Download or read book Brick City Vanguard written by James Edward Smethurst and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Amiri Baraka is unquestionably the most recognized leader of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the key literary and cultural figures of the postwar United States. While Baraka's political and aesthetic stances changed considerably over the course of his career, Brick City Vanguard demonstrates the continuity in his thinking about the meaning of black music in the material, psychic, and ideological development of black people. Drawing on primary texts, paratexts (including album liner notes), audio and visual recordings, and archival sources, James Smethurst takes a new look at how Baraka's writing on and performance of music envisioned the creation of an African American people or nation, as well as the growth and consolidation of a black working class within that nation, that resonates to this day. This vision also provides a way of understanding the encounter of black people with what has been called "the urban crisis" and a projection of a liberated black future beyond that crisis"--
Download or read book Brick City Vanguard written by James Smethurst and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amiri Baraka is unquestionably the most recognized leader of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the key literary and cultural figures of the postwar United States. While Baraka's political and aesthetic stances changed considerably over the course of his career, Brick City Vanguard demonstrates the continuity in his thinking about the meaning of black music in the material, psychic, and ideological develophorroment of black people. Drawing on primary texts, paratexts (including album liner notes), audio and visual recordings, and archival sources, James Smethurst takes a new look at how Baraka's writing on and performance of music envisioned the creation of an African American people or nation, as well as the growth and consolidation of a black working class within that nation, that resonates to this day. This vision also provides a way of understanding the encounter of black people with what has been called "the urban crisis" and a projection of a liberated black future beyond that crisis.
Download or read book Listen written by Michel Faber and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2023-11-28 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I'm not here to change your mind about Dusty Springfield or Shostakovich or Tupac Shakur or synthpop. I'm here to change your mind about your mind." There are countless books on music with much analysis given to musicians, bands, eras and/or genres. But rarely does a book delve into what's going on inside us when we listen. Michel Faber explores two big questions: how do we listen to music and why do we listen to music? To answer these questions, he considers a range of factors, which includes age, illness, the notion of "cool," commerce, the dichotomy between "good" and "bad" taste and much more. From the award-winning author of The Crimson Petal and the White and Under the Skin, this idiosyncratic and philosophical book reflects Michel Faber's lifelong obsession with music of all kinds. Listen will change your relationship with the heard world.
Download or read book In the Shadow of Invisibility written by Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2022-12-14 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With In the Shadow of Invisibility, Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. offers a long-overdue reconsideration of Ralph Ellison, examining the trajectory of his intellectual thought in relation to its resonances in twenty-first-century American culture. Bland charts Ellison’s evolving attitudes on several central topics including democracy, race, identity, social community, place, and political expression. This compelling new exploration of Ellison’s legacy stresses the perpetual need to reexamine the intersections of race, literature, and American culture, with particular attention to how the democratic principle has grown increasingly urgent in the nation’s ongoing, and often contentious, conversations about race. Arguing that Ellison saw racial and social identity as being inseparable from the nation’s past and its complicated history of racial anxiety, In the Shadow of Invisibility traces the growth and transformation of Ellison’s ideas across his life and work, from his early apprentice writing that culminated in his groundbreaking first novel, Invisible Man, through the posthumous publication of his unfinished second novel, Three Days before the Shooting . . . Focused on his mythic vision of the promise of America, this book firmly situates Ellison in the sociopolitical environments from which his ideas arose, with close consideration of his published writings, including his influential essays on literature and jazz, as well as his working notes and correspondence. Bland foregrounds Ellison’s thinking on the responsibilities of Black writers to examine democratic ideals, the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and the impacts of civil rights movements. Interweaving biography, history, and literary criticism, and drawing from extensive archival research, In the Shadow of Invisibility reveals the extent to which Ellison’s work exposes the contradictions inherent in American culture, arguing anew for the importance and immediacy of his writings in the broader context of American intellectual thought.
Download or read book Poetry FM written by Lisa Hollenbach and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2023-05-12 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry FM is the first book to explore the dynamic relationship between post-1945 poetry and radio in the United States. Lisa Hollenbach traces the history of Pacifica Radio--founded in 1946, the nation's first listener-supported public radio network--through the 1970s: from the radical pacifists and poets who founded Pacifica after the war; to the San Francisco Renaissance, Beat, and New York poets who helped define the countercultural sound of Pacifica stations KPFA and WBAI in the 1950s and 1960s; to the feminist poets and activists who seized Pacifica's frequencies in the 1970s.
Download or read book Songbooks written by Eric Weisbard and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-23 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna; the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan; or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre—cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning.
Download or read book When the Smoke Cleared written by Celes Tisdale and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-17 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the Attica prison uprising in September 1971, Celes Tisdale—a poet and then professor at Buffalo State College—began leading poetry workshops with those incarcerated at Attica. Tisdale’s workshop created a space of radical Black creativity and solidarity, in which poets who lived through the uprising were able to turn their experiences into poetry. The poems written by Tisdale’s students were published as Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica in 1974. When the Smoke Cleared contains the entirety of Betcha Ain’t, Tisdale’s own poems and journal entries from the three years he taught at Attica, a previously unpublished collection of poems by Attica poets, and a critical introduction by poet Mark Nowak. In addition to the poetry, Tisdale’s journal entries give readers a unique opportunity to experience what it was like to enter Attica as an educator and return week after week to discuss poetry. When the Smoke Cleared showcases these poets’ achievements, their desire for self-determination, and their historical role as storytellers of Black life in a prison monitored exclusively by white guards and administrators.
Download or read book The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka written by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-06-28 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka examines the full length of Baraka’s discography as a poet recording with musicians as well as his contributions to jazz and R & B, beginning with his earliest studio recordings in 1965 and continuing to the last year of his life, 2014. This recorded history traces his evolution from the era of Beat poetry and “projective verse,” through the period of the Black Arts Movement and cultural nationalism, and on to his commitments to “third world Marxism,” which characterized the last decades of his life. The music enfolding Baraka’s recitations ranges from traditional African drumming, to doo wop, rhythm and blues, soul and the avant garde jazz that was his great love and the subject of so much of his writing, and includes both in-studio sessions and live concert performances. This body of work offers a rare opportunity to think about not only jazz/poetry, but the poet in the recording studio and the relations of text to score.
Download or read book Black Diamond Queens written by Maureen Mahon and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll—from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.
Download or read book New Music and Institutional Critique written by Christian Grüny and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-10-26 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While institutional critique has long been an important part of artistic practice and theoretical debate in the visual arts, it has long escaped attention in the field of music. This open access volume assembles for the first time an array of theoretical approaches and practical examples dealing with New Music’s institutions, their critique, and their transformations. For scholars, leaders, and practitioners alike, it offers an important overview of current developments as well as theoretical reflections about New Music and its institutions today. In this way, it provides a major contribution to the debate about the present and future of contemporary music.
Download or read book A History of the Harlem Renaissance written by Rachel Farebrother and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms – from the roman à clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations – this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression. It aims to re-frame conventional ideas of the New Negro movement by presenting new readings of well-studied authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, alongside analysis of topics, authors, and artists that deserve fuller treatment. An authoritative collection on the major writers and issues of the period, A History of the Harlem Renaissance takes stock of nearly a hundred years of scholarship and considers what the future augurs for the study of 'the New Negro'.
Download or read book Near Black written by Baz Dreisinger and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative look at the shifting contours of racial identity in America.
Download or read book D A Tale of Two Worlds written by Michel Faber and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Glorious. A story that will be found and enjoyed and dreamed about for years to come.”—Neil Gaiman A stunning modern-day Dickensian fable and a celebration of friendship and bravery for freethinkers everywhere. It all starts on the morning the letter D disappears from language. First, it vanishes from Dhikilo’s parents’ conversation at breakfast, then from the road signs outside and from her school dinners. Soon the local dentist and the neighbor’s dalmatian are missing, and even the Donkey Derby has been called off. Though she doesn’t know why, Dhikilo is summoned to the home of her old history teacher Professor Dodderfield and his faithful Labrador, Nelly Robinson. And this is where our story begins. Set between England and the wintry land of Liminus, a world enslaved by the monstrous Gamp and populated by fearsome, enchanting creatures, D (A Tale of Two Worlds) is told with simple beauty and warmth. Its celebration of moral courage and freethinking is a powerful reminder of our human capacity for strength, hope and justice. Don't miss Michel Faber's lyrically woven and deeply evocative nonfiction debut, LISTEN, which relfects his lifelong passion for music of all kinds and will change your relationship with the heard world!
Download or read book The Making Of Black Lives Matter written by Christopher J. Lebron and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An introduction for the second edition of a book like The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea is a less straightforward thing than it might first seem. Typically, when an author revisits a book, some years later, their ruminations center on how they may have become clearer on the ideas in their book, taken into consideration critical corrections, or maybe, generally how their own thinking has matured thanks to the miracle of living a life. But as I sit here, towards the end of 2021, experiencing a late fall in which the leaves seem to refuse to quit the trees, I am reflecting in the midst of an entirely different set of considerations"--
Download or read book Capital City written by Samuel Stein and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This superbly succinct and incisive book couldn’t be more timely or urgent.” —Michael Sorkin, author of All Over the Map Our cities are changing. Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms sixty percent of global assets, and one of the most powerful people in the world—the president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and developer. Samuel Stein shows that this explosive transformation of urban life and politics has been driven not only by the tastes of wealthy newcomers, but by the state-driven process of urban planning. Planning agencies provide a unique window into the ways the state uses and is used by capital, and the means by which urban renovations are translated into rising real estate values and rising rents. Capital City explains the role of planners in the real estate state, as well as the remarkable power of planning to reclaim urban life.
Download or read book Behold the Land written by James Smethurst and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-1960s, African American artists and intellectuals formed the Black Arts movement in tandem with the Black Power movement, with creative luminaries like Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gil Scott-Heron among their number. In this follow-up to his award-winning history of the movement nationally, James Smethurst investigates the origins, development, maturation, and decline of the vital but under-studied Black Arts movement in the South from the 1960s until the early 1980s. Traveling across the South, he chronicles the movement's radical roots, its ties to interracial civil rights organizations on the Gulf Coast, and how it thrived on college campuses and in southern cities. He traces the movement's growing political power as well as its disruptive use of literature and performance to advance Black civil rights. Though recognition of its influence has waned, the Black Arts movement's legacy in the South endures through many of its initiatives and constituencies. Ultimately, Smethurst argues that the movement's southern strain was perhaps the most consequential, successfully reaching the grassroots and leaving a tangible, local legacy unmatched anywhere else in the United States.
Download or read book In The Break written by Fred Moten and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2003-04-09 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the connections between jazz, sexual identity, and radical black politics In his controversial essay on white jazz musician Burton Greene, Amiri Baraka asserted that jazz was exclusively an African American art form and explicitly fused the idea of a black aesthetic with radical political traditions of the African diaspora. In the Break is an extended riff on “The Burton Greene Affair,” exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance—culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself—is improvisation. For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten’s concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other. Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, Moten’s wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplines—semiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysis—to understand the politicized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Moten’s ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition
