Robert E. Washington

Robert E. Park reconsidered

One of the persisting paradoxes confronting sociology, a discipline that seeks to explain the organization and dynamics of societal processes, is that of explaining its own development and changes as part of those societal processes. In short, we are obliged ? or as some would have it, cursed ? to see ourselves and our leading thinkers as objects for sociologi? cal study. We are obliged to feel uncomfortable and suspicious about social influences on their ideas, wary about their values and their legacy. We are obliged to continuously scrutinize and reevaluate their work, not because we are afflicted with a fetish for navel gazing, but because we feel the need, as a result of historical changes, to periodically reset our compass as we navigate new terrain. When one thinks of those persons whose writings and professional activities helped to set the compass of American sociologys early develop? ment, few ? if any ? were as enigmatic, influential or interesting as Robert Park. It is for this reason that Stanford Lymans Militarism, Imperialism and Racial Accommodation is long overdue and welcome. Lyman presents an extensive introductory interpretation along with Parks early writings on: German militarism and imperialism, capitalist imperialism in the Belgium Congo, various aspects of black American life, and observations pertaining to teaching. In light of the enormous changes in the black American com? munity and in American society over the past half-century since Parks death, this collection of Parks pre-Chicago writings provides an opportune occasion to reassess and to enlarge our understanding of his intellectual career. As a pioneer ? if not to say, the leader ? in shaping the character and direction of American sociology between the two world wars, Park in? fused into sociology both the peculiar Puritanical qualities of his personality and the practical precepts of his non-academic experiences. To a degree perhaps unparalleled by anyone except Talcott Parsons, Park presided over the mainstream sociology of his day. In the opinion of Morris Janowitz,

An urban slum revisited

William Foote Whyte. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943.xii + 284 pp.

Big-Time Sports in American Universities

5.00.

Obama and Africa

The Spectacular State explores the production of national identity in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. The main protagonists are the cultural elites involved in the elaboration of new state-sponsored mass-spectacle national holidays: Navro’z (Zoroastrian New Year) and Independence Day. The overall argument is that despite their aspirations to reinvigorate national identity, mass spectacle creators in Uzbekistan have reproduced much of the Soviet cultural production. National identity has been one of the most fraught questions in Central Asia, where nationality was a contradictory and complicated product of the Soviet rule. Although the category of nationality was initiated, produced, and imposed by the Soviet state in the 1920s, it eventually became a source of power and authority for local elites, including cultural producers. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened up possibilities for revising and reversing many understandings manufactured by the socialist regime. Yet, upon her arrival in Tashkent to conduct her research on the renegotiation of national identity in 1995, Laura Adams discovered that instead of embracing newly-found freedom to recover a more authentic history, most Uzbek intellectuals, especially cultural producers working with the state, avoided probing too far in this direction. Rather than entirely discarding the Soviet colonial legacies, they revised their history selectively. Whereas the ideological content of their cultural production shifted from socialism to nationalism, many of the previous cultural ‘‘forms’’ have remained. Similarly, the Uzbek government continued to employ cultural elites to implement the task of reinforcing its nation-building program, thus following the Soviet model of cultural production. The book consists of four chapters. The first chapter delineates the broad themes of national identity building, and the remaining chapters explore mass spectacle creation by distinguishing between three elements: form (Chapter Two), content (Chapter Three), and the mode of production (Chapter Four). The study is based on content analysis of two Olympic Games-style national holidays, interviews with cultural producers, and participation observation of festivals and behind-the-scenes preparation meetings. Although Adams provides a few references to viewers and their attitude toward the public holiday performances, her book does not offer an extended engagement with reception and consumption of these holidays. The comprehensive and multi-layered overview of the process of revising national identity in Uzbekistan is one of the book’s major accomplishments. For Adams, the production of national identity is not a selfevident and seamless production forced by the state but instead a dynamic, complex, and dialogical process of negotiation between various parties (intellectual factions, state officials, mass spectacle producers, etc.). Her account reveals the messy and often contradictory nature of national identity production and thus moves away from the tendency to reify the state and its policies. The book makes a significant contribution to studies of nationalism by suggesting that the production of national identity in Uzbekistan was centrally constituted by the consideration of the ‘‘international audience.’’ Although public holidays, studied by Adams, aimed at fostering national identification, the forms in which these celebrations are performed (including national dances and music) indicate the aspiration of cultural producers to be part of the international community. This kind of national production self-consciously oriented toward the international viewer has been the legacy of the Soviet nationalities policy where all cultural producers had to produce art ‘‘socialist in content, national in form.’’ Notwithstanding the difference in generations or genres,

Reclaiming the civil rights movement

Barack Obamas emergence as the leader of the worlds most powerful nation stirred much enthusiasm in Africa. This article examines Obamas relationship to Africa and African reactions to Obama – spanning from the time of his election to the United States Senate to the current period of his role as president of the United States. Focusing specifically on Obamas Ghana speech and subsequent African policy initiatives, the article suggests that many Africans are disappointed with Obamas Africa policy and that this is the result of several misperceptions: misperceptions of Obamas power as US president, misperceptions of his moderate political world view, and misperceptions of his cosmopolitan identity as an individual of African ancestry.

Black Identity and Self-Esteem: A Review of Studies of Black Self-Concept, 1968-1978

In desegregating the American South, the civil rights movement marked not only a major social revolution, but also, and with more far reaching and complex repercussions, the beginning of the end of the liberal political coalition that supported those 1960s racial reforms. We have come to realize this over the past thirty years, in the wake of the civil rights movement, as we have witnessed the debilitation of liberal ideology, the growth of cynicism about race relations, and the fragmentation of the old New Deal liberal coalition into bickering, mutually antagonistic political factions. Among the conflicts dividing these factions, perhaps none has been more central than the interpretation of the civil rights movement it self, specifically, the intellectual struggle to shape the public memory of its meaning. Among the combatants in this struggle are neo-conservatives, left ists, black nationalists, and black populists. Though the mass media have failed to cover this controversy, it is hardly trivial; for what is at stake is not just the nations understanding of the civil rights movement, but also? and most important?its attitudes toward the current predicament of black Americans.