Conjuring Freedom
Conjuring Freedom

Author: Johari Jabir

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 9780814213308

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Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's "Gospel Army" analyzes the songs of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of Black soldiers who met nightly in the performance of the ring shout. In this study, acknowledging the importance of conjure as a religious, political, and epistemological practice, Johari Jabir demonstrates how the musical performance allowed troop members to embody new identities in relation to national citizenship, militarism, and masculinity in more inclusive ways. Jabir also establishes how these musical practices of the regiment persisted long after the Civil War in Black culture, resisting, for instance, the paternalism and co-optive state antiracism of the film Glory, and the assumption that Blacks need to be deracinated to be full citizens. Reflecting the structure of the ring shout--the counterclockwise song, dance, drum, and story in African American history and culture--Conjuring Freedom offers three new concepts to cultural studies in order to describe the practices, techniques, and implications of the troop's performance: (1) Black Communal Conservatories, borrowing from Robert Farris Thompson's "invisible academies" to describe the structural but spontaneous quality of black music-making, (2) Listening Hermeneutics, which accounts for the generative and material affects of sound on meaning-making, and (3) Sonic Politics, which points to the political implications of music's use in contemporary representations of race and history.

Conjuring Culture
Conjuring Culture

Author: Theophus H. Smith

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1995-11-09

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0198023197

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This book provides a sophisticated new interdisciplinary interpretation of the formulation and evolution of African American religion and culture. Theophus Smith argues for the central importance of "conjure"--a magical means of transforming reality--in black spirituality and culture. Smith shows that the Bible, the sacred text of Western civilization, has in fact functioned as a magical formulary for African Americans. Going back to slave religion, and continuing in black folk practice and literature to the present day, the Bible has provided African Americans with ritual prescriptions for prophetically re-envisioning, and thereby transforming, their history and culture. In effect the Bible is a "conjure book" for prescribing cures and curses, and for invoking extraordinary and Divine powers to effect changes in the conditions of human existence--and to bring about justice and freedom. Biblical themes, symbols, and figures like Moses, the Exodus, the Promised Land, and the Suffering Servant, as deployed by African Americans, have crucially formed and reformed not only black culture, but American society as a whole. Smith examines not only the religious and political uses of conjure, but its influence on black aesthetics, in music, drama, folklore, and literature. The concept of conjure, he shows, is at the heart of an indigenous and still vital spirituality, with exciting implications for reformulating the next generation of black studies and black theology. Even more broadly, Smith proposes, "conjuring culture" can function as a new paradigm for understanding Western religious and cultural phenomena generally.

Freedom's Coming
Freedom's Coming

Author: Paul Harvey

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 1469606429

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In a sweeping analysis of religion in the post-Civil War and twentieth-century South, Freedom's Coming puts race and culture at the center, describing southern Protestant cultures as both priestly and prophetic: as southern formal theology sanctified dominant political and social hierarchies, evangelical belief and practice subtly undermined them. The seeds of subversion, Paul Harvey argues, were embedded in the passionate individualism, exuberant expressive forms, and profound faith of believers in the region. Harvey explains how black and white religious folk within and outside of mainstream religious groups formed a southern "evangelical counterculture" of Christian interracialism that challenged the theologically grounded racism pervasive among white southerners and ultimately helped to end Jim Crow in the South. Moving from the folk theology of segregation to the women who organized the Montgomery bus boycott, from the hymn-inspired freedom songs of the 1960s to the influence of black Pentecostal preachers on Elvis Presley, Harvey deploys cultural history in fresh and innovative ways and fills a decades-old need for a comprehensive history of Protestant religion and its relationship to the central question of race in the South for the postbellum and twentieth-century period.

Brassroots Democracy
Brassroots Democracy

Author: Benjamin Barson

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2024-09-24

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0819501131

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Brassroots Democracy recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from below," following the musicians as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies, and participated in general strikes. Perhaps most importantly, Barson locates the first emancipatory revolution in the Americas—Haiti—as a nexus for cultural and political change in nineteenth-century Louisiana. In dialogue with the work of recent historians who have inverted traditional histories of Latin American and Caribbean independence by centering the influence of Haitian activists abroad, this work traces the impact of Haitian culture in New Orleans and its legacy in movements for liberation. Brassroots Democracy demonstrates how Black musicians infused participatory music practice with innovative forms of grassroots democracy. Late nineteenth-century Black brass bands and activists rehearsed these participatory models through collective performance that embodied the democratic ethos of Black Reconstruction. Termed "Brassroots Democracy," this fusion of political and musical spheres revolutionized both. Brassroots Democracy illuminates the Black Atlantic struggles that informed music-as-world-making from the Haitian Revolution through Reconstruction to the jazz revolution. The work theorizes the roots of the New Orleans brass band tradition in the social relations grown in maroon ecologies across the Americas. Their fruits contributed to the socio-sonic commons of the music we call jazz today.

Freedom Soldiers
Freedom Soldiers

Author: Assistant Professor of History Jonathan Lande

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 019753175X

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Freedom Soldiers examines the lives of formerly enslaved men who deserted the US Army during the Civil War and their experiences in army camps, courts, and prisons. It explores their reasons for leaving, often through their own voices from courts-martial testimony.

Conjure in African American Society
Conjure in African American Society

Author: Jeffrey E. Anderson

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2008-08

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0807135283

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From black sorcerers' client-based practices in the antebellum South to the postmodern revival of hoodoo and its tandem spiritual supply stores, the supernatural has long been a key component of the African American experience. What began as a mixture of African, European, and Native American influences within slave communities finds expression today in a multimillion dollar business. In Conjure in African American Society, Jeffrey E. Anderson unfolds a fascinating story as he traces the origins and evolution of conjuring practices across the centuries. Though some may see the study of conjure as a perpetuation of old stereotypes that depict blacks as bound to superstition, the truth, Anderson reveals, is far more complex. Drawing on folklore, fiction and nonfiction, music, art, and interviews, he explores various portrayals of the conjurer -- backward buffoon, rebel against authority, and symbol of racial pride. He also examines the actual work performed by conjurers, including the use of pharmacologically active herbs to treat illness, psychology to ease mental ailments, fear to bring about the death of enemies and acquittals at trials, and advice to encourage clients to succeed on their own. By critically examining the many influences that have shaped conjure over time, Anderson effectively redefines magic as a cultural power, one that has profoundly touched the arts, black Christianity, and American society overall.

Conjure Women
Conjure Women

Author: Afia Atakora

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0525511490

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A mother and daughter with a shared talent for healing—and for the conjuring of curses—are at the heart of this dazzling first novel WINNER OF THE SOCIETY OF AMERICAN HISTORIANS PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • NPR • Parade • Book Riot • PopMatters “Lush, irresistible . . . It took me into the hearts of women I could otherwise never know. I was transported.”—Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of White Houses and Away Conjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a midwife; and their master’s daughter Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to a head at the beginning of a war and at the birth of an accursed child, who sets the townspeople alight with fear and a spreading superstition that threatens their newly won, tenuous freedom. Magnificently written, brilliantly researched, richly imagined, Conjure Women moves back and forth in time to tell the haunting story of Rue, Varina, and May Belle, their passions and friendships, and the lengths they will go to save themselves and those they love. LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE “[A] haunting, promising debut . . . Through complex characters and bewitching prose, Atakora offers a stirring portrait of the power conferred between the enslaved women. This powerful tale of moral ambiguity amid inarguable injustice stands with Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “An engrossing debut . . . Atakora structures a plot with plenty of satisfying twists. Life in the immediate aftermath of slavery is powerfully rendered in this impressive first novel.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Creative Activism
Creative Activism

Author: Rachel Lee Rubin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2018-05-17

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 150133722X

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This collection brings together interviews with a compelling range of musicians, artists, and activists from around the globe. What does it mean for an artist to be “political”? Moving away from a narrow idea about politics that is organized around elections, advocacy groups, or concrete manifestos, the subjects of Creative Activism do their work through song, poetry, painting, and other arts. The interviews take us from Oakland to London to Johannesburg and from the Occupy movement to the coal mines of Appalachia to the fantasy worlds created by some of our most fascinating writers of spectacular fiction. Listening to the important “cultural workers” of our time challenges any idea that some other time was the golden age of political art: Creative Activism gives us a front-row seat to the thrilling artistic activism of our own moment.

The Pursuit of Pleasure
The Pursuit of Pleasure

Author: Lionel Tiger

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-12

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1351475657

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Pleasure is biologically desirable and good for physical and mental health. In The Pursuit of Pleasure, Lionel Tiger explores this aspect of human nature by focusing on the origins and forms of pleasure. Medical science has perfected a host of often astonishingly impressive methods for preventing, alleviating, or recovering from pain. Its opposite, pleasure, has not had such a well-funded and fully justified constituency. In fact, those committed to the understanding and pursuit of pleasure, are rarely accorded respect and a sense of significance. People have objected to the notion of pleasure for a variety of reasons. The most complex derive from religious convictions that the most morally admirable human life is marked by abstemiousness, suffering, even martyrdom. There is also a corresponding fear that people may pursue pleasure too avidly and with too strong a sense of entitlement, and the world's work will not get done. But just as there have been suspicions of the dangers of pleasure, there have also been its supporters who assert its vital and joyful centrality to human experience. The Pursuit of Pleasure favors an agnostic approach borrowed from natural science. In lively, witty, and eminently readable prose, Tiger identifies major forms of pleasure and explores their variations, now and in the past. Pleasure, says Tiger, is not a luxury but an evolutionary entitlement that deserves to be taken seriously. As we acknowledge our need for enjoyment, we understand the need to establish balance in our lives-our need for the pursuit of pleasure.