African American Studies

Founded in 1940 in Harlem, the American Negro Theatre successfully balanced expressions of African American consciousness with efforts to gain white support for the burgeoning civil rights movement. ANT became a valued community institution for Harlem--an important platform for African American artists to speak to racial issues--and a trailblazer in promoting integration and interracial artistic collaboration in the U.S.

Woll starts the development of the musical through the great shows of the twenties to current-day blockbusters like Ain't Misbehavin'. Throughout, stage history has paralleled social history; a subtext of discrimination against black performers and authors underscores Woll's re-creation of the world of Cole and Johnson, Williams and Walker, Florence Mills, and countless others.

Generating a new understanding of the past, this volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre today. Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue that theatre, rooted in African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation.

This history represents a range of styles - from African ritual born out of slavery to European forms, from amateur to professional. It covers nearly two and a half centuries of black performance and production with issues of gender, class, and race ever in attendance.

Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP).a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units," African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of "white" classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this history of the FTP Negro Units, Dosset posits that the cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America.

The recollections of black theatrical artists including Eddie Hunter, Paul Robeson, and Ruby Dee, together with biographical and explanatory commentary, call attention to the contributions of the black performer, writer, director, and producer

This comprehensive reference book provides information on almost thirteen hundred musical stage works written and produced from the 1870s to the 1990s involving contributions by black librettists, lyricists, composers, musicians, producers, or performers or containing thematic materials relevant to the black experience. Organized alphabetically, they include tent and outdoor shows, vaudeville, operas and operettas, comedies, farces, spectacles, revues, cabaret and nightclub shows, children's musicals, skits, one-act musicals, one-person shows, and even a musical without songs.

Black American Cinema demonstrates the wealth of the Black contribution to American film and the complex course that contribution has taken. Contributors: Houston Baker, Jr., Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Jacquie Bobo, Richard Dyer, Jane Gaines, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ron Green, Ed Guerrero, bell hooks, Phyllis Klotman, Ntongele Masilela, Clyde Taylor, and Michele Wallace.

Focusing on a much-neglected area of film experience in America, Black Cinema Treasures furthers the preservation of African-American's cultural and historic heritage, as seen through the eyes of the African-American independent filmmakers of the 1920s through the 1950s.

Focusing on a much-neglected area of film experience in America, Black Cinema Treasures furthers the preservation of America's cultural and historic heritage, especially its African-American heritage as seen through the eyes of the African-American independent filmmakers of the 1920s through the 1950s.

This comprehensive reference book provides information on almost thirteen hundred musical stage works written and produced from the 1870s to the 1990s involving contributions by black librettists, lyricists, composers, musicians, producers, or performers or containing thematic materials relevant to the black experience. Organized alphabetically, they include tent and outdoor shows, vaudeville, operas and operettas, comedies, farces, spectacles, revues, cabaret and nightclub shows, children's musicals, skits, one-act musicals, one-person shows, and even a musical without songs.

In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race.

The rise of cinema as the predominant American entertainment around the turn of the last century coincided with the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to the North. This illustrated book is the first look at the numerous early relationships between African Americans and cinema. It shows that African American urban populations and cinema shaped each other in powerful ways.

Watkins examines two of the most important developments in the recent history of black cinema--the ascendancy of Spike Lee and the proliferation of "ghettocentric films." Representing explores a distinct contradiction in American society: at the same time that black youth have become the targets of a fierce racial backlash, their popular expressive cultures have become highly visible and commercially viable.