Author : Lisa Tomlinson
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 23,25 MB
Release : 2017-01-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9004342338
The African- Jamaican Aesthetics Cultural Retention and Transformation Across Borders centres on the use of African Jamaican Aesthetics in Jamaica’s literary traditions and its transformation and transmission in the diaspora.
Author : Krista A. Thompson
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 419 pages
File Size : 10,64 MB
Release : 2015-05-09
Category : Art
ISBN : 0822375982
In Jamaican dancehalls competition for the video camera's light is stiff, so much so that dancers sometimes bleach their skin to enhance their visibility. In the Bahamas, tuxedoed students roll into prom in tricked-out sedans, staging grand red-carpet entrances that are designed to ensure they are seen being photographed. Throughout the United States and Jamaica friends pose in front of hand-painted backgrounds of Tupac, flashy cars, or brand-name products popularized in hip-hop culture in countless makeshift roadside photography studios. And visual artists such as Kehinde Wiley remix the aesthetic of Western artists with hip-hop culture in their portraiture. In Shine, Krista Thompson examines these and other photographic practices in the Caribbean and United States, arguing that performing for the camera is more important than the final image itself. For the members of these African diasporic communities, seeking out the camera's light—whether from a cell phone, Polaroid, or video camera—provides a means with which to represent themselves in the public sphere. The resulting images, Thompson argues, become their own forms of memory, modernity, value, and social status that allow for cultural formation within and between African diasporic communities.
Author : Sarah Nuttall
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 13,51 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780822339076
In Cameroon, a monumental "statue of liberty" is made from scrap metal. In Congo, a thriving popular music incorporates piercing screams and carnal dances. When these and other instantiations of the aesthetics of Africa and its diasporas are taken into account, how are ideas of beauty reconfigured? Scholars and artists take up that question in this invigorating, lavishly illustrated collection, which includes more than one hundred color images. Exploring sculpture, music, fiction, food, photography, fashion, and urban design, the contributors engage with and depart from canonical aesthetic theories as they demonstrate that beauty cannot be understood apart from ugliness. Highlighting how ideas of beauty are manifest and how they mutate, travel, and combine across time and distance, continental and diasporic writers examine the work of a Senegalese sculptor inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's photographs of Nuba warriors; a rich Afro-Brazilian aesthetic incorporating aspects of African, Jamaican, and American cultures; and African Americans' Africanization of the Santería movement in the United States. They consider the fraught, intricate spaces of the urban landscape in postcolonial South Africa; the intense pleasures of eating on Réunion; and the shockingly graphic images on painted plywood boards advertising "morality" plays along the streets of Ghana. And they analyze the increasingly ritualized wedding feasts in Cameroon as well as the limits of an explicitly "African" aesthetics. Two short stories by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto gesture toward what beauty might be in the context of political failure and postcolonial disillusionment. Together the essays suggest that beauty is in some sense future-oriented and that taking beauty in Africa and its diasporas seriously is a way of rekindling hope. Contributors. Rita Barnard, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mia Couto, Mark Gevisser, Simon Gikandi, Michelle Gilbert, Isabel Hofmeyr, William Kentridge, Dominique Malaquais, Achille Mbembe, Cheryl-Ann Michael, Celestin Monga, Sarah Nuttall, Patricia Pinho, Rodney Place, Els van der Plas, Pippa Stein, Françoise Vergès
Author : Carol Tulloch
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 17,32 MB
Release : 2016-01-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1474262864
It is broadly recognized that black style had a clear and profound influence on the history of dress in the twentieth century, with black culture and fashion having long been defined as 'cool'. Yet despite this high profile, in-depth explorations of the culture and history of style and dress in the African diaspora are a relatively recent area of enquiry. The Birth of Cool asserts that 'cool' is seen as an arbiter of presence, and relates how both iconic and 'ordinary' black individuals and groups have marked out their lives through the styling of their bodies. Focusing on counter- and sub-cultural contexts, this book investigates the role of dress in the creation and assertion of black identity. From the gardenia corsage worn by Billie Holiday to the work-wear of female African-Jamaican market traders, through to the home-dressmaking of black Britons in the 1960s, and the meaning of a polo-neck jumper as depicted in a 1934 self-portrait by African-American artist Malvin Gray Johnson, this study looks at the ways in which the diaspora experience is expressed through self-image. Spanning the late nineteenth century to the modern day, the book draws on ready-made and homemade fashion, photographs, paintings and films, published and unpublished biographies and letters from Britain, Jamaica, South Africa, and the United States to consider how personal style statements reflect issues of racial and cultural difference. The Birth of Cool is a powerful exploration of how style and dress both initiate and confirm change, and the ways in which they expresses identity and resistance in black culture.
Author : Roger Mais
Publisher : MacMillan Caribbean
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 28,57 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781405062961
Originally published in 1954, this is the tragic story of an honest Rastafarian healer caught up in a web of intrigue and betrayal in Jamaica's tough West Kingston slums. It is a portrait of a ghetto saint - an ordinary man selected by the universe to bring enlightenment to poor belittled people.
Author : Akinwumi Ogundiran
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 419 pages
File Size : 26,37 MB
Release : 2014-10-03
Category : History
ISBN : 0253013917
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.
Author : Maria A. Robinson-Smith
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 30,27 MB
Release : 2018
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9789766406547
Maria A. Robinson-Smith presents an overview and genealogy of Revivalism in this work. She explores the role of the Revival iconography in building a culture of shared understanding among Revivalists and, by extension, African Jamaicans. The Watt Town setting, with bands coming together from communities all over Jamaica, engaging in the same practices, is a symbolic homeland where people celebrate their Africanness and sustain the collective memory of Revivalists. Revival iconography is explored through its many modes: visual, sound and movement. Seals, symbols and colour symbolism are presented as a representation of the repertoire of images that make up the Revival iconography. Revival cosmology in the rituals and ceremonies are explored and the spaces created by the seals are treated as liminal ones for the enactment of cultural performances. Smith makes the point that the iconography makes it possible for Revivalists to interpret events and rituals in much the same way across Jamaica. Iconography is the symbolic language and carrier of culture that is central to the practice and production of shared meanings, and this language gives Revivalists a sense of identity. The Revival iconography stores information that makes it possible for Revivalists to reconnect with African metaphysics, thus reclaiming the African self.
Author : Kwame Senu Neville Dawes
Publisher : Peepal Tree Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 17,18 MB
Release : 1999
Category : History
ISBN :
Dawes takes an in-depth look at reggae as an artistic form, exploring how reggae is both uniquely Jamaican and a music of world wide appeal. His writing communicates his infectious enthusiasm for his subject.
Author : Shirley Anne Tate
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 15,21 MB
Release : 2016-04-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1317174011
Previous work discussing Black beauty has tended to concentrate on Black women's search for white beauty as a consequence of racialization. Without denying either the continuation of such aesthetics or their enduring power, this book uncovers the cracks in this hegemonic Black beauty. Drawing on detailed ethnographic research amongst British women of Caribbean heritage, this volume pursues a broad discussion of beauty within the Black diaspora contexts of the Caribbean, the UK, the United States and Latin America through different historical periods to the present day. With a unique exploration of beauty, race and identity politics, the author reveals how Black women themselves speak about, negotiate, inhabit, work on and perform Black beauty. As such, it will appeal not only to sociologists, but anyone working in the fields of race, ethnicity and post-colonial thought, feminism and the sociology of the body.
Author : Shirley Anne Tate
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 18,66 MB
Release : 2022-12-20
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1000798240
In this accessible and yet challenging work, Shirley Anne Tate engages with race and gender intersectionality, connecting through to affect theory, to develop a Black decolonial feminist analysis of global anti-Blackness. Through the focus on skin, Tate provides a groundwork of historical context and theoretical framing to engage more contemporary examples of racist constructions of Blackness and Black bodies. Examining the history of intersectionality including its present ‘post-intersectionality’, the book continues intersectionality’s racialized gender critique by developing a Black decolonial feminist approach to cultural readings of Black skin’s consumption, racism within ‘body beauty institutions’ (e.g. modelling, advertising, beauty pageants) and cultural representations, as well as the affects which keep anti-Blackness in play. This book is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students in gender studies, sociology and media studies.
