The demise of American slavery in 1865 put black Americans in motion to an unprecedented degree. Freed slaves and their descendants migrated from the plantations in the rural South to destinations around the globe. Travelling in a variety of new roles – as missionaries, journalists, agronomists, scientists, athletes, performers, entrepreneurs and political activists – African Americans gained international visibility, inspiring other oppressed populations in the colonial world to struggle for their liberation.

This essay introduces Inhabiting Cultures, a special issue of the Journal of American Studies. The guest editors, idea collective John Q, examine the relationship between method and academic writing by riding a train as a public editorial act and a way of practicing empathy in public scholarship. Contributors to this issue produce the very kinds of culture they critique. John Q tracks these activities as the careful handling of particular kinds of cultural production with a critical and ethical aim.

Archives are power-laden spaces. For Foucault, the archive is “the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.” In this way, the archive is not merely a neutral repository. It is a system governed by those who have the power to choose what gets archived and therefore produce meaning through that discursive formation.

This essay uses a quilt made from used Ku Klux Klan regalia to examine the complicated interpersonal relationships and internal ambivalence that have emerged in the process of the author's study of Klan material culture. Concerns about the relationship between preserving objects and preserving ideology emerge through the process of untangling the story of this enigmatic object.

Focusing on the Virginia Jubilee Singers, an African American singing ensemble that toured South Africa in the late nineteenth century, this article reveals how the transnational reach of commercialized black music informed debates about race, modernity, and black nationalism in South Africa. The South African performances of the Jubilee Singers enlivened debates concerning race, labor and the place of black South Africans in a rapidly industrializing South Africa. A visit from the first generation of global black American superstars fueled both white and black concerns about the racial political economy. The sonic actions of the Jubilee Singers were therefore a springboard for black South African claims for recognition as modern, educated and educable subjects, capable of, and entitled to, the full apparatus, and insignia, of liberal self-determination. Although black South Africans welcomed the Jubilee Singers enthusiastically, the article cautions against reading their positive reception as evidence that black Africans had no agenda of their own and looked to African Americans as their leaders in a joint struggle.

Across the twentieth century, black South Africans often drew inspiration from African American progress. This transatlantic history informed the global antiapartheid struggle, animated by international human rights norms, of Martin Luther King Jr., his fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner the South African leader Albert Luthuli, and the African American tennis star Arthur Ashe. While tracing the travels of African Americans and Africans “going South,” this article centers Africa and Africans, thereby redressing gaps in black Atlantic and African diaspora scholarship.

In 2019, US-based African American artist Dread Scott will present his new performative work, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, just outside the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. It will be a re-performance of the German Coast uprising of 1811, one of the largest rebellions of enslaved people in US history. It is the most recent installment in a slowly growing historical body of knowledge about this little-known history. The story is about a radical idea of freedom that Scott seeks to enliven through recruiting the performers. The potential for organizing and future networks is at the heart of this effort. This text is based upon Joey Orr's interview with Dread Scott on Thursday 12 May 2016, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, American cinema played a major role in transforming what George Fredrickson has called “the black image in the white mind.” This transformation began with the invention of cinema and climaxed with The Birth of a Nation, a film whose appeal derived not from its content, but rather from D. W. Griffith's ability to seize on this content to provoke an intense emotional response in his viewers. This essay begins by examining some of the first images of African Americans captured on camera. It then turns to Griffith's innovations in the one- and two-reelers he made at the Biograph Company. Finally, and on the occasion of the film's hundredth anniversary, the essay provides a detailed analysis of how Griffith achieved his effect in The Birth of a Nation. What the essay shows, ultimately, is that whereas the earliest depictions of African Americans relied on audience foreknowledge, the arrival of American narrative cinema led Griffith to create new kinds of black characters. Griffith's use of the close-up, the point of view, the shot/reverse-shot pattern, and parallel editing enabled him to convince his audiences of a “black menace” that threatened white America.

In 1887, T. Thomas Fortune published an editorial, “The Negro's Peculiar Work,” in the black newspaper the New York Freeman, wherein he reflected on a recent keynote speech delivered by Reverend J. C. Price on 3 January in Columbia, South Carolina, to commemorate Emancipation Day. Price, a member of the Zion Wesley Institute of the AME Zion Church, hailed from North Carolina and his denomination considered him to be “the most popular and eloquent Negro of the present generation.” On the occasion meant to reflect on the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation (which went into effect on 1 January 1863) for present-day African Americans, Price turned his gaze away from the US towards Africa. In his speech “The American Negro, His Future, and His Peculiar Work” Price declared that African Americans had a duty to redeem Africans and help them take back their continent from the Europeans who had partitioned it in 1884–85. He railed,

From 2010 to 2015, Pocket Guide to Hell, a series of public history projects in Chicago, produced site-specific, participatory historical reenactments with the intention of treating the past as if it were a public space – an inhabitable site where multiple voices can be heard, meanings contested, and alliances forged. This paper narrates the process behind the production of the final Pocket Guide to Hell project, which marked the centennial of the Arts Club of Chicago, in order to reflect upon the origins of creative acts, the challenges of cocreation, and the possibilities and limitations of the reenactment form.

This essay analyzes the writings of two American Anglo-Catholic socialists, Vida Dutton Scudder and Ralph Adams Cram, on medieval monasticism. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Scudder and Cram appealed to monasticism to fold together their nonnormative sexualities with their radical anticapitalism. Nevertheless, they rejected the ideology of social progress common to most forms of liberalism and socialism. By attending to the past examples of St. Francis and St. Benedict, they produced surprisingly forward-looking critiques of modern capitalist society.

This article explores the hemispheric and transatlantic uses of race and empire as tropes of settler-colonial otherness in the novel The Canadian Brothers (1840) by Canadian author John Richardson. In this pre-Confederation historical novel, Richardson contrasts the imperial British discourse of racial tolerance, and the British military alliances with the Natives in the War of 1812, with the brutality of American Indian policies south of the border, in an effort to craft a narrative of Canadian difference from, and incompatibility with, American culture. At the same time, the author's critical attitude towards all European military and commercial interventions in the New World illuminates the rootedness of both American and Canadian settler colonialisms in British imperialism, and exposes the arbitrariness and constructedness of the political boundaries dividing the continent.

This article examines the border-crossing journalism of the Negro Digest, a leading African American periodical, published from 1942 to 1951. The first title produced by the Johnson Publishing Company, the Digest had an international focus that connected Jim Crow to racial oppression around the world. However, while the magazine challenged white supremacy on a local and global level, its patriotic tone and faith in American democracy occasionally restricted its global analysis of racism. Ultimately, the internationalism of the Negro Digest was quintessentially American – wedded to the exceptional status of American freedom and an overriding belief that the US could change the world for the better.

A creative collective, I'm Making A Boy Band (IMMABB) discuss the issues of postcolonialism and identity/gender politics surrounding the transnational circulation of K-pop by sharing their process of making a non-Korean K-pop idol group called EXP in New York in the form of an experimental “how-to” manual. They also talk about the possibilities of fandom in relation to feminism and sexuality by using an in-depth analysis of the K-pop industry as well as themselves whilst blurring the line between fine art and pop culture.