Download or read book Scars of Conquest masks of Resistance written by Tejumola Olaniyan and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining in detail the dramas of Baraka, Soyinka, Walcott and Shange, this study describes how these black writers are preoccupied with the invention of a postimperial cultural identity. It charts the foundations of an important aesthetic form, the drama of the African diaspora.
Download or read book Scars of Conquest Masks of Resistance written by Tejumola Olaniyan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-22 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original work redefines and broadens our understanding of the drama of the English-speaking African diaspora. Looking closely at the work of Amiri Baraka, Nobel prize-winners Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott, and Ntozake Shange, the author contends that the refashioning of the collective cultural self in black drama originates from the complex intersection of three discourses: Eurocentric, Afrocentric, and Post-Afrocentric. From blackface minstrelsy to the Trinidad Carnival, from the Black Aesthetic to the South African Black Consciousness theatres and the scholarly debate on the (non)existence of African drama, Olaniyan cogently maps the terrains of a cultural struggle and underscores a peculiar situation in which the inferiorization of black performance forms is most often a shorthand for subordinating black culture and corporeality. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory and cultural studies, and offering detailed readings of the above writers, Olaniyan shows how they occupy the interface between the Afrocentric and a liberating Post-Afrocentric space where black theatrical-cultural difference could be envisioned as a site of multiple articulations: race, class, gender, genre, and language.
Download or read book The Harvard Guide to African American History written by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 968 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiles information and interpretations on the past 500 years of African American history, containing essays on historical research aids, bibliographies, resources for womens' issues, and an accompanying CD-ROM providing bibliographical entries.
Download or read book The Shadow and the Act written by Walton M. Muyumba and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though often thought of as rivals, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka shared a range of interests, especially a passion for music. Jazz, in particular, was a decisive influence on their thinking, and, as The Shadow and the Act reveals, they drew on their insights into the creative process of improvisation to analyze race and politics in the civil rights era. In this inspired study, Walton M. Muyumba situates them as a jazz trio, demonstrating how Ellison, Baraka, and Baldwin’s individual works form a series of calls and responses with each other. Muyumba connects their writings on jazz to the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, particularly its support for more freedom for individuals and more democratic societies. He examines the way they responded to and elaborated on that lineage, showing how they significantly broadened it by addressing the African American experience, especially its aesthetics. Ultimately, Muyumba contends, the trio enacted pragmatist principles by effectively communicating the social and political benefits of African Americans fully entering society, thereby compelling America to move closer to its democratic ideals.
Download or read book Myths of Oppression written by Inci Bilgin Tekin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inci Bilgin Tekin's study offers a comparative perspective on two very challenging contemporary female playwrights, Liz Lochhead and Cherrie Moraga, and their Scottish and Chicanese adaptations of myths—such as the Greek Medea and Oedipus or the Mayan Popul Vuh—which address ethnic, racial, gender, and hierarchical oppression. Her book incorporates postcolonial and feminist readings of Lochhead's and Moraga's plays while it also explores different mythologies on the background. Bilgin Tekin not only introduces an original point of view on Liz Lochhead's and Cherrie Moraga's plays as adaptations or rewrites, but also calls attention to the non-canonized Scottish, Aztec, and Mayan mythologies. Following an innovative approach, she discusses the question in which ways Lochhead's and Moraga's adaptations of myths are challenges to the canon and further suggests a feminist version of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed.The study appeals to readers of mythology, drama, and comparative literature. Those interested in postcolonial and feminist theories will also gain valuable new insights.
Download or read book Contemporary Black Men s Fiction and Drama written by Keith Clark and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrating the extraordinary versatility of African-American men's writing since the 1970s, this forceful collection illustrates how African-American male novelists and playwrights have absorbed, challenged, and expanded the conventions of black American writing and, with it, black male identity. From the "John Henry Syndrome"--a definition of black masculinity based on brute strength or violence--to the submersion of black gay identity under equations of gay with white and black with straight, the African-American male in literature and drama has traditionally been characterized in ways that confine and silence him. Contemporary Black Men's Fiction and Drama identifies the forces that limit black male discourse, including traditions established by iconic African-American male authors such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. This thoughtful volume also shows how contemporary black male authors use their narratives to put forward new ways of being and knowing that foster a more complete sense of self and more humane and open ways of communicating with and relating to others. In the work of Charles Johnson, Ernest Gaines, and August Wilson, contributors find paths toward broader, less rigid ideas of what black literature can be, what the connections among individual and communal resistance can be, and how black men can transcend the imprisoning models of hyper masculinity promoted by American culture. Seeking greater spiritual connection with the past, John Edgar Wideman returns to the folk rituals of his family, while Melvin Dixon and Brent Wade reclaim African roots and traditions. Ishmael Reed struggles with a contemporary cultural oppression that he sees as an insidious echo of slavery, while Clarence Major's experimental writing suggests how black men might reclaim their own voices in a culture that silences them. Taking in a wide range of critical, theoretical, cultural, gender, and sexual concerns, Contemporary Black Men's Fiction and Drama provides provocative new readings of a broad range of contemporary writers.
Download or read book History Trauma and Healing in Postcolonial Narratives written by O. Ifowodo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would it mean to read postcolonial writings under the prism of trauma? Ogaga Ifowodo tackles these questions through a psycho-social examination of the lingering impact of imperialist domination, resulting in a refreshing complement to the cultural-materialist studies that dominate the field.
Download or read book Kerouac written by Hassan Melehy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given Jack Kerouac's enduring reputation for heaving words onto paper, it might surprise some readers to see his name coupled with the word �poetics.� But as a native speaker of French, he embarked on his famous �spontaneous prose� only after years of seeking techniques to overcome the restrictions he encountered in writing in a single language, English. The result was an elaborate poetics that cannot be fully understood without accounting for his bilingual thinking and practice. Of the more than twenty-five biographies of Kerouac, few have seriously examined his relationship to the French language and the reason for his bilingualism, the Qu�bec Diaspora. Although this background has long been recognized in French-language treatments, it is a new dimension in Anglophone studies of his writing. In a theoretically informed discussion, Hassan Melehy explores how Kerouac's poetics of exile involves meditations on moving between territories and languages. Far from being a na�ve pursuit, Kerouac's writing practice not only responded but contributed to some of the major aesthetic and philosophical currents of the twentieth century in which notions such as otherness and nomadism took shape. Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory offers a major reassessment of a writer who, despite a readership that extends over much of the globe, remains poorly appreciated at home.
Download or read book Wole Soyinka Literature Activism and African Transformation written by Bola Dauda and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely and expansive biography of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer, Nobel laureate, and social activist, shows how the author's early years influence his life's work and how his writing, in turn, informs his political engagement. Three sections spanning his life, major texts, and place in history, connect Soyinka's legacy with global issues beyond the borders of his own country, and indeed beyond the African continent. Covering his encounters with the widespread rise of kleptocratic rule and international corporate corruption, his reflection on the human condition of the North-South divide, and the consequences of postcolonialism, this comprehensive biography locates Wole Soyinka as a global figure whose life and works have made him a subject of conversation in the public sphere, as well as one of Africa's most successful and popular authors. Looking at the different forms of Soyinka's work--plays, novels, and memoirs, among others--this volume argues that Soyinka used writing to inform, mobilize, and sometimes incite civil action, in a decades-long attempt at literary social engineering.
Download or read book Trends in Twenty First Century African Theatre and Performance written by Kene Igweonu and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2011 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trends in Twenty-First Century African Theatre and Performance is a collection of regionally focused articles on African theatre and performance. The volume provides a broad exploration of the current state of African theatre and performance and considers the directions they are taking in the 21st Century. It contains sections on current trends in theatre and performance studies, on applied/community theatre and on playwrights. The chapters have evolved out of a working group process, in which papers were submitted to peer-group scrutiny over a period of four years, at four international conferences. The book will be particularly useful as a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in non-western theatre and performance (where this includes African theatre and performance), and would be a very useful resource for theatre scholars and anyone interested in African performance forms and cultures.
Download or read book World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre written by Irving Brown (Consulting Bibliographer) and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 1344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An annotated world theatre bibliography documenting significant theatre materials published world wide since 1945, plus an index to key names throughout the six volumes of the series.
Download or read book Talawa Theatre Company written by David Vivian Johnson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the theatrical history of Talawa, the work of Dr Yvonne Brewster OBE, her contribution to the genre of contemporary black British theatre generally, and her founding and subsequent directing of Talawa from 1986 to 2001. The analysis details how Brewster's theatre helped forge a black British identity in Britain, both on and off the British stage, through its strategic presentation of black language and culture in performance. Following explanations of definitions and sociolinguistic methodology in Chapter One: Voicing an Identity, Talawa's theatrical roots are shown in Chapter Two: Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder, to have begun in Africa, developed in Jamaica and further progressed by British Caribbean post war artists in Britain. In Chapter Three: A Stanger in Non-Paradise, Brewster's early life, her significant contribution to contemporary black British theatre, her founding of Talawa and the company's three year residency in the West End are discussed. Talawa's work is then explored by genre as follows; Chapter Four: The Island Plays highlights Talawa's Caribbean productions. These are; An Echo In The Bone, Maskarade, The Black Jacobins, The Dragon Can't Dance, The Lion and Beef No Chicken. In Chapter Five: The Black South, Talawa's American productions; The Love Space Demands, From The Mississippi Delta and Flyin' West point to the relevance of African American work to Talawa's audience. Chapter Six: Stay in Your Box illustrates Brewster's ground breaking work in the British classical genre. The productions discussed are; Anthony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Tis Pity She's a Whore, The Importance of Being Earnest and Othello. The book ends with Chapter Seven: Don't Tell Massa. Brewster and her work at Talawa are summed up, followed by an insight into her final attempt to secure a permanent home for black theatre in Britain.
Download or read book The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance written by Lizbeth Goodman and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance brings together a collection of extracts from key writings on politics, ideology, and performance.
Download or read book A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka s Slave Ship written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on 2016 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Slave Ship," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
Download or read book Black Theatre written by Paul Carter Harrison and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2002-11 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insider's view of Black theatres of the world and how they reflect their culture, concerns, and history.
Download or read book Africans in Global Migration written by John A. Arthur and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-08-31 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four overarching themes underscore the essays in this book. These are the creation of African diaspora community and institutional structures; the structured and shared relationships among African immigrants, host, and homeland societies; the construction and negotiation of diaspora spaces, and domains (racial, ethnic, class consciousness, including identity politics; and finally African migrant economic integration, occupational, and labor force roles and statuses and impact on host societies. Each of the thematic themes has been chosen with one specific goal in mind: to depict and represent the critical components in the reconstitution of the African diaspora in international migration. We contextualized the themes in the African diaspora as a dynamic process involving what Paul Zeleza called the “diasporization” of African immigrant settlement communities in global transnational spaces. These themes also reflect the diversities inherent in the diaspora communities and call attention to the fluid and dynamic boundaries within which Africans create, diffuse, and engage host and home societies. In this context, the themes outlined in this book embody the diaspora tapestries woven by the immigrants to center African social and cultural forms in their host societies and communities. Collectively, the themes represent pathways for the elucidation of understanding African immigrant territorialization. Our purpose is to map out and identify the sources and sites for the contestations of the myriad of cultural manifestations of the new African diaspora and its depictions within the totality of the shared meanings and appropriations of the essences of African-ness or African blackness. The vulnerabilities, struggles, threats (internal or external to the immigrant community), and opportunities emanating from the diasporic relationships that these immigrants create are accentuated within the nexus of African global migrations. We view the African diaspora in terms of spatial and geographic constructions and propagations of African cultural identities and institutional forms in global domains whose boundaries are not static but rather dynamic, complex, and multidimensional. Simply stated, we approach the African diaspora from a perspective that incorporates the historical, as well as contemporary postmodern constructions of the Africa’s dispersed communities and their associated transnational identity forms.
Download or read book Hybridity written by Anjali Prabhu and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This critical engagement with some of the most prominent contemporary theorists of postcolonial studies reevaluates recent theories of hybridity and agency. Challenging the claim that hybridity provides a site of resistance to hegemonic and homogenizing forces in an increasingly globalized world, Anjali Prabhu pursues the ways in which hybridity plays out in the Creole, postcolonial societies of Mauritius and La Réunion, two small islands in the Indian Ocean, and offers an introduction to the literature and culture of this lesser-known region of Francophonie. She also reconsiders two major theorists from the Francophone context, Edouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon, through a provocatively Marxian framing that reveals these two writers shared more in common about agency and society than has previously been recognized.
