In Another Voice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marian Wilson Kimber
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Women Composers ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
Children's Songs ◽  
Musical Accompaniment

Women confirmed their own more highly cultured positions through recitation of African American dialect, particularly the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, or “child dialect,” sometimes with musical accompaniment. Many women incorporated Dunbar’s dialect poems into their repertoires, texts that also inspired settings for speaker and piano by women composers. However white women’s imitations of African American dialect perpetuated racial stereotypes such as that of the Mammy, even while their musical settings negated the text’s origins. Child dialect allowed child imitators to express comedic and rebellious sentiments without transgressing feminine social boundaries. The child-like persona cultivated by diseuse Kitty Cheatham facilitated her eclectic programming of children’s songs, nursery rhymes, and European art music alongside spirituals and African-American dialect texts.

The Genteel Tradition and the Emergence of the African American Sonnet

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-38
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter traces the emergence of the sonnet in African American literature to the pervasive influence of genteel conventions. These conventions have widely been regarded as conservative or even stultifying, but they provided black poets with various opportunities for self-assertion in the public sphere. The sonnet was a favourite genre among the genteel establishment, and poets pushed the boundaries of black expression by appropriating the form to subvert racial stereotypes, develop a black poetic subjectivity, and participate in the debate over the memory of the Civil War. In tracing these developments, the chapter repositions the outstanding poets of the period, Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson, alongside their less-known contemporaries, Samuel Beadle, William Stanley Braithwaite, Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr., T. Thomas Fortune, and Henrietta Cordelia Ray.

I Love You with an Asterisk: African-American Experimental Composers and the French Jazz Press, 1970-1980

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen H. Lehman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Improvised Music ◽  
The Impact

Beginning in the 1970s, the French jazz press became the first community of critics seriously to consider the new African-American experimental music being put forth by musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). More than any other aspect of their music, the incorporation of instrumentations, concepts, and musical forms normally associated with Western art music challenged assumptions within both the European and the American jazz communities. The response to these musicians in publications like Jazz Magazine and Jazz Hot was complex and multi-dimensional. A genuine fascination with this new music was nevertheless tempered by received notions about race and musical idiom. The political climate in France after the student demonstrations of 1968 provided a context which also may have been important for at least some French jazz critics. The impact of the French jazz press on the field of improvised music in France in the 1970s was only one component of a transactional process of resistance by critics and conscious counter-resistance by key musicians/composers who wanted to expand notions of what jazz could encompass. Based on archival research and interviews with both musicians and French critics and scholars I intend to examine this dialogue between the French jazz press and the musicians themselves, in an effort to better understand how each community affected the other in France from 1970 to 1980.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Dudley
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Political Views ◽  
African American Artists

Paul Laurence Dunbar, born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872, became the first African American to make his living solely as a writer. When he died of tuberculosis in 1906, he was perhaps the most famous and best-loved black man in America. During a short but prolific career, Dunbar composed about five hundred poems, one hundred short stories, four novels, many essays, and song lyrics. His public performances of his own works were wildly popular, and generations of African Americans were raised knowing, often by heart, his best-loved poems. In 1896, William Dean Howells, dean of American literary critics, hailed Dunbar’s work, but singled out the dialect poems for special praise. The public preferred them, too. For the decade that remained to him, Dunbar continued to write dialect poems, some of which seem to reinforce negative stereotypes of African Americans, and others that appear to romanticize the “good old days” of the antebellum South. On the other hand, Dunbar produced essays and poetry critical of America and the severe limits and indignities imposed on African Americans. Why would such a writer produce works so contradictory? This has been the crux of Dunbar studies almost from the time of his death. His critical reception reveals much about the taste and political views of subsequent generations of his readers and critics, who would do well to remember the enormous challenges facing Dunbar and all African American artists who strove to find their voices and make a living during those post-Reconstruction years, the “nadir” of the black experience in America.

African American Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 183-200
Author(s):  
Christine A. Wooley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
Simple Representation ◽  
Racist Discourse ◽  
American Literary Realism

Critical accounts of American literary realism have often focused on how realism is an intervention in, rather than a simple representation of, reality. Truth, however, remains a powerful referent for realists and a particularly complex one for postbellum African American writers whose works exemplify, but also interrogate, realism as a mode of representation. This chapter argues that linking African American writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt to the realism of William Dean Howells reveals how for these writers, realism itself becomes a way to interrogate the power of stories to define what is true and to intervene in such assumptions. At the same time, these authors’ works increasingly show the limits of such interventions in relation to the intractability of racialized and racist discourse—and the racial disparities such discourse reinforces—at the turn of the twentieth century.

Singing High

2019 ◽  
pp. 34-51
Author(s):  
Alisha Lola Jones
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Cultural Performance ◽  
Dual Processes ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
African American Churches ◽  
Western Art ◽  
American Churches

Drawing on a case study of African American countertenor Patrick Dailey and an ethnography of his live performance, this chapter is an ethnomusicological assessment of his social and theological navigation of gendered vocal sound. African American gospel singing challenges the binary gender framework that the American public expects, with men singing low and women singing high. As a man who sings high, Dailey has to demonstrate performance competence in African American worship. Dailey deftly negotiates the tensions and intersections between these dual processes of musical performance. He does so with an aspiration to deliver a presentation that is what he refers to as “anointed”: music that is from and for God. Dailey’s performance also engages African American audiences’ various types of cultural familiarity to portray competency as a worship leader and trained artist. Thus, while making a mark in sacred music history, more generally, Patrick Dailey’s performance reveals the subtle ways Western art music conventions of classifying vocalists are utilized and revised in the interpretation of cross-cultural performance in African American churches.

A literatura afro-americana sob a ótica da tradução

1989 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Idelber Vasconcelos Avelar
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Short Story ◽  
English Language ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
Major Language ◽  
Recurrent Process ◽  
Shed Light

The article makes use of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor literature - i.e. that which is produced by a minority within a major language - to shed light on the displacements imposed by Afro-American writers upon the symbolic tradition they inherit through the English language. By means of an analysis of a short story by Katherine Porter and a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, emphasis is placed on the recurrent process of demetaphorization one finds in African-American texts. Such Processes are shown to entail a theory of translation that highlights difference and contests the authority of the original. O artigo utiliza, a partir de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, o conceito de literatura menor – literatura produzida por uma minoria no interior de uma língua majoritária - para analisar os deslocamentos operados pelos escritores negros americanos na tradição simbólica herdada por eles através da língua inglesa. Por meio de uma leitura de um conto de Katherine Porter e um poema de Paul Laurence Dunbar, enfatiza-se os recorrentes processos de desmetaforização encontrados nos textos afro-americanos. Num momento seguinte, mostra-se que tais processos implicam uma teoria da tradução que privilegia a diferença e contesta a autoridade do original.

Knowing About Racial Stereotypes Versus Believing Them

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-524 ◽  
Author(s):  
Na’ilah Suad Nasir ◽  
Maxine McKinney de Royston ◽  
Kathleen O’Connor ◽  
Sarah Wischnia
Keyword(s):  
Middle School ◽  
African American ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Latino Students ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Northern California ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Middle Schoolers ◽  
Urban Educators ◽  
And Mathematics

Despite post-racial rhetoric, stereotypes remain salient for American youth. We surveyed 150 elementary and middle schoolers in Northern California and conducted case studies of 12 students. Findings showed that (a) students hold school-related stereotypes that get stronger in middle school, (b) African American and Latino students experience greater divergence between stereotype awareness about their group and endorsement than other students, and (c) students who eschewed the applicability of stereotypes to them demonstrated higher engagement and achievement in math. This study has implications for studying race in schools and mathematics, and the need for urban educators to facilitate racialized counter-narratives.

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