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Rethinking Social Realism
The social realist movement, with its focus on proletarian themes and its strong ties to New Deal programs and leftist politics, has long been considered a depression-era phenomenon that ended with the start of World War II. This study explores how and why African American writers and visual artists sustained an engagement with the themes and aesthetics of social realism into the early cold war-era--far longer than a majority of their white counterparts. Stacy I. Morgan recalls the social realist atmosphere in which certain African American artists and writers were immersed and shows how black social realism served alternately to question the existing order, instill race pride, and build interracial, working-class coalitions. Morgan discusses, among others, such figures as Charles White, John Wilson, Frank Marshall Davis, Willard Motley, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Catlett, and Hale Woodruff.
An Eye for the Tropics
Images of Jamaica and the Bahamas as tropical paradises full of palm trees, white sandy beaches, and inviting warm water seem timeless. Surprisingly, the origins of those images can be traced back to the roots of the islands’ tourism industry in the 1880s. As Krista A. Thompson explains, in the late nineteenth century, tourism promoters, backed by British colonial administrators, began to market Jamaica and the Bahamas as picturesque “tropical” paradises. They hired photographers and artists to create carefully crafted representations, which then circulated internationally via postcards and illustrated guides and lectures. Illustrated with more than one hundred images, including many i...
New Visions
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Stealing the Show
Stealing the Show is a study of African American actors in Hollywood during the 1930s, a decade that saw the consolidation of stardom as a potent cultural and industrial force. Petty focuses on five performers whose Hollywood film careers flourished during this period—Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit” Perry, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Hattie McDaniel—to reveal the “problematic stardom” and the enduring, interdependent patterns of performance and spectatorship for performers and audiences of color. She maps how these actors—though regularly cast in stereotyped and marginalized roles—employed various strategies of cinematic and extracinematic performance to negotiate their complex positions in Hollywood and to ultimately “steal the show.” Drawing on a variety of source materials, Petty explores these stars’ reception among Black audiences and theorizes African American viewership in the early twentieth century. Her book is an important and welcome contribution to the literature on the movies.
Thieving Three-Fingered Jack
The fugitive slave known as “Three-Fingered Jack” terrorized colonial Jamaica from 1780 until vanquished by Maroons, self-emancipated Afro-Jamaicans bound by treaty to police the island for runaways and rebels. A thief and a killer, Jack was also a freedom fighter who sabotaged the colonial machine until his grisly death at its behest. Narratives about his exploits shed light on the problems of black rebellion and solutions administered by the colonial state, creating an occasion to consider counter-narratives about its methods of divide and conquer. For more than two centuries, writers, performers, and storytellers in England, Jamaica, and the United States have “thieved" Three Fingered Jack's riveting tale, defining black agency through and against representations of his resistance. Frances R. Botkin offers a literary and cultural history that explores the persistence of stories about this black rebel, his contributions to constructions of black masculinity in the Atlantic world, and his legacies in Jamaican and United States popular culture.
Independence, Colonial Relics, and Monuments in the Caribbean
Independence, Colonial Relics, and Monuments in the Caribbean is a collection of critical perspectives on independence and the legacies of colonialism in the post-colonial Caribbean. The contributors examine themes relating to culture, identity, gender, nationhood, heritage and historic preservation in the post-independent Caribbean. In a twenty-first century context where calls for reparatory justice for the people of the Caribbean who have been disadvantaged by the effects of colonialism have intensified, this book is quite relevant as some chapters examine colonialism through relics, laws, statues and monuments, while other chapters explore the implications of African enslavement, the role of Indian indentureship, the Federation of the West Indies and the effect of the American based Black Lives Movement on the Caribbean.
Readings in Caribbean History and Culture
This book introduces the scholarly work of a number of new researchers working on the history and culture of the Caribbean. The eleven essays in this book cover topical themes and issues relating to those two subject areas, and specifically address the topics of colonialism, slavery, the Christianizing and moralizing missions, education, art history, and musical culture in the form of Reggae and its interactions with politics.
Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London
Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London offers a fresh perspective on Social Realism by contextualizing it within the burgeoning new media environment of Victorian London. Paintings labelled as Social Realist by Luke Fildes, Frank Holl and Hubert Herkomer are frequently considered to typify the sentimental Victorian genre painting that quickly became outdated with the development of modernism. Yet this book argues that the paintings must be considered as the result of the new experiences of modernity-the urban poverty that the paintings represent and, most importantly, the advent of the mass-produced illustrated news. Fildes, Holl and Herkomer worked for The Graphic, a publication...
Heritage Regimes and the State
What happens when UNESCO heritage conventions are ratified by a state? How do UNESCO’s global efforts interact with preexisting local, regional and state efforts to conserve or promote culture? What new institutions emerge to address the mandate? The contributors to this volume focus on the work of translation and interpretation that ensues once heritage conventions are ratified and implemented. With seventeen case studies from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and China, the volume provides comparative evidence for the divergent heritage regimes generated in states that differ in history and political organization. The cases illustrate how UNESCO’s aspiration to honor and celebrate cultural diversity diversifies itself. The very effort to adopt a global heritage regime forces myriad adaptations to particular state and interstate modalities of building and managing heritage.
