Download or read book Performance Art and Politics in the African Diaspora written by Myron Beasley and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-29 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines necropolitics and performance art, with a particular focus on the black body and the African diaspora. In this book, Myron M. Beasley situates artists as cultural workers and theorists who illuminate the political linkages between their own and others’ specific locales. The focus is an interrogation of the political systems that dictate and determine the value of lives (and decide which lives matter) through a lens of performance and art. Beasley highlights how the performances of rupture, which are of artistic, and historical significance, reveal both strategies of survival and promises of possibility. Artists and curators examined include Jelili Atiku, Giscard Bouchotte, Nona Faustine, Vanessa German, Simone Leigh, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Ebony G. Patterson, and Dianne Smith. The volume is an ideal research and reference book for students and scholars of Contemporary Art, African Studies, and Performance Theory.

Download or read book Art Creativity and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora written by Abimbola Adelakun and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the politics of artistic creativity, examining how black artists in Africa and the diaspora create art as a procedure of self-making. Essays cross continents to uncover the efflorescence of black culture in national and global contexts and in literature, film, performance, music, and visual art. Contributors place the concerns of black artists and their works within national and transnational conversations on anti-black racism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, migration, resettlement, resistance, and transnational feminisms. Does art by the subaltern fulfill the liberatory potential that critics have ascribed to it? What other possibilities does political art offer? Together, these essays sort through the aesthetics of daily life to build a thesis that reflects the desire of black artists and cultures to remake themselves and their world.

Download or read book Black Movements written by Soyica Diggs Colbert and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Movements analyzes how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. The post–Jim Crow, post–apartheid, postcolonial era has ushered in a purportedly color blind society and along with it an assault on race-based forms of knowledge production and coalition formation. Soyica Diggs Colbert argues that in the late twentieth century race went “underground,” and by the twenty-first century race no longer functioned as an explicit marker of second-class citizenship. The subterranean nature of race manifests itself in discussions of the Trayvon Martin shooting that focus on his hoodie, an object of clothing that anyone can choose to wear, rather than focusing on structural racism; in discussions of the epidemic proportions of incarcerated black and brown people that highlight the individual’s poor decision making rather than the criminalization of blackness; in evaluations of black independence struggles in the Caribbean and Africa that allege these movements have accomplished little more than creating a black ruling class that mirrors the politics of its former white counterpart. Black Movements intervenes in these discussions by highlighting the ways in which artists draw from the past to create coherence about blackness in present and future worlds. Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Black Movements offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and African American studies.

Download or read book Let s Get it on written by Catherine Ugwu and published by Institute of Contemporary Art. This book was released on 1995 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Produced by ICA Live Arts, a contemporary arts institute in Boston, 'Let's Get It On' features the art of Reza Abdoh, Elia Arce, Chila Kumari Burman, Ronald Fraser-Monro and more as well as essays by Cosco Fusco and bell hooks and others. The collection evaluates various forms of African-American performance art from the circle of the dance under slavery to Carnival and its masquerade of identities, and the validity of the art form in a contemporary society"--Amazon.com.

Download or read book Arts Management Cultural Policy the African Diaspora written by Antonio C. Cuyler and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book centers people of African descent as cultural leaders to challenge the myth that they do not know how or care about managing and preserving their culture. Arts Management, Cultural Policy, & the African Diaspora also presents comparative case studies of the challenges, differences, similarities, and successes in approaches to cultural leadership across multiple cultural contexts throughout the diaspora. This volume disrupts the enduring and systemic global marginalization, oppression, and subjugation that threatens and undermines people of African descent’s cultural contributions to humanity. The most important distinguishing feature of the volume is its geographical use of the African diaspora to explore the subjects of arts management and cultural policy which, to date, no volume has done before. Furthermore, the volume’s comparative examination of ten critical, historical, practical, and theoretical questions makes it a significant contribution to the literatures in Arts Management, Cultural Policy, Cultural, Africana, African American, and Ethnic studies.

Download or read book Black Theatre written by Paul Carter Harrison and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Generating a new understanding of the past—as well as a vision for the future—this path-breaking volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre as it is practiced today.Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the community; in Paul Carter Harrison's words, it "reveals the Form of Things Unknown" in a way that "binds, cleanses, and heals."

Download or read book Performing Africa written by Paulla A. Ebron and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The jali--a member of a hereditary group of Mandinka professional performers--is a charismatic but contradictory figure. He is at once the repository of his people's history, the voice of contemporary political authority, the inspiration for African American dreams of an African homeland, and the chief entertainment for the burgeoning transnational tourist industry. Numerous journalists, scholars, politicians, and culture aficionados have tried to pin him down. This book shows how the jali's talents at performance make him a genius at representation--the ideal figure to tell us about the "Africa" that the world imagines, which is always a thing of illusion, magic, and contradiction. Africa often enters the global imagination through news accounts of ethnic war, famine, and despotic political regimes. Those interested in countering such dystopic images--be they cultural nationalists in the African diaspora or connoisseurs of "global culture"--often found their representations of an emancipatory Africa on an enthusiasm for West African popular culture and performance arts. Based on extensive field research in The Gambia and focusing on the figure of the jali, Performing Africa interrogates these representations together with their cultural and political implications. It explores how Africa is produced, circulated, and consumed through performance and how encounters through performance create the place of Africa in the world. Innovative and discerning, Performing Africa is a provocative contribution to debates over cultural nationalism and the construction of identity and history in Africa and elsewhere.

Download or read book Black Movements written by Soyica Diggs Colbert and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Movements analyzes how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. The post–Jim Crow, post–apartheid, postcolonial era has ushered in a purportedly color blind society and along with it an assault on race-based forms of knowledge production and coalition formation. Soyica Diggs Colbert argues that in the late twentieth century race went “underground,” and by the twenty-first century race no longer functioned as an explicit marker of second-class citizenship. The subterranean nature of race manifests itself in discussions of the Trayvon Martin shooting that focus on his hoodie, an object of clothing that anyone can choose to wear, rather than focusing on structural racism; in discussions of the epidemic proportions of incarcerated black and brown people that highlight the individual’s poor decision making rather than the criminalization of blackness; in evaluations of black independence struggles in the Caribbean and Africa that allege these movements have accomplished little more than creating a black ruling class that mirrors the politics of its former white counterpart. Black Movements intervenes in these discussions by highlighting the ways in which artists draw from the past to create coherence about blackness in present and future worlds. Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Black Movements offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and African American studies.

Download or read book African Performance Arts and Political Acts written by Naomi Andre and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-10-28 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Performance Arts and Political Actspresents innovative formulations for how African performance and the arts shape the narratives of cultural history and politics. This collection, edited by Naomi André, Yolanda Covington-Ward, and Jendele Hungbo, engages with a breadth of African countries and art forms, bringing together speech, hip hop, religious healing and gesture, theater and social justice, opera, radio announcements, protest songs, and migrant workers’ dances. The spaces include village communities, city landscapes, prisons, urban hostels, Township theaters, opera houses, and broadcasts through the airwaves on television and radio as well as in cyberspace. Essays focus on case studies from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania.

Download or read book Jay Pather Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa written by Ketu H. Katrak and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa offers the first full-length monograph on the award-winning choreographer, theater director, curator, and creative artist in contemporary global performance. Working within the contexts of African studies, dance, theater, and performance, Ketu H. Katrak explores the extent of Pather's productive career but also places him and his work in the South African and global arts scene, where he is considered a visionary. Pather, a South African of Indian heritage, is known as a master of space, site, and location. Katrak examines how Pather's performance practices place him in the center of global trends that are interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and multimedia and that cross borders between dance, theater, visual art, and technology. Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa offers a vision of an artist who is strategically aware of the spatiality of human life, who understands the human body as the nation's collective history, and who is a symbol of hope and resilience after the trauma of violent segregation.

Download or read book Undercurrents of Power written by Kevin Dawson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-05-07 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kevin Dawson considers how enslaved Africans carried aquatic skills—swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing—to the Americas. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

Download or read book African American Arts written by Sharrell D. Luckett and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Signaling recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive the arts as critical to the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we as scholars and creative thinkers further employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society?"--

Download or read book Fire Under My Feet written by Ofosuwa M. Abiola and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fire Under My Feet seeks to expose the diverse, significant, and often under-researched historical and developmental phenomena revealed by studies in the dance systems of the African Diaspora. In the book, written documentation and diverse methodologies are buttressed by the experiences of those whose lives are built around the practice of African diaspora dance. Replete with original perspectives, this book makes a significant contribution to dance and African diaspora scholarship simultaneously. Most important, it highlights the work of researchers from Ecuador, India, Puerto Rico, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and it exposes under-researched and omitted voices of the African diaspora dance world of the aforesaid locations and Puerto Rico, Columbia, and Trinidad as well. This study showcases a blend of scholars, dance practitioners, and interdisciplinarity, and engages the relationship between African diaspora dance and the fields of history, performance studies, critical race theory, religion, identity, and black agency.

Download or read book Falling Floating Flickering written by Hershini Bhana Young and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insists on the importance of embodiment and movement to the creation of Black sociality Linking African diasporic performance, disability studies, and movement studies, Falling, Floating, Flickering approaches disability transnationally by centering Black, African, and diasporic experiences. By eschewing capital’s weighted calculus of which bodies hold value, this book centers alternate morphologies and movement practices that have previously been dismissed as abnormal or unrecognizable. To move beyond binaries of ability, Hershini Bhana Young traverses multiple geohistories and cultural forms stretching from the United States and the Mediterranean to Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and South Africa, as well as independent and experimental film, novels, sculptures, images, dance, performances, and anecdotes. In doing so, she argues for the importance of differential embodiment and movement to the creation and survival of Black sociality, and refutes stereotypic notions of Africa as less progressive than the West in recognizing the rights of disabled people. Ultimately, this book foregrounds the engagement of diasporic Africans, who are still reeling from the violence of colonialism, slavery, poverty, and war, as they gesture toward a liberatory Black sociality by falling, floating, and flickering.

Download or read book African American Performance and Theater History written by Harry J. Elam and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-18 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American Performance and Theater History is an anthology of critical writings that explores the intersections of race, theater, and performance in America. Assembled by two esteemed scholars in black theater, Harry J. Elam, Jr. and David Krasner, and composed of essays from acknowledged authorities in the field, this anthology is organized into four sections representative of the ways black theater, drama, and performance interact and enact continual social, cultural, and political dialogues. Ranging from a discussion of dramatic performances of Uncle Tom's Cabin to the Black Art Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, articles gathered in the first section, "Social Protest and the Politics of Representation," discuss the ways in which African American theater and performance have operated as social weapons and tools of protest. The second section of the volume, "Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory and Performance," features, among other essays, Joseph Roach's chronicle of the slave performances at Congo Square in New Orleans and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s critique of August Wilson's cultural polemics. "Intersections of Race and Gender," the third section, includes analyses of the intersections of race and gender on the minstrel stage, the plight of black female choreographers at the inception of Modern Dance, and contemporary representations of black homosexuality by PomoAfro Homo. Using theories of performance and performativity, articles in the fourth section, "African American Performativity and the Performance of Race," probe into the ways blackness and racial identity have been constructed in and through performance. The final section is a round-table assessment of the past and present state of African American Theater and Performance Studies by some of the leading senior scholars in the field--James V. Hatch, Sandra L. Richards, and Margaret B. Wilkerson. Revealing the dynamic relationship between race and theater, this volume illustrates how the social and historical contexts of production critically affect theatrical performances of blackness and their meanings and, at the same time, how African American cultural, social, and political struggles have been profoundly affected by theatrical representations and performances. This one-volume collection is sure to become an important reference for those studying black theater and an engrossing survey for all readers of African American literature.

Download or read book Visualising Slavery written by Celeste-Marie Bernier and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book adopts a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the experimental bodies of works produced by African, African American, African Caribbean and Black British artists in order to excavate and theorise the formal and thematic contours of an African Diasporic visual arts tradition.

Download or read book Black Art A Cultural History Third World of Art written by Richard J. Powell and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study explores the visual representations of Black culture across the globe throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The African diaspora—a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade and Western colonialism—has generated a wide array of artistic achievements, from blues and reggae to the paintings of the pioneering American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner and the music videos of Solange. This study concentrates on how these works, often created during times of major social upheaval and transformation, use Black culture both as a subject and as context. From musings on “the souls of black folk” in late-nineteenth-century art to questions of racial and cultural identities in performance, media, and computer-assisted arts in the twenty-first century, this book examines the philosophical and social forces that have shaped Black presence in modern and contemporary visual culture. Renowned art historian Richard J. Powell presents Black art drawn from across the African diaspora, with examples from the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe. Black Art features artworks executed in a broad range of media, including film, photography, performance art, conceptual art, advertising, and sculpture. Now updated and expanded, this new edition helps to better understand how the first two decades of the twenty-first century have been a transformative moment in which previous assumptions about race and identity have been irrevocably altered, with art providing a useful lens through which to think about these compelling issues.