scholarly journals La rinascita della tragedia dallo spirito del blues nel teatro di August Wilson

Le Simplegadi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (20) ◽  
pp. 147-161
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
Blues Music

Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August Wilson was the most prolific and represented African American playwright of the twentieth century. His Century Cycle, a series of ten plays that chronicle the lives of African Americans from the early 1900s to the late 1990s, is an expression of Wilson’s spiritual realism, a form of drama that, while adhering to some conventions of the Western realist tradition, also introduces elements of innovation inspired by blues music and Yoruba cosmology. This essay analyses the double cultural genealogy of Wilson’s work to show how, despite respecting the Aristotelian principle of mìmesis, his playwriting draws on a quintessentially black aesthetic. In conceiving of theatre as a ritualistic performative context where music and words intertwine, Wilson restored what Friedrich Nietzsche regarded as the authentic spirit of Greek tragedy – the harmony between Dionysian and Apollonian – while at the same time injecting an African American ethos into the Western theatrical canon.

Contested Terrain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Weems
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Business ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Bank ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Business Person

This chapter examines the “contested terrain” associated with the founding of Chicago’s Douglass National Bank in 1921. Anthony Overton, one of history’s most prominent African American entrepreneurs, is widely regarded as the founder of the second national bank organized by African Americans. Yet, the evidence indicates that this distinction should go to Pearl W. Chavers, a relatively obscure early twentieth-century black business person. The story of Anthony Overton’s ascent and P.W. Chavers’ descent in the Douglass National Bank’s administrative hierarchy reveals the power of money and influence. It also illuminates the nuances of both group and individual entrepreneur-based strategies for African American economic development.

Advising the Race

2021 ◽  
pp. 86-114
Author(s):  
Julie Golia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
The Many

This chapter examines the advice column “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise,” which ran in the Chicago Defender, one of the most successful black newspapers in the United States. In the early twentieth century, black publishers recognized the many ways that mainstream newspapers reinforced the racial status quo in America and failed to address the needs of African American readers. They also sought to offer more feature content to women readers. “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise” was one of the country’s most widely read black advice columns. Columnist Princess Mysteria, a vaudeville mentalist, embraced the Defender’s mission of racial “uplift” and advocacy. But her counsel also reflected a unique sensitivity to the dual prejudices that her female readers faced as African Americans and as women. The columnist offered a worldview very different from that of white columnists, one that doled out assertive, even feminist advice.

“To Build a New World”: Black American Internationalism and Palestine Solidarity

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 52-68
Author(s):  
Russell Rickford
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Middle East ◽  
New World ◽  
Black American ◽  
The Political ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
Political Imaginary

This essay traces the arc of Black American solidarity with Palestine, placing the phenomenon in the context of twentieth-century African American internationalism. It sketches the evolution of the political imaginary that enabled Black activists to depict African Americans and Palestinians as compatriots within global communities of dissent. For more than half a century, Black internationalists identified with Zionism, believing that the Jewish bid for a national homeland paralleled the African American freedom struggle. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, colonial aggression in the Middle East led many African American progressives to rethink the analogy. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, African American dissidents operating within the nexus of Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Third Worldism constructed powerful theories of Afro-Palestinian kinship. In so doing, they reimagined or transcended bonds of color, positing anti-imperialist struggle, rather than racial affinity, as the precondition of camaraderie.

The Making of the Modern Death Penalty in Jim Crow North Carolina

2019 ◽  
pp. 192-214
Author(s):  
Seth Kotch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Convictions ◽  
The Impact

focuses on the transition from local public hangings to state-controlled electrocutions in North Carolina in the early twentieth century. The chapter addresses the impact of this shift on African American communities. Although the death penalty had long served as an instrument of racial control, the ritual of a local hanging nevertheless had allowed the condemned and black witnesses a public space to express religious convictions and honor the condemned’s suffering. Once the state seized control of this ritual, African Americans were largely excluded as witnesses. The modern death penalty thus came to represent the racial subjugation of Jim Crow, indeed having more in common with lynchings than legal hangings had.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Cressler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Color Line ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
Black Catholics ◽  
Catholic History

This chapter begins with the ten Black bishops declaring in 1984 that Black Catholics should be “authentically Black and truly Catholic.” It contrasts this statement with the story of Mary Dolores Gadpaille, who argued in 1958 that Catholicism “lifted her up above the color line.” It juxtaposes these two examples in order to introduce readers to the central questions that govern the book. Why did tens of thousands of African Americans convert to Catholicism in the middle decades of the twentieth century? What did it mean to be Black and Catholic in the first half of the twentieth century and why did it change so dramatically in the thirty years that separated Gadpaille from the bishops? How would placing Black Catholics at the center of our historical narratives change the ways we understand African American religion and Catholicism in the United States? The chapter situates the book in scholarship and briefly introduces readers to Black Catholic history writ large.

Collins, Janet (1917–2003)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaël Lewin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
American Cultural History ◽  
Concert Dance ◽  
Dual Identities

Magical on stage, elusive off stage, Janet Collins was an enigmatic and complex presence in twentieth-century dance. As the first full-time African American ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera in 1951, she broke the color barrier and generated international headlines—no small feat in an era when racial tension and discrimination continued to prevail. This celebrated achievement placed her in the pantheon of pioneering African Americans and became the triumph for which she was most remembered. Yet Collins also succeeded as a unique concert dance soloist and choreographer, fusing disparate techniques and influences in her creations—an approach that was in keeping with modernist experimentations and set her apart from many of her dancing peers. As a result of these dual identities, she serves as a pivotal figure in the lineage of African American cultural history, and as one of the distinguished women of her generation who helped propel the evolution of American dance.

The Black Press and a Mass Black Readership

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-44
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Mass Movement ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
Black Life

This chapter examines the mass movement of southern African Americans to Northern cities in the first half of the twentieth century and shows how it dramatically altered the Black Press. After 1920, black newspaper editors covered more news that they believed would appeal to working-class African Americans. In charting the development of the early-twentieth-century Black Press, chapter 1 presents a comparative analysis of five different newspapers: The Amsterdam News, The Baltimore Afro-American, The Chicago Defender, The Philadelphia Tribune, and the Pittsburgh Courier. These five newspapers demonstrate how the Black Press fostered and imagined an African American readership’s interest in sexuality through its sensational coverage of the variegations of black life throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

“God’s Spirit Lives in Me”

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
Vaughn A. Booker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Daily Practice ◽  
Positive Thinking ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
New Thought ◽  
Financial Wealth

This article explores the work of the Rev. Charleszetta “Mother” Waddles (1912–2001), an independent African American Christian minister who operated the Perpetual Mission for Saving Souls of All Nations in Detroit, Michigan. It argues that Mother Waddles sought to reshape and repurpose the spiritual rhetoric of New Thought theology—especially the concept of “positive thinking”—for her daily practice as a home missionary and for others living in similar circumstances. Mother Waddles was distinct from other twentieth-century, African American New Thought messengers because she sought to speak to and change the lives and mindsets of other impoverished African Americans without making a theological case for their divine entitlement to material prosperity or by encouraging their desire for financial wealth. Her undated, self-published book, Attributes and Attitudes, offered twelve divine virtues that every potential home (urban) missionary worker should embody—as well as twelve negative attitudes they must reject—in order to serve others.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Kevin D. Greene
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Consciousness ◽  
The South ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Blues Music ◽  
New Negro Renaissance ◽  
The Way

The invention and reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy reveals numerous pathways African American entertainers faced during the first half of the twentieth century. After Broonzy left the South for Chicago, his 30-year career as a pioneer in blues music would be shaped by his own ambitions and those held by others. Both consciously and unconsciously, Big Bill became a full participant in Chicago and America’s critically vital New Negro Renaissance. Along the way, his reinventions would help negotiate African American celebrity and modernity in a manner that would hasten the transformation of his ever-expanding black consciousness.

The Harlem Renaissance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catrina Hill ◽  
Sophie Meridien ◽  
Keith Holt ◽  
Daniel Boyle ◽  
Paul Ardoin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
African American Community ◽  
The World ◽  
Philosophical Questions ◽  
Breaking Work ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a flourishing of artistic, intellectual, musical, and literary accomplishments by African Americans between the World Wars. The movement took its name from Harlem, a neighborhood on the northern section of Manhattan Island. Harlem became the de facto center of the African American community in New York City, and many of the most important figures of the Renaissance called it home. During the Renaissance, intellectuals published ground-breaking work that explored philosophical questions and political possibilities for African Americans that would be explored throughout the twentieth century.

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