2 Spreading the Word: The Cultural Work of the Black Press

2020 ◽  
pp. 84-140
Keyword(s):  
Black Press ◽  
Cultural Work

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Book Reviews

Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 146-166
Author(s):  
Johannes Görbert ◽  
Russ Pottle ◽  
Jeff Morrison ◽  
Pramod K. Nayar ◽  
Dirk Göttsche ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
Alexander Von Humboldt ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Review Finding ◽  
University Of Massachusetts

German Literary Anthropology: Across Cultures, Across Genres Stefan Hermes and Sebastian Kaufmann, eds., Der ganze Mensch – die ganze Menschheit: Völkerkundliche Anthropologie, Literatur und Ästhetik um 1800 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 318 pp., 10 illustrations, €89.95What’s Old Is New Again, Mostly Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, eds., New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 325 pp., $90Complex Journeys around the World and through Literary and Intellectual Traditions around 1800 Johannes Görbert, Die Vertextung der Welt: Forschungsreisen als Literatur bei Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt und Adelbert von Chamisso. Weltliteraturen/World Literatures, Schriftenreihe der Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, vol. 7 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), vi, 426 pp., 8 illustrations, €109.95Travel as Cultural Work Gary Totten, African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 170 pp., $26.95Colonial Encounters between Africa and Europe—with Special Reference to Austria and Switzerland Manuel Menrath, ed., Afrika im Blick: Afrikabilder im deutschsprachigen Europa, 1870–1970 (Zurich: Chronos, 2012), 329 pp., €43Social Formations and Literary Forms in Long Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing Mary Henes and Brian H. Murray, eds., Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 248 pp., 21 illustrations, $95Travel Accounts of Polar Regions and Colonial Discourse Mike Frömel, Off ene Räume und gefährliche Reisen im Eis: Reisebeschreibungen über die Polarregionen und ein kolonialer Diskurs im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2013), 288 pp., €29.50.“Imagined Geographies” and the Navigation of British European Identity Katarina Gephardt, Th e Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789–1914 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 248 pp., 15 illustrations, $104.95Terminal and Threshold: Experiencing the Airport Christopher Schaberg, Th e End of Airports (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 216 pp., 25 illustrations, £13.99NOVEL REVIEW Finding Purity Jonathan Franzen, Purity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 563 pp., $28

On Strike and On Stage: Migration, Mobilization, and the Cultural Work of El Teatro Campesino

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-121
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Integrated Analysis ◽  
Stage Migration ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Picket Line ◽  
A Performance ◽  
Teatro Campesino

This essay looks at the role of labor activism through the cultural work of El Teatro Campesino, the theater company that emerged from the farmworkers’ strike led by Cesear Chavez in Delano, California, during the mid-1960s. Through makeshift performances along the picket line, the farmworkers and their creative visionary, Luis Valdez, innovated Chicano/a performance and created an activist aesthetic that has continued to influence Chicano/a performance and art. Their productions, which started as small improvisational actos, drew from a wealth of transnational influences as well as from a larger proletariat and activist theater tradition. However, El Teatro Campesino adapted these techniques to their local resources. The result created a unique forum that enabled promotional education about unions and workers’ rights to exist side-by-side with themes of self-reflection and criticism concerning the risks of identity politics. The essay explores the methods by which El Teatro Campesino questioned and critiqued ethnic identity and argues for a more complex approach to their earlier picket-line entertainment. It proceeds to consider the importance of cultural production for labor mobilization, and argues for a more integrated analysis of the relationship between activism and art.

White Writers, Race Matters

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory S. Jay
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Writers ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Taking Action

White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with period bestsellers now sometimes forgotten. Hollywood regularly adapted them into blockbusters, reinforcing their cultural influence. These novels and films protest slavery, confront stereotypes, dramatize social and legal injustices, engage the political controversies of their time, and try to move readers emotionally toward taking action. The literary forms and arguments of these books derive from the cultural work they intend to do in educating the minds and hearts, and propelling the actions, of those who think they are white—indeed, in making the social construction of that whiteness readable and thus more susceptible of reform. The white writers of these fictions struggle with their own place in systems of oppression and privilege while asking their readers to do the same. The predominance of women among this tradition’s authors leads to exploring how their critiques of gender and race norms often reinforced each other. Each chapter provides a case study combining biography, historical analysis, close reading, and literary theory to map the significance of this genre and its ongoing relevance. This tradition remains vital because every generation must relearn the lessons of antiracism and formulate effective cultural narratives for passing on the intellectual and emotional tools useful in fighting injustice.

scholarly journals Supervisors’ Leadership Styles’ Influence on Foreign Teachers’ Self-Efficacy in a Cross-Cultural Work Setting: A Moderated Mediation Analysis

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824402199454
Author(s):  
Bernard Gumah ◽  
Liu Wenbin ◽  
Maxwell Akansina Aziabah
Keyword(s):  
Leadership Styles ◽  
Leadership Style ◽  
Self Efficacy ◽  
Moderated Mediation ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Adaptation Theory ◽  
Foreign Teachers ◽  
Communication Challenges ◽  
Positive Effect

Leadership style impacts on the manner and frequency of feedback transmission. However, communication challenges between superiors and subordinates originate from cultural differences, which undermine the usefulness of feedback. The study tested leadership style’s effect on self-efficacy through a moderated mediation approach, examined through the lens of the cross-cultural adaptation theory. Path analysis conducted on data from 281 foreign teachers in Chengdu, China, revealed that there is a positive effect of Chinese supervisors’ leadership styles on foreign teacher’s self-efficacy. Leadership style similarly has an influence on the nature of feedback. And the nature of feedback in turn mediates leadership style and self-efficacy. We establish in particular that transactional and transformational leadership styles, through the nature of feedback, influence self-efficacy of foreign teachers. Moreover, the association between the nature of feedback and self-efficacy is moderated by the perceived value of feedback. Employees’ perceptions are also found to be crucial in determining the value of feedback. It is thus imperative for supervisors and managers working with foreigners as subordinates to figure out when and how to provide valuable feedback. We conclude with suggested areas for further research.

Nonaligned Modernism: Yugoslav Culture, Nonaligned Cultural Diplomacy, and Transnational Solidarity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Bojana Videkanić
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Bilateral Agreements ◽  
Political Cooperation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Transnational Solidarity ◽  
Political Scene

Abstract This article examines aspects of the history of socialist Yugoslavia’s contribution to creating a transnational Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) culture. It does so by analyzing cultural diplomacy on the Yugoslav cultural and political scene between the 1950s and 1980s. The cultural diplomacy of Yugoslavia and its nonaligned partners is seen as a form of political agency, paralleling and supplementing larger activities of forming economic and political cooperation in the Global South. Yugoslavia’s role in building NAM culture was instrumental in nurturing nascent transnationalism, which was born out of anti-colonial movements following World War II. Cultural events, bilateral agreements, and cultural institutions were used to complement Yugoslav participation in an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist struggle; they promoted NAM ideals and sought to create transcultural networks that would counter Western cultural hegemony. Such examples of solidarity were based in a modernist cultural ethos, but espoused political, social, and cultural forms that were indigenous to various NAM countries. For Yugoslavia, nonaligned modernism and transnationalism solidified the country’s transition from a hardline, Soviet-style state to a more open, humanist-socialist one. The history of transnational collaboration, examined through the narrative of cultural work, is an example of Yugoslav attempts at building political agency and international cooperation through the promotion of nonaligned ideals.

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