Water and African American Memory

Water and African American Memory PDF Author: Anissa J. Wardi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813062501
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"This cutting-edge text not only increases our understanding of African American literature and film; it also enlarges the accessibility and the possibilities of the field of ecocriticism."--Yvonne Atkinson, Mt. San Jacinto College and president of the Toni Morrison Society While there is no lack of scholarship on the trans-Atlantic voyage and the Middle Passage as tropes in African diasporic writing, to date there has not been a comprehensive analysis of bodies of water in African American literature and culture. In Water and African American Memory, Anissa Wardi offers the first sustained treatise on watercourses in the African American expressive tradition. Her holistic approach especially highlights the ways that water acts not only as a metaphorical site of trauma, memory, and healing but also as a material site. Using the trans-Atlantic voyage as a starting point and ending with a discussion of Hurricane Katrina, this pioneering ecocritical study delves deeply into the environmental dimension of African American writing. Beyond proposing a new theoretical map for conceptualizing the African Diaspora, Wardi offers a series of engaging and original close readings of major literary, filmic, and blues texts, including the works of Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Julie Dash, Henry Dumas, and Kasi Lemmon.

Water and African American Memory

Water and African American Memory PDF Author: Anissa J. Wardi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813062501
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This cutting-edge text not only increases our understanding of African American literature and film; it also enlarges the accessibility and the possibilities of the field of ecocriticism."--Yvonne Atkinson, Mt. San Jacinto College and president of the Toni Morrison Society While there is no lack of scholarship on the trans-Atlantic voyage and the Middle Passage as tropes in African diasporic writing, to date there has not been a comprehensive analysis of bodies of water in African American literature and culture. In Water and African American Memory, Anissa Wardi offers the first sustained treatise on watercourses in the African American expressive tradition. Her holistic approach especially highlights the ways that water acts not only as a metaphorical site of trauma, memory, and healing but also as a material site. Using the trans-Atlantic voyage as a starting point and ending with a discussion of Hurricane Katrina, this pioneering ecocritical study delves deeply into the environmental dimension of African American writing. Beyond proposing a new theoretical map for conceptualizing the African Diaspora, Wardi offers a series of engaging and original close readings of major literary, filmic, and blues texts, including the works of Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Julie Dash, Henry Dumas, and Kasi Lemmon.

Undercurrents of Power

Undercurrents of Power PDF Author: Kevin Dawson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812224930
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Kevin Dawson considers how enslaved Africans carried aquatic skills—swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing—to the Americas. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

Bodies of Water in African American Literature, Music, and Film

Bodies of Water in African American Literature, Music, and Film PDF Author: Sharon A. Lewis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527502112
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
This is an edited volume of original essays which explore the meaning of bodies of water in creative narratives by African Americans. The contributors explore the representations of still and moving waterbodies across several genres of literature, film, and music. They also deploy socio-historical and environmental theories, in addition to close-reading interpretive strategies, all acknowledging and developing traditional ways of thinking about water in relation to African American experience and culture. The writers gathered here showcase insightful and vigorous research in various art forms, and, together, embody provocative, innovative and refreshing ways to contemplate water in Black American artistic expressivity.

Dream of the Water Children

Dream of the Water Children PDF Author: Frederick D. Kakinami Cloyd
Publisher: 2leaf Press
ISBN: 9781940939285
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Born to an African American father and Japanese mother, Frederick D. Kakinami Cloyd, the narrator of Dream of the Water Children, finds himself not only to be a marginalized person by virtue of his heritage, but often a cultural drifter, as well. Indeed, both his family and his society treat him as if he doesn't entirely belong to any world. Tautly written in spare, clear poetic prose, this memoir explores the specific contours of Japanese and African American cultures, as well as the broader experience of biracial and multicultural identity. To tell his story, Cloyd incorporates photographs and Japanese writing, history, and memory to convey both rich personal experience and significant historical detail. Bringing together vivid memories with a perceptive cultural eye, Dream of the Water Children brings readers closer to a biracial experience, opening up our understanding of the cultural richness and social challenges people from diverse backgrounds face.

Istwa across the Water

Istwa across the Water PDF Author: Toni Pressley-Sanon
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813072204
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Honorable Mention, Latin American Studies Association Haiti-Dominican Republic Section Isis Duarte Book Prize Gathering oral stories and visual art from Haiti and two of its "motherlands" in Africa, Istwa across the Water recovers the submerged histories of the island through methods drawn from its deep spiritual and cultural traditions. Toni Pressley-Sanon employs three theoretical anchors to bring together parts of the African diaspora that are profoundly fractured because of the slave trade. The first is the Vodou concept of marasa, or twinned entities, which she uses to identify parts of Dahomey (the present-day Benin Republic) and the Kongo region as Haiti's twinned sites of cultural production. Second, she draws on poet Kamau Brathwaite's idea of tidalectics—the back-and-forth movement of ocean waves—as a way to look at the cultural exchange set in motion by the transatlantic movement of captives. Finally, Pressley-Sanon searches out the places where history and memory intersect in story, expressed by the Kreyòl term istwa. Challenging the tendency to read history linearly, this volume offers a bold new approach for understanding Haitian histories and imagining Haitian futures.

Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory

Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory PDF Author: Owen J. Dwyer
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9781930066717
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
"Owen Dwyer and Derek Alderman examine civil rights memorials as cultural landscapes, offering the first book-length critical reading of the monuments, museums, parts, streets, and sites dedicated to the African-American struggle for civil rights and interpreting them is the context of the Movement's broader history and its current scene. In paying close attention to which stories, people, and places are remembered and which are forgotten, the authors present an engaging account of an unforgettable story."--BOOK JACKET.

Rooted in the Earth

Rooted in the Earth PDF Author: Dianne D. Glave
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 156976753X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
With a basis in environmental history, this groundbreaking study challenges the idea that a meaningful attachment to nature and the outdoors is contrary to the black experience. The discussion shows that contemporary African American culture is usually seen as an urban culture, one that arose out of the Great Migration and has contributed to international trends in fashion, music, and the arts ever since. However, because of this urban focus, many African Americans are not at peace with their rich but tangled agrarian legacy. On one hand, the book shows, nature and violence are connected in black memory, especially in disturbing images such as slave ships on the ocean, exhaustion in the fields, dogs in the woods, and dead bodies hanging from trees. In contrast, though, there is also a competing tradition of African American stewardship of the land that should be better known. Emphasizing the tradition of black environmentalism and using storytelling techniques to dramatize the work of black naturalists, this account corrects the record and urges interested urban dwellers to get back to the land.

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo PDF Author: Ntozake Shange
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1429956666
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Ntozake Shange's beloved Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is the story of three sisters and their mother from Charleston, South Carolina. "A jubilant celebration of womanhood—as moving as the moon . . . pure magic." --Kansas City Star Ntozake Shange's beloved Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is the story of three sisters and their mother from Charleston, South Carolina. Sassafrass, the oldest, is a poet and a weaver like her mother before her. Having gone north to college, she is now living with other artists in Los Angeles and trying to weave a life out of her work, her man, her memories and dreams. Cypress, the dancer, leaves home to find new ways of moving in the world. Indigo, the youngest, is still a child of Charleston-"too much of the south in her"-who lives in poetry and has the supreme gift of seeing the obvious magic of the world. Shange's rich and wondrous story of womanhood, art, and passionately-lived lives is written "with such exquisite care and beauty that anybody can relate to her message" (The New York Times).

Toni Morrison and the Natural World

Toni Morrison and the Natural World PDF Author: Anissa Janine Wardi
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496834186
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Critics have routinely excluded African American literature from ecocritical inquiry despite the fact that the literary tradition has, from its inception, proved to be steeped in environmental concerns that address elements of the natural world and relate nature to the transatlantic slave trade, plantation labor, and nationhood. Toni Morrison’s work is no exception. Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color is the first full-length ecocritical investigation of the Nobel Laureate’s novels and brings to the fore an unequaled engagement between race and nature. Morrison’s ecological consciousness holds that human geographies are enmeshed with nonhuman nature. It follows, then, that ecology, the branch of biology that studies how people relate to each other and their environment, is an apt framework for this book. The interrelationships and interactions between individuals and community, and between organisms and the biosphere, are central to this analysis. They highlight that the human and nonhuman are part of a larger ecosystem of interfacings and transformations. Toni Morrison and the Natural World is organized by color, examining soil (brown) in The Bluest Eye and Paradise; plant life (green) in Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Home; bodies of water (blue) in Tar Baby and Love; and fire (orange) in Sula and God Help the Child. By providing a racially inflected reading of nature, Toni Morrison and the Natural World makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies and provides a landmark for Morrison scholarship.

Living the California Dream

Living the California Dream PDF Author: Alison Rose Jefferson
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496229061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
2020 Miriam Matthews Ethnic History Award from the Los Angeles City Historical Society Alison Rose Jefferson examines how African Americans pioneered America’s “frontier of leisure” by creating communities and business projects in conjunction with their growing population in Southern California during the nation’s Jim Crow era.