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The Harlem Renaissance was an unprecedented period of vitality in the American Arts. Defined as the years between 1910 and 1927, it was the time when Harlem came alive with theater, drama, sports, dance and politics. Looking at events as diverse as the prizefight between Jack Johnson and Jim 'White Hope' Jeffries, the choreography of Aida Walker and Ethel Waters, the writing of Zora Neale Hurston and the musicals of the period, Krasner paints a vibrant portrait of those years. This was the time when the residents of northern Manhattan were leading their downtown counterparts at the vanguard of artistic ferment while at the same time playing a pivotal role in the evolution of Black nationalism. This is a thrilling piece of work by an author who has been working towards this major opus for years now. It will become a classic that will stay on the American history and theater shelves for years to come.
Presenting an innovative approach to performance studies and literary history, Soyica Colbert argues for the centrality of black performance traditions to African American literature, including preaching, dancing, blues and gospel, and theatre itself, showing how these performance traditions create the 'performative ground' of African American literary texts. Across a century of literary production using the physical space of the theatre and the discursive space of the page, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, August Wilson and others deploy performances to re-situate black people in time and space. The study examines African American plays past and present, including A Raisin in the Sun, Blues for Mister Charlie and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, demonstrating how African American dramatists stage black performances in their plays as acts of recuperation and restoration, creating sites that have the potential to repair the damage caused by slavery and its aftermath.
The concept of framing has long intrigued and troubled scholars in fields including philosophy, rhetoric, media studies and literary criticism. But framing also has rich implications for environmental debate, urging us to reconsider how we understand the relationship between humans and their ecological environment, culture and nature. The contributors to this wide-ranging volume use the concept of framing to engage with key questions in environmental literature, history, politics, film, TV, and pedagogy. In so doing, they show that framing can serve as a valuable analytical tool connecting different academic discourses within the emergent interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities. No less importantly, they demonstrate how increased awareness of framing strategies and framing effects can help us move society in a more sustainable direction.
Compiles information and interpretations on the past 500 years of African American history, containing essays on historical research aids, bibliographies, resources for womens' issues, and an accompanying CD-ROM providing bibliographical entries.
Gloria Anzaldua Book Prize, National Women's Studies Association, 2009 In the early twentieth century, three women of color helped shape a new world of ethnographic discovery. Ella Cara Deloria, a Sioux woman from South Dakota, Zora Neale Hurston, an African American woman from Florida, and Jovita González, a Mexican American woman from the Texas borderlands, achieved renown in the fields of folklore studies, anthropology, and ethnolinguistics during the 1920s and 1930s. While all three collaborated with leading male intellectuals in these disciplines to produce innovative ethnographic accounts of their own communities, they also turned away from ethnographic meaning making at key points in...
Hurston was renowned for her portrayal of assertive women in her fiction, folklore, and drama. This book explores her development as an assertive woman and outspoken writer, emphasizing the impact of the African American oral traditions and vernacular speech patterns of Harlem, Polk County, and her hometown of Eatonville, Florida on the development of her personal and artistic voice. The study traces the development of her assertive women characters, the emphasis upon verbal performance and verbal empowerment, the significance of down home Southern humor, and the importance of an ideology of assertive individualism in Hurston's writings and analyzes changes in Hurston's personal style. Hurst...
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), the most prominent of the Harlem Renaissance women writers, was unique because her social and professional connections were not limited to literature but encompassed theatre, dance, film, anthropology, folklore, music, politics, high society, academia, and artistic bohemia. Hurston published four novels, three books of nonfiction, and dozens of short stories, plays, and essays. In addition, she won a long list of fellowships and prizes, including a Guggenheim and a Rosenwald. Yet by the 1950s, Hurston, like most of her Harlem Renaissance peers, had faded into oblivion. An essay by Alice Walker in the 1970s, however, spurred the revival of Hurston’s literary ...
Zora Neale Hurston was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Her most famous novel, "Their Eyes Were Watching God", a classic in the African-American canon, depicts a woman's struggle for self-empowerment. This work takes a critical look at Hurston's work and its influence on contemporary themes, such as race and gender in American society.
In the 1970s, feminists focused critical attention on fairy tales and broke the spell that had enchanted readers for centuries. Now, after three decades of provocative criticism and controversy, this book reevaluates the feminist critique of fairy tales.