This volume documents a groundbreaking convening on January 28, 2017 in The Met’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, inspired by the exhibition Kerry James Marshall: Mastry on view at The Met Breuer October 25, 2016–January 29, 2017. During the daylong event, twenty noted thought leaders and creative practitioners considered the role of creativity, hard work, social justice, and imagination in art history, performance, science, and other disciplines inspired by visual artist Kerry James Marshall’s practice and work. The event was a mix of rich extended conversations and exciting nine-minute performances and presentations. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana} The program and this publication were made possible by the generous support of the Ford Foundation.
Whether you are a student with a keen interest in literature, or a teacher wondering where to start with those poems haunting your curriculum, "Art of Poetry" will show you the way. Comprising a series of intense, yet accessible, explorations of twenty famous poems, these books expose the inner circuitry of poetry.
The Art of Poetry, volume 4, offers sharp and engaging critical essays on all the poems from the pre-1900 selection of AQA's A-level English Literature poetry anthology, Love Through the Ages. Alongside the essays are teaching and revision ideas to stimulate students and teachers as well as advice on writing comparative essays and tackling unseen poetry.
This innovative, new critical guide follows the same format as our Art of Poetry series. High quality, fine-grained analysis of key aspects of the play, including essays on key characters and exploration of key scenes, is supported with contextual information, teaching ideas and much more. Designed specifically for teachers and high-achieving GCSE pupils, The Art of Drama is a springboard to better teaching, greater literary appreciation and to the highest grades.
Soul Covers is an engaging look at how three very different rhythm and blues performers—Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Phoebe Snow—used cover songs to negotiate questions of artistic, racial, and personal authenticity. Through close readings of song lyrics and the performers’ statements about their lives and work, the literary critic Michael Awkward traces how Franklin, Green, and Snow crafted their own musical identities partly by taking up songs associated with artists such as Dinah Washington, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, George Gershwin, Billie Holiday, and the Supremes. Awkward sees Franklin’s early album Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington, released shortly after Washington’s death in 1964, as an attempt by a struggling young singer to replace her idol as the acknowledged queen of the black female vocal tradition. He contends that Green’s album Call Me (1973) reveals the performer’s attempt to achieve formal coherence by uniting seemingly irreconcilable aspects of his personal history, including his career in popular music and his religious yearnings, as well as his sense of himself as both a cosmopolitan black artist and a forlorn country boy. Turning to Snow’s album Second Childhood (1976), Awkward suggests that through covers of blues and soul songs, Snow, a white Jewish woman from New York, explored what it means for non-black enthusiasts to perform works considered by many to be black cultural productions. The only book-length examination of the role of remakes in American popular music, Soul Covers is itself a refreshing new take on the lives and work of three established soul artists.
As garment workers, longshoremen, autoworkers, sharecroppers and clerks took to the streets, striking and organizing unions in the midst of the Depression, artists, writers and filmmakers joined the insurgent social movement by creating a cultural front. Disney cartoonists walked picket lines, and Billie Holiday sand 'Strange Fruit' at the left-wing cabaret, Café Society. Duke Ellington produced a radical musical, Jump for Joy, New York garment workers staged the legendary Broadway revue Pins and Needles, and Orson Welles and his Mercury players took their labor operas and anti-fascist Shakespeare to Hollywood and made Citizen Kane. A major reassessment of US cultural history, The Cultural Front is a vivid mural of this extraordinary upheaval which reshaped American culture in the twentieth century.
This book looks at the influence of jazz on the development of African American modernist literature over the 20th century, with a particular attention to the social and aesthetic significance of stylistic changes in the music.
Engaging with critical theory, poststructuralist perspectives, cultural studies, film theory and urban studies, the book provides stunning insights into the micropolitics of ethnicity, identity, security, subjectivity and sovereignty.
A daring and innovative study that rewrites the story of American pragmatism. Emancipating Pragmatism is a radical rereading of Emerson that posits African- American culture, literature, and jazz as the very continuation and embodiment of pragmatic thought and democratic tradition. It traces Emerson's philosophical legacy through the 19th and 20th centuries to discover how Emersonian thought continues to inform issues of race, aesthetics, and poetic discourse. Emerson's pragmatism derives from his abolitionism, Michael Magee argues, and any pragmatic thought that aspires toward democracy canno.
The New York loft jazz scene of the 1970s was a pivotal period for uncompromising, artist-produced work. Faced with a flagging jazz economy, a group of young avant-garde improvisers chose to eschew the commercial sphere and develop alternative venues in the abandoned factories and warehouses of Lower Manhattan. Loft Jazz provides the first book-length study of this period, tracing its history amid a series of overlapping discourses surrounding collectivism, urban renewal, experimentalist aesthetics, underground archives, and the radical politics of self-determination.
This extensively researched text concerning the life and career of Liverpool-born Black jazz musician Gordon Stretton not only contributes to the important debate concerning the transoceanic pathways of jazz during the 20th century, but also suggests to the jazz fan and scholar alike that such pathways, reaching as they also did across the Atlantic from Europe, are actually part of a largely ignored therefore partially-hidden history of 20th century jazz performance, industry and influence. The work also exists to contribute to a more complete picture of the significance of diaspora studies across the spectrum of popular music performance, and to award to those Liverpool musicians who were not contributors to the city’s musical visage post-rock ‘n’ roll, a place in popular music history. Gordon Stretton was a jazz pioneer in several senses: he emerged from a poverty-stricken, racially marginalized upbringing in Liverpool to develop a popular music career emblematic of Black diasporan experience. He was a child dancer and singer in the Lancashire Lads (the troupe which was also part of a young Charlie Chaplin’s development), a well-respected solo touring artist in the UK as ‘The Natural Artistic Coon’, a chorister and musical director with the Jamaican Choral Union and, having encountered syncopated music, a jazz percussionist, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist (not to mention a ground-breaking bandleader). All of these musical experiences took place through time on his own terms as he learnt his craft ‘on the hoof’ via many different encounters with musical genres from Liverpool to London, Paris, Brussels, Rio, and Buenos Aires. Gordon Stretton was truly a transoceanic jazz pioneer.
Just Beyond Listening asks how we might think about encounters with sound that complicate standard accounts of aurality. In a series of essays, Michael C. Heller considers how sound functions in dialogue with a range of sensory and affective modalities, including physical co-presence, textual interference, and spectral haunting. The text investigates sound that is experienced in other parts of the body, altered by cross-wirings of the senses, weaponized by the military, or mediated and changed by cultural practices and memory. Building on recent scholarship in sound studies and affect theory, Heller questions not only how sound propagates acoustically but how sonic presences temper our total experience of the world around us.
In his 1967 megahit "San Francisco," Scott McKenzie sang of "people in motion" coming from all across the country to San Francisco, the white-hot center of rock music and anti-war protests. At the same time, another large group of young Americans was also in motion, less eagerly, heading for the jungles of Vietnam. Now, in The Republic of Rock, Michael Kramer draws on new archival sources and interviews to explore sixties music and politics through the lens of these two generation-changing places--San Francisco and Vietnam. From the Acid Tests of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to hippie disc jockeys on strike, the military's use of rock music to "boost morale" in Vietnam, and the forgotten tale of a South Vietnamese rock band, The Republic of Rock shows how the musical connections between the City of the Summer of Love and war-torn Southeast Asia were crucial to the making of the sixties counterculture. The book also illustrates how and why the legacy of rock music in the sixties continues to matter to the meaning of citizenship in a global society today. Going beyond clichéd narratives about sixties music, Kramer argues that rock became a way for participants in the counterculture to think about what it meant to be an American citizen, a world citizen, a citizen-consumer, or a citizen-soldier. The music became a resource for grappling with the nature of democracy in larger systems of American power both domestically and globally. For anyone interested in the 1960s, popular music, and American culture and counterculture, The Republic of Rock offers new insight into the many ways rock music has shaped our ideas of individual freedom and collective belonging.
Hip Figures dramatically alters our understanding of the postwar American novel by showing how it mobilized fantasies of black style on behalf of the Democratic Party. Fascinated by jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, novelists such as Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, John Updike, and Joan Didion turned to hip culture to negotiate the voter realignments then reshaping national politics. Figuratively transporting white professionals and managers into the skins of African Americans, these novelists and many others insisted on their own importance to the ambitions of a party dependent on coalition-building but not fully committed to integration. Arbiters of hip for readers who weren't, they effectively branded and marketed the liberalism of their moment—and ours.
Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist elucidates the theory of temporality that binds Ellison's oeuvre together, and explains why race is a matter of time. Germana offers a wholesale reinterpretation of Ellison's corpus as well as an extension of Ellison's ideas about the dynamism of becoming and the open-endedness of the future.
By affirming the relativity of the American historical imagination, political theorist Michael J. Shapiro offers a powerful polemic against ethnocentric interpretations of American culture and politics. Deforming American Political Thought analyzes issues that range from the nature of Thomas Jefferson's vision of an egalitarian nation to the persistence of racial inequality. Shapiro offers a multifaceted argument that transcends the myopic scope of traditional political discourse. Deforming American Political Thought illustrates the various ways in which history, architecture, film, music, literature, and art provide approaches to the comprehension of diverse facets of American political thought from the founding to the present. Using these seemingly disparate disciplines as a framework, Shapiro paints a picture of American political philosophy that is as distinctive as it enlightening. Shapiro explores the historically vital role of dissenting points of view in American politics and asserts its continuing importance in today's political landscape. Exploring such diverse works as slave narratives, contemporary films, genre fiction, and blues and jazz music, Shapiro reveals that there have always been dissenting voices casting doubt on the moral purpose and exceptionalism of the American mind. An unprecedented inquiry into American politics, Deforming American Political Thought will surely serve to reinvigorate discussions about the essence of American political thought.
Crossroads Modernism provides an in-depth look at how West African cultural legacies are brought to bear in the structure of a truly African American modernist creative process. Whereas much has been said about the (generally racist) use of blackness in constituting modernism, Crossroads Modernism is the first book to expose the key role that modernism has played in the constitution of blackness in African American aesthetics". --Publisher.
For almost a century, writers such as Ralph Ellison, Michael Ondaatje, and Ishmael Reed have expressed an affinity for jazz, hearing the music as a model for writing. Michael Jarrett examines their work and the work of others who have brought jazz into language, pushing "interpretation" into the realm of "invention.
Drawing on diverse cultural forms, and ranging across disciplinary boundaries, Nation States maps the contested cultural terrain of Irish nationalism from the Act of Union of 1800 to the present. In looking at Irish nationalism as a site of struggle, Mays examines the myriad ways in which the nation fashions itself as the a priori ground of identity, and those processes through which nationalism engenders an ostensibly unique national identity corresponding to one and only one nation-state, the place where we always have been, and can only ever be, "at home." Book jacket.
The last century witnessed an explosion of theologies born out of the conviction that the science of evolution can and must contribute to our understandings of God, humanity, technology, suffering, sin, and the natural world. Even today, a sense of development continues to shape contemporary understandings of not only our origins, but also our place in the world now and in the future. Evolutionary theology's popularity continues to accelerate, but the conversation has lacked a critical, comprehensive, and accessible introduction to this field--until now. Evolutionary Theology provides a clear, critical, and concise synthesis of the most influential viewpoints in the field--from its origins in the eighteenth century to its maturation in the twenty-first. Topics include scientific contributions, philosophical ideas, dogmatic debates, and the development of process theology. Abril provides a springboard for researchers, teachers, and college students to critically engage the existing literature and develop new, constructive ideas. Evolutionary Theology is accessible to students, is helpful to scholars, and includes a wide range of perspectives from science, philosophy, and theology--Catholic and Protestant. It illustrates how integrating faith with science, as an inescapable and crucial dimension of modern life, leads to both fruitful discoveries and important challenges.
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is one of the most widely read works of African American literature. This book gives students a thorough yet concise introduction to the novel. Included are chapters on the creation of the novel, its plot, its historical and social contexts, the themes and issues it addresses, Ellison's literary style, and the critical reception of the work. Students will welcome this book as a guide to the novel and the concerns it raises. The volume offers a detailed summary of the plot of Invisible Man as well as a discussion of its origin. It additionally considers the social, historical, and political contexts informing Ellison's work, along with the themes and issues Ellison addresses. It explores Ellison's literary art and surveys the novel's critical reception. Students will value this book for what it says about Invisible Man as well as for its illumination of enduring social concerns.
While the Haitian musical tradition is probably best known for the Vodou-inspired roots music that helped topple the two-generation Duvalier dictatorship, the nation’s troubled history of civil unrest and its tangled relationship with the United States is more intensely experienced through its art music, which combines French and German elements of classical music with Haiti's indigenous folk music. Vodou Nation examines art music by Haitian and African American composers who were inspired by Haiti’s history as a nation created by slave revolt. Around the time of the United States’s occupation of Haiti in 1915, African American composers began to incorporate Vodou-inspired musical idioms to showcase black artistry and protest white oppression. Together with Haitian musicians, these composers helped create what Michael Largey calls the “Vodou Nation,” an ideal vision of Haiti that championed its African-based culture as a bulwark against America’s imperialism. Highlighting the contributions of many Haitian and African American composers who wrote music that brought rhythms and melodies of the Vodou ceremony to local and international audiences, Vodou Nation sheds light on a black cosmopolitan musical tradition that was deeply rooted in Haitian culture and politics.
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