Download or read book The African Jamaican Aesthetic written by Lisa Tomlinson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-01-23 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The African- Jamaican Aesthetics Cultural Retention and Transformation Across Borders centres on the use of African Jamaican Aesthetics in Jamaica’s literary traditions and its transformation and transmission in the diaspora.
Download or read book Shine written by Krista A. Thompson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-09 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Jamaican dancehalls competition for the video camera's light is stiff, so much so that dancers sometimes bleach their skin to enhance their visibility. In the Bahamas, tuxedoed students roll into prom in tricked-out sedans, staging grand red-carpet entrances that are designed to ensure they are seen being photographed. Throughout the United States and Jamaica friends pose in front of hand-painted backgrounds of Tupac, flashy cars, or brand-name products popularized in hip-hop culture in countless makeshift roadside photography studios. And visual artists such as Kehinde Wiley remix the aesthetic of Western artists with hip-hop culture in their portraiture. In Shine, Krista Thompson examines these and other photographic practices in the Caribbean and United States, arguing that performing for the camera is more important than the final image itself. For the members of these African diasporic communities, seeking out the camera's light—whether from a cell phone, Polaroid, or video camera—provides a means with which to represent themselves in the public sphere. The resulting images, Thompson argues, become their own forms of memory, modernity, value, and social status that allow for cultural formation within and between African diasporic communities.
Download or read book African and Diaspora Aesthetics written by Sarah Nuttall and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cameroon, a monumental "statue of liberty" is made from scrap metal. In Congo, a thriving popular music incorporates piercing screams and carnal dances. When these and other instantiations of the aesthetics of Africa and its diasporas are taken into account, how are ideas of beauty reconfigured? Scholars and artists take up that question in this invigorating, lavishly illustrated collection, which includes more than one hundred color images. Exploring sculpture, music, fiction, food, photography, fashion, and urban design, the contributors engage with and depart from canonical aesthetic theories as they demonstrate that beauty cannot be understood apart from ugliness. Highlighting how ideas of beauty are manifest and how they mutate, travel, and combine across time and distance, continental and diasporic writers examine the work of a Senegalese sculptor inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's photographs of Nuba warriors; a rich Afro-Brazilian aesthetic incorporating aspects of African, Jamaican, and American cultures; and African Americans' Africanization of the Santería movement in the United States. They consider the fraught, intricate spaces of the urban landscape in postcolonial South Africa; the intense pleasures of eating on Réunion; and the shockingly graphic images on painted plywood boards advertising "morality" plays along the streets of Ghana. And they analyze the increasingly ritualized wedding feasts in Cameroon as well as the limits of an explicitly "African" aesthetics. Two short stories by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto gesture toward what beauty might be in the context of political failure and postcolonial disillusionment. Together the essays suggest that beauty is in some sense future-oriented and that taking beauty in Africa and its diasporas seriously is a way of rekindling hope. Contributors. Rita Barnard, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mia Couto, Mark Gevisser, Simon Gikandi, Michelle Gilbert, Isabel Hofmeyr, William Kentridge, Dominique Malaquais, Achille Mbembe, Cheryl-Ann Michael, Celestin Monga, Sarah Nuttall, Patricia Pinho, Rodney Place, Els van der Plas, Pippa Stein, Françoise Vergès
Download or read book The Birth of Cool written by Carol Tulloch and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is broadly recognized that black style had a clear and profound influence on the history of dress in the twentieth century, with black culture and fashion having long been defined as 'cool'. Yet despite this high profile, in-depth explorations of the culture and history of style and dress in the African diaspora are a relatively recent area of enquiry. The Birth of Cool asserts that 'cool' is seen as an arbiter of presence, and relates how both iconic and 'ordinary' black individuals and groups have marked out their lives through the styling of their bodies. Focusing on counter- and sub-cultural contexts, this book investigates the role of dress in the creation and assertion of black identity. From the gardenia corsage worn by Billie Holiday to the work-wear of female African-Jamaican market traders, through to the home-dressmaking of black Britons in the 1960s, and the meaning of a polo-neck jumper as depicted in a 1934 self-portrait by African-American artist Malvin Gray Johnson, this study looks at the ways in which the diaspora experience is expressed through self-image. Spanning the late nineteenth century to the modern day, the book draws on ready-made and homemade fashion, photographs, paintings and films, published and unpublished biographies and letters from Britain, Jamaica, South Africa, and the United States to consider how personal style statements reflect issues of racial and cultural difference. The Birth of Cool is a powerful exploration of how style and dress both initiate and confirm change, and the ways in which they expresses identity and resistance in black culture.
Download or read book Brother Man written by Roger Mais and published by MacMillan Caribbean. This book was released on 2004 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1954, this is the tragic story of an honest Rastafarian healer caught up in a web of intrigue and betrayal in Jamaica's tough West Kingston slums. It is a portrait of a ghetto saint - an ordinary man selected by the universe to bring enlightenment to poor belittled people.
Download or read book Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic written by Akinwumi Ogundiran and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-03 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African–descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition.
Download or read book Dub written by Michael Veal and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the ARSC’s Award for Best Research (History) in Folk, Ethnic, or World Music (2008) When Jamaican recording engineers Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock, Errol Thompson, and Lee “Scratch” Perry began crafting “dub” music in the early 1970s, they were initiating a musical revolution that continues to have worldwide influence. Dub is a sub-genre of Jamaican reggae that flourished during reggae’s “golden age” of the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Dub involves remixing existing recordings—electronically improvising sound effects and altering vocal tracks—to create its unique sound. Just as hip-hop turned phonograph turntables into musical instruments, dub turned the mixing and sound processing technologies of the recording studio into instruments of composition and real-time improvisation. In addition to chronicling dub’s development and offering the first thorough analysis of the music itself, author Michael Veal examines dub’s social significance in Jamaican culture. He further explores the “dub revolution” that has crossed musical and cultural boundaries for over thirty years, influencing a wide variety of musical genres around the globe. Ebook Edition Note: Seven of the 25 illustrations have been redacted.
Download or read book Rhythms of the Afro Atlantic World written by Ifeoma C.K. Nwankwo and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-11-22 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Collecting essays by fourteen expert contributors into a trans-oceanic celebration and critique, Mamadou Diouf and Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo show how music, dance, and popular culture turn ways of remembering Africa into African ways of remembering. With a mix of Nuyorican, Cuban, Haitian, Kenyan, Senegalese, Trinidagonian, and Brazilian beats, Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World proves that the pleasures of poly-rhythm belong to the realm of the discursive as well as the sonic and the kinesthetic." ---Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater, Yale University "As necessary as it is brilliant, Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World dances across, beyond, and within the Black Atlantic Diaspora with the aplomb and skill befitting its editors and contributors." ---Mark Anthony Neal, author of Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic Along with linked modes of religiosity, music and dance have long occupied a central position in the ways in which Atlantic peoples have enacted, made sense of, and responded to their encounters with each other. This unique collection of essays connects nations from across the Atlantic---Senegal, Kenya, Trinidad, Cuba, Brazil, and the United States, among others---highlighting contemporary popular, folkloric, and religious music and dance. By tracking the continuous reframing, revision, and erasure of aural, oral, and corporeal traces, the contributors to Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World collectively argue that music and dance are the living evidence of a constant (re)composition and (re)mixing of local sounds and gestures. Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World distinguishes itself as a collection focusing on the circulation of cultural forms across the Atlantic world, tracing the paths trod by a range of music and dance forms within, across, or beyond the variety of locales that constitute the Atlantic world. The editors and contributors do so, however, without assuming that these paths have been either always in line with national, regional, or continental boundaries or always transnational, transgressive, and perfectly hybrid/syncretic. This collection seeks to reorient the discourse on cultural forms moving in the Atlantic world by being attentive to the specifics of the forms---their specific geneses, the specific uses to which they are put by their creators and consumers, and the specific ways in which they travel or churn in place. Mamadou Diouf is Leitner Family Professor of African Studies, Director of the Institute of African Studies, and Professor of History at Columbia University. Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo is Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Jacket photograph by Elias Irizarry
Download or read book Black Beauty Aesthetics Stylization Politics written by Dr Shirley Anne Tate and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012-12-28 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Previous work discussing Black beauty has tended to concentrate on Black women's search for white beauty as a consequence of racialization. Without denying either the continuation of such aesthetics or their enduring power, this book uncovers the cracks in this hegemonic Black beauty. Drawing on detailed ethnographic research amongst British women of Caribbean heritage, this volume pursues a broad discussion of beauty within the Black diaspora contexts of the Caribbean, the UK, the United States and Latin America through different historical periods to the present day. With a unique exploration of beauty, race and identity politics, the author reveals how Black women themselves speak about, negotiate, inhabit, work on and perform Black beauty. As such, it will appeal not only to sociologists, but anyone working in the fields of race, ethnicity and post-colonial thought, feminism and the sociology of the body.
Download or read book Revivalism written by Maria A. Robinson-Smith and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maria A. Robinson-Smith presents an overview and genealogy of Revivalism in this work. She explores the role of the Revival iconography in building a culture of shared understanding among Revivalists and, by extension, African Jamaicans. The Watt Town setting, with bands coming together from communities all over Jamaica, engaging in the same practices, is a symbolic homeland where people celebrate their Africanness and sustain the collective memory of Revivalists. Revival iconography is explored through its many modes: visual, sound and movement. Seals, symbols and colour symbolism are presented as a representation of the repertoire of images that make up the Revival iconography. Revival cosmology in the rituals and ceremonies are explored and the spaces created by the seals are treated as liminal ones for the enactment of cultural performances. Smith makes the point that the iconography makes it possible for Revivalists to interpret events and rituals in much the same way across Jamaica. Iconography is the symbolic language and carrier of culture that is central to the practice and production of shared meanings, and this language gives Revivalists a sense of identity. The Revival iconography stores information that makes it possible for Revivalists to reconnect with African metaphysics, thus reclaiming the African self.
Download or read book How to Love a Jamaican written by Alexia Arthurs and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2018-07-24 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In these kaleidoscopic stories of Jamaica and its diaspora we hear many voices at once. All of them convince and sing. All of them shine.”—Zadie Smith An O: The Oprah Magazine “Top 15 Best of the Year” • A Well-Read Black Girl Pick Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret—Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life. In “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race. In “Mash Up Love,” a twin’s chance sighting of his estranged brother—the prodigal son of the family—stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In “Bad Behavior,” a couple leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In “Mermaid River,” a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart. In “The Ghost of Jia Yi,” a recently murdered student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in “Shirley from a Small Place,” a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother’s big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital. Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant, lyrical, intimate collection as one of fiction’s most dynamic and essential authors. Praise for How to Love a Jamaican “A sublime short-story collection from newcomer Alexia Arthurs that explores, through various characters, a specific strand of the immigrant experience.”—Entertainment Weekly “With its singular mix of psychological precision and sun-kissed lyricism, this dazzling debut marks the emergence of a knockout new voice.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Gorgeous, tender, heartbreaking stories . . . Arthurs is a witty, perceptive, and generous writer, and this is a book that will last.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties “Vivid and exciting . . . every story rings beautifully true.”—Marie Claire
Download or read book The Slave Sublime written by Stacy J. Lettman and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this interdisciplinary work, Stacy J. Lettman explores real and imagined violence as depicted in Caribbean and Jamaican text and music, how that violence repeats itself in both art and in the actions of the state, and what that means for Caribbean cultural identity. Jamaica is known for having one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, a fact that Lettman links to remnants of the plantation era—namely the economic dispossession and structural violence that still haunt the island. Lettman contends that the impact of colonial violence is so embedded in the language of Jamaican literature and music that violence has become a separate language itself, one that paradoxically can offer cultural modes of resistance. Lettman codifies Paul Gilroy's concept of the "slave sublime" as a remix of Kantian philosophy through a Caribbean lens to take a broad view of Jamaica, the Caribbean, and their political and literary history that challenges Eurocentric ideas of slavery, Blackness, and resistance. Living at the intersection of philosophy, literary and musical analysis, and postcolonial theory, this book sheds new light on the lingering ghosts of the plantation and slavery in the Caribbean.
Download or read book Natural Mysticism written by Kwame Senu Neville Dawes and published by Peepal Tree Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dawes takes an in-depth look at reggae as an artistic form, exploring how reggae is both uniquely Jamaican and a music of world wide appeal. His writing communicates his infectious enthusiasm for his subject.
Download or read book African Dance written by Kariamu Welsh-Asante and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient tradition of African dance has influenced dance styles all over the world. It is used to commemorate many annual ceremonies and activities, such as rites of passage and the harvest, and it is also an important form of recreation, religious expression, and storytelling. In African Dance, Second Edition, the varied cultures of Africa and their respective dances are explored, along with the effects that colonialism had on the art form.
Download or read book Slavery Geography and Empire in Nineteenth Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica written by CharmaineA. Nelson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica is among the first Slavery Studies books - and the first in Art History - to juxtapose temperate and tropical slavery. Charmaine A. Nelson explores the central role of geography and its racialized representation as landscape art in imperial conquest. One could easily assume that nineteenth-century Montreal and Jamaica were worlds apart, but through her astute examination of marine landscape art, the author re-connects these two significant British island colonies, sites of colonial ports with profound economic and military value. Through an analysis of prints, illustrated travel books, and maps, the author exposes the fallacy of their disconnection, arguing instead that the separation of these colonies was a retroactive fabrication designed in part to rid Canada of its deeply colonial history as an integral part of Britain's global trading network which enriched the motherland through extensive trade in crops produced by enslaved workers on tropical plantations. The first study to explore James Hakewill's Jamaican landscapes and William Clark's Antiguan genre studies in depth, it also examines the Montreal landscapes of artists including Thomas Davies, Robert Sproule, George Heriot and James Duncan. Breaking new ground, Nelson reveals how gender and race mediated the aesthetic and scientific access of such - mainly white, male - artists. She analyzes this moment of deep political crisis for British slave owners (between the end of the slave trade in 1807 and complete abolition in 1833) who employed visual culture to imagine spaces free of conflict and to alleviate their pervasive anxiety about slave resistance. Nelson explores how vision and cartographic knowledge translated into authority, which allowed colonizers to 'civilize' the terrains of the so-called New World, while belying the oppression of slavery and indigenous displacement.
Download or read book Songs of Jamaica written by Claude McKay and published by Graphic Arts Books. This book was released on 2021-05-28 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Songs of Jamaica (1912) is a poetry collection by Claude McKay. Published before the poet left Jamaica for the United States, Songs of Jamaica is a pioneering collection of verse written in Jamaican Patois, the first of its kind. As a committed leftist, McKay was a keen observer of the Black experience in the Caribbean, the American South, and later in New York, where he gained a reputation during the Harlem Renaissance for celebrating the resilience and cultural achievement of the African American community while lamenting the poverty and violence they faced every day. “Quashie to Buccra,” the opening poem, frames this schism in terms of labor, as one class labors to fulfill the desires of another: “You tas’e petater an’ you say it sweet, / But you no know how hard we wuk fe it; / You want a basketful fe quattiewut, / ‘Cause you no know how ‘tiff de bush fe cut.” Addressing himself to a white audience, he exposes the schism inherent to colonial society between white and black, rich and poor. Advising his white reader to question their privileged consumption, dependent as it is on the subjugation of Jamaica’s black community, McKay warns that “hardship always melt away / Wheneber it comes roun’ to reapin’ day.” This revolutionary sentiment carries throughout Songs of Jamaica, finding an echo in the brilliant poem “Whe’ fe do?” Addressed to his own people, McKay offers hope for a brighter future to come: “We needn’ fold we han’ an’ cry, / Nor vex we heart wid groan and sigh; / De best we can do is fe try / To fight de despair drawin’ night: / Den we might conquer by an’ by— / Dat we might do.” With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Claude McKay’s Songs of Jamaica is a classic of Jamaican literature reimagined for modern readers.
Download or read book Africa and Trans Atlantic Memories written by Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang and published by Africa Research and Publications. This book was released on 2008 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
