Call and Response as Critical Method: African-American Oral Traditions and Beloved

1992 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maggie Sale
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Call And Response ◽  
Critical Method

scholarly journals Call-and-Response: An Ancient Linguistic Device Surfaces in Usher's "Love in This Club"

Elements ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Keegan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
American Culture ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Call And Response ◽  
Salient Features

The call-and-response, originating from African tribal rituals, has become part of the foundation of modern African-American culture. This article explores the significance of call-and-response in Usher's "Love in This Club" and relates salient features of the music to the club culture that underlies it. "Club hip-hop" emerges as firmly rooted in the use of call-and-response. The rituals of the club are likewise mirrored in the style of the music, which at times can bear the importance of sacred ceremony.

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.

In Pursuit of Letters: A History of the Bray Schools for Enslaved Children in Colonial Virginia

2011 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio T. Bly
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The United States ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
History Of ◽  
Book Talk

The pursuit of literacy is a central theme in the history of African Americans in the United States. In the Western tradition, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and others have observed, people of African descent have been written out of “culture” because they have been identified with oral traditions. In that setting, literacy signifies both reason and civilization. Performance in print earned the laurel of humanity. Consequently, for well over 200 years, the African-American literary tradition has been defined as one in which books talked and a few slave authors achieved, at once, voice and significance by making a book talk back by writing.

Studying the African American Narrative in English Composition Classes

2018 ◽  
pp. 225-238
Author(s):  
Paula Fender
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Religious Rhetoric ◽  
History Of Rhetoric ◽  
College Classrooms ◽  
Linguistic Patterns ◽  
History Of ◽  
Rhetorical Traditions ◽  
American Spirituality

This piece explores the history of rhetoric that can be placed in the context of contemporary college classrooms. Though US colleges explore and teach the fundamentals of rhetoric from a Greek perspective, this piece explains the oratory heritage of Africa, where rhetoric began (Diop, 2008; Hilliard, Williams, & Damali, 1987; Jackson II & Richardson, 2003; Semmes, 1992). Contemporary college classrooms can remediate their practices of teaching rhetoric by exploring it through the lens of Egyptian's ancient rhetorical traditions. African American (AA) students maintain their oral traditions through storytelling and contemporary religious rhetoric. Scholars presented in this piece will show that the oral rhetorical traditions of ancient Africa, African American spirituality, and AA linguistic patterns can help teachers of AA students in the contemporary classroom. It will also examine the narratives of critical race theory, social justice, and opportunity as they relate to students in educational settings.

Rock ’n Roll Dance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Malnig
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Body Movement ◽  
Response Patterns ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Rhythm And Blues ◽  
Call And Response ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
The Uk

Rock ’n roll dance was a major American dance form that became prominent in the 1950s and soon thereafter spread to the UK. The dance was performed to a new musical style that was a combination of country, gospel, and rhythm and blues, and was associated with both black and white musicians, including Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bill Haley. Rock ’n roll dance was also a cultural phenomenon that galvanised a large, primarily white, youth culture. The dances themselves, which were disseminated nationally through the modern invention of television, were mostly of African-American origin and displayed a new configuration of body movement involving pelvic and hip rotations, greater use of the arms and torso, and call and response patterns. The Twist was one of the most iconic solo dances of the era, while popular line dances included the Madison, Stroll, and Hand Jive.

Jazz Dancing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Flanders Crosby ◽  
Wendy Oliver
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
Call And Response ◽  
The Many ◽  
Modern Era

Jazz dancing is an important modern art form that developed in tandem with jazz music between the 1910s and 1940s in America. Emanating from African-American folk and vernacular practices of the early 20th century, jazz dancing reflects the evolving freedoms of modern African-Americans as well as the racial tensions of the modern era in which it was created. Indeed, jazz dance displays the complexity and exuberance of modern American culture and history. The many manifestations of jazz dancing range in style from vernacular to theatrical and embrace, to varying degrees, fundamental movement qualities such as a weighted release into gravity, rhythmic complexity, propulsive rhythms, a dynamic spine, call and response, a conversational approach to accompanying rhythms, and attention to syncopation and musicality.

scholarly journals African American Parents’ Perceptions of an American Deaf Community: Where’s the Poetic Justice?

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Borum
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Deaf Children ◽  
Deaf Community ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
African American Parents ◽  
Qualitative Technique ◽  
Poetic Justice ◽  
Poetic Prose ◽  
Grounded Theory Approach

Poetic prose, a creative qualitative technique, is used to present the findings (emerging themes) of in-depth, thematic interviews with 14 African American parents with deaf children. This is presented in a multi- vocal, interactive, and interwoven style. This style of interweaving voices of participants in a creative poetic prose is indicative of African American cultural and oral traditions. It also permits and deepens the reader’s ability to emotionally and spiritually connect with experiences and emotions of African American parents and their perceptions of an American deaf community. This research was conducted using a modified grounded theory approach where theory (grand narrative) and communal- personal-based narratives interact. Afrocentricsm offers a powerful conceptual frame for organizing these experiences of parents of deaf children within the deaf community and schools for deaf children.

Black Jazz in the Digital Age

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Tate
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Keynote Address ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Personal Essay ◽  
Call And Response ◽  
Destination Point

Originally presented as a keynote address at the 2006 Guelph Jazz Festival and Colloquium, this personal essay explores the author’s past and present in jazz and asks important questions about jazz’s future as a relevant Black music. Exactly what information did African American genius, living under American apartheid, bring to the formation of jazz that jazz is losing or has lost access to today? Even more pointedly, what will jazz lose if it loses contact, loses the call and response conversation it used to enjoy with Black working class humanity and that group's racialized self-consciousness and ritualized cultural practices? There is, of course, further the question of whether we err on the side of novelty by thinking of jazz in teleological, futurological terms, of thinking of jazz as in need of a newer post-modern post-Black destination point.

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