With an analysis informed by more than two decades of cultural work and activism on the frontlines, Nightmare Overhanging Darkly reviews the historic tradition of Black cultural resistance to Western imperialism and oppression. In emphasizing the process by which creative artists have initiated and influenced social change, Dr. Acklyn Lynch issues a challenge to Black cultural workers and offers Black educators a blueprint for restructuring Black colleges and universities to best assist Black empowerment. Dr. Lynch centers his study on the 1940s to the 1990s and offers critiques of the major political activists and creative artists of that period -- including Paul Robeson, Sonia Sanchez, Charlie Parker, Malcolm X, Katherine Dunham, Jeff Donaldson, Alice Walker, George Jackson, Richard Wright, Toni Cade Bambara, Romare Bearden, KRS-ONE and others. Lynch reminds us that there is an organic link between art and resistance that moves beyond art for art's sake.--Publisher's description.
African-American writer Richard Wright (1908-1960) was celebrated during the early 1940s for his searing autobiography (Black Boy) and fiction (Native Son). By 1947 he felt so unwelcome in his homeland that he exiled himself and his family in Paris. But his writings changed American culture forever, and today they are mainstays of literature and composition classes. He and his works are also the subjects of numerous critical essays and commentaries by contemporary writers. This volume presents a comprehensive annotated bibliography of those essays, books, and articles from 1983 through 2003. Arranged alphabetically by author within years are some 8,320 entries ranging from unpublished dissertations to book-length studies of African American literature and literary criticism. Also included as an appendix are addenda to the author's earlier bibliography covering the years from 1934 through 1982. This is the exhaustive reference for serious students of Richard Wright and his critics.
Covering the vast and various terrain of African American music, this text begins with an account of the author's own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago. It goes on to explore the global influence and social relevance of African American music.
"Among the many books on the history of jazz. . . an implicit division of labor has solidified, whereby black artists play and invent while white writers provide the commentary. . . . Eric Porter's brilliant book seeks to trace the ways in which black jazz musicians have made verbal sense of their accomplishments, demonstrating the profound self-awareness of the artists themselves as they engaged in discourse about their enterprise."—Susan McClary, author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form "With What Is This Thing Called Jazz Eric Porter has given us an original portrait of black musicians as creators, thinkers and politically conscious individuals. This well-written, thoroughly researched work is a model of a new kind of scholarship about African American musicians: one that shows them as people who are both shaped by and actively shaping their political and social context. One of the book's most important contributions is that it takes seriously what the musicians themselves say about the music and allows their voices to join that of critics and musicologists in helping to construct a critical and philosophical framework for analyzing the music. Professor Porter's work is rare in it's balanced attention to the formal qualities of the music, historical interpretation and theoretical reflection. His is a work that will certainly shape the direction of future studies. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? is an extraordinary work."—Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday "A major contribution to American Studies in music, Eric Porter's lucidly written book is the first to thoroughly analyze and contextualize the critical, historical and aesthetic writings of some of today's most innovative composer-performers. Placing the vital concerns of artists at the center, this work provides academic and lay readers alike with important new insights on how African-American musicians sought to realize ambitious dreams and concrete goals through direct action--not only in sound, but through building alternative institutions that emphasized the importance of community involvement."—George E. Lewis, Professor of Music, Critical Studies/Experimental Practices Area University of California, San Diego
Tracing the conflict between assimilation and Black Nationalism through the movements, myths, and moments that shaped black America and the hip-hop generation in the 20th century, Ross argues that the battle between Nas and Jay-Z was the latest in a long line of creative conflicts between complex, oppositional black icons.
Fifty-one essays by writers such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as critics and academics such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. examine the central texts and arguments in African American literary theory from the 1920s through the present. Contributions are organized chronologically beginning with the rise of a black aesthetic criticism, through the Black Arts Movement, feminism, structuralism and poststructuralism, queer theory, and cultural studies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Interdisciplinary approach chimes with current teaching trends Each section opens with specially commissioned thinkpiece from major scholar The first reader to address improvisation from a performance studies perspective
Introduction : who hears here now? -- Cosmopolitan or provincial? : ideology in early black music historiography, 1867-1940 -- Who hears here? : black music, critical bias, and the musicological skin trade -- The pot liquor principle : developing a black music criticism in American music studies -- Secrets, lies and transcriptions : new revisions on race, black music and culture -- Muzing new hoods, making new identities : film, hip-hop culture, and jazz music -- Afro-Modernism and music : on science, community, and magic in the Black Avant-Garde -- Bebop, jazz manhood and "piano shame" -- Blues and the ethnographic truth -- Time is illmatic : a song for my father, a letter to my son -- A new kind of blue : the power of suggestion and the pleasure of groove in Robert Glasper's black radio -- Free jazz and the price of black musical abstraction -- Jack Whitten's musical eye -- Out of place and out of line : Jason Moran's eclecticism as critical inquiry -- African American music -- Onward : an afterword by Shana L. Redmond.
