Author: Juanita Karpf Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 1496836707 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
In Performing Racial Uplift: E. Azalia Hackley and African American Activism in the Postbellum to Pre-Harlem Era, Juanita Karpf rediscovers the career of Black activist E. Azalia Hackley (1867–1922), a concert artist, nationally famous music teacher, and charismatic lecturer. Growing up in Black Detroit, she began touring as a pianist and soprano soloist while only in her teens. By the late 1910s, she had toured coast-to-coast, earning glowing reviews. Her concert repertoire consisted of an innovative blend of spirituals, popular ballads, virtuosic showstoppers, and classical pieces. She also taught music while on tour and visited several hundred Black schools, churches, and communities during her career. She traveled overseas and, in London and Paris, studied singing with William Shakespeare and Jean de Reszke—two of the classical music world’s most renowned teachers. Her acceptance into these famous studios confirmed her extraordinary musicianship, a “first” for an African American singer. She founded the Normal Vocal Institute in Chicago, the first music school founded by a Black performer to offer teacher training to aspiring African American musicians. Hackley’s activist philosophy was unique. Unlike most activists of her era, she did not align herself unequivocally with either Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois. Instead, she created her own mediatory philosophical approach. To carry out her agenda, she harnessed such strategies as giving music lessons to large audiences and delivering lectures on the ecumenical religious movement known as New Thought. In this book, Karpf reclaims Hackley's legacy and details the talent, energy, determination, and unprecedented worldview she brought to the cause of racial uplift.
Author: Lawrence Schenbeck Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 1617032301 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 330
Book Description
Racial Uplift and American Music, 1878-1943 traces the career of racial uplift ideology as a factor in elite African Americans' embrace of classical music around the turn of the previous century, from the collapse of Reconstruction to the death of composer/conductor R. Nathaniel Dett, whose music epitomized "uplift." After Reconstruction many black leaders had retreated from emphasizing "inalienable rights" to a narrower rationale for equality and inclusion: they now sought to rehabilitate the race's image by stressing class distinctions, respectable middle-class behavior, and service to the masses. Musically, the black intelligentsia resorted to European models as vehicles for cultural vindication. Their response to racism was to create and promote morally positive, politically inoffensive art that idealized the race. By incorporating black folk elements into the dignified genres of art song, symphony, and opera, "uplifters" demonstrated worthiness through high achievement in acknowledged arenas. Their efforts were variously opposed, tolerated, or supported by a range of white elites with their own notions about African American culture. The resulting conversation--more a stew of arguments than a dialogue--occupied the pages of black newspapers and informed the work of white philanthropists. Women also played crucial roles. Racial Uplift and American Music, 1878-1943 examines the lives and thought of personalities central to musical uplift--Dett, Sears CEO Julius Rosenwald, author James Monroe Trotter, sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, journalist Nora Douglas Holt, and others--with an eye to recognizing their contributions and restoring their stature.
Author: Spike Lee Publisher: Touchstone ISBN: Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 330
Book Description
Spike Lee rises again. This time, he and Lisa Jones document his transition from struggling independent to mainstream filmmaker with the making of the Columbia Pictures film, School Daze. No longer working with a small cast and a painfully tight budget, Spike Lee and his crew find themselves working in a swirl of university politics, a cast of thousands, big musical production numbers and the not-insignificant pressures of coming up with a hit in the majors. He "uplifts the race" by demystifying the process of producing an entertaining commercial film that, at the same time, delivers a stinging - yet funny - critique on American culture.
Author: Le'Trice D. Donaldson Publisher: ISBN: 0809337592 Category : African American soldiers Languages : en Pages : 217
Book Description
"The book demonstrates how African American soldiers used military service as a tool to challenge white notions of second-class citizenry"--
Author: Kevin K. Gaines Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 146960647X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
Amidst the violent racism prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century, African American cultural elites, struggling to articulate a positive black identity, developed a middle-class ideology of racial uplift. Insisting that they were truly representative of the race's potential, black elites espoused an ethos of self-help and service to the black masses and distinguished themselves from the black majority as agents of civilization; hence the phrase 'uplifting the race.' A central assumption of racial uplift ideology was that African Americans' material and moral progress would diminish white racism. But Kevin Gaines argues that, in its emphasis on class distinctions and patriarchal authority, racial uplift ideology was tied to pejorative notions of racial pathology and thus was limited as a force against white prejudice. Drawing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Hubert H. Harrison, and others, Gaines focuses on the intersections between race and gender in both racial uplift ideology and black nationalist thought, showing that the meaning of uplift was intensely contested even among those who shared its aims. Ultimately, elite conceptions of the ideology retreated from more democratic visions of uplift as social advancement, leaving a legacy that narrows our conceptions of rights, citizenship, and social justice.
Author: Shane Vogel Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226862526 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
Harlem's nightclubs in the 1920s and '30s were a crucible for testing society's racial and sexual limits. Combining performance theory, historical research, and biographical study, this title explores the role of nightlife performance as a definitive touchstone for understanding the racial and sexual politics of the early 20th century.
Author: Luis A. Campos Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022678357X Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 317
Book Description
“Engineering” has firmly taken root in the entangled bank of biology even as proposals to remake the living world have sent tendrils in every direction, and at every scale. Nature Remade explores these complex prospects from a resolutely historical approach, tracing cases across the decades of the long twentieth century. These essays span the many levels at which life has been engineered: molecule, cell, organism, population, ecosystem, and planet. From the cloning of agricultural crops and the artificial feeding of silkworms to biomimicry, genetic engineering, and terraforming, Nature Remade affirms the centrality of engineering in its various forms for understanding and imagining modern life. Organized around three themes—control and reproduction, knowing as making, and envisioning—the chapters in Nature Remade chart different means, scales, and consequences of intervening and reimagining nature.
Author: Anne-Elizabeth Murdy Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317849493 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 202
Book Description
Is knowledge power? In Teach the Nation , Anne-Elizabeth Murdy explores the history and contradictions in the notion that education and literacy are vital means for improving social and political status in the US. By closely examining the rapidly shifting social context of education, and the emerging literature by and for African-American women during the 1890s, Murdy proves that the histories of education and literature are deeply connected and argues that their current lives must be regarded as mutually dependent. Teach the Nation offers a new understanding of literacy and pedagogical study and identifies how literary history enhances current feminist and anti-racist teachings. By excavating notions about education in the 1890s-as turbulent a time for American public education as today-Murdy asks readers to step back from this historical moment to better understand the contexts and institutions within which we theorize learning and teaching. In doing so, she compels readers to reimagine the potential for gaining social power through education and literature.
Author: Felix L. Armfield Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 0252093623 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 138
Book Description
A leading African American intellectual, Eugene Kinckle Jones (1885–1954) was instrumental in professionalizing black social work in America. Jones used his position was executive secretary of the National Urban League to work with social reformers advocating on behalf of African Americans and against racial discrimination. He also led the Urban League's efforts at campaigning for equal hiring practices and the inclusion of black workers in labor unions, and promoted the importance of vocational training and social work. Drawing on interviews with Jones's colleagues and associates, as well as recently opened family and Urban League archives, Felix L. Armfield blends biography with an in-depth discussion of the roles of black institutions and organizations. The result is a work that offers new details on the growth of African American communities, the evolution of African American life, and the role of black social workers in the years before the civil rights era.
Author: Juanita Karpf
Author: Lawrence Schenbeck
Author: Spike Lee
Author: Le'Trice D. Donaldson
Author: Kevin K. Gaines
Author: Shane Vogel
Author: Luis A. Campos
Author: Anne-Elizabeth Murdy
Author: Rory Lanier Bedford
Author: Felix L. Armfield