Vodou Imagery, African American Tradition, and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

2018 ◽  
pp. 69-94
Author(s):  
Daphne Lamothe
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
African American Tradition

Where Honor is Due: Frederick Douglass as Representative Black Man

Prospects ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 177-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilson J. Moses
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
The Self ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
African American Tradition ◽  
The 19Th Century

Frederick Douglass may or may not have been the greatest African American abolitionist and orator of the 19th Century, but he was certainly the most accomplished master of self-projection. His autobiographical writings demonstrate the genius with which he seized and manipulated mainstream American symbols and values. By appropriating the Euro-American myth of the self-made man, Douglass guaranteed that his struggle would be canonized, not only within an African American tradition, but within the traditions of the mainstream as well. He manipulated the rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon manhood as skillfully as did any of his white contemporaries, including such master manipulators as Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Phineas T. Barnum. I mention Douglass along with these wily exemplars of American showmanship, not because I want to drag out embarrassing cliches about making heroes more human, but in order to address the truly monumental nature of Douglass's accomplishments. Douglass, like Lincoln, Emerson, and Barnum, was abundantly endowed with the spiderish craft and foxlike cunning that are often marks of self-made men.

Taboo language used as banter

2018 ◽  
pp. 333-352
Author(s):  
Elijah Wald
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Close Relationships ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Joking Relationships ◽  
African American Tradition ◽  
The Relationship

Taboo is used in many cultures to cement familial and other relationships, not only by observing taboos but by selectively breaking them. Probably the most common form of societally sanctioned taboo-breaking is within what anthropologists call joking relationships—close relationships in which people are expected to show their affinity by behaving to each other in mocking or insulting ways that would be unacceptable outside the relationship. Such relationships have been found among many Native American groups and throughout Africa, typically involving people who are joined by particular kinship or ceremonial links. In the African diaspora these traditions are maintained in less formal ways, most famously in the dozens, an African American tradition of insult play that most typically involves sexualized or otherwise taboo-skirting insults directed at a companion’s or acquaintance’s mother.

Syncope Fever: James Weldon Johnson and the Black Phonographic Voice

2006 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATHERINE BIERS
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
African American Tradition

ABSTRACT This essay examines links between James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and the cultural logic of ragtime and the phonograph during the pre-WWI era, in order to reconsider critical conceptions of voice within the African-American tradition.

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