Download or read book A Change Is Gonna Come written by Craig Werner and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ". . . extraordinarily far-reaching. . . . highly accessible." —Notes "No one has written this way about music in a long, long time. Lucid, insightful, with real spiritual, political, intellectual, and emotional grasp of the whole picture. A book about why music matters, and how, and to whom." —Dave Marsh, author of Louie, Louie and Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story "This book is urgently needed: a comprehensive look at the various forms of black popular music, both as music and as seen in a larger social context. No one can do this better than Craig Werner." —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University "[Werner has] mastered the extremely difficult art of writing about music as both an aesthetic and social force that conveys, implies, symbolizes, and represents ideas as well as emotion, but without reducing its complexities and ambiguities to merely didactic categories." —African American Review A Change Is Gonna Come is the story of more than four decades of enormously influential black music, from the hopeful, angry refrains of the Freedom movement, to the slick pop of Motown; from the disco inferno to the Million Man March; from Woodstock's "Summer of Love" to the war in Vietnam and the race riots that inspired Marvin Gaye to write "What's Going On." Originally published in 1998, A Change Is Gonna Come drew the attention of scholars and general readers alike. This new edition, featuring four new and updated chapters, will reintroduce Werner's seminal study of black music to a new generation of readers. Craig Werner is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and author of many books, including Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse and Up Around the Bend: An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival. His most recent book is Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul.

Download or read book A Different Sense of Power written by Thomas Fink and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume analyzes the work of a racially, ethnically, and geographically diverse group of recent social poets. These figures -- Thylias Moss, John Yau, Denise Duchamel, Carolyn Forche, Joseph Lease, Gloria Anzaldua, Martin Espada, Melvin Dixon, and Stephen Paul Miller -- utilize a diversity of aesthetic strategies to address a number of central problems, such as poetic speculations about dangers and opportunities of visual representations by dominant and marginalized groups, effacement of specific communities' histories, and attempts at restoration of history.

Download or read book Music and the Racial Imagination written by Ronald M. Radano and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000-12 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A specter lurks in the house of music, and it goes by the name of race," write Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman in their introduction. Yet the intimate relationship between race and music has rarely been examined by contemporary scholars, most of whom have abandoned it for the more enlightened notions of ethnicity and culture. Here, a distinguished group of contributors confront the issue head on. Representing an unusually broad range of academic disciplines and geographic regions, they critically examine how the imagination of race has influenced musical production, reception, and scholarly analysis, even as they reject the objectivity of the concept itself. Each essay follows the lead of the substantial introduction, which reviews the history of race in European and American, non-Western and global musics, placing it within the contexts of the colonial experience and the more recent formation of "world music." Offering a bold, new revisionist agenda for musicology in a postmodern, postcolonial world, this book will appeal to students of culture and race across the humanities and social sciences.

Download or read book Reader s Guide to Literature in English written by Mark Hawkins-Dady and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 1024 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.

Download or read book Ralph Ellison written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of Ralph Ellison.

Download or read book Fingering the Jagged Grain written by Keith E. Byerman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fingering the Jagged Grain, Keith E. Byerman discusses how black writers such as Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, and Ernest Gaines have moved away from the ideological rigidity of the black arts movement that arose in the 1960s to create a more expressive, imaginative, and artistic fiction inspired by the example of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Combining a strong concern for technique and craftsmanship with elements of African American heritage including jazz, blues, spirituals, cautionary tales, and voodoo, these writers have created a vital fiction that celebrates the strength and resilience of the black American voice as it recounts the painful details and brutal episodes of black experience.

Download or read book Black Manhood in James Baldwin Ernest J Gaines and August Wilson written by Keith Clark and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the standard portrayals of Black men in African American literature From Frederick Douglass to the present, the preoccupation of black writers with manhood and masculinity is a constant. Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson explores how in their own work three major African American writers contest classic portrayals of black men in earlier literature, from slave narratives through the great novels of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Keith Clark examines short stories, novels, and plays by Baldwin, Gaines, and Wilson, arguing that since the 1950s the three have interrupted and radically dismantled the constricting literary depictions of black men who equate selfhood with victimization, isolation, and patriarchy. Instead, they have reimagined black men whose identity is grounded in community, camaraderie, and intimacy. Delivering original and startling insights, this book will appeal to scholars and students of African American literature, gender studies, and narratology.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison written by Ross Posnock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ralph Ellison's classic 1952 novel Invisible Man is one of the most important and controversial novels in the American canon and remains widely read and studied. This Companion provides an introduction to this influential and significant novelist and critic and to his masterpiece. It features essays by leading scholars, a chronology and a guide to further reading. The essays reveal alternative dimensions of Ellison's art radiating out from Invisible Man into other domains - technology, political theory, law, photography, music, religion - and recover the compelling urgency and relevance of Ellison's political and artistic vision. Since Ellison's death his published oeuvre has been expanded by several major volumes - his collected essays, the fragment of a novel, Juneteenth (1999), letters and short stories - examined here in the context of his life and work. Students and scholars of Ellison and of American and African-American literature will find this an invaluable and accessible guide.

Download or read book Ralph Ellison s Invisible Man written by Michael D. Hill and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-01-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is one of the most widely read works of African American literature. This book gives students a thorough yet concise introduction to the novel. Included are chapters on the creation of the novel, its plot, its historical and social contexts, the themes and issues it addresses, Ellison's literary style, and the critical reception of the work. Students will welcome this book as a guide to the novel and the concerns it raises. The volume offers a detailed summary of the plot of Invisible Man as well as a discussion of its origin. It additionally considers the social, historical, and political contexts informing Ellison's work, along with the themes and issues Ellison addresses. It explores Ellison's literary art and surveys the novel's critical reception. Students will value this book for what it says about Invisible Man as well as for its illumination of enduring social concerns.

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 James Baldwin s Later Fiction written by Lynn O. Scott and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2002-02-28 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Baldwin’s Later Fiction examines the decline of Baldwin’s reputation after the middle 1960s, his tepid reception in mainstream and academic venues, and the ways in which critics have often mis-represented and undervalued his work. Scott develops readings of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Just Above My Head that explore the interconnected themes in Baldwin’s work: the role of the family in sustaining the arts, the price of success in American society, and the struggle of black artists to change the ways that race, sex, and masculinity are represented in American culture. Scott argues that Baldwin’s later writing crosses the cultural divide between the 1950s and 1960s in response to the civil rights and black power movements. Baldwin’s earlier works, his political activism and sexual politics, and traditions of African American autobiography and fiction all play prominent roles in Scott’s analysis.

Download or read book Eating the Black Body written by Carlyle Van Thompson and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Textbook

Download or read book The Lever of Riches written by Joel Mokyr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1992-04-09 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world of supercomputers, genetic engineering, and fiber optics, technological creativity is ever more the key to economic success. But why are some nations more creative than others, and why do some highly innovative societies--such as ancient China, or Britain in the industrial revolution--pass into stagnation? Beginning with a fascinating, concise history of technological progress, Mokyr sets the background for his analysis by tracing the major inventions and innovations that have transformed society since ancient Greece and Rome. What emerges from this survey is often surprising: the classical world, for instance, was largely barren of new technology, the relatively backward society of medieval Europe bristled with inventions, and the period between the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution was one of slow and unspectacular progress in technology, despite the tumultuous developments associated with the Voyages of Discovery and the Scientific Revolution. What were the causes of technological creativity? Mokyr distinguishes between the relationship of inventors and their physical environment--which determined their willingness to challenge nature--and the social environment, which determined the openness to new ideas. He discusses a long list of such factors, showing how they interact to help or hinder a nation's creativity, and then illustrates them by a number of detailed comparative studies, examining the differences between Europe and China, between classical antiquity and medieval Europe, and between Britain and the rest of Europe during the industrial revolution. He examines such aspects as the role of the state (the Chinese gave up a millennium-wide lead in shipping to the Europeans, for example, when an Emperor banned large ocean-going vessels), the impact of science, as well as religion, politics, and even nutrition. He questions the importance of such commonly-cited factors as the spill-over benefits of war, the abundance of natural resources, life expectancy, and labor costs. Today, an ever greater number of industrial economies are competing in the global market, locked in a struggle that revolves around technological ingenuity. The Lever of Riches, with its keen analysis derived from a sweeping survey of creativity throughout history, offers telling insights into the question of how Western economies can maintain, and developing nations can unlock, their creative potential.

Download or read book Ralph Ellison s Invisible Man written by John F. Callahan and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The books that comprise the 'Casebooks in Criticism' series offer edited in-depth readings and critical notes and studies on the most important classic novels. This volume explores Ellison's 'Invisible Man'.

Download or read book Crossroads Modernism written by Edward Michael Pavlić and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Crossroads Modernism provides an in-depth look at how West African cultural legacies are brought to bear in the structure of a truly African American modernist creative process. Whereas much has been said about the (generally racist) use of blackness in constituting modernism, Crossroads Modernism is the first book to expose the key role that modernism has played in the constitution of blackness in African American aesthetics". --Publisher.

Download or read book Fifteen Jugglers Five Believers written by T. V. Reed and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: T. V. Reed urges an affiliation between literary theory and political action—and between political action and literary theory. What can the "new literary theory" learn from "new social movements," and what can social activists learn from poststructuralism, new historicism, feminist theory, and neomarxism? In striking interpretations of texts in four different genres—James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, and the ecofeminist Women's Pentagon Actions of the early 1980s—Reed shows how reading literary texts for their political strategies and reading political movements as texts can help us overcome certain rhetorical traps that have undermined American efforts to combat racism, sexism, and economic inequality. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

Download or read book May All Your Fences Have Gates written by Alan Nadel and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 1993-11-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stimulating collection of essays, the first comprehensive critical examination of the work of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, deals individually with his five major plays and also addresses issues crucial to Wilson's canon: the role of history, the relationship of African ritual to African American drama, gender relations in the African American community, music and cultural identity, the influence of Romare Bearden's collages, and the politics of drama. The collection includes essays by virtually all the scholars who have currently published on Wilson along with many established and newer scholars of drama and/or African American literature.