Download or read book Toni Morrison s Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination written by Kathleen Marks and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination investigates Toni Morrison's Beloved in light of ancient Greek influences, arguing that the African American experience depicted in the novel can be set in a broader context than is usually allowed. Kathleen Marks gives a history of the apotropaic from ancient to modern times, and shows the ways that Beloved'sprotagonist, Sethe, and her community engage the apotropaic as a mode of dealing with their communal suffering. Apotropaic, from the Greek, meaning "to turn away from," refers to rituals that were performed in ancient times to ward off evil deities. Modern scholars use the term to denote an action that, in attempting to prevent an evil, causes that very evil. Freud employed the apotropaic to explain his thought concerning Medusa and the castration complex, and Derrida found the apotropaic's logic of self-sabotage consonant with his own thought. Marks draws on this critical history and argues that Morrison's heroine's effort to keep the past at bay is apotropaic: a series of gestures aimed at resisting a danger, a threat, an imperative. These gestures anticipate, mirror, and put into effect that which they seek to avoid--one does what one finds horrible so as to mitigate its horror. In Beloved, Sethe's killing of her baby reveals this dynamic: she kills the baby in order to save it. As do all great heroes, Sethe transgresses boundaries, and such transgressions bring with them terrific dangers: for example, the figure Beloved. Yet Sethe's action has ritualistic undertones that link it to the type of primal crimes that can bring relief to a petrified community. It is through these apotropaic gestures that the heroine and the community resist what Morrison calls "cultural amnesia" and engage in a shared past, finally inaugurating a new order of love. Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination is eclectic in its approach--calling upon Greek religion, Greek mythology and underworld images, and psychology. Marks looks at the losses and benefits of the kind of self-damage/self-agency the apotropaic affords. Such an approach helps to frame the questions of the role of suffering in human life, the relation between humans and the underworld, and the uses of memory and history."--Publishers website

Download or read book Re forming the Past written by A. Timothy Spaulding and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The slave experience was a defining one in American history, and not surprisingly, has been a significant and powerful trope in African American literature. In Re-Forming the Past, A. Timothy Spaulding examines contemporary revisions of slave narratives that use elements of the fantastic to redefine the historical and literary constructions of American slavery. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, postmodern slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Charles Johnson's Ox Herding Tale and Middle Passage, Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories, and Samuel Delaney's Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand set out to counter the usual slave narrative's reliance on realism and objectivity by creating alternative histories based on subjective, fantastic, and non-realistic representations of slavery. As these texts critique traditional conceptions of history, identity, and aesthetic form, they simultaneously re-invest these concepts with a political agency that harkens back to the original project of the 19th-century slave narratives. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, Spaulding contextualizes postmodern slave narrative. By addressing both literary and popular African American texts, Re-Forming the Past expands discussions of both the African American literary tradition and postmodern culture.

Download or read book Seeing the Unspeakable written by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-06 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVThe first book analyzing the artistic production and critical reception of Kara Walker, a young African-American artist whose controversial work deals with unsettling themes of racism./div

Download or read book The Daughter s Return written by Caroline Rody and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-04-12 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Daughter's Return offers a close analysis of an emerging genre in African-American and Caribbean fiction produced by women writers who make imaginative returns to their ancestral pasts. Considering some of the defining texts of contemporary fiction--Toni Morrison's Beloved, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven--Rody discusses their common inclusion of a daughter who returns to the site of her people's founding trauma of slavery through memory or magic. Rody treats these texts as allegorical expressions of the desire of writers newly emerging into cultural authority to reclaim their difficult inheritance, and finds a counter plot of heroines' encounters with women of other racial and ethnic groups running through these works.

Download or read book Shaping the Future of African American Film written by Monica White Ndounou and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hollywood, we hear, it’s all about the money. It’s a ready explanation for why so few black films get made—no crossover appeal, no promise of a big payoff. But what if the money itself is color-coded? What if the economics that governs film production is so skewed that no film by, about, or for people of color will ever look like a worthy investment unless it follows specific racial or gender patterns? This, Monica Ndounou shows us, is precisely the case. In a work as revealing about the culture of filmmaking as it is about the distorted economics of African American film, Ndounou clearly traces the insidious connections between history, content, and cash in black films. How does history come into it? Hollywood’s reliance on past performance as a measure of potential success virtually guarantees that historically underrepresented, underfunded, and undersold African American films devalue the future prospects of black films. So the cycle continues as it has for nearly a century. Behind the scenes, the numbers are far from neutral. Analyzing the onscreen narratives and off-screen circumstances behind nearly two thousand films featuring African Americans in leading and supporting roles, including such recent productions as Bamboozled, Beloved, and Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Ndounou exposes the cultural and racial constraints that limit not just the production but also the expression and creative freedom of black films. Her wide-ranging analysis reaches into questions of literature, language, speech and dialect, film images and narrative, acting, theater and film business practices, production history and financing, and organizational history. By uncovering the ideology behind profit-driven industry practices that reshape narratives by, about, and for people of color, this provocative work brings to light existing limitations—and possibilities for reworking stories and business practices in theater, literature, and film.

Download or read book Remembering Generations written by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-01-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery is America's family secret, a partially hidden phantom that continues to haunt our national imagination. Remembering Generations explores how three contemporary African American writers artistically represent this notion in novels about the enduring effects of slavery on the descendants of slaves in the post-civil rights era. Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Ashraf Rushdy situates these works in their cultural moment of production, highlighting the ways in which they respond to contemporary debates about race and family. Tracing the evolution of this literary form, he considers such works as Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998), in which descendants of slaveholders expose the family secrets of their ancestors. Remembering Generations examines how cultural works contribute to social debates, how a particular representational form emerges out of a specific historical epoch, and how some contemporary intellectuals meditate on the issue of historical responsibility--of recognizing that the slave past continues to exert an influence on contemporary American society.

Download or read book The Forgetting Tree written by Rae Paris and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-12 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A personal narrative of past and present racial violence and resistance to terror in the United States. Rae Paris began writing The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory in 2010, while traveling the United States, visiting sites of racial trauma, horror, and defiance. The desire to do this work came from being a child of parents born and raised in New Orleans during segregation, who ultimately left for California in the late 1950s. After the death of her father in 2011, the fiction Paris had been writing gave way to poetry and short prose, which were heavily influenced by the questions she'd long been considering about narrative, power, memory, and freedom. The need to write this story became even more personal and pressing. While Paris sometimes uses the genre of "memoir" or "hybrid memoir" when referring to her work, in this case the term "rememory," born from Toni Morrison's Beloved, feels most accurate. Paris is driven by the familial and historical spaces and by what happens when we remember seemingly disparate images and moments. The collection is not fully prose or poetry, but rather an elegy for those who have passed through us. A perfect blend of prose, poetry, and images, The Forgetting Tree is a unique and thought-provoking collection that argues for a deeper understanding of past and present so that we might imagine a more hopeful, sustainable, and loving future.

Download or read book Fiction and the Incompleteness of History written by Zhu Ying and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on the author's thesis (Doctoral--University of Hong Kong, 2005).

Download or read book Toni Morrison s Beloved written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of critical essays that examine Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved," with a chronology of the author's life, an overview of the novel, its plot, themes, characters, and literary impact, and an introduction by Harold Bloom.

Download or read book Rememory written by John Gregory Betancourt and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For catmen Hangman and Slash, prowling the burned-out urban Sprawl is the ideal life. These genetically modified people live to rip off hot cargoes from rival animen. It's a fine life of thief vs. thief...cat vs. dog... Fine, that is, until Slash scores a take that's a little too hot: the PED spy-eye, a top-secret sense-recorder implant that turns the human brain into a perfect playback machine. Any brain, living or dead... And there are those who will stop at nothing to get this particular set of memories back! By best-selling science fiction and mystery author John Gregory Betancourt, this novel was originally published by Warner Books in 1990.

Download or read book The Fall of the House of Poe written by Phillip Roderick and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2006 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why was Edgar Allan Poe unable to form either emotional or sexual bonds with the women in his life? Why did he worship at the grave of his friend's mother-a woman he may have loved but who he could have never been intimate with? Why did he marry his 13 year-old cousin and what impact did her tragic death have on his literary creations? Why do the female characters in his short stories endure disturbingly sadistic punishment and torture at the hands of an almost overtly mad husband or acquaintance? Through both a feminist and psychoanalytic analysis, The Fall of the House of Poe attempts to explain Poe's morbid treatment of the female characters in his short stories by examining his own disturbingly tragic experiences with women throughout his short life. Ultimately this book elucidates unequivocally the acute psychological motivations for Poe's profoundly psychoanalytic tales of horror and imagination.

Download or read book Worrying the Line written by Cheryl A. Wall and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In blues music, "worrying the line" is the technique of breaking up a phrase by changing pitch, adding a shout, or repeating words in order to emphasize, clarify, or subvert a moment in a song. Cheryl A. Wall applies this term to fiction and nonfiction wr

Download or read book The Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Education written by Michael W. Apple and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-12-16 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together the work of a group of the world’s leading sociologists of education to explore and address key issues and concerns within the discipline. The chapters draw upon theory and research to provide ‘state of the art’ accounts of contemporary educational processes, global trends, and changing and enduring forms of social conflict and social inequality. The topics which are addressed are of international relevance and significance.

Download or read book Black Women Identity and Cultural Theory written by Kevin Everod Quashie and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic that aims to center black women and their philosophies. Book jacket.

Download or read book Working Through Memory written by Ofelia Ferrán and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2007 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies various constructions of memory in contemporary Spanish literature, evoking different aspects of a past of repression, from both the civil war and the Franco regime. This book analyzes narrative texts published between the 1960s and 1990s that present memory and the recuperation of a traumatic past as their main theme.

Download or read book Hebrew Gothic written by Karen Grumberg and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sinister tales written since the early 20th century by the foremost Hebrew authors, including S. Y. Agnon, Leah Goldberg, and Amos Oz, reveal a darkness at the foundation of Hebrew culture. The ghosts of a murdered Talmud scholar and his kidnapped bride rise from their graves for a nocturnal dance of death; a girl hidden by a count in a secret chamber of an Eastern European castle emerges to find that, unbeknownst to her, World War II ended years earlier; a man recounts the act of incest that would shape a trajectory of personal and national history. Reading these works together with central British and American gothic texts, Karen Grumberg illustrates that modern Hebrew literature has regularly appropriated key gothic ideas to help conceptualize the Jewish relationship to the past and, more broadly, to time. She explores why these authors were drawn to the gothic, originally a European mode associated with antisemitism, and how they use it to challenge assumptions about power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence, and to shape modern Hebrew culture. Grumberg provides an original perspective on Hebrew literary engagement with history and sheds new light on the tensions that continue to characterize contemporary Israeli cultural and political rhetoric.

Download or read book Milieus of ReMemory written by Norman Saadi Nikro and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Milieus of ReMemory concentrates on how people in Lebanon situate and work on memories of violence and trauma, as well as exchanges of voice. Developing a critical phenomenology of social material practices, a relational notion of community and subjectivity outlines thematic discussions of intergenerational memory, gender, temporality, and transactions between personal and public memory. While emphasizing conduits and channels by which material and imaginary resources circulate as differential circuits of power and authority, the book focuses on how memory activism and memory projects constitute emergent milieus of social exchange and ethical responsibility to self and circumstance, to both publics and political cultures.