Sounding the Color Line

Sounding the Color Line PDF Author: Erich Nunn
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082034737X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Sounding the Color Line explores how competing understandings of the U.S. South in the first decades of the twentieth century have led us to experience musical forms, sounds, and genres in racialized contexts. Yet, though we may speak of white or black music, rock or rap, sounds constantly leak through such barriers. A critical disjuncture exists, then, between actual interracial musical and cultural forms on the one hand and racialized structures of feeling on the other. This is nowhere more apparent than in the South. Like Jim Crow segregation, the separation of musical forms along racial lines has required enormous energy to maintain. How, asks Nunn, did the protocols structuring listeners' racial associations arise? How have they evolved and been maintained in the face of repeated transgressions of the musical color line? Considering the South as the imagined ground where conflicts of racial and national identities are staged, this book looks at developing ideas concerning folk song and racial and cultural nationalism alongside the competing and sometimes contradictory workings of an emerging culture industry. Drawing on a diverse archive of musical recordings, critical artifacts, and literary texts, Nunn reveals how the musical color line has not only been established and maintained but also repeatedly crossed, fractured, and reformed. This push and pull--between segregationist cultural logics and music's disrespect of racially defined boundaries--is an animating force in twentieth-century American popular culture.

Sounding the Color Line

Sounding the Color Line PDF Author: Erich Nunn
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082034737X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sounding the Color Line explores how competing understandings of the U.S. South in the first decades of the twentieth century have led us to experience musical forms, sounds, and genres in racialized contexts. Yet, though we may speak of white or black music, rock or rap, sounds constantly leak through such barriers. A critical disjuncture exists, then, between actual interracial musical and cultural forms on the one hand and racialized structures of feeling on the other. This is nowhere more apparent than in the South. Like Jim Crow segregation, the separation of musical forms along racial lines has required enormous energy to maintain. How, asks Nunn, did the protocols structuring listeners' racial associations arise? How have they evolved and been maintained in the face of repeated transgressions of the musical color line? Considering the South as the imagined ground where conflicts of racial and national identities are staged, this book looks at developing ideas concerning folk song and racial and cultural nationalism alongside the competing and sometimes contradictory workings of an emerging culture industry. Drawing on a diverse archive of musical recordings, critical artifacts, and literary texts, Nunn reveals how the musical color line has not only been established and maintained but also repeatedly crossed, fractured, and reformed. This push and pull--between segregationist cultural logics and music's disrespect of racially defined boundaries--is an animating force in twentieth-century American popular culture.

Life on the Color Line

Life on the Color Line PDF Author: Gregory Howard Williams
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440673330
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
“Heartbreaking and uplifting… a searing book about race and prejudice in America… brims with insights that only someone who has lived on both sides of the racial divide could gain.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “A triumph of storytelling as well as a triumph of spirit.”—Alex Kotlowitz, award-winning author of There Are No Children Here As a child in 1950s segregated Virginia, Gregory Howard Williams grew up believing he was white. But when the family business failed and his parents’ marriage fell apart, Williams discovered that his dark-skinned father, who had been passing as Italian-American, was half black. The family split up, and Greg, his younger brother, and their father moved to Muncie, Indiana, where the young boys learned the truth about their heritage. Overnight, Greg Williams became black. In this extraordinary and powerful memoir, Williams recounts his remarkable journey along the color line and illuminates the contrasts between the black and white worlds: one of privilege, opportunity and comfort, the other of deprivation, repression, and struggle. He tells of the hostility and prejudice he encountered all too often, from both blacks and whites, and the surprising moments of encouragement and acceptance he found from each. Life on the Color Line is a uniquely important book. It is a wonderfully inspiring testament of purpose, perseverance, and human triumph. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Dancing on the Color Line

Dancing on the Color Line PDF Author: Gretchen Martin
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496804163
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The extensive influence of the creative traditions derived from slave culture, particularly black folklore, in the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black authors, such as Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, has become a hallmark of African American scholarship. Yet similar inquiries regarding white authors adopting black aesthetic techniques have been largely overlooked. Gretchen Martin examines representative nineteenth-century works to explore the influence of black-authored (or narrated) works on well-known white-authored texts, particularly the impact of black oral culture evident by subversive trickster figures in John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, Joel Chandler Harris's short stories, as well as Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson. As Martin indicates, such white authors show themselves to be savvy observers of the many trickster traditions and indeed a wide range of texts suggest stylistic and aesthetic influences representative of the artistry, subversive wisdom, and subtle humor in these black figures of ridicule, resistance, and repudiation. The black characters created by these white authors are often dismissed as little more than limited, demeaning stereotypes of the minstrel tradition, yet by teasing out important distinctions between the wisdom and humor signified by trickery rather than minstrelsy, Martin probes an overlooked aspect of the nineteenth-century American literary canon and reveals the extensive influence of black aesthetics on some of the most highly regarded work by white American authors.

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War PDF Author: Michael Gorra
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631491717
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
A “timely and essential” (New York Times Book Review) reconsideration of William Faulkner’s life and legacy that vitally asks, “How should we read Faulkner today?” With this “rich, complex, and eloquent” (Drew Gilpin Faust, Atlantic) work, Pulitzer Prize finalist Michael Gorra charts the evolution of an author through his most cherished—and contested—novels. Given the undeniable echoes of “Lost Cause” romanticism in William Faulkner’s fiction, as well as his depiction of Black characters and Black speech, Gorra argues convincingly that Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Upending previous critical traditions and interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, the widely acclaimed The Saddest Words recontextualizes Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.

Reading Faulkner: Collected Stories

Reading Faulkner: Collected Stories PDF Author:
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781604737240
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
For readers and critics, a guide to the Nobel Laureate's short stories

Reading Faulkner

Reading Faulkner PDF Author: Theresa M. Towner
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN:
Category : Mississippi
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
For readers and critics, a guide to the Nobel Laureate's short stories

The Campus Color Line

The Campus Color Line PDF Author: Eddie R. Cole
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691206767
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
"Although it is commonly known that college students and other activists, as well as politicians, actively participated in the fight for and against civil rights in the middle decades of the twentieth century, historical accounts have not adequately focused on the roles that the nation's college presidents played in the debates concerning racism. Focusing on the period between 1948 and 1968, The Campus Color Line sheds light on the important place of college presidents in the struggle for racial parity. College presidents, during a time of violence and unrest, initiated and shaped racial policies and practices inside and outside of the educational sphere. The Campus Color Line illuminates how the legacy of academic leaders' actions continues to influence the unfinished struggle for Black freedom and racial equity in education and beyond."--

New People

New People PDF Author: Danzy Senna
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 159448709X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
"As the twentieth century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, 'King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom.' Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation on the Jonestown massacre ... Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her--yet she can't stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows"--Back cover.

The Bear

The Bear PDF Author: William Faulkner
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 1443423203
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 27

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Book Description
Isaac McCaslin is obsessed with hunting down Old Ben, a mythical bear that wreaks havoc on the forest. After this feat is accomplished, Isaac struggles with his relationship to nature and to the land, which is complicated when he inherits a large plantation in Yoknapatawapha County. “The Bear” is included in William Faulkner’s novel, Go Down, Moses. Although primarily known for his novels, Faulkner wrote in a variety of formats, including plays, poetry, essays, screenplays, and short stories, many of which are highly acclaimed and anthologized. Like his novels, many of Faulkner’s short stories are set in fictional Yoknapatawapha County, a setting inspired by Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most frequently anthologized stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves" and "That Evening Sun." HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

Policing Intimacy

Policing Intimacy PDF Author: Jenna Grace Sciuto
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496833465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
In Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, author Jenna Grace Sciuto analyzes literary depictions of sexual policing of the color line across multiple spaces with diverse colonial histories: Mississippi through William Faulkner’s work, Louisiana through Ernest Gaines’s novels, Haiti through the work of Marie Chauvet and Edwidge Danticat, and the Dominican Republic through writing by Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario. This literature exposes the continuing coloniality that links depictions of US democracy with Caribbean dictatorships in the twentieth century, revealing a set of interrelated features characterizing the transformation of colonial forms of racial and sexual control into neocolonial reconfigurations. A result of systemic inequality and large-scale historical events, the patterns explored herein reveal the ways in which private relations can reflect national occurrences and the intimate can be brought under public scrutiny. Acknowledging the widespread effects of racial and sexual policing that persist in current legal, economic, and political infrastructures across the circum-Caribbean can in turn bring to light permutations of resistance to the violent discriminations of the status quo. By drawing on colonial documents, such as early law systems like the 1685 French Code Noir instated in Haiti, the 1724 Code Noir in Louisiana, and the 1865 Black Code in Mississippi, in tandem with examples from twentieth-century literature, Policing Intimacy humanizes the effects of legal histories and leaves space for local particularities. By focusing on literary texts and variances in form and aesthetics, Sciuto demonstrates the necessity of incorporating multiple stories, histories, and traumas into accounts of the past.