Terra 2008


Book Description

Earthen architecture constitutes one of the most diverse forms of cultural heritage and one of the most challenging to preserve. It dates from all periods and is found on all continents but is particularly prevalent in Africa, where it has been a building tradition for centuries. Sites range from ancestral cities in Mali to the palaces of Abomey in Benin, from monuments and mosques in Iran and Buddhist temples on the Silk Road to Spanish missions in California. This volume's sixty-four papers address such themes as earthen architecture in Mali, the conservation of living sites, local knowledge systems and intangible aspects, seismic and other natural forces, the conservation and management of archaeological sites, research advances, and training.




Uranie


Book Description

I WAS seventeen. She was called Uranie. Was Uranie, then, a young girl, fair, with blue eyes, innocent, but eager for knowledge? No, she was simply what she has always been, one of the nine muses; she who presided over astronomy, and whose celestial glance animated and directed the spheral choir; she was the heavenly idea hovering above earthly dullness; she had neither the palpitating flesh, nor the heart whose pulsations can be transmitted through space, nor the soft warmth of humanity; but she existed, nevertheless, in a sort of ideal world, superior to humanity, and always pure; and yet she was human enough in name and form to produce in the soul of a youth a vivid and profound impression; to awaken in that soul an undefined and undefinable sentiment of admiration: almost of love.




Le Tumulte Noir


Book Description

Jody Blake demonstrates in this book that although the impact of African-American music and dance in France was constant from 1900 to 1930, it was not unchanging. This was due in part to the stylistic development and diversity of African-American music and dance, from the prewar cakewalk and ragtime to the postwar Charleston and jazz. Successive groups of modernists, beginning with the Matisse and Picasso circle in the 1900s and concluding with the Surrealists and Purists in the 1920s, constructed different versions of la musique and la danse negre. Manifested in creative and critical works, these responses to African-American music and dance reflected the modernists' varying artistic agendas and historical climates.