Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACT: This essay celebrates John Wilson's visual masterpiece, The Richard Wright Suite (2001), a series of six elegant etchings that reimagine Richard Wright's novella, "Down by the Riverside." Wilson's images, and the story that inspired them, remember lives lost to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Just as Wright's novella has been associated with accounts of the flood lyricized in blues music, Wilson's etchings visualize the blues by depicting the Mississippi River as a striking blue stream. Laboriously crafted in aquatint, the river not only memorializes the power of climate disasters fomented by industrial capitalism, but honors those Black lives claimed in their devastation.

'Africana Sociology' begins with a reappraisal of the 'image of Africa' in the form of sociology's theoretical narrative about modernity's spatial and temporal order. Early sociologists, like Auguste Comte and Lester Ward, conceived sociology as a secular discourse, although it transmitted Protestant values that reduced people of African descent to fetish objects. In the work of Charles H. Long, the 'image of Africa' appears in the African American religious imagination because it – more than the land in which Blacks were enslaved – authenticated their origins. In my appropriation of the concept, it is a semiotic device that, through its dialectical relationship with the 'image of involuntary presence', structures sociology's narrative form. Like in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, the image of Africa designates the American nation as a site of crisis, while imbuing Black subjectivity with a wider consciousness of modernity.