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A revised and expanded edition of a groundbreaking text.
This collection of papers, comments, and documents traces the distant and recent history of the Ebonics debate in the USA. The book examines how, despite increasing access to public education over the past century, schools continue to impose language standards and expectations on children that methodically privileges some, while disadvantaging others.
Slang is the language of pop culture, low culture, street culture, underground movements and secret societies; depending on your point of view, it is a badge of honour, a sign of identity or a dangerous assault on the values of polite society. Over several centuries and across international borders, VULGAR TONGUES is the story of how the English language of Shakespeare's day fragmented and twisted into all kinds of shapes, as people like pickpockets, beggars, sailors, musicians, gangsters, whores, politicians, gypsies, soldiers, gays and lesbians, policemen, rappers, cockneys, biker gangs and circus folk seized the King's or Queen's English by the throat and took it to places it would probably regret in the morning.
In 1952, a young Belgian scholar of European medieval history traveled to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) to live in a remote Kuba village. Armed with a smattering of training in African cultures and language, Jan Vansina was sent to do fieldwork for a Belgian cultural agency. As it turned out, he would help found the field of African history, with a handful of other European and African scholars. "I'm not an ethnologist, I'm a historian!" Vansina was to repeat again and again to those who assumed that people without written texts have no history. His discovery that he could analyze Kuba oral tradition using the same methods he had learned for interpreting medieval dirges was a historiographic...
A sport and a military exercise, hunting involved aggressive action with weapons and dogs, and pursuit to the point of combat and killing, for the sake of recreation, food or conquest. The Stag of Love explores the body of erotic metaphor that developed from the hunt together with Ovid's flourishing legacies. While representing a range of human experience, the metaphor finds its dominant expression in the literature of love. As Marcelle Thiébaux demonstrates, the hunt's disciplined violence represented sexual desire, along with strategies and arts for getting love, the joys of love, and love's elevating mystique. The genre gave rise to a lavish imagery of footprints and tracking, arrows, ne...
The first comprehensive book on the participation of Muslim Fula business elites in the post-independence politics of Sierra Leone
Constraints on freedom, education, and individual dignity have always been fundamental in determining who is able to write, when, and where. Considering the singular experience of the African American writer, William W. Cook and James Tatum here argue that African American literature did not develop apart from canonical Western literary traditions but instead grew out of those literatures, even as it adapted and transformed the cultural traditions and religions of Africa and the African diaspora along the way.Tracing the interaction between African American writers and the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome, from the time of slavery and its aftermath to the civil rights era and on into t...