Maurice Peress
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195098228
- eISBN:
- 9780199869817
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195098228.003.0019
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This final chapter takes a walk through what once was Dvorák's New York neighborhood. It discusses the unsuccessful battle to save the Dvorák House where Dvorák lived from 1892-5. The heightened ...
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This final chapter takes a walk through what once was Dvorák's New York neighborhood. It discusses the unsuccessful battle to save the Dvorák House where Dvorák lived from 1892-5. The heightened awareness he brought to the bountiful riches of African American music that helped inspire the Composer-Collector generation — James Weldon Johnson, James Rosamond Johnson, W. C. Handy, Ernest Hogan, and Will Marion Cook — are detailed. It discusses the search for and emergence of a “New African-American Orchestra”, Ford Dabney's theater “roof-top” bands, Hogan and Cook's “Memphis Students Band”, Europe's “Clef Club”, and Cook's “Southern Synchopaters” orchestra, preparing the way for Duke Ellington, “a world-class composer, who stands alone as the foremost American genius who remained loyal to the improvisational, tonal, and rhythmic endowments of African American music”. His universe was an “orchestra” of brilliant jazz artists, one he never found wanting. With a light but firm tether, he drew and followed them along a trail of discovery, leaving glorious artifacts in his path.Less
This final chapter takes a walk through what once was Dvorák's New York neighborhood. It discusses the unsuccessful battle to save the Dvorák House where Dvorák lived from 1892-5. The heightened awareness he brought to the bountiful riches of African American music that helped inspire the Composer-Collector generation — James Weldon Johnson, James Rosamond Johnson, W. C. Handy, Ernest Hogan, and Will Marion Cook — are detailed. It discusses the search for and emergence of a “New African-American Orchestra”, Ford Dabney's theater “roof-top” bands, Hogan and Cook's “Memphis Students Band”, Europe's “Clef Club”, and Cook's “Southern Synchopaters” orchestra, preparing the way for Duke Ellington, “a world-class composer, who stands alone as the foremost American genius who remained loyal to the improvisational, tonal, and rhythmic endowments of African American music”. His universe was an “orchestra” of brilliant jazz artists, one he never found wanting. With a light but firm tether, he drew and followed them along a trail of discovery, leaving glorious artifacts in his path.
Diana Rebekkah Paulin
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816670987
- eISBN:
- 9781452947204
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816670987.003.0004
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
This chapter explores the interracial mixing among Indians and blacks and its embodiment of miscegenation in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It reads Pauline ...
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This chapter explores the interracial mixing among Indians and blacks and its embodiment of miscegenation in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It reads Pauline Hopkins’s serialized novel Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902) and Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson’s collaborative musical, The Red Moon (1908), both of which responded to the heightened polarization of black and white by employing the social reality of racial hybridity as well as complex Afro-Indian relations to unsettle the monolithic narratives of black-white relations. In addition to staging miscegenation in multiple geographic sites, Winona and The Red Moon took into account the histories and contemporaneous patterns of migration and immigration, played out new visions of interracial and intercultural dynamics in the context of U.S. cultural and imperial politics, reconceptualized the bifurcated portrait of U.S. race relations, and provided an alternative platform for imagining citizenship and nation making.Less
This chapter explores the interracial mixing among Indians and blacks and its embodiment of miscegenation in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It reads Pauline Hopkins’s serialized novel Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902) and Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson’s collaborative musical, The Red Moon (1908), both of which responded to the heightened polarization of black and white by employing the social reality of racial hybridity as well as complex Afro-Indian relations to unsettle the monolithic narratives of black-white relations. In addition to staging miscegenation in multiple geographic sites, Winona and The Red Moon took into account the histories and contemporaneous patterns of migration and immigration, played out new visions of interracial and intercultural dynamics in the context of U.S. cultural and imperial politics, reconceptualized the bifurcated portrait of U.S. race relations, and provided an alternative platform for imagining citizenship and nation making.
Jenny Woodley
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780813145167
- eISBN:
- 9780813145471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813145167.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter explores the NAACP's response to black art and literature during the 1910s and 1920s. This was the era of the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of black artistic creativity. It was also a ...
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This chapter explores the NAACP's response to black art and literature during the 1910s and 1920s. This was the era of the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of black artistic creativity. It was also a time when the nature and purpose of that creativity were much debated. James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois in particular had much to say about the role of the arts and, in the case of the latter, about the relationship between art and propaganda. The NAACP could be criticized for overstating the importance and value of art and literature to ordinary African Americans, but it was not alone in hoping that a demonstration of black artistic talent could begin to chip away at racial prejudice.Less
This chapter explores the NAACP's response to black art and literature during the 1910s and 1920s. This was the era of the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of black artistic creativity. It was also a time when the nature and purpose of that creativity were much debated. James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois in particular had much to say about the role of the arts and, in the case of the latter, about the relationship between art and propaganda. The NAACP could be criticized for overstating the importance and value of art and literature to ordinary African Americans, but it was not alone in hoping that a demonstration of black artistic talent could begin to chip away at racial prejudice.
Ira Dworkin
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781469632711
- eISBN:
- 9781469632735
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469632711.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This introduction uses the popular James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson song “Congo Love Song” to consider the way that African American popular culture—in this instance a wildly successful ...
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This introduction uses the popular James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson song “Congo Love Song” to consider the way that African American popular culture—in this instance a wildly successful vaudeville song—were integral parts of a larger culture of African American transnational engagement with the Congo. The song was written and first performed in 1903 at the height of an African American campaign against King Leopold II of Belgium’s colonial regime. The political significance of the song is further highlighted by the career of James Weldon Johnson, who was not only a songwriter, but also a novelist, journalist, lawyer, educator, diplomat, and political activist with the NAACP. His longer career trajectory points to the ways that the Congo is deeply embedded with a wide range of African American cultural and political engagements.Less
This introduction uses the popular James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson song “Congo Love Song” to consider the way that African American popular culture—in this instance a wildly successful vaudeville song—were integral parts of a larger culture of African American transnational engagement with the Congo. The song was written and first performed in 1903 at the height of an African American campaign against King Leopold II of Belgium’s colonial regime. The political significance of the song is further highlighted by the career of James Weldon Johnson, who was not only a songwriter, but also a novelist, journalist, lawyer, educator, diplomat, and political activist with the NAACP. His longer career trajectory points to the ways that the Congo is deeply embedded with a wide range of African American cultural and political engagements.
Katherine Biers
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816667543
- eISBN:
- 9781452946542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816667543.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter focuses on James Weldon Johnson and his quest to achieve cultural uplift for African Americans during the “nadir” of race relations in the ’teens. It argues that ragtime music—a ...
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This chapter focuses on James Weldon Johnson and his quest to achieve cultural uplift for African Americans during the “nadir” of race relations in the ’teens. It argues that ragtime music—a much-adulterated and much recorded mass cultural form—was at the center of Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, passages from which were reused in his essays and prefaces about black contributions to the arts. Johnson creates a virtual voice in his novel that mimics the “phonographic” logic of ragtime itself. The voice signifies the unspeakable legacies of slavery through its very inarticulacy, while simultaneously acting as a crucible for interpretative possibility.Less
This chapter focuses on James Weldon Johnson and his quest to achieve cultural uplift for African Americans during the “nadir” of race relations in the ’teens. It argues that ragtime music—a much-adulterated and much recorded mass cultural form—was at the center of Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, passages from which were reused in his essays and prefaces about black contributions to the arts. Johnson creates a virtual voice in his novel that mimics the “phonographic” logic of ragtime itself. The voice signifies the unspeakable legacies of slavery through its very inarticulacy, while simultaneously acting as a crucible for interpretative possibility.
Diana Rebekkah Paulin
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816670987
- eISBN:
- 9781452947204
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816670987.003.0005
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
This chapter explores how Pauline Hopkins and James Weldon Johnson staged the transnational and diasporic contours of miscegenation through their works: Of One Blood, or the Hidden Self and The ...
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This chapter explores how Pauline Hopkins and James Weldon Johnson staged the transnational and diasporic contours of miscegenation through their works: Of One Blood, or the Hidden Self and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, respectively. Through their creative reconceptualizations of the black-white binary, Hopkins and Johnson emphasized the elasticity of the definitions used to organize and understand the messy intersections of race, nation, gender, and class. They embraced the hybridization of the black population and of other non-Anglo and multiracial communities; their work illuminated the representational potential of interracial mixing, as well as the national and global implications that were so often subsumed by the overriding black-white divide. At the same time, however, Hopkins and Johnson employed radical stagings of miscegenation to promote and legitimize the visible and palpable presence of a diverse black population and to document the vital historical and contemporaneous societal contributions of the black diaspora.Less
This chapter explores how Pauline Hopkins and James Weldon Johnson staged the transnational and diasporic contours of miscegenation through their works: Of One Blood, or the Hidden Self and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, respectively. Through their creative reconceptualizations of the black-white binary, Hopkins and Johnson emphasized the elasticity of the definitions used to organize and understand the messy intersections of race, nation, gender, and class. They embraced the hybridization of the black population and of other non-Anglo and multiracial communities; their work illuminated the representational potential of interracial mixing, as well as the national and global implications that were so often subsumed by the overriding black-white divide. At the same time, however, Hopkins and Johnson employed radical stagings of miscegenation to promote and legitimize the visible and palpable presence of a diverse black population and to document the vital historical and contemporaneous societal contributions of the black diaspora.
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195072389
- eISBN:
- 9780199787982
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195072389.003.0018
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
America's entry into war on April 2, 1917, turned Mencken's life upside down. As a German-American now writing for the New York Evening Mail, he became the target of super-patriots. George Creel ...
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America's entry into war on April 2, 1917, turned Mencken's life upside down. As a German-American now writing for the New York Evening Mail, he became the target of super-patriots. George Creel launched the Espionage Act, containing some of the broadest and most restrictive sanctions against civil liberties and free speech that the country ever witnessed. As a German-American who felt separated from American society, Mencken began to gain insight on another group he had derided years earlier: African-Americans. Together with James Weldon Johnson, they urged black Americans to start writing realistically about racial issues, including lynching. Mencken also met Philip Goodman, and wrote A Book of Prefaces and Damn a Book of Calumny, both of which attacked American literature and conformity head on.Less
America's entry into war on April 2, 1917, turned Mencken's life upside down. As a German-American now writing for the New York Evening Mail, he became the target of super-patriots. George Creel launched the Espionage Act, containing some of the broadest and most restrictive sanctions against civil liberties and free speech that the country ever witnessed. As a German-American who felt separated from American society, Mencken began to gain insight on another group he had derided years earlier: African-Americans. Together with James Weldon Johnson, they urged black Americans to start writing realistically about racial issues, including lynching. Mencken also met Philip Goodman, and wrote A Book of Prefaces and Damn a Book of Calumny, both of which attacked American literature and conformity head on.
Josef Sorett
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199844937
- eISBN:
- 9780190606640
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199844937.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter offers an extended portrait of a persistent pairing—of church and spirit—that appeared in so much of black writing during the 1920s. Special attention is paid to several of the texts ...
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This chapter offers an extended portrait of a persistent pairing—of church and spirit—that appeared in so much of black writing during the 1920s. Special attention is paid to several of the texts that were considered central to the making of a Negro Renaissance in New York during the decade, as examples of how New Negro writers imagined a racial spirit. By all accounts a theological discourse, the frequent pairing of church and spirit provided an analytical frame through which to make sense of a novel black cultural pluralism, but also as a means for disciplining religious practices in accordance with an ethic of racial uplift. Through a close engagement with Alain Locke’s editorial process in compiling the period’s pivotal text The New Negro (1925), along with several key essays written by some of the period’s most prominent black artists and intellectuals (e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois, George Edmund Haynes, Langston Hughes, George Schuyler, and James Weldon Johnson), this chapter reveals a spiritual grammar at the very center of the cultural imagining of the New Negro.Less
This chapter offers an extended portrait of a persistent pairing—of church and spirit—that appeared in so much of black writing during the 1920s. Special attention is paid to several of the texts that were considered central to the making of a Negro Renaissance in New York during the decade, as examples of how New Negro writers imagined a racial spirit. By all accounts a theological discourse, the frequent pairing of church and spirit provided an analytical frame through which to make sense of a novel black cultural pluralism, but also as a means for disciplining religious practices in accordance with an ethic of racial uplift. Through a close engagement with Alain Locke’s editorial process in compiling the period’s pivotal text The New Negro (1925), along with several key essays written by some of the period’s most prominent black artists and intellectuals (e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois, George Edmund Haynes, Langston Hughes, George Schuyler, and James Weldon Johnson), this chapter reveals a spiritual grammar at the very center of the cultural imagining of the New Negro.
Nick Bromell
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199973439
- eISBN:
- 9780199367771
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199973439.003.0005
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This chapter brings together the stories of the travels of Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, and Malcolm X in an attempt to explore what their perspectives might portend for political theory ...
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This chapter brings together the stories of the travels of Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, and Malcolm X in an attempt to explore what their perspectives might portend for political theory and US public philosophy as these struggle to reconcile the conflicting obligations of national and world citizenship. It then considers how Douglass, Johnson, and Malcolm would enter the conversation between Nussbaum and her critics. On the one hand, they would share Balfour's view that the particularities of history should not be erased by principles claiming to be universal, and that political theory itself must take care to recall its own historical situatedness. On the other hand, Douglass and Malcolm would agree with Nussbaum that some conception of universal moral truth is necessary to US democracy, and indeed to moral life of any kind.Less
This chapter brings together the stories of the travels of Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, and Malcolm X in an attempt to explore what their perspectives might portend for political theory and US public philosophy as these struggle to reconcile the conflicting obligations of national and world citizenship. It then considers how Douglass, Johnson, and Malcolm would enter the conversation between Nussbaum and her critics. On the one hand, they would share Balfour's view that the particularities of history should not be erased by principles claiming to be universal, and that political theory itself must take care to recall its own historical situatedness. On the other hand, Douglass and Malcolm would agree with Nussbaum that some conception of universal moral truth is necessary to US democracy, and indeed to moral life of any kind.
Katherine Biers
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816667543
- eISBN:
- 9781452946542
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816667543.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This book offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen ...
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This book offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, it argues that American modernist writers developed a “poetics of the virtual” in response to the rise of mass communications technologies before World War I. These authors’ modernist formal experimentation was provoked by the immediate, individualistic pleasures and thrills of mass culture. But they also retained a faith in the representational power of language—and the worth of common experience—more characteristic of realism and naturalism. In competition with new media experiences such as movies and recorded music, they simultaneously rejected and embraced modernity. This book establishes the virtual poetics of these five writers as part of a larger “virtual turn” in the United States, when a fascination with the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and vitalist philosophy—and the idea of virtual experience—swept the nation. The book contends that a turn to the virtual experience of language was a way for each of these authors to carve out a value for the literary, both with and against the growth of mass entertainments. This technologically inspired reengagement with experience was formative for American modernism.Less
This book offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, it argues that American modernist writers developed a “poetics of the virtual” in response to the rise of mass communications technologies before World War I. These authors’ modernist formal experimentation was provoked by the immediate, individualistic pleasures and thrills of mass culture. But they also retained a faith in the representational power of language—and the worth of common experience—more characteristic of realism and naturalism. In competition with new media experiences such as movies and recorded music, they simultaneously rejected and embraced modernity. This book establishes the virtual poetics of these five writers as part of a larger “virtual turn” in the United States, when a fascination with the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and vitalist philosophy—and the idea of virtual experience—swept the nation. The book contends that a turn to the virtual experience of language was a way for each of these authors to carve out a value for the literary, both with and against the growth of mass entertainments. This technologically inspired reengagement with experience was formative for American modernism.
Imani Perry
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469638607
- eISBN:
- 9781469638621
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469638607.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter describes the personal history of the author and composer of Lift Every Voice and Sing: James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson. It situates the composition of the song in the ...
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This chapter describes the personal history of the author and composer of Lift Every Voice and Sing: James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson. It situates the composition of the song in the context of the social and political movements of African Americans in the midst of the development of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South, with a particular focus on Associational Life and the development of formal rituals. It traces how Lift Every Voice and Sing became known as the Negro National Anthem.Less
This chapter describes the personal history of the author and composer of Lift Every Voice and Sing: James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson. It situates the composition of the song in the context of the social and political movements of African Americans in the midst of the development of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South, with a particular focus on Associational Life and the development of formal rituals. It traces how Lift Every Voice and Sing became known as the Negro National Anthem.
Sterling Stuckey
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199931675
- eISBN:
- 9780199356027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199931675.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century, Cultural History
Paul Robeson won Phi Beta Kappa honors and oratorical and debating prizes and was named All-American in football and class valedictorian at Rutgers. By then, he had found, among southern blacks, main ...
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Paul Robeson won Phi Beta Kappa honors and oratorical and debating prizes and was named All-American in football and class valedictorian at Rutgers. By then, he had found, among southern blacks, main sources of black genius in the arts, which he later illustrated during the Negro Renaissance. A declared socialist after arriving in England in the late twenties, he celebrated values common to the people, and this was reflected in songs he sang in many languages to universal acclaim. In addition to Chinese, Greek and Russian, he was a brilliant student of African languages at the London School of Oriental Languages and was invited to join the West African Student Union, a rare honor. Though possibly the greatest artist in the world, he was persecuted in the United States because he firmly opposed both colonialism and racism. He favored Negro students studying abroad and thereby being rescued from American racism.Less
Paul Robeson won Phi Beta Kappa honors and oratorical and debating prizes and was named All-American in football and class valedictorian at Rutgers. By then, he had found, among southern blacks, main sources of black genius in the arts, which he later illustrated during the Negro Renaissance. A declared socialist after arriving in England in the late twenties, he celebrated values common to the people, and this was reflected in songs he sang in many languages to universal acclaim. In addition to Chinese, Greek and Russian, he was a brilliant student of African languages at the London School of Oriental Languages and was invited to join the West African Student Union, a rare honor. Though possibly the greatest artist in the world, he was persecuted in the United States because he firmly opposed both colonialism and racism. He favored Negro students studying abroad and thereby being rescued from American racism.
Jahan Ramazani
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226083735
- eISBN:
- 9780226083421
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226083421.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Whether atheist, agnostic, or of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other heritage, poets frequently both mimic and interrogate prayer. From Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and ...
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Whether atheist, agnostic, or of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other heritage, poets frequently both mimic and interrogate prayer. From Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and James Weldon Johnson, to George Oppen, Louise Glück, Agha Shahid Ali, A. K. Ramanujan, and Charles Wright, poets interlace poetry with prayer, drawing on its apostrophe, intimate address, awed colloquy, solemn petition, musical recursiveness, and other features. At the same time, they work the tensions between poetry and prayer, tensions between invention and devotion first identified by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century: they skeptically question prayer’s conventions, refuse to subordinate imaginative idiosyncrasy, indulge metaphor and the aesthetic for their own sake, and thus push poetry beyond prayerful norms. Modern and contemporary poetry mobilizes the performative energies of prayer, but steps back from and reframes them, playing in the space between prayer and antiprayer.Less
Whether atheist, agnostic, or of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other heritage, poets frequently both mimic and interrogate prayer. From Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and James Weldon Johnson, to George Oppen, Louise Glück, Agha Shahid Ali, A. K. Ramanujan, and Charles Wright, poets interlace poetry with prayer, drawing on its apostrophe, intimate address, awed colloquy, solemn petition, musical recursiveness, and other features. At the same time, they work the tensions between poetry and prayer, tensions between invention and devotion first identified by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century: they skeptically question prayer’s conventions, refuse to subordinate imaginative idiosyncrasy, indulge metaphor and the aesthetic for their own sake, and thus push poetry beyond prayerful norms. Modern and contemporary poetry mobilizes the performative energies of prayer, but steps back from and reframes them, playing in the space between prayer and antiprayer.
Naomi André
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252041921
- eISBN:
- 9780252050619
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041921.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, Opera
This chapter addresses Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess story as it was told in 1935 awash in minstrel characterizations and then adapted in 2011 on Broadway to rethink how the depth inherent in the ...
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This chapter addresses Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess story as it was told in 1935 awash in minstrel characterizations and then adapted in 2011 on Broadway to rethink how the depth inherent in the original characters could be made more visible. This analysis fleshes out the larger view of black womanhood in the 1930s and the first decades of the twenty-first century. This chapter also explores the opera in terms of constructions of the folk, the Harlem Renaissance, and the efforts of black writers (Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Harold Cruse, and James Baldwin) to come to grips with its negative stereotypes and celebrated opportunities for black performers in virtuosic roles.Less
This chapter addresses Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess story as it was told in 1935 awash in minstrel characterizations and then adapted in 2011 on Broadway to rethink how the depth inherent in the original characters could be made more visible. This analysis fleshes out the larger view of black womanhood in the 1930s and the first decades of the twenty-first century. This chapter also explores the opera in terms of constructions of the folk, the Harlem Renaissance, and the efforts of black writers (Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Harold Cruse, and James Baldwin) to come to grips with its negative stereotypes and celebrated opportunities for black performers in virtuosic roles.
Darieck Scott
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814740941
- eISBN:
- 9780814786543
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814740941.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter links the terms derived from what is essentially a literary reading of Fanon's mid-20th-century theoretical and activist texts to an attempt to derive theory from a literary scene of ...
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This chapter links the terms derived from what is essentially a literary reading of Fanon's mid-20th-century theoretical and activist texts to an attempt to derive theory from a literary scene of lynching in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). It focuses on how the representation of the Ex-Coloured Man's traumatic response to the lynching he witnesses enacts one of the chief symptoms, and puissant forms, of the black power explicated in Chapter 1: temporal dispersal, hostility toward, as Fanon describes it, “conformity to the categories of time.” Though the novel is designed as a narrative of failure in many senses, peripheral suggestions of actions alternative to those the narrator chooses emerge in the miscegenation with which the novel concludes—this miscegenation is at once denied (the Ex-Coloured Man passes as white) and affirmed (not only because he is a once-colored man but also through his desire for his white wife's desire for his black boyhood friend, Shiny)—possibilities that, if consciously embraced, would position the Ex-Coloured Man as a kind of race- and family-terrorist.Less
This chapter links the terms derived from what is essentially a literary reading of Fanon's mid-20th-century theoretical and activist texts to an attempt to derive theory from a literary scene of lynching in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). It focuses on how the representation of the Ex-Coloured Man's traumatic response to the lynching he witnesses enacts one of the chief symptoms, and puissant forms, of the black power explicated in Chapter 1: temporal dispersal, hostility toward, as Fanon describes it, “conformity to the categories of time.” Though the novel is designed as a narrative of failure in many senses, peripheral suggestions of actions alternative to those the narrator chooses emerge in the miscegenation with which the novel concludes—this miscegenation is at once denied (the Ex-Coloured Man passes as white) and affirmed (not only because he is a once-colored man but also through his desire for his white wife's desire for his black boyhood friend, Shiny)—possibilities that, if consciously embraced, would position the Ex-Coloured Man as a kind of race- and family-terrorist.
Darius J. Young
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813056272
- eISBN:
- 9780813058061
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056272.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter begins by discussing the 1917 lynching of Ell Persons and the subsequent reaction of the black community to this extra-legal violence. In the aftermath of the lynching Church and his ...
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This chapter begins by discussing the 1917 lynching of Ell Persons and the subsequent reaction of the black community to this extra-legal violence. In the aftermath of the lynching Church and his friend James Weldon Johnson used the platform of the Lincoln League to rally more support from black voters in the city, and helped to establish an NAACP branch in Memphis. As a result, Church would be named the director of the NAACP’s southern branches, thus cementing his legacy as a local leader.Less
This chapter begins by discussing the 1917 lynching of Ell Persons and the subsequent reaction of the black community to this extra-legal violence. In the aftermath of the lynching Church and his friend James Weldon Johnson used the platform of the Lincoln League to rally more support from black voters in the city, and helped to establish an NAACP branch in Memphis. As a result, Church would be named the director of the NAACP’s southern branches, thus cementing his legacy as a local leader.
Diana Rebekkah Paulin
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816670987
- eISBN:
- 9781452947204
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816670987.003.0006
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
This chapter discusses the issue of interracial unions and suggests that the simultaneous threat and possibility the idea poses remain central to explorations of race in America in the twenty-first ...
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This chapter discusses the issue of interracial unions and suggests that the simultaneous threat and possibility the idea poses remain central to explorations of race in America in the twenty-first century. James Weldon Johnson reminds us that our cultural obsession with sex—talking about it, prohibiting it, circumventing it, exhibiting it—is what drives the nation’s passionate cultural preoccupation with miscegenation. He goes on to suggest that “the sex factor” is the root—and, this book also argues, the route—that must be explored and excavated in order to uncover the complex understanding and function of polarized racial boundaries and conflict. By reconfiguring the trope of miscegenation as a rehearsal of the complex intersection of race, nation, gender, sexuality, and class, it is possible to critical opportunities to traverse new territories rather than merely transgress binarized boundaries.Less
This chapter discusses the issue of interracial unions and suggests that the simultaneous threat and possibility the idea poses remain central to explorations of race in America in the twenty-first century. James Weldon Johnson reminds us that our cultural obsession with sex—talking about it, prohibiting it, circumventing it, exhibiting it—is what drives the nation’s passionate cultural preoccupation with miscegenation. He goes on to suggest that “the sex factor” is the root—and, this book also argues, the route—that must be explored and excavated in order to uncover the complex understanding and function of polarized racial boundaries and conflict. By reconfiguring the trope of miscegenation as a rehearsal of the complex intersection of race, nation, gender, sexuality, and class, it is possible to critical opportunities to traverse new territories rather than merely transgress binarized boundaries.
