The roots of such music can be traced back still further to the gospel hymns, work songs, and field calls that developed amongst slave populations in the south during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Scholastic 2011). The Southern and decidedly African-American sounds of blues and early jazz were brought along with the Great migration, where New Orleans styles like Dixieland met with the calmer strains of the Mississippi blues and other styles (Scholastic 2011). In New York, with the greatest concentration of African-Americans, new collaborations and iterations sprang up quite rapidly. The Harlem Renaissance, named for the neighborhood in Manhattan where the African-American community was concentrated and centralized, was an explosion of artistic, literary, and musical expression largely because it represented the first major community of African-Americans located in a small geographical area (McDougal & Littell 2008). The jazz music that developed in New York as a part of this Renaissance was especially dependent on the concentration of African-Americans from different parts of the South, with their own musical traditions and styles, as it was the blend and evolution of these combined styles that led to the styles and sounds of what can now be thought of as Jazz proper (McDougal & Littell 2008). With only white audiences allowed in the most popular clubs, the sounds of Jazz became popular outside of the African-American community and developed into mainstream styles that persisted for...
This is a part of the American tapestry that is not often acknowledged in an explicit or meaningful way, and one that deserves greater attention and awareness. It is strange to think that the vicious abuses of human rights practiced upon African natives should be the ultimate cause of this musical progression; one can see this as tragic or as ultimately uplifting and redeeming.
Harlem Renaissance Harlem's Poets Claude McKay and Langston Hughes became like two poster boys for the Harlem Renaissance. They burst from the "Harlem Shadows" and underground jazz world into the mainstream, crossing the racial divide to find support and fame not only in America but all over the world. Their poems, however, like African-American music, were co-opted by white culture and exploited for aims entirely divorced from the ethnicity that justified the
(It will be recalled that Wright's then unpublished Lawd Today served as a working model for The Outsider.) Cross, in his daily dealings with the three women and his fellow postal workers feel something akin to nausea. His social and legal obligations have enslaved him. He has inherited from his mother a sense of guilt and foreboding regarding his relationship to women and his general awareness of amoral physical
Black Arts Known as the "artistic sister of the Black Power movement," Black Arts refers to the collective expressions of African-American culture during the 1960s and 1970s. Corresponding with the climax of the Civil Rights movement and the self-empowerment of the African-American community, the Black Arts was a politically charged yet aesthetically ripe collection of visual, performance, music, and literary art forms. Amiri Baraka is credited widely with the genesis of
Gender as Prison At first reading, Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale seem to have little to do with each other except for the very general fact that both novels have elements of social and political commentary in them. But, while the world's portrayed in these books are fundamentally different from each other, a closer reading suggests important intersections and congruences in the novels around the subject
Schulman illustrates this by reference to Bob Dylan's lyrics, whose images (such as Isis) evoke the spiritual quests of the New Age mysticism and whose outlaw heroes voice an angry suspicion again established institutional authority (Schulman, 147). The same hostility to mainstream values was repeated in iconoclastic directors such as Cassavetes and Scorsese. One sees as well that the 1970s critiques of religion were not based on evolutionary science
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