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Originally published in 1995, The Music of African American Fiction is a historical analysis of the tradition of representing music in African American fiction. The book examines the impact of evolving musical styles and innovative musicians on black culture as is manifested in the literature. The analysis begins with the slave narratives and the emergence of the first black fiction of the antebellum years and moves through the Reconstruction. This is followed by analyses of definitive fictional representations of African American music from the turn-of-the-century through Harlem Renaissance, the Depression and World War II eras through the 1960s and the Black Arts Movement. The representation of black music shapes a lineage that extends from the initial chronicles written in response to sub-human bondage to the declarations of an autonomous "black aesthetic" and dramatically influences the evolution of an African American literary tradition.
Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance comprehensively explores the contours and content of the Black Chicago Renaissance, a creative movement that emerged from the crucible of rigid segregation in Chicago's "Black Belt" from the 1930s through the 1960s. Heavily influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago Renaissance of white writers, its participants were invested in political activism and social change as much as literature, art, and aesthetics. The revolutionary writing of this era produced some of the first great accolades for African American literature and set up much of the important writing that came to fruition in the Black Arts Movement. The volume covers a vast collecti...
This book presents a collection of essays on the debates about origins, authenticity, and identity in folk and blues music. The essays had their origins in an international conference on the Transatlantic routes of American roots music, out of which emerged common themes and questions of origins and authenticity in folk music, black and white, American and British. The central theme is musical influences, but issues of identity—national, local, and racial—are also recurring subjects. The extent to which these identities were invented, imagined, or constructed by the performers, or by those who recorded their work for posterity, is also a prominent concern and questions of racial identity...
This book examines the role of music in British-South Asian postcolonial literature, asking how music relates to the construction of postcolonial identity. It focuses on novels that explore the postcolonial condition in India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag, Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag, Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, and Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, with reference to other texts, such as E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. The analyzed novels feature different kinds of music, from Indian classical to non-classical traditions, and from Western classical...
The years between the collapse of Reconstruction and the end of World War I mark a pivotal moment in African American cultural production. Christened the “Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem” era by the novelist Charles Chesnutt, these years look back to the antislavery movement and forward to the artistic flowering and racial self-consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance. Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem offers fresh perspectives on the literary and cultural achievements of African American men and women during this critically neglected, though vitally important, period of our nation's past. Using a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the sixteen scholars gathered here offer both a reappraisal and celebrat...
Perhaps the brevity of short fiction accounts for the relatively scant attention devoted to it by scholars, who have historically concentrated on longer prose narratives. The Geographies of African American Short Fiction seeks to fill this gap by analyzing the ways African American short story writers plotted a diverse range of characters across multiple locations—small towns, a famous metropolis, city sidewalks, a rural wooded area, apartment buildings, a pond, a general store, a prison, and more. In the process, these writers highlighted the extents to which places and spaces shaped or situated racial representations. Presenting African American short story writers as cultural cartograph...
In Music and Literary Modernism, the intersections of music, literature and language are examined by an international group of scholars who engage in studies of modernist art and practice. The essays collected here present the significant place of music in the writing of T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, James Weldon Johnson, Mina Loy, Stephen Mallarme, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein,Wallace Stevens and Virginia Woolf, as well as the importance of literary art for composers such as George Antheil, Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messaein, and The Beatles. Contributors explore the role of music and literary modernism in the postmodern sublime, sound and "music" in language, the uneasy alliance of jazz and pop song in high modernist work, the Beatles as modernists, and other topics. This is a revised and updated second edition.
This remarkable exploration of the underbelly of New York City life from 1880 to 1930 takes readers through the city's inexhaustible variety of distinctive neighborhood cultures. Slumming in New York shows how the city's rich and poor, foreign-born and native-born, competed for a voice from such diverse vantage points as the East Side waterfront, the Bowery, the Tenderloin's "black bohemia," the Jewish Lower East Side, and mythic Harlem. Investigating a wide range of New York "slumming" narratives in which mainstream outsiders write about marginalized urban insiders, Robert M. Dowling shows how literary works transformed moral threats into cultural treasures.
Paul Robeson's Voices is a meditation on Robeson's singing, a study of the artist's life in song. Music historian Grant Olwage examines Robeson's voice as it exists in two broad and intersecting domains: as sound object and sounding gesture, specifically how it was fashioned in the contexts of singing practices, in recital, concert, and recorded performance, and as subject of identification. Olwage asks: how does the voice encapsulate modes of subjectivity, of being? Combining deep archival research with musicological theory, this book is a study of voice as central to Robeson's sense of self and his politics. Paul Robeson's Voices charts the dialectal process of Robeson's vocal and self-discovery, documenting some of the ways Robeson's practice revised the traditions of concert singing in the first half of the twentieth century and how his voice manifested as resistance.