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In Black Dragon, Zachary F. Price illuminates martial arts as a site of knowledge exchange between Black, Asian, and Asian American people and cultures to offer new insights into the relationships among these groups. Drawing on case studies that include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's appearance in Bruce Lee's film Game of Death, Ron Van Clief and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Chinese American saxophonist Fred Ho, Price argues that the regular blending and borrowing between these distinct cultural heritages is healing rather than appropriative. His analyses of performance, power, and identity within this cultural fusion demonstrate how, historically, urban working-class Black men have developed community and practiced self-care through the contested adoption of Asian martial arts practice. By zeroing in on this rich but heretofore understudied vein of American cultural exchange, Price not only broadens the scholarship around sites of empowerment via such exchanges but also offers a compelling example of nonessentialist liberation for the twenty-first century.

Literary Criticism / American / Asian American --- Literary Criticism / Drama --- Literary Criticism / American / African American & Black --- Literature --- History and criticism

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"Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author's literary production and including her very latest works--the theatrical production Desdemona and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of Desdemona and Home within the wider scope of Morrison's career. Indeed, in Home, we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison's fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to themes prevalent in Home. In many ways, Morrison has actually initiated paradigm shifts that permeate the essays. They consistently reflect, in approach and interpretation, the revolutionary change in the study of American literature presented by Morrison's focus on the interior lives of enslaved Africans. This collection assumes black subjectivity, rather than argues for it, in order to reread and revise the horror of slavery and its consequences into our time. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in novels that have now become classics in world literature. The essays are divided into five sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from Home, and framed by two poems: Rita Dove's "The Buckeye" and Sonia Sanchez's "Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo.""--

Morrison, Toni --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Wofford, Chloe Anthony --- Morrisonová, Toni --- מוריסון, טוני --- LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African American. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / Women Authors.

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"This anthology presents underappreciated works by African Americans active throughout the nineteenth century. Readers will find familiar names in this anthology, such as Douglass, Wells Brown, Jacobs, and Du Bois, but readers will also be introduced to lesser known and even unknown African Americans worthy of discussion, such as Solomon G. Brown, H. Cordelia Ray, and T. Thomas Fortune. Mance's intention for this volume is to offer an alternative to the Norton and Houghton Mifflin anthologies that emphasize only the canonical works of African American literature in the 19th century and to introduce students--and even professors--to a variety of writings, from poetry to journalism, by African Americans who have yet to receive their due"-- "Despite important recovery and authentication efforts during the last twenty-five years, the vast majority of nineteenth-century African American writers and their work remain unknown to today's readers. Moreover, the most widely used anthologies of black writing have established a canon based largely on current interests and priorities. Seeking to establish a broader perspective, this collection brings together a wealth of autobiographical writings, fiction, poetry, speeches, sermons, essays, and journalism that better portrays the intellectual and cultural debates, social and political struggles, and community publications and institutions that nurtured black writers from the early 1800s to the eve of the Harlem Renaissance. As editor Ajuan Mance notes, previous collections have focused mainly on writing that found a significant audience among white readers. Consequently, authors whose work appeared in African American-owned publications for a primarily black audience--such as Solomon G. Brown, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, and T. Thomas Fortune--have faded from memory. Even figures as celebrated as Frederick Douglass and Paul Laurence Dunbar are today much better known for their "cross-racial" writings than for the larger bodies of work they produced for a mostly African American readership. There has also been a tendency in modern canon making, especially in the genre of autobiography, to stress antebellum writing rather than writings produced after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Similarly, religious writings--despite the centrality of the church in the everyday lives of black readers and the interconnectedness of black spiritual and intellectual life--have not received the emphasis they deserve. Filling those critical gaps with a selection of 143 works by 65 writers, Before Harlem presents as never before an in-depth picture of the literary, aesthetic, and intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century African America and will be a valuable resource for a new generation of readers. "--

LITERARY CRITICISM / Reference. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African American. --- African Americans --- American literature --- African American literature (English) --- Black literature (American) --- Negro literature --- African American authors. --- Afro-American authors --- Negro authors

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"With the publication of Cane in 1923 Jean Toomer emerged one of the most widely read, and now one of the most widely studied, authors of the Harlem Renaissance. Honored as a bold literary experimenter and as an eyewitness reporter of the abuses and outrages of Jim Crow Georgia, Toomer himself wished to evade being considered an African American writer and instead sought appreciation as a poet and idealist. While those qualities of his work have attracted significant critical attention, and his biography has been explored to illuminate them, his interest in class struggle and revolution have been eclipsed. In a series of articles that culminate in this book, Barbara Foley brings those aspects back into the light and into close focus, showing how often and how deeply he thought about them and how fierce and enduring they were. Without making the error of ignoring Toomer's artistic accomplishments, Foley shows how much history surrounds and informs Toomer's work, especially in Cane. In his journals from the time when he was writing Cane, Toomer wrote, "It is a symptom of weakness when one must bring God, equality, liberty, and justice to one's support. It follows that the working classes, particularly the dark-skinned among the working classes, are still weak. . . . If the Negro, consolidated on race rather than class interests, ever become strong enough to demand the exercise of Power, a race war will occur in America." This book examines Toomer's sense of "equality, liberty, and justice," of "nation," the South," and "America," to reveal elements in his writings that ignite them"-- "The 1923 publication of Cane established Jean Toomer as a modernist master and one of the key literary figures of the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Though critics and biographers alike have praised his artistic experimentation and unflinching eyewitness portraits of Jim Crow violence, few seem to recognize how much Toomer's interest in class struggle, catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and the post-World War One radical upsurge, situate his masterwork in its immediate historical context. In Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution, Barbara Foley explores Toomer's political and intellectual connections with socialism, the New Negro movement, and the project of Young America. Examining his rarely scrutinized early creative and journalistic writings, as well as unpublished versions of his autobiography, she recreates the complex and contradictory consciousness that produced Cane. Foley's discussion of political repression runs parallel with a portrait of repression on a personal level. Examining family secrets heretofore unexplored in Toomer scholarship, she traces their sporadic surfacing in Cane. Toomer's text, she argues, exhibits a political unconscious that is at once public and private. "--

Harlem Renaissance --- Modernism (Literature) --- New Negro Movement --- Renaissance, Harlem --- African American arts --- American literature --- African American authors --- Toomer, Jean, --- Toomer, N. Jean, --- Pinchback, Eugene, --- Pinchback, Nathan Eugene, --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Toomer, Jean --- Criticism and interpretation --- United States --- LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African American. --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies. --- Harlem Renaissance.

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What unites and what divides Americans as a nation? Who are we, and can we strike a balance between an emphasis on our divergent ethnic origins and what we have in common? Opening with a survey of American literature through the vantage point of ethnicity, Werner Sollors examines our evolving understanding of ourselves as an Anglo-American nation to a multicultural one and the key role writing has played in that process. Challenges of Diversity contains stories of American myths of arrival (pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, slave ships at Jamestown, steerage passengers at Ellis Island), the powerful rhetoric of egalitarian promise in the Declaration of Independence and the heterogeneous ends to which it has been put, and the recurring tropes of multiculturalism over time (e pluribus unum, melting pot, cultural pluralism). Sollors suggests that although the transformation of this settler country into a polyethnic and self-consciously multicultural nation may appear as a story of great progress toward the fulfillment of egalitarian ideals, deepening economic inequality actually exacerbates the divisions among Americans today.

HISTORY / United States / General. --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination & Race Relations. --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies. --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / General. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African American. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. --- Immigrants in literature. --- Race in literature. --- Ethnicity in literature. --- Multiculturalism in literature. --- American literature --- National characteristics, American, in literature. --- History and criticism.