Turn the world upside down: empire and unruly forms of Black folk culture in the U.S. and Caribbean

"Black hemispheric writing in the first half of the twentieth century was forged by the intertwined legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers sought to transmit the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to representations...

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. Verfasser: Owens, Imani D. (VerfasserIn)
Format: Elektronisch E-Book
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: New York Columbia University Press [2023]
Schriftenreihe:Black lives in the diaspora.
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:DE-862
DE-863
Zusammenfassung:"Black hemispheric writing in the first half of the twentieth century was forged by the intertwined legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers sought to transmit the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to representations of folk culture. Many critics and scholars have perceived these representations as an effort to reclaim an authentic folk heritage as the foundation for national literary movements. In Turn the World Upside Down, Imani Owens tells a different story showing how writers and performers crafted alternatives to the tropes of authenticity and developed a different set of theories and aesthetic forms and styles to understand the relationship between folk culture and the modern Black experience. Turning to a transnational and multilingual archive, Owens considers a wide range of writers, including Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer, the experimental ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price Mars, the written and recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén and Eusebia Cosme, and finally, the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. She considers how these writers and performers depicted folk culture-and blackness itself-as a site of disruption, experimentation, ambiguity, and flux. In their attunement to Black labor, movement, speech, ritual, these figures show how "everyday folk" contributed to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. At the same time, she argues that the aim of these works is not to render the folk more knowable or worthy of assimilation into predetermined models of citizenship or resistance but rather to suggest alternatives"--
Beschreibung:1 online resource (xv, 258 pages) illustrations
Bibliographie:Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN:0231557671
9780231557672

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