You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This 2007 Companion is a comprehensive guide to the key authors and works of the African American literary movement.
“ I mean to live and die by my own mind,” Zora Neale Hurston told the writer Countee Cullen. Arriving in Harlem in 1925 with little more than a dollar to her name, Hurston rose to become one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, only to die in obscurity. Not until the 1970s was she rediscovered by Alice Walker and other admirers. Although Hurston has entered the pantheon as one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, the true nature of her personality has proven elusive. Now, a brilliant, complicated and utterly arresting woman emerges from this landmark book. Carla Kaplan, a noted Hurston scholar, has found hundreds of revealing, previously unpublished ...
Established as an academic field in the 1970s, women's studies is a relatively young but rapidly growing area of study. Not only has the number of scholars working in this subject expanded exponentially, but women's studies has become institutionalized, offering graduate degrees and taking on departmental status in many colleges and universities. At the same time, this field--formed in the wake of the feminist movement--is finding itself in a precarious position in what is now often called a "post-feminist" society. This raises challenging issues for faculty, students, and administrators. How must the field adjust its goals and methods to continue to affect change in the future? Bringing tog...
"Race is a visual phenomenon, the ability to see "difference." At least that is what conventional wisdom has lead us to believe. Yet, The Sonic Color Line argues that American ideologies of white supremacy are just as dependent on what we hear-voices, musical taste, volume-as they are on skin color or hair texture. Reinforcing compelling new ideas about the relationship between race and sound with meticulous historical research, Jennifer Lynn Stoever helps us to better understand how sound and listening not only register the racial politics of our world, but actively produce them. Through analysis of the historical traces of sounds of African American performers, Stoever reveals a host of racialized aural representations operating at the level of the unseen-the sonic color line-and exposes the racialized listening practices she figures as "the listening ear."" --New York University Press.
In Wit’s End, Sean Zwagerman offers an original perspective on women’s use of humor as a performative strategy as seen in works of twentieth-century American literature. He argues that women whose direct, explicit performative speech has been traditionally denied, or not taken seriously, have often turned to humor as a means of communicating with men. The book examines both the potential and limits of women’s humor as a rhetorical strategy in the writings of James Thurber, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker, Edward Albee, Louise Erdrich, and others. For Zwagerman, these texts “talk back” to important arguments in humor studies and speech-act theory. He deconstructs the use of humor...
Offers a new conceptual framework rooted in mythological analysis to ground the field of Africana cultural memory studies. Black Cultural Mythology retrieves the concept of “mythology” from its Black Arts Movement origins and broadens its scope to illuminate the relationship between legacies of heroic survival, cultural memory, and creative production in the African diaspora. Christel N. Temple comprehensively surveys more than two hundred years of figures, moments, ideas, and canonical works by such visionaries as Maria Stewart, Richard Wright, Colson Whitehead, and Edwidge Danticat to map an expansive yet broadly overlooked intellectual tradition of Black cultural mythology and to prov...
A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance presents a comprehensive collection of original essays that address the literature and culture of the Harlem Renaissance from the end of World War I to the middle of the 1930s. Represents the most comprehensive coverage of themes and unique new perspectives on the Harlem Renaissance available Features original contributions from both emerging scholars of the Harlem Renaissance and established academic “stars” in the field Offers a variety of interdisciplinary features, such as the section on visual and expressive arts, that emphasize the collaborative nature of the era Includes “Spotlight Readings” featuring lesser known figures of the Harlem Renaissance and newly discovered or undervalued writings by canonical figures
DIVA cultural studies reading of white southern femininity as seen in a range of popular sites including novels, television, and tourist attractions./div
In the early twentieth century, the field of anthropology transformed itself from the "welcoming science," uniquely open to women, people of color, and amateurs, into a professional science of culture. The new field grew in rigor and prestige but excluded practitioners and methods that no longer fit a narrow standard of scientific legitimacy. In Rhetoric in American Anthropology, Risa Applegarth traces the "rhetorical archeology" of this transformation in the writings of early women anthropologists. Applegarth examines the crucial role of ethnographic genres in determining scientific status and recovers the work of marginalized anthropologists who developed alternative forms of scientific wr...
For generations, fans and critics have characterized classic American radio drama as a “theater of the mind.” This book unpacks that characterization by recasting the radio play as an aesthetic object within its unique historical context. In Theater of the Mind, Neil Verma applies an array of critical methods to more than six thousand recordings to produce a vivid new account of radio drama from the Depression to the Cold War. In this sweeping exploration of dramatic conventions, Verma investigates legendary dramas by the likes of Norman Corwin, Lucille Fletcher, and Wyllis Cooper on key programs ranging from The Columbia Workshop, The Mercury Theater on the Air, and Cavalcade of America to Lights Out!, Suspense, and Dragnet to reveal how these programs promoted and evolved a series of models of the imagination. With close readings of individual sound effects and charts of broad trends among formats, Verma not only gives us a new account of the most flourishing form of genre fiction in the mid-twentieth century but also presents a powerful case for the central place of the aesthetics of sound in the history of modern experience.