Download or read book Conjuring Culture written by Theophus H. Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-11-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a sophisticated new interdisciplinary interpretation of the formulation and evolution of African American religion and culture. Theophus Smith argues for the central importance of "conjure"--a magical means of transforming reality--in black spirituality and culture. Smith shows that the Bible, the sacred text of Western civilization, has in fact functioned as a magical formulary for African Americans. Going back to slave religion, and continuing in black folk practice and literature to the present day, the Bible has provided African Americans with ritual prescriptions for prophetically re-envisioning, and thereby transforming, their history and culture. In effect the Bible is a "conjure book" for prescribing cures and curses, and for invoking extraordinary and Divine powers to effect changes in the conditions of human existence--and to bring about justice and freedom. Biblical themes, symbols, and figures like Moses, the Exodus, the Promised Land, and the Suffering Servant, as deployed by African Americans, have crucially formed and reformed not only black culture, but American society as a whole. Smith examines not only the religious and political uses of conjure, but its influence on black aesthetics, in music, drama, folklore, and literature. The concept of conjure, he shows, is at the heart of an indigenous and still vital spirituality, with exciting implications for reformulating the next generation of black studies and black theology. Even more broadly, Smith proposes, "conjuring culture" can function as a new paradigm for understanding Western religious and cultural phenomena generally.
Download or read book Conjuring Science written by Christopher P. Toumey and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toumey focuses on the ways in which the symbols of science are employed to signify scientific authority in a variety of cases, from the selling of medical products to the making of public policy about AIDS/HIV--a practice he calls "conjuring" science. It is this "conjuring" of the images and symbols of scientific authority that troubles Toumey and leads him to reflect on the history of public understanding and perceptions of science in the United States.
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 Conjuring Black Funk written by Hameed S. Williams and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural Writing. African American Studies. Gay and Lesbian Studies. CONJURING BLACK FUNK: NOTES ON CULTURE, SEXUALITY, AND SPIRITUALITY, VOLUME 1 is a fiery collection of essays, poetry, creative nonfiction, and experimental writing that challenges conventional thought, offers alternative perspectives, and suggests ways of practicing Afrocentric, queer liberation/transgression. This book is an important contribution to Black Queer Theory, Black Feminist Thought, and Afrocentric Thought. Herukhuti is a sociologist/anthropologist, sexologist, educator, shaman, BDSM practitioner, artist, cultural animator, and author. He is the founder of Black Funk, a sexual cultural center dedicated to providing a space for the exhibition and exploration of sensual awareness, sexual consciousness, erotic power, and pleasure. He has contributed to the development of the perspective known as Afrocentric, Decolonizing Queer Theory. Herukhuti is on the faculty at Goddard College, Plainfield, VT.
Download or read book Conjure in African American Society written by Jeffrey E. Anderson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-08 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From black sorcerers' client-based practices in the antebellum South to the postmodern revival of hoodoo and its tandem spiritual supply stores, the supernatural has long been a key component of the African American experience. What began as a mixture of African, European, and Native American influences within slave communities finds expression today in a multimillion dollar business. In Conjure in African American Society, Jeffrey E. Anderson unfolds a fascinating story as he traces the origins and evolution of conjuring practices across the centuries. Though some may see the study of conjure as a perpetuation of old stereotypes that depict blacks as bound to superstition, the truth, Anderson reveals, is far more complex. Drawing on folklore, fiction and nonfiction, music, art, and interviews, he explores various portrayals of the conjurer -- backward buffoon, rebel against authority, and symbol of racial pride. He also examines the actual work performed by conjurers, including the use of pharmacologically active herbs to treat illness, psychology to ease mental ailments, fear to bring about the death of enemies and acquittals at trials, and advice to encourage clients to succeed on their own. By critically examining the many influences that have shaped conjure over time, Anderson effectively redefines magic as a cultural power, one that has profoundly touched the arts, black Christianity, and American society overall.
Download or read book Conjuring written by Marjorie Lee Pryse and published by . This book was released on 1985-12-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explains the emergence of black women novelists in contemporary American literature and the cultural and personal influences that made it possible for them to find their literary authority. Beginning with the 19th century origins of the tradition--the autobiographical writings and slave narratives--the volume discusses individual writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Ann Petry and Octavia Butler; the aggregate significance of fiction by black women; and their influence on each other. Novels examined include Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, Ann Petry's The Street, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye. ISBN 0-253-31407-0 : $29.95; ISBN 0-253-20360-0 (pbk.) : $10.95.
Download or read book Conjuring Freedom written by Johari Jabir and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's "Gospel Army" analyzes the songs of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of Black soldiers who met nightly in the performance of the ring shout. In this study, acknowledging the importance of conjure as a religious, political, and epistemological practice, Johari Jabir demonstrates how the musical performance allowed troop members to embody new identities in relation to national citizenship, militarism, and masculinity in more inclusive ways. Jabir also establishes how these musical practices of the regiment persisted long after the Civil War in Black culture, resisting, for instance, the paternalism and co-optive state antiracism of the film Glory, and the assumption that Blacks need to be deracinated to be full citizens. Reflecting the structure of the ring shout--the counterclockwise song, dance, drum, and story in African American history and culture--Conjuring Freedom offers three new concepts to cultural studies in order to describe the practices, techniques, and implications of the troop's performance: (1) Black Communal Conservatories, borrowing from Robert Farris Thompson's "invisible academies" to describe the structural but spontaneous quality of black music-making, (2) Listening Hermeneutics, which accounts for the generative and material affects of sound on meaning-making, and (3) Sonic Politics, which points to the political implications of music's use in contemporary representations of race and history.
Download or read book Archives of Conjure written by Solimar Otero and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Afrolatinx religious practices such as Cuban Espiritismo, Puerto Rican Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé, the dead tell stories. Communicating with and through mediums’ bodies, they give advice, make requests, and propose future rituals, creating a living archive that is coproduced by the dead. In this book, Solimar Otero explores how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture. By examining spirit mediumship through a Caribbean cross-cultural poetics, she shows how divinities and ancestors serve as active agents in shaping the experiences of gender, sexuality, and race. Otero argues that what she calls archives of conjure are produced through residual transcriptions or reverberations of the stories of the dead whose archives are stitched, beaded, smoked, and washed into official and unofficial repositories. She investigates how sites like the ocean, rivers, and institutional archives create connected contexts for unlocking the spatial activation of residual transcriptions. Drawing on over ten years of archival research and fieldwork in Cuba, Otero centers the storytelling practices of Afrolatinx women and LGBTQ spiritual practitioners alongside Caribbean literature and performance. Archives of Conjure offers vital new perspectives on ephemerality, temporality, and material culture, unraveling undertheorized questions about how spirits shape communities of practice, ethnography, literature, and history and revealing the deeply connected nature of art, scholarship, and worship.
Download or read book Conjuring the Folk written by David Nicholls and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a new way of looking at literary responses to migration and modernization
Download or read book Nature s Colorways written by Linda Ligon and published by . This book was released on 2021-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Voodoo Hoodoo and Conjure in African American Literature written by James S. Mellis and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the earliest slave narratives to modern fiction by the likes of Colson Whitehead and Jesmyn Ward, African American authors have drawn on African spiritual practices as literary inspiration, and as a way to maintain a connection to Africa. This volume has collected new essays about the multiple ways African American authors have incorporated Voodoo, Hoodoo and Conjure in their work. Among the authors covered are Frederick Douglass, Shirley Graham, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ntozake Shange, Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, and Ishmael Reed.
Download or read book Conjuring Property written by Jeremy M. Campbell and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2017 James M. Blaut Award from the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers Honorable Mention for the 2016 Book Prize from the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Since the 1960s, when Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization, violence and confusion have often accompanied national policies concerning land reform, corporate colonization, indigenous land rights, environmental protection, and private homesteading. Conjuring Property shows how, in a region that many perceive to be stateless, colonists - from highly capitalized ranchers to landless workers - adopt anticipatory stances while they await future governance intervention regarding land tenure. For Amazonian colonists, property is a dynamic category that becomes salient in the making: it is conjured through papers, appeals to state officials, and the manipulation of landscapes and memories of occupation. This timely study will be of interest to development studies scholars and practitioners, conservation ecologists, geographers, and anthropologists.
Download or read book The Cross of Christ in African American Christian Religious Experience written by Demetrius K. Williams and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Cross of Christ in African American Christian Religious Experience: Piety, Politics, and Protest Demetrius K. Williams examines and explores the ideational importance and rhetorical function of cross language and terminology in the spirituals, conversion narratives, and Black preaching tradition through an ideological lens.
Download or read book Conjuring Moments in African American Literature written by K. Samuel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-12-27 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages the ways African American authors have shifted, recycled, and reinvented the conjure woman in fiction. Kameelah Martin Samuel traces her presence and function in twentieth-century literature through historical records, oral histories, blues music, and collections of African American folklore.
Download or read book Erotic Defiance written by Courtney Bryant and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Erotic Defiance considers the sacred and transformative power of the flesh, investigating the ethical and theological dimensions of the erotic experiences of Black women and performances of Black womanhood. Bryant approaches the erotic as a divine energy that manifests love through the flesh and makes healing, resistance, and self-making possible.
Download or read book Hoodoo Voodoo and Conjure written by Jeffrey E. Anderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-10-30 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hoodoo, voodoo, and conjure are part of a mysterious world of African American spirituality that has long captured the popular imagination. These magical beliefs and practices have figured in literary works by such authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Ishmael Reed, and they have been central to numerous films, such as The Skeleton Key. Written for students and general readers, this book is a convenient introduction to hoodoo, voodoo, and conjure. The volume begins by defining and classifying elements of these spiritual traditions. It then provides a wide range of examples and texts, which illustrate the richness of these beliefs and practices. It also examines the scholarly response to hoodoo, voodoo, and conjure, and it explores the presence of hoodoo, voodoo, and conjure in popular culture. The volume closes with a glossary and bibliography. Students in social studies classes will use this book to learn more about African American magical beliefs, while literature students will enjoy its exploration of primary sources and literary works.
Download or read book Theorizing Scriptures written by Vincent L. Wimbush and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historically, religious scriptures are defined as holy texts that are considered to be beyond the abilities of the layperson to interpret. This volume takes a look at the social, cultural and racial meanings invested in these texts.
