Download or read book Dessa Rose written by Sherley Anne Williams and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book History and Memory in African American Culture written by Genevieve Fabre Professor of American Literature University of Paris and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994-10-29 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning--the frame and the substance--of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading scholars has come together to examine the role of historical consciousness and imagination in African-American culture. The result is a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in literature, art, oral documents, and performances. Each of the scholars represented has chosen a different "site of memory"--from a variety of historical and geographical points, and from different ideological, theoretical, and artistic perspectives. Yet the book is unified by a common concern with the construction of an emerging African-American cultural memory. The renowned group of contributors, including Hazel Carby, Werner Sollors, Veve Clark, Catherine Clinton, and Nellie McKay, among others, consists of participants of the five-year series of conferences at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, from which this collection originated. Conducted under the leadership of Genevieve Fabre, Melvin Dixon, and the late Nathan Huggins, the conferences--and as a result, this book--represent something of a cultural moment themselves, and scholars and students of American and African-American literature and history will be richer as a result.

Download or read book History and Memory in African American Culture written by Genevieve Fabre and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-12-08 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning--the frame and the substance--of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading scholars has come together to examine the role of historical consciousness and imagination in African-American culture. The result is a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in literature, art, oral documents, and performances. Each of the scholars represented has chosen a different "site of memory"--from a variety of historical and geographical points, and from different ideological, theoretical, and artistic perspectives. Yet the book is unified by a common concern with the construction of an emerging African-American cultural memory. The renowned group of contributors, including Hazel Carby, Werner Sollors, Vèvè Clark, Catherine Clinton, and Nellie McKay, among others, consists of participants of the five-year series of conferences at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, from which this collection originated. Conducted under the leadership of Geneviève Fabre, Melvin Dixon, and the late Nathan Huggins, the conferences--and as a result, this book--represent something of a cultural moment themselves, and scholars and students of American and African-American literature and history will be richer as a result.

Download or read book My Own Devices written by Dessa and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I love the way Dessa puts words together. In her songs, in her poetry, in her short stories, and now in this beautiful and candid memoir. Wanna be an artist? Get this book.” --Lin-Manuel Miranda "Dessa writes beautifully about a wide range of topics, including science, music, and the pain that comes with being in love; it's a surprising and generous memoir by a singular voice." --NPR, Best Books of 2018 Dessa defies category--she is an intellectual with an international rap career and an inhaler in her backpack; a creative writer fascinated by philosophy and behavioral science; and a funny, charismatic performer dogged by blue moods and heartache. She's ferocious on stage and endearingly neurotic in the tour van. Her stunning literary debut memoir stitches together poignant insights on love, science, and language--a demonstration of just how far the mind can travel while the body is on a six-hour ride to the next gig. In "The Fool That Bets Against Me," Dessa writes to Geico to request a commercial insurance policy for the broken heart that's helped her write so many sad songs. "A Ringing in the Ears" tells the story of her father building a wooden airplane in their backyard garage. In "'Congratulations,'" she describes the challenge of recording a song for The Hamilton Mixtape in a Minneapolis basement, straining for a high note and hoping for a break. "Call Off Your Ghost" chronicles the fascinating project she undertook with a team of neuroscientists to try to clinically excise romantic feelings for an old flame. Her writing is infused with scientific research, dry wit, a philosophical perspective, and an abiding tenderness for the people she tours with and the people she leaves behind to be on the road. My Own Devices is an uncompromising and candid account of a life in motion, in music, and in love. Dessa is as compelling on the page as she is onstage, making My Own Devices the debut of a unique and deft literary voice.

Download or read book The Freedom to Remember written by Angelyn Mitchell and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. The narratives at the center of this book include: Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison's Beloved, J. California Cooper's Family, and Lorene Cary's The Price of a Child. Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on the theme of freedom, not slavery, defining these works as "liberatory narratives." These works create a space to problematize the slavery/freedom dichotomy from which contemporary black women writers have the "safe" vantage point to reveal aspects of enslavement that their ancestors could not examine. The nineteenth-century female emancipatory narrative, by contrast, was written to aid the cause of abolition by revealing the unspeakable realitiesof slavery. Mitchell shows how the liberatory narrative functions to emancipate its readers from the legacies of slavery in American society: by facilitating a deeper discussion of the issues and by making them new through illumination and interrogation.

Download or read book Race Mixing written by Suzanne W. Jones and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2006-02-15 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the southern United States, there remains a deep need among both black and white writers to examine the topic of race relations, whether they grew up during segregation or belong to the younger generation that graduated from integrated schools. In Race Mixing, Suzanne Jones offers insightful and provocative readings of contemporary novels, the work of a wide range of writers—black and white, established and emerging. Their stories explore the possibilities of cross-racial friendships, examine the repressed history of interracial love, reimagine the Civil Rights era through children's eyes, herald the reemergence of the racially mixed character, investigate acts of racial violence, and interrogate both rural and urban racial dynamics. Employing a dynamic model of the relationship between text and context, Jones shows how more than thirty relevant writers—including Madison Smartt Bell, Larry Brown, Bebe Moore Campbell, Thulani Davis, Ellen Douglas, Ernest Gaines, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Reynolds Price, Alice Walker, and Tom Wolfe—illuminate the complexities of the color line and the problems in defining racial identity today. While an earlier generation of black and white southern writers challenged the mythic unity of southern communities in order to lay bare racial divisions, Jones finds in the novels of contemporary writers a challenge to the mythic sameness within racial communities—and a broader definition of community and identity. Closely reading these stories about race in America, Race Mixing ultimately points to new ways of thinking about race relations. "We need these fictions," Jones writes, "to help us imagine our way out of the social structures and mind-sets that mythologize the past, fragment individuals, prejudge people, and divide communities."

Download or read book Slavery and the Literary Imagination written by Deborah E. McDowell and published by Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven noted scholars examine slave narratives and the topic of slavery in American literature, from Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845)-- treated in chapters by James Olney and William L. Andrews-- to Sheley Anne William's "Dessa Rose" (1984). Among the contributors, Arnold Rampersad reads W.E.B. DuBois's classic work "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903) as a response to Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery" (1901). Hazel V. Carby examines novels of slavery and novels of sharecropping and questions the critical tendency to conflate the two, thereby also conflating the nineteenth century with the twentieth, the rural with the urban.

Download or read book Fugitive Life written by Stephen Dillon and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1970s in the United States, hundreds of feminist, queer, and antiracist activists were imprisoned or became fugitives as they fought the changing contours of U.S. imperialism, global capitalism, and a repressive racial state. In Fugitive Life Stephen Dillon examines these activists' communiqués, films, memoirs, prison writing, and poetry to highlight the centrality of gender and sexuality to a mode of racialized power called the neoliberal-carceral state. Drawing on writings by Angela Davis, the George Jackson Brigade, Assata Shakur, the Weather Underground, and others, Dillon shows how these activists were among the first to theorize and make visible the links between conservative "law and order" rhetoric, free market ideology, incarceration, sexism, and the continued legacies of slavery. Dillon theorizes these prisoners and fugitives as queer figures who occupied a unique position from which to highlight how neoliberalism depended upon racialized mass incarceration. In so doing, he articulates a vision of fugitive freedom in which the work of these activists becomes foundational to undoing the reign of the neoliberal-carceral state.

Download or read book The Oxford Book of the American South written by Edward L. Ayers and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gathers short stories, journalism, and excerpts from novels, diaries, and memoirs by Southern authors.

Download or read book Speaking Power written by DoVeanna S. Fulton Minor and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Speaking Power, DoVeanna S. Fulton explores and analyzes the use of oral traditions in African American women's autobiographical and fictional narratives of slavery. African American women have consistently employed oral traditions not only to relate the pain and degradation of slavery, but also to celebrate the subversions, struggles, and triumphs of Black experience. Fulton examines orality as a rhetorical strategy, its role in passing on family and personal history, and its ability to empower, subvert oppression, assert agency, and create representations for the past. In addition to taking an insightful look at obscure or little-studied slave narratives like Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon and the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Fulton also brings a fresh perspective to more familiar works, such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and highlights Black feminist orality in such works as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.

Download or read book Liberating Narratives written by Stefanie Sievers and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 1999 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three contemporary novels of slavery - Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966), Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) - are the central focus of Liberating Narratives. In significantly different ways that reflect their individual and socio-political contexts of origin, these three novels can all be read as critiques of historical representation and as alternative spaces for remembrance - 'sites of memory' - that attempt to shift the conceptual ground on which our knowledge of the past is based.

Download or read book The Slave s Rebellion written by Adélékè Adéèkó and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-21 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Episodes of slave rebellions such as Nat Turner's are central to speculations on the trajectory of black history and the goal of black spiritual struggles. Using fiction, history, and oral poetry drawn from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa, this book analyzes how writers reinterpret episodes of historical slave rebellion to conceptualize their understanding of an ideal "master-less" future. The texts range from Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave and Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World to Yoruba praise poetry and novels by Nigerian writers Adebayo Faleti and Akinwumi Isola. Each text reflects different "national" attitudes toward the historicity of slave rebellions that shape the ways the texts are read. This is an absorbing book about the grip of slavery and rebellion on modern black thought.

Download or read book The Scary Mason Dixon Line written by Trudier Harris and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In The Scary Mason-Dixon Line, renowned literary scholar Trudier Harris explores why black writers, whether born in Mississippi, New York, or elsewhere, have consistently both loved and hated the South. Harris explains that for these authors the South represents not so much a place or even a culture as a rite of passage. Not one of them can consider himself or herself a true African American writer without confronting the idea of the South in a decisive way. Harris considers native-born black southerners Raymond Andrews, Ernest J. Gaines, Edward P. Jones, Tayari Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, and Phyllis Alesia Perry, and nonsouthern writers James Baldwin, Sherley Anne Williams, and Octavia E. Butler. The works Harris examines date from Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) to Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003). By including Komunyakaa's poems and Baldwin's play, as well as male and female authors, Harris demonstrates that the writers' preoccupation with the South cuts across lines of genre and gender. Whether their writings focus on slavery, migration from the South to the North, or violence on southern soil, and whether they celebrate the triumph of black southern heritage over repression or castigate the South for its treatment of blacks, these authors cannot escape the call of the South. Indeed, Harris asserts that creative engagement with the South represents a defining characteristic of African American writing. A singular work by one of the foremost literary scholars writing today, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line superbly demonstrates how history and memory continue to figure powerfully in African American literary creativity.

Download or read book Calls and Responses written by Tim A. Ryan and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-06 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive, groundbreaking study, Tim A. Ryan explores how American novelists since World War I have imagined the institution of slavery and the experience of those involved in it. Complicating the common assumption that authentic black-authored fiction about slavery is starkly opposed to the traditional, racist fiction (and history) created by whites, Ryan suggests that discourses about American slavery are -- and have always been -- defined by connections rather than disjunctions. Ryan contends that African American writers didn't merely reject and move beyond traditional portrayals of the black past but rather actively engaged in a dynamic dialogue with white-authored versions of slavery and existing historiographical debates. The result is an ongoing cultural conversation that transcends both racial and disciplinary boundaries and is akin to the call-and-response style of African American gospel music. Ryan addresses in detail more than a dozen major American novels of slavery, from the first significant modern fiction about the institution -- Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (both published in 1936) -- to recent noteworthy novels on the topic -- Edward P. Jones's The Known World and Valerie Martin's Property (both published in 2003). His insistence upon the necessity of interpreting novels about the past directly in relation to specific historical scholarship makes Calls and Responses especially compelling. He reads Toni Morrison's Beloved not in opposition to a monolithic orthodoxy about slavery but in relation to specific arguments of controversial historian Stanley Elkins. Similarly, he analyzes William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner in terms of its rhetorical echoes of Frederick Douglass's famous autobiographical narrative. Ryan shows throughout Calls and Responses how a variety of novelists -- including Alex Haley, Octavia Butler, Ishmael Reed, Margaret Walker, and Frances Gaither -- engage in a dynamic debate with each other and with such historians as Herbert Aptheker, Charles Joyner, Eugene and Elizabeth Genovese, and many others. A substantially new account of the development of American slavery fiction in the last century, Calls and Responses goes beyond merely exalting the expression of black voices and experiences and actually reconfigures the existing view of the American novel of slavery.

Download or read book Scarlett s Women written by Helen Taylor and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this entertaining and informative book, Helen Taylor is the first to seek reasons for Gone With the Wind's success among viewers and readers. The author asked fans to relate their experiences with the work, to explain their fascination with the story, and describe its impact. She not only explains the enduring appeal of the work, but also identifies different kinds of response at particular historical moments (especially World War II) and through the past five decades by women of different classes, races, and generations. The result is a book that is sophisticated, accessible, and revealing. Scarlett's Women is a book for every fan, and for all students of film and popular culture.

Download or read book Performing Arts Management written by Jessica Rae Bathurst and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-02-23 with total page 830 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you know what it takes to manage a performing arts organization today? In this comprehensive volume, more than 100 managers of top nonprofit and commercial venues share their winning strategies. * Financial management, building a funding base, labor relations, much more * Explores the realities of running a performing arts organization today From theater to classical music, from opera to dance, every type of organization is included, with information on how each one is structured, key managerial figures, its best-practices for financial management, how it handles labor relations, and more. Kennedy Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center, the Mark Morris Dance Company, the New Victory Theater, the Roundabout Theater, the Guthrie Theater, Steppenwolf Theater Company, and many other top groups are represented. Learn to manage a performing arts group successfully in today’s rapidly changing cultural environment with Performing Arts Management.

Download or read book Feminism and Its Fictions written by Lisa Maria Hogeland and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fascinating chapters on the relationship between fiction, the theoretical and political debates among women's and feminist groups, and the questions of sexuality . . . and race . . . merit broad readership and prove more culturally illuminating for their emphasis on popular fiction."--In Brief