Mitchell, Michele 1965-

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Mitchell, Michele 1965-

PERSONAL:

Born April 23, 1965. Education: Northwestern University, Ph.D., 1998.

ADDRESSES:

Office—New York University, Department of History, King Juan Carlos I of Spain Bldg., 53 Washington Sq. S., 7th Fl., New York, NY 10012. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

New York University, New York, NY, associate professor of history. North American coeditor of Gender & History.

AWARDS, HONORS:

University of Virginia, Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, Charlottesville, research fellow, 1994-96; Rutgers University, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, New Brunswick, NJ, fellow, 1997-98; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY, National Endowment for the Humanities scholar-in-residence, 2001-02.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Sandra Gunning and Tera W. Hunter) Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality and African Diasporas, Blackwell Publishing (Malden, MA), 2004.

Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS:

Michele Mitchell, an associate professor of history at New York University, received critical praise for her book Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction. H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online contributor Edward J. Blum lauded Mitchell's "superb research and dynamic analysis" of a complex subject: the racial uplift movement among African Americans from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Mitchell explains the gender, class, and racial contexts in which this movement arose and flourished, and discusses subjects such as the exodus of newly freed blacks to Liberia; Jim Crow laws; racial improvement teachings of leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who emphasized racial pride, and Marcus Garvey, who led the Universal Negro Improvement Association; theories of social Darwinism and eugenics; and increased social stratification.

Mitchell argues that blacks in the postbellum United States felt that they shared a racial destiny, which they sought to fulfill through various means. When political avenues to equality were denied to African Americans through disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws, they turned toward the private realm. Because concerns about the healthiest ways in which to reproduce and thus regenerate the race were central to this notion of racial destiny, leaders emphasized the importance of strong families and of private black businesses. Books and magazines instructed African American families about proper housekeeping and other behaviors that fostered black respectability, especially sexual conduct. These materials emphasized the dignity of black manhood and womanhood, and warned against blacks mixing sexually with whites. Alarmed by declining black birthrates, some African American leaders encouraged black women to bear many children and to protect the purity of the race by avoiding white men because, as Mitchell writes, "rape, concubinage, and miscegenation compromised racial reproduction." Thus, Mitchell argues, sexual purity and the respectability of the black family became crucial elements in the goals of black separatists and nationalists.

Blum admired Mitchell's especially astute analysis of gender and "brilliant eye for the evocative vignette." Citing the story of Anna Logan and her two daughters, who had contemplated migration to Liberia in 1891 but ultimately decided against it after hearing stories that young black women who had made this journey had been accosted en route, the critic observed that "Mitchell should be applauded for finding so many of these tales and recounting them so well." While Blum felt that Righteous Propagation would have benefited from some discussion of the role of African American history as a scholarly discipline in the context of the racial uplift movement, the critic nevertheless found the book to be a "superb" work, concluding that Mitchell presents "a penetrating social and intellectual history, one that mixes the global and the local, the racial and the gendered, the sacred and the profane, and all with an eye to nuance, individual experience, and broad trends." According to David Fort Godshalk in a Historian review, "the legacies of the discourses analyzed in Righteous Propagation continue to haunt our cultural landscape. Mitchell's book should be mandatory reading for historians of African American history and for a broader audience seeking to gain a fuller understanding of Americans' longstanding debates over black respectability and sexuality."

With Sandra Gunning and Tera W. Hunter, Mitchell has edited Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality and African Diasporas. This collection of articles explores how gender and sexuality figure in the many diasporas that Africans have experienced, from trans-Atlantic slavery to the establishment of political émigré communities. Contributors discuss subjects including Jean "Binta" Breeze's dub poetry, Creole performance art, the construction of masculinity in French colonial New Orleans, and the role of gender and hiphop in Afro-German activist culture.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Mitchell, Michele, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2004.

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, February, 2006, Julie Saville, review of Righteous Propagation, p. 210.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, September, 2005, T.F. Armstrong, review of Righteous Propagation, p. 172.

Historian, spring, 2006, David Fort Godshalk, review of Righteous Propagation.

International Journal of African Historical Studies, January 1, 2006, Marc Epprecht, review of Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality and African Diasporas, p. 144.

Journal of American History, March, 2006, Victoria W. Wolcott, review of Righteous Propagation, p. 1453.

Journal of Southern History, August, 2006, Mary Niall Mitchell, review of Righteous Propagation, p. 688.

Reviews in American History, June, 2005, "Future Generations," p. 203.

Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 2005, Andrew Witmer, review of Righteous Propagation.