Download or read book Art and Healing of the Bakongo Commented by Themselves written by Wyatt MacGaffey and published by Folkens Museum Etnografiska. This book was released on 1991 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book In the Looking Glass written by Rebecca K. Shrum and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-08-30 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[An] utterly fascinating reading of the multiple uses and meanings of mirrors among European Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans.” —Journal of Social History What did it mean, Rebecca K. Shrum asks, for people—long-accustomed to associating reflective surfaces with ritual and magic—to became as familiar with how they looked as they were with the appearance of other people? Fragmentary histories tantalize us with how early Americans—people of Native, European, and African descent—interacted with mirrors. Shrum argues that mirrors became objects through which white men asserted their claims to modernity, emphasizing mirrors as fulcrums of truth that enabled them to know and master themselves and their world. In claiming that mirrors revealed and substantiated their own enlightenment and rationality, white men sought to differentiate how they used mirrors from not only white women but also from Native Americans and African Americans, who had long claimed ownership of and the right to determine the meaning of mirrors for themselves. Mirrors thus played an important role in the construction of early American racial and gender hierarchies. Drawing from archival research, as well as archaeological studies, probate inventories, trade records, and visual sources, Shrum also assesses extant mirrors in museum collections through a material culture lens. Focusing on how mirrors were acquired in America and by whom, as well as the profound influence mirrors had, both individually and collectively, on the groups that embraced them, In the Looking Glass is a piece of innovative textual and visual scholarship. “A superb reflection of the many meanings held by an object usually taken for granted. Highly recommended.” —Choice
Download or read book Art and Oracle written by Alisa LaGamma and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2000 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-eight African cultures are represented here by artifacts created to communicate with ancestors, spirits, and gods, about such issues as health, conception, and determination of guilt or innocence. Issued in conjunction with an April-July 2000 exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, this catalog contains extensive ethnographic, descriptive, and interpretive text in connection with each of 50 pictured pieces, as well as a 13-page essay about divination in Sub-Saharan Africa (by John Pemberton III) and an introductory essay by LaGamma. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book The Art of Small Things written by John Mack and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This richly illustrated book celebrates the art of the miniature, but also looks beyond it at the many aspects of "small worlds"--in particular, their capacity to evoke responses that far exceed their physical dimensions. Mack explores the talismanic, religious, or magical properties with which miniatures are often imbued. Considering a wide range of objects, he examines the use of the miniature form in various cultural contexts.
Download or read book Black Magic written by Yvonne P. Chireau and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-11-20 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Magic looks at the origins, meaning, and uses of Conjure—the African American tradition of healing and harming that evolved from African, European, and American elements—from the slavery period to well into the twentieth century. Illuminating a world that is dimly understood by both scholars and the general public, Yvonne P. Chireau describes Conjure and other related traditions, such as Hoodoo and Rootworking, in a beautifully written, richly detailed history that presents the voices and experiences of African Americans and shows how magic has informed their culture. Focusing on the relationship between Conjure and Christianity, Chireau shows how these seemingly contradictory traditions have worked together in a complex and complementary fashion to provide spiritual empowerment for African Americans, both slave and free, living in white America. As she explores the role of Conjure for African Americans and looks at the transformations of Conjure over time, Chireau also rewrites the dichotomy between magic and religion. With its groundbreaking analysis of an often misunderstood tradition, this book adds an important perspective to our understanding of the myriad dimensions of human spirituality.
Download or read book African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry written by Philip D. Morgan and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Included are essays on the double-edged freedom that the American Revolution made possible to black women, the Lowcountry as site of the largest gathering of African Muslims in early North America, and the coexisting worlds of Christianity and Conjuring in coastal Georgia and the links (with variations) to African practices.
Download or read book Revolutionary Freedoms written by Cécile Accilien and published by Educa Vision Inc.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of survival, strength and imagination in Haiti. This new perspective on Haitian history features essays that augment the historical paintings of renowned contemporary Haitian-American artist, Ulrick Jean-Pierre. Poet, playwright, and scholar Kamau Brathwaite has written the powerful Foreword to this volume, which combines scholarship, experience, and inspiration to reveal the complex history of the island that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic. Chapters cover pre-Columbian and colonial history; critical events and people of the Haitian Revolution; the tangle of U.S.Haitian relations, including the special relationship with Louisiana; Haitian connections to South America; and the contested border with the neighboring Dominican Republic. Revolutionary Freedoms also includes an interview with the artist, a section on women in the nations history, and suggested reading. The Editors of the book, Ccile Accilien, Jessica Davis, and Elmide Mlance, have assembled a distinguished collection of writers and scholars, such as Edwidge Danticat, Max Beauvoir, Marc Christophe, Lauren Derby, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Rgine Latortue, Carolyn Morrow Long, Margaret Mitchell Armand, Richard Turits, and Philippe Zacar. 2006, Caribbean Studies Press, 266pp, 45 full-color reproductions, Hardcover. ISBN 1-58432-293-4
Download or read book Presence written by Robert Maniura and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In about 25 BC tribesmen of the kingdom of Meroe placed a bronze head of Augustus, cut from a full-length statue, beneath the steps of a temple of victory: the decapitated head of the Emperor was thus regularly trampled underfoot. Two millennia later, during the second Gulf War, Iraqis 'insulted' a toppled bronze statue of Saddam Hussein by beating it with their shoes. Do these chronologically distant but apparently related examples of the defamation of images imply that the persons represented were regarded by their detractors as in some way 'present' in the images? Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects reconsiders the notion of 'presence' in objects. The first book to address the issue directly, it contains a series of case studies covering a broad geographical and chronological range from ancient Greece and the Incas to industrial America and contemporary India, as well as examples from the canon of western European art. The studies reveal the widespread evidence for this striking form of response and allow readers to see how 'presence' is evoked and either embraced or repressed in differing historical and cultural contexts. Featuring a variety of disciplines and approaches, the book will be of interest to students of art history, art theory, visual culture, anthropology, psychology and philosophy.
Download or read book World of a Slave 2 volumes written by Kym S. Rice and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-12-13 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume encyclopedia is the first to focus on the material life of slaves. Although many encyclopedias discuss slavery, enslaved blacks, and African American life and culture, none focus on the material world of slaves, such as what they saw; touched; heard; ate, drank, and smoked; wore; worked with and in; used, cultivated, crafted, played, and played with; and slept on. The two-volume World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States is a landmark work in this important new field of study. Recognizing that a full understanding of the complexity of American slavery and its legacy requires an understanding of the material culture of slavery, the encyclopedia includes entries on almost every aspect of that material culture, beginning in the 17th century and extending through the Civil War. Readers will find information on animals, documents, economy, education and literacy, food and drink, home, music, personal items, places, religion, rites of passage, slavery, structures, and work. There are also introductory essays on literacy and oral culture and on music and dance.
Download or read book Painting a Hidden Life written by Mechal Sobel and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-03-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born into slavery on an Alabama plantation in 1853, Bill Traylor worked as a sharecropper for most of his life. But in 1928 he moved to Montgomery and changed his life, becoming a self-taught lyric painter of extraordinary ability and power. From 1936 to 1946, he sat on a street corner—old, ill, and homeless—and created well over 1,200 paintings. Collected and later promoted by Charles Shannon, a young Montgomery artist, his work received star placement in the Corcoran Gallery’s 1982 exhibition “Black Folk Art in America.” From then on, the spare and powerful “radical modernity” of Traylor’s work helped place him among the rising stars of twentieth-century American artists. Most critics and art historians who analyze Traylor’s paintings emphasize his extraordinary form and evaluate the content as either simple or enigmatic narratives of black life. In Painting a Hidden Life, historian Mechal Sobel’s trenchant analysis reveals a previously unrecognized central core of meaning in Traylor’s near-hidden symbolism—a call for retribution in response to acts of lynching and other violence toward blacks. Drawing on historical records and oral histories, Sobel carefully explores the relationship between Traylor’s life and his paintings and arrives at new interpretations of his art. From an interview with Traylor’s great-granddaughter, Sobel learned that Traylor believed the Birmingham policemen who killed his son in 1929 in fact lynched him—a story that neither Traylor nor his family had previously disclosed. The trauma of this event, Sobel explains, propelled Traylor to find a way to voice his rage and spurred the creation of his powerful, mysterious visual language. Traylor’s encoded paintings tell a vibrant, multilayered story of conjure power, sexual rivalry, and violence. Revealing an extraordinarily diverse visual universe, the symbols in Traylor’s paintings reflect the worlds he lived in between 1853 and 1949: the plantation conjure milieu into which he was born, the blues culture in which he matured, the world of Jim Crow he learned to secretly violate, and the Catholic values he adopted in his final years. From his African heritage, Traylor drew symbols not readily understood by whites. He mixed traditional African images with conjure signs, with symbols of black Baptists and Freemasons, and with images central to the hidden black protest movement—the cross and the lynching tree. In this groundbreaking examination of an extraordinary artist, Sobel uncovers the internalized pain of several generations and traces the paths African Americans blazed long before the march down the Selma–Montgomery highway.
Download or read book Signs of Diaspora diaspora of Signs written by Grey Gundaker and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the interplay of cultural trajectories and sign systems in the African diaspora, particularly in the U.S., Gundaker shows that African Americans, while readily mastering the conventions and canons of Euro-America, also drew on knowledge of their own to make an oppositional repertoire of signs and meanings.
Download or read book A Dance of Assassins written by Allen F. Roberts and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dance of Assassins presents the competing histories of how Congolese Chief Lusinga and Belgian Lieutenant Storms engaged in a deadly clash while striving to establish hegemony along the southwestern shores of Lake Tanganyika in the 1880s. While Lusinga participated in the east African slave trade, Storms' secret mandate was to meet Henry Stanley's eastward march and trace "a white line across the Dark Continent" to legitimize King Leopold's audacious claim to the Congo. Confrontation was inevitable, and Lusinga lost his head. His skull became the subject of a sinister evolutionary treatise, while his ancestral figure is now considered a treasure of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Allen F. Roberts reveals the theatricality of early colonial encounter and how it continues to influence Congolese and Belgian understandings of history today.
Download or read book Buying Into the World of Goods written by Ann Smart Martin and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2008-03-14 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cowinner, 2008 Fred Kniffen Book Award. Pioneer America Society/Association for the Preservation of Landscapes and Artifacts How did people living on the early American frontier discover and then become a part of the market economy? How do their purchases and their choices revise our understanding of the market revolution and the emerging consumer ethos? Ann Smart Martin provides answers to these questions by examining the texture of trade on the edge of the upper Shenandoah Valley between 1760 and 1810. Reconstructing the world of one country merchant, John Hook, Martin reveals how the acquisition of consumer goods created and validated a set of ideas about taste, fashion, and lifestyle in a particular place at a particular time. Her analysis of Hook's account ledger illuminates the everyday wants, transactions, and tensions recorded within and brings some of Hook's customers to life: a planter looking for just the right clock, a farmer in search of nails, a young woman and her friends out shopping on their own, and a slave woman choosing a looking glass. This innovative approach melds fascinating narratives with sophisticated analysis of material culture to distill large abstract social and economic systems into intimate triangulations among merchants, customers, and objects. Martin finds that objects not only reflect culture, they are the means to create it.
Download or read book African Voices in the African American Heritage written by Betty M. Kuyk and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The survival of African belief systems and social structures in contemporary African American culture
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History written by John Parker and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History represents an invaluable tool for historians and others in the field of African studies. This collection of essays, produced by some of the finest scholars currently working in the field, provides the latest insights into, and interpretations of, the history of Africa - a continent with a rich and complex past. An understanding of this past is essential to gain perspective on Africa's current challenges, and this accessible and comprehensive volume will allow readers to explore various aspects - political, economic, social, and cultural - of the continent's history over the last two hundred years. Since African history first emerged as a serious academic endeavour in the 1950s and 1960s, it has undergone numerous shifts in terms of emphasis and approach, changes brought about by political and economic exigencies and by ideological debates. This multi-faceted Handbook is essential reading for anyone with an interest in those debates, and in Africa and its peoples. While the focus is determinedly historical, anthropology, geography, literary criticism, political science and sociology are all employed in this ground-breaking study of Africa's past.
Download or read book Llewellyn s 2012 Magical Almanac written by Llewellyn and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2011-09-08 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breathe new life into your magical practice with the bounty of practical spells, rituals, and divinations inside Llewellyn's Magical Almanac. For more than twenty years, this trusted guide has inspired and enlightened magical practitioners of all skill levels. Get organized with the handy calendar section-shaded for easier "flip-to" reference. It features world festivals and holidays, 2012 sabbats for both Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and Full Moons. You'll find the Moon's sign and phase, plus each day's color and incense correspondences. Thirty-six original articles offer creative ideas for using elemental energy to maximize the power of your spellwork in 2012. —Make your home a magical haven using sacred geometry —Stir things up (in a good way) with a magical air altar —Dispel negativity with a cord-cutting ritual —Manifest, inspire, and heal with bathtub spells Published annually for over twenty years
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions written by Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Caribbean is a microcosm of the world. In this very small geographic space one encounters global religions as well as religious practices that are indigenous to the region. This volume provides an overview of Caribbean religions, one that respects the diversity of the religious traditions and the national particularity of the region. It addresses the prominent religious traditions in the Caribbean, with a focus on multiple geographic settings, and examines a cross-section of themes that impact the region broadly and the academic study of Caribbean religion.
