American Studies Research Seminars, 2016

The American Studies Research Seminar series for Semester 2  kicks off next Thursday (4th February), when we’ll be hearing from our very own Megan Hunt, a third-year PhD student in the department. Megan’s paper is entitled "Protective Fortress? 'The Southern Black Church' in Hollywood Civil Rights Melodrama." The seminar will be in Lipman 332 from 4.30pm.

2016 Seminar Series

Thur, 4 Feb, 4:30, Lip 332: Megan Hunt (Northumbria Univ), “Protective Fortress? ‘The Southern Black Church’ in Hollywood Civil Rights Melodrama.”

Thur, 18 Feb, 4:30, Lip 332: Simon Cooper (American Studies Early Career Visiting Scholar, Northumbria Univ), “Lost in the Ocean of Sorrow: Dissonant Counterpoint and Reznikoff’s Testimony.”

Wed, 24 Feb, 4:30, Lip 121: Matthew Shaw (curator of US collections at the British Library), title TBD. Cosponsored with English.

Wed, 13 April, 4:30, Lip 121: Robert Cook (Univ of Sussex), “The Death of Jefferson Davis, the Making of the New South, and the Thorny Problem of North-South Reconciliation after the American Civil War.” Sponsored by History.

The Shadow of Selma: Selma and the Voting Rights Act, 1965-2015

The programme for the upcoming conference on Selma and the Voting Rights Act is now available. See the panels and plenary session below, or download the full programme here. The Northumbria University website notes that the American Studies programme will host "its own 'Shadow of Selma' initiative with a major international conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma protests and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The conference runs on April 8 and 9 and culminates with a public lecture by celebrated journalist and author Gary Younge at The Sage, Gateshead. Younge’s lecture will also launch the 60th Anniversary Conference of the British Association for American Studies, which is coming to Northumbria for the first time."*

The Shadow of Selma: 

Selma and the Voting Rights Act, 1965-2015

Northumbria University American Studies International Conference

April 8-9 2015
Sponsorship: Northumbria University and the US Embassy, London

WED. 8TH APRIL
City Campus East 1 Room 007

9.00-9.20 Coffee & Tea

9.20-9.30 Introduction from Professor Brian Ward

9.30-11.00: PANEL A: Selma and Grassroots Organisation

Chair: Dr. Ashley Riley Sousa (Middle Tennessee State University)

Dr. Ben Houston (Newcastle University)
“Before the Bridge: Grassroots Activism in Selma”

Professor Alma Billingslea-Brown (Spelman College)
“Selma: Bridge, Boundary and Beyond”

11.00-11.30 Coffee & Tea

11.30–1.00 PANEL B: Selma and Media Coverage

Chair: Dr. Joe Street (Northumbria University)

Mark Walmsley (Leeds University)
“‘They Couldn’t Just Write it the Way it Wasn’t Anymore’: Examining Mainstream Coverage of the 1965 Selma Campaign”

Professor Aniko Bodroghkozy (University of Virginia)
“Mediating Selma: 1965, 2015”

1.00-2.00 Lunch

2.00-4.00 PANEL C: Responses to Selma and the Voting Rights Act

Chair: Dr. Randall Stephens (Northumbria University)

Professor Tony Badger (Northumbria University)
“Backlash or Adjustment? The White South responds to Selma”

Professor Clive Webb (University of Sussex)
“‘We cannot escape the same challenge’: Britain, France and the US Voting Rights Act”

Dr. George Lewis (Leicester University)
“Sidelining Selma’s Segregationists: Memory, Strategy, Ideology and Agency”

7.00 Conference Dinner at Blackfriars Restaurant

THU. 9TH APRIL

9.00-9.30 Coffee & Tea

09.30-11.00 PANEL D: The Supreme Court, Voting Rights, and Economic Citizenship

Chair: Kristine McCusker (Middle Tennessee State University)

J. Douglas Smith (Colburn Music Conservatory)
“The Dirksen Amendment and the Effective Repeal of the Voting Rights Act”

Dr. Lynn Itagaki (Ohio State University)
“Shareholder, Debtor, Voter: Economic Citizenship in the Roberts Court Deregulation of Campaign Finance Reform and The Voting Rights Act”

11.00-11.30 Coffee & Tea

11.30-1.00 PANEL E: Race, Voting, and Wealth in the South Since 1965

Chair: Professor Brian Ward (Northumbria University)

Dr. Devin Fergus (Ohio State University)
"The Third Reconstruction: The Racial Wealth Gap and the Post-Civil Rights US South"

Dr. George Derek Musgrove (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) (co-author with Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Ohio State University)
“The decline of ‘freedom politics’ in the midst of the Second Redemption: black voter mobilization and white voter suppression in the Alabama Black Belt, 1965-2010”

1.00-2.00 Lunch

2.00-3.30 PANEL F: Shelby County vs. Holder (2013) and the South Today

Chair: Dr. Nick Hayward (Northumbria University)

Dr. Barbara Combs (University of Mississippi)
“Purpose Nor Effect: How the Rise of Colorblind Racism Opened the Door For the Supreme Court Decision in Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder”

Dr. James Hall (Rochester Institute of Technology)
“A Newer New South:  Reading Shelby County v. Holder in Post Racial America”
 
5.00-6.30 Keynote (at the Baltic, with the British Association of American Studies Conference): Gary Younge (The Guardian)

Showing of film Selma with Intro Lecture by Prof Brian Ward, January 31

The North East premiere of the new feature film Selma will take place at the Star & Shadow Cinema at 2pm on Saturday, January 31, a week before its official release.  The movie tells the story of a pivotal moment in the African-American fight for voting rights in the 1960s South. Northumbria Professor in American Studies Brian Ward will give a short introductory talk on the film before the screening.

Film critic A.O. Scott writes of the movie in a recent New York Times review:

While entirely satisfying on its own, “Selma” seems to contain the seeds of at least a dozen other movies — a reminder of how fertile the civil rights era is and how poorly it has been explored by popular culture. Spike Lee and Denzel Washington gave us a fine Malcolm X (who shows up here briefly, played by Nigel Thatch), but how long will we have to wait for a biopic devoted to Bayard Rustin (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Toussaint) or Andrew Young (Andre Holland)? Or for a daring director to tackle the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose internal tensions and impatience with Dr. King surface here in arguments between James Forman (Trai Byers) and the future Congressman John Lewis (Stephan James)? Where is the premium-cable mini-series about Diane Nash (Ms. Thompson) and James Bevel (Common)? The Martin Luther King-Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo) buddy movie? The “Law & Order” spinoff about the career of the Justice Department lawyer John Doar (Alessandro Nivola)? They are all here, in miniature, but “Selma” made me impatient for more. . .

Edmund Pettus Bridge scene from the film.

“Selma” is not a manifesto, a battle cry or a history lesson. It’s a movie: warm, smart, generous and moving in two senses of the word. It will call forth tears of grief, anger, gratitude and hope. And like those pilgrims on the road to Montgomery, it does not rest.*

The showing of the film at the Star and Shadow will also serve as a fundraiser for the Journey to Justice/Shadow of Selma Project. In Spring 2015, J2J/SoS will bring an exhibition on the US Civil Rights Movement and its connections to struggles for social justice and democracy in the North East to the Discovery and Great North Museums, as well as running various public engagement and educational events on similar themes.

Tickets cost £10 each and are available here.

For more information on tickets and Journey to Justice, contact Bethany Elen Kirtley Coyle. For more information on the Star & Shadow, go here.

Obamascare

Nick Hayward

Behind the Obama and Democrat obituaries and the gleeful Republican taunts about a comprehensive repudiation of Obama’s policies, lie some less well-publicised, but nonetheless significant, aspects of Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Fox News broadcasts President Obama addressing the
nation on Nov 5th, 2014, after the sweeping Republican
victories in the midterm elections

Turnout in midterms rarely ever attains the levels of voting in presidential contests but the early figures for this week’s poll suggests that the numbers have slumped further, possibly to a point where barely one-third of the electorate turned out to vote. It is generally accepted that amongst those most difficult to galvanise into voting are poorer sections of American society, the young, ethnic minorities and women – the very groups amongst which Obama’s Democrats have scored some notable successes in garnering support. So, turnout was always going to be a worry for the Democrats. And yet these elections were fought with additional obstacles to voting in place, the effects of which were felt most by these very groups. Tuesday’s elections were contested under a raft of new electoral rules introduced by many states following the Supreme Court’s landmark Shelby County v Holder 2013 judgement suspending those elements of the Voting Rights Act, which had sought to protect vulnerable groups from discrimination in electoral practices designed to prevent them from registering to vote or from actually voting. Early voting was curbed by some states and tougher voter ID requirements were also introduced. The conclusions of one group of academics looking at these new electoral laws are not uncommon amongst informed commentaries on the subject:

Specifically, the Republican Party has proved incapable of expanding its appeal among the much faster growing minority electorate—which just so happens to exhibit notably lower turnout rates vis-à-vis the stagnant non-Hispanic white electorate that is more supportive of Republican candidates. Faced with this reality, the GOP appears to have opted for coalition maintenance instead of coalition expansion (Karol 2009), by embracing several restrictive voting reforms whose true purpose is to marginally curtail the participation of voters typically aligned with the Democratic Party.*

If you own a gun, a car, a passport or have been in the military, it isn’t so difficult to vote in Texas, but if you have no acceptable photo ID, can’t find you birth certificate and only have the likes of utility bills with your name and address, then the obstacles are considerable.

Of course, much more was happening in these elections. Sure, amongst Democrats there was considerable disappointment with the Obama Presidency and its failure to live up to expectations and this will have depressed the turnout somewhat.  And yet, at the same time as Democrats in fierce battles with Republican opponents seemed to adopt a strategy of tacking rightwards and shunned the notion of trumpeting the Obama achievements on healthcare and the economy, voters were swinging behind a raft of progressive measures covering the minimum wage, personal & medical marijuana use, prison sentencing, abortion and gun control in both blue and red states. So the socially liberal American voter is there and voting: did Democrat candidates lack the nerve to go out and rally them? Or, was it a more wily game where, knowing who was most likely to turn out, the Democrats decided to pitch for some of the traditional Republican vote? Either way, it didn’t work.

This post also appeared on the Northumbria University Politics blog.  Nick Hayward is Principal Lecturer in Politics at Northumbria and teaches on the American Studies programme. He was Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at the State University of New York, Fredonia, 2002-3. He is currently researching British and American post-war views of Empire.