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The concept of African American home ground knits together diverse aspects of the American landscape, from elite suburbs and tower apartments to the old homeplaces of the countryside, to the tabletop array of family photos beside the bed of a housebound elder. This fascinating volume focuses on ways African Americans have invested actual and symbolic landscapes with signifigance, gained the means to acquire property, and brought new insight to the interpretation of contemporary, historical, and archaelogical sites. Keep Your Head to the Sky demonstrates how visions of home, past and present, have helped to shape African Americans' sense of place, often under extremely hostile conditions.
"Focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on the southeastern United States, the book examines works ranging from James Hampton's well-known Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (now part of the Smithsonian collection), to several elaborately decorated yards and gardens, to smaller-scale acts of commemoration, protection, and witness. The authors show how the artful arrangement and adornment of everyday objects and plants express both the makers' own experiences and concerns and a number of rich and sustaining cultural traditions. They identify a "lexicon" of material signs that are frequently and consistently used in African American culture and art and then show how such elements have been used in various individual works and what they mean to the practitioners themselves."--BOOK JACKET.
Perhaps no other group of people has been as much formed by biblical texts and tropes as African Americans. From literature and the arts to popular culture and everyday life, the Bible courses through black society and culture like blood through veins. Despite the enormous recent interest in African American religion, relatively little attention has been paid to the diversity of ways in which African Americans have utilized the Bible. African Americans and the Bible is the fruit of a four-year collaborative research project directed by Vincent L. Wimbush and funded by the Lilly Endowment. It brings together scholars and experts (sixty-eight in all) from a wide range of academic and artistic ...
"This impressive collaborative effort by two dozen leading authorities in the field will be essential reading for any serious student of the history of American publishing and print culture during one of its most crucially transformative periods." Lawrence Buell, Harvard University "A magnificent achievement. Brilliant editing and graceful writing shatter many old assumptions about the world of the Founders. Linking intellectual history with politics, social change, and the distinctive experiences of women, African Americans and Indians, An Extensive Republic is the rare reference book that is also a mesmerizing read." Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women an...
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Folk art is one of the American South's most significant areas of creative achievement, and this comprehensive yet accessible reference details that achievement from the sixteenth century through the present. This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture explores the many forms of aesthetic expression that have characterized southern folk art, including the work of self-taught artists, as well as the South's complex relationship to national patterns of folk art collecting. Fifty-two thematic essays examine subjects ranging from colonial portraiture, Moravian material culture, and southern folk pottery to the South's rich quilt-making traditions, memory painting, and African American vernacular art, and 211 topical essays include profiles of major folk and self-taught artists in the region.
Global in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, Creolization as Cultural Creativity explores the expressive forms and performances that come into being when cultures encounter one another. Creolization is presented as a powerful marker of identity in the postcolonial creole societies of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the southwest Indian Ocean region, as well as a universal process that can occur anywhere cultures come into contact. An extraordinary number of cultures from Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, the southern United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, RĂ©union, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Suriname, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone are discussed in these essays. ...
Historically, religious scriptures are defined as holy texts that are considered to be beyond the abilities of the layperson to interpret. This volume takes a look at the social, cultural and racial meanings invested in these texts.
"Summarizes highlights of the scholarship presented at the conference, 'Places of cultural memory: African reflections on the American landscape, ' ... held May 9-12 in Atlanta, Georgia. It ... illustrates ways in which this scholarship can be applied"--Page v.
"By analyzing what she describes as richly detailed archaeological site biographies, De Cunzo reconstructs how Delaware's farming people actively created their identities and shaped their interactions at home, at work, at church, and in the marketplace as they began to confront industrial capitalism. Informed by a contextual, interpretive perspective, this valuable work reveals the complex interrelationships among environment, technology, economy, social order, and cultural praxis that defined the "cultures of agriculture" in Delaware during the last three centuries."--Jacket.