POLITICS OF FULLFILMENT POLITICS OF TRANSFIGURATION (see Gilroy)

2. POLITICS OF FULLFILMENT POLITICS OF TRANSFIGURATION (see Gilroy)

3. 1688: Pennsylvania Quakers petition • 1734: “Great Awakening” • 1740: South Carolina outlaws teaching slaves to write • 1773: Phyllis Wheatley, Poems • 1776: Declaration of Independence

4. 1810: Saartije Baartman (“the Hottentot Venus”), a young woman who suffered from steatopygia, is forced to leave Africa and travels to London • (blackness associated to hypersexuality)

5. Is this image traditional or subversive?

6. 1807: slave-trade is abolished • 1820: American Colonization Society • 1821: African Grove theatre • 1829: 3-day race riot breaks out in Cincinnati • 1831: Nat Turner leads slave uprising in Virginia

7. 1839: U.S. State Department rejects passport application by Philadelphia black man • 1845: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself • 1849: Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery and begins work with Underground Railroad • 1850: Fugitive Slave Act is strengthened • 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

8. 1859: Last U.S. slave ship lands in Alabama • 1863-1865: American Civil War • 1863: Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln • 1865: Slavery outlawed by 13th Amendment • “black codes” issued

9. 1865: “40 acres and a mule” are promised for compensation to freed African American slaves after the Civil war • 1868: Congress passes 14th Amendment • 1865: the Ku Klux Klan is created in Tennessee • 1890: Moses Fleetwood Walker plays baseball for Toledo Blue Stockings as one of the first black major leaguers • 1894: Bessie Smith is born in Texas

11. 1903: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk • “ It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”

12. 1903: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk • “In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”