Customer Reviews:
Indespensable.......2006-02-19
Quite frankly I think every student of Yoruba culture should own this book. While Gelede is the central object of study, the books touches on multiple aspects Yoruba and Orisa spirituality. The amount of information is so overwhelming that you will literally have to read it over and over again.
A very good book.......2000-12-06
I do recommend this nice book to all those engaged in the practice of the Yoruba cult. The author gives a good persp- ective of what is behind the cerimony. Mo juba Iyami Osoronga!
Worth reading for student & practitioners of Yoruba religion.......1998-06-22
This is a fairly good book on the subject of Yoruba masks and drumming. Contains good pictures of masks (Gelede) and is very informative with regards to ceremonies performed at the Gelede.
Is recommended reading for any of the followers of the Yoruba religion and to students as well.
I would have liked to have seen a more in depth review of the ceremonies and religious aspects of the Gelede, therefore I have not rated it a 5 Star.
Nonetheless, I would still read it all over again !
Book Description
African American Performance and Theater History is an anthology of critical writings that explores the intersections of race, theater, and performance in America. Assembled by two esteemed scholars in black theater, Harry J. Elam, Jr. and David Krasner, and composed of essays from acknowledged authorities in the field, this anthology is organized into four sections representative of the ways black theater, drama, and performance interact and enact continual social, cultural, and political dialogues. Ranging from a discussion of dramatic performances of Uncle Tom's Cabin to the Black Art Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, articles gathered in the first section, "Social Protest and the Politics of Representation," discuss the ways in which African American theater and performance have operated as social weapons and tools of protest. The second section of the volume, "Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory and Performance," features, among other essays, Joseph Roach's chronicle of the slave performances at Congo Square in New Orleans and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s critique of August Wilson's cultural polemics. "Intersections of Race and Gender," the third section, includes analyses of the intersections of race and gender on the minstrel stage, the plight of black female choreographers at the inception of Modern Dance, and contemporary representations of black homosexuality by PomoAfro Homo. Using theories of performance and performativity, articles in the fourth section, "African American Performativity and the Performance of Race," probe into the ways blackness and racial identity have been constructed in and through performance. The final section is a round-table assessment of the past and present state of African American Theater and Performance Studies by some of the leading senior scholars in the field--James V. Hatch, Sandra L. Richards, and Margaret B. Wilkerson. Revealing the dynamic relationship between race and theater, this volume illustrates how the social and historical contexts of production critically affect theatrical performances of blackness and their meanings and, at the same time, how African American cultural, social, and political struggles have been profoundly affected by theatrical representations and performances. This one-volume collection is sure to become an important reference for those studying black theater and an engrossing survey for all readers of African American literature.
Book Description
Herman Gray takes a sweeping look at black popular culture over the past decade to explore culture's role in the push for black political power and social recognition. In a series of linked essays, he finds that black artists, scholars, musicians, and others have been instrumental in reconfiguring social and cultural life in the United States and he provocatively asks how black culture can now move beyond a preoccupation with inclusion and representation.
Gray considers how Wynton Marsalis and his creation of a jazz canon at Lincoln Center acted to establish cultural visibility and legitimacy for jazz. Other essays address such topics as the work of the controversial artist Kara Walker; the relentless struggles for representation on network television when those networks are no longer the primary site of black or any other identity; and how black musicians such as Steve Coleman and George Lewis are using new technology to shape and extend black musical traditions and cultural identities.
Customer Reviews:
The Poverty of Sociological Reductionism in Black Cultural Studies.......2006-07-20
Gray, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, builds on his previous scholarship on the circulation of race in network television and jazz in this study of contemporary black cultural politics. The book starts on a promising foot, offering a paradigm of cultural production that examines how current "black self-representation and collective self-fashioning in music, visual arts, broadcast television, and new information technologies...move beyond cultural politics preoccupied solely with inclusion, representation, and identity" (3). According to Gray, *Cultural Moves* is interested in the interplay between media, technology, consumerism, and institutionality as they bear on current strategies of black cultural representation.
Unfortunately, the rest of the book fails to deliver on this intriguing premise. Gray is the type of sociologist who spends so much time setting up his structuralist account of social action that he never gets around to actually analyzing the things -- artistic practices, musical and visual texts -- that constitute cultural production as such. On the potentially illustrative case of Wynton Marsalis' directorship of the jazz program at the Lincoln Center, for example, Gray is paralyzed by utterly meaningless abstractions -- to wit, "jazz is characterized by a complex set of social values, a sophisticated tradition of recognizable texts and practitioners, and a systemic means of reproduction" (37). Wow. I can almost hear Marsalis howling in mock disgust at Gray's sociological reductionism, for evacuated from this discussion is *any* concept of the properly aesthetic irruptions that Marsalis' jazz project brings to the U.S. musical and concertgoing establishment. Instead, we leave this example with merely a vague intimation of Marsalis' "cultural difference."
In a similar vein, chapters on the circulation of blacks in postnetwork TV culture (pp. 77-113) and in cyberspace (pp. 133-47) cite NO examples of actual texts, television shows, websites, etc. to support Gray's theories, save a smattering of references to Fox's *In Living Color*. Rather than engage original interpretive analysis of the multitude of examples available to him, Gray is content to wax academic on the *idea* of black cultural production with trite, vacuous pieties such as, "To the extent that television ever did produce effective national identifications by managing racial difference through exclusion and eventually incorporation, it did so primarily through representation and consumption" (105). This is a truly unfortunate sentence, enamored as it is of its seeming intelligence when all it says is the painfully obvious -- that television's "racial" meaning is a function of representation and consumption.
In short, this book is a reductive sociological account of complex cultural phenomena -- a mode of scholarship that I've noted is all-too-common in the field of black cultural studies in particular. As someone who is committed to the serious, in-depth study of black cultural politics, I'm dismayed by scholars like Gray who cannot understand cultural practices as they are taken up by living, breathing people rather than disembodied, structuralist theories. (And not especially smart structuralist theories at that.)
Book Description
Cain made the first blackface turn, blackface minstrels liked to say of the first man forced to wander the world acting out his low place in life. It wasn't the "approved" reading, but then, blackface wasn't the "approved" culture either--yet somehow we're still dancing to its renegade tune. The story of an insubordinate, rebellious, truly popular culture stretching from Jim Crow to hip hop is told for the first time in Raising Cain, a provocative look at how the outcasts of official culture have made their own place in the world.
Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to handle, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer, W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating. He shows that early blackface, dating back to the 1830s, put forward an interpretation of blackness as that which endured a commonly felt scorn and often outwitted it. To follow the subsequent turns taken by the many forms of blackface is to pursue the way modern social shifts produce and disperse culture. Raising Cain follows these forms as they prolong and adapt folk performance and popular rites for industrial commerce, then project themselves into the rougher modes of postmodern life through such heirs of blackface as stand-up comedy, rock 'n' roll, talk TV, and hip hop.
Formally raising Cain in its myriad variants, blackface appears here as a racial project more radical even than abolitionism. Lhamon's account of its provenance and persistence is a major reinterpretation of American culture.
Customer Reviews:
Contexts, Talents, and Cross-fertilization.......2001-12-10
Richard J. Powell's Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century is fascinating reading for ever type of reader: aficionados of Negritude, lovers of prints, paintings, or sculpture, lovers of cinema and pop culture, students of Caribbean cultures, lovers of contemporary or modern art, and students of African-American history. There is truly something here for everyone. This small paperback book is jammed with illustrations rarely seen. Powell's keen eye and sharp intellect make this a rare treat. Powell approaches his subject from many angles, and we are left inspired to seek more. A fantastic buy.
20th Century Black Art Discussed in Dynamic Fashion.......2000-01-30
Examine the African diaspora - a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade and western colonialism while learning about the lives of african american artists who dipicted the temprament of this timeperiod through visual arts. Catlett, Bearden, Mailou Jones, Lawrence, and many others artists are discussed. The "New Negro", Post-Depression period, Souls of Black folks and divided souls of the african american (europe versus african) which called racial idenity into question are also discussed. Very well written and I highly recommend.
Customer Reviews:
Twenty Six Views on Black Performances.......2006-06-21
This book contains twenty six essays on black culture and how it has moved from Africa to the United States and from there to the world. It is specifically oriented to the performing arts, loosely defined to include everything from gospel music to sports to television series. The contributors are an eclectic mix of scholars (mostly), critics and practicing artists who express their own views about black culture.
The writers, like people everywhere offer a diverse set of views from their own perspectives. In these times the influence of Black culture in areas like popular music and sports that even these writers have a hard time defining things like Black Music. Music for instance that started as black has found homes in other cultures as diverse as Gospel groups in Australia and Broadway.
This book could be used for readings in Black studies, or by anyone interested in the differentiation in Black performing arts.
A thought-provoking discussion.......2006-03-23
This is not a collection of essays celebrating the tremendous influence of black culture around the world.
Instead, as Tricia Rose states in the Foreword, "The traffic in black culture to which this volume is dedicated is tethered to the trafficking in black bodies on which these cultural exchanges are based. They share several disheartening characteristics: similar trade routes, unequal forms of exchange, and often, a soulless focus on capital gain." But she adds, "Despite the troubled ground on which these traffic patterns are set, a good deal of black culture emphasizes sacrifice for the larger good and a steadfast commitment to affirmation and confirmation against relentlessly long odds."
I suspect that if the 26 contributors - an international and interdisciplinary mix of scholars, critics, and practicing artists - met together in a room, they would not reach consensus on exactly what constitutes "black culture" or "appropriation" or "authenticity." But therein lies the book's strength; there is no company line here, but rather a dynamic, thought-provoking discussion.
Racial "hybridization" and public perceptions are a common thread, as in Caroline Streeter's "Faking the Funk? Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys and (Hybrid) Black Celebrity."
Others explore the commodification - or "trafficking" - of black culture. It is not addressed as a simple matter of whites exploiting blacks. As Kennell Jackson notes in "The Shadows of Texts: Will Black Music and Singers Sell Everything on Television?" the sort of collaboration taking place between black artists and television ad creators "reminds us that in late capitalism black cultural material often travels in commercial contexts with collusion of the makers of cultural products."
It's impossible to sum up this diverse collection in a few paragraphs. Suffice to say I think it provides much food for thought to anyone interested in cultural studies, African American Studies, vernacular culture or the arts in general.
The book came out too early to address Dave Chapelle's rationale for terminating his show, which he summed up to Oprah as discomfort over "the white guy laughing." Here's hoping the second edition includes something by or about him, since it would be a perfect fit.
Book Description
African-American art has made an increasingly vital contribution to the art of the United States from the time of its origins in early-eighteenth-century slave communities. Folk and decorative arts such as ceramics, furniture, and quilts are discussed alongside fine art -- sculpture, painting, and photography -- produced by African Americans, both enslaved and free, throughout the nineteenth century. Twentieth-century developments are given full coverage, particularly the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the Era of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism through the 1960s and 1970s, and the emergence of new black artists and theorists in the 1980s and 1990s. New evidence has provided an exciting myriad of perspectives about African-American art, confirming that it represents the culture and society from which it emerges. Professor Patton explores significant issues such as the relationship of art and politics, the influence of galleries and museums, the growth of black universities, critical theory, the impact of artists' collectives, and the assortment of art practices since the 1960s. African-American Art shows that in its cultural diversity and synthesis of cultures it mirrors those in American society as a whole. `African-American Art should be read by teachers, students, and writers, and on the shelves of every library. Professor Patton begins this impressive book with the slave ships that brought Africans to this country and gives evidence of the fine metalworking, carving, carpentry, basketry, weaving, and clay building skills passed from Africa through the works of valued but nameless slave-artisans. She tells how we learned accidentally about a few named artists like the slave, Scipio Moorhead, who in 1773 engraved the only surviving image of poet, Phyllis Wheatley. She describes the portraitists, furniture makers and highly skilled artisans. Sharon Patton follows a path leading from great African formal styles, which, mixed with the powerful expressive force of struggle and opposition, led to distinctive new ideasfrom the quilts of Harriet Powers in the late 1800s to the paintings of Jean Michel Basquiat in the 1980s. She helps the reader to think and search for the evidence of the art-making skills that not only survived the Middle Passage, but the many erasings of the auction block and racism's lack, little and denial. In a fine survey of contemporary African-American art and ideascomplete with words from the artists themselvesPatton takes us first through its foundations and the through the movements, people and ideas that surrounded and generated this art. An art historian, curator, and scholar, Patton has produced a volume which, like no other, can be used both as an unusual reference book and a good read on an important part of American art. The illustrations are a special treat.' Emma Amos, Artist Professor of Art, Rutgers University `For a long period of time there has been an acknowledged need for a comprehensive text that integrates the full range of African American artistry, the building crafts, slave craftsmanship, the decorative and the fine arts tradition into one scholarly document. Professor Patton has brought those elements of history into her text that are often omitted in the available texts on the subject of African-American art and much of what she has written is primary information not previously recorded outside the context of social history. The cultural context in which Professor Patton has written accounts of the artistry of African-American artists and craftsmen from the period of American slavery to the present is illuminating, analytically sound, and well documented. She has brought to the attention of the reader a number of topics such as 'Art Institutions and the Artist's Groups' that have not been thoroughly discussed in previous texts on the subject. A subject such as 'The Plantation House', the place where many decorative arts originated in the slave society is a welcomed addition to Professor Patton's historical overview.' David Driskell, Artist Distinguished University Professor of Art, University of Maryland `Sharon Patton has written a much needed text which surveys the broad scope of the history of African-American art from slavery to the present. She has followed a different tack, tracing art themes and their development throughout the history, rather than the influences of specific artists or periods. Thus, she shows how ideas such as crafts, formal painting and sculpture, or architecture, co-existed with equal importance to the culture from the times of the Colonies. In so doing, she breaks down the barrier between folk and formal art, and articulates an interrelationship of both concepts to African-American people and their culture. Her book expands the framework for the visual arts in the United States in the last two centuries.' Professor Keith Morrison, Dean, College of Creative Arts, San Francisco State University
Customer Reviews:
Great resource and easy to read.......2000-10-10
Sharon Patton does a wonderful job placing African-American art and artist within the contex of the time in which it was made. She shows how people of color were part of all the art movements and what the contributions were. The reproductions are high quality and the images cover many different mediums. It is easy to read and flows more like a story of art instead of a dry lecture.
Book Description
In 1363 the Black Death struck central Italy for the second time, causing a detectable shift in notions of the afterlife and patterns of charitable giving. Throughout Tuscany and Umbria, patricians and peasants alike abandoned their previous practice of dividing bequests into small sums, combining them instead into last gifts to enhance their "fame and glory" and that of their lineages. Illustrative of the new mentality, religious art patronage spread to new social classes, touching even peasants, who sought to be represented "in their very likeness" at the feet of their patron saints. From the supposed center of Renaissance culture--Florence--to the citadel of Franciscan devotion--Assisi--this change in sentiment spurred new levels of demand for monumental burials, testamentary commissions for art, and other efforts to exert control over the living from the grave.
In his award-winning study, Death and Property in Siena, historian Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., used close analysis of last wills to chart transformations in mentalities over a six-hundred-year history. In The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death, he applies the same methods to compare six Italian city-states--Arezzo, Florence, Perugia, Assisi, Pisa, and Siena--showing the rise of a new Renaissance cult of remembrance. But this new cult was not Burckhardt's Renaissance "individualism" tout court. Instead, the new piety grew in tandem with reverence for the ancestors and a strong sense of family identity that flowed down male blood lines.
Book Description
This richly illustrated book offers a glimpse into the lives and creativity of African American quilters during the era of slavery. Originally published in 1989, Stitched from the Soul was the first book to examine the history of quilting in the enslaved community and to place slave-made quilts into historical and cultural context. It remains a beautiful and moving tribute to an African American tradition.
Undertaking a national search to locate slave-crafted textiles, Gladys-Marie Fry uncovered a treasure trove of pieces. The 123 color and black and white photographs featured here highlight many of the finest and most interesting examples of the quilts, woven coverlets, counterpanes, rag rugs, and crocheted artifacts attributed to slave women and men. In a new preface, Fry reflects on the inspiration behind her original research--the desire to learn more about her enslaved great-great-grandmother, a skilled seamstress--and on the deep and often emotional chords the book has struck among readers bonded by an interest in African American artistry.
Amazon.com
The great strength of this fascinating examination of "cross-racial impersonations and imitators" is the thoroughness with which Susan Gubar approaches her topic, focusing on film, literature, journalism, painting, and photography. Because she focuses on the decades before the 1970s, Gubar takes in a great deal of territory--movies such as Birth of a Nation, in which blacks were played by whites in blackface; and Watermelon Man, a 1970 film in which black comedian Godfrey Cambridge played a white man who mysteriously becomes black; the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe; minstrel images of Bing Crosby, Shirley Temple, and Mickey Rooney; as well as instances of literary "blackface" such as white writer William Styron's novel The Confession of Nat Turner. This is an important work that illuminates the tangle of American mulatto culture that produced both Elvis (who wanted to sing like a black man) and country music singer Charlie Pride.
Book Description
When the actor Ted Danson appeared in blackface at a 1993 Friars Club roast, he ignited a firestorm of protest that landed him on the front pages of the newspapers, rebuked by everyone from talk show host Montel Williams to New York City's then mayor, David Dinkins. Danson's use of blackface was shocking, but was the furious pitch of the response a triumphant indication of how far society has progressed since the days when blackface performers were the toast of vaudeville, or was it also an uncomfortable reminder of how deep the chasm still is separating black and white America? In Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, Susan Gubar, who fundamentally changed the way we think about women's literature as co-author of the acclaimed The Madwoman in the Attic, turns her attention to the incendiary issue of race. Through a far-reaching exploration of the long overlooked legacy of minstrelsy--cross-racial impersonations or "racechanges"--throughout modern American film, fiction, poetry, painting, photography, and journalism, she documents the indebtedness of "mainstream" artists to African-American culture, and explores the deeply conflicted psychology of white guilt. The fascinating "racechanges" Gubar discusses include whites posing as blacks and blacks "passing" for white; blackface on white actors in The Jazz Singer, Birth of a Nation, and other movies, as well as on the faces of black stage entertainers; African-American deployment of racechange imagery during the Harlem Renaissance, including the poetry of Anne Spencer, the black-and-white prints of Richard Bruce Nugent, and the early work of Zora Neale Hurston; white poets and novelists from Vachel Lindsay and Gertrude Stein to John Berryman and William Faulkner writing as if they were black; white artists and writers fascinated by hypersexualized stereotypes of black men; and nightmares and visions of the racechanged baby. Gubar shows that unlike African-Americans, who often are forced to adopt white masks to gain their rights, white people have chosen racial masquerades, which range from mockery and mimicry to an evolving emphasis on inter-racial mutuality and mutability. Drawing on a stunning array of illustrations, including paintings, film stills, computer graphics, and even magazine morphings, Racechanges sheds new light on the persistent pervasiveness of racism and exciting aesthetic possibilities for lessening the distance between blacks and whites.
Books:
- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
- Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s (Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications)
- Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- As You Like It
- The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed
- Methods in Enzymology, Volume 229: Cumulative Subject Index, Volumes 195-198, 200-227
- Probability and Statistics in Experimental Physics
- Practical Research: Planning and Design
- The Attractor Factor: 5 Easy Steps for Creating Wealth
- The Essential Weimaraner
- Anatomy for Fantasy Artists: An Illustrator's Guide to Creating Action Figures and Fantastical Forms
- New American Additions and Renovations: Innovations in Residential Construction and Design: 25 Cas
- Apple Pie Tree
African
| Regional
| History & Criticism
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
The Gelede Spectacle: Art, Gender, and Social Harmony in an African Culture
Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations Of Aje In Africana Literature (Blacks in the Diaspora)
The Sacred IFA Oracle
Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought
Osun Across the Waters : A Yoruba Goddess in
