Jump Jim Crow

2003-07-31 Biography & Autobiography

Author : W. T. Lhamon
Release : 2003-07-31
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 628/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Jump Jim Crow by : W. T. Lhamon

Download or read book Jump Jim Crow written by W. T. Lhamon. This book was released on 2003-07-31. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the 1830s, the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage as Jim Crow, and the ragged and charismatic trickster of black folklore entered—and forever transformed—American popular culture. Jump Jim Crow brings together for the first time the plays and songs performed in this guise and reveals how these texts code the complex use and abuse of blackness that has characterized American culture ever since Jim Crow’s first appearance. Along with the prompt scripts of nine plays performed by Rice—never before published as their original audiences saw them—W. T. Lhamon, Jr., provides a reconstruction of their performance history and a provocative analysis of their contemporary meaning. His reading shows us how these plays built a public blackness, but also how they engaged a disaffected white audience, who found in Jim Crow’s sass and wit and madcap dancing an expression of rebellion and resistance against the oppression and confinement suffered by ordinary people of all colors in antebellum America and early Victorian England. Upstaging conventional stories and forms, giving direction and expression to the unruly attitudes of a burgeoning underclass, the plays in this anthology enact a vital force still felt in great fictions, movies, and musics of the Atlantic and in the jumping, speedy styles that join all these forms.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies

2016 Music

Author : Blake Howe
Release : 2016
Genre : Music
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 448/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies by : Blake Howe

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies written by Blake Howe. This book was released on 2016. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disability is a broad, heterogeneous, and porous identity, and that diversity is reflected in the variety of bodily conditions under discussion here, including autism and intellectual disability, deafness, blindness, and mobility impairment often coupled with bodily deformity. Cultural Disability Studies has, from its inception, been oriented toward physical and sensory disabilities, and has generally been less effective in dealing with cognitive and intellectual impairments and with the sorts of emotions and behaviors that in our era are often medicalized as "mental illness." In that context, it is notable that so many of these essays are centrally concerned with madness, that broad and ever-shifting cultural category. There is also in impressive diversity of subject matter including YouTube videos, Ghanaian drumming, Cirque du Soleil, piano competitions, castrati, medieval smoking songs, and popular musicals. Amid this diversity of time, place, style, medium, and topic, the chapters share two core commitments.0First, they are united in their theoretical and methodological connection to Disability Studies, especially its central idea that disability is a social and cultural construction. Disability both shapes and is shaped by culture, including musical culture. Second, these essays individually and collectively make the case that disability is not something at the periphery of culture and music, but something central to our art and to our humanity.

Raising Cain

1998 Music

Author : W. T. Lhamon
Release : 1998
Genre : Music
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 111/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Raising Cain by : W. T. Lhamon

Download or read book Raising Cain written by W. T. Lhamon. This book was released on 1998. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cain made the first blackface turn, blackface minstrels liked to say of the first man forced to wander the world acting out his low place in life. It wasn't the "approved" reading, but then, blackface wasn't the "approved" culture either--yet somehow we're still dancing to its renegade tune. The story of an insubordinate, rebellious, truly popular culture stretching from Jim Crow to hip hop is told for the first time in Raising Cain, a provocative look at how the outcasts of official culture have made their own place in the world. Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to handle, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer, W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating. He shows that early blackface, dating back to the 1830s, put forward an interpretation of blackness as that which endured a commonly felt scorn and often outwitted it. To follow the subsequent turns taken by the many forms of blackface is to pursue the way modern social shifts produce and disperse culture. Raising Cain follows these forms as they prolong and adapt folk performance and popular rites for industrial commerce, then project themselves into the rougher modes of postmodern life through such heirs of blackface as stand-up comedy, rock 'n' roll, talk TV, and hip hop. Formally raising Cain in its myriad variants, blackface appears here as a racial project more radical even than abolitionism. Lhamon's account of its provenance and persistence is a major reinterpretation of American culture.

Jim Crow, American

2009 Biography & Autobiography

Author : W. T. Lhamon
Release : 2009
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 935/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Jim Crow, American by : W. T. Lhamon

Download or read book Jim Crow, American written by W. T. Lhamon. This book was released on 2009. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jim Crow has long represented America's imperfect union. This edition of the earliest Jim Crow plays and songs presents essential performances assembling backtalk, banter, masquerade, and dance into the diagnostic American style. They celebrate blackness in a Republic that failed to unite until Americans agreed to disagree over Jim Crow's meaning.

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