Author: William L. Van Deburg
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299096342
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Spanning more than three centuries, from the colonial era to the present, Van Deburg's overview analyzes the works of American historians, dramatists, novelists, poets, lyricists, and filmmakers -- and exposes, through those artists' often disquieting perceptions, the cultural underpinnings of American current racial attitudes and divisions. Crucial to Van Deburg's analysis is his contrast of black and white attitudes toward the Afro-American slave experience. There has, in fact, been a persistent dichotomy between the two races' literary, historical, and theatrical representations of slavery. If white culture-makers have stressed the "unmanning" of the slaves and encouraged such steteotypes as the Noble Savage and the comic minstrel to justify the blacks' subordination, Afro-Americans have emphasized a counter self-image that celebrates the slaves' creativity, dignity, pride, and assertiveness. ISBN 0-299-09634-3 (pbk.) : $12.50.
Author: Sarah N. Roth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139992805
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
In the decades leading to the Civil War, popular conceptions of African American men shifted dramatically. The savage slave featured in 1830s' novels and stories gave way by the 1850s to the less-threatening humble black martyr. This radical reshaping of black masculinity in American culture occurred at the same time that the reading and writing of popular narratives were emerging as largely feminine enterprises. In a society where women wielded little official power, white female authors exalted white femininity, using narrative forms such as autobiographies, novels, short stories, visual images, and plays, by stressing differences that made white women appear superior to male slaves. This book argues that white women, as creators and consumers of popular culture media, played a pivotal role in the demasculinization of black men during the antebellum period, and consequently had a vital impact on the political landscape of antebellum and Civil War-era America through their powerful influence on popular culture.
Author: Kevern Verney
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136475273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 139
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Book Description
This volume is an authoritative introduction to the history of African Americans in US popular culture, examining its development from the early nineteenth century to the present. Kevern Verney examines: * the role and significance of race in all major forms of popular culture, including sport, film, television, radio and music * how the entertainment industry has encouraged racism through misrepresentations and caricatured images of African Americans. African Americans have made a unique contribution to the richness and diversity of US popular culture. Rooted in African society and traditions, black slaves in America created a dynamic culture which continues to evolve. Present day hip-hop and rap music are still shaped by the historical experience of slavery and the ongoing will to oppose oppression and racism. Any student of African-American history or cultural studies will find this a fascinating and highly useful book.
Author: Keri Leigh Merritt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110718424X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 373
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Book Description
This book examines the lives of the Antebellum South's underprivileged whites in nineteenth-century America.
Author: Benjamin Reiss
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674006362
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
In this compelling story about one of the nineteenth century's most famous Americans, Benjamin Reiss uses P. T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the contours of race relations in the antebellum North. Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Heth was an elderly enslaved woman who was said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. Seizing upon the novelty, the newly emerging commercial press turned her act--and especially her death--into one of the first media spectacles in American history. In piecing together the fragmentary and conflicting evidence of the event, Reiss paints a picture of people looking at history, at the human body, at social class, at slavery, at performance, at death, and always--if obliquely--at themselves. At the same time, he reveals how deeply an obsession with race penetrated different facets of American life, from public memory to private fantasy. Concluding the book is a piece of historical detective work in which Reiss attempts to solve the puzzle of Heth's real identity before she met Barnum. His search yields a tantalizing connection between early mass culture and a slave's subtle mockery of her master.
Author: William L. Van Deburg
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
The Florentine artist Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) has long been celebrated as the consummate court painter and his sumptuous portrayals of Duke Cosimo de' Medici and Duchess Eleonora de Toledo have become icons of Italian Renaissance art. In this volume, an international assembly of scholars advances modern perceptions of Bronzino's art by applying fresh research paradigms not only to the well-known portraits, but also to other painted subjects, frescoes, and tapestries within the context of ancient Roman precedents, Renaissance European court culture, and postmodernist theory. The seven essays supplement two recent Bronzino exhibitions in New York and Florence (2010) by addressing Bronzino's portraiture, creative process, and tapestry production as well as past and present attitudes towards nudity, sexuality, landscapes, and poetic satire in Bronzino's imagery.
Author: Katrina Dyonne Thompson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252096118
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
In this ambitious project, historian Katrina Thompson examines the conceptualization and staging of race through the performance, sometimes coerced, of black dance from the slave ship to the minstrel stage. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, Thompson explicates how black musical performance was used by white Europeans and Americans to justify enslavement, perpetuate the existing racial hierarchy, and mask the brutality of the domestic slave trade. Whether on slave ships, at the auction block, or on plantations, whites often used coerced performances to oppress and demean the enslaved. As Thompson shows, however, blacks' "backstage" use of musical performance often served quite a different purpose. Through creolization and other means, enslaved people preserved some native musical and dance traditions and invented or adopted new traditions that built community and even aided rebellion. Thompson shows how these traditions evolved into nineteenth-century minstrelsy and, ultimately, raises the question of whether today's mass media performances and depictions of African Americans are so very far removed from their troublesome roots.
Author: William Fitzhugh Brundage
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807834629
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Beyond Blackface
Author: Sterling Stuckey Professor of History Northwestern University
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198021240
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442
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Book Description
How were blacks in American slavery formed, out of a multiplicity of African ethnic peoples, into a single people? In this major study of Afro-American culture, Sterling Stuckey, a leading thinker on black nationalism for the past twenty years, explains how different African peoples interacted during the nineteenth century to achieve a common culture. He finds that, at the time of emancipation, slaves were still overwhelmingly African in culture, a conclusion with profound implications for theories of black liberation and for the future of race relations in America. By examining anthropological evidence about Central and West African cultural traditions--Bakongo, Ibo, Dahomean, Mendi and others--and exploring the folklore of the American slave, Stuckey has arrived at an important new cross-cultural analysis of the Pan-African impulse among slaves that contributed to the formation of a black ethos. He establishes, for example, the centrality of an ancient African ritual--the Ring Shout or Circle Dance--to the black American religious and artistic experience. Black nationalist theories, the author points out, are those most in tune with the implication of an African presence in America during and since slavery. Casting a fresh new light on these ideas, Stuckey provides us with fascinating profiles of such nineteenth century figures as David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglas. He then considers in detail the lives and careers of W. E. B. Dubois and Paul Robeson in this century, describing their ambition that blacks in American society, while struggling to end racism, take on roles that truly reflected their African heritage. These concepts of black liberation, Stuckey suggests, are far more relevant to the intrinsic values of black people than integrationist thought on race relations. But in a final revelation he concludes that, with the exception of Paul Robeson, the ironic tendency of black nationalists has been to underestimate the depths of African culture in black Americans and the sophistication of the slave community they arose from.
Author: Gregory Jerome Hampton
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739191462
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 115
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Book Description
Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture: Reinventing Yesterday's Slave with Tomorrow's Robot is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to investigate and speculate about the relationship between technology and human nature. It is a timely and creative analysis of the ways in which we domesticate technology and the manner in which the history of slavery continues to be utilized in contemporary society. This text interrogates how the domestic slaves of the past are being re-imaged as domestic robots of the future. Hampton asserts that the rhetoric used to persuade an entire nation to become dependent on the institution of chattel slavery will be employed to promote the enslavement of technology in the form of humanoid robots with Artificial Intelligence. Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture makes the claim that science fiction, film, and popular culture have all been used to normalize the notion of robots in domestic spaces and relationships. In examining the similarities of human slaves and mechanical or biomechanical robots, this text seeks to gain a better understanding of how slaves are created and justified in the imaginations of a supposedly civilized nation. And in doing so, give pause to those who would disassociate America’s past from its imminent future.
