Download or read book Dessa Rose written by Sherley A. Williams and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 2010-12-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1829 in Kentucky, a pregnant black woman helped lead an uprising of a group of slaves headed to the market for sale. She was sentenced to death, but her hanging was delayed until after the birth of her baby. In North Carolina in 1830, a white woman living on an isolated farm was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves. In this classic novel of courage and redemption, acclaimed author Sherley Anne Williams asks the question: "What if these two women had met?" These two strong women, one black, one white, form a forbidden and ambivalent alliance as a bold scheme is hatched to win freedom. Trust is slowly extended and cautiously accepted as the women unite and discover greater strength together than alone. Bound by fate but divided by prejudice, they explore and defy racial barriers in a moving story of courage, freedom, friendship, and love.
Download or read book Dessa Rose written by Sherley A. Williams and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-08-27 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sherley A. Williams’ highly acclaimed historical novel details two women’s fierce strength of will and an unlikely bond despite racial barriers in the pre-civil war south “Having this treasure of a book available again for new and more readers is not only necessary, it is imperative.”—Toni Morrison In 1829, in Kentucky, a pregnant black woman helped lead an uprising of a group of slaves headed to the market for sale. She was sentenced to death, but her hanging was delayed until after the birth of her baby. In North Carolina in 1830, a white woman living on an isolated farm was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves. In Dessa Rose, Sherley A. Williams asks the question: “What if these two women met?” From there the story unfolds: two strong women, one black, one white, form a forbidden and ambivalent alliance; a bold scheme is hatched to win freedom; trust is slowly extended and cautiously accepted as the two women unite and discover greater strength together than alone. United by fate but divided by prejudice, these two women are locked in a thrilling battle for freedom, sisterhood, friendship, and love.
Download or read book My Own Devices written by Dessa (Vocalist) and published by Dutton. This book was released on 2018 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witty and moving, this debut memoir in essays from the dynamic rapper and singer Dessa, is a candid account of her life in the van as a hard-touring musician, her determination to beat long odds to make a name for herself as a performing artist, and her struggle to fall out of love with someone in her band. In a literary, honest style, evoking Amanda Palmer and Miranda July, Dessa demonstrates just how far the mind can travel while the body is on the six-hour ride to the next rap show.
Download or read book The Freedom to Remember written by Angelyn Mitchell and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. The narratives at the center of this book include: Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison's Beloved, J. California Cooper's Family, and Lorene Cary's The Price of a Child. Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on the theme of freedom, not slavery, defining these works as "liberatory narratives." These works create a space to problematize the slavery/freedom dichotomy from which contemporary black women writers have the "safe" vantage point to reveal aspects of enslavement that their ancestors could not examine. The nineteenth-century female emancipatory narrative, by contrast, was written to aid the cause of abolition by revealing the unspeakable realitiesof slavery. Mitchell shows how the liberatory narrative functions to emancipate its readers from the legacies of slavery in American society: by facilitating a deeper discussion of the issues and by making them new through illumination and interrogation.
Download or read book History and Memory in African American Culture written by Genevieve Fabre Professor of American Literature University of Paris and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994-10-29 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning--the frame and the substance--of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading scholars has come together to examine the role of historical consciousness and imagination in African-American culture. The result is a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in literature, art, oral documents, and performances. Each of the scholars represented has chosen a different "site of memory"--from a variety of historical and geographical points, and from different ideological, theoretical, and artistic perspectives. Yet the book is unified by a common concern with the construction of an emerging African-American cultural memory. The renowned group of contributors, including Hazel Carby, Werner Sollors, Veve Clark, Catherine Clinton, and Nellie McKay, among others, consists of participants of the five-year series of conferences at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, from which this collection originated. Conducted under the leadership of Genevieve Fabre, Melvin Dixon, and the late Nathan Huggins, the conferences--and as a result, this book--represent something of a cultural moment themselves, and scholars and students of American and African-American literature and history will be richer as a result.
Download or read book History and Memory in African American Culture written by Genevieve Fabre and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-12-08 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning--the frame and the substance--of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading scholars has come together to examine the role of historical consciousness and imagination in African-American culture. The result is a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in literature, art, oral documents, and performances. Each of the scholars represented has chosen a different "site of memory"--from a variety of historical and geographical points, and from different ideological, theoretical, and artistic perspectives. Yet the book is unified by a common concern with the construction of an emerging African-American cultural memory. The renowned group of contributors, including Hazel Carby, Werner Sollors, Vèvè Clark, Catherine Clinton, and Nellie McKay, among others, consists of participants of the five-year series of conferences at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, from which this collection originated. Conducted under the leadership of Geneviève Fabre, Melvin Dixon, and the late Nathan Huggins, the conferences--and as a result, this book--represent something of a cultural moment themselves, and scholars and students of American and African-American literature and history will be richer as a result.
Download or read book Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgement Fictional Treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection written by and published by LSU Press. This book was released on with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dessa Rose written by Sherley Anne Williams and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature written by William L. Andrews and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-15 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A breathtaking achievement, this Concise Companion is a suitable crown to the astonishing production in African American literature and criticism that has swept over American literary studies in the last two decades. It offers an enormous range of writers-from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison, and from Toni Morrison to August Wilson. It contains entries on major works (including synopses of novels), such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It also incorporates information on literary characters such as Bigger Thomas, Coffin Ed Johnson, Kunta Kinte, Sula Peace, as well as on character types such as Aunt Jemima, Brer Rabbit, John Henry, Stackolee, and the trickster. Icons of black culture are addressed, including vivid details about the lives of Muhammad Ali, John Coltrane, Marcus Garvey, Jackie Robinson, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. Here, too, are general articles on poetry, fiction, and drama; on autobiography, slave narratives, Sunday School literature, and oratory; as well as on a wide spectrum of related topics. Compact yet thorough, this handy volume gathers works from a vast array of sources--from the black periodical press to women's clubs--making it one of the most substantial guides available on the growing, exciting world of African American literature.
Download or read book Liberating Narratives written by Stefanie Sievers and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 1999 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three contemporary novels of slavery - Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966), Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) - are the central focus of Liberating Narratives. In significantly different ways that reflect their individual and socio-political contexts of origin, these three novels can all be read as critiques of historical representation and as alternative spaces for remembrance - 'sites of memory' - that attempt to shift the conceptual ground on which our knowledge of the past is based.
Download or read book Traumatic Possessions written by Jennifer L. Griffiths and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-12 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of traumatic stress have explored the challenges to memory as a result of extreme experience, particularly in relation to the ways in which trauma resonates within the survivor’s body and the difficulties survivors face when trying to incorporate their experience into meaningful narratives. Jennifer Griffiths examines the attempts of several African American writers and playwrights to explore ruptures in memory after a traumatic experience and to develop creative strategies for understanding the inscription of trauma on the body in a racialized cultural context. In the literary and performance texts examined here, Griffiths shows how the self is reconstituted through testimony—through the attempt to put into language and public statement the struggle of survivors to negotiate the limits placed on their bodies and to speak controversial truths. Dessa in her jail cell, Venus in the courtroom, Sally on the auction block, Ursa in her own family history, and Rodney King in the video frame—each character in these texts by Sherley Anne Williams, Suzan-Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley, Gayl Jones, and Anna Deavere Smith gives voice not only to the limits of language in representing traumatic experience but also to the necessity of testimony as the public enactment of memory and bodily witness. In focusing specifically and exclusively on the relation of trauma to race and on the influence of racism on the creation and reception of narrative testimony, this book distinguishes itself from previous studies of the literatures of trauma.
Download or read book Deep Talk written by Debra Walker King and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: King (English, U. of Florida) draws on the work of Kristeva, Bakhtin, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. to explore the interpretive guidelines necessary to read what she calls the "metatext" of names, where these chosen words comment on and revise the action in a novel by giving voice to unspoken themes and events. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Neo slave Narratives written by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-11-04 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NeoSlave Narratives is a study in the political, social, and cultural content of a given literary form--the novel of slavery cast as a first-person slave narrative. After discerning the social and historical factors surrounding the first appearance of that literary form in the 1960s, NeoSlave Narratives explores the complex relationship between nostalgia and critique, while asking how African American intellectuals at different points between 1976 and 1990 remember and use the site of slavery to represent the crucial cultural debates that arose during the sixties.
Download or read book Dessa Rose written by Stephen Flaherty and published by Alfred Music. This book was released on 2005 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selections from this acclaimed musical written by Ahrens/Flaherty, the team that brought you Ragtime. Titles are: At the Glen * Capture the Girl * Fly Away * In the Bend of My Arm * Ink * Little Star * Old Banjar * The Scheme * Something of My Own * Twelve Children * We Are Descended * White Milk & Red Blood.
Download or read book Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance written by Shannon Sullivan and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a wide variety of philosophical approaches to the neglected philosophical problem of ignorance, this groundbreaking collection builds on Charles Mills's claim that racism involves an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance. Contributors explore how different forms of ignorance linked to race are produced and sustained and what role they play in promoting racism and white privilege. They argue that the ignorance that underpins racism is not a simple gap in knowledge, the accidental result of an epistemological oversight. In the case of racial oppression, ignorance often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation. But as these essays demonstrate, ignorance is not simply a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful. It can also be a strategy for survival, an important tool for people of color to wield against white privilege and white supremacy. The book concludes that understanding ignorance and the politics of such ignorance should be a key element of epistemological and social/political analyses, for it has the potential to reveal the role of power in the construction of what is known and provide a lens for the political values at work in knowledge practices.
Download or read book Calls and Responses written by Tim A. Ryan and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive, groundbreaking study, Tim A. Ryan explores how American novelists since World War I have imagined the institution of slavery and the experience of those involved in it. Complicating the common assumption that authentic black-authored fiction about slavery is starkly opposed to the traditional, racist fiction (and history) created by whites, Ryan suggests that discourses about American slavery are -- and have always been -- defined by connections rather than disjunctions. Ryan contends that African American writers didn't merely reject and move beyond traditional portrayals of the black past but rather actively engaged in a dynamic dialogue with white-authored versions of slavery and existing historiographical debates. The result is an ongoing cultural conversation that transcends both racial and disciplinary boundaries and is akin to the call-and-response style of African American gospel music. Ryan addresses in detail more than a dozen major American novels of slavery, from the first significant modern fiction about the institution -- Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (both published in 1936) -- to recent noteworthy novels on the topic -- Edward P. Jones's The Known World and Valerie Martin's Property (both published in 2003). His insistence upon the necessity of interpreting novels about the past directly in relation to specific historical scholarship makes Calls and Responses especially compelling. He reads Toni Morrison's Beloved not in opposition to a monolithic orthodoxy about slavery but in relation to specific arguments of controversial historian Stanley Elkins. Similarly, he analyzes William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner in terms of its rhetorical echoes of Frederick Douglass's famous autobiographical narrative. Ryan shows throughout Calls and Responses how a variety of novelists -- including Alex Haley, Octavia Butler, Ishmael Reed, Margaret Walker, and Frances Gaither -- engage in a dynamic debate with each other and with such historians as Herbert Aptheker, Charles Joyner, Eugene and Elizabeth Genovese, and many others. A substantially new account of the development of American slavery fiction in the last century, Calls and Responses goes beyond merely exalting the expression of black voices and experiences and actually reconfigures the existing view of the American novel of slavery.
Download or read book Come the Spring written by Julie Garwood and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 8 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julie Garwood triumphed with her phenomenal For the Roses and her #1 New York Times bestselling trio of novels, One Pink Rose, One White Rose, and One Red Rose. Now, she brings her irresistible and heartwarming wit to a delightful love story featuring the unforgettable frontier family, the Claybornes of Blue Belle, Montana. Cole Clayborne had always walked a dark path and flirted with a life of crime. While his three brothers chose to settle into married life, Cole rebelliously refused to be tied down. Now, an elusive stranger draws him into a shadowy chase that will bring unexpected turns to his uncertain future—and may determine which side of the law the restless Cole favors. A tragic, heartbreaking loss drives US Marshal Daniel Ryan on a quest for vengeance—and leads him to a beautiful young woman, the sole witness to a terrible crime. But the lawman finds that love is the greatest trial of all as he unwittingly draws her into the line of fire. The power and drama of their blossoming passion, entwined with the surprising destiny of the wayward Cole, make Come the Spring a superbly entertaining adventure inside the heart of “a family whose love and loyalty will truly inspire” (Romantic Times).
