The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966

The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966
Author: David Murphy
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2016-09-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1781383510

This volume is the first sustained attempt to provide an overview of the First World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Dakar in 1966, and of its multiple legacies.

The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966

The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966
Author: David Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2016
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1781383162

In April 1966, thousands of artists, musicians, performers and writers from across Africa and its diaspora gathered in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to take part in the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Premier Festival Mondial des arts nègres). The international forum provided by the Dakar Festival showcased a wide array of arts and was attended by such celebrated luminaries as Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Aimé Césaire, André Malraux and Wole Soyinka. Described by Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, as 'the elaboration of a new humanism which this time will include all of humanity on the whole of our planet earth', the festival constituted a highly symbolic moment in the era of decolonization and the push for civil rights for black people in the United States. In essence, the festival sought to perform an emerging Pan-African culture, that is, to give concrete cultural expression to the ties that would bind the newly liberated African 'homeland' to black people in the diaspora. This volume is the first sustained attempt to provide not only an overview of the festival itself but also of its multiple legacies, which will help us better to understand the 'festivalization' of Africa that has occurred in recent decades with most African countries now hosting a number of festivals as part of a national tourism and cultural development strategy.

Crossing Borders Through Folklore

Crossing Borders Through Folklore
Author: Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0826260098

Examining works by Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, this innovative book frames black women's aesthetic sensibilities across art forms. Investigating the relationship between vernacular folk culture and formal expression, this study establishes how each of the four artists engaged the identity issues of the 1960s and used folklore as a strategy for crossing borders in the works they created during the following two decades. Because of its interdisciplinary approach, this study will appeal to students and scholars in many fields, including African American literature, art history, women's studies, diaspora studies, and cultural studies.

The Dance of Death

The Dance of Death
Author: Dubem Okafor
Publisher: Africa World Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780865435551

Christopher Okigbo (1932-1967) was one of Africa's foremost poets until his life was cut short by the Biafran civil war. This work analyses his poetry and considers its importance as prophecy in the light of the current concern about the direction of the Nigerian government.

Building the Black Arts Movement

Building the Black Arts Movement
Author: Jonathan Fenderson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2019-03-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252051270

As both an activist and the dynamic editor of Negro Digest, Hoyt W. Fuller stood at the nexus of the Black Arts Movement and the broader black cultural politics of his time. Jonathan Fenderson uses historical snapshots of Fuller's life and achievements to rethink the period and establish Fuller's important role in laying the foundation for the movement. In telling Fuller's story, Fenderson provides provocative new insights into the movement's international dimensions, the ways the movement took shape at the local level, the impact of race and other factors, and the challenges--corporate, political, and personal--that Fuller and others faced in trying to build black institutions. An innovative study that approaches the movement from a historical perspective, Building the Black Arts Movement is a much-needed reassessment of the trajectory of African American culture over two explosive decades.

African Vodun

African Vodun
Author: Suzanne Preston Blier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 500
Release: 1995
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780226058603

"This book will be of critical importance not only to those concerned with African, African American, and Caribbean art, but also to anthropologists, scholars of the African diaspora, students of comparative religion and comparative psychology, and anyone fascinated by the traditions of vodou and vodun."--Jacket.

Who Was Duke Ellington?

Who Was Duke Ellington?
Author: M. D. Payne
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 039953962X

How did a working-class young man from Washington, DC, turn the music world on its head and become the "Master Of Jazz"? Find out in this addition to the Who HQ library! A pivotal fixture of the Harlem Renaissance, Duke Ellington was the bandleader of the historic Cotton Club and a master composer -- writing close to 3,000 songs in his lifetime and capturing the spirit of the Black experience in the Unites States. Over a 50-year career, Ellington became one of the biggest names in jazz as we know it. He went on to win 13 Grammys, a Pulitzer, and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969. Who Was Duke Ellington? follows the exciting, multifaceted journey of this musical genius and takes a look at what truly makes Ellington an artist "beyond category."

The Cultural Cold War and the Global South

The Cultural Cold War and the Global South
Author: Kerry Bystrom
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2021-07-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000399478

This volume investigates the cultural sites where the global Cold War played out. It brings to view unpredictable encounters that arose as writers, artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals from or aligned with the Third World navigated the ideological and material constraints set by superpowers and emerging regional powers. Often these encounters generated communitas and solidarity, while at times they fed old and new conflicts. Pushing forward recent scholarship that tracks the Cold War in the Global South and draws on postcolonial approaches, our contributors use archival, secondary, and ethnographic sources to trace the afterlives and memories of key figures and to explore meetings that performed cultural diplomacy. Our focus on sites of encounter or exchange underscores the situated, interpersonal, and embodied dimensions through which much of the cultural Cold War was experienced. While the global conflict divided citizens along ideological fault lines, it also linked people through circulating media—novels, film, posters, journals, and theatre—and multinational conferences that brought artists, intellectuals, and political activists together. Such contacts introduced new axes of solidarity and hierarchies of exclusion. Examining these connections and disjunctures, this new and necessary mapping of the cultural Cold War highlights under-addressed locations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.