Download or read book Cold War Negritude written by CHRISTOPHER T. BONNER and published by . This book was released on 2023-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cold War Negritude is the first book-length study of francophone Caribbean literature to foreground the political context of the global Cold War. It focuses on three canonical francophone Caribbean writers--René Depestre, Aimé Césaire, and Jacques-Stephen Alexis--whose literary careers and political alignments spanned all three "worlds" of the 1950s Cold War order. As black Caribbean authors who wrote in French, who participated directly in the global communist movement, and whose engagements with Marxist thought and practice were mediated by their colonial relationship to France, these writers expressed unique insight into this bipolar system as it was taking shape. The book shows how, over the course of the 1950s, French Caribbean Marxist authors re-evaluated the literary aesthetics of Negritude and sought to develop alternatives that would be adequate to the radically changed world system of the Cold War. Through close readings of literary, theoretical, and political texts by Depestre, Césaire, and Alexis, I show that this formal shift reflected a strikingly changed understanding of what it meant to write engaged literature in the new, bipolar world order. Debates about literary aesthetics became the proxy battlefield on which Antillean writers promoted and fought for their different visions of an emancipated Caribbean modernity. Consequent to their complicated Cold War alignments, these Antillean authors developed original and unorthodox Marxist literary aesthetics that syncretized an array of socialist literary tendencies from around the globe.
Download or read book Cold War Negritude written by Christopher T. Bonner and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cold War Negritude is the first book-length study of francophone Caribbean literature to foreground the political context of the global Cold War. It focuses on three canonical francophone Caribbean writers—René Depestre, Aimé Césaire, and Jacques-Stephen Alexis—whose literary careers and political alignments spanned all three “worlds” of the 1950s Cold War order. As black Caribbean authors who wrote in French, who participated directly in the global communist movement, and whose engagements with Marxist thought and practice were mediated by their colonial relationship to France, these writers expressed unique insight into this bipolar system as it was taking shape. The book shows how, over the course of the 1950s, French Caribbean Marxist authors re-evaluated the literary aesthetics of Negritude and sought to develop alternatives that would be adequate to the radically changed world system of the Cold War. Through close readings of literary, theoretical, and political texts by Depestre, Césaire, and Alexis, I show that this formal shift reflected a strikingly changed understanding of what it meant to write engaged literature in the new, bipolar world order. Debates about literary aesthetics became the proxy battlefield on which Antillean writers promoted and fought for their different visions of an emancipated Caribbean modernity. Consequent to their complicated Cold War alignments, these Antillean authors developed original and unorthodox Marxist literary aesthetics that syncretized an array of socialist literary tendencies from around the globe.
Download or read book NEGRITUDE AND ITS REVOLUTION written by CHRISTIAN FILOSTRAT and published by Pierre Kroft Legacy Publishers. This book was released on 2019-05-08 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and why négritude came to be defined by Aimé Césaire the way it did, including the author’s personal notes from interactions with Léon G. Damas, Aimé Césaire, and Leopold S. Senghor (Author’s note: I was carrying Léon G. Damas’s ashes to (French Guyana) Guyane (Damas had been one of the my advisors re Négritude doctoral dissertation.) and was making a stop in Fort de France for Cesaire’s eulogy. Césaire was at the airport to meet me, and while waiting for my bags, we exchanged our experiences with the cremation procedures of dear friends. In my case, it was that Marietta Damas had had it with people moving her husband and had given me specific directions. One of them was that Damas should not be moved anymore and should be cremated in the massive oak casket that Houphouet Boigny had bought for her. In Southeast Washington, DC, the cremation technician, to show me he was following instructions to the letter, opened the door of the oven, then lifted the lid of the casket for me to see that he had moved nothing; even the roses that Marietta had placed on the body were still there. The procedure of cremation had already started, and I could see blue flames as though from welding torches shooting everywhere, attacking the body. After a moment of reflection, Césaire, in turn, told me of his experience with Richard Wright and hearing his friend’s bones explode during the procedure. To a reflection regarding what négritude had become at the time of Damas’s death, Césaire gave me a long soliloquy, starting with Paris’s effervescence around the Paris Colonial Exposition back in the 30s and concluding with Sartre’s Black Orpheus. Black Orpheus broke the mold, turning négritude into an aesthetic of literature stripped of socio-political value. The crux of which was that négritude had become another academic subject of post - colonial studies. That was not what Senghor intended. After Black Orpheus, no one could write about négritude without mentioning ontology, epistemology, esthetics, Hegel, integrism, and so on. “You heard what I said in Dakar in 66, I don’t like the word négritude. It’s disruptive.” Then too, it bothered him that négritude had gotten disconnected from people’s reality. He then compared that disconnect with what he had witnessed in Haiti in 1944. The disconnect between the people and the intelligentsia. (Césaire’s interest in Haiti was immense. It was like a duty to visit him whenever I had been to Haiti.) (Author’s note: In 1980 I was the Cultural Attaché at the US Embassy in Dakar. Randall Robinson of Trans-Africa was visiting, and I arranged an interview with him for the Dakar daily, Le Soleil. Among the subjects discussed was the Western Sahara issue. Robinson explained his support for the Saharawis and the Polisario Front. The interview never ran. Instead, President Senghor asked me to his office. When he said, “I have a great weakness for France,” he meant it. It made no difference if I saw him every day. I could never meet him without being taken aback by how much Francité he exuded. But not this time. This time it was a furious Senghor I was meeting. He could not let views inimical to Morocco’s interests in the Senegalese media. He then gave me a long lecture about Arab racism, Morocco excepted. It didn’t help that the slave state of Mauritania, right across the Senegal River, insisted on an Arab designation. He grew bitter. I was astounded, for no one was more guarded than Senghor. But here he let it rip, perhaps because he was a few months from announcing his retirement. ) Thanks for taking the time to read this. If you liked this book, it would mean a lot if you could take a moment to leave an honest review on your favorite online store. Thanks so much! Pierre Kroft Legacy Publishers
Download or read book The Sorcery of Color written by Elisa Larkin Nascimento and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how racial and gender hierarchies are intertwined in Brazil.
Download or read book A Soviet Journey written by Alex La Guma and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma (1925–1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Guma’s book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future South Africa. For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system that had achieved political and economic justice through socialism—a point of view that has since been lost with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition of A Soviet Journey—the first since 1978—restores this vision to the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development. The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of La Guma’s text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies, and radical political thought.
Download or read book La N gritude written by Dr Wacyf H Ghali and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2024-08-09 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La Négritude: An African Social Humanism seeks to tackle accounts of African society—particularly sub-Saharan Africa—from its roots through modern times. La Négritude—meaning Blackness in French—was coined as a term in the 1930s, initially as a strategy for political resistance against French colonialism. As the resistance matured, its namesake developed to refer to being proud to be Black, proud of being a Negro—the true and correct word for defining an African Black man’s ethnicity. Instead of being disrespectful, the word became meaningful and beautiful in terms of what it portrayed. Because of the effects of slavery and colonialism, the traditional Negro-African society transformed into a modern society so different from the old one that many expressed a loss of identity culturally, politically, and economically. This study attempts to redefine and reidentify sub-Saharan Negro-African society using the traditional values that existed before or during the era of colonialism. Its goal is to instill a sense of security and unity among the people—with the understanding that adding changes from outside Negro-Africa could allow positive growth and development without fear of destroying the African character and personality.
Download or read book Soul written by Monique Guillory and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other word in the English language is more endemic to contemporary Black American culture and identity than "Soul". Since the 1960s Soul has been frequently used to market and sell music, food, and fashion. However, Soul also refers to a pervasive belief in the capacity of the Black body/spirit to endure the most trying of times in an ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. While some attention has been given to various genre manifestations of Soul-as in Soul music and food-no book has yet fully explored the discursive terrain signified by the term. In this broad-ranging, free-spirited book, a diverse group of writers, artists, and scholars reflect on the ubiquitous but elusive concept of Soul. Topics include: politics and fashion, Blaxploitation films, language, literature, dance, James Brown, and Schoolhouse Rock. Among the contributors are Angela Davis, Manning Marable, Paul Gilroy, Lyle Ashton Harris, Michelle Wallace, Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, Manthia Diawara, and dream hampton.
Download or read book Thresholds A Complete Table of the Borrowings in Yambo Ouologuem s Le Devoir de violence and Why They Matter written by Christopher L. Miller and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-19 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent research has revealed that the borrowings in Yambo Ouologuem’s epochal novel Le Devoir de violence (Bound to Violence) are far more extensive than was previously thought. Accused of plagiarism, Ouologuem quit the Parisian literary world and returned to a definitive silence in Mali. This book attempts to provide both a complete table of the borrowings in Le Devoir de Violence and a new theory of their meaning. Miller dispels the myth that the borrowings are minor, negligible, or criminal; he argues that they are artful “thresholds,” openings to a profound reconsideration of African history. Ouologuem set up this system of borrowings as a way to invite readers down unexpected paths of meaning. The borrowings are not mere stunts; they are inseparable from Ouologuem’s radical revision of African history and his rejection of Negritude. The table of borrowings in part three of this book will serve as a resource for readers and scholars.
Download or read book Ballet in the Cold War written by Anne Searcy and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the full story of the earliest Soviet-American ballet exchanges, in which the governments of the USSR and the United States sent their most prestigious ballet companies on tours to the other country. Author Anne Searcy draws on Soviet- and American- archival sources and shows the spectacular misunderstandings that happened when audiences trained to view one type of ballet saw a very different style.
Download or read book Race Sport and Politics written by Ben Carrington and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of the leading international authorities on the sociology of race and sport, this is the first book to address sport′s role in ′the making of race′, the place of sport within black diasporic struggles for freedom and equality, and the contested location of sport in relation to the politics of recognition within contemporary multicultural societies. Race, Sport and Politics shows how, during the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea of ′the natural black athlete′ was invented in order to make sense of and curtail the political impact and cultural achievements of black sportswomen and men. More recently, ′the black athlete′ as sign has become a highly commodified object within contemporary hyper-commercialized sports-media culture thus limiting the transformative potential of critically conscious black athleticism to re-imagine what it means to be both black and human in the twenty-first century. Race, Sport and Politics will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology of culture and sport, the sociology of race and diaspora studies, postcolonial theory, cultural theory and cultural studies.
Download or read book In Search of Africa written by Manthia Diawara and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There I was, standing alone, unable to cry as I said goodbye to Sidimé Laye, my best friend, and to the revolution that had opened the door of modernity for me--the revolution that had invented me." This book gives us the story of a quest for a childhood friend, for the past and present, and above all for an Africa that is struggling to find its future. In 1996 Manthia Diawara, a distinguished professor of film and literature in New York City, returns to Guinea, thirty-two years after he and his family were expelled from the newly liberated country. He is beginning work on a documentary about Sékou Touré, the dictator who was Guinea's first post-independence leader. Despite the years that have gone by, Diawara expects to be welcomed as an insider, and is shocked to discover that he is not. The Africa that Diawara finds is not the one on the verge of barbarism, as described in the Western press. Yet neither is it the Africa of his childhood, when the excitement of independence made everything seem possible for young Africans. His search for Sidimé Laye leads Diawara to profound meditations on Africa's culture. He suggests solutions that might overcome the stultifying legacy of colonialism and age-old social practices, yet that will mobilize indigenous strengths and energies. In the face of Africa's dilemmas, Diawara accords an important role to the culture of the diaspora as well as to traditional music and literature--to James Brown, Miles Davis, and Salif Kéita, to Richard Wright, Spike Lee, and the ancient epics of the griots. And Diawara's journey enlightens us in the most disarming way with humor, conversations, and well-told tales.
Download or read book The Free World written by Louis Menand and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one." —Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post "The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high." —David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review | Editors' Choice One of The New York Times's 100 best books of 2021 | One of The Washington Post's 50 best nonfiction books of 2021 | A Mother Jones best book of 2021 In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.
Download or read book American Africans in Ghana written by Kevin K. Gaines and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-30 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1957 Ghana became one of the first sub-Saharan African nations to gain independence from colonial rule. Over the next decade, hundreds of African Americans--including Martin Luther King Jr., George Padmore, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Richard Wright, Pauli Murray, and Muhammad Ali--visited or settled in Ghana. Kevin K. Gaines explains what attracted these Americans to Ghana and how their new community was shaped by the convergence of the Cold War, the rise of the U.S. civil rights movement, and the decolonization of Africa. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's president, posed a direct challenge to U.S. hegemony by promoting a vision of African liberation, continental unity, and West Indian federation. Although the number of African American expatriates in Ghana was small, in espousing a transnational American citizenship defined by solidarities with African peoples, these activists along with their allies in the United States waged a fundamental, if largely forgotten, struggle over the meaning and content of the cornerstone of American citizenship--the right to vote--conferred on African Americans by civil rights reform legislation.
Download or read book Cultural Identity N gritude and Decolonization written by Guy Viêt Levilain and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Micha l Ferrier Transnational Novelist French Without Borders written by Akane Kawakami and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michaël Ferrier is a prize-winning novelist, essayist and academic whose cosmopolitan life – he grew up in Chad and France, has Mauritian roots and lives in Japan – has inspired him to write some fascinating novels that cross generic and geographical boundaries. This book is the first ever monograph dedicated to his works, which explore themes as various as an African childhood, notions of Frenchness, inter-identities, and post-Fukushima life in Japan. Hybridity is key to his themes, forms and genres, which include – as befits a twenty-first century author – a website, called ‘Tokyo-Time-Table’ and discussed in this study. Kawakami uses an eclectic range of frameworks to analyse Ferrier’s output, ranging from translingualism to Environmental Humanities and Ferrier’s own vision of his oeuvre, which he discloses for the first time in this book in the interview that he grants Kawakami. This interview, first published in this volume, is rich in insights into Ferrier’s views on dreams, Japan, the internet, and collaborating with other artists. This book is an indispensable guide to an author who is one of the rising stars of contemporary French and Francophone literature, and a unique voice that crosses all kinds of borders across the globe.
Download or read book The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land written by Aimé Césaire and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.
Download or read book Reversing Sail written by Michael A. Gomez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the global unfolding of the African Diaspora, the migrations and dispersals of people of African, from antiquity to the modern period. Their exploits, challenges, and struggles are discussed over a wide expanse of time in ways that link as well as differentiate past and present circumstances. The experiences of Africans in the Old World, in the Mediterranean and Islamic worlds, is followed by their movement into the New, where their plight in lands claimed by Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English colonial powers is analyzed from enslavement through the Cold War. While appropriate mention is made of persons of renown, particular attention is paid to the everyday lives of working class people and their cultural efflorescence. The book also attempts to explain contemporary plights and struggles through the lens of history.
