Author: David NichollsPublisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472110346
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
Provides a new way of looking at literary responses to migration and modernization
Conjuring the Folk
Author: David NichollsPublisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472110346
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
Provides a new way of looking at literary responses to migration and modernization
Conjuring Culture
Author: Theophus H. SmithPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198023197
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
This book provides a sophisticated new interdisciplinary interpretation of the formulation and evolution of African American religion and culture. Theophus Smith argues for the central importance of "conjure"--a magical means of transforming reality--in black spirituality and culture. Smith shows that the Bible, the sacred text of Western civilization, has in fact functioned as a magical formulary for African Americans. Going back to slave religion, and continuing in black folk practice and literature to the present day, the Bible has provided African Americans with ritual prescriptions for prophetically re-envisioning, and thereby transforming, their history and culture. In effect the Bible is a "conjure book" for prescribing cures and curses, and for invoking extraordinary and Divine powers to effect changes in the conditions of human existence--and to bring about justice and freedom. Biblical themes, symbols, and figures like Moses, the Exodus, the Promised Land, and the Suffering Servant, as deployed by African Americans, have crucially formed and reformed not only black culture, but American society as a whole. Smith examines not only the religious and political uses of conjure, but its influence on black aesthetics, in music, drama, folklore, and literature. The concept of conjure, he shows, is at the heart of an indigenous and still vital spirituality, with exciting implications for reformulating the next generation of black studies and black theology. Even more broadly, Smith proposes, "conjuring culture" can function as a new paradigm for understanding Western religious and cultural phenomena generally.
Conjuring Moments in African American Literature
Author: K. SamuelPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137336811
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189
Book Description
This book engages the ways African American authors have shifted, recycled, and reinvented the conjure woman in fiction. Kameelah Martin Samuel traces her presence and function in twentieth-century literature through historical records, oral histories, blues music, and collections of African American folklore.
Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation
Author: Shirley Moody-TurnerPublisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617038865
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
Before the innovative work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied, and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, these folklorists worked within but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream institutions. They often called into question the meaning of the very folklore projects in which they were engaged. Shirley Moody-Turner analyzes this output, along with the contributions of a disparate group of African American authors and scholars. She explores how black authors and folklorists were active participants—rather than passive observers—in conversations about the politics of representing black folklore. Examining literary texts, folklore documents, cultural performances, legal discourse, and political rhetoric, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation demonstrates how folklore studies became a battleground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century. The study is framed by two questions of historical and continuing import. What role have representations of black folklore played in constructing racial identity? And, how have those ideas impacted the way African Americans think about and creatively engage black traditions? Moody-Turner renders established historical facts in a new light and context, taking figures we thought we knew—such as Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, and Paul Laurence Dunbar—and recasting their place in African American intellectual and cultural history.
Encyclopedia of American Folklore
Author: Linda WattsPublisher: Infobase Holdings, Inc
ISBN: 1646930002
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 462
Book Description
Folklore has been described as the unwritten literature of a culture: its songs, stories, sayings, games, rituals, beliefs, and ways of life. Encyclopedia of American Folklore helps readers explore topics, terms, themes, figures, and issues related to this popular subject. This comprehensive reference guide addresses the needs of multiple audiences, including high school, college, and public libraries, archive and museum collections, storytellers, and independent researchers. Its content and organization correspond to the ways educators integrate folklore within literacy and wider learning objectives for language arts and cultural studies at the secondary level. This well-rounded resource connects United States folk forms with their cultural origin, historical context, and social function. Appendixes include a bibliography, a category index, and a discussion of starting points for researching American folklore. References and bibliographic material throughout the text highlight recently published and commonly available materials for further study. Coverage includes: Folk heroes and legendary figures, including Paul Bunyan and Yankee Doodle Fables, fairy tales, and myths often featured in American folklore, including "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Princess and the Pea" American authors who have added to or modified folklore traditions, including Washington Irving Historical events that gave rise to folklore, including the civil rights movement and the Revolutionary War Terms in folklore studies, such as fieldwork and the folklife movement Holidays and observances, such as Christmas and Kwanzaa Topics related to folklore in everyday life, such as sports folklore and courtship/dating folklore Folklore related to cultural groups, such as Appalachian folklore and African-American folklore and more.
Conjuring Freedom
Author: Johari JabirPublisher:
ISBN: 9780814213308
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 181
Book Description
Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's "Gospel Army" analyzes the songs of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of Black soldiers who met nightly in the performance of the ring shout. In this study, acknowledging the importance of conjure as a religious, political, and epistemological practice, Johari Jabir demonstrates how the musical performance allowed troop members to embody new identities in relation to national citizenship, militarism, and masculinity in more inclusive ways. Jabir also establishes how these musical practices of the regiment persisted long after the Civil War in Black culture, resisting, for instance, the paternalism and co-optive state antiracism of the film Glory, and the assumption that Blacks need to be deracinated to be full citizens. Reflecting the structure of the ring shout--the counterclockwise song, dance, drum, and story in African American history and culture--Conjuring Freedom offers three new concepts to cultural studies in order to describe the practices, techniques, and implications of the troop's performance: (1) Black Communal Conservatories, borrowing from Robert Farris Thompson's "invisible academies" to describe the structural but spontaneous quality of black music-making, (2) Listening Hermeneutics, which accounts for the generative and material affects of sound on meaning-making, and (3) Sonic Politics, which points to the political implications of music's use in contemporary representations of race and history.
Doctoring the Devil
Author: Jake RichardsPublisher: Weiser Books
ISBN: 1578637333
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
"Appalachian folk magic and conjure are little known today, but forty or fifty years ago, just about every person you might ask in Appalachia either knew something about it themselves or knew someone who did it. These practices and 'superstitions' are at the core Appalachian culture. Who were the old conjurors and witches of Appalachia? What did they do, believe in, and dress land talk like? How can you learn the ways of conjuring for yourself? This book answers those questions and more"--
Theorizing Scriptures
Author: Vincent L. WimbushPublisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813542049
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Book Description
Historically, religious scriptures are defined as holy texts that are considered to be beyond the abilities of the layperson to interpret. This volume takes a look at the social, cultural and racial meanings invested in these texts.
Conjuring the Commonplace: A Guide to Everyday Enchantment and Junk Drawer Magic
Author: Laine FullerPublisher: 1000 Volt Press
ISBN: 1734742275
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 219
Book Description
Is there magic in your junk drawer or in the pieces of a broken china plate? In Conjuring the Commonplace, Laine Fuller and Cory Thomas Hutcheson answer with a resounding, “Yes!” and deftly show you how to incorporate that magic into your everyday. They also point to other hidden treasures in places in your home you may have never thought to look. As the hosts of the long-running podcast New World Witchery, Cory and Laine have shared the folklore and magic of North America and their own magical journeys with listeners. Conjuring the Commonplace continues that conversation, highlighting the folklore of the common objects and the practical ways they have each incorporated these small magics into their lives and how you might too. If you’ve ever questioned whether to toss out that bit of string from a sewing project or wondered what you should know before picking up that shiny penny on the sidewalk, this book is for you.
The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals
Author: Bruce JacksonPublisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292755104
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 399
Book Description
In the eyes of many white Americans, North and South, the Negro did not have a culture until the Emancipation Proclamation. With few exceptions, serious collecting of Negro folklore by whites did not begin until the Civil War—and it was to be another four decades before black Americans would begin to appreciate their own cultural heritage. Few of the earlier writers realized that they had observed and recorded not simply a manifestation of a particular way of life but also a product peculiarly American and specifically Negro, a synthesis of African and American styles and traditions. The folksongs, speech, beliefs, customs, and tales of the American Negro are discussed in this anthology, originally published in 1967, of thirty-five articles, letters, and reviews from nineteenth-century periodicals. Published between 1838 and 1900 and written by authors who range from ardent abolitionist to dedicated slaveholder, these articles reflect the authors’ knowledge of, and attitudes toward, the Negro and his folklore. From the vast body of material that appeared on this subject during the nineteenth century, editor Bruce Jackson has culled fresh articles that are basic folklore and represent a wide range of material and attitudes. In addition to his introduction to the volume, Jackson has prefaced each article with a commentary. He has also supplied a supplemental bibliography on Negro folklore. If serious collecting of Negro folklore had begun by the middle of the nineteenth century, so had exploitation of its various aspects, particularly Negro songs. By 1850 minstrelsy was a big business. Although Jackson has considered minstrelsy outside the scope of this collection, he has included several discussions of it to suggest some aspects of its peculiar relation to the traditional. The articles in the anthology—some by such well-known figures as Joel Chandler Harris, George Washington Cable, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Mason Brown, and Antonin Dvorak—make fascinating reading for an observer of the American scene. This additional insight into the habits of thought and behavior of a culture in transition—folklore recorded in its own context—cannot but afford the thinking reader further understanding of the turbulent race problems of later times and today.
