The Songs of Seydou Camara
Author: Seyidu Kamara
Publisher:
Published: 1974
Total Pages: 284
ISBN-13:
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African Intellectual Heritage
Author: Abu Shardow Abarry
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 852
ISBN-13: 9781566394031
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOrganized by major themes—such as creation stories, and resistance to oppression—this collection gather works of imagination, politics and history, religion, and culture from many societies and across recorded time. Asante and Abarry marshal together ancient, anonymous writers whose texts were originally written on stone and papyri and the well-known public figures of more recent times whose spoken and written words have shaped the intellectual history of the diaspora. Within this remarkably wide-ranging volume are such sources as prayers and praise songs from ancient Kemet and Ethiopia along with African American spirituals; political commentary from C.L.R. James, Malcolm X, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Joseph Nyerere; stirring calls for social justice from David Walker, Abdias Nacimento, Franzo Fanon, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Featuring newly translated texts and ocuments published for the first time, the volume also includes an African chronology, a glossary, and an extensive bibliography. With this landmark book, Asante and Abarry offer a major contribution to the ongoing debates on defining the African canon. Author note:Molefi Kete Asanteis Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Temple University and author of several books, includingThe Afrocentric Idea(Temple) andThe Historical and Cultural Atlas of African Americans.Abu S. Abarryis Assistant Chair of African American Studies at Temple University.
Languages and Their Speakers
Author: Timothy Shopen
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 1987-05-29
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780812212501
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLanguages and Their Speakers provides an introduction both to languages themselves and to their social functions. Written especially for nonlinguistics majors, the book considers how speakers know their languages—know them as grammatical systems and know them as part of a cultural matrix.
The Peoples of the Middle Niger
Author: Roderick James McIntosh
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 1998-10-15
Total Pages: 378
ISBN-13: 0631173617
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Peoples of the Middle Niger This book provides the first comprehensive history of the peoples of the Middle Niger written by an English-speaking scholar. ‘The Island of Gold’ was the medieval Muslim and later European name for a fabled source of gold and other tropical riches. Although the floodplain of the Niger river lies far from the goldfields, the mosaic of peoples along the Middle Niger created a wealth of grain, fish, and livestock that supported some of Africa’s oldest cities, including Timbuktu. These ancient cities of the region that came to be known as Western Sudan were founded without outside stimulation and their inhabitants long resisted the coercive, centralized state that characterized the origins of earliest towns elsewhere. In this book, Roderick James McIntosh uses the latest archaeological and anthropological research to provide a bold overview of the distant origins of life for the inhabitants of the Middle Niger, and an explanation for their social evolution. He shows, for instance, the difficulties the peoples faced in adapting to an unpredictable climate, and how their particular social organization determined the unusual nature of their responses to that change. Throughout the book oral traditions are integrated into the story, providing vivid insights into the inhabitants' complex culture and belief systems.
Daniel Johnston
Author: Henry Glassie
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2020-03-03
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 0253048893
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDANIEL JOHNSTON, raised on a farm in Randolph County, returned from Thailand with a new way to make monumental pots. Back home in North Carolina, he built a log shop and a whale of a kiln for wood-firing. Then he set out to create beautiful pots, grand in scale, graceful in form, and burned bright in a blend of ash and salt. With mastery achieved and apprentices to teach, Daniel Johnston turned his brain to massive installations. First, he made a hundred large jars and lined them along the rough road that runs past his shop and kiln. Next, he arranged curving clusters of big pots inside pine frames, slatted like corn cribs, to separate them from the slick interiors of four fine galleries in succession. Then, in concluding the second phase of his professional career, Daniel Johnston built an open-air installation on the grounds around the North Carolina Museum of Art, where 178 handmade, wood-fired columns march across a slope in a straight line, 350 feet in length, that dips and lifts with the heave while the tops of the pots maintain a level horizon. In 2000, when he was still Mark Hewitt's apprentice, Daniel Johnston met Henry Glassie, who has done fieldwork on ceramic traditions in the United States, Brazil, Italy, Turkey, Bangladesh, China, and Japan. Over the years, during a steady stream of intimate interviews, Glassie gathered the understanding that enabled him to compose this portrait of Daniel Johnston, a young artist who makes great pots in the eastern Piedmont of North Carolina.
The Work of Art
Author: Michael D. Jackson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-10-25
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13: 0231541996
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow are we to think of works of art? Rather than treat art as an expression of individual genius, market forces, or aesthetic principles, Michael Jackson focuses on how art effects transformations in our lives. Art opens up transitional, ritual, or utopian spaces that enable us to reconcile inward imperatives and outward constraints, thereby making our lives more manageable and meaningful. Art allows us to strike a balance between being actors and being acted upon. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia and West Africa, as well as insights from psychoanalysis, religious studies, literature, and the philosophy of art, Jackson deploys an extraordinary range of references—from Bruegel to Beuys, Paleolithic art to performance art, Michelangelo to Munch—to explore the symbolic labor whereby human beings make themselves, both individually and socially, out of the environmental, biographical, and physical materials that affect them: a process that connects art with gestation, storytelling, and dreaming and illuminates the elementary forms of religious life.
Heroism and the Supernatural in the African Epic
Author: Mariam Konaté Deme
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-09-13
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 113693264X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThere exists a strong tendency within Western literary criticism to either deny the existence of epics in Africa or to see African literatures as exotic copies of European originals. In both cases, Western criticism has largely failed to acknowledge the distinctiveness of African literary aesthetics. This book revises traditional literary canons in examining the social, cultural and emotional specificity of African epics. Mariam Konate Deme highlights the distinguishing features that characterize the African epic, emphasizing the significance of the fantastic and its use as an essential element in the dramatic structure of African epics. As Deme notes, the fantastic can be fully appreciated only against the cosmological background of the societies that produce those heroic tales. This book not only contributes to the scholarship on African oral literature, but also adds reshapes our understanding of heroic literature in general.
African Folklore
Author: Philip M. Peek
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2004-03-01
Total Pages: 1256
ISBN-13: 1135948739
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWritten by an international team of experts, this is the first work of its kind to offer comprehensive coverage of folklore throughout the African continent. Over 300 entries provide in-depth examinations of individual African countries, ethnic groups, religious practices, artistic genres, and numerous other concepts related to folklore. Featuring original field photographs, a comprehensive index, and thorough cross-references, African Folklore: An Encyclopedia is an indispensable resource for any library's folklore or African studies collection. Also includes seven maps.
Subversive Traditions
Author: Jonathon Repinecz
Publisher: MSU Press
Published: 2019-10-01
Total Pages: 278
ISBN-13: 1628953764
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow can traditions be subversive? The kinship between African traditions and novels has been under debate for the better part of a century, but the conversation has stagnated because of a slowness to question the terms on which it is based: orality vs. writing, tradition vs. modernity, epic vs. novel. These rigid binaries were, in fact, invented by colonialism and cemented by postcolonial identity politics. Thanks to this entrenched paradigm, far too much ink has been poured into the so-called Great Divide between oral and writing societies, and to the long-lamented decline of the ways of old. Given advances in social science and humanities research—studies in folklore, performance, invented traditions, colonial and postcolonial ethnography, history, and pop culture—the moment is right to rewrite this calcified literary history. This book is not another story of subverted traditions, but of subversive ones. West African epics like Sunjata, Samori, and Lat-Dior offer a space from which to think about, and criticize, the issues of today, just as novels in European languages do. Through readings of documented performances and major writers like Yambo Ouologuem and Amadou Hampâté Bâ of Mali, Ahmadou Kourouma of Ivory Coast, and Aminata Sow Fall and Boubacar Boris Diop of Senegal, this book conducts an entirely new analysis of West African oral epic and its relevance to contemporary world literature.
Excursions
Author: Michael Jackson
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2007-10-24
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 9780822340751
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDIVPhilosophical meditations on a series of journeys the author has taken to various places around the world./div
