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Languages : en
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Puttin' Down Ole Massa : African Satire in the New World
Author: Publisher:
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Languages : en
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African Folklore in the New World
Author: Daniel J. CrowleyPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120
Book Description
Art and Ritual in the Black Diaspora
Author: Paul GriffithPublisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498527442
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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.
Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties
Author: Salikoko S. MufwenePublisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820314655
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 528
Book Description
For review see: Daniel J. Crowley, in New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, vol. 70, no. 1 & 2 (1996); p. 188-190.
The Dozens
Author: Elijah WaldPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199895406
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
Following his groundbreaking explorations of the blues and American popular music in Escaping the Delta and How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, Elijah Wald turns his attention to the tradition of African American street rhyming and verbal combat that ruled urban neighborhoods long before rap: the viciously funny, outrageously inventive insult game called "the dozens."At its simplest, the dozens is a comic concatenation of "yo' mama" jokes. At its most complex, it is a form of social interaction that reaches back to African ceremonial rituals. Whether considered vernacular poetry, verbal dueling, a test of street cool, or just a mess of dirty insults, the dozens has been a basic building block of African-American culture. A game which could inspire raucous laughter or escalate to violence, it provided a wellspring of rhymes, attitude, and raw humor that has influenced pop musicians from Jelly Roll Morton to Ice Cube. Wald explores the depth of the dozens' roots, looking at mother-insulting and verbal combat from Greenland to the sources of the Niger, and shows its breadth of influence in the seminal writings of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston; the comedy of Richard Pryor and George Carlin; the dark humor of the blues; the hip slang and competitive jamming of jazz; and most recently in the improvisatory battling of rap. A forbidden language beneath the surface of American popular culture, the dozens links children's clapping rhymes to low-down juke joints and the most modern street verse to the earliest African American folklore.In tracing the form and its variations over more than a century of African American culture and music, The Dozens sheds fascinating new light on schoolyard games and rural work songs, serious literature and nightclub comedy, and pop hits from ragtime to rap.
Afro-Caribbean Poetry and Ritual
Author: P. GriffithPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230106528
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
Focusing on orally transmitted cultural forms in the Caribbean, this book reaffirms the importance of myth and symbol in folk consciousness as a mode of imaginative conceptualization. Paul A. Griffith cross-references Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott s postcolonial debates with issues at seminal sites where Caribbean imaginary insurgencies took root. This book demonstrates the ways residually oral forms distilled history, society, and culture to cleverly resist aggressions authored through colonialist presumptions. In an analysis of the archetypal patterns in the oral tradition - both literary and nonliterary, this impressive book gives insight into the way in which people think about the world and represent themselves in it.
Minima Ethnographica
Author: Michael JacksonPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226389464
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
The postmodern opposition between theory and lived reality has led in part to an anthropological turn to "dialogic" or "reflexive" approaches. Michael Jackson claims these approaches are hardly radical as they still drift into such abstractions as "society" or "culture." His Minima Ethnographica proposes an existential anthropology that recognizes even abstract relationships as modalities of interpersonal life. Written in the style of Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, Jackson's work shows how general ideas are always anchored in particular social events and critical concerns. Emphasizing the intersubjective encounter over objective descriptions of the whole historical and contemporary situation of a given people, he illustrates the power and originality of existential anthropology through a series of vignettes from his fieldwork in Sierra Leone and Australia. An award-winning poet, novelist, and anthropologist, Jackson offers a timely critique of conventions that dull our sense of the links between academic study and lived experience.
Tuk Music Tradition in Barbados
Author: Sharon MeredithPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135187733X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 101
Book Description
Barbados is a small Caribbean island better known as a tourist destination rather than for its culture. The island was first claimed in 1627 for the English King and remained a British colony until independence was gained in 1966. This firmly entrenched British culture in the Barbadian way of life, although most of the population are descended from enslaved Africans taken to Barbados to work on the sugar plantations. After independence, an official desire to promulgate the country’s African heritage led to the revival and recontextualisation of cultural traditions. Barbadian tuk music, a type of fife and drum music, has been transformed in the post-independence period from a working class music associated with plantations and rum shops to a signifier of national culture, played at official functions and showcased to tourists. Based on ethnographic and archival research, Sharon Meredith considers the social, political and cultural developments in Barbados that led to the evolution, development and revival of tuk as well as cultural traditions associated with it. She places tuk in the context of other music in the country, and examines similar musics elsewhere that, whilst sharing some elements with tuk, have their own individual identities.
A Question of Manhood, Volume 1
Author: Darlene Clark HinePublisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253112477
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 630
Book Description
Each of these essays illuminates an important dimension of the complex array of Black male experiences as workers, artists, warriors, and leaders. The essays describe the expectations and demands to struggle, to resist, and facilitate the survival of African American culture and community. Black manhood was shaped not only in relation to Black womanhood, but was variously nurtured and challenged, honed and transformed against a backdrop of white male power and domination, and the relentless expectations and demands on them to struggle, resist, and to facilitate the survival of African-American culture and community.
Was Huck Black?
Author: Shelley Fisher FishkinPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190282312
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
Published in 1884, Huck Finn has become one of the most widely taught novels in American curricula. But where did Huckleberry Finn come from, and what made it so distinctive? Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that in Huckleberry Finn, more than in any other work, Mark Twain let African-American voices, language, and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art. In Was Huck Black?, Fishkin combines close readings of published and unpublished writing by Twain with intensive biographical and historical research and insights gleaned from linguistics, literary theory, and folklore to shed new light on the role African-American speech played in the genesis of Huckleberry Finn. Given that book's importance in American culture, her analysis illuminates, as well, how the voices of African-Americans have shaped our sense of what is distinctively "American" about American literature. Fishkin shows that Mark Twain was surrounded, throughout his life, by richly talented African-American speakers whose rhetorical gifts Twain admired candidly and profusely. A black child named Jimmy whom Twain called "the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across" helped Twain understand the potential of a vernacular narrator in the years before he began writing Huckleberry Finn, and served as a model for the voice with which Twain would transform American literature. A slave named Jerry whom Twain referred to as an "impudent and satirical and delightful young black man" taught Twain about "signifying"--satire in an African-American vein--when Twain was a teenager (later Twain would recall that he thought him "the greatest man in the United States" at the time). Other African-American voices left their mark on Twain's imagination as well--but their role in the creation of his art has never been recognized. Was Huck Black? adds a new dimension to current debates over multiculturalism and the canon. American literary historians have told a largely segregated story: white writers come from white literary ancestors, black writers from black ones. The truth is more complicated and more interesting. While African-American culture shaped Huckleberry Finn, that novel, in turn, helped shape African-American writing in the twentieth century. As Ralph Ellison commented in an interview with Fishkin, Twain "made it possible for many of us to find our own voices." Was Huck Black? dramatizes the crucial role of black voices in Twain's art, and takes the first steps beyond traditional cultural boundaries to unveil an American literary heritage that is infinitely richer and more complex than we had thought.
