Black Imagination and the Middle Passage PDF Download

Author: Maria Diedrich
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195352130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This volume of essays examines the forced dispossession caused by the Middle Passage. The book analyzes the texts, religious rites, economic exchanges, dance, and music it elicited, both on the transatlantic journey and on the American continent. The totality of this collection establishes a broad topographical and temporal context for the Passage that extends from the interior of Africa across the Atlantic and to the interior of the Americas, and from the beginning of the Passage to the present day. A collective narrative of itinerant cultural consciousness as represented in histories, myths, and arts, these contributions conceptualize the meaning of the Middle Passage for African American and American history, literature, and life.

Author: M. Jordan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403978328
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
In African-American Servitude and Historical Imaginings Margaret Jordan initiates a new way of looking at the African American presence in American literature. Twentieth-century retrospective fiction is the site for this compelling investigation about how African American servants and slaves have enormous utility as cultural artifacts, objects to be acted upon, agents in place, or agents provocateurs. Jordan argues that those who even those seemingly innocuous, infrequently visible, or silent servants are vehicles through which history, culture and social values and practices are cultivated and perpetuated, challenged and destabilized. Jordan demonstrates how African American servants and servitude are strategically deployed and engaged in ways which encourage a rethinking of the past. She examines the ideological underpinnings of retrospective fiction by writers who are clearly social theorists and philosophers. Jordan contends that they do not read or misread history, they imagine history as meditations on social realties and reconstruct the past as a way to confront the present.

Author: Amanda Brickell Bellows
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469655551
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freedpeople strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation's post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freedpeople countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. This book provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power.

Author: Michael Ra-Shon Hall
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1949979717
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Freedom Beyond Confinement examines the cultural history of African American travel and the lasting influence of travel on the imagination particularly of writers of literary fiction and nonfiction. Using the paradox of freedom and confinement to frame the ways travel represented both opportunity and restriction for African Americans, the book details the intimate connection between travel and imagination from post Reconstruction (ca. 1877) to the present. Analysing a range of sources from the black press and periodicals to literary fiction and nonfiction, the book charts the development of critical representation of travel from the foundational press and periodicals which offered African Americans crucial information on travel precautions and possibilities (notably during the era of Jim Crow) to the woefully understudied literary fiction that would later provide some of the most compelling and lasting portrayals of the freedoms and constraints African Americans associated with travel. Travel experiences (often challenging and vexed) provided the raw data with which writers produced images and ideas meaningful as they learned to navigate, negotiate and even challenge racialized and gendered impediments to their mobility. In their writings African Americans worked to realize a vision and state of freedom informed by those often difficult experiences of mobility. In telling this story, the book hopes to center literary fiction in studies of travel where fiction has largely remained absent.

Author: Helen Bannerman
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0397300069
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 74

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Book Description
The jolly and exciting tale of the little boy who lost his red coat and his blue trousers and his purple shoes but who was saved from the tigers to eat 169 pancakes for his supper, has been universally loved by generations of children. First written in 1899, the story has become a childhood classic and the authorized American edition with the original drawings by the author has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Little Black Sambo is a book that speaks the common language of all nations, and has added more to the joy of little children than perhaps any other story. They love to hear it again and again; to read it to themselves; to act it out in their play.

Author: Roland Owen Laird
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.
ISBN: 9781402762260
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Chronicles achievements made since the time of slavery, including contributions to the arts, science, literature, and politics through the election of President Barack Obama.

Author: Marlene Calvin
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643105746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
African Americans and Jamaicans share a common past of forced dispersion from their original homelands and enslavement in the Americas. The legacies of white supremacy, racism and Euro-centrism are still influential in both societies today. The conditions of alienation and violence which are represented in African American and Jamaican cultural texts are tied to the sociological development of both societies. The processes of having to prove their humanity, as cultural communities and as individuals, have caused many African diasporic people to become alienated from - and violated by - the societies they live in.

Author: Cassander L. Smith
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319767860
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies brings into conversation two fields—Early Modern Studies and Black Studies—that traditionally have had little to say to each other. This disconnect is the product of current scholarly assumptions about a lack of archival evidence that limits what we can say about those of African descent before modernity. This volume posits that the limitations are not in the archives, but in the methods we have constructed for locating and examining those archives. The essays that make up this volume offer new critical approaches to black African agency and the conceptualization of blackness in early modern literary works, historical documents, material and visual cultures, and performance culture. Ultimately, this critical anthology revises current understandings about racial discourse and the cultural contributions of black Africans in early modernity and in the present across the globe.

Author: Tuire Valkeakari
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813072441
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Precarious Passages unites literature written by members of the far-flung Black Anglophone diaspora. Rather than categorizing novels as simply "African American," "Black Canadian," "Black British," or "postcolonial African Caribbean," this book takes an integrative approach: it argues that fiction creates and sustains a sense of a wider African diasporic community in the Western world. Tuire Valkeakari analyzes the writing of Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, Lawrence Hill, and other contemporary novelists of African descent. She shows how their novels connect with each other and with defining moments in the transatlantic experience, most notably the Middle Passage and enslavement. The lives of their characters are marked by migration and displacement. Their protagonists yearn to experience fulfilling human connection in a place they can call home. Portraying strategies of survival, adaptation, and resistance across the limitless varieties of life experiences in the diaspora, these novelists continually reimagine what it means to share a Black diasporic identity.

Author: Peter Kolchin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674920989
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
Kolchin compares the world of masters and the world of slaves in U.S. and Russian nonfree labor systems. He theorizes that while southern states in the U.S. existed as slaveowner's communities, the rural Russian communal landcape was severely influenced by the bargaining power of peasant bondsmen.