Crazy Patriotism and Angry (Post)Black Women

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Notes

1. I want to thank Joni Omi Jones for helping me remember the “usefulness” and generative force of anger for black women.

2. I place in quotations marks the terms “America” and “American” as a critical comment against the discourse of crazy patriotism and to reflect my own dissatisfaction with these terms as imperialistic and insulting to other histories, populations, and nations that occupy the North American continent.

3. This observation is made in the article by Ta-Nehisis Coates, “America Girl,” The Atlantic Monthly, January/February, 2009.

4. Nicholas De Genova, Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and Illegality in Mexico Chicago (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005), 66.

5. De Genova, 68.

6. Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 124.

7. Lorde, 124.

8. Lorde, 124.

9. See Lorde, “The Uses of Anger.”

10. I am referring here to Ida B. Wells’ biography by Paula Giddings where Giddings writes of Wells’ transforming her anger against racism and lynching into the most acclaimed anti-lynching campaign in the United States, as well as to the (in)famous response by Ertha Kitt toward Lady Bird Johnson and her guests at a White House luncheon in the 1960s where Kitt angrily excoriated the attendees for their complicity in US racism.

11. Relative to the agendas of the oppressed, see Lorde, “The Uses of Anger.”

12. Sarah Valdez, “Art in America,” in Freestylin—Studio Museum of Harlem (New York: Arts Publications, 2001), 1–3.

13. I do not include the hyphen in order to avoid the suggestion that postblack is after blackness—a historical marker where “blackness” is surpassed and no longer relevant (e.g., postcolonial as opposed to post-colonial). I include it to underscore an existential shift and political re-articulation that is co-temporal with being “black,” where blackness does not disappear in this time and space, and where blackness, race, and racism still interpenetrate in this historical moment, but in ways that are both the same and different from the past.

14. Holland Cotter, “Beyond Multiculturalism, Freedom?” New York Times, 29 July 2008, 4.

15. Cotter, 4.

16. Coats, 6.

17. Coats, 6.

18. David A. Hollinger, “Obama, The Instability of Color Liens, And The Promise of A Postethnic Future,” Callaloo 31/4 (2008): 1033–37, see 1037.

19. Hollinger, 1037.

20. The March 2009 issue of Vogue magazine, with Michelle Obama on the cover, states: “Michelle Obama: The First Lady The World's Been Waiting For.”

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D. Soyini Madison

D. Soyini Madison1 is a Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, African American Studies, and Anthropology at Northwestern University. Madison is now serving as the Interim Director of the Program of African Studies. Her latest book, Acts of Activism: Human Rights As Performance (available in November from Cambridge UP), focuses on how local rights activists in Ghana, West Africa employ modes of performance as a tactic in the defense of women's rights, public health, and water democracy. Madison's other recent publications include: Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics, and Performance and The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies (co-edited with Judith Hamera)