For more than a decade a vicious civil war has torn the fabric of society in the West African country of Sierra Leone, forcing thousands to flee their homes for refugee camps and others to seek peace ...and asylum abroad. Sierra Leoneans have established new communities around the world, in London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Yet despite the great geographic range of this diaspora and the diverse ethnic backgrounds among Sierra Leoneans settled in the same communities abroad, these Africans have come to understand and express their shared identity through religious rituals, social engagements, and material culture. InAn Imagined Geography, anthropologist JoAnn D'Alisera demonstrates persuasively that the long-held anthropological paradigms of separate, bounded, and unique communities, geographically located and neatly localized, must be reconsidered. Studying Sierra Leonean Muslims living in greater Washington, D.C., she shows how these immigrants maintain intense and genuine community ties through weddings, rituals, and travel, across both vast urban spaces and national boundaries. D'Alisera examines two primary issues: Sierra Leoneans' engagement with their homeland, to which they frequently traveled and often sent their children for upbringing until the outbreak of the civil war; and the Sierra Leonean interaction with a diverse, multicultural, increasingly global Muslim community that is undergoing its own search for identity. Sierra Leoneans in America, D'Alisera observes, express a longing for home and the pain of disconnection in powerful narratives about their country and about their own displacement. At the same time, however, self and communal identity are shaped by a pressing need to affiliate in their adopted country with Sierra Leoneans of all ethnic and religious backgrounds and with fellow Muslims from other parts of the world, a process that is played out against the complex social field of the American urban landscape.
The National Mall Benton-Short, Lisa
The National Mall,
2016, 20160808, 2016, 2016-08-12, 2016-08-08
eBook
"The National Mall in Washington, D.C. is one of the most important and highly visible urban public spaces in the U.S. It is considered by many Americans to be "the nation's front yard." Yet few have ...written about the role of this public space in the twenty-first century."--
"In The National Mall, Lisa Benton-Short explores the critical issues that are redefining and reshaping this extraordinary public space. Her work focuses on three contemporary and interrelated debates about public space: the management challenges faced by federal authorities, increased demands for access and security post 9/11, and the role of the public in the Mall's long-term planning and development plans. By taking a holistic view of the National Mall and analyzing the unique twenty-first century challenges it faces, Lisa Benton-Short provides a fluid, cohesive, and timely narrative that is as extraordinary as the Mall itself."--
In this book, Ashante M. Reese makes clear the structural forces that determine food access in urban areas, highlighting Black residents' navigation of and resistance to unequal food distribution ...systems. Linking these local food issues to the national problem of systemic racism, Reese examines the history of the majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Reese not only documents racism and residential segregation in the nation's capital but also tracks the ways transnational food corporations have shaped food availability. By connecting community members' stories to the larger issues of racism and gentrification, Reese shows there are hundreds of Deanwoods across the country. Reese's geographies of self-reliance offer an alternative to models that depict Black residents as lacking agency, demonstrating how an ethnographically grounded study can locate and amplify nuances in how Black life unfolds within the context of unequal food access.
Hailed by Oprah as a "warrior woman for our times," reviled by teachers unions as the enemy, Michelle Rhee, outgoing chancellor of Washington DC public schools, has become the controversial face of ...school reform. She has appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, and is currently featured as a hero in the documentary "Waiting for Superman." This is the story of her journey from good-girl daughter of Korean immigrants to tough-minded political game-changer. When Rhee first arrived in Washington, she found a school district that had been so broken for so long, that everyone had long since given up. The book provides an inside view of the union battles, the school closings, and contentious community politics that have been the subject of intense public interest and debate along with a rare look at Rhee's upbringing and life before DC. This book includes an insert with photos from Rhee's personal and professional life, and an "exit" interview that sheds light on what she's learned and where the future might take her. Contents include: (1) An (Asian) American Life; (2) Learn, Teach, Rinse, Repeat; (3) Going National; (4) Welcome to the Nation's Education Superfund Site; (5) Closing Schools; (6) Randi and Michelle; (7) New Hires, New Fires; (8) Up from the Foundations: The Challenge of High School Reform; (9) Rhee's Critics Find a Winning Storyline; (10) The Mayor's Race; (11) Lessons Learned; and (12) What's Next? Notes and an index are also included.
While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as "Chocolate City," it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this ...shift better than the H Street corridor. In this book, Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.'s shift to a "post-chocolate" cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street's economic and racial developments. In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital. Summers focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like the nation's capital, how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization, and how it laid an important foundation for how Black people have been thought to exist in cities. Summers also analyzes how blackness-as a representation of diversity-is marketed to sell a progressive, "cool," and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban center. Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, Summers shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often excludes D.C.'s Black residents.
Home to established African American institutions and communities, Washington, D.C., offered women in the New Negro movement a unique setting for the fight against racial and gender ...oppression.Colored No Moretraces how African American women of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century made significant strides toward making the nation's capital a more equal and dynamic urban center.Treva B. Lindsey presents New Negro womanhood as a multidimensional space that included race women, blues women, mothers, white collar professionals, beauticians, fortune tellers, sex workers, same-gender couples, artists, activists, and innovators. Drawing from these differing but interconnected African American women's spaces, Lindsey excavates a multifaceted urban and cultural history of struggle toward a vision of equality that could emerge and sustain itself. Upward mobility to equal citizenship for African American women encompassed challenging racial, gender, class, and sexuality status quos. Lindsey maps the intersection of these challenges and their place at the core of New Negro womanhood.
This second edition of A Charter School Principal's Story shares the impact of a leadership experience in a DC school within a greater context of education as told through the critical and creative ...lens of ten years of reflection.
From its 1790 founding until 1974, Washington, D.C.--capital of "the land of the free--lacked democratically elected city leadership. Fed up with governance dictated by white stakeholders, federal ...officials, and unelected representatives, local D.C. activists catalyzed a new phase of the fight for home rule. Amid the upheavals of the 1960s, they gave expression to the frustrations of black residents and wrestled for control of their city. Bringing together histories of the carceral and welfare states, as well as the civil rights and Black Power movements, Lauren Pearlman narrates this struggle for self-determination in the nation's capital. She captures the transition from black protest to black political power under the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations and against the backdrop of local battles over the War on Poverty and the War on Crime. Through intense clashes over funds and programming, Washington residents pushed for greater participatory democracy and community control. However, the anticrime apparatus built by the Johnson and Nixon administrations curbed efforts to achieve true home rule. As Pearlman reveals, this conflict laid the foundation for the next fifty years of D.C. governance, connecting issues of civil rights, law and order, and urban renewal.
This book presents a sociolinguistic ethnography of the linguistic landscape of Chinatown in Washington, DC. The book sheds new light on the impact of urban development on traditionally ethnic ...neighbourhoods and discusses the various historical, social and cultural factors that contribute to this area's shifting linguistic landscape.
In this provocative study, Robert Harrison provides new insight into grassroots reconstruction after the Civil War and into the lives of those most deeply affected, the newly emancipated African ...Americans. Harrison argues that the District of Columbia, far from being marginal to the Reconstruction story, was central to Republican efforts to reshape civil and political relations, with the capital a testing ground for Congressional policy makers. The study describes the ways in which federal agencies such as the Army and the Freedmen's Bureau attempted to assist Washington's freed population and shows how officials struggled to address the social problems resulting from large-scale African-American migration. It also sheds new light on the political processes that led to the abandonment of Reconstruction and the onset of black disfranchisement.
