Black Theatre

Black Theatre PDF Author: Paul Carter Harrison
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1566399440
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book Here

Book Description
Generating a new understanding of the past—as well as a vision for the future—this path-breaking volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre as it is practiced today.Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the community; in Paul Carter Harrison's words, it "reveals the Form of Things Unknown" in a way that "binds, cleanses, and heals."

Black Theatre

Black Theatre PDF Author: Paul Carter Harrison
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1566399440
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book Here

Book Description
Generating a new understanding of the past—as well as a vision for the future—this path-breaking volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre as it is practiced today.Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the community; in Paul Carter Harrison's words, it "reveals the Form of Things Unknown" in a way that "binds, cleanses, and heals."

Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic

Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic PDF Author: Akinwumi Ogundiran
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253013917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

Get Book Here

Book Description
Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African–descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition.

The African Diaspora

The African Diaspora PDF Author: Ingrid Tolia Monson
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415967694
Category : Black people
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book Here

Book Description
The African Diaspora presents musical case studies from various regions of the African diaspora, including Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe, that engage with broader interdisciplinary discussions about race, gender, politics, nationalism, and music.

Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink

Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink PDF Author: Marc Michael Epstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691165246
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
Introduction: for the love of books / Marc Michael Epstein -- The people of the book/books of the people: illuminating the canon / Hartley Lachter and Marc Michael Epstein -- Parchments and palimpsests: scribe, illuminator, patron, audience / Marc Michael Epstein -- The illuminated page: materials, methods, and techniques / Barbara Wolff -- Mapping the territory: ʼArbʻah kanfot maʼareẓ, the four corners of the medieval Jewish world. Ereẓ Yisrael/The land of Israel: homeland and center / Marc Michael Epstein ; Italia/Italy: the first western diaspora / Marc Michael Epstein ; Ashkenaz: Franco-Germany, England, Central, and East Europe / Eva Frojmovic with Marc Michael Epstein ; Sepharad and ʻArav: Spain and the Middle East / Raymond P. Scheindlin with Marc Michael Epstein ; The problem of national style / Eva Frojmovic with Marc Michael Epstein -- Iconography: telling the story / Marc Michael Epstein -- Dialogue and disputation: cultural negotiation / Marc Michael Epstein -- This world centered on the home: women, marriage, and the family / Shalom Sahar -- Glimpses of Jewish life: reality or illusion? / Marc Michael Epstein -- Incidental details: margins and meaning / Marc Michael Epstein -- Sacred and profane: naked ladies in the Haggadah? / Ágnes Vető -- Other worlds: fantastic horizons and unseen universes / Hartley Lachter wtih Marc Michael Epstein -- Zion and Jerusalem: the sum of all beauty, the joy of all the earth / Shalom Sahar -- In the royal court: Jewish illumination in an age of printing / Marc Michael Epstein -- A Yiddish Minhagim manuscript / Diane Wolfthal -- Illuminating the present: contemporary Jewish illumination / Susan Vick with Marc Michael Epstein -- Continuing the journey: annotated bibliography and manuscript descriptions / Jenna Siman Jacobs with Marc Michael Epstein.

Art and Ritual in the Black Diaspora

Art and Ritual in the Black Diaspora PDF Author: Paul Griffith
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498527442
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
Archetypes of Transition in Diaspora Art and Ritual examines residually oral conventions that shape the black diaspora imaginary in the Caribbean and America. Colonial humanist violations and inverse issues of black cultural and psychological affirmation are indexed in terms of a visionary gestalt according to which inner and outer realities unify creatively in natural and metaphysical orders. Paul Griffith’s central focus is hermeneutical, examining the way in which religious and secular symbols inherent in rite and word as in vodun, limbo, the spirituals, puttin’ on ole massa, and dramatic and narrative structures, for example, are made basic to the liberating post-colonial struggle. This evident interpenetration of political and religious visions looks back to death-rebirth traditions through which African groups made sense of the intervention of evil into social order. Herein, moreover, the explanatory, epistemic, and therapeutic structures of art and ritual share correspondences with the mythic archetypes that Carl Jung posits as a psychological inheritance of human beings universally.

Tradition and the Black Atlantic

Tradition and the Black Atlantic PDF Author: Henry Louis Gates (Jr.)
Publisher: Civitas Books
ISBN: 0465014100
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
A major figure in African American studies, Gates (Harvard)--whose earlier works include Signifying Monkey (CH, Jun'89, 26-5523) and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (CH, Jun'97, 34-5887)--here joins such theorists as Paul Gilroy (The Black Atlantic, CH, May'94, 31-5034), Hazel Carby (Cultures in Babylon, 1999), and Stuart Hall (editor, Representation, 1997) in taking a culture-studies approach to examining the politics and culture of the African diaspora. In four far-ranging chapters (written between 1989 and 1992), Gates considers the British Black Arts Movement and the continuing US "culture wars." Though the study is thought-provoking, this reviewer would have liked a longer preface that could effectively tie together the four separate essays. Gates sometimes (for example, in the essay titled "Critical Fanonism") succumbs to the overly dense language of theory, but at his best--as in the essay "Enlightenment's Esau," in which he makes the case for Edmund Burke as an unlikely early anti-colonialism advocate--he is brilliant. Required reading for scholars of cultural studies and/or black-diaspora studies. Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty. Reviewed by L. J. Parascandola.

Manipulating the Sacred

Manipulating the Sacred PDF Author: Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814328521
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first art historical study of Yoruba-descended African Brazilian religious art based on an author's long-term participation in and observation of private and public rituals. At a time when the art of the African diaspora has aroused much general interest for its multicultural dimensions, Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara contributes strikingly rich insights as a participant/observer in the African-based religions of Brazil. She focuses on the symbolism and function of ritual objects and costumes used in the Brazilian Candomblé (miniature "African" environments or temples) of the Bahia region, which combine Yorùbá, Bantu/Angola, Caboclo, Roman Catholic, and/or Kardecist/Spiritist elements. An initiate herself with more than twenty years of study, the author is considered an insider, and has witnessed how practitioners manipulate the "sacred" to encode, in art and ritual, vital knowledge about meaning, values, epistemologies, and history. She demonstrates how this manipulation provides Brazilian descendents of slaves with a sense of agency--with a link to their African heritage and a locus for resistance to the dominant Euro-Brazilian culture.

The African Diaspora

The African Diaspora PDF Author: Isidore Okpewho
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253334251
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 612

Get Book Here

Book Description
* How black people established their identities in the African diaspora.

The Black Art Renaissance

The Black Art Renaissance PDF Author: Joshua I. Cohen
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520309685
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture’s influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history’s alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The “Black Art” Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.

Fighting for Honor

Fighting for Honor PDF Author: T. J. Desch-Obi
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643361937
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
A groundbreaking investigation into the migration of martial arts techniques across continents and centuries The presence of African influence and tradition in the Americas has long been recognized in art, music, language, agriculture, and religion. T. J. Desch-Obi explores another cultural continuity that is as old as eighteenth-century slave settlements in South America and as contemporary as hip-hop culture. In this thorough survey of the history of African martial arts techniques, Desch-Obi maps the translation of numerous physical combat techniques across three continents and several centuries to illustrate how these practices evolved over time and are still recognizable in American culture today. Some of these art traditions were part of African military training while others were for self-defense and spiritual discipline. Grounded in historical and cultural anthropological methodologies, Desch-Obi's investigation traces the influence of well-delineated African traditions on long-observed but misunderstood African and African American cultural activities in North America, Brazil, and the Caribbean. He links the Brazilian martial art capoeira to reports of slave activities recorded in colonial and antebellum North America. Likewise Desch-Obi connects images of the kalenda African stick-fighting techniques to the Haitian Revolution. Throughout the study Desch-Obi examines the ties between physical mastery of these arts and changing perceptions of honor. Including forty-five illustrations, this rich history of the arrival and dissemination of African martial arts in the Atlantic world offers a new vantage for furthering our understanding of the powerful influence of enslaved populations on our collective social history.