Download or read book AKAN ASHANTI FOLKTALES Revised and Annotated written by and published by Prince Sarfo-Adu. This book was released on 2024-07-17 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of 75 Ashanti tales recorded in the Ashanti and Kwawu areas of Ghana.Each folktale in Twi/Akan dialect of the Tshi language, is followed by an English translation. The English translation is, throughout, made as nearly literal as possible.(At this point, one meets a certain difficulty in a conflict between a desire for accuracy and an endeavour to give a translation acceptable to English ears). First published in 1930 by R.S. Rattray, this edition features a modern Akan/Twi orthography with a brief introduction to the Language. Ashanti folktales often tell a moral lesson, describe a myth, or answer a question about the natural world. Most of the Ashanti tales use animal characters to represent human qualities such as jealousy, honesty, greed, and bravery. Ananse, the spider, is a trickster figure who appears in many of the Ashanti tales. With regard to the classification of these stories, it will be observed that the majority of them fall under one or other of the well-known headings: drolls and cumulative tales; apologues or tales with a moral; aetiological stories, accounting for physical characteristics in men and beasts, e.g. How the Leopard became Spotted; etymological tales, e.g. How the Ram came to be called Odwanini. Each and all of the stories in this volume would, however, be classed by the Akan-speaking African under the generic title of “Anansesɛm” (Spider stories), whether the spider appeared in the tale or not.
Download or read book Akan Ashanti Folk tales written by and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book West African Folktales written by Richard A. Spears and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1991-10 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collection of West African folktales drawn from prose narratives, proverbs, riddles, and songs.
Download or read book The Annotated African American Folktales The Annotated Books written by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 1437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner • NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Fiction) Winner • Anne Izard Storytellers’ Choice Award Holiday Gift Guide Selection • Indiewire, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis Star-Tribune These nearly 150 African American folktales animate our past and reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature. Drawing from the great folklorists of the past while expanding African American lore with dozens of tales rarely seen before, The Annotated African American Folktales revolutionizes the canon like no other volume. Following in the tradition of such classics as Arthur Huff Fauset’s “Negro Folk Tales from the South” (1927), Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), and Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly (1985), acclaimed scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar assemble a groundbreaking collection of folktales, myths, and legends that revitalizes a vibrant African American past to produce the most comprehensive and ambitious collection of African American folktales ever published in American literary history. Arguing for the value of these deceptively simple stories as part of a sophisticated, complex, and heterogeneous cultural heritage, Gates and Tatar show how these remarkable stories deserve a place alongside the classic works of African American literature, and American literature more broadly. Opening with two introductory essays and twenty seminal African tales as historical background, Gates and Tatar present nearly 150 African American stories, among them familiar Brer Rabbit classics, but also stories like “The Talking Skull” and “Witches Who Ride,” as well as out-of-print tales from the 1890s’ Southern Workman. Beginning with the figure of Anansi, the African trickster, master of improvisation—a spider who plots and weaves in scandalous ways—The Annotated African American Folktales then goes on to draw Caribbean and Creole tales into the orbit of the folkloric canon. It retrieves stories not seen since the Harlem Renaissance and brings back archival tales of “Negro folklore” that Booker T. Washington proclaimed had emanated from a “grapevine” that existed even before the American Revolution, stories brought over by slaves who had survived the Middle Passage. Furthermore, Gates and Tatar’s volume not only defines a new canon but reveals how these folktales were hijacked and misappropriated in previous incarnations, egregiously by Joel Chandler Harris, a Southern newspaperman, as well as by Walt Disney, who cannibalized and capitalized on Harris’s volumes by creating cartoon characters drawn from this African American lore. Presenting these tales with illuminating annotations and hundreds of revelatory illustrations, The Annotated African American Folktales reminds us that stories not only move, entertain, and instruct but, more fundamentally, inspire and keep hope alive. The Annotated African American Folktales includes: Introductory essays, nearly 150 African American stories, and 20 seminal African tales as historical background The familiar Brer Rabbit classics, as well as news-making vernacular tales from the 1890s’ Southern Workman An entire section of Caribbean and Latin American folktales that finally become incorporated into the canon Approximately 200 full-color, museum-quality images
Download or read book Akan Ashanti Folk tales written by and published by . This book was released on 1930 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Black Mind written by Oscar Ronald Dathorne and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1976 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Black Culture and Black Consciousness written by the late Lawrence W. Levine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-27 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Black Culture and Black Consciousness first appeared thirty years ago, it marked a revolution in our understanding of African American history. Contrary to prevailing ideas at the time, which held that African culture disappeared quickly under slavery and that black Americans had little group pride, history, or cohesiveness, Levine uncovered a cultural treasure trove, illuminating a rich and complex African American oral tradition, including songs, proverbs, jokes, folktales, and long narrative poems called toasts--work that dated from before and after emancipation. The fact that these ideas and sources seem so commonplace now is in large part due this book and the scholarship that followed in its wake. A landmark work that was part of the "cultural turn" in American history, Black Culture and Black Consciousness profoundly influenced an entire generation of historians and continues to be read and taught. For this anniversary reissue, Levine wrote a new preface reflecting on the writing of the book and its place within intellectual trends in African American and American cultural history.
Download or read book Spiders of the Market written by David Afriyie Donkor and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-04 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of the trickster spider character from West African folklore, performance, and Ghanian politics. The Ghanaian trickster-spider, Ananse, is a deceptive figure full of comic delight who blurs the lines of class, politics, and morality. David Afriyie Donkor identifies social performance as a way to understand trickster behavior within the shifting process of political legitimization in Ghana, revealing stories that exploit the social ideologies of economic neoliberalism and political democratization. At the level of policy, neither ideology was completely successful, but Donkor shows how the Ghanaian government was crafty in selling the ideas to the people, adapting trickster-rooted performance techniques to reinterpret citizenship and the common good. Trickster performers rebelled against this takeover of their art and sought new ways to out trick the tricksters. “A precise and inviting appeal to political economy, performance, and the enduring relevance of the cultural and archetypal trickster.” —D. Soyini Madison, Northwestern University “David Afriyie Donkor’s experience as a theatre artist and director supports the rich political economic component that frames this analysis of performance and performance traditions for broad audiences.” —Jesse Weaver Shipley, Haverford College “By sharing the performance experiences, rather than texts, Donkor accomplishes the challenging task of introducing rare theatre performances in a particularly compelling context for a Western readership in a global age.” —Theatre Survey “Overall, as a Ghanaian actor and director as well as a scholar, Donkor’s cultural insider analyses of ananse theatre within the space of political economy make important contributions and interventions to the discourses on performance (theory) and neoliberalism and their interaction in Ghana and Africa.” —African Studies Review
Download or read book Black Culture and Black Consciousness written by Lawrence W. Levine and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1978 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveys the oral cultural heritage of black Americans as manifested in music, folk tales and heroes, and humor.
Download or read book Speaking Out written by Jack Zipes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his successful Creative Storytelling, Jack Zipes showed how storytelling is a rich and powerful tool for self-expression and for building children's imaginations. In Speaking Out, this master storyteller goes further, speaking out against rote learning and testing and for the positive force within storytelling and creative drama during the K-12 years. For the past four years, Jack Zipes has worked with the Neighborhood Bridges Program of the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis, taking his storytelling techniques into inner-city schools. Speaking Out is in part a record of the transformations storytelling can work on the minds and lives of young people. But it is also a vivid and exhilarating demonstration of a different kind of education - one built from deep inside each child. Speaking Out is a book for storytellers, educators, parents, and anyone who cares about helping kids find within themselves the keys to imagination.
Download or read book Sacred Narrative written by Alan Dundes and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1984-11-15 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan Dundes defines myth as a sacred narrative that explains how the world and humanity came to be in their present form. This new volume brings together classic statements on the theory of myth by the authors. The twenty-two essays by leading experts on myth represent comparative, functionalist, myth-ritual, Jungian, Freudian, and structuralist approaches to studying the genre.
Download or read book Memory and Myth written by Fiona Darroch and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the problematical historical location of the term 'religion' and examines how this location has affected the analytical reading of postcolonial fiction and poetry. The adoption of the term 'religion' outside of a Western Enlightenment and Christian context should therefore be treated with caution. Within postcolonial literary criticism, there has been either a silencing of the category as a result of this caution or an uncritical and essentializing adoption of the term 'religion'. It is argued in the present study that a vital aspect of how writers articulate their histories of colonial contact, migration, slavery, and the re-forging of identities in the wake of these histories is illuminated by the classificatory term 'religion'. Aspects of postcolonial theory and Religious Studies theory are combined to provide fresh insights into the literature, thereby expanding the field of postcolonial literary criticism. The way in which writers 'remember' history through writing is central to the way in which 'religion' is theorized and articulated; the act of remembrance can be persuasively interpreted in terms of 'religion'. The title 'Memory and Myth' therefore refers to both the syncretic mythology of Guyana, and the key themes in a new critical understanding of 'religion'. Particular attention is devoted to Wilson Harris's novel Jonestown, alongside theoretical and historical material on the actual Jonestown tragedy; to the mesmerizing effect of the Anancy tales on contemporary writers, particularly the poet John Agard; and to the work of the Indo-Guyanese writer David Dabydeen and his elusive character Manu.
Download or read book The Trickster Comes West written by Babacar M'baye and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-02-11 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past, scholars have looked at narratives of the African diaspora only to discover how these memoirs, poems, and fictions related to the West. The Trickster Comes West: Pan-African Influence in Early Black Diasporan Narratives explores relationships among African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-British narratives of slavery and of New World and British oppression and what African influences brought to these diasporic expressions. Using an interdisciplinary method that combines history, literary theory, cultural studies, anthropology, folklore, and philosophy, the book examines the work of Pan-African trickster icons, such as Leuk (Rabbit), Golo (Monkey), Bouki (Hyena), Mbe (Tortoise), and Anancy (Spider), on the resistance strategies of early black writers who were exposing the evils of slavery, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, and other forms of oppression. Works discussed in this book include Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), Quobna Ottobah Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787), Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1795), Elizabeth Hart Thwaites's “History of Methodism” (1804), Anne Hart Gilbert's "History of Methodism" (1804), and Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, Related By Herself (1831). Analyzing these writings in the context of the black Atlantic struggle for freedom, The Trickster Comes West relocates the beginnings of Pan-Africanism and suggests the strong influence of its theories of communal resistance, racial solidarity, and economic development on pioneering black narratives.
Download or read book African Folklore written by Philip M. Peek and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 1509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by an international team of experts, this is the first work of its kind to offer comprehensive coverage of folklore throughout the African continent. Over 300 entries provide in-depth examinations of individual African countries, ethnic groups, religious practices, artistic genres, and numerous other concepts related to folklore. Featuring original field photographs, a comprehensive index, and thorough cross-references, African Folklore: An Encyclopedia is an indispensable resource for any library's folklore or African studies collection. Also includes seven maps.
Download or read book The Trickster in West Africa written by Robert D. Pelton and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The trickster appears in the myths and folktales of nearly every traditional society. Robert Pelton examines Ashanti, Fon, Yoruba, and Dogon trickster-figures in their social and mythical contexts and in light of contemporary thought, exploring the way the trickster links animality and ritual transformation; culture, sex, and laughter; cosmic process and personal history; divination and social change. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980. The trickster appears in the myths and folktales of nearly every traditional society. Robert Pelton examines Ashanti, Fon, Yoruba, and Dogon trickster-figures in their social and mythical contexts and in light of contemporary thought, exploring the way th
Download or read book Mother Wit from Laughing Barrel written by Alan Dundes and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1973 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book What is this Thing Called Sunsum written by Clifford Owusu-Gyamfi and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, African scholarship has stressed the importance of regional oral traditions in academic learning. With this broad knowledge base in African studies, significant categories of socio-religious learning have been closely studied. This volume focuses on the notion of "spirit" as understood by the Akan people of West Africa.