Hustling Is Not Stealing
Hustling Is Not Stealing

Author: John M. Chernoff

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-02-11

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 022607465X

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While living in West Africa in the 1970s, John Chernoff recorded the stories of “Hawa,” a spirited and brilliant but uneducated woman whose insistence on being respected and treated fairly propelled her, ironically, into a life of marginality and luck as an “ashawo,” or bar girl. Rejecting traditional marriage options and cut off from family support, she is like many women in Africa who come to depend on the help they receive from one another, from boyfriends, and from the men they meet in bars and nightclubs. Refusing to see herself as a victim, Hawa embraces the freedom her lifestyle permits and seeks the broadest experience available to her. In Hustling Is Not Stealing and its follow-up, Exchange Is Not Robbery, a chronicle of exploitation is transformed by verbal art into an ebullient comedy. In Hustling Is Not Stealing, Hawa is a playful warrior struggling against circumstances in Ghana and Togo. In Exchange Is Not Robbery, Hawa returns to her native Burkina Faso, where she achieves greater control over her life but faces new difficulties. As a woman making sacrifices to live independently, Hawa sees her own situation become more complex as she confronts an atmosphere in Burkina Faso that is in some ways more challenging than the one she left behind, and the moral ambiguities of her life begin to intensify. Combining elements of folklore and memoir, Hawa’s stories portray the diverse social landscape of West Africa. Individually the anecdotes can be funny, shocking, or poignant; assembled together they offer a sweeping critical and satirical vision.

This is how We Flow
This is how We Flow

Author: Edited by Angela M S Nelson

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9781570031908

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Explores the meaning, motif, & theme of rhythm in black cultures throughout the United States & Africa.

The Music of Africa
The Music of Africa

Author: J. H. Kwabena Nketia

Publisher:

Published: 1974

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13:

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The study of African music is a study at once of unity and diversity. The range of indigenous musical resources and practices found on this vast continent is as wide and varies as its topography. In this informative and highly readable book, Professor Nketia provides an overview of the musical traditions of Africa with respect to their historical, cultural, and social background, their organization and practice, and delineates the most significant aspects of musical style.

What Makes That Black?
What Makes That Black?

Author: Luana

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1483454797

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We all can name some of the Africanist aesthetic-structures that fuel African American and American art ... Syncopation, Improvisation, Call and Response, Cool, Polyrhythm, or Innovation as an ambition- But there are many, many more. What Makes That Black? The African-American Aesthetic identifies and defines seventy-four elements of the aesthetic through text and illustration. Using the magnificent camerawork of R.J. Muna, Sharen Bradford, Jae Man Joo, Rachel Neville, James Barry Knox, and more- as they point their cameras at Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, and jazz artists such as Cécile McLorin Salvant and Wynton Marsalis- a specific artistic consciousness or sensibility visually unfolds. Luana even joins the camera crew as she shoots Oakland Street Graffiti.

Riddim
Riddim

Author: Billy Martin

Publisher: Music in Motion

Published: 2008-02

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780967309842

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Billy Martin, aka illy B, is a remarkable drummer, visual artist, and label owner who has successfully carved out his own musical path. As the organic beat-maker for Medeski, Martin & Wood, Martin has successfully blended world-music cultures in to his own unique style. The claves in this book open up rhythmic subdivisions, substitutions, and a much wider vocabulary to draw upon than just playing static beats. Call them systems, bell patterns, or claves, but be assured that there is much freedom to be gained from owning these riddims.

Bodies of the Text
Bodies of the Text

Author: Ellen W. Goellner

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780813521275

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Dance and literary studies have traditionally been at odds: dancers and dance critics have understood academic analysis to be overly invested in the mind at the expense of body signification; literary critics and theorists have seen dance studies as anti-theoretical, even anti-intellectual. Bodies of the Text is the first book-length study of the interconnections between the two arts and the body of writing about them. The essays, by scholar-critics of dance and literature, explore dances actual and fictional to offer powerful new insights into issues of gender, race, ethnicity, popular culture, feminist aesthetics, historical "embodiment," identity politics, and narrativity. The general introduction traces the genealogy of dance studies in the academy to suggest why critical and theoretical attention to dance--and dance's challenges to writing--is both compelling and overdue. A milestone in interdisciplinary studies, Bodies of the Text opens both its fields to new inquiry, new theoretical precision, and to new readers and writers.

The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance
The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance

Author: Vida L. Midgelow

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-02-21

Total Pages: 1358

ISBN-13: 0190925604

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From the dance floor of a tango club to group therapy classes, from ballet to community theatre, improvised dance is everywhere. For some dance artists, improvisation is one of many approaches within the choreographic process. For others, it is a performance form in its own right. And while it has long been practiced, it is only within the last twenty years that dance improvisation has become a topic of critical inquiry. With The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance, dancer, teacher, and editor Vida L. Midgelow provides a cutting-edge volume on dance improvisation in all its facets. Expanding beyond conventional dance frameworks, this handbook looks at the ways that dance improvisation practices reflect our ability to adapt, communicate, and respond to our environment. Throughout the handbook, case studies from a variety of disciplines showcase the role of individual agency and collective relationships in improvisation, not just to dancers but to people of all backgrounds and abilities. In doing so, chapters celebrate all forms of improvisation, and unravel the ways that this kind of movement informs understandings of history, socio-cultural conditions, lived experience, cognition, and technologies.

Representing African Music
Representing African Music

Author: Kofi Agawu

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-23

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1317794060

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The aim of this book is to stimulate debate by offering a critique of discourse about African music. Who writes about African music, how, and why? What assumptions and prejudices influence the presentation of ethnographic data? Even the term "African music" suggests there is an agreed-upon meaning, but African music signifies differently to different people. This book also poses the question then, "What is African music?" Agawu offers a new and provocative look at the history of African music scholarship that will resonate with students of ethnomusicology and post-colonial studies. He offers an alternative "Afro-centric" means of understanding African music, and in doing so, illuminates a different mode of creativity beyond the usual provenance of Western criticism. This book will undoubtedly inspire heated debate--and new thinking--among musicologists, cultural theorists, and post-colonial thinkers. Also includes 15 musical examples.

African Polyphony and Polyrhythm
African Polyphony and Polyrhythm

Author: Simha Arom

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1991-07-18

Total Pages: 700

ISBN-13: 052124160X

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An original approach to the understanding of the complete and sophisticated patterns of polyphony and polyrhythm of African music.

Living the Hiplife
Living the Hiplife

Author: Jesse Weaver Shipley

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2013-01-28

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 0822395908

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Hiplife is a popular music genre in Ghana that mixes hip-hop beatmaking and rap with highlife music, proverbial speech, and Akan storytelling. In the 1990s, young Ghanaian musicians were drawn to hip-hop's dual ethos of black masculine empowerment and capitalist success. They made their underground sound mainstream by infusing carefree bravado with traditional respectful oratory and familiar Ghanaian rhythms. Living the Hiplife is an ethnographic account of hiplife in Ghana and its diaspora, based on extensive research among artists and audiences in Accra, Ghana's capital city; New York; and London. Jesse Weaver Shipley examines the production, consumption, and circulation of hiplife music, culture, and fashion in relation to broader cultural and political shifts in neoliberalizing Ghana. Shipley shows how young hiplife musicians produce and transform different kinds of value—aesthetic, moral, linguistic, economic—using music to gain social status and wealth, and to become respectable public figures. In this entrepreneurial age, youth use celebrity as a form of currency, aligning music-making with self-making and aesthetic pleasure with business success. Registering both the globalization of electronic, digital media and the changing nature of African diasporic relations to Africa, hiplife links collective Pan-Africanist visions with individualist aspiration, highlighting the potential and limits of social mobility for African youth. The author has also directed a film entitled Living the Hiplife and with two DJs produced mixtapes that feature the music in the book available for free download.