Download or read book History and Memory in African American Culture written by Geneviève Fabre and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relation between history and memory has become an object of increasing attention among historians and literary critics. Through a team of leading scholars, this volume offers a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which an African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in books, art, performance, and oral documents.
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 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 The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory written by Renee Christine Romano and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The movement for civil rights in America peaked in the 1950s and1960s; however, a closely related struggle, this time over themovement's legacy, has been heatedly engaged over the past twodecades. How the civil rights movement is currently being rememberedin American politics and culture - and why it matters - is the commontheme of the thirteen essays in this unprecedented collection.Memories of the movement are being created and maintained - in waysand for purposes we sometimes only vaguely perceive - throughmemorials, art exhibits, community celebrations, and even streetnames.
Download or read book Beyond the Rope written by Karlos K. Hill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of African Americans' evolving attitudes towards lynching from the 1880s to the present. Unlike most histories of lynching, it explains how African Americans were both purveyors and victims of lynch mob violence and how this dynamic has shaped the meaning of lynching in black culture.
Download or read book Living In Living Out written by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This oral history portrays the lives of African American women who migrated from the rural South to work as domestic servants in Washington, DC in the early decades of the twentieth century. In Living In, Living Out Elizabeth Clark-Lewis narrates the personal experiences of eighty-one women who worked for wealthy white families. These women describe how they encountered—but never accepted—the master-servant relationship, and recount their struggles to change their status from “live in” servants to daily paid workers who “lived out.” With candor and passion, the women interviewed tell of leaving their families and adjusting to city life “up North,” of being placed as live-in servants, and of the frustrations and indignities they endured as domestics. By networking on the job, at churches, and at penny savers clubs, they found ways to transform their unending servitude into an employer-employee relationship—gaining a new independence that could only be experienced by living outside of their employers' homes. Clark-Lewis points out that their perseverance and courage not only improved their own lot but also transformed work life for succeeding generations of African American women. A series of in-depth vignettes about the later years of these women bears poignant witness to their efforts to carve out lives of fulfillment and dignity.
Download or read book Making Black History written by Jeffrey Aaron Snyder and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Jim Crow era, along with black churches, schools, and newspapers, African Americans also had their own history. Making Black History focuses on the engine behind the early black history movement, Carter G. Woodson and his Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Author Jeffrey Aaron Snyder shows how the study and celebration of black history became an increasingly important part of African American life over the course of the early to mid-twentieth century. It was the glue that held African Americans together as “a people,” a weapon to fight racism, and a roadmap to a brighter future. Making Black History takes an expansive view of the historical enterprise, covering not just the production of black history but also its circulation, reception, and performance. Woodson, the only professional historian whose parents had been born into slavery, attracted a strong network of devoted members to the ASNLH, including professional and lay historians, teachers, students, “race” leaders, journalists, and artists. They all grappled with a set of interrelated questions: Who and what is “Negro”? What is the relationship of black history to American history? And what are the purposes of history? Tracking the different answers to these questions, Snyder recovers a rich public discourse about black history that took shape in journals, monographs, and textbooks and sprang to life in the pages of the black press, the classrooms of black schools, and annual celebrations of Negro History Week. By lining up the Negro history movement’s trajectory with the wider arc of African American history, Snyder changes our understanding of such signal aspects of twentieth-century black life as segregated schools, the Harlem Renaissance, and the emerging modern civil rights movement.
Download or read book Blacks and Reds written by Earl Ofari Hutchinson and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this important study, Hutchinson examines in detail the American Communist party's largely unsuccessful effort to win the allegiance of black Americans in the 20th century. While Communism may have appealed to some, Hutchinson shows that most blacks were not interested in the party, its penchant for theoretical abstraction, or its call for proletarian revolt.
Download or read book Slavery and Public History written by James Oliver Horton and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A fascinating collection of essays” by eminent historians exploring how we teach, remember, and confront the history and legacy of American slavery (Booklist Online). In recent years, the culture wars have called into question the way America’s history of slavery is depicted in books, films, television programs, historical sites, and museums. In the first attempt to examine the historiography of slavery, this unique collection of essays looks at recent controversies that have played out in the public arena, with contributions by such noted historians as Ira Berlin, David W. Blight, and Gary B. Nash. From the cancellation of the Library of Congress’s “Back of the Big House” slavery exhibit at the request of the institution’s African American employees, who found the visual images of slavery too distressing, to the public reaction to DNA findings confirming Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, Slavery and Public History takes on contemporary reactions to the fundamental contradiction of American history—the existence of slavery in a country dedicated to freedom—and offers a bracing analysis of how Americans choose to remember the past, and how those choices influence our politics and culture. “Americans seem perpetually surprised by slavery—its extent (North as well as South), its span (over half of our four centuries of Anglo settlement), and its continuing influence. The wide-ranging yet connected essays in [this book] will help us all to remember and understand.” —James W. Loewen, author of Sundown Towns
Download or read book Denmark Vesey s Garden written by Ethan J. Kytle and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Janet Maslin’s Favorite Books of 2018, The New York Times One of John Warner’s Favorite Books of 2018, Chicago Tribune Named one of the “Best Civil War Books of 2018” by the Civil War Monitor “A fascinating and important new historical study.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “A stunning contribution to the historiography of Civil War memory studies.” —Civil War Times The stunning, groundbreaking account of "the ways in which our nation has tried to come to grips with its original sin" (Providence Journal) Hailed by the New York Times as a "fascinating and important new historical study that examines . . . the place where the ways slavery is remembered mattered most," Denmark Vesey's Garden "maps competing memories of slavery from abolition to the very recent struggle to rename or remove Confederate symbols across the country" (The New Republic). This timely book reveals the deep roots of present-day controversies and traces them to the capital of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the slaves brought to the United States stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, which was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822. As they examine public rituals, controversial monuments, and competing musical traditions, "Kytle and Roberts's combination of encyclopedic knowledge of Charleston's history and empathy with its inhabitants' past and present struggles make them ideal guides to this troubled history" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A work the Civil War Times called "a stunning contribution, " Denmark Vesey's Garden exposes a hidden dimension of America's deep racial divide, joining the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting interpretations of slavery's enduring legacy in the United States.
Download or read book Water and African American Memory written by Anissa J. Wardi and published by . This book was released on 2015-12-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This cutting-edge text not only increases our understanding of African American literature and film; it also enlarges the accessibility and the possibilities of the field of ecocriticism."--Yvonne Atkinson, Mt. San Jacinto College and president of the Toni Morrison Society While there is no lack of scholarship on the trans-Atlantic voyage and the Middle Passage as tropes in African diasporic writing, to date there has not been a comprehensive analysis of bodies of water in African American literature and culture. In Water and African American Memory, Anissa Wardi offers the first sustained treatise on watercourses in the African American expressive tradition. Her holistic approach especially highlights the ways that water acts not only as a metaphorical site of trauma, memory, and healing but also as a material site. Using the trans-Atlantic voyage as a starting point and ending with a discussion of Hurricane Katrina, this pioneering ecocritical study delves deeply into the environmental dimension of African American writing. Beyond proposing a new theoretical map for conceptualizing the African Diaspora, Wardi offers a series of engaging and original close readings of major literary, filmic, and blues texts, including the works of Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Julie Dash, Henry Dumas, and Kasi Lemmon.
Download or read book A History of African American Autobiography written by Joycelyn Moody and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 724 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This History explores innovations in African American autobiography since its inception, examining the literary and cultural history of Black self-representation amid life writing studies. By analyzing the different forms of autobiography, including pictorial and personal essays, editorials, oral histories, testimonials, diaries, personal and open letters, and even poetry performance media of autobiographies, this book extends the definition of African American autobiography, revealing how people of African descent have created and defined the Black self in diverse print cultures and literary genres since their arrival in the Americas. It illustrates ways African Americans use life writing and autobiography to address personal and collective Black experiences of identity, family, memory, fulfillment, racism and white supremacy. Individual chapters examine scrapbooks as a source of self-documentation, African American autobiography for children, readings of African American persona poems, mixed-race life writing after the Civil Rights Movement, and autobiographies by African American LGBTQ writers.
Download or read book Long Memory written by Mary Frances Berry and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 1997-08-14 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This powerful, provocative survey is organized around the key issues of Afro-American history: Africa and slavery, family, religion, sex and racism, politics, economics, education, criminal justice, discrimination and protest movements, and black nationalism.
Download or read book Jim Crow Wisdom written by Jonathan Scott Holloway and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we balance the desire for tales of exceptional accomplishment with the need for painful doses of reality? How hard do we work to remember our past or to forget it? These are some of the questions that Jonathan Scott Holloway addresses in this exploration of race memory from the dawn of the modern civil rights era to the present. Relying on social science, documentary film, dance, popular literature, museums, memoir, and the tourism trade, Holloway explores the stories black Americans have told about their past and why these stories are vital to understanding a modern black identity. In the process, Holloway asks much larger questions about the value of history and facts when memories do violence to both. Making discoveries about his own past while researching this book, Holloway weaves first-person and family memories into the traditional third-person historian's perspective. The result is a highly readable, rich, and deeply personal narrative that will be familiar to some, shocking to others, and thought-provoking to everyone.
Download or read book Activating the Past written by Andrew Apter and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-12-14 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Activating the Past explores critical historical events and transformations associated with embodied memories in the Black Atlantic world. The assembled case-studies disclose hidden historical references to local and regional encounters with Atlantic modernity, focusing on religious festivals that represent political and economic relationships in “fetishized” forms of power and value. Although memories of the slave trade are rarely acknowledged in West Africa and the Americas, they have retreated, so to speak, within ritual associations as restricted, repressed, even secret histories that are activated during public festivals and through different styles of spirit possession. In West Africa, our focus on selected port cities along the coast extends into the hinterlands, where slave raiding occurred but is poorly documented and rarely acknowledged. In the Caribbean, regional contrasts between coastal and hinterland communities relate figures of the jíbaro, the indio and the caboclo to their ritual representations in Santería, Vodou, and Candomblé. Highlighting the spatial association of memories with shrines and the ritual “condensation” of regional geographies, we locate local spirits and domestic terrains within co-extensive Atlantic horizons. The volume brings together leading scholars of the African Diaspora who not only explore these ritual archives for significant echoes of the past, but also illuminate a subaltern historiography embedded within Atlantic cultural systems.
Download or read book Begin with the Past written by Mabel O. Wilson and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rising on the National Mall next to the Washington Monument, the National Museum of African American History and Culture is a tiered bronze beacon inviting everyone to learn about the richness and diversity of the African American experience and how it helped shape this nation. Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture is the story of how this unparalleled museum found its place in the nation’s collective memory and on its public commons. Begin with the Past presents the long history of efforts to build a permanent place to collect, study, and present African American history and culture. In 2003 the museum was officially established at long last, yet the work of the museum was only just beginning. The book traces the appointment of the director, the selection of the site, and the process of conceiving, designing, and constructing a public monument to the achievements and contributions of African Americans. The careful selection of architects, designers, and engineers culminated in a museum that embodies African American sensibilities about space, form, and material and incorporates rich cultural symbols into the design of the building and its surrounding landscape. The National Museum of African American History and Culture is a place for all Americans to understand our past and embrace our future, and this book is a testament to the inspiration and determination that went into creating this unique place.
Download or read book Desegregating the Past written by Robyn Autry and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, visitors confront the past upon arrival. They must decide whether to enter the museum through a door marked "whites" or another marked "non-whites." Inside, along with text, they encounter hanging nooses and other reminders of apartheid-era atrocities. In the United States, museum exhibitions about racial violence and segregation are mostly confined to black history museums, with national history museums sidelining such difficult material. Even the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is dedicated not to violent histories of racial domination but to a more generalized narrative about black identity and culture. The scale at which violent racial pasts have been incorporated into South African national historical narratives is lacking in the U.S. Desegregating the Past considers why this is the case, tracking the production and display of historical representations of racial pasts at museums in both countries and what it reveals about underlying social anxieties, unsettled emotions, and aspirations surrounding contemporary social fault lines around race. Robyn Autry consults museum archives, conducts interviews with staff, and recounts the public and private battles fought over the creation and content of history museums. Despite vast differences in the development of South African and U.S. society, Autry finds a common set of ideological, political, economic, and institutional dilemmas arising out of the selective reconstruction of the past. Museums have played a major role in shaping public memory, at times recognizing and at other times blurring the ongoing influence of historical crimes. The narratives museums produce to engage with difficult, violent histories expose present anxieties concerning identity, (mis)recognition, and ongoing conflict.
