Download or read book The Last Darky written by Louis Chude-Sokei and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Last “Darky” establishes Bert Williams, the comedian of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, as central to the development of a global black modernism centered in Harlem’s Renaissance. Before integrating Broadway in 1910 via a controversial stint with the Ziegfeld Follies, Williams was already an international icon. Yet his name has faded into near obscurity, his extraordinary accomplishments forgotten largely because he performed in blackface. Louis Chude-Sokei contends that Williams’s blackface was not a display of internalized racism nor a submission to the expectations of the moment. It was an appropriation and exploration of the contradictory and potentially liberating power of racial stereotypes. Chude-Sokei makes the crucial argument that Williams’s minstrelsy negotiated the place of black immigrants in the cultural hotbed of New York City and was replicated throughout the African diaspora, from the Caribbean to Africa itself. Williams was born in the Bahamas. When performing the “darky,” he was actually masquerading as an African American. This black-on-black minstrelsy thus challenged emergent racial constructions equating “black” with African American and marginalizing the many diasporic blacks in New York. It also dramatized the practice of passing for African American common among non-American blacks in an African American–dominated Harlem. Exploring the thought of figures such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Claude McKay, Chude-Sokei situates black-on-black minstrelsy at the center of burgeoning modernist discourses of assimilation, separatism, race militancy, carnival, and internationalism. While these discourses were engaged with the question of representing the “Negro” in the context of white racism, through black-on-black minstrelsy they were also deployed against the growing international influence of African American culture and politics in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Dark Reflections written by Samuel R. Delany and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2019-12-19 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Stonewall Book Award-winning novel traces the life and unrealized dreams of a gay African American poet. A meditation on isolation and sexual repression, it also explores the frustrations intrinsic to artistic life.
Download or read book A Dictionary of the Underworld written by Eric Partridge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1949 (this edition in 1968), this book is a dictionary of the past, exploring the language of the criminal and near-criminal worlds. It includes entries from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, as well as from Britain and America and offers a fascinating and unique study of language. The book provides an invaluable insight into social history, with the British vocabulary dating back to the 16th century and the American to the late 18th century. Each entry comes complete with the approximate date of origin, the etymology for each word, and a note of the milieu in which the expression arose.
Download or read book The Selected Works of Eric Partridge written by Eric Partridge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-14 with total page 2733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This set reissues important selected works by Eric Partridge, covering the period from 1933 to 1968. Together, the books look at many and diverse aspects of language, focusing in particular on English. Included in the collection are a variety of insightful dictionaries and reference works that showcase some of Partridge’s best work. The books are creative, as well as practical, and will provide enjoyable reading for both scholars and the more general reader, who has an interest in language and linguistics.
Download or read book In Search of the Black Fantastic written by Richard Iton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to the 1960s, when African Americans had little access to formal political power, black popular culture was commonly seen as a means of forging community and effecting political change. But as Richard Iton shows, despite the changes politics, black artists have continued to play a significant role in the making of critical social spaces.
Download or read book American Culture in the 1910s written by Mark Whalan and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a fresh account of the major cultural and intellectual trends of the United State in the 1910s, a decade characterised by war, the flowering of modernism, the birth of Hollywood, and Progressive interpretations of culture and society. Chapters on fiction and poetry, art and photography, film and vaudeville, and music, theatre, and dance explore these developments, linking detailed commentary with focused case studies of influential texts and events. These range from Tarzan of the Apes to The Birth of a Nation, from the radical modernism of Gertrude Stein and the Provincetown Players to the earliest jazz recordings. A final chapter explores the huge impact of the First World War on cultural understandings of nationalism, citizenship, and propaganda.Key Features*three case studies per chapter featuring key texts, genres, writers and artists*Detailed chronology of 1910s American Culture*Bibliographies for each chapter*Fifteen black and white illustrations
Download or read book Creole Noise written by Belinda Edmondson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-23 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creole Noise is a history of Creole, or 'dialect', literature and performance in the English-speaking Caribbean, from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. By emphasizing multiracial origins, transnational influences, and musical performance alongside often violent historical events of the nineteenth century - slavery, Emancipation, the Morant Bay Rebellion, the era of blackface minstrelsy, indentureship and immigration - it revises the common view that literary dialect in the Caribbean was a relatively modern, twentieth-century phenomenon, associated with regional anti-colonial or black-affirming nationalist projects. It explores both the lives and the literary texts of a number of early progenitors, among these a number of pro-slavery white creoles as well as the first black author of literary dialect in the English-speaking Caribbean. Creole Noise features a number of fascinating historical characters, among these Henry Garland Murray, a black Jamaican journalist and lecturer; Michael McTurk, the white magistrate from British Guiana who, as 'Quow', authored one of the earliest books of dialect literature; as well as blackface comedian and calypsonian Sam Manning, who along with Marcus Garvey's ex-wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey, wrote a popular dialect play that traveled across the United States. In so doing it reconstructs an earlier period of dialect literature, usually isolated or dismissed from the cultural narrative as racist mimicry or merely political, not part of a continuum of artistic production in the Caribbean.
Download or read book The Dark Side written by Young Park and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2012 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the United States is the history of people who migrated to America from all parts of the world. As a result American society is composed of many unique cultures and races. Unfortunately, the uniqueness of these cultures is one of the underlying causes of tension and conflict in America, resulting in racism, religious intolerance, and class warfare. In spite of this, the multi-racial nature of American society is an integral part of America's strength as a nation. Thousands of immigrants from unique cultures who speak totally different languages came to find a better life in America. But they were never accepted by the dominate white Christians. The immigrants had to fight for the right to be in America. Racism, race riots, and genocide are integral parts of the lives of immigrants. The racial complexion of America is changing in the twenty-first century. In a short time the non-white population will be the majority. Social, economic, and political changes are already taking place. Unfortunately, the dominate power holders and white middle classes have not adjusted to these changes. The unique system of government and economics developed over the years has reached a point that many believe will end the American Empire. There is a certain bias in this presentation and criticism is aimed at the extreme beliefs and actions of a large segment of Americans, particularly white Christians. They have been the dominant political, social, and economic forces in the country. Any assessment of the American system becomes a criticism of that segment of Americans. Their beliefs and actions represent the Dark Side of America.
Download or read book The Sound of Culture written by Louis Chude-Sokei and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-29 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sound of Culture explores the histories of race and technology in a world made by slavery, colonialism, and industrialization. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and moving through to the twenty-first, the book argues for the dependent nature of those histories. Looking at American, British, and Caribbean literature, it distills a diverse range of subject matter: minstrelsy, Victorian science fiction, cybertheory, and artificial intelligence. All of these facets, according to Louis Chude-Sokei, are part of a history in which music has been central to the equation that links blacks and machines. As Chude-Sokei shows, science fiction itself has roots in racial anxieties and he traces those anxieties across two centuries and a range of writers and thinkers—from Samuel Butler, Herman Melville, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Sigmund Freud, William Gibson, and Donna Haraway, to Norbert Weiner, Sylvia Wynter, and Samuel R. Delany.
Download or read book Burnt Cork written by Stephen Burge Johnson and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the 1830s and continuing for more than a century, blackface minstrelsy--stage performances that claimed to represent the culture of black Americans--remained arguably the most popular entertainment in North America. A renewed scholarly interest in this contentious form of entertainment has produced studies treating a range of issues: its contradictory depictions of class, race, and gender; its role in the development of racial stereotyping; and its legacy in humor, dance, and music, and in live performance, film, and television. The style and substance of minstrelsy persist in popular music, tap and hip-hop dance, the language of the standup comic, and everyday rituals of contemporary culture. The blackface makeup all but disappeared for a time, though its influence never diminished--and recently, even the makeup has been making a comeback. This collection of original essays brings together a group of prominent scholars of blackface performance to reflect on this complex and troublesome tradition. Essays consider the early relationship of the blackface performer with American politics and the antislavery movement; the relationship of minstrels to the commonplace compromises of the touring "show" business and to the mechanization of the industrial revolution; the exploration and exploitation of blackface in the mass media, by D. W. Griffith and Spike Lee, in early sound animation, and in reality television; and the recent reappropriation of the form at home and abroad. In addition to the editor, contributors include Dale Cockrell, Catherine Cole, Louis Chude-Sokei, W. T. Lhamon, Alice Maurice, Nicholas Sammond, and Linda Williams.
Download or read book Dark Whispers written by Bruce Coville and published by Scholastic Paperbacks. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a riveting tale of two quests. In the first, Cara Diana Hunter searches for an ancient story that may unravel the secret of a long enmity between the unicorns and the monstrous delvers. In the second, Cara's father journeys to free her mother from the Rainbow Prison. As Cara travels through the strange and terrifying underground world of the delvers and to the court of the centaur king, her father travels from mysterious India to the depths of the Rainbow Prison itself. Who can be trusted? Who is the enemy? Readers will be at the edge of their seats with this multi-stranded story filled with wonder and suspense.
Download or read book A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900 1950 written by John T. Matthews and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-03-25 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cutting-edge Companion is a comprehensive resource for the study of the modern American novel. Published at a time when literary modernism is being thoroughly reassessed, it reflects current investigations into the origins and character of the movement as a whole. Brings together 28 original essays from leading scholars Allows readers to orient individual works and authors in their principal cultural and social contexts Contributes to efforts to recover minority voices, such as those of African American novelists, and popular subgenres, such as detective fiction Directs students to major relevant scholarship for further inquiry Suggests the many ways that “modern”, “American” and “fiction” carry new meanings in the twenty-first century
Download or read book Love Theft written by Eric Lott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over two centuries, America has celebrated the same African-American culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show appropriated black dialect, music, and dance; at once applauded and lampooned black culture; and, ironically, contributed to a "blackening of America." Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of the years leading up to the Civil War. Reading minstrel music, lyrics, jokes, burlesque skits, and illustrations in tandem with working-class racial ideologies and the sex/gender system, Love and Theft argues that blackface minstrelsy both embodied and disrupted the racial tendencies of its largely white, male, working-class audiences. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear--a dialectic of "love and theft"--the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it enabled the formation of a self-consciously white working class. Lott exposes minstrelsy as a signifier for multiple breaches: the rift between high and low cultures, the commodification of the dispossessed by the empowered, the attraction mixed with guilt of whites caught in the act of cultural thievery. This new edition celebrates the twentieth anniversary of this landmark volume. It features a new foreword by renowned critic Greil Marcus that discusses the book's influence on American cultural studies as well as its relationship to Bob Dylan's 2001 album of the same name, "Love & Theft." In addition, Lott has written a new afterword that extends the study's range to the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Introducing Bert Williams written by Camille F. Forbes and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2008-08-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is not hard to argue that every black performer in show business owes something to Bert Williams. Discovered in California in 1890 by a minstrel troupe manager, Williams swiftly became a regular player in the troupe. Traveling on from the rough-and-ready "medicine shows" that then dotted the West, he rose through the ranks of big-time vaudeville in New York City, and finally ascended to the previously all-white pinnacle of live-stage success: the fabled Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. Inspite of his triumphs-he brought the first musical with an all-black cast to Broadway in 1903-he was often viewed by the black community with more critical suspicion than admiration because of his controversial decision to perform in blackface. Modest, private, and conservative in his personal life, Williams left political activism and soapbox thumping to others. More than the simple narration of a remarkable life, Introducing Bert Williams offers a fascinating window into the fraught issues surrounding race and artistic expression in American culture. The story of Williams's long and varied career is a whirlwind of inner turmoil, racial tension, glamour, and striving-nothing less than the birth of American show business.
Download or read book Stolen Time written by Shane Vogel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-09-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1956 Harry Belafonte’s Calypso became the first LP to sell more than a million copies. For a few fleeting months, calypso music was the top-selling genre in the US—it even threatened to supplant rock and roll. Stolen Time provides a vivid cultural history of this moment and outlines a new framework—black fad performance—for understanding race, performance, and mass culture in the twentieth century United States. Vogel situates the calypso craze within a cycle of cultural appropriation, including the ragtime craze of 1890s and the Negro vogue of the 1920s, that encapsulates the culture of the Jim Crow era. He follows the fad as it moves defiantly away from any attempt at authenticity and shamelessly embraces calypso kitsch. Although white calypso performers were indeed complicit in a kind of imperialist theft of Trinidadian music and dance, Vogel argues, black calypso craze performers enacted a different, and subtly subversive, kind of theft. They appropriated not Caribbean culture itself, but the US version of it—and in so doing, they mocked American notions of racial authenticity. From musical recordings, nightclub acts, and television broadcasts to Broadway musicals, film, and modern dance, he shows how performers seized the ephemeral opportunities of the fad to comment on black cultural history and even question the meaning of race itself.
Download or read book Eric Walrond written by James Davis and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eric Walrond (1898–1966) was a writer, journalist, caustic critic, and fixture of 1920s Harlem. His short story collection, Tropic Death, was one of the first efforts by a black author to depict Caribbean lives and voices in American fiction. Restoring Walrond to his proper place as a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, this biography situates Tropic Death within the author's broader corpus and positions the work as a catalyst and driving force behind the New Negro literary movement in America. James Davis follows Walrond from the West Indies to Panama, New York, France, and finally England. He recounts his relationships with New Negro authors such as Countée Cullen, Charles S. Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Gwendolyn Bennett, as well as the white novelist Carl Van Vechten. He also recovers Walrond's involvement with Marcus Garvey's journal Negro World and the National Urban League journal Opportunity and examines the writer's work for mainstream venues, including Vanity Fair. In 1929, Walrond severed ties with Harlem, but he did not disappear. He contributed to the burgeoning anticolonial movement and print culture centered in England and fueled by C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and other Caribbean expatriates. His history of Panama, shelved by his publisher during the Great Depression, was the first to be written by a West Indian author. Unearthing documents in England, Panama, and the United States, and incorporating interviews, criticism of Walrond's fiction and journalism, and a sophisticated account of transnational black cultural formations, Davis builds an eloquent and absorbing narrative of an overlooked figure and his creation of modern American and world literature.
Download or read book Lies Across America written by James W. Loewen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines more than one hundred sites that promote incorrect interpretations of American history and raises questions about what Americans choose to commemorate. Originally published as Lies Across America. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.
