Download or read book Staging Ghana written by Paul Schauert and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-07 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ghana Dance Ensemble takes Ghana's national culture and interprets it in performance using authentic dance forms adapted for local or foreign audiences. Often, says Paul Schauert, the aims of the ensemble and the aims of the individual performers work in opposition. Schauert discusses the history of the dance troupe and its role in Ghana's post-independence nation-building strategy and illustrates how the nation's culture makes its way onto the stage. He argues that as dancers negotiate the terrain of what is or is not authentic, they also find ways to express their personal aspirations, discovering, within the framework of nationalism or collective identity, that there is considerable room to reform national ideals through individual virtuosity.
Download or read book Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities written by Emily A. Rollie and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-27 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction to the staging of genders and sexualities across world theatre sets out a broad view of the subject by featuring plays and performance artists that shifted the conversation in their cultural, social, and historical moments. Designed for weekly use in theatre studies, dramatic literature, or gender and performance studies courses, these ten milestones highlight women and writers of the global majority, supporting and amplifying voices that are key to the field and some that have typically been overlooked. From Paula Vogel, Split Britches, and Young Jean Lee to Werewere Liking, Mahesh Dattani, Yvette Nolan, and more, the chapters place artists’ key works into conversation with one another, structurally offering an intersectional perspective on staging genders and sexualities. Milestones are a range of accessible textbooks, breaking down the need-to-know moments in the social, cultural, political, and artistic development of foundational subject areas.
Download or read book Ghana written by Jeffrey Ahlman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-05 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few African countries have attracted the international attention that Ghana has. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the then-colonial Gold Coast emerged as a key political and intellectual hub for British West Africa. Half a century later, when Ghana became the first sub-Saharan state to emerge from European colonial rule, it became a key site for a burgeoning, transnational, African anticolonial politics that drew activists, freedom fighters, and intellectuals from around the world. As the twentieth century came to a close, Ghana also became an international symbol of the putative successes of post-Cold-War African liberalization and democratization projects. Here Jeffrey Ahlman narrates this rich political history stretching from the beginnings of the very idea of the "Gold Coast" to the country's 1992 democratization, which paved the way for the Fourth Republic. At the same time, he offers a rich social history stretching that examines the sometimes overlapping, sometimes divergent nature of what it means to be Ghanaian through discussions of marriage, ethnicity, and migration; of cocoa as a cultural system; of the multiple meanings of chieftaincy; and of other contemporary markers of identity. Throughout it all, Ahlman distills decades of work by other scholars while also drawing on a wide array of archival, oral, journalistic, and governmental sources in order to provide his own fresh insights. For its clear, comprehensive coverage not only of Ghanaian history, but also of the major debates shaping nineteenth- and twentieth-century African politics and society more broadly, Ghana: A Political and Social History is a must-read for students and scholars of African Studies.
Download or read book Ghana on the Go written by Jennifer Hart and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As early as the 1910s, African drivers in colonial Ghana understood the possibilities that using imported motor transport could further the social and economic agendas of a diverse array of local agents, including chiefs, farmers, traders, fishermen, and urban workers. Jennifer Hart's powerful narrative of auto-mobility shows how drivers built on old trade routes to increase the speed and scale of motorized travel. Hart reveals that new forms of labor migration, economic enterprise, cultural production, and social practice were defined by autonomy and mobility and thus shaped the practices and values that formed the foundations of Ghanaian society today. Focusing on the everyday lives of individuals who participated in this century of social, cultural, and technological change, Hart comes to a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which these individuals made new technology meaningful to their local communities and associated it with their future aspirations.
Download or read book Staging 21st Century Tragedies written by Avra Sidiropoulou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis is an international collection of essays by leading academics, artists, writers, and curators examining ways in which the global tragedies of our century are being negotiated in current theatre practice. In exploring the tragic in the fields of history and theory of theatre, the book approaches crisis through an understanding of the existential and political aspect of the tragic condition. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, it showcases theatre texts and productions that enter the public sphere, manifesting notably participatory, immersive, and documentary modes of expression to form a theatre of modern tragedy. The coexistence of scholarly essays with manifesto-like provocations, interviews, original plays, and diaries by theatre artists provides a rich and multifocal lens that allows readers to approach twenty-first-century theatre through historical and critical study, text and performance analysis, and creative processes. Of special value is the global scope of the collection, embracing forms of crisis theatre in many geographically diverse regions of both the East and the West. Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis will be of use and interest to academics and students of political theatre, applied theatre, theatre history, and theatre theory.
Download or read book Making an African City written by Jennifer Hart and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Making an African City, Jennifer Hart traces the way that British colonial officials, Accra Town Council members, and a diverse group of technocrats used regulation to define what an "acceptable" city looked like. Unlike cities elsewhere on the continent, Accra had a long history of urbanism that predated British colonial presence. By criminalizing some activities and privileging others, colonial officials sought to marginalize indigenous practices of Accra residents and shape the development of a new, "modern" city. Hart argues, however, that residents regularly pushed back, protesting regulations, refusing to participate in newly developed systems, reappropriating infrastructure, demanding rights to city services, and asserting their own informal vision for the future of the city. While urban plans and regulations ultimately failed to substantively remake the city, their effects were and are still felt by urban residents, who are often subject to but not served by urban infrastructure. Making an African City explores how the informalization of Accra's development was a historical process, not a natural and self-evident phenomenon, which connects the history of the city with the history of urban development and the growth of technocracy around the world.
Download or read book Visions of African Unity written by Matteo Grilli and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays analyzes different iterations of African unity, exploring the political and cultural visions that informed projects aimed at African unification. It explores the cultural, economic and non-state aspects of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) as the principal institution dedicated to the cooperation of African states, from its establishment in 1963 to its transformation into the African Union (AU) in 2000, as well as how ideas of African unity shaped the Cold War and African liberation struggles. Bringing together contributors from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds across Africa, Europe and the US, this book investigates the ideological origins and historiography of Pan-African and unification projects, and considers how African intellectuals, leaders and populations engaged with these ideas.
Download or read book Youth and Popular Culture in Africa written by Paul Ugor and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The edited collection focuses on the links between young people and African popular culture. It explores popular culture produced and consumed by young people in contemporary Africa. And by "culture," we mean all kinds of texts or representations-visual, oral, written, performative, fictional, social, and virtual-created by African youth, mostly about their lives and their immediate societies, and for themselves, but also consumed by the larger public, and shared locally and globally. We proceed from the premise that cultural texts not only function as "social facts" as Karin Barber argues, but that they double as "commentaries upon, and interpretations of, social facts. They are part of social reality, but they also take up an attitude to social reality" (2007, 04). So, the work focuses specifically on what African youth produce as popular culture, under what conditions or contexts they produce such work, how they produce those texts, why they produce them, the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts, and why these textual practices matter as social facts, as interpretive acts, and as cultural symbols of the general cultural activism of young people in a rapidly changing world, a world where the global cultural economy is the prime terrain for the relentless struggles over the meanings that come to shape political-economic and social systems"--
Download or read book China India and the Eastern World written by Martin Banham and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bernth Lindfors, Ira Aldridge: The Last Years, 1855-1867 -- Paul Schauert, Staging Ghana: Artistry & nationalism in state dance ensembles -- Maëline Le Lay, 'La parole construit le pays': Théâtre, langues et didactisme au Katanga (République Démocratique du Congo) -- Benita Brown, Dannabang Kuwabong & Christopher Olsen, Myth Performance in the African Diasporas: Ritual, theater, and dance -- S.A. Kafewo, T.J. Iorapuu & E.S. Dandaura (eds), Theatre Unbound: Reflections on Theatre for Development and Social Change - A festschrift in honour of Oga Steve Abah -- Hakeem Bello, The Interpreters: Ritual, Violence and Social Regeneration in the Writing of Wole Soyinka -- Five plays: Ekpe Inyang, The Swamps -- Augustine Brempong, The King's Wages -- Denja Abdullahi, Death and the King's Grey Hair and Other Plays -- Books received and noted
Download or read book DIY Urbanism in Africa written by Stephen Marr and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-11-02 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Protracted economic crises, accelerating inequalities, and increased resource scarcity present significant challenges for the majority of Africa's urban population. Limited state capacity and widespread infrastructure deficiencies common in cities across the continent often require residents to draw on their own resources, knowledge, and expertise to resolve these life and livelihood dilemmas. DIY Urbanism in Africa investigates these practices. It develops a theoretical framework through which to analyze them, and it presents a series of case studies to demonstrate how residents invent new DIY tactics and strategies in response to security, place-making, or economic problems. This book offers a timely critical intervention into literatures on urban development and politics in Africa. It is valuable to students, policymakers, and urban practitioners keen to understand the mechanisms and political implications of widespread dynamics now shaping Africa's expanding urban environments.
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 Staging Habla de Negros written by Nicholas R. Jones and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-04-05 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Nicholas R. Jones analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s, when the performance of Africanized Castilian, commonly referred to as habla de negros (black speech), was in vogue. Focusing on Spanish Golden Age theater and performative poetry from authors such as Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Rueda, and Rodrigo de Reinosa, Jones makes a strong case for revising the belief, long held by literary critics and linguists, that white appropriations and representations of habla de negros language are “racist buffoonery” or stereotype. Instead, Jones shows black characters who laugh, sing, and shout, ultimately combating the violent desire of white supremacy. By placing early modern Iberia in conversation with discourses on African diaspora studies, Jones showcases how black Africans and their descendants who built communities in early modern Spain were rendered legible in performative literary texts. Accessibly written and theoretically sophisticated, Jones’s groundbreaking study elucidates the ways that habla de negros animated black Africans’ agency, empowered their resistance, and highlighted their African cultural retentions. This must-read book on identity building, performance, and race will captivate audiences across disciplines.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History written by Martin S. Shanguhyia and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-01-28 with total page 1360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging volume presents the most complete appraisal of modern African history to date. It assembles dozens of new and established scholars to tackle the questions and subjects that define the field, ranging from the economy, the two world wars, nationalism, decolonization, and postcolonial politics to religion, development, sexuality, and the African youth experience. Contributors are drawn from numerous fields in African studies, including art, music, literature, education, and anthropology. The themes they cover illustrate the depth of modern African history and the diversity and originality of lenses available for examining it. Older themes in the field have been treated to an engaging re-assessment, while new and emerging themes are situated as the book’s core strength. The result is a comprehensive, vital picture of where the field of modern African history stands today.
Download or read book Ghana s Concert Party Theatre written by Catherine M. Cole and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "... succeeds in conveying the exciting and fascinating character of the concert party genre, as well as showing clearly how this material can be used to rethink a number of contemporary theoretical themes and issues." --Karin Barber Under colonial rule, the first concert party practitioners brought their comic variety shows to audiences throughout what was then the British Gold Coast colony. As social and political circumstances shifted through the colonial period and early years of Ghanaian independence, concert party actors demonstrated a remarkable responsiveness to changing social roles and volatile political situations as they continued to stage this extremely popular form of entertainment. Drawing on her participation as an actress in concert party performances, oral histories of performers, and archival research, Catherine M. Cole traces the history and development of Ghana's concert party tradition. She shows how concert parties combined an eclectic array of cultural influences, adapting characters and songs from American movies, popular British ballads, and local story-telling traditions into a spirited blend of comedy and social commentary. Actors in blackface, inspired by Al Jolson, and female impersonators dramatized the aspirations, experiences, and frustrations of their audiences. Cole's extensive and lively look into Ghana's concert party provides a unique perspective on the complex experience of British colonial domination, the postcolonial quest for national identity, and the dynamic processes of cultural appropriation and social change. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of African performance, theatre, and popular culture.
Download or read book Hamlet and World Cinema written by Mark Thornton Burnett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals a rich cinematic history, discussing Hamlet films from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
Download or read book APPLIED FOREIGN AFFAIRS written by Baerbel Mueller and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2017-04-10 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: [a]FA is a laboratory of the Institute of Architecture of the University for Applied Arts in Vienna, in which spatial, infrastructure, ecological and cultural phenomena of the Sub-Saharan region are investigated. The concept for each project is based on an interdisciplinary and trans-cultural approach. This publication documents three projects that were carried out between 2011 and 2015. GUABULIGA _ WELL BY THE THORN TREE / ON OTHER PLANNING in northern Ghana, STAGING APAM / ON OTHER ARCHITECTURE at Ghana’s Atlantic coast, and LUBUNGAMODE / ON OTHER ARTISTIC RESEARCH in Kisangani, DR of Congo. The book illustrates the projects’ creative processes and contexts, embedded in contemporary discourses – well-known experts from architecture, art, theory, and urban sociology take a stand.
Download or read book Aesthetic Practices in African Tourism written by Ruti Talmor and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-08 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetic Practices in African Tourism explores "Rastahood", a community, youth culture, and new tourist art form created by young men on the margins of the Ghanaian economy as they came of age at the turn of the millennium. This book focuses on art, music, and affective experience created within tourism contexts, which enabled young men without educational or class capital to achieve mobility through work with foreigners, transforming the temporal horizon by expanding the geographic one. It traces the path that led young men down the path to Rastahood and investigates how they created an art form in, and of, a particular place and then used it to propel themselves far beyond its confines. The book ends with a leap forward into the present, out of Ghana, and beyond Rastahood, as men, now in middle age, look back upon the path that Rastahood created. It explores the social effects of neoliberal capitalism, specifically the rise of neoliberal subjectivities, collectivities, and socialities. The book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, tourism, art, African and Africana Studies, popular culture; gender studies; migration; youth studies and those interested in African cities.
