African Folklore in the New World

African Folklore in the New World PDF Author: Daniel J. Crowley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description

African Folklore in the New World

African Folklore in the New World PDF Author: Daniel J. Crowley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description


The Dozens

The Dozens PDF Author: Elijah Wald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199895406
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Following his groundbreaking explorations of the blues and American popular music in Escaping the Delta and How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, Elijah Wald turns his attention to the tradition of African American street rhyming and verbal combat that ruled urban neighborhoods long before rap: the viciously funny, outrageously inventive insult game called "the dozens."At its simplest, the dozens is a comic concatenation of "yo' mama" jokes. At its most complex, it is a form of social interaction that reaches back to African ceremonial rituals. Whether considered vernacular poetry, verbal dueling, a test of street cool, or just a mess of dirty insults, the dozens has been a basic building block of African-American culture. A game which could inspire raucous laughter or escalate to violence, it provided a wellspring of rhymes, attitude, and raw humor that has influenced pop musicians from Jelly Roll Morton to Ice Cube. Wald explores the depth of the dozens' roots, looking at mother-insulting and verbal combat from Greenland to the sources of the Niger, and shows its breadth of influence in the seminal writings of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston; the comedy of Richard Pryor and George Carlin; the dark humor of the blues; the hip slang and competitive jamming of jazz; and most recently in the improvisatory battling of rap. A forbidden language beneath the surface of American popular culture, the dozens links children's clapping rhymes to low-down juke joints and the most modern street verse to the earliest African American folklore.In tracing the form and its variations over more than a century of African American culture and music, The Dozens sheds fascinating new light on schoolyard games and rural work songs, serious literature and nightclub comedy, and pop hits from ragtime to rap.

Art and Ritual in the Black Diaspora

Art and Ritual in the Black Diaspora PDF Author: Paul Griffith
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498527442
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Archetypes of Transition in Diaspora Art and Ritual examines residually oral conventions that shape the black diaspora imaginary in the Caribbean and America. Colonial humanist violations and inverse issues of black cultural and psychological affirmation are indexed in terms of a visionary gestalt according to which inner and outer realities unify creatively in natural and metaphysical orders. Paul Griffith’s central focus is hermeneutical, examining the way in which religious and secular symbols inherent in rite and word as in vodun, limbo, the spirituals, puttin’ on ole massa, and dramatic and narrative structures, for example, are made basic to the liberating post-colonial struggle. This evident interpenetration of political and religious visions looks back to death-rebirth traditions through which African groups made sense of the intervention of evil into social order. Herein, moreover, the explanatory, epistemic, and therapeutic structures of art and ritual share correspondences with the mythic archetypes that Carl Jung posits as a psychological inheritance of human beings universally.

Jump at the Sun

Jump at the Sun PDF Author: John Lowe
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252066375
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
"Lowe has written what may well be the Hurston book for the years to come." -- Werner Sollors, Harvard University "Lowe's study . . . smartly begins with the assumption that one reason for the stunning popularity of Hurston's work is the verve with which it addresses serious subjects in a comic style." -- Cheryl A. Wall, editor of Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women "Appreciative of Hurston's 'bodacious' humor, Lowe argues that she is 'a profoundly serious, experimental, subversive, and therefore unsettling artist.' . . . Strongly recommended." -- Choice "A trailblazing effort, a work that will enrich our understanding of Hurston's fiction." -- William R. Nash, The Southern Literary Journal "The most important booklength contribution to Hurston scholarship since Robert Hemenway published his biography in 1978." -- Will Brantley, Contemporary Literature

Afro-Caribbean Poetry and Ritual

Afro-Caribbean Poetry and Ritual PDF Author: P. Griffith
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230106528
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Focusing on orally transmitted cultural forms in the Caribbean, this book reaffirms the importance of myth and symbol in folk consciousness as a mode of imaginative conceptualization. Paul A. Griffith cross-references Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott s postcolonial debates with issues at seminal sites where Caribbean imaginary insurgencies took root. This book demonstrates the ways residually oral forms distilled history, society, and culture to cleverly resist aggressions authored through colonialist presumptions. In an analysis of the archetypal patterns in the oral tradition - both literary and nonliterary, this impressive book gives insight into the way in which people think about the world and represent themselves in it.

The Poverty of Progress

The Poverty of Progress PDF Author: E. Bradford Burns
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520342437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
From the Preface by Bradford Burns:If this essay succeeds, it will open an interpretive window providing a different perspective of Latin America's recent past. At first glance, the view might seem to be of the conventional landscape of modernization, but I hope a steady gaze will reveal it to be far vaster and more complex. For one thing, rather than enumerating the benefits accruing to Latin America as modernization became a dominant feature of the social, economic, and political life of the region, this essay regards the imposition of modernization as the catalyst of a devastating cultural struggle and as a barrier to Latin America's development. Clearly if a window to the past is opened by this essay, then so too is a new door to controversy. After most of the nations of Latin America gained political independence, their leaders rapidly accelerated trends more leisurely under way since the closing decades of the eighteenth century: the importation of technology and ideas with their accompanying values from Western Europe north of the Pyrenees and the full entrance into the world's capitalistic marketplace. Such trends shaped those new nations more profoundly than their advocates probably had realized possible. Their promoters moved forward steadfastly within the legacy of some basic institutions bequeathed by centuries of Iberian rule. That combination of hoary institutions with newer, non-Iberian technology, values, and ideas forged contemporary Latin America with its enigma of overwhelming poverty amid potential plenty. This essay emphasizes that the victory of the European oriented ruling elites over the Latin American folk with their community values resulted only after a long and violent struggle, which characterized most of the nineteenth century. Whatever advantages might have resulted from the success of the elites, the victory also fastened two dominant and interrelated characteristics on contemporary Latin America: a deepening dependency and the declining quality of life for the majority.

A Question of Manhood, Volume 1

A Question of Manhood, Volume 1 PDF Author: Darlene Clark Hine
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253213433
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description
Each of these essays illuminates an important dimension of the complex array of Black male experiences as workers, artists, warriors, and leaders. The essays describe the expectations and demands to struggle, to resist, and facilitate the survival of African American culture and community. Black manhood was shaped not only in relation to Black womanhood, but was variously nurtured and challenged, honed and transformed against a backdrop of white male power and domination, and the relentless expectations and demands on them to struggle, resist, and to facilitate the survival of African-American culture and community.

Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties

Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties PDF Author: Salikoko S. Mufwene
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820314655
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
For review see: Daniel J. Crowley, in New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, vol. 70, no. 1 & 2 (1996); p. 188-190.

Minima Ethnographica

Minima Ethnographica PDF Author: Michael Jackson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226389464
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The postmodern opposition between theory and lived reality has led in part to an anthropological turn to "dialogic" or "reflexive" approaches. Michael Jackson claims these approaches are hardly radical as they still drift into such abstractions as "society" or "culture." His Minima Ethnographica proposes an existential anthropology that recognizes even abstract relationships as modalities of interpersonal life. Written in the style of Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, Jackson's work shows how general ideas are always anchored in particular social events and critical concerns. Emphasizing the intersubjective encounter over objective descriptions of the whole historical and contemporary situation of a given people, he illustrates the power and originality of existential anthropology through a series of vignettes from his fieldwork in Sierra Leone and Australia. An award-winning poet, novelist, and anthropologist, Jackson offers a timely critique of conventions that dull our sense of the links between academic study and lived experience.

Genius in Bondage

Genius in Bondage PDF Author: Vincent Carretta
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813159466
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Until fairly recently, critical studies and anthologies of African American literature generally began with the 1830s and 1840s. Yet there was an active and lively transatlantic black literary tradition as early as the 1760s. Genius in Bondage situates this literature in its own historical terms, rather than treating it as a sort of prologue to later African American writings. The contributors address the shifting meanings of race and gender during this period, explore how black identity was cultivated within a capitalist economy, discuss the impact of Christian religion and the Enlightenment on definitions of freedom and liberty, and identify ways in which black literature both engaged with and rebelled against Anglo-American culture.