Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America since 1940

by Jonathan Scott Holloway

Overview

How do we balance the desire for tales of exceptional accomplishment with the need for painful doses of reality? How hard do we work to remember our past or to forget it? These are some of the questions that Jonathan Scott Holloway addresses in this exploration of race memory from the dawn of the modern civil rights era to the present. Relying on social science, documentary film, dance, popular literature, museums, memoir, and the tourism trade, Holloway explores the stories black Americans have told about their past and why these stories are vital to understanding a modern black identity. In the process, Holloway asks much larger questions about the value of history and facts when memories do violence to both.
Making discoveries about his own past while researching this book, Holloway weaves first-person and family memories into the traditional third-person historian's perspective. The result is a highly readable, rich, and deeply personal narrative that will be familiar to some, shocking to others, and thought-provoking to everyone.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469610719
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	10/15/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Jonathan Scott Holloway is provost of Northwestern University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: The Scars of Memory 1

1 Editing and the Art of Forgetfulness in Social Science 14

2 Memory and Racial Humiliation in Popular Literature 40

3 The Black Body as Archive of Memory 67

4 Black Scholars and Memory in the Age of Black Studies 102

5 The Silences in a Civil Rights Narrative 135

6 Heritage Tourism, Museums of Horror, and the Commerce of Memory 174

Epilogue: Memory in the Diaspora 214

Notes 231

Bibliography 251

Index 269

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

You may find it to be quite eye-opening. For you, Jim Crow Wisdom might spur you to share a few good stories."—Terri Schlichenmeyer

An evocative, beautifully written exploration of knowledge production, memory, and self-creation in African American life. Jim Crow Wisdom is compelling."—Imani Perry, Princeton University

Part history, part memoir, part cultural analysis, Jim Crow Wisdom is a riveting, beautiful, tragicomic meditation on the work and consequences of forgetting. This is not just another book about memory. Rather, it is a soul-bearing, audacious act of truth and reconciliation, an accounting of those stories we suppress and sanitize and revise, and a critical examination of what's at stake. A gifted story-teller, Jonathan Holloway isn't interested in "airing dirty laundry," but asking whether it was ever dirty in the first place and who really owns our traumatic past? Jim Crow wisdom, in other words, is not a "Black Thang" but an American dilemma."— Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times

Beautifully written and broadly accessible, Jim Crow Wisdom opens up entirely new conversations about what we think to be familiar topics. Jonathan Holloway's reading of film, literature, tourist sites, and the very act of remembering itself does more than merely tell us about African American identity; it helps us understand the story of this nation—even if it is a story that many people don't want to tell."—Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/19/2013
“What do we tell our children? What stories do we pass along so they know their history?” These questions permeate Yale historian Holloway’s riveting account of how we see, study, and learn about racial identity, and how we acquire the memories that shape that identity. Holloway (Confronting the Veil) surveys the social, political, and cultural milieu of race in the latter half of the 20th century, from a review of various sociologists’ perspectives and the controversies surrounding them in light of “the explosion of social science literature in the 1940s,” to the role played by the Johnson family of magazines, the impact of 1960s documentaries, and the development of Black Studies programs in the 1970s. He visits American plantations, museums, and other important sites before taking his research to places such as Ghana and Liverpool. The book is noteworthy for the clarity with which Holloway treats historical events and persons buried in ephemera, and for its abundance of detail. Part jargon-free academic treatise and pertinent personal memoir, the result is an evocative bildungsroman in which we see the social scientist as a young man become the provocative historian. 18 illus. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

[A] riveting account of how we see, study, and learn about racial identity, and how we acquire the memories that shape that identity. . . . An evocative bildungsroman in which we see the social scientist as a young man become the provocative historian."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Shows how racial alienation continues to stoke a centuries-old longing for home in many African-Americans."—Chronicle of Higher Education

A very valuable contribution that has broader significance than a traditional history book. . . . Highly recommended. All levels/libraries."—Choice

An outstanding and beautifully written book that opens up a whole new conversation about the role of memory, knowledge production, and identity formation within African American life."—Journal of Southern History

With a scholarly perspective, [Holloway] engages with his own family lore and makes a fair amount of self-discovery in this exploration of modern black identity."—Stanford Magazine

A book worth careful study. . . . A nuanced account of African American identity and survival during the age of Jim Crow."—North Carolina Historical Review

The author's trenchant wit simultaneously unsettles and engages the reader. . . . A significant, and personal, contribution to the burgeoning field of memory studies, and black historical memory in particular." —American Historical Review

Outstanding."—Oral History Review

[An] artful, moving book."—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

Combines memoir and family history with social science to look at the stories that African-Americans have told about themselves and to their children."—faithandleadership.com

Beautifully written and brimming with insight. . . . The force of Holloway's book is that it reveals the more deeply hidden injuries of race as they include the middle class, the ones rarely seen from the outside."—Florida Historical Quarterly

Expands burgeoning scholarship beginning to apply memory studies to histories of the Jim Crow, civil rights, and post-civil rights. . . . Succeeds in showing how class produces a politics of memory that has shaped blacks' understandings of and confrontations with racial injustice."—Louisiana History

From the Publisher