Sub-Project C03: A Myriad of Threats: American Race Relations after 1945
Project Team
Project Leader
Prof. Dr. Astrid Franke
Post-doc and Ph.D. Students:
Dr. Christine Knauer
Dr. Nicole Hirschfelder (associated Post-doc)
Academic Disciplines and Orientation
American Studies
Project Description
This project inquires into the power relation between white and black Americans which has come under threat. This threat originated with intensified efforts among African-Americans to achieve increased democratic participation and social justice. It became more and more difficult to defame these efforts as a threat, and attempts to do so often led to unintended consequences; white Americans' use of traditional threat scenarios as a justification, especially for physical violence, increasingly lost acceptance and the discourse associated with this threat took on a new twist. These changes occurred in part due to the Cold War and to the emergence of social movements such as the student protest movement and the civil rights movement. On the one hand, the Cold War intensified the awareness of the deficits in democracy, which became threatening because they made the USA more vulnerable in the ideological contest with the Soviet Union. This feeling of a threat coming from both internal and external enemies during the McCarthy era (ca. 1948 – 1956) led to a paranoia toward outsiders or people who could be turned into them, such as homosexuals, Jews, Afro-Americans or (former) communist sympathisers. In turn, this paranoia made it easier for the establishment to stigmatise people who questioned the current political order and its power constellations as a threat to the nation and to isolate them – even among the ranks of the opposition itself. Simultaneously, however, the oppositional movements of the so-called counterculture critically questioned the validity of both of the threat scenarios whose visibility was increased by this very act, but also revealed them for what they really were and unmasked them as a sham conflict.
The goal of the project is a differentiated, interdisciplinary analysis of different threats, their exploitation and their often unintended threatening side effects. Racist actions will be explained from the perspective of their own logic as reactions to the threat to the existing constellation of power, i.e. the impending loss of power.
This complex web of multiple threats will be analysed in two separate studies. The first project looks at lynching as a drastic reaction to the threat against white supremacy. Lynching deaths were legitimised by painting the victim as a threat to moral order. Lynching thus appeared to be an act to establish order. This type of threat communication, however, increasingly lost credibility and "functioned" less and less – but the question remains as to why? A socio-historical analysis looks at the backgrounds of lynching within the post-war climate and will show how they were constructed, discussed, and exploited in a national, regional and ethnic context. This study seeks to explain which notions of social order and threat experiences were communicated by the actors involved and how the reception of this communication changed over time.
The second study examines effective methods of power retention and the overlapping threats that existed by looking at how those in power subtly instrumentalised these threats in the case of Bayard Rustin, the mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr. It analyses how this man – as an educated African-American and a pacifist Quaker – became one of the most influential people in the Civil Rights Movement, but also how he, as such, was repeatedly stigmatised by the white establishments as a threat, above all as a communist and a homosexual. From the perspective of African-Americans, Rustin thereby became a real threat to the integrity and prestige of the Civil Rights Movement – but, it has yet to be explained how this "importation" of a threat from within one social group into another actually functioned.
A key aspect of this study is the analysis of the role that imagination and fiction played in the representation and staging of threats. This entails conceptualising threat communication as a performative and strategically instrumentalised act whose factual base needs to be scrutinised.
Project-related Lectures and Publications
Franke, Astrid
- Poetry and (In-)justice: Lynchpoems in American Culture. Publikationsorgan wird nachgetragen.
- Early African-American Poetry: Phillis Wheatley’s ‘On being brought from Africa to America’ and George Moses Horton’s ‘On Hearing of the Intention of a gentleman to purchase the Poet’s Freedom.’ In: A History of American Poetry: Contexts – Developments – Readings, hrsg. Oliver Scheiding, René Dietrich und Clemens Spahr. Publikationsorgan wird nachgetragen.
- (mit Nicole Hirschfelder) "Maycomb was itself again": Wandel und Resilienz einer ungerechten Ordnung, in: Aufruhr – Katastrophe – Konkurrenz – Zerfall. Bedrohte Ordnungen als Thema der Kulturwissenschaften, Bd.1 der SFB 923-Reihe ‚Bedrohte Ordnungen‘, hg. von Ewald Frie und Mischa Meier, Tübingen 2014, S. 197 - 228.
- 09.01.2013 - "Superman trifft den Ku Klux Klan: Rassismus und andere Bedrohungen in der Zeit des Kalten Krieges in den USA"; Vortrag im Rahmen des Studium Generale, Universität Tübingen.
- 23.11.2012 - "Sex, Race, and Rock 'n Roll, oder: Welche Ordnungen bedroht Elvis?" Vortrag im Kolloquium des SFB 923, Universität Tübingen.
- 31.03.2012 - "'The more things change the more they remain the same'. Stabilität und Wandel einer ungerechten Ordnung"; Vortrag auf der Konferenz "Bedrohte Ordnungen I", Universität Tübingen.
Hirschfelder, Nicole
- Oppression as Process: The Case of Bayard Rustin. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014.
- (mit Astrid Franke) "Maycomb was itself again": Wandel und Resilienz einer ungerechten Ordnung, in: Aufruhr – Katastrophe – Konkurrenz – Zerfall. Bedrohte Ordnungen als Thema der Kulturwissenschaften, Bd.1 der SFB 923-Reihe 'Bedrohte Ordnungen‘, hg. von Ewald Frie und Mischa Meier, Tübingen 2014, S. 197 - 228.
- Homophobie und Rassismus – eine figurationssoziologische Betrachtung des Falles von Bayard Rustin. In: Neue alte Rassimen? Differenz und Exklusion in Europa nach 1989, Drews-Sylla, Gesine, Makarska, Renata (Hrsg.), Bielefeld, transcript Verlag, 2015, pp. 1-14. (Artikel eingereicht, peer-reviewed und akzeptiert 2012. Veröffentlichung Januar 2015.)
- (mit Astrid Franke) "Maycomb was itself again": Wandel und Resilienz einer ungerechten Ordnung, in: Aufruhr – Katastrophe – Konkurrenz – Zerfall. Bedrohte Ordnungen als Thema der Kulturwissenschaften, Bd.1 der SFB 923-Reihe 'Bedrohte Ordnungen‘, hg. von Ewald Frie und Mischa Meier, Tübingen 2014, S. 197 - 228.
- A Study in Oppression: A Critical Perspective on 'Civilization' and 'Change.' In: Civilization and Change, pp. 1-11. (Artikel eingereicht, peer-reviewed und akzeptiert 2013.)
- 12.11.2014 – "How Good Were the "Good Sixties"? Pacifism and the Civil Rights Movement" im Rahmen der Vorlesungsreihe "Issues in American Literary and Cultural History IV: From the First World War to the Present", Universität Tübingen.
- 27.06.2014 – "Religion & Resistance: The Impact of Quakerism on Political Activism"; Vortrag im Rahmen des Workshops "Race, Rights, and Religion", Universität Tübingen.
- 08.07.2014 – Projektpräsentation im Cluster 7 USA im Rahmen des ’Interner Workshop Lauterbad IV’, Universität Tübingen.
- 08.11.2013 - "Oppression amongst the Oppressed: How Inequality Pervades Social Dynamic"; Vortrag auf dem Workshop "Ungerechte Ordnungen – The Structure and Dynamics of Inequality", Universität Tübingen.
- 08.02.3013 - (mit Christine Knauer) "Multiple Bedrohungen in amerikanischen Rassenbeziehungen nach 1945", Vortrag im Kolloquium des SFB 923, Tübingen.
- 08.11.2012 - "Why it Matters how we Remember: The Case of Bayard Rustin and the Issue of Fragmented Memory"; Vortrag auf der Konferenz 'What is LGTB(Q) History and where do we stand?', Queen Mary University, London.
- 03.11.2012 - "A Study in Oppression: A Critical Perspective on 'Civilization' and 'Change'"; Vortrag auf der Konferenz 'Civilization and Change' (International ISAR Symposium) in Istanbul.
Knauer, Christine
- Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and Civil Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
- Rezension zu John Virtue, The Black Soldiers who Built the Alaska Highway: A History of Four Army Regiments in the North 1942-43 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2013) in: H-War, Januar 2014.
- Rezension zu: Kruse, Kevin M.; Tuck, Stephen (Hrsg.): Fog of War. The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement. Oxford 2012, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, 30.10.2012.
- A Man 'Who Fancies Himself Abraham Lincoln': Senator Langer from North Dakota and Civil Rights, in: North Dakota History 76:3 &4 (2011), S. 22-40.
- März 2015 – "Labor, Lynching, and the White South after the Second World War", Southern Labor Studies Association, College Park/Washington D.C.
- 04.04.2014 – "'Crimes in Which Negroes Are the Victim:' Lynching and the Liberal White South after the Second World War,” EAAS, Den Haag.
- 02.10.2013 - "Kalter Krieg und Ordnungskonkurrenz", Vortrag im Rahmen der SFB 923-Lehrerfortbildung "Wissenschaft trifft Unterricht: Aktuelle historische Forschungsergebnisse als Bereicherung für den Geschichtsunterricht. Entwicklung praktischer Unterrichtsbeispiele für die Sekundarstufe I und II.", Uni Tübingen.
- 07.07.2013 - "The Death of 'Judge Lynch': White Southerners and the Last Lynchings after the Second World War", Vortrag im Rahmen der HOTCUS Annual Conference 2013 (Historians of the Twentieth Century United States) in Newcastle, GB.
- 03.07.2013 - "Ordnungszersetzung und Guess Who's Coming To Dinner", Vortrag im Rahmen der Übung "Bedrohten Ordnungen im Film", Uni Tübingen.
- 08.02.2013 - (mit Nicole Hirschfelder) "Multiple Bedrohungen in amerikanischen Rassenbeziehungen nach 1945", Vortrag im Kolloquium des SFB 923, Tübingen.