Object Performance in the Black Atlantic

Object Performance in the Black Atlantic PDF

Author: Paulette Richards

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-28

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1000919897

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Given that slaveholders prohibited the creation of African-style performing objects, is there a traceable connection between traditional African puppets, masks, and performing objects and contemporary African American puppetry? This study approaches the question by looking at the whole performance complex surrounding African performing objects and examines the material culture of object performance. Object Performance in the Black Atlantic argues that since human beings can attribute private, personal meanings to objects obtained for personal use such as dolls, vessels, and quilts, the lines of material culture continuity between African and African American object performance run through objects that performed in ritual rather than theatrical capacity. Split into three parts, this book starts by outlining the spaces where the African American object performance complex persisted through the period of slavery. Part Two traces how African Americans began to reclaim object performance in the era of Jim Crow segregation and Part Three details how increased educational and economic opportunities along with new media technologies enabled African Americans to use performing objects as a powerful mode of resistance to the objectification of Black bodies. This is an essential study for any students of puppetry and material performance, and particularly those concerned with African American performance and performance in North America more broadly.

Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic

Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic PDF

Author: Akinwumi Ogundiran

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2014-10-03

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 0253013917

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Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African–descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition.

Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic

Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic PDF

Author: Kathleen Gough

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-07

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1135924899

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Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic advances an innovative and compelling approach to writing comparative studies of performance in transnational, intercultural relation to one another. Its chosen subject in this case is the cultural and political intersection of African and Irish diasporic peoples and movements. Gough approaches her subject via five key flashpoints in Black/Green relations, moving from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. In turn, each of these is related to mediums of performance that were prevalent at the time, such as abolitionist oratory and melodrama, photography and tableaux, architecture and folk drama, television and political demonstrations, and visual art and dramaturgy. By examining the unlikely kinship between social actors such as Ida B. Wells and Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory and Zora Neale Hurston, and Bernadette Devlin and Alice Childress, along with a host of old and new theatrical characters, this book explores how a transmedial investigation of gender, community, and performance allows for a revision of historiography in Atlantic studies, while the study itself revises and reimagines key concepts central to performance studies. In 2014 Kinship and Performance was given the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theatre from the American Society for Theatre Research.

Reading the Puppet Stage

Reading the Puppet Stage PDF

Author: Claudia Orenstein

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-21

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1000918424

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Drawing on the author’s two decades of seeing, writing on, and teaching about puppetry from a critical perspective, this book offers a collection of insights into how we watch, understand, and appreciate puppetry. Reading the Puppet Stage uses examples from a broad range of puppetry genres, from Broadway shows and the Muppets to the rich field of international contemporary performing object experimentation to the wealth of Asian puppet traditions, as it illustrates the ways performing objects can create and structure meaning and the dramaturgical interplay between puppets, performers, and language onstage. An introductory approach for students, critics, and artists, this book underlines where significant artistic concerns lie in puppetry and outlines the supportive networks and resources that shape the community of those who make, watch, and love this ever-developing art.

The Black Atlantic

The Black Atlantic PDF

Author: Paul Gilroy

Publisher: Verso

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9780860916758

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An account of the location of black intellectuals in the modern world following the end of racial slavery. The lives and writings of key African Americans such as Martin Delany, W.E.B. Dubois, Frederick Douglas and Richard Wright are examined in the light of their experiences in Europe and Africa.

Diasporic Women’s Writing of the Black Atlantic

Diasporic Women’s Writing of the Black Atlantic PDF

Author: Emilia María Durán-Almarza

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-30

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1136656987

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This book brings together a complete set of approaches to works by female authors that articulate the black Atlantic in relation to the interplay of race, class, and gender. The chapters provide the grounds to (en)gender a more complex understanding of the scattered geographies of the African diaspora in the Atlantic basin. The variety of approaches displayed bears witness to the vitality of a field that, over the years, has become a diasporic formation itself as it incorporates critical insights and theoretical frameworks from multiple disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, thus exposing the manifold character of (black) diasporic interconnections within and beyond the Atlantic. Focusing on a wide array of contemporary literary and performance texts by women writers and performers from diverse locations including the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, the US, and the UK, chapters visit genres such as performance art, the novel, science fiction, short stories, and music. For these purposes, the volume is organized around two significant dimensions of diasporas: on the one hand, the material—corporeal and spatial—locations where those displacements associated with travel and exile occur, and, on the other, the fluid environments and networks that connect distant places, cultures, and times. This collection explores the ways in which women of African descent shape the cultures and histories in the modern, colonial, and postcolonial Atlantic worlds.

Radical Virtuosity

Radical Virtuosity PDF

Author: Genevieve Hyacinthe

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2019-10-29

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0262042703

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Reclaiming the artist Ana Mendieta as a formally innovative maker of performative art who forged connections to the marginalized around the world. The artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) is remembered as the creator of powerful works expressing a vibrant and unflinching second-wave feminist sensibility. In Radical Virtuosity, art historian Genevieve Hyacinthe offers a new view of Mendieta, connecting her innovative artwork to the art, cultural aesthetics and concerns, feminisms, and sociopolitical messages of the black Atlantic. Mendieta left Cuba as a preteen, fleeing the Castro regime, and spent years in U.S. foster care. Her sense of exile, Hyacinthe argues, colors her work. Hyacinthe examines the development of Mendieta's performative artworks—particularly the Silueta series (1973–1985), which documented the silhouette of her body in the earth over time (a series “without end,” Mendieta said)—and argues that these works were shaped by Mendieta's appropriation and reimagining of Afro-Cuban ritual. Mendieta's effort to create works that invited audience participation, Hyacinthe says, signals her interest in forging connections with the marginalized, particularly those of the black Atlantic and Global South. Hyacinthe describes the “counter entropy” of Mendieta's small-scale earthworks (contrasting them with more massive works created by Robert Smithson and other male artists); considers the resonance of Mendieta's work with the contemporary practices of black Atlantic female artists including Wangechi Mutu, Renee Green, and Damali Abrams; and connects Mendieta's artistic and political expressions to black Atlantic feminisms of such popular artists as Princess Nokia. Mendieta's life and work are often overshadowed in popular perception by her early and tragic death—at thirty-six, she plunged from the window of the thirty-fourth floor Greenwich Village apartment she shared with her husband, the artist Carl Andre. (Andre was charged with her murder and acquitted.) Hyacinthe's account—profusely illustrated, with many images in color—reclaims Mendieta's work and legacy for its artistic significance.

Sensible Objects

Sensible Objects PDF

Author: Elizabeth Edwards

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-31

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1000190064

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Anthropologists of the senses have long argued that cultures differ in their sensory registers. This groundbreaking volume applies this idea to material culture and the social practices that endow objects with meanings in both colonial and postcolonial relationships. It challenges the privileged position of the sense of vision in the analysis of material culture. Contributors argue that vision can only be understood in relation to the other senses. In this they present another challenge to the assumed western five-sense model, and show how our understanding of material culture in both historical and contemporary contexts might be reconfigured if we consider the role of smell, taste, touch and sound, as well as sight, in making meanings about objects.

Difficult Diasporas

Difficult Diasporas PDF

Author: Samantha Pinto

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2013-09-06

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0814771289

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Winner of the 2013 Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature In this comparative study of contemporary Black Atlantic women writers, Samantha Pinto demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and location. Thinking beyond national identity to include African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black British literature, Difficult Diasporas brings together an innovative archive of twentieth-century texts marked by their break with conventional literary structures. These understudied resources mix genres, as in the memoir/ethnography/travel narrative Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston, and eschew linear narratives, as illustrated in the book-length, non-narrative poem by M. Nourbese Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Such an aesthetics, which protests against stable categories and fixed divisions, both reveals and obscures that which it seeks to represent: the experiences of Black women writers in the African Diaspora. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship in her study of authors such as Jackie Kay, Elizabeth Alexander, Erna Brodber, Ama Ata Aidoo, among others, Pinto argues for the critical importance of cultural form and demands that we resist the impulse to prioritize traditional notions of geographic boundaries. Locating correspondences between seemingly disparate times and places, and across genres, Pinto fully engages the unique possibilities of literature and culture to redefine race and gender studies.