The Jumbies’ Playing Ground

The Jumbies’ Playing Ground PDF Author: Robert Wyndham Nicholls
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617036110
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
A study of the carnival traditions that created "whole theater" folk pageants

The Jumbies’ Playing Ground

The Jumbies’ Playing Ground PDF Author: Robert Wyndham Nicholls
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617036110
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
A study of the carnival traditions that created "whole theater" folk pageants

The Jumbies' Playing Ground

The Jumbies' Playing Ground PDF Author: Robert Wyndham Nicholls
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496801180
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
During the masquerades common during carnival time, jumbies (ghosts or ancestral spirits) are set free to roam the streets of Caribbean nations, turning the world topsy-turvy. Modern carnivals, which evolved from earlier ritual celebrations featuring disguised performers, are important cultural andeconomic events throughout the Caribbean, a direct link to a multilayered history. This work explores the evolutionary connections in function, garb, and behavior between Afro-Creole masquerades and precursors from West Africa, the British Isles, and Western Europe. Robert Wyndham Nicholls utilizes a concept of play derived from Africa to describe a range of lighthearted and ritualistic activities. Along with Old World seeds, he studies the evolution of Afro- Creole prototypes that emerged in the Eastern Caribbean--bush masquerades, stilt dancers, animal disguises, she-males, female masquerades, and carnival clowns. Masquerades enact social, political, and spiritual roles within recurring festivals, initiations, wakes, skimmingtons, and weddings. The author explores performance in terms of abstraction in costume-disguise and the aesthetics of music, songs, drum rhythms, dance, and licentiousness. He reveals masquerades as transformative agent, ancestral endorser, behavior manager, informal educator, and luck conferrer.

The Jumbies

The Jumbies PDF Author: Tracey Baptiste
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 161620592X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Corinne La Mer claims she isn’t afraid of anything. Not scorpions, not the boys who tease her, and certainly not jumbies. They’re just tricksters made up by parents to frighten their children. Then one night Corinne chases an agouti all the way into the forbidden forest, and shining yellow eyes follow her to the edge of the trees. They couldn’t belong to a jumbie. Or could they? When Corinne spots a beautiful stranger at the market the very next day, she knows something extraordinary is about to happen. When this same beauty, called Severine, turns up at Corinne’s house, danger is in the air. Severine plans to claim the entire island for the jumbies. Corinne must call on her courage and her friends and learn to use ancient magic she didn’t know she possessed to stop Severine and to save her island home.

Rise of the Jumbies

Rise of the Jumbies PDF Author: Tracey Baptiste
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616206659
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Deep beneath the waves, a great enemy awakens . . . Corinne LaMer defeated the wicked jumbie Severine months ago, but things haven’t exactly gone back to normal in her Caribbean island home. Everyone knows Corinne is half-jumbie, and many of her neighbors treat her with mistrust. When local children begin to go missing, snatched from the beach and vanishing into wells, suspicious eyes turn to Corinne. To rescue the missing children and clear her own name, Corinne goes deep into the ocean to find Mama D’Leau, the dangerous jumbie who rules the sea. But Mama D’Leau’s help comes with a price. Corinne and her friends Dru, Bouki, and Malik must travel with mermaids across the ocean to fetch a powerful object for Mama D’Leau. The only thing more perilous than Corinne’s adventures across the sea is the jumbie that waits for her back home. With action-packed storytelling and inventive twists on Caribbean and West African mythology and fairy tales, Rise of the Jumbies is a breathlessly exciting tale of courage and friendship. An NPR Best Book of 2017 A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2017 A School Library Journal Best Book of 2017

New Perspectives on African Childhood

New Perspectives on African Childhood PDF Author: De-Valera NYM Botchway
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1622735870
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
What does it mean to be a child in Africa? In the detached Western media, narratives of penury, wickedness and death have dominated portrayals of African childhood. The hegemonic lens of the West has failed to take into account the intricacies of not only what it means to be an African child in local and culturally specific contexts, but also African childhood in general. Challenging colonial discourses, this edited volume guides the reader through different comprehensions and perspectives of childhood in Africa. Using a blend of theory, empiricism and history, the contributors to this volume offer studies from a range of fields including African literature, Afro-centric psychology and sociology. Importantly, in its eclectic geographical coverage of Africa, this book unashamedly presents the good, the bad and the ugly of African childhood. The resilience, creativity, pains and triumphs of African childhood are skilfully woven together to present the myriad of lived experiences and aspirations of children from across Africa. As an important contribution to African childhood studies, this book has the potential to be used by policymakers to shape, sustain or change socio-cultural, economic and education systems that accommodate African childhood dynamics and experiences at different levels.

Yo' Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux

Yo' Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux PDF Author: Jeanne Pitre Soileau
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496810414
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Winner of the 2018 Chicago Folklore Prize and Winner of the 2018 Opie Prize Jeanne Soileau, a teacher in New Orleans and south Louisiana for more than forty years, examines how children’s folklore, especially among African Americans, has changed. From the tumult of integration to the present, her experience afforded unique opportunities to observe children as they played. With integration in New Orleans during the 1960s, Soileau notes how children began to play with one another almost immediately. Children taught each other play routines, chants, jokes, jump-rope rhymes, cheers, taunts, and teases—all the folk games that happen in normal play on the street and playground. When adults—the judges and attorneys, the parents, and the politicians—haggled and shouted, children began to hold hands in a circle, fall down together to “Ring around the Rosie,” and tease each other in new and creative ways. Children’s ability to adapt can be seen not only in their response to social change, but in how they adopt and utilize pop culture and technology. Vast technological changes in the last third of the twentieth century influenced the way children sang, danced, played, and interacted. Soileau catalogs these changes and studies how games evolve and transform as much as they are preserved. She includes several topics of study: oral narratives and songs, jokes and tales, and teasing formulae gleaned from mostly African American sources. Because much of the field work took place on public school playgrounds, this body of oral narratives remains of particular interest to teachers, folklorists, linguists, and those who study play. In the end, Soileau shows that despite the restrictions of air-conditioning, shorter recess periods, ever-increasing hours of television watching, the growing popularity of video games, and carefully scripted after-school activities, many children in south Louisiana sustain traditional games. At the same time, they invent varied and clever new ones. As Soileau observes, children strive through their folk play to learn how to fit into a rapidly changing society.

Igbo in the Atlantic World

Igbo in the Atlantic World PDF Author: Toyin Falola
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253022576
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
The Igbo are one of the most populous ethnic groups in Nigeria and are perhaps best known and celebrated in the work of Chinua Achebe. In this landmark collection on Igbo society and arts, Toyin Falola and Raphael Chijioke Njoku have compiled a detailed and innovative examination of the Igbo experience in Africa and in the diaspora. Focusing on institutions and cultural practices, the volume covers the enslavement, middle passage, and American experience of the Igbo as well as their return to Africa and aspects of Igbo language, society, and cultural arts. By employing a variety of disciplinary perspectives, this volume presents a comprehensive view of how the Igbo were integrated into the Atlantic world through the slave trade and slavery, the transformations of Igbo identities and culture, and the strategies for resistance employed by the Igbo in the New World. Moving beyond descriptions of generic African experiences, this collection includes 21 essays by prominent scholars throughout the world.

Kakaamotobe

Kakaamotobe PDF Author: Courtnay Micots
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793643105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Kakaamotobe, meaning to scare, is known across southern Ghana, West Africa, as Fancy Dress performance. Masqueraders dress in colorful costumes and wear fancy and fierce masks; they dance energetically to drums or brass band music through the main streets of town during holidays, especially during Christmastime. Competitions held in two towns are intense annual events. This lively secular masquerade is a carnival form that has been practiced for well over a century primarily by coastal Fante people, and many additional ethnicities participate today. Kakaamotobe: Fancy Dress Carnival in Ghana explores the fascinating history, aesthetics, performance, and underlying messages of this masquerade with ties to other carnivalesque practices in the Black Atlantic. While Fancy Dress may engage with global cultures through some of its aesthetics, the practice is profoundly African. The utilization of elaborate costumes, masks, and brass bands expresses not a desire to imitate outside cultures, but rather the impulse of youth to adapt traditional culture to the contemporary environment. Courtnay Micots argues that the outward impression of folly belies the more serious refashioning of power, identity, and modernity in the community.

Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean

Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean PDF Author: Yvon van der Pijl
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978818688
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean is a collection of essays that explores fundamental questions of equality and freedom on the non-sovereign islands of the Dutch Caribbean. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, historical and media analysis, the study of popular culture, and autoethnographic accounts, the various contributions challenge conventional assumptions about political non/sovereignty. While the book recognizes the existence of nationalist independence movements, it opens a critical space to look at other forms of political articulation, autonomy, liberty, and a good life. Focusing on all six different islands and through a multitude of voices and stories, the volume engages with the everyday projects, ordinary imaginaries, and dreams of equaliberty alongside the work of independistas and traditional social movements aiming for more or full self-determination. As such, it offers a rich and powerful telling of the various ways of being in and belonging to our contemporary postcolonial world.

Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs

Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs PDF Author: Susan Davis
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252051459
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 485

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Book Description
Collector of sexual folklore. Cataloger of erotica. Tireless social critic. Gershon Legman's singular, disreputable resume made him a counter-cultural touchstone during his forty-year exile in France. Despite his obscurity today, Legman’s prescient work and passion for the prurient laid the groundwork for our contemporary study of the forbidden.Susan G. Davis follows the life and times of the figure driven to share what he found in civilization's secret libraries. Self-taught and fiercely unaffiliated, Legman collected the risqué on street corners and in theaters and dug it out of little-known archives. If the sexual humor he uncovered often used laughter to disguise hostility and fear, he still believed it indispensable to the human experience. Davis reveals Legman in all his prickly, provocative complexity as an outrageous nonconformist thundering at a wrong-headed world while reveling in conflict, violating laws and boundaries with equal abandon, and pursuing love and improbable adventures. Through it all, he maintained a kaleidoscopic network of friends, fellow intellectuals, celebrity admirers, and like-minded obsessives.