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The first decades of the twentieth century were years of dramatic change in Zanzibar, a time when the social, economic, and political lives of island residents were in incredible flux, framed by the abolition of slavery, the introduction of colonialism, and a tide of urban migration. Pastimes and Politics explores the era from the perspective of the urban poor, highlighting the numerous and varied ways that recently freed slaves and other immigrants to town struggled to improve their individual and collective lives and to create a sense of community within this new environment. In this study Laura Fair explores a range of cultural and social practices that gave expression to slaves’ ideas of emancipation, as well as how such ideas and practices were gendered.

Pastimes and Politics examines the ways in which various cultural practices, including taarab music, dress, football, ethnicity, and sexuality, changed during the early twentieth century in relation to islanders’ changing social and political identities. Professor Fair argues that cultural changes were not merely reflections of social and political transformations. Rather, leisure and popular culture were critical practices through which the colonized and former slaves transformed themselves and the society in which they lived.

Methodologically innovative and clearly written, Pastimes and Politics is accessible to specialists and general readers alike. It is a book that should find wide use in courses on African history, urbanization, popular culture, gender studies, or emancipation.

What does it mean to be Black? If Blackness is not biological in origin but socially and discursively constructed, does the meaning of Blackness change over time and space? In Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Michelle M. Wright argues that although we often explicitly define Blackness as a “what,” it in fact always operates as a “when” and a “where.”

By putting lay discourses on spacetime from physics into conversation with works on identity from the African Diaspora, Physics of Blackness explores how Middle Passage epistemology subverts racist assumptions about Blackness, yet its linear structure inhibits the kind of inclusive epistemology of Blackness needed in the twenty-first century. Wright then engages with bodies frequently excluded from contemporary mainstream consideration: Black feminists, Black queers, recent Black African immigrants to the West, and Blacks whose histories may weave in and out of the Middle Passage epistemology but do not cohere to it.

Physics of Blackness takes the reader on a journey both known and unfamiliar—from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravity to the contemporary politics of diasporic Blackness in the academy, from James Baldwin’s postwar trope of the Eiffel Tower as the site for diasporic encounters to theoretical particle physics’ theory of multiverses and superpositioning, to the almost erased lives of Black African women during World War II. Accessible in its style, global in its perspective, and rigorous in its logic, Physics of Blackness will change the way you look at Blackness.

Twenty-one writers answer the call for literature that addresses who we are by understanding where we are--where, for each of them, being in some way part of academia. In personal essays, they imaginatively delineate and engage the diverse, occasionally unexpected play of place in shaping them, writers and teachers in varied environments, with unique experiences and distinctive world views, and reconfiguring for them conjunctions of identity and setting, here, there, everywhere, and in between.

Contents

I Introduction Writing Place, Jennifer Sinor

II Here
Six Kinds of Rain: Searching for a Place in the Academy, Kathleen Dean Moore and Erin E. Moore
The Work the Landscape Calls Us To, Michael Sowder
Valley Language, Diana Garcia
What I Learned from the Campus Plumber, Charles Bergman
M-I-Crooked Letter-Crooked Letter, Katherine Fischer
On Frogs, Poems, and Teaching at a Rural Community College, Sean W. Henne

III There
Levittown Breeds Anarchists Film at 11:00, Kathryn T. Flannery
Living in a Transformed Desert, Mitsuye Yamada
A More Fortunate Destiny, Jayne Brim Box
Imagined Vietnams, Charles Waugh

IV Everywhere
Teaching on Stolen Ground, Deborah A. Miranda
The Blind Teaching the Blind: The Academic as Naturalist, or Not, Robert Michael Pyle
Where Are You From? Lee Torda

V In Between
Going Away to Think, Scott Slovic
Fronteriza Consciousness: The Site and Language of the Academy and of Life, Norma Elia Cantu
Bones of Summer, Mary Clearman Blew
Singing, Speaking, and Seeing a World, Janice M. Gould
Making Places Work: Felt Sense, Identity, and Teaching, Jeffrey M. Buchanan

VI Coda
Running in Place: The Personal at Work, in Motion, on Campus, and in the Neighborhood, Rona Kaufman