eBook PDF Download Digital Library
Author: Yuval Taylor
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-08-27
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 0393070980
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Investigates the origin and heyday of black minstrelsy, which in modern times is considered an embarrassment, and discusses whether or not the art form is actually still alive in the work of contemporary performers--from Dave Chappelle and Flavor Flav to Spike Lee.
Author: Yuval Taylor
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-08-27
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 039308390X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An exploration and celebration of a controversial tradition that, contrary to popular opinion, is alive and active after more than 150 years. Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen investigate the complex history of black minstrelsy, adopted in the mid-nineteenth century by African American performers who played the grinning blackface fool to entertain black and white audiences. We now consider minstrelsy an embarrassing relic, but once blacks and whites alike saw it as a black art form—and embraced it as such. And, as the authors reveal, black minstrelsy remains deeply relevant to popular black entertainment, particularly in the work of contemporary artists like Dave Chappelle, Flavor Flav, Spike Lee, and Lil Wayne. Darkest America explores the origins, heyday, and present-day manifestations of this tradition, exploding the myth that it was a form of entertainment that whites foisted on blacks, and shining a sure-to-be controversial light on how these incendiary performances can be not only demeaning but also, paradoxically, liberating.
Author: Yuval Taylor
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Published: 2012-08-28
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 0393070980
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An exploration and celebration of a controversial tradition that, contrary to popular opinion, is alive and active after more than 150 years. Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen investigate the complex history of black minstrelsy, adopted in the mid-nineteenth century by African American performers who played the grinning blackface fool to entertain black and white audiences. We now consider minstrelsy an embarrassing relic, but once blacks and whites alike saw it as a black art form—and embraced it as such. And, as the authors reveal, black minstrelsy remains deeply relevant to popular black entertainment, particularly in the work of contemporary artists like Dave Chappelle, Flavor Flav, Spike Lee, and Lil Wayne. Darkest America explores the origins, heyday, and present-day manifestations of this tradition, exploding the myth that it was a form of entertainment that whites foisted on blacks, and shining a sure-to-be controversial light on how these incendiary performances can be not only demeaning but also, paradoxically, liberating.
Author: Annemarie Bean
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 1996-11-29
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 9780819563002
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A sourcebook of contemporary and historical commentary on America's first popular mass entertainment.
Author: John Berryman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-10-21
Total Pages: 469
ISBN-13: 1466879637
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The complete Dream Songs--hypnotic, seductive, masterful--as thrilling to read now as they ever were John Berryman's The Dream Songs are perhaps the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of oems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of beings at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. And while Henry is breaking down and cracking up and patching himself together again, Berryman is doing the same thing to the English language, crafting electric verses that defy grammar but resound with an intuitive truth: "if he had a hundred years," Henry despairs in "Dream Song 29," "& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time / Henry could not make good." This volume collects both 77 Dream Songs, which won Berryman the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, and their continuation, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which was awarded the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1969. The Dream Songs are witty and wild, an account of madness shot through with searing insight, winking word play, and moments of pure, soaring elation. This is a brilliantly sustained and profoundly moving performance that has not yet-and may never be-equaled.
Author: Yuval Taylor
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-03-26
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 0393243923
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A Finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography “A complete pleasure to read.” —Lisa Page, Washington Post Novelist Zora Neale Hurston and poet Langston Hughes, two of America’s greatest writers, first met in New York City in 1925. Drawn to each other, they helped launch a radical journal, Fire!! Later, meeting by accident in Alabama, they became close as they traveled together—Hurston interviewing African Americans for folk stories, Hughes getting his first taste of the deep South. By illuminating their lives, work, competitiveness, and ambitions, Yuval Taylor savvily details how their friendship and literary collaborations dead-ended in acrimonious accusations.
Author: W. T. Lhamon
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13: 9780674035935
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Jim Crow has long represented America's imperfect union. This edition of the earliest Jim Crow plays and songs presents essential performances assembling backtalk, banter, masquerade, and dance into the diagnostic American style. They celebrate blackness in a Republic that failed to unite until Americans agreed to disagree over Jim Crow's meaning.
Author: Rajen Persaud
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-03-03
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 1416595422
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A provocative, candid study of the romantic relationships between white women and black men offers a psychological explanation for the phenomenon, as well as analyzing the influence of the entertainment industry, exposing stereotypes, and assessing the global implications of black and white relationships.
Author: Tim Brooks
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2019-11-15
Total Pages: 291
ISBN-13: 1476676763
DOWNLOAD EBOOK → The minstrel show occupies a complex and controversial space in the history of American popular culture. Today considered a shameful relic of America's racist past, it nonetheless offered many black performers of the 19th and early 20th centuries their only opportunity to succeed in a white-dominated entertainment world, where white performers in blackface had by the 1830s established minstrelsy as an enduringly popular national art form. This book traces the often overlooked history of the "modern" minstrel show through the advent of 20th century mass media--when stars like Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Mickey Rooney continued a long tradition of affecting black music, dance and theatrical styles for mainly white audiences--to its abrupt end in the 1950s. A companion two-CD reissue of recordings discussed in the book is available from Archeophone Records at www.archeophone.com.
Author: Hugh Barker
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2007-01-30
Total Pages: 392
ISBN-13: 0393060780
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Musicians strive to "keep it real"; listeners condemn "fakes"; but does great music really need to be authentic? By investigating this obsession in the last century, this title rethinks what makes popular music work.
