Crossing Borders Through Folklore

Crossing Borders Through Folklore PDF Author: Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826260098
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Examining works by Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, this innovative book frames black women's aesthetic sensibilities across art forms. Investigating the relationship between vernacular folk culture and formal expression, this study establishes how each of the four artists engaged the identity issues of the 1960s and used folklore as a strategy for crossing borders in the works they created during the following two decades. Because of its interdisciplinary approach, this study will appeal to students and scholars in many fields, including African American literature, art history, women's studies, diaspora studies, and cultural studies.

Crossing Borders Through Folklore

Crossing Borders Through Folklore PDF Author: Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826260098
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examining works by Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, this innovative book frames black women's aesthetic sensibilities across art forms. Investigating the relationship between vernacular folk culture and formal expression, this study establishes how each of the four artists engaged the identity issues of the 1960s and used folklore as a strategy for crossing borders in the works they created during the following two decades. Because of its interdisciplinary approach, this study will appeal to students and scholars in many fields, including African American literature, art history, women's studies, diaspora studies, and cultural studies.

Portraits of the New Negro Woman

Portraits of the New Negro Woman PDF Author: Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813539773
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Of all the images to arise from the Harlem Renaissance, the most thought-provoking were those of the mulatta. For some writers, artists, and filmmakers, these images provided an alternative to the stereotypes of black womanhood and a challenge to the color line. For others, they represented key aspects of modernity and race coding central to the New Negro Movement. Due to the mulatta's frequent ability to pass for white, she represented a variety of contradictory meanings that often transcended racial, class, and gender boundaries. In this engaging narrative, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson uses the writings of Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset as well as the work of artists like Archibald Motley and William H. Johnson to illuminate the centrality of the mulatta by examining a variety of competing arguments about race in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.

Leaving the South

Leaving the South PDF Author: Mary Weaks-Baxter
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496819608
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Millions of Southerners left the South in the twentieth century in a mass migration that has, in many ways, rewoven the fabric of American society on cultural, political, and economic levels. Because the movements of Southerners—and people in general—are controlled not only by physical boundaries marked on a map but also by narratives that define movement, narrative is central in building and sustaining borders and in breaking them down. In Leaving the South: Border Crossing Narratives and the Remaking of Southern Identity, author Mary Weaks-Baxter analyzes narratives by and about those who left the South and how those narratives have remade what it means to be southern. Drawing from a broad range of narratives, including literature, newspaper articles, art, and music, Weaks-Baxter outlines how these displacement narratives challenged concepts of Southern nationhood and redefined Southern identity. Close attention is paid to how depictions of the South, particularly in the media and popular culture, prompted Southerners to leave the region and changed perceptions of Southerners to outsiders as well as how Southerners saw themselves. Through an examination of narrative, Weaks-Baxter reveals the profound effect gender, race, and class have on the nature of the migrant’s journey, the adjustment of the migrant, and the ultimate decision of the migrant either to stay put or return home, and she connects the history of border crossings to the issues being considered in today’s national landscape.

Race, Women of Color, and the State University System

Race, Women of Color, and the State University System PDF Author: Vivian Yenika-Agbaw
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761854428
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Race, Women of Color, and the State University System focuses on challenges women of color experience or have experienced while teaching or pursuing administrative duties within the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. The book systematically examines how women of color —- administrators, faculty, and staff —- cope with the demands of the profession, their disciplines, the expectations from the system, and the isolation that comes with working in institutions and/or environments that are predominately all white. The book identifies challenges that are unique to the state system, although they may be applicable to the academy in general. Contributors, through their testimonies and shared experiences, provide academic tools and strategies to navigate the academy successfully.

Teaching African American Women’s Writing

Teaching African American Women’s Writing PDF Author: G. Wisker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137086475
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The essays in Teaching African American Women's Writing provide reflections on issues, problems and pleasures raised by studying the texts. They will be of use to those teaching and studying African American women's writing in colleges, universities and adult education groups as well as teachers involved in teaching in schools to A level.

Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison PDF Author: Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807146919
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
In this first interdisciplinary study of all nine of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber investigates how the communal and personal trauma of slavery embedded in the bodies and minds of its victims lives on through successive generations of African Americans. Approaching trauma from several cutting-edge theoretical perspectives -- psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and cultural and social theories -- Schreiber analyzes the lasting effects of slavery as depicted in Morrison's work and considers the almost insurmountable task of recovering from trauma to gain subjectivity. With an innovative application of neuroscience to literary criticism, Schreiber explains how trauma, whether initiated by physical abuse, dehumanization, discrimination, exclusion, or abandonment, becomes embedded in both psychic and bodily circuits. Slavery and its legacy of cultural rejection create trauma on individual, familial, and community levels, and parents unwittingly transmit their trauma to their children through repetition of their bodily stored experiences. Concepts of "home" -- whether a physical place, community, or relationship -- are reconstructed through memory to provide a positive self and serve as a healing space for Morrison's characters. Remembering and retelling trauma within a supportive community enables trauma victims to move forward and attain a meaningful subjectivity and selfhood. Through careful analysis of each novel, Schreiber traces the success or failure of Morrison's characters to build or rebuild a cohesive self, starting with slavery and the initial postslavery generation, and continuing through the twentieth century, with a special focus on the effects of inherited trauma on children. When characters attempt to escape trauma through physical relocation, or to project their pain onto others through aggressive behavior or scapegoating, the development of selfhood falters. Only when trauma is confronted through verbalization and challenged with reparative images of home, can memories of a positive self overcome the pain of past experiences and cultural rejection. While the cultural trauma of slavery can never truly disappear, Schreiber argues that memories that reconstruct a positive self, whether created by people, relationships, a physical place, or a concept, help Morrison's characters to establish subjectivity. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Schreiber's book unites psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and social theories into a full and richly textured analysis of trauma and the possibility of healing in Morrison's novels.

Grime, Glitter, and Glass

Grime, Glitter, and Glass PDF Author: Nikki A. Greene
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478059559
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In Grime, Glitter, and Glass, Nikki A. Greene examines how contemporary Black visual artists use sonic elements to refigure the formal and philosophical developments of Black art and culture. Focusing on the multimedia art of Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Greene traces the intersection of the visual’s sonic possibilities with the Black body’s physical, representational, and metaphorical use in art. She employs her concept of “visual aesthetic musicality” to interpret Black visual art by examining the musical genres of jazz and rap along with the often-overlooked innovations of funk and rumba within art historiography. From Bailey’s use of multilayered surfaces of glitter, mud, and recycled materials to meditate on Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism to Stout’s life-sized cast of her own body that recalls funk musician Betty Davis to Campos-Pons’s performative and sculptural references to sugar that resonate with the legacy of Celia Cruz, Greene outlines how these artists use mediums such as molded glass sculptures, viscous wet plaster, and dazzling manikin heads to enhance the manifestations of Black identity. By foregrounding the sonic elements of their work, Greene demonstrates that these artists use sound to make themselves legible, recognizable, and audible.

Understanding Lynn Nottage

Understanding Lynn Nottage PDF Author: Jennifer L. Hayes
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643365118
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
The first comprehensive study of the two-time Pulitzer-winning playwright Lynn Nottage is one of the leading innovators in American theater today. In settings ranging from seventeenth-century France (Las Meninas) to twenty-first century conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Ruined) and at a Pennsylvania factory (Sweat), she creatively foregrounds explorations of race, gender, and class. In Understanding Lynn Nottage, Jennifer L. Hayes presents an accessible overview of Nottage's body of work to date, connecting her to other Black female playwrights and situating her in the African American literary tradition. In this character-driven study, Hayes examines how the playwright's dynamic narratives bring together diverse perspectives to address historical and contemporary issues. Hayes argues that Nottage privileges Black women's voices within vital discourse about topics such as migration, domestic terrorism, and historical erasure. This book lays essential groundwork for future study of Nottage, who will continue to be a central dramatic voice for years to come, examining social problems through complex portraits of communities struggling to balance their values with shifting societal norms.

Africa and its Historical and Contemporary Diasporas

Africa and its Historical and Contemporary Diasporas PDF Author: Tunde Adeleke
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666940208
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Africa and its Historical and Contemporary Diasporas edited by Tunde Adeleke and Arno Sonderegger is an interdisciplinary study of the changing and complex nature of the Africa-Black Diaspora relationship. The contributors highlight the problems and challenges of this relationship and provide strategies for developing a more functional and mutually beneficial engagement in a radically changing global environment. This book presents new methodological approaches and research to study the many dimensions and complexities of Africa and its Diasporas. Collectively, this book addresses three vital themes. First, it foregrounds new and emerging forces reshaping the Africa-Black Diaspora nexus. Second, it highlights new and interdisciplinary approaches to “Diaspora” and “Pan-Africanism” (culture, religion, ideology, literature, philosophy, and epistemology). Third, it examines factors infusing the transformation in, and challenges of, African Diaspora and Pan-Africanist collaborations, and possible strategies of strengthening the relationship.

Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black Community, 1965-1980

Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black Community, 1965-1980 PDF Author: Kalenda C. Eaton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135899037
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
This book examines how cultural and ideological reactions to activism in the post-Civil Rights Black community were depicted in fiction written by Black women writers, 1965–1980. By recognizing and often challenging prevailing cultural paradigms within the post-Civil Rights era, writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Paule Marshall fictionalized the black community in critical ways that called for further examination of progressive activism after the much publicized 'end' of the Civil Rights Movement. Through their writings, the authors’ confronted marked shifts within African American literature, politics and culture that proved detrimental to the collective 'wellness' of the community at large.