Author: Randal Maurice Jelks File Type: pdf In 1964, Muhammad Ali said of his decision to join the Nation of Islam I know where Im going and I know the truth and I dont have to be what you want me to be. Im free to be what I want to be. This sentiment, the brash assertion of individual freedom, informs and empowers each of the four personalities profiled in this book. Randal Maurice Jelks shows that to understand the black American experience beyond the larger narratives of enslavement, emancipation, and Black Lives Matter, we need to hear the individual stories. Drawing on his own experiences growing up as a religious African American, he shows that the inner history of black Americans in the 20th century is a story worthy of telling. This book explores the faith stories of four African Americans Ethel Waters, Mary Lou Williams, Eldridge Cleaver, and Muhammad Ali. It examines their autobiographical writings, interviews, speeches, letters, and memorable performances to understand how each of these figures used religious faith publicly to reconcile deep personal struggles, voice their concerns for human dignity, and reinvent their public image. For them, liberation was not simply defined by material or legal wellbeing, but by a spiritual search for community and personal wholeness. ***About the Author Randal Maurice Jelks is Professor of American Studies and African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas, USA. His previous books are both award-winning African Americans in the Furniture City The Struggle for Civil Rights Struggle in Grand Rapids (2006) and Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement A Biography (2012).

Author: Elizabeth Edwards File Type: pdf Photographs have had an integral and complex role in many anthropological contexts, from fieldwork to museum exhibitions. This book explores how approaching anthropological photographs as history can offer both theoretical and empirical insights into these roles. Photographs are thought to make problematic history because of their ambiguity and rawness. In short, they have too many meanings. The author refutes this prejudice by exploring, through a series of case studies, precisely the potential of this raw quality to open up new perspectives. Taking the nature of photography as her starting point, the author argues that photographs are not merely pictures of things but are part of a dynamic and fluid historical dialogue, which is active not only in the creation of the photograph but in its subsequent social biography in archive and museum spaces, past and present. In this context, the book challenges any uniform view of anthropological photography and its resulting archives. Drawing on a variety of examples, largely from the Pacific, the book demonstrates how close readings of photographs reveal not only western agendas, but also many layers of differing historical and cross-cultural experiences. That is, photographs can spring leaks to show an alternative viewpoint. These themes are developed further by examining the dynamics of photographs and issues around them as used by contemporary artists and curators and presented to an increasingly varied public. This book convincingly demonstrates photographs potential to articulate histories other than those of their immediate appearances, a potential that can no longer be neglected by scholars and institutions. **