps the nation’s most iconic black community.
The volume traces the varied ways that Harlem residents defined and pursued educational justice for their children and community despite consistent neglect and structural oppression. Contributors investigate the individuals, organizations, and initiatives that fostered educational visions, underscoring their breadth, variety, and persistence. Their essays span the century, from the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance through the 1970s fiscal crisis and up to the present. They tell the stories of Harlem residents from a wide variety of social positions and life experiences, from young children to expert researchers to neighborhood mothers and ambitious institution builders who imagined a dynamic array of possibilities from modest improvements to radical reshaping of their schools. Representing many disciplinary perspectives, the chapters examine a range of topics including architecture, literature, film, youth and adult organizing, employment, and city politics. Challenging the conventional rise-and-fall narratives found in many urban histories, the book tells a story of persistent struggle in each phase of the twentieth century. Educating Harlem paints a nuanced portrait of education in a storied community and brings much-needed historical context to one of the most embattled educational spaces today.
Year: 2019
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231182218
Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning (Book)Title: Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning
Author: Rafia Zafar
Abstract: Food studies, once trendy, has settled into the public arena. In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. Recipes for Respect bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream.
Beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing nearly to the present day, African Americans have often been stereotyped as illiterate kitchen geniuses. Rafia Zafar addresses this error, highlighting the long history of accomplished African Americans within our culinary traditions, as well as the literary and entrepreneurial strategies for civil rights and respectability woven into the written records of dining, cooking, and serving. Whether revealed in cookbooks or fiction, memoirs or hotel-keeping manuals, agricultural extension bulletins or library collections, foodways knowledge sustained Black strategies for self-reliance and dignity, the preservation of historical memory, and civil rights and social mobility. If, to follow Mary Douglas's dictum, food is a field of action-that is, a venue for social intimacy, exchange, or aggression-African American writing about foodways constitutes an underappreciated critique of the racialized social and intellectual spaces of the United States.
Year: 2019
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820353663
Stalled in the Movement: The Black Panther Party in Night Catches Us (Book Section)Title: Stalled in the Movement: The Black Panther Party in Night Catches Us
Author: Ayesha K. Hardison
Editor: Brian Purnell
Editor: Jeanne Theoharis
Abstract: Did American racism originate in the liberal North? An inquiry into the system of institutionalized racism created by Northern Jim Crow
Jim Crow was not a regional sickness, it was a national cancer. Even at the high point of twentieth century liberalism in the North, Jim Crow racism hid in plain sight. Perpetuated by colorblind arguments about “cultures of poverty,” policies focused more on black criminality than black equality. Procedures that diverted resources in education, housing, and jobs away from poor black people turned ghettos and prisons into social pandemics. Americans in the North made this history. They tried to unmake it, too.
Liberalism, rather than lighting the way to vanquish the darkness of the Jim Crow North gave racism new and complex places to hide. The twelve original essays in this anthology unveil Jim Crow’s many strange careers in the North. They accomplish two goals: first, they show how the Jim Crow North worked as a system to maintain social, economic, and political inequality in the nation’s most liberal places; and second, they chronicle how activists worked to undo the legal, economic, and social inequities born of Northern Jim Crow policies, practices, and ideas.
The book ultimately dispels the myth that the South was the birthplace of American racism, and presents a compelling argument that American racism actually originated in the North.
Year: 2019
Publisher: New York: New York University Press
Book Title: The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside of the South
ISBN: 9781479881192,
To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (Book)Title: To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism
Editor: Keisha Blain,
Editor: Tiffany Gill
Abstract: Black women undertook an energetic and unprecedented engagement with internationalism from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. In many cases, their work reflected a complex effort to merge internationalism with issues of women's rights and with feminist concerns. To Turn the Whole World Over examines these and other issues with a collection of cutting-edge essays on black women's internationalism in this pivotal era and beyond. Analyzing the contours of gender within black internationalism, scholars examine the range and complexity of black women's global engagements. At the same time, they focus on these women's remarkable experiences in shaping internationalist movements and dialogues. The essays explore the travels and migrations of black women; the internationalist writings of women from Paris to Chicago to Spain; black women advocating for internationalism through art and performance; and the involvement of black women in politics, activism, and global freedom struggles. Contributors: Nicole Anae, Keisha N. Blain, Brandon R. Byrd, Stephanie Beck Cohen, Anne Donlon, Tiffany N. Florvil, Kim Gallon, Dayo F. Gore, Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Grace V. Leslie, Michael O. West, and Julia Erin Wood
Year: 2019
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 025208411X
A Woman’s Trip: Domestic Violence and Black Feminist Healing in Ntozake Shange’s 'For Colored Girls' (Book Section)Title: A Woman’s Trip: Domestic Violence and Black Feminist Healing in Ntozake Shange’s 'For Colored Girls'
Author: Soyica Diggs Colbert
Editor: Robert J Patterson
Abstract: The post-civil rights era of the 1970s offered African Americans an all-too-familiar paradox. Material and symbolic gains contended with setbacks fueled by resentment and reaction. African American artists responded with black approaches to expression that made history in their own time and continue to exercise an enormous influence on contemporary culture and politics. This collection's fascinating spectrum of topics begins with the literary and cinematic representations of slavery from the 1970s to the present. Other authors delve into visual culture from Blaxploitation to the art of Betye Saar to stage works like A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White as well as groundbreaking literary works like Corregidora and Captain Blackman. A pair of concluding essays concentrate on institutional change by looking at the Seventies surge of black publishing and by analyzing Ntozake Shange's for colored girls... in the context of current controversies surrounding sexual violence. Throughout, the writers reveal how Seventies black cultural production anchors important contemporary debates in black feminism and other issues while spurring the black imagination to thrive amidst abject social and political conditions.Contributors: Courtney Baker, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Madhu Dubey, Nadine Knight, Monica White Ndounou, Kinohi Nishikawa, Samantha Pinto, Jermaine Singleton, Terrion L. Williamson, and Lisa Woolfork.
Year: 2019
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Book Title: Black Cultural Production After Civil Rights
ISBN: 9780252051630
The Rise of Brown Identity in Jamaica (Book Section)Title: The Rise of Brown Identity in Jamaica
Author: Belinda Edmondson
Editor: Tim Barringer
Editor: Wayne Modest
Abstract: Victorian Jamaica explores the extraordinary surviving archive of visual representation and material objects to provide a comprehensive account of Jamaican society during Queen Victoria's reign over the British Empire, from 1837 to 1901. In their analyses of material ranging from photographs of plantation laborers and landscape paintings to cricket team photographs, furniture, and architecture, as well as a wide range of texts, the contributors trace the relationship between black Jamaicans and colonial institutions; contextualize race within ritual and performance; and outline how material and visual culture helped shape the complex politics of colonial society. By narrating Victorian history from a Caribbean perspective, this richly illustrated volume—featuring 270 full-color images—offers a complex and nuanced portrait of Jamaica that expands our understanding of the wider history of the British Empire and Atlantic world during this period.
Year: 2018
Publisher: Duke University Press
Book Title: Victorian Jamaica
ISBN: 978-0-8223-606
Mother Tongues (Book)Title: Mother Tongues
Author: Tsitsi Jaji
Abstract: Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s second full-length collection of poems, Mother Tongues, begins at home, with the first words and loves we learn, and the most intimate vows we swear. How deep does your language go back? Jaji’s artful verse is a three-tiered gourd of sustenance, vessel, and folklore. The tongues speak the beginnings and the present; they capture and claim the losses, the ironies, and a poet’s human evolution. Mother Tongues is a collection of language unto itself that translates directly to the heart.
Year: 2019
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780810141360
The Haiti Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Book)Title: The Haiti Reader: History, Culture, Politics
Editor: Laurent Dubois
Editor: Kaiama L. Glover
Editor: Nadève Ménard
Editor: Millery Polyné
Editor: Chantalle F. Verna
Abstract: While Haiti established the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere and was the first black country to gain independence from European colonizers, its history is not well known in the Anglophone world. The Haiti Reader introduces readers to Haiti's dynamic history and culture from the viewpoint of Haitians from all walks of life. Its dozens of selections—most of which appear here in English for the first time—are representative of Haiti's scholarly, literary, religious, visual, musical, and political cultures, and range from poems, novels, and political tracts to essays, legislation, songs, and folk tales. Spanning the centuries between precontact indigenous Haiti and the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, the Reader covers widely known episodes in Haiti's history, such as the U.S. military occupation and the Duvalier dictatorship, as well as overlooked periods such as the decades immediately following Haiti's “second independence” in 1934. Whether examining issues of political upheaval, the environment, or modernization, The Haiti Reader provides an unparalleled look at Haiti's history, culture, and politics.
Year: 2020
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 1478007605
The Life and Political Contributions of Hubert Harrison (Article)Title: The Life and Political Contributions of Hubert Harrison
Author: Brian Kwoba
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://newpol.org/review/the-life-and-political-contributions-of-hubert-harrison/Format: Journal
Periodical Title: New Politics Vol. XVIII No. 4