African American Studies

This book looks at the popularity of hip-hop among America's white youth. It asks whether white identification is rooted in admiration and a desire to transcend race or if it is merely a new chapter in the long continuum of stereotyping, mimicry and cultural appropriation?

In discussions of black musicians from Billie Holiday and Thelonious Monk to Charlie Parker, Archie Shepp, Don Cherry, and Sun-Ra, LeRoi Jones examines each musician's personality, background, musical ambitions, accomplishments, and disappointments to illuminate both the context and spirit of jazz.

Oware reveals how emcees perpetuate and challenge gendered and racialized constructions of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality. Male and female artists litter their rhymes with misogynistic and violent imagery. However, men also express a full range of emotions, from arrogance to vulnerability, conveying a more complex manhood than previously acknowledged. Women emphatically state their desires while embracing a more feminist approach.

Breaking with prior understandings of soul as a vague masculinist political formation tethered to the Black Power movement, Lordi offers a vision of soul that foregrounds the intricacies of musical craft, the complex personal and social meanings of the music, the dynamic movement of soul across time, and the leading role played by black women in this musical-intellectual tradition.

Anecdotes and firsthand accounts, from the 1700s through the 1850s, show how profoundly slaves shaped the American soundscape. From the sounds of a plantation at dawn to the baying of hounds on the trail of runaways to whistling in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1850s, this book is the closest we' ll ever get to re-creating the sounds of slavery. The book comes with an 18-track CD compilation-- with most of the tracks recorded in the 1930s.

"This pictorial history of African American dance traces its roots back to slavery and lists its characteristics. The photographs offer compelling glimpses into the world of slavery, minstrel show, the honky-tonk, the vaudeville stage, dance halls, nightclubs, movies, and more. Most images are culled from hundreds of rare items in the author's collection of black dance memorabilia."

Roberts argues that the historical, cultural and social experiences of marginalized black and brown bodies materialize in and through Hip Hop dance from the streets of the South Bronx and other urban centers to contemporary worldwide expressions. An Afro-diasporic dance form, Hip Hop dance, she argues, is a provocative and sentient process of resisting oppressive manifestations of race and power.

A Film produced from dance productions of the Black American Dance Festival, April 21-24, 1983, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The film includes major contemporary Black dancers and dance companies in the context of a historical survey which indicates the African and Caribbean heritage upon which Black American dance is based.

The first scholarly anthology on African American dance, Dancing Many Drums reevaluates "black" & "African American" as both racial & dance categories. Abundantly illustrated, the volume includes images of a wide variety of dance forms & performers, from ring shouts, vaudeville, & social dances to professional dance companies & Hollywood movie dancing.

George-Graves presents a history of Urban Bush Women since their founding in 1984. She analyzes their complex work, drawing on interviews with current and former dancers and her own observation of and participation in Urban Bush Women rehearsals. This illustrated book captures the grace and power of the dancers in motion and provides an absorbing look at an innovative company that continues to raise the bar for socially conscious dance.