Bodies of Water in African American Literature, Music, and Film
Bodies of Water in African American Literature, Music, and Film

Author: Sharon A. Lewis

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2023-05-04

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1527502112

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This is an edited volume of original essays which explore the meaning of bodies of water in creative narratives by African Americans. The contributors explore the representations of still and moving waterbodies across several genres of literature, film, and music. They also deploy socio-historical and environmental theories, in addition to close-reading interpretive strategies, all acknowledging and developing traditional ways of thinking about water in relation to African American experience and culture. The writers gathered here showcase insightful and vigorous research in various art forms, and, together, embody provocative, innovative and refreshing ways to contemplate water in Black American artistic expressivity.

Bodies of Water in African American Literature, Music, and Film
Bodies of Water in African American Literature, Music, and Film

Author: Sharon A. Lewis

Publisher:

Published: 2023-06

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781527502109

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This is an edited volume of original essays which explore the meaning of bodies of water in creative narratives by African Americans. The contributors explore the representations of still and moving waterbodies across several genres of literature, film, and music. They also deploy socio-historical and environmental theories, in addition to close-reading interpretive strategies, all acknowledging and developing traditional ways of thinking about water in relation to African American experience and culture. The writers gathered here showcase insightful and vigorous research in various art forms, and, together, embody provocative, innovative and refreshing ways to contemplate water in Black American artistic expressivity.

Water and African American Memory
Water and African American Memory

Author: Anissa J. Wardi

Publisher:

Published: 2015-12-30

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780813062501

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"This cutting-edge text not only increases our understanding of African American literature and film; it also enlarges the accessibility and the possibilities of the field of ecocriticism."--Yvonne Atkinson, Mt. San Jacinto College and president of the Toni Morrison Society While there is no lack of scholarship on the trans-Atlantic voyage and the Middle Passage as tropes in African diasporic writing, to date there has not been a comprehensive analysis of bodies of water in African American literature and culture. In Water and African American Memory, Anissa Wardi offers the first sustained treatise on watercourses in the African American expressive tradition. Her holistic approach especially highlights the ways that water acts not only as a metaphorical site of trauma, memory, and healing but also as a material site. Using the trans-Atlantic voyage as a starting point and ending with a discussion of Hurricane Katrina, this pioneering ecocritical study delves deeply into the environmental dimension of African American writing. Beyond proposing a new theoretical map for conceptualizing the African Diaspora, Wardi offers a series of engaging and original close readings of major literary, filmic, and blues texts, including the works of Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Julie Dash, Henry Dumas, and Kasi Lemmon.

Undercurrents of Power
Undercurrents of Power

Author: Kevin Dawson

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2021-05-07

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0812224930

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Kevin Dawson considers how enslaved Africans carried aquatic skills—swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing—to the Americas. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature
Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature

Author: Steven C. Tracy

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2015-06

Total Pages: 556

ISBN-13: 0817318658

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Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature examines the diverse ways in which African American "hot" music influenced American culture - particularly literature - in early twentieth-century America. Steven C. Tracy provides a history of the fusion of African and European elements that formed African American "hot" music, and considers how terms like ragtime, jazz, and blues developed their own particular meanings for American music and society. He draws from the fields of literature, literary criticism, cultural anthropology, American studies, and folklore to demonstrate how blues as a musical and poetic form has been a critical influence on American literature. -- from dust jacket.

New Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's God Help the Child
New Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's God Help the Child

Author: Alice Knox Eaton

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2020-07-23

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1496828917

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Contributions by Alice Knox Eaton, Mar Gallego, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, Shirley A. Stave, Justine Tally, Susana Vega-González, and Anissa Wardi In her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, Toni Morrison returned to several of the signature themes explored in her previous work: pernicious beauty standards for women, particularly African American women; mother-child relationships; racism and colorism; and child sexual abuse. God Help the Child, published in 2015, is set in the contemporary period, unlike all of her previous novels. The contemporary setting is ultimately incidental to the project of the novel, however; as with Morrison’s other work, the story takes on mythic qualities, and the larger-than-life themes lend themselves to allegorical and symbolic readings that resonate in light of both contemporary and historical issues. New Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's “God Help the Child”: Race, Culture, and History, a collection of eight essays by both seasoned Morrison scholars as well as new and rising scholars, takes on the novel in a nuanced and insightful analysis, interpreting it in relation to Morrison’s earlier work as well as locating it within ongoing debates in literary and other academic disciplines engaged with African American literature. The volume is divided into three sections. The first focuses on trauma—both the pain and suffering caused by neglect and abuse, as well as healing and understanding. The second section considers narrative choices, concentrating on experimentation and reader engagement. The third section turns a comparative eye to Morrison's fictional canon, from her debut work of fiction, The Bluest Eye, until the present. These essays build on previous studies of Morrison’s novels and deepen readers’ understanding of both her last novel and her larger literary output.

Slavery at Sea
Slavery at Sea

Author: Sowande M Mustakeem

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2016-11-01

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0252098994

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Most times left solely within the confine of plantation narratives, slavery was far from a land-based phenomenon. This book reveals for the first time how it took critical shape at sea. Expanding the gaze even more deeply, the book centers how the oceanic transport of human cargoes--infamously known as the Middle Passage--comprised a violently regulated process foundational to the institution of bondage. Sowande' Mustakeem's groundbreaking study goes inside the Atlantic slave trade to explore the social conditions and human costs embedded in the world of maritime slavery. Mining ship logs, records and personal documents, Mustakeem teases out the social histories produced between those on traveling ships: slaves, captains, sailors, and surgeons. As she shows, crewmen manufactured captives through enforced dependency, relentless cycles of physical, psychological terror, and pain that led to the the making--and unmaking--of enslaved Africans held and transported onboard slave ships. Mustakeem relates how this process, and related power struggles, played out not just for adult men, but also for women, children, teens, infants, nursing mothers, the elderly, diseased, ailing, and dying. Mustakeem offers provocative new insights into how gender, health, age, illness, and medical treatment intersected with trauma and violence transformed human beings into the world's most commercially sought commodity for over four centuries.

The Geographies of African American Short Fiction
The Geographies of African American Short Fiction

Author: Kenton Rambsy

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2022-03-25

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 1496838742

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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 cartographers, author Kenton Rambsy documents the variety of geographical references within their short stories to show how these authors make cultural spaces integral to their artwork and inscribe their stories with layered and resonant social histories. The history of these short stories also documents the circulation of compositions across dozens of literary collections for nearly a century. Anthology editors solidified the significance of a core group of short story authors including James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Charles Chesnutt, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright. Using quantitative information and an extensive literary dataset, The Geographies of African American Short Fiction explores how editorial practices shaped the canon of African American short fiction.

Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature
Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature

Author: Anissa Janine Wardi

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9780813026886

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"A very impressive book. Wardi's redefinition of the African American pastoral and her treatment of the themes of death, blues, and the collective memory are original and exciting."--Charles Scruggs, University of Arizona This book examines the preponderance of death and its accompanying funerary and mourning rituals in the African American expressive tradition. Focusing on the relationship between geography and death in African American literature, Anissa Wardi argues that the American South represents an unmarked graveyard that is simultaneously the sacred locus of the ancestors and a material memorial to their suffering. She proposes a new theoretical map that expands the definition of “home” in African American studies. Wardi traces the evolution of the relationship between place and the culture of death from Jean Toomer's Cane through the works of Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, and Gloria Naylor, providing close readings of the intertextual play in A Gathering of Old Men, Of Love and Dust, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Linden Hills, and Jazz. In so doing, she provides a fresh definition of the African American pastoral and focuses on a new and significant area in African American literature--the importance of gravesites and death as modes of memory, illuminating the continuity between the living and the dead that is such an important theme in African American literature. Anissa Janine Wardi is assistant professor of English and director of cultural studies and African American studies at Chatham College, Pittsburgh.