Download or read book The Star Side of Bird Hill written by Naomi Jackson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two sisters are suddenly sent from their home in Brooklyn to Barbados to live with their grandmother, in Naomi Jackson’s stunning debut novel This lyrical novel of community, betrayal, and love centers on an unforgettable matriarchal family in Barbados. Two sisters, ages ten and sixteen, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister, Dionne, live for the summer of 1989 with their grandmother Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah. Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother’s limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations, accompanies her grandmother in her role as a midwife, and investigates their mother’s mysterious life. This tautly paced coming-of-age story builds to a crisis when the father they barely know comes to Bird Hill to reclaim his daughters, and both Phaedra and Dionne must choose between the Brooklyn they once knew and loved or the Barbados of their family. Naomi Jackson’s Barbados and her characters are singular, especially the wise Hyacinth and the heartbreaking young Phaedra, who is coming into her own as a young woman amid the tumult of her family. Praise for The Star Side of Bird Hill: “Once in a while, you’ll stumble onto a book like this, one so poetic in its descriptions and so alive with lovable, frustrating, painfully real characters, that your emotional response to it becomes almost physical. . . . The dual coming-of-age story alone could melt the sternest of hearts, but Jackson’s exquisite prose is a marvel too. . . . A gem of a book.” —Entertainment Weekly (A)

Download or read book Fighting for Honor written by T. J. Desch-Obi and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2021-04-12 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking investigation into the migration of martial arts techniques across continents and centuries The presence of African influence and tradition in the Americas has long been recognized in art, music, language, agriculture, and religion. T. J. Desch-Obi explores another cultural continuity that is as old as eighteenth-century slave settlements in South America and as contemporary as hip-hop culture. In this thorough survey of the history of African martial arts techniques, Desch-Obi maps the translation of numerous physical combat techniques across three continents and several centuries to illustrate how these practices evolved over time and are still recognizable in American culture today. Some of these art traditions were part of African military training while others were for self-defense and spiritual discipline. Grounded in historical and cultural anthropological methodologies, Desch-Obi's investigation traces the influence of well-delineated African traditions on long-observed but misunderstood African and African American cultural activities in North America, Brazil, and the Caribbean. He links the Brazilian martial art capoeira to reports of slave activities recorded in colonial and antebellum North America. Likewise Desch-Obi connects images of the kalenda African stick-fighting techniques to the Haitian Revolution. Throughout the study Desch-Obi examines the ties between physical mastery of these arts and changing perceptions of honor. Including forty-five illustrations, this rich history of the arrival and dissemination of African martial arts in the Atlantic world offers a new vantage for furthering our understanding of the powerful influence of enslaved populations on our collective social history.

Download or read book The Little Capoeira Book Revised Edition written by Nestor Capoeira and published by Blue Snake Books. This book was released on 2007-12-26 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nestor Capoeira, a long-time teacher of capoeira and noted mestre (master), begins this revised edition of his bestseller with an in-depth history of the Brazilian art, giving the most popular theories for the origins and purposes of this movement that combines the grace of dance with lethal self-defense techniques in a unique game-song structure. He discusses some of the most famous capoeristas and their influence on the art. In addition, he describes how the two major branches of capoeira (Angola and Regional) came about and the differences between them. The Little Capoeira Book’s clear descriptions of the game, or jogo, explain the actual application of capoeira, vaguely similar to sparring but very different in purpose and style. The music of capoeira, which is played during all jogo, is also examined, along with its main instrument, the berimbau. The author includes a how-to guide with photographs showing basic moves for beginners, with offensive and defensive applications for simple kicks, takedowns, advanced kicks and movements, head butts, hand strikes, and knee and elbow strikes. Each technique is vividly depicted with drawings that are easy to understand and learn from, and mestre capoeira includes an explanation of both Angola and Regional versions.

Download or read book African Roots Brazilian Rites written by C. Sterling and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores how Afro-Brazilians define their Africanness through Candomblé and Quilombo models, and construct paradigms of blackness with influences from US-based perspectives, through the vectors of public rituals, carnival, drama, poetry, and hip hop.

Download or read book Martial Arts Studies written by Paul Bowman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-04-09 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phrase “martial arts studies” is increasingly circulating as a term to describe a new field of interest. But many academic fields including history, philosophy, anthropology, and Area studies already engage with martial arts in their own particular way. Therefore, is there really such a thing as a unique field of martial arts studies? Martial Arts Studies is the first book to engage directly with these questions. It assesses the multiplicity and heterogeneity of possible approaches to martial arts studies, exploring orientations and limitations of existing approaches. It makes a case for constructing the field of martial arts studies in terms of key coordinates from post-structuralism, cultural studies, media studies, and post-colonialism. By using these anti-disciplinary approaches to disrupt the approaches of other disciplines, Martial Arts Studies proposes a field that both emerges out of and differs from its many disciplinary locations.

Download or read book Underground Sociabilities written by Sandra Jovchelovitch and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Capoeira written by Matthias Röhrig Assunção and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art now spreading over the rest of the world and this book, the only complete history of the art in the English language, traces the history of the martial art and examines its influence.

Download or read book Runner s World written by and published by . This book was released on 2008-07 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Runner's World magazine aims to help runners achieve their personal health, fitness, and performance goals, and to inspire them with vivid, memorable storytelling.

Download or read book Abstracts of the Annual Meeting written by American Anthropological Association and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Coming Up Taller written by Judith Weitz and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1996 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Deconstructing Martial Arts written by Paul Bowman and published by Cardiff University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-24 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the essence of martial arts? What is their place in or relationship with culture and society? Deconstructing Martial Arts analyses familiar issues and debates that arise in scholarly, practitioner and popular cultural discussions and treatments of martial arts and argues that martial arts are dynamic and variable constructs whose meanings and values regularly shift, mutate and transform, depending on the context. It argues that deconstructing martial arts is an invaluable approach to both the scholarly study of martial arts in culture and society and also to wider understandings of what and why martial arts are. Placing martial arts in relation to core questions and concerns of media and cultural studies around identity, value, orientalism, and embodiment, Deconstructing Martial Arts introduces and elaborates deconstruction as a rewarding method of cultural studies.

Download or read book Brazilian Bodies and Their Choreographies of Identification written by Cristina F. Rosa and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brazilian Bodies, and their Choreographies of Identification retraces the presence of a particular way of swaying the body that, in Brazil, is commonly known as ginga . Cristina Rosa its presence across distinct and specific realms: samba-de-roda (samba-in-a-circle) dances, capoeira angola games, and the repertoire of Grupo Corpo.

Download or read book Ecstatic Encounters written by Mattijs van de Port and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reality does not comply with our narrations of it. And that is most certainly the case with the narrations produced in academia. An anthropologist in Bahia, Brazil, fears to become possessed by the spirits he had come to study; falls madly in love withan 'informant'; finds himself baffled by the sayings of a clairvoyant; and has to come to grips with the murder of one of his best friends. Unsettling events that do not belong to the orderly world of scientific research, yet leave their imprint on the way the anthropologist comes to understand the world. REflecting on his long research experience with the spirit possession cult Candomblâe, the author shows, in a probing manner, how definitions of reality always require the exclusion of certain perceptions, experiences and insights. And yet, this 'rest-of-what-is' turns out to be an inexhaustible source of amazement, seduction and renewal." --P [4] of cover.

Download or read book Runner s World written by and published by . This book was released on 2008-07 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Runner's World magazine aims to help runners achieve their personal health, fitness, and performance goals, and to inspire them with vivid, memorable storytelling.

Download or read book Capoeira a Brazilian Art Form written by Bira Almeida 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 Jacob s Advice written by Jude Cook and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Astute, funny, elegant meditation on identity . . . full of energy with an alluring Parisian glow’ Diana Evans, author of Ordinary People 'Generous, urbane, zestful . . . a Francophile's feast' Rob Doyle, author of Threshold Larry Frost, a British pharmacologist living in Paris, is exuberant, charismatic, wildly opinionated. He’s also convinced he’s Jewish – or at least he’s long had his hopes. But his search for what he believes is his true identity produces more questions than answers. In early 2015, following the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, Larry is joined by his sceptical older cousin, Nick Newman. Divorced, separated from his son and desperately trying to understand his own place in the world, Nick is drawn inextricably into Larry’s slipstream as they walk the fractured, uneasy, magical streets of Paris. Then, in November, terrorism strikes the city again. With Paris and the cousins still reeling from the trauma, Larry receives the information he’s urgently been seeking: a long-held family secret that will change both their lives forever. Set against a backdrop of extremism, nationalism and the resurgence of antisemitism, Jacob’s Advice is a timely exploration of identity, race, family and the inescapable nature of the past.

Download or read book The City of Women written by Ruth Landes and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the landmark study of candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion of Bahia, Brazil.