John Henry: Roark Bradford's Novel and Play

John Henry: Roark Bradford's Novel and Play PDF Author: Roark Bradford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199707901
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Roark Bradford's 1931 novel and 1939 play dealing with the legendary folk-hero John Henry (both titled John Henry) were extremely influential in their own time, but have since then been nearly forgotten. Steven C. Tracy has united these hard-to-find works in a single critical edition that helps contextualize-and revive-both texts. An expansive introduction explores Bradford's life; recounts critical responses to his works; and surveys John Henry's pervasive influence in folk, literary, and popular culture. The volume also features a wide array of supplementary materials including a selected bibliography and discography, transcriptions of folksong texts and recordings available during the 1930s, and a chronology of the lives of both Bradford and Henry. As Tracy's introduction makes clear, such a consideration of Bradford--set in the context of writers, both black and white, drawing upon African American folklore and using dialects along with stereotypical and non-stereotypical portrayals--is long overdue. This new edition is a windfall for scholars and students of folklore and African American literature.

John Henry: Roark Bradford's Novel and Play

John Henry: Roark Bradford's Novel and Play PDF Author: Roark Bradford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199707901
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Roark Bradford's 1931 novel and 1939 play dealing with the legendary folk-hero John Henry (both titled John Henry) were extremely influential in their own time, but have since then been nearly forgotten. Steven C. Tracy has united these hard-to-find works in a single critical edition that helps contextualize-and revive-both texts. An expansive introduction explores Bradford's life; recounts critical responses to his works; and surveys John Henry's pervasive influence in folk, literary, and popular culture. The volume also features a wide array of supplementary materials including a selected bibliography and discography, transcriptions of folksong texts and recordings available during the 1930s, and a chronology of the lives of both Bradford and Henry. As Tracy's introduction makes clear, such a consideration of Bradford--set in the context of writers, both black and white, drawing upon African American folklore and using dialects along with stereotypical and non-stereotypical portrayals--is long overdue. This new edition is a windfall for scholars and students of folklore and African American literature.

Focus On: 100 Most Popular Fictional African-American People

Focus On: 100 Most Popular Fictional African-American People PDF Author: Wikipedia contributors
Publisher: e-artnow sro
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 854

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Book Description


Black Stereotypes in Popular Series Fiction, 1851-1955

Black Stereotypes in Popular Series Fiction, 1851-1955 PDF Author: Bernard A. Drew
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476616108
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Even well-meaning fiction writers of the late Jim Crow era (1900-1955) perpetuated racial stereotypes in their depiction of black characters. From 1918 to 1952, Octavus Roy Cohen turned out a remarkable 360 short stories featuring Florian Slappey and the schemers, romancers and ditzes of Birmingham's Darktown for The Saturday Evening Post and other publications. Cohen said, "I received a great deal of mail from Negroes and I have never found any resentment from a one of them." The black readership had to be satisfied with any black presence in the popular literature of the day. The best known white writers of black characters included Booth Tarkington (Herman and Verman in the Penrod books), Irvin S. Cobb (Judge Priest's houseman Jeff Poindexter), Roark Bradford (Widow Duck, the plantation matriarch), Hugh Wiley (Wildcat Marsden, the war veteran who traveled the country in the company of his goat) and Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden (radio's Amos 'n' Andy). These writers deservedly declined in the civil rights era, but left a curious legacy that deserves examination. This book, focusing on authors of series fiction and particularly of humorous stories, profiles 29 writers and their black characters in detail, with brief entries covering 72 others.

Black Folklorists in Pursuit of Equality

Black Folklorists in Pursuit of Equality PDF Author: Ronald LaMarr Sharps
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498586147
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
After the Civil War, Emancipation purportedly brought physical freedom to African Americans. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, blacks continued to experience inequality in all phases of American life—social, cultural, political, and economic. In pursuit of equality, African American movements interpreted folklore to reveal in their rhetoric the soul of a race and a path toward civilization. This book provides a comprehensive chronicle of these competing initiatives and their reception starting with the folklore society organized by Hampton Institute in 1893 and continuing through the early 1940s with the American Negro Academy, Fisk University graduates, William Hannibal Thomas, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, the Friends of Negro Freedom, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and blacks associated with the Communist Party USA. Disavowing a culture of fear, money, guns, and death, black folklorists in these movements exposed a racial inner life ranging from loving, loyal, and happy to imitative, tragic, spiritual, emotional, and creative. Each characterization of the race justified a distinct path and possible contributions to civilization. If unable to know their past, members of the movements and other folklorists were fearful that African Americans would be an anomaly among humanity.

King of the Delta Blues

King of the Delta Blues PDF Author: Gayle Dean Wardlow
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1621906612
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
"Charlie Patton (1891-1934) was born in central Mississippi. By 1908, he had begun his performing career, initially at small house parties, then at barrelhouses and other settings that could accommodate a hundred people or more. Until his death in 1934, Patton was a top draw for the numerous African Americans then living and working in the Delta. In 1929 and 1930, he recorded several hits for Paramount Records, on the basis of which he was sought by the American Record Company in January 1934 for what would be his last recordings. He was immensely influential to other bluesmen, including Tommy Johnson, Kid Bailey, Robert Johnson, and Howlin' Wolf. Since 1991, his collected recordings have been available to the wider public. This book was previously published in 1988 under the authorship of Wardlow (b. 1940) and Calt (1946-2010). Its sole printing of 3,000 paperback copies sold out within seven years, and since 1988 additional recordings of Patton and his associates have been recovered and widely reissued to the public, particularly on Jack White's Third Man Records. Komara (b. 1966) has updated Wardlow and Calt's original edition and has written a new afterword discussing a resurgence of Delta-blues-style rock and the continuing influence of Patton and the music genre he helped pioneer"--

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal PDF Author: Kate Dossett
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469654431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units" set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of "white" classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the black performance community—a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made and remade black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.

Folklore Recycled

Folklore Recycled PDF Author: Frank de Caro
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496806336
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Folklore Recycled: Old Traditions in New Contexts starts from the proposition that folklore—usually thought of in its historical social context as “oral tradition”—is easily appropriated and recycled into other contexts. That is, writers may use folklore in their fiction or poetry, taking plots, as an example, from a folktale. Visual artists may concentrate on depicting folk figures or events, like a ritual or a ceremony. Tourism officials may promote a place through advertising its traditional ways. Folklore may play a role in intellectual conceptualizations, as when nationalists use folklore to promote symbolic unity. Folklore Recycled discusses the larger issue of folklore being recycled into nonfolk contexts and proceeds to look at a number of instances of repurposing. Colson Whitehead’s novel John Henry Days is a literary text that recycles folklore but does so in a manner that examines a number of other uses of the American folk figure John Henry. The nineteenth-century members of the Louisiana branch of the American Folklore Society and the author Lyle Saxon in the twentieth century used African American folklore to establish personal connections to the world of the southern plantation and buttress their own social status. The writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote about folklore to strengthen his insider credentials wherever he lived. Photographers in Louisiana leaned on folklife to solidify local identity and to promote government programs and industry. Promoters of “unorthodox” theories about history have used folklore as historical document. Americans in Mexico took an interest in folklore for acculturation, for tourism promotion, for interior decoration, and for political ends. All of the examples throughout the book demonstrate the durability and continued relevance of folklore in every context it appears.

Opportunity

Opportunity PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 780

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Book Description


Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes

Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes PDF Author: Archie Green
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252019630
Category : Folklore
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
In this culmination of his half-century of involvement with American workers and their traditions, Archie Green explores occupational expression - stories, songs, customs, beliefs, artifacts - on the job and in institutions such as trade unions. Combining ethnographic description with analysis drawn from folklore, history, literary criticism, art history, linguistics, and philosophy, Green presents ten case studies in which he reflects on single words as social texts ("Wobbly", "fink") and clustered words within anecdotes, tales, and ballads ("John Henry", Homestead's strike songs, job yarns about cuckoldry and sexual impotence, and pile-driving traditions, for example). Drawing on Green's own experience as a shipwright and carpenter, the book will appeal both to workers curious about their history and traditions and to academicians who study the workforce and labor process.

A Southern Life

A Southern Life PDF Author: Laurence G. Avery
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469619520
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 804

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Book Description
This exceptional collection provides new insight into the life of North Carolina writer and activist Paul Green (1894-1981), the first southern playwright to attract international acclaim for his socially conscious dramas. Green, who taught philosophy and drama at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for In Abraham's Bosom, an authentic drama of black life. Among his other Broadway productions were Native Son and Johnny Johnson. From the 1930s onward, Green created fifteen outdoor historical productions known as symphonic dramas, thereby inventing a distinctly American theater form. These include The Lost Colony (1937), which is still performed today. Laurence Avery has selected and annotated the 329 letters in this volume from over 9,000 existing pieces. The letters, to such figures as Sherwood Anderson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston, and others interested in the arts and human rights in the South, are alive with the intellect, buoyant spirit, and sensitivity to the human condition that made Green such an inspiring force in the emerging New South. Avery's introduction and full bibliography of the playwright's works and first productions give readers a context for understanding Green's life and times.