Download or read book Cultures in Babylon written by Hazel V. Carby and published by Verso. This book was released on 1999-08-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a decade and a half, since she first appeared in the Birmingham Centre’s collective volume The Empire Strikes Back, Hazel Carby has been on the frontline of the debate over multicultural education in Britain and the US. This book brings together her most important and influential essays, ranging over such topics as the necessity for racially diverse school curricula, the construction of literary canons, Zora Neale Hurston’s portraits of “the Folk,” C.L.R. James and Trinidadian nationalism and black women blues artists, and the necessity for racially diverse school curricula. Carby’s analyses of diverse aspects of contemporary culture are invariably sharp and provocative, her political insights shrewd and often against the grain. A powerful intervention, Culture in Babylon will become a standard reference point in future debates over race, ethnicity and gender.

Download or read book Cultures in Babylon written by Hazel V. Carby and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a decade and a half, since she first appeared in the Birmingham Centre's collective volume The Empire Strikes Back, Hazel Carby has been on the frontline of the debate over multicultural education in Britain and the US. This book brings together her most important and influential essays, ranging over such topics as the necessity for racially diverse school curricula, the construction of literary canons, Zora Neale Hurston's portraits of "the Folk," C.L.R. James and Trinidadian nationalism and black women blues artists, and the necessity for racially diverse school curricula. Carby's analyses of diverse aspects of contemporary culture are invariably sharp and provocative, her political insights shrewd and often against the grain. A powerful intervention, Culture in Babylon will become a standard reference point in future debates over race, ethnicity and gender.

Download or read book Babylon Girls written by Jayna Brown and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-19 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Babylon Girls is a groundbreaking cultural history of the African American women who performed in variety shows—chorus lines, burlesque revues, cabaret acts, and the like—between 1890 and 1945. Through a consideration of the gestures, costuming, vocal techniques, and stagecraft developed by African American singers and dancers, Jayna Brown explains how these women shaped the movement and style of an emerging urban popular culture. In an era of U.S. and British imperialism, these women challenged and played with constructions of race, gender, and the body as they moved across stages and geographic space. They pioneered dance movements including the cakewalk, the shimmy, and the Charleston—black dances by which the “New Woman” defined herself. These early-twentieth-century performers brought these dances with them as they toured across the United States and around the world, becoming cosmopolitan subjects more widely traveled than many of their audiences. Investigating both well-known performers such as Ada Overton Walker and Josephine Baker and lesser-known artists such as Belle Davis and Valaida Snow, Brown weaves the histories of specific singers and dancers together with incisive theoretical insights. She describes the strange phenomenon of blackface performances by women, both black and white, and she considers how black expressive artists navigated racial segregation. Fronting the “picaninny choruses” of African American child performers who toured Britain and the Continent in the early 1900s, and singing and dancing in The Creole Show (1890), Darktown Follies (1913), and Shuffle Along (1921), black women variety-show performers of the early twentieth century paved the way for later generations of African American performers. Brown shows not only how these artists influenced transnational ideas of the modern woman but also how their artistry was an essential element in the development of jazz.

Download or read book Imperial Intimacies written by Hazel V. Carby and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Where are you from?' was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby's place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt. Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby's working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the 'white Carbys' and the 'black Carbys', as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby's family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire's interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.

Download or read book Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture written by Alison Donnell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture is the first comprehensive reference book to provide multidisciplinary coverage of the field of black cultural production in Britain. The publication is of particular value because despite attracting growing academic interest in recent years, this field is still often subject to critical and institutional neglect. For the purpose of the Companion, the term 'black' is used to signify African, Caribbean and South Asian ethnicities, while at the same time addressing the debates concerning notions of black Britishness and cultural identity. This single volume Companion covers seven intersecting areas of black British cultural production since 1970: writing, music, visual and plastic arts, performance works, film and cinema, fashion and design, and intellectual life. With entries on distinguished practitioners, key intellectuals, seminal organizations and concepts, as well as popular cultural forms and local activities, the Companion is packed with information and suggestions for further reading, as well as offering a wide lens on the events and issues that have shaped the cultural interactions and productions of black Britain over the last thirty years. With a range of specialist advisors and contributors, this work promises to be an invaluable sourcebook for students, researchers and academics interested in exploring the diverse, complex and exciting field of black cultural forms in postcolonial Britain.

Download or read book Race Men written by Hazel V. Carby and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who are the "race men" standing for black America? It is a question Hazel Carby rejects, along with its long-standing assumption: that a particular type of black male can represent the race. A searing critique of definitions of black masculinity at work in American culture, Race Men shows how these defining images play out socially, culturally, and politically for black and white society--and how they exclude women altogether. Carby begins by looking at images of black masculinity in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Her analysis of The Souls of Black Folk reveals the narrow and rigid code of masculinity that Du Bois applied to racial achievement and advancement--a code that remains implicitly but firmly in place today in the work of celebrated African American male intellectuals. The career of Paul Robeson, the music of Huddie Ledbetter, and the writings of C. L. R. James on cricket and on the Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint L'Ouverture, offer further evidence of the social and political uses of representations of black masculinity. In the music of Miles Davis and the novels of Samuel R. Delany, Carby finds two separate but related challenges to conventions of black masculinity. Examining Hollywood films, she traces through the career of Danny Glover the development of a cultural narrative that promises to resolve racial contradictions by pairing black and white men--still leaving women out of the picture. A powerful statement by a major voice among black feminists, Race Men holds out the hope that by understanding how society has relied upon affirmations of masculinity to resolve social and political crises, we can learn to transcend them.

Download or read book The Cultural Memory of Africa in African American and Black British Fiction 1970 2000 written by Leila Kamali and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-10 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new approach to reading the cultural memory of Africa in African American fiction from the post-Civil Rights era and in Black British fiction emerging in the wake of Thatcherism. The critical period between the decline of the Civil Rights Movement and the dawn of the twenty-first century saw a deep contrast in the distinctive narrative approaches displayed by diverse African diaspora literatures in negotiating the crisis of representing the past. Through a series of close readings of literary fiction, this work examines how the cultural memory of Africa is employed in diverse and specific negotiations of narrative time, in order to engage and shape contemporary identity and citizenship. By addressing the practice of “remembering” Africa, the book argues for the signal importance of the African diaspora’s literary interventions, and locates new paradigms for cultural identity in contemporary times.

Download or read book Black British Culture and Society written by Kwesi Owusu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black British Culture and Society brings together in one indispensable volume key writings on the Black community in Britain, from the 'Windrush' immigrations of the late 1940s and 1950s to contemporary multicultural Britain. Combining classic writings on Black British life with new, specially commissioned articles, Black British Culture and Society records the history of the post-war African and Caribbean diaspora, tracing the transformations of Black culture in British society. Black British Culture and Society explores key facets of the Black experience, charting Black Britons' struggles to carve out their own identity and place in an often hostile society. The articles reflect the rich diversity of the Black British experience, addressing economic and social issues such as health, religion, education, feminism, old age, community and race relations, as well as Black culture and the arts, with discussions of performance, carnival, sport, style, literature, theatre, art and film-making. The contributors examine the often tense relationship between successful Black public figures and the media, and address the role of the Black intellectual in public life. Featuring interviews with noted Black artists and writers such as Aubrey Williams, Mustapha Matura and Caryl Phillips, and including articles from key contemporary thinkers, such as Stuart Hall, A. Sivanandan, Paul Gilroy and Henry Louis Gates, Black British Culture and Society provides a rich resource of analysis, critique and comment on the Black community's distinctive contribution to cultural life in Britain today.

Download or read book Banana Bottom written by Claude McKay and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1974 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Jamaican girl returns to her island home after her English education.

Download or read book Roots Culture written by Eddie Chambers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-18 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did a distinct and powerful Black British identity emerge? In the 1950s, when many Caribbean migrants came to Britain, there was no such recognised entity as “Black Britain.” Yet by the 1980s, the cultural landscape had radically changed, and a remarkable array of creative practices such as theatre, poetry, literature,South Sudan in War and Peace music and the visual arts gave voice to striking new articulations of Black-British identity.

Download or read book Black British Intellectuals and Education written by Paul Warmington and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-24 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ask any moderately interested Briton to name a black intellectual and chances are the response will be an American name: Malcolm X or Barack Obama, Toni Morrison or Cornel West. Yet Britain has its own robust black intellectual traditions and its own master teachers, among them C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. However, while in the USA black public intellectuals are an embedded, if often embattled, feature of national life, black British thinkers remain routinely marginalized. Black British Intellectuals and Education counters this neglect by exploring histories of race, education and social justice through the work of black British public intellectuals: academics, educators and campaigners. The book provides a critical history of diverse currents in black British intellectual production, from the eighteenth century, through post-war migration and into the ‘post-multicultural’ present, focusing on the sometimes hidden impacts of black thinkers on education and social justice. Firstly, it argues that black British thinkers have helped fundamentally to shape educational policy, practice and philosophy, particularly in the post-war period. Secondly, it suggests that education has been one of the key spaces in which the mass consciousness of being black and British has emerged, and a key site in which black British intellectual positions have been defined and differentiated. Chapters explore: • the early development of black British intellectual life, from the slave narratives to the anti-colonial movements of the early twentieth century • how African-Caribbean and Asian communities began to organize against racial inequalities in schooling in the post-Windrush era of the 1950s and 60s • how, from out of these grassroots struggles, black intellectuals and activists of the 1970s, 80s and 90s developed radical critiques of education, youth and structural racism • the influence of multiculturalism, black cultural studies and black feminism on education • current developments in black British educational work, including ‘post-racial’ approaches, Critical Race Theory and black social conservatism. Black British Intellectuals and Education will be of key relevance to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics engaged in research on race, ethnicity, education, social justice and cultural studies.

Download or read book An Anthology of African Cultural Studies Volume II written by Handel Kashope Wright and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-04 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on the directions that African cultural studies has taken over the years and covers the following central themes: contemporary issues in African cultural studies; Gender and the making of identity; the dual discourses of Afropessimism and Afrofuturism; problematizing the African diaspora and methodology and African cultural studies. The second of two volumes, the book predominantly pulls together a rich reservoir of previously published articles from Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies. Taken together the two volumes re-expose for international readers sets of theories, methodologies and studies that not only have been influenced by global trends, but which themselves have contributed to shaping those trends. While the first volume addressed foundational themes and issues in African cultural studies, this second volume focuses on the directions that African cultural studies is taking; the complex ways in which gender can be seen at work in the making of identity; the juxtaposition of two relatively new themes in African cultural studies, namely Afropessimism and Afrofuturism; the ways in which the presence of continental Africans in the diaspora problematize taken-for-granted conceptions of diaspora and diasporic identity; identifying some of the methodological issues and approaches that have been taken up in African cultural studies work. This book will be a key resource for academics, researchers and advanced students of African cultural studies, media and cultural studies, African studies, history, politics, sociology, and social and cultural anthropology, while also being of interest to those seeking an introduction to the sub-field of African cultural studies.

Download or read book Check It While I Wreck It written by Gwendolyn D. Pough and published by Northeastern University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hip-hop culture began in the early 1970s as the creative and activist expressions -- graffiti writing, dee-jaying, break dancing, and rap music -- of black and Latino youth in the depressed South Bronx, and the movement has since grown into a worldwide cultural phenomenon that permeates almost every aspect of society, from speech to dress. But although hip-hop has been assimilated and exploited in the mainstream, young black women who came of age during the hip-hop era are still fighting for equality. In this provocative study, Gwendolyn D. Pough explores the complex relationship between black women, hip-hop, and feminism. Examining a wide range of genres, including rap music, novels, spoken word poetry, hip-hop cinema, and hip-hop soul music, she traces the rhetoric of black women "bringing wreck." Pough demonstrates how influential women rappers such as Queen Latifah, Missy Elliot, and Lil' Kim are building on the legacy of earlier generations of women -- from Sojourner Truth to sisters of the black power and civil rights movements -- to disrupt and break into the dominant patriarchal public sphere. She discusses the ways in which today's young black women struggle against the stereotypical language of the past ("castrating black mother," "mammy," "sapphire") and the present ("bitch," "ho," "chickenhead"), and shows how rap provides an avenue to tell their own life stories, to construct their identities, and to dismantle historical and contemporary negative representations of black womanhood. Pough also looks at the ongoing public dialogue between male and female rappers about love and relationships, explaining how the denigrating rhetoric used by men has been appropriated by black women rappers as a means to empowerment in their own lyrics. The author concludes with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of rap music as well as of third wave and black feminism. This fresh and thought-provoking perspective on the complexities of hip-hop urges young black women to harness the energy, vitality, and activist roots of hip-hop culture and rap music to claim a public voice for themselves and to "bring wreck" on sexism and misogyny in mainstream society.

Download or read book Black Men Black Feminism written by Jared Sexton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brief commentary on the necessity and the impossibility of black men’s participation in the development of black feminist theory and politics, Black Men, Black Feminism examines the basic assumptions that have guided—and misguided—black men’s efforts to take up black feminism. Offering a rejoinder to the contemporary study of black men and masculinity in the twenty-first century, Jared Sexton interrogates some of the most common intellectual postures of black men writing about black feminism, ultimately departing from the prevailing discourse on progressive black masculinities. Sexton examines, by contrast, black men’s critical and creative work—from Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep to Jordan Peele’s Get Out— to describe the cultural logic that provides a limited moral impetus to the quest for black male feminism and that might, if reconfigured, prompt an ethical response of an entirely different order.

Download or read book People Get Ready written by Kevin Meehan and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-11-12 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout this book, Kevin Meehan offers historical and theoretical readings of Caribbean and African American interaction from the 1700s to the present. By analyzing travel narratives, histories, creative collaborations, and political exchanges, he traces the development of African American/Caribbean dialogue through the lives and works of four key individuals: historian Arthur Schomburg, writer/archivist Zora Neale Hurston, poet Jayne Cortez, and politican Jean-Bertrand Aristide. People Get Ready examines how these influential figures have reevaluated popular culture, revised the relationship between intellectuals and everyday people, and transformed practices ranging from librarianship and anthropology to poetry and broadcast journalism. This discourse, Meehan notes, is not free of contradictions, and misunderstandings arise on both sides. In addition to noting dialogues of unity, People Get Ready focuses on instances of intellectual elitism, sexim, color, prejudice, imperialism, national, chauvinism, and other forms of mutual disdain that continue to limit African American and Caribbean solidarity.

Download or read book Frances Ellen Watkins Harper written by Michael Stancliff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prominent early feminist, abolitionist, and civil rights advocate, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote and spoke across genres and reform platforms during the turbulent second half of the nineteenth century. Her invention of a new commonplace language of moral character drew on the persuasive and didactic motifs of the previous decades of African-American reform politics, but far exceeded her predecessors in crafting lessons of rhetoric for women. Focusing on the way in which Harper brought her readers a critical training for the rhetorical action of a life commitment to social reform, this book reconsiders her practice as explicitly and primarily a project of teaching. This study also places Harper's work firmly in black-nationalist lineages from which she is routinely excluded, establishes Harper as an architect of a collective African-American identity that constitutes a political and theoretical bridge between early abolitionism and 20th-century civil rights activism, and contributes to the contemporary portrayal of Harper as an important theorist of African-American feminism whose radical egalitarian ethic has lasting relevance for civil rights and human rights workers.

Download or read book En gendering the Political written by Joe B. Turner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between being political and citizenship? What might it mean to be marginalised through both the practices and knowledge of citizenship? What might citizenship look like from a position of social, political and cultural exclusion? This book responds to these questions by treating marginalisation as a political process and position. It explores how different lives, experiences and forms of political action might be engendered when subjects are excluded, made vulnerable and invisible from contemporary forms of citizenship. It aims to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of resistance by investigating how complex forms of marginality are not only produced by dominant forms of citizenship but also actively challenge them. Modernist approaches to politics tend to see the citizen as the ideal type of political agent and citizenship as the zenith of struggles over rights, representation and belonging. This edited volume challenges this approach to political subjectivity by showing how political acts work for but also against/beyond citizenship claims, towards different orientations and as ‘acts’ of (non)citizen. By bringing together diverse theoretical and empirical contributions, and exploring the emergent politics of marginalised subjects, this collection challenges how we think about citizenship and opens up space for alternative imaginaries of political action and belonging. This book was originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.