How Not to Introduce Blues Prosody:

Poetics Today ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-681
Author(s):  
Michael Skansgaard
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
West African ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Call And Response ◽  
Sterling Brown ◽  
Response Patterning ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Iambic Pentameter

This article delivers a two-pronged intervention into blues prosody. First, it argues that scholars have repeatedly misidentified the metrical organization of blues poems by Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. The dominant approach to these poems has sought to explain their rhythms with models of alternating stress, including both classical foot prosody and the beat prosody of Derek Attridge. The article shows that the systematic organization of blues structures originates in West African call-and-response patterning (not alternating stress), and is better explained by models of syntax and musical phrasing. Second, it argues that these misclassifications — far from being esoteric matters of taxonomy — lie at the heart of African American aesthetics and identity politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Whereas literary blues verse has long been oversimplified with conventional metrics like “free verse,” “accentual verse,” and “iambic pentameter,” the article suggests that its rhythms arise instead from a rich and complex vernacular style that cannot be explained by the constraints of Anglo-American versification.

Of Origins and Colonial Order: Southern Nigerian Historians and the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ c. 1870–1970

1994 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip S. Zachernuk
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
West African ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Racial History ◽  
Colonial Order ◽  
Hamitic Hypothesis ◽  
New Treatments

The professional Nigerian nationalist historiography which emerged in reaction against the imperialist Hamitic Hypothesis – the assertion that Africa's history had been made only by foreigners – is rooted in a complex West African tradition of critical dialogue with European ideas. From the mid-nineteenth century, western-educated Africans have re-worked European ideas into distinctive Hamitic Hypotheses suited to their colonial location. This account developed within the constraints set by changing European and African-American ideas about West African origins and the evolving character of the Nigerian intelligentsia. West Africans first identified themselves not as victims of Hamitic invasion but as the degenerate heirs of classical civilizations, to establish their potential to create a modern, Christian society. At the turn of the century various authors argued for past development within West Africa rather than mere degeneration. Edward Blyden appropriated African-American thought to posit a distinct racial history. Samuel Johnson elaborated on Yoruba traditions of a golden age. Inter-war writers such as J. O. Lucas and Ladipo Solanke built on both arguments, but as race science declined they again invoked universal historical patterns. Facing the arrival of Nigeria as a nation-state, later writers such as S. O. Biobaku developed these ideas to argue that Hamitic invasions had created Nigeria's proto-national culture. In the heightened identity politics of the 1950s, local historians adopted Hamites to compete for historical primacy among Nigerian communities. The Hamitic Hypothesis declined in post-colonial conditions, in part because the concern to define ultimate identities along a colonial axis was displaced by the need to understand identity politics within the Nigerian sphere. The Nigerian Hamitic Hypothesis had a complex career, promoting élite ambitions, Christian identities, Nigerian nationalism and communal rivalries. New treatments of African colonial historiography – and intellectual history – must incorporate the complexities illus-trated here.

African American Journalists in World War II West Africa: The NNPA Commission Tour of 1944–1945

2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110549
Author(s):  
Oliver Coates
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
West Africa ◽  
American West ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic

The National Negro Publishers Association (NNPA) Commission to West Africa in 1944–1945 represents a major episode in the history of World War II Africa, as well as in American–West Africa relations. Three African American reporters toured the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, and the Congo between November 1944 and February 1945, before returning to Washington, DC to report to President Roosevelt. They documented their tour in the pages of the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, and the Norfolk Journal and Guide. Their Americans’ visit had a significant impact in wartime West Africa and was widely documented in the African press. This article examines the NNPA tour geographically, before analyzing American reporters’ interactions with West Africans, and assessing African responses to the tour. Drawing on both African American and West African newspapers, it situates the NNPA tour within the history of World War II West Africa, and in terms of African print culture. It argues that the NNPA tour became the focus of West African hopes for future political, economic, and intellectual relations with African Americans, while revealing how the NNPA reporters engaged African audiences during their tour.

Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Information Age ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Mina Loy ◽  
Cultural Narrative ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Technological Sublime

Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist avant-gardes used technology not only as a means of analysing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by Mina Loy, the untold story of Bob Brown’s ‘reading machine’ and the radical technicities of African American experimentalists including Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From dazzle camouflage to microfilm, and from rail networks to broadcast systems, White explores how vanguardists harnessed socio-technics to provoke social change. Reading Machines argues that transatlantic avant-gardes deployed ‘techno-bathetic’ strategies to contest the dominance of the technological sublime. This major but hidden cultural narrative engaged with the messy particulars and unintended consequences of technology’s transduction in society. Techno-bathetic vanguardists including Futurists, Vorticists, Dadaists, post-Harlem Renaissance radicals and American Super-realists proposed new, non-servile ways of reading and doing technology. The books reveals how these formations contested the entrenched hierarchies of both the transatlantic Machine Age and technological sublime.

scholarly journals The patterns of the Estonian sonnet: periodization, incidence, meter and rhyme

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-124
Author(s):  
Rebekka Lotman
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Free World ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Axis I ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
Estonian Language ◽  
Iambic Pentameter ◽  
Second World

The first sonnets in Estonian language were published almost 650 years after this verse form was invented by Federico da Lentini in Sicily, in the late of 19th century. Sonnet form became instantly very popular in Estonia and has since remained the most important fixed form in Estonian poetry. Despite its widespread presence over time the last comprehensive research on Estonian sonnet was written in 1938.This article has a twofold aim. First, it will give an overview of the incidence of Estonian sonnets from its emergence in 1881 until 2015. The data will be studied from the diachronic perspective; in calculating the popularity of the sonnet form in Estonian poetry through the years, the number of the sonnets published each year has been considered in relation to the amount of published poetry books. The second aim is to outline through the statistical analyses Estonian sonnets formal patterns: rhyme schemes and meter. The sonnet’s original meter, hendecasyllable, is tradionally translated into Estonian as iambic pentameter. However, over the time various meters from various verse systems (accentual, syllabic, syllabic-accentual, free verse) have been used. The data of various meters used in Estonian sonnets will also be examined on the diachronic axis. I have divided the history of Estonian sonnets into eight parts: the division is not based only on time, but also space: post Second World War Estonian sonnet (as the whole culture) was divided into two, Estonian sonnet abroad, i. e in the free world, and sonnet in Soviet Estonia.The material for this study includes all the published sonnets in Estonian language, i.e almost 4400 texts.

Gwendolyn Bennett's “The Ebony Flute”

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 744-755
Author(s):  
Belinda Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Assistant Editor ◽  
Cover Art ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

IntroductionGwendolyn Bennett (1902-81) is often mentioned in books that discuss the harlem renaissance, and some of her poems Occasionally appear in poetry anthologies; but much of her career has been overlooked. Along with many of her friends, including Jessie Redmond Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, Bennett was featured at the National Urban League's Civic Club Dinner in March 1924, an event that would later be “widely hailed as a ‘coming out party’ for young black artists, writers, and intellectuals whose work would come to define the Harlem Renaissance” (McHenry 383n100). In the next five years Bennett published over forty poems, short stories, and reviews in leading African American magazines and anthologies, such as Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927) and William Stanley Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927; she created magazine cover art that adorned two leading African American periodicals, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races and the National Urban League's Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life; she worked as an editor or assistant editor of several magazines, including Opportunity, Black Opals, and Fire!; and she wrote a renowned literary column, “The Ebony Flute.” Many scholars, such as Cary Wintz, Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, and Elizabeth McHenry, recognized the importance of Bennett's column to the Harlem Renaissance in their respective studies, but their emphasis on a larger Harlem Renaissance discussion did not afford a detailed examination of her column.

Race Doesn’t Matter

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey D. Fields
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Abstract Notion

This chapter focuses on African American Republicans who can be labeled as “color-blind” because their strategy for linking black identity to Republican politics involves de-emphasizing the role of race in black people's lives. These African American Republicans see themselves as linked to a broader black community, but they reject identity politics as the pathway to racial uplift. They endorse Republican social policy as part of a commitment to an abstract notion of conservative politics, not because the policies are good for black people. Indeed, for race-blind African American Republicans, the best thing for blacks is to abandon race-based identity politics.

From the Bamboula to the Baby Dolls

Walking Raddy ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Jennifer Atkins
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
West African ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
West African Dance ◽  
Baby Doll

Baby Dolls embodied the rambunctious, ambulatory dance practices of New Orleans' African-American community, playing with ragtime dancing, a style in conversation with early twentieth century music. Baby Doll dancing referenced their contemporary situation, empowering them through ribald street jaunts full of dynamism, while also relating to other cultural practices like jazz funerals and connecting them to a historical legacy that traced back to Congo Square (and earlier). Essential to Congo Square, where the Bamboula dance featured prominently, was that West African dance aesthetics persevered but also blended with sociocultural ideas influenced by its New Orleans context. Improvisation was key. Dancing, whether in Congo Square or ragtime style, highlighted spontaneity and a spirited—even competitive—style that cultivated agency while acknowledging a communal presence. These moments (and movement) were vibrant, illuminating Baby Dolls as innovators within a rich, cultural tradition that left troubles behind as liveliness surged through their dancing processions.

‘Our Technology Was Vernacular’: Radical Technicities in African American Experimental Writing

2020 ◽  
pp. 214-264
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Black Vernacular ◽  
Spatial Practice ◽  
Industrial Modernity ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Definition Of

Chapter 5 focuses on technicities of African American vanguardists, including Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka. These writers joined the civil rights lawyer and writer Pauli Murray in recognising illegal rail travel and other appropriations of infrastructure as signifyin(g) spatial practices. Building on research by sociologists, historians of technology and literary critics, the chapter uses a techno-bathetic framework to explore how railroads became signifyin(g) machines for the everyday technicities of black life throughout the twentieth century. The long-running crises sparked by the Scottsboro trials encouraged African American avant-gardes to formulate a vernacular, counter-servile technicity that served as a hinge between rhetorical and spatial practice. When Ellison claimed that ‘[o]ur technology was vernacular’, the shared valences he identifies between language, technology and strategies of adaptation and appropriation elides closely with Rayvon Fouché’s conception of ‘black vernacular technological creativity’ and Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s definition of motivated signifyin(g). African American vanguardists dragged the invisible and over-determined rail networks, and the spaces that framed them, back into plain sight, and made them the targets of sustained attack. The chapter argues that by doing so, these writers practiced a nuanced vernacular technicity articulated across the longue durée of industrial modernity.

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