Download or read book White People Do Not Know how to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies Gentlemen of Colour written by Marvin Edward McAllister and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: McAllister offers a history of black theater pioneer William Brown's career and places his productions within the broader context of U.S. social, political, and cultural history.

Download or read book White People Do Not Know how to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour written by Marvin Edward McAllister and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour written by Marvin McAllister and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-11-20 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In August 1821, William Brown, a free man of color and a retired ship's steward, opened a pleasure garden on Manhattan's West Side. It catered to black New Yorkers, who were barred admittance to whites-only venues offering drama, music, and refreshment. Over the following two years, Brown expanded his enterprises, founding a series of theaters that featured African Americans playing a range of roles unprecedented on the American stage and that drew increasingly integrated audiences. Marvin McAllister explores Brown's pioneering career and reveals how each of Brown's ventures--the African Grove, the Minor Theatre, the American Theatre, and the African Company--explicitly cultivated an intercultural, multiracial environment. He also investigates the negative white reactions, verbal and physical, that led to Brown's managerial retirement in 1823. Brown left his mark on American theater by shaping the careers of his performers and creating new genres of performance. Beyond that legacy, says McAllister, this nearly forgotten theatrical innovator offered a blueprint for a truly inclusive national theater.

Download or read book White People Do Not Know how to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour written by Marvin Edward McAllister and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The African Grove/African Theatre was founded by William Brown, a retired ship steward who traveled the Caribbean and Europe before settling in New York City. Brown's entertainments existed from 1821 to 1824 and his African Theatre was the first black-owned theater in North America. In 1822, Brown wrote and produced the first black drama, The Drama of King Shotaway, a play that chronicles a 1795 Black Carib insurrection on the island of St. Vincent. The primary objective of this dissertation is to place the African Grove pleasure garden and the African theatre in the theatrical, political, and social contexts of nineteenth century America. The early nineteenth century was one of the most diverse periods in American entertainment history. By grounding the company in America's early national period, I attempt to recover much of that diversity and to reevaluate this formative era in American and Afro-American history. This project's secondary objective is to establish a tradition of Afro-American performance that predates blackface minstrelsy. America's degrading national art form has nearly erased the existence of Negro cultural institutions like the African Theatre and New World African celebrations like Pinkster. Before minstrelsy, Brown's company employed European, Indian, and African dramatic, dance, and musical conventions. At America's first black theater, actors and audiences occasionally challenged conventional theater practices. In 1822, the troupe was arrested for performing their unique version of Shakespeare's Richard III. Brown's innovative entertainments politicized the New York stage and ultimately led to his theater's demise.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater written by Nadine George-Graves and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theatre. Taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work of dance and theater scholars and artists, and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics with important stakes, these essays focus on the politics and poetics of the moving body in performance both on and off stage. Contemporary stage performances have sparked global interest in new experiments between dance and theater, and this volume situates this interest in its historical context by extensively investigating other such moments: from pagan mimes of late antiquity to early modern archives to Bolshevik Russia to post-Sandinista Nicaragua to Chinese opera on the international stage, to contemporary flash mobs and television dance contests. Ideologically, the essays investigate critical race theory, affect theory, cognitive science, historiography, dance dramaturgy, spatiality, gender, somatics, ritual, and biopolitics among other modes of inquiry. In terms of aesthetics, they examine many genres such as musical theater, contemporary dance, improvisation, experimental theater, television, African total theater, modern dance, new Indian dance theater aesthetics, philanthroproductions, Butoh, carnival, equestrian performance, tanztheater, Korean Talchum, Nazi Movement Choirs, Lindy Hop, Bomba, Caroline Masques, political demonstrations, and Hip Hop. The volume includes innovative essays from both young and seasoned scholars and scholar/practitioners who are working at the cutting edges of their fields. The handbook brings together essays that offer new insight into well-studied areas, challenge current knowledge, attend to neglected practices or moments in time, and that identify emergent themes. The overall result is a better understanding of the roles of dance and theater in the performative production of meaning.

Download or read book Querying Difference in Theatre History written by Ann Haugo and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terms such as race, ethnicity, otherness, and pluralism are becoming increasingly problematic as we grapple with issues of identity in the “post-multicultural” discursive landscape of the twenty-first century. Querying Difference in Theatre History comprises sixteen scholarly case studies in which authors tease out the limitations of contemporary discourse concerning ideas of difference in theatre history today. The essays then incorporate new approaches, theories, and critical vocabulary for dealing with such issues. Unlike other works that address similar subjects, this volume arranges essays by mode of inquiry rather than by “kind of difference.” It offers essays that are complex and rigorous, yet accessible and pleasurable—ideal for use in graduate- and upper-division undergraduate theatre and performance classrooms. While “difference” may immediately conjure issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and/or sexuality, this volume also includes essays that examine differences more broadly construed: nationalisms, economic gradations, and so forth. Particular topics in this volume range from intersections of class-based and sex-based politics in theatrical performances during the French Revolution, constructions of blackness and whiteness in turn-of-the-century American brothel dramas, “fantasy heritage,” examinations of immigrant, exile, and refugee dramatic characters vis-à-vis notions of diasporic space, to the political and methodological dilemmas raised when dealing with an individual or event that is “repugnant” or “despicable” to the historian (e.g., anti-gay funeral protests).

Download or read book Pioneer Performances written by Matthew Rebhorn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pioneer Performances draws from a diverse cast of relevant historical figures, ultimately revealing the frontier as a set of complex performative practices imbued with a sense of trenchant social critique.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical written by Raymond Knapp and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text presents keywords and critical terms that deepen analysis and interpretation of the musical. Taking into account issues of composition, performance, and reception, the book's contributors bring a range of practical and theoretical perspectives to bear on their considerations of American musicals.

Download or read book Coloring Whiteness written by Faedra Chatard Carpenter and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading representations of whiteness by contemporary African American performers and artists

Download or read book Emancipating New York written by David N. Gellman and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-11-01 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative blend of cultural and political history, Emancipating New York is the most complete study to date of the abolition of slavery in New York state. Focusing on public opinion, David N. Gellman shows New Yorkers engaged in vigorous debates and determined activism during the final decades of the eighteenth century as they grappled with the possibility of freeing the state's black population. The gradual emancipation that began in New York in 1799 helped move an entire region of the country toward a historically rare slaveless democracy, creating a wedge in the United States that would ultimately lead to the Civil War. Gellman's comprehensive examination of the reasons for and timing of New York's dismantling of slavery provides a fascinating narrative of a citizenry addressing longstanding injustices central to some of the greatest traumas of American history.

Download or read book Whiting Up written by Marvin McAllister and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-12-05 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface supercop in his hit music video "Dangerous." In this sweeping work, Marvin McAllister explores the enduring tradition of "whiting up," in which African American actors, comics, musicians, and even everyday people have studied and assumed white racial identities. Not to be confused with racial "passing" or derogatory notions of "acting white," whiting up is a deliberate performance strategy designed to challenge America's racial and political hierarchies by transferring supposed markers of whiteness to black bodies--creating unexpected intercultural alliances even as it sharply critiques racial stereotypes. Along with conventional theater, McAllister considers a variety of other live performance modes, including weekly promenading rituals, antebellum cakewalks, solo performance, and standup comedy. For over three centuries, whiting up as allowed African American artists to appropriate white cultural production, fashion new black identities through these "white" forms, and advance our collective ability to locate ourselves in others.

Download or read book Shakespeare in America written by Alden T. Vaughan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a lively account of how American culture has embraced the English playwright and poet from colonial times to the present. It ranges widely, following the story of Shakespeare's reception in America from the scholarly - criticism, editions of the plays, and curricula - to the light-hearted - burlesques, musical comedies, and kitsch.

Download or read book African American Humor Irony and Satire written by Dana A. Williams and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking includes select proceedings from the annual Heart’s Day Conference, sponsored by the Department of English at Howard University. Among the collection’s many strengths is the range of essays included here. Essays on Ishmael Reed center the collection, and satirists from George Schuyler to Aaron McGruder are examined as are popular culture comedians Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle. Thus, the collection adds broadly to the body of scholarship on traditional and non-traditional interpretations of humor, irony, and satire. What these essays also reveal is how the lens of humor, irony, and satire as a way of reading texts is especially useful in highlighting the complexity of African American life and culture. The essays also uncover crucial but no so obvious connections between African Americans and other world cultures.

Download or read book Staging Slavery written by Sarah J. Adams and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-16 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This international analysis of theatrical case studies illustrates the ways that theater was an arena both of protest and, simultaneously, racist and imperialist exploitations of the colonized and enslaved body. By bringing together performances and discussions of theater culture from various colonial powers and orbits—ranging from Denmark and France to Great Britain and Brazil—this book explores the ways that slavery and hierarchical notions of "race" and "civilization" manifested around the world. At the same time, against the backdrop of colonial violence, the theater was a space that also facilitated reformist protest and served as evidence of the agency of Black people in revolt. Staging Slavery considers the implications of both white-penned productions of race and slavery performed by white actors in blackface makeup and Black counter-theater performances and productions that resisted racist structures, on and off the stage. With unique geographical perspectives, this volume is a useful resource for undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the history of theater, nationalism and imperialism, race and slavery, and literature.

Download or read book A Respectable Woman written by Jane E. Dabel and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-05-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century, New York City underwent a tremendous demographic transformation driven by European immigration, the growth of a native-born population, and the expansion of one of the largest African American communities in the North. New York's free blacks were extremely politically active, lobbying for equal rights at home and an end to Southern slavery. As their activism increased, so did discrimination against them, most brutally illustrated by bloody attacks during the 1863 New York City Draft Riots. The struggle for civil rights did not extend to equal gender roles, and black male leaders encouraged women to remain in the domestic sphere, serving as caretakers, moral educators, and nurses to their families and community. Yet as Jane E. Dabel demonstrates, separate spheres were not a reality for New York City's black people, who faced dire poverty, a lopsided sex ratio, racialized violence, and a high mortality rate, all of which conspired to prevent men from gaining respectable employment and political clout. Consequently, many black women came out of the home and into the streets to work, build networks with other women, and fight against racial injustice. A Respectable Woman reveals the varied and powerful lives led by black women, who, despite the exhortations of male reformers, occupied public roles as gender and race reformers.

Download or read book The World the Civil War Made written by Gregory P. Downs and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-07-22 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the close of the Civil War, it was clear that the military conflict that began in South Carolina and was fought largely east of the Mississippi River had changed the politics, policy, and daily life of the entire nation. In an expansive reimagining of post–Civil War America, the essays in this volume explore these profound changes not only in the South but also in the Southwest, in the Great Plains, and abroad. Resisting the tendency to use Reconstruction as a catchall, the contributors instead present diverse histories of a postwar nation that stubbornly refused to adopt a unified ideology and remained violently in flux. Portraying the social and political landscape of postbellum America writ large, this volume demonstrates that by breaking the boundaries of region and race and moving past existing critical frameworks, we can appreciate more fully the competing and often contradictory ideas about freedom and equality that continued to define the United States and its place in the nineteenth-century world. Contributors include Amanda Claybaugh, Laura F. Edwards, Crystal N. Feimster, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Steven Hahn, Luke E. Harlow, Stephen Kantrowitz, Barbara Krauthamer, K. Stephen Prince, Stacey L. Smith, Amy Dru Stanley, Kidada E. Williams, and Andrew Zimmerman.

Download or read book Race and Sex across the French Atlantic written by Frieda Ekotto and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jean Genet's masterpiece Les N_gres was first published in 1958, in the midst of the Algerian war, and first performed at the ThZ%tre de Lut_ce in Paris in October 1959. Yet even though the play is more than 50 years old, it remains a fundamental contribution to critical race theory, as Genet unequivocally posits that no matter what a black person does or doesn't do, simply to be black in our times is itself a tragedy. Placing Genet in the context of Negritude movement, Race and Sex across the French Atlantic equally reveals and examines blackness within the African-American dialogue with a white French author's provocative questions about race: 'Is a black man always black?' and even more fundamentally, 'What is blackness?' Within this framework, to question 'blackness,' therefore, is to set out on an ontological quest, as 'blackness' has become a real, living thing in its own right within European ideology, social theory, and historical consciousness, even as Les N_gres has taken its place as a major text in the francophone and philosophical tradition of writing on race. In essence, this book concentrates on the way in which language-particularly the French language-has shaped ideas about race within transatlantic discourses, and, with its companion, continental philosophy, has also shaped the historical understanding of discourse on race. It navigates between multiple readings of race within the French Atlantic using Lorraine Hansberry's play Les Blancs; Dany Laferri_re's Comment faire l'amour avec un N_gre sans se fatiguer; Genet's dialogue with the Black Panthers; and different conceptions of the so-called N word. Race and Sex across the French Atlantic thus explores how Les N_gres offered a groundbreaking reading of how race functioned-and continues to function-as an all-pervasive discourse that provides a central principle around which society in general is organized. The play stages a deeply self-reflexive and critical examination of the very essence of 'blackness,' which, in Genet's world, is not simply about the color of a person's skin, but constitutes a critical function within socio-political and historical discourse. This book deals with an understanding of the concept of race in terms of alienation, and asks the question: Why, 50 years after the fact, given the long, historical, negative associations of the term Le N_gre in French language, does the title remain unchanged?