scholarly journals Creole Sketches

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lafcadio Hearn

New Orleans in 1878 was the most exotic and cosmopolitan city in North America. An international port, with more than 200,000 inhabitants, it was open to French, Spanish, Mexican, South American, and West Indian cultural influences, and home to a thriving population descended from free African Americans. It was also a battleground in the fight against yellow fever (malaria) and in the political upheavals that followed the end of Reconstruction. The continued influx of Anglo-Americans and the renewed ascendancy of white supremacists threatened to overwhelm the local blend of languages, races, and cultures that enlivened the unique Creole character of the city. Writing for an English-language newspaper, Lafcadio Hearn presented the speech, charm, and humor of the Creolized natives on the other side of Canal Street, and illustrated his sketches with woodcut cartoons — the first of their kind in any Southern paper. These vignettes, published in the New Orleans Daily Item during 1878-1880, capture a traditionalist urban world and its colorful characters with a delicate and sympathetic understanding.

2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 597-615
Author(s):  
Spencer A. Klavan

Simply by formulating a question about the nature of ancient Greek poetry or music, any modern English speaker is already risking anachronism. In recent years especially, scholars have reminded one another that the words ‘music’ and ‘poetry’ denote concepts with no easy counterpart in Greek. μουσική in its broadest sense evokes not only innumerable kinds of structured movement and sound but also the political, psychological and cosmic order of which song, verse and dance are supposed to be perceptible manifestations. Likewise, ποίησις and the ποιητικὴ τέχνη can encompass all kinds of ‘making’, from the assembly of a table to the construction of a rhetorical argument. Of course, there were specifically artistic usages of these terms—according to Plato, ‘musical and metrical production’ was the default meaning of ποίησις in everyday speech. But even in discussions which restrict themselves to the sphere of human art, we find nothing like the neat compartmentalization of harmonized rhythmic melody on the one hand, and stylized verbal composition on the other, which is often casually implied or expressly formulated in modern comparisons of ‘music’ with ‘poetry’. For many ancient theorists the City Dionysia, a dithyrambic festival and a recitation of Homer all featured different versions of one and the same form of composition, a μουσική or ποιητική to which λόγοι, γράμματα and συλλαβαί were just as essential as ἁρμονία, φθόγγοι, ῥυθμός and χρόνοι.


2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-158
Author(s):  
Michael C. Dawson ◽  
Lawrence D. Bobo

By the time you read this issue of the Du Bois Review, it will be nearly a year after the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina swept the Gulf Coast and roiled the nation. While this issue does not concentrate on the disaster, (the next issue of the DBR will be devoted solely to research on the social, economic, and political ramifications of the Katrina disaster), the editors would be amiss if we did not comment on an event that once again exposed the deadly fault lines of the American racial order. The loss of the lives of nearly 1500 citizens, the many more tens of thousands whose lives were wrecked, and the destruction of a major American city as we know it, all had clear racial overtones as the story unfolded. Indeed, the racial story of the disaster does not end with the tragic loss of life, the disruption of hundred of thousands of lives, nor the physical, social, economic, and political collapse of an American urban jewel. The political map of the city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana (and probably Texas), and the region is being rewritten as the large Black and overwhelmingly Democratic population of New Orleans was dispersed out of Louisiana, with states such as Texas becoming the perhaps permanent recipients of a large share of the evacuees.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
Sarbani Sharma

While much has been said about the historicity of the Kashmir conflict or about how individuals and communities have resisted occupation and demanded the right to self-determination, much less has been said about nature of everyday life under these conditions. This article offers a glimpse of life in the working-class neighbourhood of Maisuma, located in the central area of the city of Srinagar, and its engagement with the political movement for azadi (freedom). I argue that the predicament of ‘double interminability’ characterises life in Maisuma—the interminable violence by the state on the one hand and simultaneously the constant call of labouring for azadi by the movement on the other, since the terms of peace are unacceptable.


2019 ◽  
pp. 93-104
Author(s):  
Bala J. Baptiste

The verdict is mixed concerning the extent black broadcasters in the city provided interpretation of issues related to the modern Civil Rights Movement between 1954–1968. The black press, owned by African Americans and relatively independent, covered civil rights news locally and nationally. For example Louisiana Weekly in New Orleans provided quotes from speeches, such as those delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. The paper also published commentary concerning the movement. Nevertheless, broadcaster Larry McKinley produced programming targeting blacks. He was so moved by a King speech in 1957 that he attempted to join the rights group CORE, but could not "turn the other cheek." CORE representatives asked him to go on air and broadcast times and locations of rallies and other public meetings. McKinley also interview foots soldiers such as CORE member Jerome Smith who was terribly brutalized by white terrorists in Birmingham during the Freedom Rides in 1961.


Author(s):  
Sally McKee

This chapter argues that no family embodies the anomalous history of New Orleans better than the Dede family. Of all the towns and cities in North America with populations of free African Americans, the chapter goes on to argue, New Orleans was the city most likely to have produced a black man like Edmond Dede—possessed of enough talent, ambition, and training to launch himself up to a high level of accomplishment. Only in New Orleans could African American families trace their family's history back beyond 1864, the year the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Contrary to later reports that Edmond Dede was the son of West Indian refugees, he in fact belonged instead to a long-established family with roots in North America.


2019 ◽  
Vol XV ◽  
pp. 125-140
Author(s):  
Maciej Rogulski

Rituals are of great importance in politics at every level. Rituals bind society and strengthen their identity. Besides rituals strengthen attach-ment to culture, land and state power. On the other hand state power increases legitimacy by performing respected rituals. There are many interesting ways to classify rituals in the literature on the subject. For the purpose of showing rituals in the political space of the city of Ustka, it seems appropriate to distinguish above all the rituals of a national char-acter and those of a local dimension. In the case concept of the ritual, however, there are no final divisions, and the boundaries that divide them are certainly not impassable.


1977 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
pp. 112-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan H. Sommerstein
Keyword(s):  
The One ◽  

The dates of performance of Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae are still not generally agreed. The most widely accepted opinion is perhaps that of Wilamowitz, that Lysistrata was produced at the Lenaia and Thesmophoriazusae at the City Dionysia in the same year, 411 B.C. But both Schmid and Gelzer, in their authoritative works on Aristophanes, have given reasons for reversing these assignments and putting Th. first; Russo holds that both plays were produced on the same occasion; and Rhodes has recently revived the view—which goes back to Dobree and beyond—that Th. is to be dated to 410, during the régime of the Five Thousand.The one unequivocal and undisputed datum we have comes from Hypothesis I to Lys., which tells us that that play was produced in the archonship of Kallias (412/1). Further information can be elicited from a variety of sources:(1) statements by scholiasts giving the date, relative to one of the plays, of an event whose date is independently known;(2) references (or, less safely, failures to refer) in the plays themselves to datable events;(3) references to the season of the year at which the performance took place;(4) considerations of the type of play more likely to have been produced at one or the other festival;(5) references in one play to the other;(6) the political, military and diplomatic conditions, movements, prospects and attitudes reflected in the plays, considered with reference to contemporary events.


Author(s):  
Maram M. Samman

This paper traces the intercultural journey of a young Aboriginal girl into the hegemonic white society. Rita Joe crossed the imaginary border that separates her reserve from the other Canadian society living in the urban developed city. Through this play, George Ryga aims at achieving liberation and social equality for the Aboriginals who are considered a colonized minority in their land. The research illustrates how Ryga represented his personal version of the colonial Aboriginal history to provide an empowering body narrative that supports their identity in the present and resists the erosion of their culture and tradition. The play makes very strong statements to preserve the family, history and local heritage against this forced assimilation. It tells the truth as its playwright saw it. The play is about the trail of Rita Joe after she moved from her reserve in pursuit of the illusion of the city where she thought she would find freedom and social equality. In fact the audience and the readers are all on trial. Ryga is pointing fingers at everyone who is responsible for the plights of the Aboriginals as it is clear in the play. He questions the Whites’ stereotypical stand against the Aboriginals. The play is a direct criticism of the political, social and cultural systems in Canada. The paper reveals Aboriginals' acts of opposition to racism, assimilation and colonization as represented in The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. 


2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-457
Author(s):  
Martina Böse ◽  
Brigitta Busch

This article explores the multi-accentuality of the sign ‘gastarbajteri’, used as title word in an exhibition on labour migration that took place in Vienna, Austria, in 2004. Based on an ethnographic study of the exhibition, it addresses a variety of readings of this word, both at the level of production and reception. The analysis of texts shows, firstly, the divergent rationales of the two agents who cooperated as exhibition producers, the minority NGO who wished to signal self-empowerment of migrants on the hand and the city museum who aimed at selling the exhibition to a mainstream audience on the other hand. Secondly, it juxtaposes them with the plurality of readings by its recipients, which range from the recognition of an appeal to migrants via the mis-reading as ‘guestworker’ and its upvaluation through to an insider-perspective based on the knowledge of the word’s connotations in the former Yugoslavia.


Author(s):  
Christopher Robert Reed

The political economy of the 1920s were intricately linked to the demographic changes, emerging social structure, level of racial consciousness, cultural and aesthetic expressions, and religious practices and activities of this pivotal period in Chicago's history. This chapter focuses on demographics and the thinking accompanying the expansion of this population. Between 1910 and 1920, the African American population of Chicago increased by 148.5 percent. By 1927, a head count around the city in all three of the major geographical divisions found 196,569 persons of African descent in residence. The demographic growth of the Black Metropolis rested firmly on the continuous in-migration of primarily adults from the South—not only from the plantations of the Deep South and small towns but also cities such as Birmingham, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Mobile. Chicago's new Negro personality also bloomed and grew enormously in terms of an expanded African American worldview, expectations, and accomplishments.


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