Author : George Lipsitz
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 17,94 MB
Release : 2010
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0816666784
Looking closely at the limit of both multilingual literary expression and the literary journalism, criticism, and scholarship that comments on multilingual work, Babel's Shadow presents a critical reflection on the fate of literature in a world gripped by the crisis of globalization.
Author : George Lipsitz
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 41,87 MB
Release : 2010-03-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1452939292
Considered by many to be the godfather of R&B, Johnny Otis—musician, producer, artist, entrepreneur, pastor, disc jockey, writer, and tireless fighter for racial equality—has had a remarkable life by any measure. In this first biography of Otis, George Lipsitz tells the largely unknown story of a towering figure in the history of African American music and culture who was, by his own description, “black by persuasion.” Born to Greek immigrant parents in Vallejo, California, in 1921, Otis grew up in an integrated neighborhood and identified deeply with black music and culture from an early age. He moved to Los Angeles as a young man and submerged himself in the city’s vibrant African American cultural life, centered on Central Avenue and its thriving music scene. Otis began his six-decade career in music playing drums in territory swing bands in the 1930s. He went on to lead his own band in the 1940s and open the Barrelhouse nightclub in Watts. His R&B band had seventeen Top 40 hits between 1950 and 1969, including “Willie and the Hand Jive.” As a producer and A&R man, Otis discovered such legends as Etta James, Jackie Wilson, and Big Mama Thornton. Otis also wrote a column for the Sentinel, one of L.A.’s leading black newspapers, became pastor of his own interracial church, hosted popular radio and television shows that introduced millions to music by African American artists, and was lauded as businessman of the year in a 1951 cover story in Negro Achievements magazine. Throughout his career Otis’s driving passion has been his fearless and unyielding opposition to racial injustice, whether protesting on the front lines, exposing racism and championing the accomplishments of black Americans, or promoting African American musicians. Midnight at the Barrelhouse is a chronicle of a life rich in both incident and inspiration, as well as an exploration of the complicated nature of race relations in twentieth-century America. Otis’s total commitment to black culture and transcendence of racial boundaries, Lipsitz shows, teach important lessons about identity, race, and power while encapsulating the contradictions of racism in American society.
Author : Johnny Otis
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 39,10 MB
Release : 1993-11-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780819562876
An intriguing memoir by the legendary bandleader.
Author : Johnny Otis
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 47,92 MB
Release : 2009
Category : History
ISBN : 0816665311
In the summer of 1965, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts exploded in a race riot that spanned six days, claimed thirty-four lives, and brought America's struggle with racial oppression into harrowing relief. For Johnny Otis, "Godfather of Rhythm and Blues," the events of that summer would inspire one of the most compelling books to ever explore that fateful August in Watts. Originally published in 1968, Listen to the Lambs grew from a letter Otis wrote to an expatriate friend during the days following the riots. Otis moves back and forth between Watts and his own childhood to reveal an alternative history of the riots. Equal parts memoir, social history, and racial manifesto, Listen to the Lambs is a moving witness of collective turmoil and a people for whom the long-promised American Dream was nowhere to be found.
Author : Kelly Lytle Hernández
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 40,7 MB
Release : 2017-02-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1469631199
Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.
Author : Mark Ribowsky
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 46,2 MB
Release : 2015-06-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 0871408740
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year (Nonfiction) Finalist for the Marfield Prize, National Award for Arts Writing “Evokes the fire of Redding.... Ribowsky tells the story with nonstop energy, while always probing for the larger social and musical pictures.” —New York Times Book Review When he died in one of rock's string of tragic plane crashes, Otis Redding was only twenty-six, yet already the avatar of a new kind of soul music. The beating heart of Memphis-based Stax Records, he had risen to fame belting out gospel-flecked blues in stage performances that seemed to ignite not only a room but an entire generation. If Berry Gordy's black-owned kingdom in Motown showed the way in soul music, Redding made his own way, going where not even his two role models who had preceded him out of Macon, Georgia—Little Richard and James Brown—had gone. Now, in this transformative work, New York Times Notable Book author Mark Ribowsky contextualizes his subject's short career within the larger cultural and social movements of the era, tracing the crooner's rise from preacher's son to a preacher of three-minute soul sermons. And what a quick rise it was. At the tender age of twenty-one, Redding needed only a single unscheduled performance to earn a record deal, his voice so "utterly unique" (Atlantic) that it catapulted him on a path to stardom and turned a Memphis theater-turned-studio into a music mecca. Soon he was playing at sold-out venues across the world, from Finsbury Park in London to his ultimate conquest, the 1967 Monterrey Pop Festival in California, where he finally won over the flower-power crowd. Still, Redding was not always the affable, big-hearted man's man the PR material painted him to be. Based on numerous new interviews and prodigious research, Dreams to Remember reintroduces an incredibly talented yet impulsive man, one who once even risked his career by shooting a man in the leg. But that temperament masked a deep vulnerability that was only exacerbated by an industry that refused him a Grammy until he was in his grave—even as he shaped the other Stax soul men around him, like Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and Booker T. and The MG's. As a result, this requiem is one of great conquest but also grand tragedy: a soul king of truth, a mortal man with an immortal voice and a pain in his heart. Now he, and the forces that shaped his incomparable sound, are reclaimed, giving us a panoramic of an American original who would come to define an entire era, yet only wanted what all men deserve—a modicum of respect and a place to watch the ships roll in and away again.
Author : Art M. Blake
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 48,7 MB
Release : 2019-11-08
Category : History
ISBN : 3030318419
In the second half of the twentieth century, new sounds began to reverberate across the United States. The voices of African-Americans as well as of women, Latinx, queer, and trans people broke through in social movements, street protests, and in media stories of political and social disruption. Postwar America literally sounded different. This book argues that new technologies and new mobilities sharpened American attention to these audibly coded identities, on the radio, on the streets and highways, in new music, and on television. Covering the Puerto Rican migration to New York in the 1950s, the varying uses of CB radio by white and African American citizens in the 1970s, and the emergence of audible queerness, Art M. Blake attunes us to the sounds of race, mobility, and audible difference. As he argues, marginalized groups disrupted the postwar machine age by using new media technologies to make themselves heard.
Author : Natalia Molina
Publisher : University of California Press
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 15,13 MB
Release : 2019-02-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0520299671
Relational Formations of Race brings African American, Chicanx/Latinx, Asian American, and Native American studies together in a single volume, enabling readers to consider the racialization and formation of subordinated groups in relation to one another. These essays conceptualize racialization as a dynamic and interactive process; group-based racial constructions are formed not only in relation to whiteness, but also in relation to other devalued and marginalized groups. The chapters offer explicit guides to understanding race as relational across all disciplines, time periods, regions, and social groups. By studying race relationally, and through a shared context of meaning and power, students will draw connections among subordinated groups and will better comprehend the logic that underpins the forms of inclusion and dispossession such groups face. As the United States shifts toward a minority-majority nation, Relational Formations of Race offers crucial tools for understanding today’s shifting race dynamics.
Author : Ronald H. Bayor
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 561 pages
File Size : 36,2 MB
Release : 2016
Category : History
ISBN : 0199766037
"What is the state of the field of immigration and ethnic history; what have scholars learned about previous immigration waves; and where is the field heading? These are the main questions as historians, linguists, sociologists, and political scientists in this book look at past and contemporary immigration and ethnicity"--Provided by publisher.
Author : Laurie Ouellette
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 10,8 MB
Release : 2017-03-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1479883654
The Essential vocabulary of Media Studies Keywords for Media Studies introduces and aims to advance the field of critical media studies by tracing, defining, and problematizing its established and emergent terminology. The book historicizes thinking about media and society, whether that means noting a long history of "new media," or tracing how understandings of media "power" vary across time periods and knowledge formations. Bringing together an impressive group of established scholars from television studies, film studies, sound studies, games studies, and more, each of the 65 essays in the volume focuses on a critical concept, from "fan" to "industry," and "celebrity" to "surveillance." Keywords for Media Studies is an essential tool that introduces key terms, research traditions, debates, and their histories, and offers a sense of the new frontiers and questions emerging in the field of media studies.
