Download or read book Negotiating Difference in French Louisiana Music written by Sara Le Menestrel and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-12-19 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sara Le Menestrel explores the role of music in constructing, asserting, erasing, and negotiating differences based on the notions of race, ethnicity, class, and region. She discusses established notions and brings to light social stereotypes and hierarchies at work in the evolving French Louisiana music field. She also draws attention to the interactions between oppositions such as black and white, urban and rural, differentiation and creolization, and local and global. Le Menestrel emphasizes the importance of desegregating the understanding of French Louisiana music and situating it beyond ethnic or racial identifications, amplifying instead the importance of regional identity. Musical genealogy and categories currently in use rely on a racial construct that frames African and European lineage as an essential difference. Yet as the author samples music in the field and discovers ways music is actually practiced, she reveals how the insistence on origins continually interacts with an emphasis on cultural mixing and creative agency. This book finds French Louisiana musicians navigating between multiple identifications, musical styles, and legacies while market forces, outsiders’ interest, and geographical mobility also contribute to shape musicians’ career strategies and artistic choices. The book also demonstrates the decisive role of non-natives’ enthusiasm and mobility in the validation, evolution, and reconfiguration of French Louisiana music. Finally, the distinctiveness of South Louisiana from the rest of the country appears to be both nurtured and endured by locals, revealing how political domination and regionalism intertwine.
Download or read book French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons written by Patricia Peknik and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-10 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French Louisiana music emerged from the bayous and prairies of Southwest Louisiana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pioneered by impoverished Acadian and Afro-Caribbean settlers, the sound is marked by a high-pitched fiddle playing loud and fast above the bellow of a diatonic accordion. With lyrics about disaster and heartache sung cheerfully in a French dialect, the effect is dissonant and haunting. French Louisiana music was largely ignored in mainstream music culture, except by a handful of collectors, scholars, and commercial promoters who sought to popularize it. From the first recordings in the 1920s to the transformation of the genre by the 1970s, the spread of this regional sound was driven by local, national, and international elites who saw the music’s traditions and performers in the context of larger social, political, and cultural developments, including the folk revival and the civil rights and ethnic revival movements. Patricia Peknik illuminates how the music’s history and meaning were interpreted by a variety of actors who brought the genre onto a national and global stage, revealing the many interests at work in the popularization of a regional music.
Download or read book Lives in Music written by Sara Le Menestrel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lives in Music analyses interwoven patterns of mobility, change, and power in music and dance practices. It challenges some commonly accepted conceptual tools that are ubiquitous in anthropology today, including cultural hybridity, transnational networks, and globalization. Based on seven “itineraries” that are the result of extensive ethnographic long-term field research efforts, the processes of geographic and social mobility, transformation, and power relative to music and dance practices are explored in different parts of the world. Seven writers provide life stories constructed through ethnographic techniques and life histories and supported by a deep knowledge of local customs.
Download or read book Creole Soul written by Burt Feintuch and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-11-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creole Soul: Zydeco Lives is an exquisitely photographed volume of interviews with contemporary zydeco musicians. Featuring the voices of zydeco’s venerable senior generation and its current agents of change, this book celebrates a musical world full of passion, energy, cowboy hats and boots, banging bass, horse trailers, joy, and dazzling dance moves. Author Burt Feintuch captures an important American music in the process of significant—and sometimes controversial—change. Creole Soul draws us into conversations with zydeco musicians from Texas and Louisiana, most of them bandleaders, including Ed Poullard, Lawrence “Black” Ardoin, Step Rideau, Brian Jack, Jerome Batiste, Ruben Moreno, Nathan Williams Jr., Leroy Thomas, Corey Ledet, Sean Ardoin, and Dwayne Dopsie. Some of the interviewees represent the contemporary scene and are among today’s most popular performers along the Creole Corridor. Others are rooted in older French music forms and are especially well qualified to talk about zydeco’s origins. The musicians speak freely, whether discussing the death of a famed musician or describing a memorable performance, such as when Boozoo Chavis played the accordion while dripping blood on stage shortly after a freak barbeque-building accident that sliced off parts of two of his fingers. They address the influence of rap on today’s zydeco music and discuss how to pass music along to a younger generation—and how not to. They weigh the merits of the old-time zydeco clubs versus today’s casinos and African American trailrides, which come complete with horses and the loudest zydeco bands you can imagine. In Creole Soul, zydeco musicians give an unprecedented look into their lives, their music, and their culture.
Download or read book The Inconvenient Lonnie Johnson written by Julia Simon and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-05-25 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lonnie Johnson is a blues legend. His virtuosity on the blues guitar is second to none, and his influence on artists from T-Bone Walker and B. B. King to Eric Clapton is well established. Yet Johnson mastered multiple instruments. He recorded with jazz icons such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, and he played vaudeville music, ballads, and popular songs. In this book, Julia Simon takes a closer look at Johnson’s musical legacy. Considering the full body of his work, Simon presents detailed analyses of Johnson’s music—his lyrics, technique, and styles—with particular attention to its sociohistorical context. Born in 1894 in New Orleans, Johnson's early experiences were shaped by French colonial understandings of race that challenge the Black-white binary. His performances call into question not only conventional understandings of race but also fixed notions of identity. Johnson was able to cross generic, stylistic, and other boundaries almost effortlessly, displaying astonishing adaptability across a corpus of music produced over six decades. Simon introduces us to a musical innovator and a performer keenly aware of his audience and the social categories of race, class, and gender that conditioned the music of his time. Lonnie Johnson’s music challenges us to think about not only what we recognize and value in “the blues” but also what we leave unexamined, cannot account for, or choose not to hear. The Inconvenient Lonnie Johnson provides a reassessment of Johnson’s musical legacy and complicates basic assumptions about the blues, its production, and its reception.
Download or read book A Blues Bibliography written by Robert Ford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-24 with total page 994 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a sequel to Robert Ford's comprehensive reference work A Blues Bibliography, the second edition of which was published in 2007. Bringing Ford's bibliography of resources up to date, this volume covers works published since 2005, complementing the first volume by extending coverage through twelve years of new publications. As in the previous volume, this work includes entries on the history and background of the blues, instruments, record labels, reference sources, regional variations, and lyric transcriptions and musical analysis. With extensive listings of print and online articles in scholarly and trade journals, books, and recordings, this bibliography offers the most thorough resource for all researchers studying the blues.
Download or read book Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory written by Mathilde Köstler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-12-19 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does Cajun literature, emerging in the 1980s, represent the dynamic processes of remembering in Cajun culture? Known for its hybrid constitution and deeply ingrained oral traditions, Cajun culture provides an ideal testing ground for investigating the collective memory of a group. In particular, francophone and anglophone Cajun texts by such writers as Jean Arceneaux, Tim Gautreaux, Jeanne Castille, Zachary Richard, Ron Thibodeaux, Darrell Bourque, and Kirby Jambon reveal not only a shift from an oral to a written tradition. They also show hybrid perspectives on the Cajun collective memory. Based on recurring references to place, the texts also reflect on the (Acadian) past and reveal the innate ability of the Cajuns to adapt through repeated intertextual references. The Cajun collective memory is thus defined by a transnational outlook, a transversality cutting across various ethnic heritages to establish and legitimize a collective identity both amid the linguistic and cultural diversity in Louisiana, and in the face of American mainstream culture. Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory represents the first analysis of the mnemonic strategies Cajun writers use to explore and sustain the Cajun identity and collective memory.
Download or read book Hurricane Katrina in Transatlantic Perspective written by Romain Huret and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There is no such thing as a 'natural' disaster," writes Romain Huret in his introduction to this multidisciplinary study of the events surrounding and the legacy of Hurricane Katrina. Though nature produced Katrina's rising waters and destructive winds, a vast array of manmade factors shaped the scope of the storm's impact as well as the local and national response to it. In Hurricane Katrina in Transatlantic Perspective, American and European scholars approach this infamous storm and its aftermath through a variety of disciplines, from music to geography to anthropology, creating a nuanced understanding of how society reacts to and later remembers times of disaster. Richard Campanella and Romain Huret examine the particular geographical and political mix that set the stage for Katrina's devastation, especially among the poorest populations of New Orleans and the Gulf South. Jean Kempf, James Boyden, Andrew Diamond, and Thomas Jessen Adams address the ideological biases and racial stereotypes that infused local and national commentary in the days and weeks after the storm. Finally, Bruce Raeburn, Sara Le Menestrel, Anne M. Lovell, and Randy J. Sparks explore the impact of this powerful tropical event on the city's institutions and cultural organizations. Hurricane Katrina in Transatlantic Perspective offers a profound and innovative collection of insights on one of the most significant environmental catastrophes in U.S. history, forcing us to examine the cultural actors that transformed a natural disaster into a humanitarian crisis.
Download or read book Transatlantic Parallaxes written by Anne Raulin and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropological inquiry developed around the study of the exotic. Now that we live in a world that seems increasingly familiar, putatively marked by a spreading sameness, anthropology must re-envision itself. The emergence of diverse national traditions in the discipline offers one intriguing path. This volume, the product of a novel encounter of American anthropologists of France and French anthropologists of the United States, explores the possibilities of that path through an experiment in the reciprocal production of knowledge. Simultaneously native subjects, foreign experts, and colleagues, these scholars offer novel insights into each other’s societies, juxtaposing glimpses of ourselves and a familiar “others” to productively unsettle and enrich our understanding of both.
Download or read book Cajun Breakdown written by Ryan Andre Brasseaux and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1946, Harry Choates, a Cajun fiddle virtuoso, changed the course of American musical history when his recording of the so-called Cajun national anthem "Jole Blon" reached number four on the national Billboard charts. Cajun music became part of the American consciousness for the first time thanks to the unprecedented success of this issue, as the French tune crossed cultural, ethnic, racial, and socio-economic boundaries. Country music stars Moon Mullican, Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, and Hank Snow rushed into the studio to record their own interpretations of the waltz-followed years later by Waylon Jennings and Bruce Springsteen. The cross-cultural musical legacy of this plaintive waltz also paved the way for Hank Williams Sr.'s Cajun-influenced hit "Jamabalaya." Choates' "Jole Blon" represents the culmination of a centuries-old dialogue between the Cajun community and the rest of America. Joining into this dialogue is the most thoroughly researched and broadly conceived history of Cajun music yet published, Cajun Breakdown. Furthermore, the book examines the social and cultural roots of Cajun music's development through 1950 by raising broad questions about the ethnic experience in America and nature of indigenous American music. Since its inception, the Cajun community constantly refashioned influences from the American musical landscape despite the pressures of marginalization, denigration, and poverty. European and North American French songs, minstrel tunes, blues, jazz, hillbilly, Tin Pan Alley melodies, and western swing all became part of the Cajun musical equation. The idiom's synthetic nature suggests an extensive and intensive dialogue with popular culture, extinguishing the myth that Cajuns were an isolated folk group astray in the American South. Ryan André Brasseaux's work constitutes a bold and innovative exploration of a forgotten chapter in America's musical odyssey.
Download or read book Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California written by Mark F. DeWitt and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-02-17 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queen Ida, Danny Poullard, documentary filmmaker Les Blank, Chris Strachwitz, and Arhoolie Records. These are names that are familiar to many fans of Cajun music and zydeco, and they have one other thing in common—-longtime residence in the San Francisco Bay Area. They are all part of a vibrant scene of dancing and live Louisiana-French music that has evolved over several decades. Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California traces how this region of California has been able to develop and sustain dances several times a week with more than a dozen bands. Description of this active regional scene opens into a discussion of several historical trends that have affected life and music in Louisiana and the nation. The book portrays the diversity of people who have come together to adopt Cajun and Creole dance music as a way to cope with a globalized, media-saturated world. Ethnomusicologist Mark F. DeWitt innovatively weaves together interviews with musicians and dancers (some from Louisiana, some not), analysis of popular media, participant observation as a musician and dancer, and historical perspectives from wartime black migration patterns, the civil rights movement, American folk and blues revivals, California counterculture, and the rise of cultural tourism in “Cajun Country.” In so doing, he reveals the multifaceted appeal of celebrating life on the dance floor, Louisiana-French style.
Download or read book Articulating The Global And The Local written by Ann Cvetkovich and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-12 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how discourses of the local, the particular, the everyday, and the situated are being transformed by new discourses of globalization and transnationalism, as used both by government and business and in critical academic discourse. Unlike other studies that have focused on the politics and economics of globalization, Articulating the Global and the Local highlights the importance of culture and provides models for a cultural studies that addresses globalization and the dialectic of local and global forces. Arguing for the inseparability of global and local analysis, the book demonstrates how global forces enter into local situations and how in turn global relations are articulated through local events, identities, and cultures; it includes studies of a wide range of cultural forms including sports, poetry, pedagogy, ecology, dance, cities, and democracy. Articulating the Global and the Local makes the ambitious claim that the category of the local transforms the debate about globalization by redefining what counts as global culture. Central to the essays are the new global and translocal cultures and identities created by the diasporic processes of colonialism and decolonization. The essays explore a variety of local, national, and transnational contexts with particular attention to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as categories that force us to rethink globalization itself.
Download or read book The Two fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari written by Charles J. Stivale and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 1998-06-05 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari worked together extensively from the 1960s into the 1990s, and the resulting "intersections" of their different sensibilities and modes of knowing fueled powerful alternatives to Marxian and psychoanalytic orthodoxies. Yet readers approaching Deleuze and Guattari's works are often frustrated by the paucity or unfamiliarity of specific examples that might clarify their complex arguments. This timely volume "animates" key concepts and terminology by applying them to provocative readings of literary texts, films, and cultural phenomena--from Apocalypse Now to Cajun music and dance. Drawing extensively from primary and critical sources to elucidate Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical contributions, Stivale reinvigorates their "two-fold thought" for use as an analytical tool in the humanities and social sciences. The book also offers a clear introduction to the precollaborative phase of each thinker's work, an interview Stivale conducted with Guattari, and the first-time English translation of a 1967 essay by Deleuze. Winner--Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Award, Wayne State University
Download or read book Becoming Cajun Becoming American written by Maria Hebert-Leiter and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-06-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Becoming Cajun, Becoming American, presents an excellent and unique introduction to American Acadian and Cajun literature, exploring how American writers have portrayed Acadian culture over the past 150 years. Beginning with Henry Wadsworth Longfellows poem Evangeline and the writings of George Washington Cable, Hebert-Leiter examination includes the fiction of Kate Chopin and Ernest Gaines, James Lee Burkes Dave Robicheaux detective novels, and additional writings by Ada Jack Carver, Elma Godchaux, Shirley Ann Grau, and others. Representations of the Acadian in literature reflect the Acadians path towards assimilation. Combining her study of Acadian literary history with an examination of Acadian ethnic history, the author offers insight into the Americanization process experienced by the Acadians, who came to be known as Cajuns during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Download or read book Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers written by Emma Christopher Lirette and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-08-24 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, shrimpers on the Louisiana coast have faced a historically dire shrimp season, with the price of shrimp barely high enough to justify trawling. Yet, many of them wouldn’t consider leaving shrimping behind, despite having transferrable skills that could land them jobs in the oil and gas industry. Since 2001, shrimpers have faced increasing challenges to their trade: an influx of shrimp from southeast Asia, several traumatic hurricane seasons, and the largest oil spill at sea in American history. In Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers, author Emma Christopher Lirette traces how Louisiana Gulf Coast shrimpers negotiate land and blood, sea and freedom, and economic security and networks of control. This book explores what ties shrimpers to their boats and nets. Despite feeling trapped by finances and circumstances, they have created a world in which they have agency. Lirette provides a richly textured view of the shrimpers of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, calling upon ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interdisciplinary scholarship, and critical theory. With evocative, lyrical prose, she argues that in persisting to trawl in places that increasingly restrict their way of life, shrimpers build fragile, quietly defiant worlds, adapting to a constantly changing environment. In these flickering worlds, shrimpers reimagine what it means to work and what it means to make a living.
Download or read book Disenchanting Les Bons Temps written by Charles J. Stivale and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVPresents the complex and conflicting views of Cajun cultural heritage, identities, and their manifestation in musical and dance expression./div
Download or read book Dixie Debates written by Richard H. King and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary American South is a region of economic expansion, political sophistication, and, particularly, cultural ferment. Its literature is well-known and celebrated. But what of the popular cultural forms of expression that have done so much to reflect the curious tensions between the traditional South—white-dominated, rural, religous—and contemporary multicultural forms and discourses? This collection offers a wealth of exciting new perspectives on cultural studies in general and of the particular forms of popular Southern culture—from rock and roll to Cajun music to the impact on the South of tourism and the questions of genre and race in contemporary film-making.
