Download or read book Congo Love Song written by Ira Dworkin and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his 1903 hit "Congo Love Song," James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song's title may appear consistent with that narrative, it also invokes the site of King Leopold II of Belgium's brutal colonial regime at a time when African Americans were playing a central role in a growing Congo reform movement. In an era when popular vaudeville music frequently trafficked in racist language and imagery, "Congo Love Song" emerges as one example of the many ways that African American activists, intellectuals, and artists called attention to colonialism in Africa. In this book, Ira Dworkin examines black Americans' long cultural and political engagement with the Congo and its people. Through studies of George Washington Williams, Booker T. Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, and other figures, he brings to light a long-standing relationship that challenges familiar presumptions about African American commitments to Africa. Dworkin offers compelling new ways to understand how African American involvement in the Congo has helped shape anticolonialism, black aesthetics, and modern black nationalism.
Download or read book African written by Peter Tosh and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful children's picture book featuring the lyrics of Peter Tosh's global classic celebrating children of African descent. So don't care where you come from As long as you're a black man, you're an African No mind your nationality You have got the identity of an African African is a children's book featuring lyrics by Peter Tosh and illustrations by Jamaican artist Rachel Moss. The song "African" by Peter Tosh was originally released in 1977 on his second solo record, Equal Rights. He wrote the song during a time of civil unrest in Jamaica as a reminder to all black people that they were part of the same community. The album is considered one of the most influential reggae works of all time. A key song from the classic 1970s era of reggae Peter Tosh was one of the founding members of the iconic reggae group the Wailers "The joyful illustrations depict young and older black people of various colors, with many different hairstyles and wearing an array of clothing styles, playing, riding, dancing, and walking...The dynamic art and text work together to form a loving ode to belonging for black people of the diaspora." --Kirkus Reviews "[A] survey of Tosh's repertoire reminds us that his best works were distinctive and impactful. When the Wailers were first starting their careers at Studio One, Tosh voiced boastful classics...When the Wailers launched their own label in 1968, Tosh became the Stepping Razor, adapting a song written by the Wailers' harmony coach, Joe Higgs, and when the trio began working with visionary producer Lee 'Scratch' Perry, he recorded '400 Years,' one of the most moving explorations of the historical injustices of slavery and its lingering aftermath...His Legalize It album was far ahead of its time in demanding the decriminalization of marijuana in 1975, while Equal Rights reminded that peace will never come without justice...[He was] one of reggae's most fiery and controversial performers, whose work remains relevant." --Guardian "Tosh's first two solo records, Legalize It and Equal Rights, are not just two of the best reggae records ever, but also two of the finest records of the '70s, period. They were inventive and deeply catchy records full of songs that could be as playful as they were defiant. Peter Tosh was always outspoken, always the rebel, but it was the way he said things--that honeyed voice, those brilliant and subtly intricate compositions--that set him apart." --PopMatters
Download or read book Song Walking written by Angela Impey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-11-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Song Walking explores the politics of land, its position in memories, and its foundation in changing land-use practices in western Maputaland, a borderland region situated at the juncture of South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland. Angela Impey investigates contrasting accounts of this little-known geopolitical triangle, offsetting textual histories with the memories of a group of elderly women whose songs and everyday practices narrativize a century of borderland dynamics. Drawing evidence from women’s walking songs (amaculo manihamba)—once performed while traversing vast distances to the accompaniment of the European mouth-harp (isitweletwele)—she uncovers the manifold impacts of internationally-driven transboundary environmental conservation on land, livelihoods, and local senses of place. This book links ethnomusicological research to larger themes of international development, environmental conservation, gender, and local economic access to resources. By demonstrating that development processes are essentially cultural processes and revealing how music fits within this frame, Song Walking testifies to the affective, spatial, and economic dimensions of place, while contributing to a more inclusive and culturally apposite alignment between land and environmental policies and local needs and practices.
Download or read book Africa s Song of Karen Blixen written by Tove Hussein and published by T. Hussein. This book was released on 1998 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Language of Song written by Samuel Charters and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-06 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters—one of the pioneering collectors of African American music—writes of a trip to West Africa where he found “a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression [he] encountered everywhere . . . from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana and the great churches of Harlem.” In this book, Charters takes readers along to those and other places, including Jamaica and the Georgia Sea Islands, as he recounts experiences from a half-century spent following, documenting, recording, and writing about the Africa-influenced music of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Each of the book’s fourteen chapters is a vivid rendering of a particular location that Charters visited. While music is always his focus, the book is filled with details about individuals, history, landscape, and culture. In first-person narratives, Charters relates voyages including a trip to the St. Louis home of the legendary ragtime composer Scott Joplin and the journey to West Africa, where he met a man who performed an hours-long song about the Europeans’ first colonial conquests in Gambia. Throughout the book, Charters traces the persistence of African musical culture despite slavery, as well as the influence of slaves’ songs on subsequent musical forms. In evocative prose, he relates a lifetime of travel and research, listening to brass bands in New Orleans; investigating the emergence of reggae, ska, and rock-steady music in Jamaica’s dancehalls; and exploring the history of Afro-Cuban music through the life of the jazz musician Bebo Valdés. A Language of Song is a unique expedition led by one of music’s most observant and well-traveled explorers.
Download or read book Sound of Africa written by Louise Meintjes and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-05 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVAn ethnography of the recording of Mbaqanga music, that examines its relation to issues of identity, South African politics, and global political economy./div
Download or read book The African Imagination in Music written by Kofi Agawu and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The African Imagination in Music offers a fresh introduction to the vast and complex world of Sub-Saharan African music. Through close readings of traditional music and references to popular music, Agawu considers topics including the place of music in society, musical instruments, language and music, and appropriations of African music.
Download or read book Mama Africa written by Kathryn Erskine and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miriam Makeba, a Grammy Award–winning South African singer, rose to fame in the hearts of her people at the pinnacle of apartheid—a brutal system of segregation similar to American Jim Crow laws. Mama Africa, as they called her, raised her voice to help combat these injustices at jazz clubs in Johannesburg; in exile, at a rally beside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; and before the United Nations. Set defiantly in the present tense, this biography offers readers an intimate view of Makeba’s fight for equality. Kathryn Erskine’s call-and-response style text and Charly Palmer’s bold illustrations come together in a raw, riveting duet of protest song and praise poem. A testament to how a single voice helped to shake up the world—and can continue to do so.
Download or read book The Song Of Africa written by Isaac Benatar and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2000-07-25 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of Ivan Bender, growing up in a new resources rich country - Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), during one of the most violent periods of African history from 1948 to 1980. After a threatening encounter with a crocodile, an Ndebele warrior is assigned the job of being Ivan's guardian. A strong friendship develops between the warrior and the boy. Ivan's father is stricken by malaria and the family is forced to move to the city. There, two black waifs are taken into the Bender home. One, Enock, in time becomes a notorious guerrilla known as "One Eye". The other, Amos, becomes a policeman and a member of the Selous Scouts - a highly effective government anti-terrorist group. Ivan goes to the assistance of refugees fleeing from Katanga during the civil war erupting in Zaire. He meets a young girl, Chantelle, and a romance develops. Ivan's life becomes filled with adventure. The facts are politically accurate. Many of the events described are also true and are based on the author's and family experiences, though, on occasion literary license has been used. Isaac Benatar (LL.B) is a law graduate of the University of London. He was born in Zimbabwe in 1943. Elected Youth Mayor of the city of Salisbury during 1965-66. Became public prosecutor in Rhodesia from 1970 to 1980. He emigrated to the United States in 1980.
Download or read book Songs of Zion written by James T. Campbell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-09-07 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of the transplantation of a creed devised by and for African Americans--the African Methodist Episcopal Church--that was appropriated and transformed in a variety of South African contexts. Focusing on a transatlantic institution like the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the book studies the complex human and intellectual traffic that has bound African American and South African experience. It explores the development and growth of the African Methodist Episcopal Church both in South Africa and America, and the interaction between the two churches. This is a highly innovative work of comparative and religious history. Its linking of the United States and African black religious experiences is unique and makes it appealing to readers interested in religious history and black experience in both the United States and South Africa.
Download or read book Hip Hop Africa written by Eric Charry and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hip Hop Africa explores a new generation of Africans who are not only consumers of global musical currents, but also active and creative participants. Eric Charry and an international group of contributors look carefully at youth culture and the explosion of hip hop in Africa, the embrace of other contemporary genres, including reggae, ragga, and gospel music, and the continued vitality of drumming. Covering Senegal, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and South Africa, this volume offers unique perspectives on the presence and development of hip hop and other music in Africa and their place in global music culture.
Download or read book Africa and the Blues written by Gerhard Kubik and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-09-23 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A narrative that explores the African genealogy of American Blues
Download or read book Love Songs written by Ted Gioia and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncovers the unexplored history of the love song, from the fertility rites of ancient cultures to the sexualized YouTube videos of the present day, and discusses such topics as censorship, the legacy of love songs, and why it is a dominant form of modernmusical expression.
Download or read book Boy the Window written by Donald Earl Collins and published by . This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a preteen Black male growing up in Mount Vernon, New York, there were a series of moments, incidents and wounds that caused me to retreat inward in despair and escape into a world of imagination. For five years I protected my family secrets from authority figures, affluent Whites and middle class Blacks while attending an unforgiving gifted-track magnet school program that itself was embroiled in suburban drama. It was my imagination that shielded me from the slights of others, that enabled my survival and academic success. It took everything I had to get myself into college and out to Pittsburgh, but more was in store before I could finally begin to break from my past. "Boy @ The Window" is a coming-of-age story about the universal search for understanding on how any one of us becomes the person they are despite-or because of-the odds. It's a memoir intertwined with my own search for redemption, trust, love, success-for a life worth living. "Boy @ The Window" is about one of the most important lessons of all: what it takes to overcome inhumanity in order to become whole and human again.
Download or read book The Music of Africa written by J. H. Kwabena Nketia and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of African music is a study at once of unity and diversity. The range of indigenous musical resources and practices found on this vast continent is as wide and varies as its topography. In this informative and highly readable book, Professor Nketia provides an overview of the musical traditions of Africa with respect to their historical, cultural, and social background, their organization and practice, and delineates the most significant aspects of musical style.
Download or read book Lion Songs written by Banning Eyre and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like Fela Kuti and Bob Marley, singer, composer, and bandleader Thomas Mapfumo and his music came to represent his native country's anticolonial struggle and cultural identity. Mapfumo was born in 1945 in what was then the British colony of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The trajectory of his career—from early performances of rock 'n' roll tunes to later creating a new genre based on traditional Zimbabwean music, including the sacred mbira, and African and Western pop—is a metaphor for Zimbabwe's evolution from colony to independent nation. Lion Songs is an authoritative biography of Mapfumo that narrates the life and career of this creative, complex, and iconic figure. Banning Eyre ties the arc of Mapfumo's career to the history of Zimbabwe. The genre Mapfumo created in the 1970s called chimurenga, or "struggle" music, challenged the Rhodesian government—which banned his music and jailed him—and became important to Zimbabwe achieving independence in 1980. In the 1980s and 1990s Mapfumo's international profile grew along with his opposition to Robert Mugabe's dictatorship. Mugabe had been a hero of the revolution, but Mapfumo’s criticism of his regime led authorities and loyalists to turn on the singer with threats and intimidation. Beginning in 2000, Mapfumo and key band and family members left Zimbabwe. Many of them, including Mapfumo, now reside in Eugene, Oregon. A labor of love, Lion Songs is the product of a twenty-five-year friendship and professional relationship between Eyre and Mapfumo that demonstrates Mapfumo's musical and political importance to his nation, its freedom struggle, and its culture.
Download or read book Oral Literature in Africa written by Ruth Finnegan and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2012-09 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This revised edition makes Finnegan's ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, "drum language" and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa. This book is the first volume in the World Oral Literature Series, an ongoing collaboration between OBP and World Oral Literature Project. A free online archive of recordings and photographs that Finnegan made during her fieldwork in the late 1960s is hosted by the World Oral Literature Project (http: //www.oralliterature.org/collections/rfinnegan001.html) and can also be accessed from publisher's website.
