Examines the meanings of the marvelous in the context of the Afro-Brazilian ritual called the Reinado de Nossa Senhora do Rosário, according to the way it is applied in the song lyrics and in participants’ verbal discourses. Analyses were based on participants’ perspectives about the origin and history of their religious tradition, which is based on their enslaved ancestors’ experiences of pain. Those facts and events still highlight the sense of belonging to this tradition nowadays and make their performative acts meaningful, significant, and thus wonderful., unedited non–English abstract received by RILM] Os significados da ‘maravilha’ no contexto do Reinado de Nossa Senhora do Rosário, tal como o termo é utilizado nos cantos e nas elaborações discursivas dos congadeiros, são aqui abordados a partir da perspectiva desses participantes sobre a origem e o percurso histórico de sua tradição religiosa, calcada na experiencia da dor de seus ancestrais escravizados. Tais fatos e eventos ainda motivam o pertencimento a essa tradição no presente e preenchem de sentido, de significância e, consequentemente, de maravilha as ações performáticas atuais.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Contains the full text of 1,310 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Contains the full text of plays, written from the 1850s to the present, by playwright
Within sectors of North America's African-American community, the colloquial expression "being touched by the brush" describes a multi-ethnic individual that possesses subtle Negroid physical features which are only detectable by close inspection by a "trained eye." Here, Edison discusses the historical factors in Puerto Rico and Panama that make up the foundation upon which Francisco Arrivi's "Los Vejigantes" and Carlos Guillermo Wilson's "Chombo" were constructed.;
The conjure woman has long lived as a popular American cultural icon, so much so that it seemed destined that multimedia conglomerate the Walt Disney Company would eventually adopt and embrace her. The conjure woman's likeness is reflected in the Disney feature films Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007). This essay investigates just what happens to black women and spirit work when placed in the hands of Disney, a corporation with a sordid history of pirating in another context. The work is particularly invested in complicating black female body politics by addressing the additional stigma against female spiritual autonomy. How is an association with African spiritual cosmologies inscribed on the physicality of black women in popular culture? I focus my attention on Tia Dalma, the minor black female character engaged in Vodou in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, applying a close reading of the spiritual iconography and other cinematic coding surrounding her performance of African-based spirituality. I assess Disney's appropriation of black cultural forms in the construction of fantasy and fairytale.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
156 P., Focusing on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, these seven one-act radio plays vividly capture the loneliness and isolation that can be felt in one of the world's largest cities. With characteristic humor and poignancy, these stories touch on the dreams and disappointments of both the young and old as they face racial and class differences in a sprawling, urban London.
Around the beginning of the 20th century the codes for representing masculinity in opera began to change. This essay focuses on how the changing codes of masculinity in leading male roles are calibrated differently for white European characters and nonwhite characters with non-European ancestry (for example, African American, Caribbean, Moorish, or African) and shows how masculinity and heroism are brought together differently for black and non-black characters. The first section examines Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (1887) and focuses on a critical moment near the end of the opera that links orchestral developments in Italy at the end of the 19th century with the way Verdi dramatizes Otello's vicious murder of Desdemona. A broader overview considers four operas written in the first half of the 20th century: Berg's Wozzeck (1925), Krenek's Jonny spielt auf (1927), Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935), and Britten's Peter Grimes (1945). Two of these operas (Wozzeck and Peter Grimes) feature white European title characters, while the other two feature African American protagonists.
Reading Heading South as a decolonial romance reveals anxiety about the liminal location of young male citizens in 1970s Haiti caught within the necropower of state terror and US imperialism. Focusing on young men selling 'romance' on the beach within the continuing colonial relations between the United States and Haiti and black and white bodies, the film engages with the limits of transracial, heterosexual romance in sex tourism. The impossibility of romance shows that for Haitian citizens, nationalist redemption lies in politics not in transracial intimacies. However, politics is itself necropolitical, since death is the only passage to narratable citizenship. As a decolonial moment, death speaks about the necropower of daily existence for Haitian citizens caught between state terror and US imperialism; asserts agency in the 'will to death in order to be free'; and highlights the disposability and (un)grievability of poor, young black bodies in Baby Doc Duvalier's Haiti.
Rolando,Gloria (Author), Grupo de Video "Imagenes del Caribe" en colaboración con "Videoteca del Sur" (Editor), Monse Duane, Sonia Boggiano, Zoraima Segón, Renny Arozarena, Luz Ma. Collazo, Jorge Prieto, Aimeé Despaigne, Nora Rodríguez, Manuel Oña (Series Editor), and Maria Josefa Gómez (Translator)
Format:
Video/DVD
Publication Date:
2001
Published:
Arlington, MA: AfroCubaWeb.com
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Journal Title Details:
DVD video 1 videodisc (49 min.)
Notes:
This drama follows a young Cuban woman investigating her family history, and discovering disturbing revelations about the 1912 genocide, in which over 6,000 members of the Independents of Color were killed by the Cuban Army
Considers the role of music, both symbolic and material, in screen representations of Rio de Janeiro since the 1950s. The music of Rio's streets and hillsides has played more than a mere supporting role in the cinematic representations of the city across the last half-century. Embracing samba, bossa nova, MPB, soul, funk, funk carioca (a local variant of Miami bass), and rap, the heterogeneous voices of Rio's soundscape have arguably shaped audiences' understanding and imagination of its cultural geography and social dynamic as much as the films' visual narratives and dramas. The author discusses some key examples spanning the last 50 years, from Nelson Pereira dos Santos's Rio, Zona Norte (Rio, North Zone, 1957) and Marcel Camus's Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus, 1959), to Carlos Diegues's remake Orfeu (Orpheus, 1999) and Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002). Taking as his point of departure the mythical narrative of Orpheus, he explores the representation of popular music as a force for social redemption, regeneration, and reconciliation. He interrogates the interplay of different musical styles and idioms, such as samba and bossa nova, on screen, and challenges one of the common assumptions about shifts in style and sound: the idea that the harder soundtracks of most recent films (centering on rap and funk carioca) correspond to a necessarily more realistic and truthful representation of the city, as opposed to the allegedly sentimentalized depictions associated with the bossa nova-influenced scores of Orfeu negro and Rio, Zona Norte. In cinematic representations of the city, Rio's musical identity continues to be performed in a dialogue between tradition and innovation, the local and the diasporic, with no song style being more real than any other.
Diegues,Carlos (Author), Pompeo,Antonio (Author), Arraes,Augusto (Author), and Arraes,Augusto (Editor)
Format:
Video/DVD
Language:
por
Publication Date:
1991
Published:
New York, NY: New Yorker Video
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
1 videocassette (114 min.) : sd., col. ; 1/2 in; VHS., A dramatization which chronicles the Palmares quilombo, the most famous of the 17th century Brazilian groups of runaway black slaves. Shows how this self-governing community flourished for several decades under the reign of the legendary chieftan Ganga Zumba; Writer, director, Carlos Diegues. Videocassette release of the 1984 motion picture; In Portuguese with English subtitles; Director of photography, Lauro Escorel Filho; music, Gilberto Gil
The article discusses the role that the visual arts and museums—through the way their framing and selection choices shape viewers’ perception—play in the construction and deconstruction of post/colonial Caribbean identities. The locus of the analysis is a multimedia installation titled White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece, which was mounted at the Barbados Museum by Barbadian Canadian visual artist Joscelyn Gardner in 2004. The artist's aim in the installation was to expose the telling gaps, silences, and omissions in regard to black and white kinship and inter-racial relations in artistic productions of the colonial period. One such production was the sub-genre of portraiture known as the conversation piece, which was fashionable among an emerging middle class that included colonial landowners and merchants eager to use that visual medium to simultaneously document the wealth their colonial connections brought them and disavow their use and abuse of black bodies to create that wealth. In challenging the conventions of the conversation piece, Gardner recovers unspoken and suppressed stories from the colonial Caribbean past in order to re-present black and white Creole females identities; and in her use of the installation to ‘intervene’ into items displayed in permanent exhibits, she demonstrates how the Museum can become a site of active contestation of received knowledge.
Describes the reflections and experiences of conducting research with a group of excluded young people of African Caribbean descent. The project used participant photography to engage the participants. Concludes that visual research methods empower young people, minimizing the power relationship that can exist between the researcher and young person in conventional interviews.
