The Griot's Craft

The Griot's Craft PDF Author: Jan Jansen
Publisher: Lit Verlag
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
" Griots, the West African traditional bards, have attracted scholarly attention for decades because of their apparently infinite knowledge of history and their positions as social mediators. Academic research has thus focused on their verbal skills, their memory, their music and the meaning of their texts. Their diplomatic skills as mediators, however, have never been the object of systematic analysis. This book aims to fill that lacuna by examining how griots deal with both social relationships and the transfer of knowledge, thus illustrating why griots play such an important role in Mande societies. Griots are more than mere storytellers' or entertainers'. The subtle art of diplomatic mediation is integral to their craft. Jan Jansen elaborates his ideas on the basis of observations made during two years of research conducted among the prestigious bards of Kela (Mali). By using an interactionist approach, he demonstrates how griots create - both physically and metaphorically - a sp

The Griot's Craft

The Griot's Craft PDF Author: Jan Jansen
Publisher: Lit Verlag
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Get Book

Book Description
" Griots, the West African traditional bards, have attracted scholarly attention for decades because of their apparently infinite knowledge of history and their positions as social mediators. Academic research has thus focused on their verbal skills, their memory, their music and the meaning of their texts. Their diplomatic skills as mediators, however, have never been the object of systematic analysis. This book aims to fill that lacuna by examining how griots deal with both social relationships and the transfer of knowledge, thus illustrating why griots play such an important role in Mande societies. Griots are more than mere storytellers' or entertainers'. The subtle art of diplomatic mediation is integral to their craft. Jan Jansen elaborates his ideas on the basis of observations made during two years of research conducted among the prestigious bards of Kela (Mali). By using an interactionist approach, he demonstrates how griots create - both physically and metaphorically - a sp

Digital Griots

Digital Griots PDF Author: Adam J. Banks
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809330202
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Scholar Adam J. Banks offers a mixtape of African American digital rhetoric in his innovative study Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age. Presenting the DJ as a quintessential example of the digital griot-high-tech storyteller-this book shows how African American storytelling traditions and their digital manifestations can help scholars and teachers shape composition studies, thoroughly linking oral, print, and digital production in ways that centralize African American discursive practices as part of a multicultural set of ideas and pedagogical commitments. DJs are models of rhetorical excellence; canon makers; time binders who link past, present, and future in the groove and mix; and intellectuals continuously interpreting the history and current realities of their communities in real time. Banks uses the DJ's practices of the mix, remix, and mixtape as tropes for reimagining writing instruction and the study of rhetoric. He combines many of the debates and tensions that mark black rhetorical traditions and points to ways for scholars and students to embrace those tensions rather than minimize them. This commitment to both honoring traditions and embracing futuristic visions makes this text unique, as do the sites of study included in the examination: mixtape culture, black theology as an activist movement, everyday narratives, and discussions of community engagement. Banks makes explicit these connections, rarely found in African American rhetoric scholarship, to illustrate how competing ideologies, vernacular and academic writing, sacred and secular texts, and oral, print, and digital literacies all must be brought together in the study of African American rhetoric and in the teaching of culturally relevant writing. A remarkable addition to the study of African American rhetorical theory and composition studies, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age will compel scholars and students alike to think about what they know of African American rhetoric in fresh and useful ways.

Sunjata

Sunjata PDF Author: Gordon Innes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135753016
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Griot Potters of the Folona

Griot Potters of the Folona PDF Author: Barbara E. Frank
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025305897X
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 650

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Book Description
Griot Potters of the Folona reconstructs the past of a particular group of West African women potters using evidence found in their artistry and techniques. The potters of the Folona region of southeastern Mali serve a diverse clientele and firing thousands of pots weekly during the height of the dry season. Although they identify themselves as Mande, the unique styles and types of objects the Folona women make, and more importantly, the way they form and fire them, are fundamentally different from Mande potters to the north and west. Through a brilliant comparative analysis of pottery production methods across the region, especially how the pots are formed and the way the techniques are taught by mothers to daughters, Barbara Frank concludes that the mothers of the potters of the Folona very likely came from the south and east, marrying Mande griots (West African leatherworkers who are better known as storytellers or musicians), as they made their way south in search of clientele as early as the 14th or 15th century CE. While the women may have nominally given up their mothers' identities through marriage, over the generations the potters preserved their maternal heritage through their technological style, passing this knowledge on to their daughters, and thus transforming the very nature of what it means to be a Mande griot. This is a story of resilience and the continuity of cultural heritage in the hands of women.

Encyclopedia of African American History [3 volumes]

Encyclopedia of African American History [3 volumes] PDF Author: Leslie M. Alexander
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1851097740
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1272

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Book Description
A fresh compilation of essays and entries based on the latest research, this work documents African American culture and political activism from the slavery era through the 20th century. Encyclopedia of African American History introduces readers to the significant people, events, sociopolitical movements, and ideas that have shaped African American life from earliest contact between African peoples and Europeans through the late 20th century. This encyclopedia places the African American experience in the context of the entire African diaspora, with entries organized in sections on African/European contact and enslavement, culture, resistance and identity during enslavement, political activism from the Revolutionary War to Southern emancipation, political activism from Reconstruction to the modern Civil Rights movement, black nationalism and urbanization, and Pan-Africanism and contemporary black America. Based on the latest scholarship and engagingly written, there is no better go-to reference for exploring the history of African Americans and their distinctive impact on American society, politics, business, literature, art, food, clothing, music, language, and technology.

Rhetoric in the Rest of the West

Rhetoric in the Rest of the West PDF Author: Shane Borrowman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443822000
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
While the study of the history of rhetoric has expanded to include an ever-growing range of rhetorical traditions, lesser-known figures, and under- and un-studied texts, it has continued to exist in the hermetically sealed binary of West and Rest. Rhetorical scholars have begun uncovering the many marginalized rhetorical traditions silenced by the homogenous nature of our histories themselves, reading and writing new histories of the rhetorical tradition through frames from gender to geography. Despite these substantial challenges to the traditionally received history of rhetoric, many voices are still silenced and many spaces are still excluded—voices speaking within the spaces of the less-than-monolithic West itself. This silencing and excluding continues, perhaps, because of assumptions that no texts exist from these marginalized voices or that substantial rhetorical activity was not conducted in these marginalized spaces—regardless of already extant evidence of rhetorical activity as diverse as rural civic ethos in Classical Greece and Etruscan influences on Roman rhetoric or long-standing passive knowledge of scholarly activity in Medieval Andalusia and Ireland. Rhetoric in the Rest of the West attempts to expand the conversation in those gaps in the history of rhetoric by examining the traditions that lost the cultural competition and have been shrouded in the shadow of the rhetorical tradition.

Gettin' Our Groove on

Gettin' Our Groove on PDF Author: Kermit Ernest Campbell
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814329252
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
A critical work on the African American vernacular tradition and its expression in contemporary Hip hop.

Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century

Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: Vanessa Evans
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839470196
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
In the early twenty-first century, the concept of citizenship is more contested than ever. As refugees set out to cross the Mediterranean, European nation-states refer to »cultural integrity« and »immigrant inassimilability,« revealing citizenship to be much more than a legal concept. The contributors to this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to considering how cultures of citizenship are being envisioned and interrogated in literary and cultural (con)texts. Through this framework, they attend to the tension between the citizen and its spectral others - a tension determined by how a country defines difference at a given moment.

Griot Potters of the Folona

Griot Potters of the Folona PDF Author: Barbara E. Frank
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253058988
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 527

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Book Description
Griot Potters of the Folona reconstructs the past of a particular group of West African women potters using evidence found in their artistry and techniques. The potters of the Folona region of southeastern Mali serve a diverse clientele and firing thousands of pots weekly during the height of the dry season. Although they identify themselves as Mande, the unique styles and types of objects the Folona women make, and more importantly, the way they form and fire them, are fundamentally different from Mande potters to the north and west. Through a brilliant comparative analysis of pottery production methods across the region, especially how the pots are formed and the way the techniques are taught by mothers to daughters, Barbara Frank concludes that the mothers of the potters of the Folona very likely came from the south and east, marrying Mande griots (West African leatherworkers who are better known as storytellers or musicians), as they made their way south in search of clientele as early as the 14th or 15th century CE. While the women may have nominally given up their mothers' identities through marriage, over the generations the potters preserved their maternal heritage through their technological style, passing this knowledge on to their daughters, and thus transforming the very nature of what it means to be a Mande griot. This is a story of resilience and the continuity of cultural heritage in the hands of women.

Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past

Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004380183
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 537

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Book Description
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past outlines new directions in the historiography of West Africa. Its chapters explore new trends across regional and disciplinary fields with a focus on how political conjunctures influence source production and circulation.