164 p., Explores four contemporary novels and a film that rely heavily on photographic and mass-media images to illuminate, articulate, and critique modern-day Black urban existence: Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1997), Chris Abani's Graceland (2004), John Edgar Wideman's Fanon , Paulo Lins' Cidade de Deus (1997), and Fernando Meirelles' 2002 film adaptation of Lins' novel City of God . Chapters examine the ways in which photographic and/or mass-media images are used as narrative tropes or devices for representing the material conditions of an emerging slum existence. The author argues that each text reveals a preoccupation with the rise of global urbanism and visual culture as new types of discursive spaces--new kinds of "texts"-- that shape not only the real life of black people, but also the literary landscape of Black writing across the globe.
233 p., Analyzes three contemporary novels by Black women authors to argue that their daughter-protagonists gain a sense of their own subjectivities as women of African descent through their imaginative and creative responses to their respective muted paternal histories and legacies. These responses motivate the creation of ritualistic art forms rooted in communal practices such as storytelling, sculpting, music, dance-drama, folk medicine, and traditional cuisine. Maps the centrality of family, community, rituals, and art to the development of female subjectivity as represented in Marilene Felinto's As mulheres de Tijucopapo / The Women of Tijucopapo , Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker , and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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423 p., Focuses on the migrations and metamorphoses of black bodies, practices, and discourses around the Atlantic, particularly with regard to current issues such as questions of identity, political and human rights, cosmopolitics, and mnemo-history. Includes Judith M. Williams' "Néritude as performance practice: Rio de Janeiro's Black experimental theatre," Richard Follett's "The spirit of Brazil: football and the politics of Afro-Brazilian cultural identity," Dorothea Fischer-Hornung's "Transbodied/transcultured : moving spirits in Katherine Dunham's and Maya Deren's Caribbean," Elvira Pulitano's "Re-mapping Caribbean land(sea)scapes: aquatic metaphors and transatlantic homes in Caryl Phillips's The Atlantic sound," and Antoinette Tidjani Alou's "Marine origins and anti-marine tropism in the French Caribbean: André and Simone Schwarz-Bart."
Africans have begun to form a new diaspora in Brazil, the country with the largest concentration of Afro descendents outside of Africa. This paper aims to explore, through interviews, the various motivations and experiences of these Africans, as well as to examine the official attitude of the Brazilian authorities and that of the society at large to the new residents of this modern African diaspora.
152 p., Sheds light on the importance of orality as it is embedded in the cultural traditions of the Colombian Caribbean. Examines the different ways in which orality is manifested and produced in Colombian popular culture and literature. Also explores the dynamics of "primary orality," in which orality compensates for the absence of knowledge or usage of a written alphabet, and "secondary orality," in which orality is sustained by a technological device, in this case the cassette.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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274 p., Explores a broad range of power relationships and struggles for authority in the early 19th century British Atlantic, focusing on the Caribbean colony of Berbice. I aim to understand how enslaved people and their enslavers negotiated their relationships and forged their lives within multiple, interconnected networks of power in a notoriously brutal society. Focuses on politics and culture writ large and small, zooming in to see the internal conflicts, practices, and hierarchies that governed individual plantations, communities, and families; and zooming out to explore the various ways that imperial officials, colonial administrators, and metropolitan antislavery activists tried to shape Caribbean area slavery during the era of amelioration-a crucial period of transformation in the Atlantic world. Sources used include travel narratives, trial records, missionary correspondence, and official government documents. Most important are the records of the Berbice fiscals and protectors of slaves, officials charged with hearing enslaved peoples' grievances and enforcing colonial laws.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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249 p., Investigates the role of music in 20th century literature of the Americas. It expands the concept of the New Negro Renaissance in terms of time, place, and language. Previous studies have diminished the geographical and temporal extent of this defining moment, locating it in Harlem, starting in 1919 with the end of WWI and the Great Migration, and ending with the 1930 Great Depression. This project departs from this traditional account, demonstrating that what is usually perceived as a North American phenomenon was, in fact, international from its inception. Paying particular attention to the United States and the Caribbean, it examines "The New Negro Flow," which represents the discussion occurring during the first half of the 20th century between places in the Americas where there had been a large transplanted Black population.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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89 p, "Anthropological iconoclasts Richard and Sally Price have spent the last two decades not only creating an unparalleled oeuvre of scholarship in several areas of anthropology but also unabashedly calling foul on any untenable or patronizing concepts of "us" and "them," "primitive" and "modern," that cross their path. For this pamphlet, they crack the yellowing diaries kept by Melville and Frances Herskovits on their famous 1920s expedition deep into the South American jungle, exposing--with their trademark combination of deadpan wit and theoretical rigor--the origins of the field that has come to be known as African diaspora studies." (publisher)
