Download or read book The Life and Legend of Bras Coup written by Bryan Wagner and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although few recognize the name of Bras-Coupé today, Bryan Wagner’s riveting history The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé illustrates why the saga of this notorious escaped slave should be a touchstone among scholars and students of the African diaspora. After losing an arm in a pitched battle with the New Orleans police in the 1830s, Bras-Coupé hid for several years in a swamp near the city. During this time, law enforcement widely publicized their manhunt for him through newspapers, wanted posters, and other media. Messages from the mayor’s office promoted a violent image of Bras-Coupé, casting him as the primary reason police needed the right to use deadly force in the course of their duties. After a former friend betrayed and killed the bandit in July 1837, local officials displayed Bras-Coupé’s corpse in the Place d’Armes, where they ordered slaves to bear witness. The Bras-Coupé legend grew after his death and took on fantastic dimensions. Storytellers gave him superpowers. His skin, it was alleged, could not be punctured by bullets. His gaze could turn men to stone. Folklorists have transcribed many such examples of the tradition, and writers, including George Washington Cable and Robert Penn Warren, have adapted it into novels. Over time, new details appeared in the mythology and the legend transformed. Some said that he was an African prince before he was kidnapped and brought to Louisiana; others, that he was the most famous performer at Congo Square, playing an indispensable role in the preservation of African music and dance. Sidney Bechet, one of the city’s most celebrated composers and reed players, even suggested it was Bras-Coupé who invented jazz. Including fugitive slave advertisements, arrest records, and journalism from the 1830s, this critical edition collects the most important primary materials related to Bras-Coupé’s story. Wagner’s timely and deft examination of this unique historical figure reveals how a single man’s life, shaped by the horrors of slavery and the cultural mélange of Louisiana, can evolve into legend.
Download or read book Religion and Cultural Studies written by Susan L. Mizruchi and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001-04 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have never been more religious than they are now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. By all reports, attendance rates at traditional places of worship are high and rising; the influx of new immigrant religions has revitalized standard faiths and drawn in those who had strayed from them. Popular television shows like "The Simpsons" feature characters who go to church every Sunday and speak to God; special events, like the 1998 outdoor mass in Worcester, Massachusetts, for a comatose girl believed to have miraculous powers, attract thousands of people. This collection is both part of this ferment and an intellectual reflection upon it. Religion and Cultural Studies features essays by major scholars from the fields of anthropology, history, literary criticism, and religion in order to enrich critical discourse about religion and culture. Despite the variety of disciplines represented by this group of scholars and the variety of cultures explored in their essays--from fifteenth-century Flemish asceticism and nineteenth-century African-American spiritualism to Russian blood-libel trials and Alien Abduction Reports in the twentieth century--their common ground is the question of religion's place in current American academic analysis, and more broadly in American life today. The volume's range of vocabulary and subject matter is aimed at vitalizing scholarly interest in the field of religion and cultural studies and deepening intellectual inquiry in the contemporary academy. The contributors are Eytan Bercovitch, Karen McCarthy Brown, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Richard Wightman Fox, Jenny Franchot, Giles Gunn, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Bruce B. Lawrence, Jack Miles, Susan L. Mizruchi, and Jonathan Z. Smith.
Download or read book The Family Saga in the South Generations and Destinies written by Robert O. Stephens and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Disturbing the Peace written by Bryan Wagner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-28 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. C. Handy waking up to the blues on a train platform, Buddy Bolden eavesdropping on the drums at Congo Square, John Lomax taking his phonograph recorder into a southern penitentiary - in Disturbing the Peace, Bryan Wagner revises the history of the black vernacular tradition and gives a new account of black culture by reading these myths in the context of the tradition's ongoing engagement with the law.
Download or read book Letter and the Spirit of Nineteenth Century American Literature written by Thomas Loebel and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2005 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving back to the trial of Anne Hutchinson in Puritan Massachusetts and the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson in order to analyse theo-political signification, Loebel provides a new context for examining the politically performative function of language in such texts as The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Waiting for the Verdict. He also argues, however, that a specific theo-logic manifests itself in the political rhetoric of the nation, such that the afterlife of the New Jerusalem resonates not just in the Blessings of Liberty enshrined in the Constitution but also in the shift from a religious understanding of union with Jesus to that of the Union of States as a nation. theorising representation as a political, theological, legal, and literary issue that has continued currency both in twentieth-century literature and in the political discourse of America's global vision, such as the axis of evil and the new world order. Anyone interested in American literature and culture will view the relationship between ethics and justice differently after reading this book.
Download or read book Nationalism and the Color Line in George W Cable Mark Twain and William Faulkner written by Barbara Ladd and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner is a strikingly original study of works by three postbellum novelists with strong ties to the Deep South and Mississippi Valley. In it, Barbara Ladd argues that writers like Cable, Twain, and Faulkner cannot be read exclusively within the context of a nationalistically defined "American" literature, but must also be understood in light of the cultural legacy that French and Spanish colonialism bestowed on the Deep South and the Mississippi River Valley, specifically with respect to the very different ways these colonialist cultures conceptualized race, color, and nationality.Ladd probes the work of these writers for discontinuities, for moments of narrative incoherence, from which she charts the ideological winds that blew through the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Cable's The Grandissimes, written at the beginning of the Redemption era, the discontinuities are strategic whispers to the reader about the reality of racial division and violence that lay beneath the white reconciliation romance. Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins also inscribes racial discord, although with the added dimension of experimentation with form. And in Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, narrative incoherence becomes central as Faulkner explores the impact of radical racism on the ways that whiteness was constructed in the early twentieth century. Neither "race" nor "nation," Ladd shows, is stable in the work of these writers, but is always contested and shifting.Ladd's book raises provocative questions about the relationships between race, region, and nationalism in literary study. With its innovative approach and rich New Historicist method, it is an important contribution to scholarship in several fields.
Download or read book National Imaginaries American Identities written by Larry J. Reynolds and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2000-11-26 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the American Revolution to the present, the United States has enjoyed a rich and persuasive visual culture. These images have constructed, sustained, and disseminated social values and identities, but this unwieldy, sometimes untidy form of cultural expression has received less systematic attention than other modes of depicting American life. Recently, scholars in the humanities have developed a new critical approach to reading images and the cultural work they perform. This practice, American cultural iconography, is generating sophisticated analyses of how images organize our public life. The contributions to this volume exhibit the extraordinary scope and interpretive power of this interdisciplinary study while illuminating the dark corners of the nation's psyche. Drawing on such varied texts and visual media as daguerreotypes, political cartoons, tourist posters, and religious artifacts, these essays explore how pictures and words combine to teach us who we are and who we are not. They examine mimesis in elegant portraits of black Freemasons, industrial-age representations of national parks, and postwar photographs of atomic destruction. They consider how visual culture has described and disclosed the politics of racialized sexuality, whether subconsciously affirming it in the shadows of film noir or deliberately contesting it through the interethnic incest of John Sayles's Lone Star. Students of literature, film, and history will find that these essays extend the frontier of American studies. The contributors are Maurice Wallace, Dennis Berthold, Alan Trachtenberg, Shirley Samuels, Jenny Franchot, Cecelia Tichi, Eric Lott, Bryan C. Taylor, and José E. Limón.
Download or read book The Slave in the Swamp written by William Tynes Cowa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2005. In 19th century plantation literature, the runaway slave in the swamp was a recurring bogey-man whose presence challenged myths of the plantation system. By escaping to the swamps with its wild and threatening connotations, the runaway gained an invisibility that was more threatening to the institution than open rebellion. In part, the proslavery plantation novel served to transform that image of the free slave in the swamp from its untouchable, abstract state to a form that could be possessed, understood, and controlled. Essentially, writers defending the institution would conjure forth the rebellious image in order to dispel it safely.
Download or read book The Grandissimes written by George Washington Cable and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the mysterious shadowed city of New Orleans in the years immediately following the Louisiana Purchase, George Washington Cable's classic novel of the Old South traces the declining fortunes of a family and their society as they struggle with long-standing divisions of race and class and with the ideals of democracy and liberty imposed by their new American rulers. The hero of the novel, Joseph Frowenfeld, is a young scientist who moves to Louisiana to make his fortune. An outsider, Frowenfeld learns the ways of the Creoles and of the few Americans in the city through his acquaintance with the proud Grandissime family. He comes to know Honore Grandissime, the young leader of the clan, as well as his half-brother, a prosperous free man of color also named Honore, who has the power to rescue his relations from financial ruin.
Download or read book Transition 117 written by IU Press Journals and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published three times per year by Indiana University Press for the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. In issue 117, Transition presents new short fiction from writers with Uganda, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Liberia—and the diaspora—in their veins. Also in this issue are: selections from Transition's online forum, "I Can't Breathe," a venue for discussing the recent murders by police of unarmed black Americans; selections of poetry; and an interview with the architect and curator of the opening exhibit at Harvard University's new Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art.
Download or read book Reading Africa into American Literature written by Keith Cartwright and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The literature often considered the most American is rooted not only in European and Western culture but also in African and American Creole cultures. Keith Cartwright places the literary texts of such noted authors as George Washington Cable, W.E.B. DuBois, Alex Haley, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Joel Chandler Harris, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, and many others in the context of the history, spiritual traditions, folklore, music, linguistics, and politics out of which they were written. Cartwright grounds his study of American writings in texts from the Senegambian/Old Mali region of Africa. Reading epics, fables, and gothic tales from the crossroads of this region and the American South, he reveals that America's foundational African presence, along with a complex set of reactions to it, is an integral but unacknowledged source of the national culture, identity, and literature.
Download or read book George W Cable written by Philip Butcher and published by Ardent Media. This book was released on 1956 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Trickster to Badman written by John W. Roberts and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To protect their identity and values, Africans enslaved in America transformed various familiar character types to create folk heroes who offered models of behavior both recognizable to them as African people and adaptable to their situation in America. Roberts specifically examines the Afro-American trickster and the trickster tale tradition, the conjurer as folk hero, the biblical heroic tradition, and the badman as outlaw hero.
Download or read book Calypso Magnolia written by John Wharton Lowe and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-02-08 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this far-reaching literary history, John Wharton Lowe remakes the map of American culture by revealing the deep, persistent connections between the ideas and works produced by writers of the American South and the Caribbean. Lowe demonstrates that a tendency to separate literary canons by national and regional boundaries has led critics to ignore deep ties across highly permeable borders. Focusing on writers and literatures from the Deep South and Gulf states in relation to places including Mexico, Haiti, and Cuba, Lowe reconfigures the geography of southern literature as encompassing the "circumCaribbean," a dynamic framework within which to reconsider literary history, genre, and aesthetics. Considering thematic concerns such as race, migration, forced exile, and colonial and postcolonial identity, Lowe contends that southern literature and culture have always transcended the physical and political boundaries of the American South. Lowe uses cross-cultural readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, including William Faulkner, Martin Delany, Zora Neale Hurston, George Lamming, Cristina Garcia, Edouard Glissant, and Madison Smartt Bell, among many others, to make his argument. These literary figures, Lowe argues, help us uncover new ways of thinking about the shared culture of the South and Caribbean while demonstrating that southern literature has roots even farther south than we realize.
Download or read book Barriers between Us written by Cassandra Jackson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-08 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative book examines the representation of characters of mixed African and European descent in the works of African American and European American writers of the 19th century. The importance of mulatto figures as agents of ideological exchange in the American literary tradition has yet to receive sustained critical attention. Going beyond Sterling Brown's melodramatic stereotype of the mulatto as "tragic figure," Cassandra Jackson's close study of nine works of fiction shows how the mulatto trope reveals the social, cultural, and political ideas of the period. Jackson uncovers a vigorous discussion in 19th-century fiction about the role of racial ideology in the creation of an American identity. She analyzes the themes of race-mixing, the "mulatto," nation building, and the social fluidity of race (and its imagined biological rigidity) in novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Hildreth, Lydia Maria Child, Frances E. W. Harper, Thomas Detter, George Washington Cable, and Charles Chesnutt. Blacks in the Diaspora -- Claude A. Clegg III, editor Darlene Clark Hine, David Barry Gaspar, and John McCluskey, founding editors
Download or read book Musical Gumbo written by Grace Lichtenstein and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 1993 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first comprehensive guide to both the music and the hard-living, free-spirited musicians who made--and make--the music of New Orleans includes fascinating trivia on greats Jelly Roll Morton, the Neville Brothers, Fats Domino, Louis Armstrong, Harry Connick, Jr., and others--plus a guide to nightclubs and the New Orleans Jazz Fest. Discography of essential CDs.
Download or read book Black Legacy written by William Dillon Piersen and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on folktales, oral histories, religious rituals and music, this book explores the pervasive influence of African traditions on American life. Pierson aims to reinterpret American history in a way that disrupts conventional assumptions and turns racial stereotypes inside out.
