Racechanges

Racechanges PDF Author: Susan Gubar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195350774
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
When the actor Ted Danson appeared in blackface at a 1993 Friars Club roast, he ignited a firestorm of protest that landed him on the front pages of the newspapers, rebuked by everyone from talk show host Montel Williams to New York City's then mayor, David Dinkins. Danson's use of blackface was shocking, but was the furious pitch of the response a triumphant indication of how far society has progressed since the days when blackface performers were the toast of vaudeville, or was it also an uncomfortable reminder of how deep the chasm still is separating black and white America? In Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, Susan Gubar, who fundamentally changed the way we think about women's literature as co-author of the acclaimed The Madwoman in the Attic, turns her attention to the incendiary issue of race. Through a far-reaching exploration of the long overlooked legacy of minstrelsy--cross-racial impersonations or "racechanges"--throughout modern American film, fiction, poetry, painting, photography, and journalism, she documents the indebtedness of "mainstream" artists to African-American culture, and explores the deeply conflicted psychology of white guilt. The fascinating "racechanges" Gubar discusses include whites posing as blacks and blacks "passing" for white; blackface on white actors in The Jazz Singer, Birth of a Nation, and other movies, as well as on the faces of black stage entertainers; African-American deployment of racechange imagery during the Harlem Renaissance, including the poetry of Anne Spencer, the black-and-white prints of Richard Bruce Nugent, and the early work of Zora Neale Hurston; white poets and novelists from Vachel Lindsay and Gertrude Stein to John Berryman and William Faulkner writing as if they were black; white artists and writers fascinated by hypersexualized stereotypes of black men; and nightmares and visions of the racechanged baby. Gubar shows that unlike African-Americans, who often are forced to adopt white masks to gain their rights, white people have chosen racial masquerades, which range from mockery and mimicry to an evolving emphasis on inter-racial mutuality and mutability. Drawing on a stunning array of illustrations, including paintings, film stills, computer graphics, and even magazine morphings, Racechanges sheds new light on the persistent pervasiveness of racism and exciting aesthetic possibilities for lessening the distance between blacks and whites.

Negrophilia

Negrophilia PDF Author: Petrine Archer Straw
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780500281352
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
"Avant-garde artists and writers courted black personalities such as Josephine Baker, Henry Crowder and Langston Hughes for their sense of 'otherness', Picasso, Brancusi, Giacometti, Leger, Man Ray, Sonia Delaunay, Bataille, Apollinaire and Nancy Cunard, among many others, enthusiastically collected African sculptures, wore tribal jewelry and clothes, and adopted black forms in their work. Their 'African' style influenced a larger audience anxious to be in vogue."--Jacket.

Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance

Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance PDF Author: Emily Bernard
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300183291
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
By the time of his death in 1964, Carl Van Vechten had been a far-sighted journalist, a best-selling novelist, a consummate host, an exhaustive archivist, a prescient photographer, and a Negrophile bar non. A white man with an abiding passion for blackness.

Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club

Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club PDF Author: Bernard Gendron
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226287379
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
When and how did pop music earn so much cultural capital? This text investigates five key moments when popular music and avant-garde art transgressed the rigid boundaries separating high and low culture to form friendly alliances.

Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic

Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic PDF Author: Jeremy Braddock
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
ISBN: 1421410044
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
“How African-American artists and intellectuals sought greater liberty in Paris while also questioning the extent of the freedoms they so publicly praised.” —American Literary History Paris has always fascinated and welcomed writers. Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, writers of American, Caribbean, and African descent were no exception. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic considers the travels made to Paris—whether literally or imaginatively—by black writers. These collected essays explore the transatlantic circulation of ideas, texts, and objects to which such travels to Paris contributed. Editors Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan P. Eburne expand upon an acclaimed special issue of the journal Modern Fiction Studies with four new essays and a revised introduction. Beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois’s trip to Paris in 1900and ending with the contemporary state of diasporic letters in the French capital, this collection embraces theoretical close readings, materialist intellectual studies of networks, comparative essays, and writings at the intersection of literary and visual studies. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic is unique both in its focus on literary fiction as a formal and sociological category and in the range of examples it brings to bear on the question of Paris as an imaginary capital of diasporic consciousness. “Demonstrate[s] how Black writers shaped history and contributed to conflicting notions of modernity hosted in Paris . . . The wide range of writers and scholars from American and Francophone studies makes this collection very original and an exciting adventure in concepts, movements, and ideologies that could be acceptable to non-specialists as well.” —American Studies

Cyber Racism

Cyber Racism PDF Author: Jessie Daniels
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742565254
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
In this exploration of the way racism is translated from the print-only era to the cyber era the author takes the reader through a devastatingly informative tour of white supremacy online. The book examines how white supremacist organizations have translated their printed publications onto the Internet. Included are examples of open as well as 'cloaked' sites which disguise white supremacy sources as legitimate civil rights websites. Interviews with a small sample of teenagers as they surf the web show how they encounter cloaked sites and attempt to make sense of them, mostly unsuccessfully. The result is a first-rate analysis of cyber racism within the global information age. The author debunks the common assumptions that the Internet is either an inherently democratizing technology or an effective 'recruiting' tool for white supremacists. The book concludes with a nuanced, challenging analysis that urges readers to rethink conventional ways of knowing about racial equality, civil rights, and the Internet.

Afro-Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic

Afro-Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic PDF Author: Tanya Barson
Publisher: Tate
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Tate Liverpool, 29 January until 25 April 2010.

From Fetish to Subject

From Fetish to Subject PDF Author: Carole Sweeney
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313085889
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Was modern primitivism complicit with the ideologies of colonialism, or was it a multivalent encounter with difference? Examining race and modernism through a wider and more historically contextualized study, Sweeney brings together a variety of published and new scholarship to expand the discussion on the links between modernism and primitivism. Tracing the path from Dada and Surrealism to Josephine Baker and Nancy Cunard's Negro: An Anthology, she shows the development of négrophilie from the interest in black cultural forms in the early 1920s to a more serious engagement with difference and representations in the 1930s. Considering modernism, race, and colonialism simultaneously, this work breaks from traditional boundaries of disciplines or geographic areas. Why was the primitive so popular in this era? Sweeney shows how high, popular, and mass cultural contexts constructed primitivism and how black diasporic groups in Paris challenged this construction. Included is research from original archival material from black diasporic publications in Paris, examining their challenges to primitivism in French literature and state-sponsored exoticism. The transatlantic movement of modernism and primitivism also is part of this broad comparative study.

Negro

Negro PDF Author: Nancy Cunard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781946963598
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Reprint Edition of the 1934 Edition. This is the abridged edition of Nancy Cunard's classic collection. In 1934, Nancy Cunard self-published this volume in an edition of 1000 copies through her Hours Press. She was an odd source considering she was a wealthy white Englishwoman. Nonetheless, the volume was very well respected. Chapters in the book cover "Slavery," "Patterns of Negro Life and Expression," "Negro History and Literature," "Education and Law," and more. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, William Carlos Williams, Samuel Becket, and others contributed to the text. Mostly neglected in Cunard's own time, Negro has attained the status of a cult classic. The list of contributors--represented in poetry, prose, translations, and music--is a who's who of 20th-century arts and literature: Louis Armstrong, Samuel Beckett, Norman Douglas, Nancy Cunard herself, Theodore Dreiser, W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, William Plomer, Arthus Schomburg, William Carlos Williams, and more. In its subject and international approach, Negro was generations ahead of its time. Its exploration of black achievement and black anger takes the reader from life in America to the West Indies, South America, Europe, and Africa. Though very much of its time, Negro is also timeless in its depiction of oppressive social and political conditions as well as in its homage to myriad contributions by black artists and thinkers. The story behind Negro: An Anthology is as legendary as its contents. In the late 1920s, Nancy Cunard, socially conscious, British, white, upper-class nonconformist and heir to the famed Cunard Shipping Line, married a black man and single-handedly put out 100 copies of a groundbreaking anthology. The work contained essays, poetry, short stories, and political propaganda from the era's finest Afro-American writers, along with valuable contributions by several white writers, including William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Theodore Dreiser. In this invaluable reprint, we can see how broadly Cunard's interest in the "Negro question" ran. In chapters dealing with slavery, history, education, and the arts--as well as Latin America, Europe, and Africa--Cunard includes the poetry of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown; Zora Neale Hurston's anthropological study of the "Characteristics of Negro Expressions"; James Ford's legendary "Communism and the Negro"; and glimpses into the conditions and folk customs of blacks in Trinidad, Barbados, Cuba, Brazil, Uruguay, Paris, and West Africa. The most poignant writing, however, is her own account of the infamous case of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of innocent blacks falsely accused of raping two white women, which resulted in their near-execution. Although much of the communist-friendly content of Negro may seem naive by today's standards, the collection still stands as one of the most unique and esoteric compendiums of 20th-century Afro-American literature. --Eugene Holley, Jr.

Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography

Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography PDF Author: Emily Maguire
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813042329
Category : Black people
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Examines how a cadre of writers reimagined the nation and re-valorized Afro-Cuban culture through a textual production that incorporated elements of the ethnographic with the literary.

Racechanges

Racechanges PDF Author: Susan Gubar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195350774
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
When the actor Ted Danson appeared in blackface at a 1993 Friars Club roast, he ignited a firestorm of protest that landed him on the front pages of the newspapers, rebuked by everyone from talk show host Montel Williams to New York City's then mayor, David Dinkins. Danson's use of blackface was shocking, but was the furious pitch of the response a triumphant indication of how far society has progressed since the days when blackface performers were the toast of vaudeville, or was it also an uncomfortable reminder of how deep the chasm still is separating black and white America? In Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, Susan Gubar, who fundamentally changed the way we think about women's literature as co-author of the acclaimed The Madwoman in the Attic, turns her attention to the incendiary issue of race. Through a far-reaching exploration of the long overlooked legacy of minstrelsy--cross-racial impersonations or "racechanges"--throughout modern American film, fiction, poetry, painting, photography, and journalism, she documents the indebtedness of "mainstream" artists to African-American culture, and explores the deeply conflicted psychology of white guilt. The fascinating "racechanges" Gubar discusses include whites posing as blacks and blacks "passing" for white; blackface on white actors in The Jazz Singer, Birth of a Nation, and other movies, as well as on the faces of black stage entertainers; African-American deployment of racechange imagery during the Harlem Renaissance, including the poetry of Anne Spencer, the black-and-white prints of Richard Bruce Nugent, and the early work of Zora Neale Hurston; white poets and novelists from Vachel Lindsay and Gertrude Stein to John Berryman and William Faulkner writing as if they were black; white artists and writers fascinated by hypersexualized stereotypes of black men; and nightmares and visions of the racechanged baby. Gubar shows that unlike African-Americans, who often are forced to adopt white masks to gain their rights, white people have chosen racial masquerades, which range from mockery and mimicry to an evolving emphasis on inter-racial mutuality and mutability. Drawing on a stunning array of illustrations, including paintings, film stills, computer graphics, and even magazine morphings, Racechanges sheds new light on the persistent pervasiveness of racism and exciting aesthetic possibilities for lessening the distance between blacks and whites.