You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Performing Blackness offers a challenging interpretation of black cultural expression since the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Exploring drama, music, poetry, sermons, and criticism, Benston offers an exciting meditation on modern black performance's role in realising African-American aspirations for autonomy and authority. Artists covered include: * John Coltrane * Ntozake Shange * Ed Bullins * Amiri Baraka * Adrienne Kennedy * Michael Harper. Performing Blackness is an exciting contribution to the ongoing debate about the vitality and importance of black culture.
Interviews from over the course of the author's career document his views on writing, poetry, drama, and the social role of the writer
This collection reflects not only the multidisciplinary nature of current thinking about performance, but also the complex and contested nature of the concept itself.
Harriet E. Wilson's Our nig (1859) is a startling tale of the mistreatment of a young African American mulatto woman, Frado, living in New England at a time when slavery, though abolished in the North, still existed in the South. Frado, a Northern free black', yet treated as badly as many Southern slaves of the time, is unforgettably portrayed as experiencing and resisting vicious mistreatment. To achieve this disturbing portrait, Harriet Wilson's book combines several different literary genres - realist novel, autobiography, abolitionist slave narrative and sentimental fiction. R.J. Ellis explores the relationship of Our nig to these genres and, additionally, to laboring class writing (Harriet Wilson was an indentured farm servant). He identifies the way Our nig stands as a double first: the first separately-published novel written in English by an African American female it is also one of the first by a member of the laboring class about the laboring class.
Through a series of provocative readings of theatre theory and feminist performance Diamond demonstrates the continuing force of feminism and mimesis in critical thinking today.
This is the first comprehensive historical analysis of how black music and musicians have been represented in the fiction of African American writers. It also examines how music and musicians in fiction have exemplified the sensibilities of African Americans and provided paradigms for an African American literary tradition. The fictional representation of African American music by black authors is traced from the nineteenth century (William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, Pauline E. Hopkins, Paul Laurence Dunbar) through the early twentieth century and the Harlem Renaissance (James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston) to the 1940s and 50s (Richard Wright, Ann Petry,...
This book examines the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of a single year, 1964. The book analyses specific events that occurred in 1964 as benchmarks of the Civil Right Movement, making the case that 1964 was a watershed year. Each chapter considers individually politics, rhetoric, sports, dramatic literature, film, art, and music, breaking down the events and illustrating their importance to the social and political life in the United States in 1964. This study emphasizes 1964 as a nodal point in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, arguing that it was within this single year that the tide against racism and injustice turned markedly. This book will be of great interest to the scholars and students of civil rights, theatre and performance, art history, and drama literature.
An in-depth analysis of the composition of Invisible Man and Ralph Ellisons move away from the radical left during his writing of the novel between 1945 and 1952.