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After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South
After Freedom A Cultural Study in the Deep South Author:Hortense Powdermaker, Brackette F. Williams, Drexel G. Woodson New Directions in Anthropological Writing — Anthropology/African American Studies — Published in 1939, After Freedom is the first complete ethnography of an African American community in the United States. Hortense Powdermaker's goal was to use anthropological methods to give insight into U.S. society. She considered race rela... more »tions to be one of the most pressing social problems of her day, and she hoped that her work would prove valuable to those in a position to promote change.
"When African American freedom was still young and cotton still king in the South, Hortense Powdermaker produced the first anthropological study of Cottonville, a fictively named southern town. Powdermaker's work provides us with what is still a unique look at how African American men and women struggled to build families, develop capital, and create a community under conditions which made it necessary for both subjects and the observer to refer to their moment in time as `after freedom,' though it was almost three-quarters of a century after emancipation. She offers us perspectives that foreshadowed contemporary ethnography's efforts to `bring anthropology back home,' Afrocentric research's focus on Africa in America, and feminist theory's attempt to incorporate race and class into constructions of white-women gender studies."