Title: Black magic: religion and the African American conjuring tradition
Author: Chireau, Yvonne Patricia 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Religion | African Studies | American Studies | United States History | African American Studies
Publisher's Description: Black Magic looks at the origins, meaning, and uses of Conjure - the African American tradition of healing and harming that evolved from African, European, and American elements - from the slavery period to well into the twentieth century. Illuminating a world that is dimly understood by both scholars and the general public, Yvonne P. Chireau describes Conjure and other related traditions, such as Hoodoo and Rootworking, in a beautifully written, richly detailed history that presents the voices and experiences of African Americans and shows how magic has informed their culture. Focusing on the relationship between Conjure and Christianity, Chireau shows how these seemingly contradictory traditions have worked together in a complex and complementary fashion to provide spiritual empowerment for African Americans, both slave and free, living in white America. As she explores the role of Conjure for African Americans and looks at the transformations of Conjure over time, Chireau also rewrites the dichotomy between magic and religion. With its groundbreaking analysis of an often misunderstood tradition, this book adds an important perspective to our understanding of the myriad dimensions of human spirituality.   [brief]
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Title: To place our deeds: the African American community in Richmond, California, 1910-1963
Author: Moore, Shirley Ann Wilson 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | California and the West | African American Studies
Publisher's Description: To Place Our Deeds traces the development of the African American community in Richmond, California, a city on the San Francisco Bay. This readable, extremely well-researched social history, based on numerous oral histories, newspapers, and archival collections, is the first to examine the historical development of one black working-class community over a fifty-year period.Offering a gritty and engaging view of daily life in Richmond, Shirley Ann Wilson Moore examines the process and effect of migration, the rise of a black urban industrial workforce, and the dynamics of community development. She describes the culture that migrants brought with them - including music, food, religion, and sports - and shows how these traditions were adapted to new circumstances. Working-class African Americans in Richmond used their cultural venues - especially the city's legendary blues clubs - as staging grounds from which to challenge the racial status quo, with a steadfast determination not to be "Jim Crowed" in the Golden State.As this important work shows, working-class African Americans often stood at the forefront of the struggle for equality and were linked to larger political, social, and cultural currents that transformed the nation in the postwar period.   [brief]
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Title: The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association papers
Author: Hill, Robert A 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | African Studies | African History | Politics
Publisher's Description: "Africa for the Africans" was the name given in Africa to the extraordinary black social protest movement led by Jamaican Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940). Volumes I-VII of the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers chronicled the Garvey movement that flourished in the United States during the 1920s. Now, the long-awaited African volumes of this edition (Volumes VIII and IX and a forthcoming Volume X) demonstrate clearly the central role Africans played in the development of the Garvey phenomenon.The African volumes provide the first authoritative account of how Africans transformed Garveyism from an external stimulus into an African social movement. They also represent the most extensive collection of documents ever gathered on the early African nationalism of the inter-war period. Here is a detailed chronicle of the spread of Garvey's call for African redemption throughout Africa and the repressive colonial responses it engendered. Volume VIII begins in 1917 with the little-known story of the Pan-African commercial schemes that preceded Garveyism and charts the early African reactions to the UNIA. Volume IX continues the story, documenting the establishment of UNIA chapters throughout Africa and presenting new evidence linking Garveyism and nascent Namibian nationalism.   [brief]
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Title: California soul: music of African Americans in the West
Author: DjeDje, Jacqueline Cogdell
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Music | African American Studies | American Studies | California and the West | Californian and Western History | United States History | Contemporary Music | Jazz
Publisher's Description: This new series, co-sponsored with The Center for Black Music Research of Columbia College, seeks to increase our understanding of black music genres and their importance to the cultures of the Atlantic world, including their influence on African musical styles. Books in the series will examine the wide-ranging music of the African diaspora - including the folk-derived musical styles of the Americas as well as European-influenced concert hall music of the entire black Atlantic world - by analyzing issues critical to our interpretation of the music itself and exploring the relationships between music and the other black expressive arts.Focusing on blues, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, and soul music, California Soul is one of the first books to explore the rich musical heritage of African Americans in California. The contributors describe in detail the individual artists, locales, groups, musical styles, and regional qualities, and the result is an important book that lays the groundwork for a whole new field of study. The essays draw from oral histories, music recordings, newspaper articles and advertisements, as well as population statistics to provide insightful discussions of topics like the California urban milieu's influence on gospel music, the development of the West Coast blues style, and the significance of Los Angeles's Central Avenue in the early days of jazz. Other essays offer perspectives on how individual musicians have been shaped by their African American heritage, and on the role of the record industry and radio in the making of music. In addition to the diverse range of essays, the book includes the most comprehensive bibliography now available on African American music and culture in California.   [brief]
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Title: What is this thing called jazz?: African American musicians as artists, critics, and activists
Author: Porter, Eric (Eric C.)
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Music | History | United States History | American Studies | African American Studies | American Music | Contemporary Music | Jazz
Publisher's Description: Despite the plethora of writing about jazz, little attention has been paid to what musicians themselves wrote and said about their practice. An implicit division of labor has emerged where, for the most part, black artists invent and play music while white writers provide the commentary. Eric Porter overturns this tendency in his creative intellectual history of African American musicians. He foregrounds the often-ignored ideas of these artists, analyzing them in the context of meanings circulating around jazz, as well as in relationship to broader currents in African American thought. Porter examines several crucial moments in the history of jazz: the formative years of the 1920s and 1930s; the emergence of bebop; the political and experimental projects of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; and the debates surrounding Jazz at Lincoln Center under the direction of Wynton Marsalis. Louis Armstrong, Anthony Braxton, Marion Brown, Duke Ellington, W.C. Handy, Yusef Lateef, Abbey Lincoln, Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, Wadada Leo Smith, Mary Lou Williams, and Reggie Workman also feature prominently in this book. The wealth of information Porter uncovers shows how these musicians have expressed themselves in print; actively shaped the institutional structures through which the music is created, distributed, and consumed, and how they aligned themselves with other artists and activists, and how they were influenced by forces of class and gender. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? challenges interpretive orthodoxies by showing how much black jazz musicians have struggled against both the racism of the dominant culture and the prescriptive definitions of racial authenticity propagated by the music's supporters, both white and black.   [brief]
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Title: Dateline Soweto: travels with black South African reporters 
Author: Finnegan, William
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Media Studies | African Studies | Social Problems | Politics | African History
Publisher's Description: Dateline Soweto documents the working lives of black South African reporters caught between the mistrust of militant blacks, police harrassment, and white editors who - fearing government disapproval - may not print the stories these reporters risk their lives to get. William Finnegan revisited seve . . . [more]
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Title: Engaged surrender: African American women and Islam
Author: Rouse, Carolyn Moxley 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Anthropology | American Studies | Religion | African American Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Commonly portrayed in the media as holding women in strict subordination and deference to men, Islam is nonetheless attracting numerous converts among African American women. Are these women "reproducing their oppression," as it might seem? Or does their adherence to the religion suggest unsuspected subtleties and complexities in the relation of women, especially black women, to Islam? Carolyn Rouse sought answers to these questions among the women of Sunni Muslim mosques in Los Angeles. Her richly textured study provides rare insight into the meaning of Islam for African American women; in particular, Rouse shows how the teachings of Islam give these women a sense of power and control over interpretations of gender, family, authority, and obligations. In Engaged Surrender, Islam becomes a unique prism for clarifying the role of faith in contemporary black women's experience. Through these women's stories, Rouse reveals how commitment to Islam refracts complex processes - urbanization, political and social radicalization, and deindustrialization - that shape black lives generally, and black women's lives in particular. Rather than focusing on traditional (and deeply male) ideas of autonomy and supremacy, the book - and the community of women it depicts - emphasizes more holistic notions of collective obligation, personal humility, and commitment to overarching codes of conduct and belief. A much-needed corrective to media portraits of Islam and the misconceptions they engender, this engaged and engaging work offers an intimate, in-depth look into the vexed and interlocking issues of Islam, gender, and race.   [brief]
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Title: Human rights and reform: changing the face of North African politics 
Author: Waltz, Susan Eileen
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Politics | History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | African History | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Independence from colonial rule did not usher in the halcyon days many North Africans had hoped for, as the new governments in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria soon came to rely on repression to reinforce and maintain power. In response to widespread human rights abuses, individuals across the Maghrib began to form groups in the late 1970s to challenge the political practices and structures in the region, and over time these independent human rights organizations became prominent political actors. The activists behind them are neither saints nor revolutionaries, but political reformers intent on changing political patterns that have impeded democratization.This study, the first systematic comparative analysis of North African politics in more than a decade, explores the ability of society, including Islamist forces, to challenge the powers of states. Locating Maghribi polities within their cultural and historical contexts, Waltz traces state-society relations in the contemporary period. Even as Algeria totters at the brink of civil war and security concerns rise across the region, the human rights groups Susan Waltz examines implicitly challenge the authoritarian basis of political governance. Their efforts have not led to the democratic transition many had hoped, but human rights have become a crucial new element of North African political discourse.   [brief]
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Title: Christianity and the rhetoric of empire: the development of Christian discourse
Author: Cameron, Averil
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Classics | Classical Religions | Classical History | History | Christianity | Ancient History | Rhetoric
Publisher's Description: Many reasons can be given for the rise of Christianity in late antiquity and its flourishing in the medieval world. In asking how Christianity succeeded in becoming the dominant ideology in the unpromising circumstances of the Roman Empire, Averil Cameron turns to the development of Christian discourse over the first to sixth centuries A.D., investigating the discourse's essential characteristics, its effects on existing forms of communication, and its eventual preeminence. Scholars of late antiquity and general readers interested in this crucial historical period will be intrigued by her exploration of these influential changes in modes of communication.The emphasis that Christians placed on language - writing, talking, and preaching - made possible the formation of a powerful and indeed a totalizing discourse, argues the author. Christian discourse was sufficiently flexible to be used as a public and political instrument, yet at the same time to be used to express private feelings and emotion. Embracing the two opposing poles of logic and mystery, it contributed powerfully to the gradual acceptance of Christianity and the faith's transformation from the enthusiasm of a small sect to an institutionalized world religion.   [brief]
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Title: Culture and the senses: bodily ways of knowing in an African community
Author: Geurts, Kathryn Linn 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Cultural Anthropology | African Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: Adding her stimulating and finely framed ethnography to recent work in the anthropology of the senses, Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of "intuition," comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. After this nuanced exploration of an Anlo-Ewe theory of inner states and their way of delineating external experience, readers will never again take for granted the "naturalness" of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell.   [brief]
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Title: L.A. city limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the present
Author: Sides, Josh 1972-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | African American Studies | Urban Studies | Californian and Western History | California and the West
Publisher's Description: In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass - embodying both the best and worst of what urban America offered black migrants from the South - is the story told for the first time in this history of modern black Los Angeles. A clear-eyed and compelling look at black struggles for equality in L.A.'s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces from the Great Depression to our day, L.A. City Limits critically refocuses the ongoing debate about the origins of America's racial and urban crisis. Challenging previous analysts' near-exclusive focus on northern "rust-belt" cities devastated by de-industrialization, Josh Sides asserts that the cities to which black southerners migrated profoundly affected how they fared. He shows how L.A.'s diverse racial composition, dispersive geography, and dynamic postwar economy often created opportunities - and limits - quite different from those encountered by blacks in the urban North.   [brief]
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Title: Black African cinema
Author: Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film
Publisher's Description: From the proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the development of black African cinema. He examines the impact of culture and history, and of technology and co-production, on filmmaking throughout Africa.Every aspect of African contact with and contribution to cinematic practices receives attention: British colonial cinema; the thematic and stylistic diversity of the pioneering "francophone" films; the effects of television on the motion picture industry; and patterns of television documentary filmmaking in "anglophone" regions. Ukadike gives special attention to the growth of independent production in Ghana and Nigeria, the unique Yoruba theater-film tradition, and the militant liberationist tendencies of "lusophone" filmmakers. He offers a lucid discussion of oral tradition as a creative matrix and the relationship between cinema and other forms of popular culture. And, by contrasting "new" African films with those based on the traditional paradigm, he explores the trends emerging from the eighties and nineties.Clearly written and accessible to specialist and general reader alike, Black African Cinema 's analysis of key films and issues - the most comprehensive in English - is unique. The book's pan-Africanist vision heralds important new strategies for appraising a cinema that increasingly attracts the attention of film students and Africanists.   [brief]
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Title: The spirit of freedom: South African leaders on religion and politics 
Author: Villa-Vicencio, Charles
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Religion | Politics | African Studies
Publisher's Description: This collection of interviews explores the role of religion in the lives of eminent South Africans who led the struggle against apartheid. Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, Desmond Tutu, Nadine Gordimer, and seventeen other political, religious, and cultural leaders share the beliefs and values that informed the moral positions they adopted, often at great cost. From all ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds, these men and women have shaped one of the greatest political transformations of the century.What emerges from the interviews are reflections on all aspects of life in an embattled country. There are stories of the homelands and townships, and tales of imprisonment and exile. Dedicated communists relate their intense youthful devotion to Christianity; Muslim activists discuss the complexity of their relationships with their communities. As the respondents grapple with difficult questions about faith, politics, and authority, they expose a more personal picture: of their daily lives, of their pasts, and of the enormous conflicts that arise in a society that continually strains the moral fiber of its citizens. Taken together, these interviews reveal the many-faceted vision that has fueled South Africa's struggle for democracy.   [brief]
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Title: Beyond the stream: Islam and society in a West African town 
Author: Launay, Robert 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | African Studies | Islam
Publisher's Description: Robert Launay has been observing the changing religious practices of the Dyula, a Muslim community in West Africa, for more than a decade. In Beyond the Stream , he examines the ways in which this religious and ethnic minority group living on the fringes of the Muslim world maintains its ties to the universal Islamic tradition while adapting everyday religious practices to the local context. Through the lens of this specific community, Launay elucidates the interaction between fundamental Islamic beliefs, anchored historically in the Arab Middle East, and the continually changing ways that Islam is lived, wherever it is professed.By focusing on the tension between "particular" and "universal" - on how a given religious morality must function simultaneously within a tightly knit community and a larger global arena - Beyond the Stream addresses issues of broad concern to the anthropology of Islam and to world religions generally.   [brief]
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Title: Christian figural reading and the fashioning of identity
Author: Dawson, David 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Religion | Christianity | Judaism | Classical Religions
Publisher's Description: This book makes an illuminating contribution to one of Christianity's central problems: the understanding and interpretation of scripture, and more specifically, the relationship between the Old Testament and the New. John David Dawson analyzes the practice and theory of "figural" reading in the Christian tradition of Biblical interpretation by looking at writings of Jewish and Christian thinkers, both ancient and modern, who have reflected on that form of traditional Christian Biblical interpretation. Dawson argues Christian interpretation of Hebrew scripture originally was, and should be, aimed at not reducing the Jewish meaning or replacing it but rather at building on it or carrying on from it. Dawson closely examines the work of three prominent twentieth-century thinkers who have offered influential variants of figural reading: Biblical scholar Daniel Boyarin, philologist and literary historian Erich Auerbach, and Christian theologianHans Frei. Contrasting the interpretive programs of these modern thinkers to that of Origen of Alexandria, Dawson proposes that Origen exemplifies a kind of Christian reading that can respect Christianity's link to Judaism while also respecting the independent religious identity of Jews. Through a fresh study of Origen's allegorical interpretation, this book challenges the common charge that Christian non-literal reading of scripture necessarily undermines the literal meaning of the text. This highly interdisciplinary work will advance debates about different methods of interpretation and about different types of textual meaning that are relevant for many disciplines, including ancient Christianity, Jewish and Christian thought, literary theory, religious studies, and classical studies.   [brief]
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Title: When we began there were witchmen: an oral history from Mount Kenya 
Author: Fadiman, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Anthropology | African Studies | African History
Publisher's Description: This is the history of the Meru people of Mount Kenya, based on their own traditions, from the earliest times through the colonial period. Many of these tales have been ritually passed down through no fewer than nineteen generations; others were remembered by those personally involved. Jeffrey Fadiman gathered them in interviews with more than 100 of the Meru's oldest men and women.The traditions touch on every era of the Meru past. They include narrations, songs, chants, and riddles. They tell of a mysterious origin, past enslavement, despairing flight, mountain warriorhood, British conquest, and the fight for freedom. The Meru elders spoke most often of urogi, or witchcraft, the incantations, rituals, and potions used to deal with the supernatural aspects of Meru life. As their society evolved, so did their urogi , developing a history of its own as practitioners in every generation sought to cope with the challenges of slavery, migration, war, colonialism, and Christianity.Fadiman has crafted the tales into a compelling narrative, passing on in his turn the stories he was given. This is African history from African perspectives that stretch back over 300 years.   [brief]
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Title: I heard it through the grapevine: rumor in African-American culture
Author: Turner, Patricia 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | Sociology | African American Studies | Anthropology | American Studies | Folklore and Mythology | Popular Culture
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Title: Speaking with vampires: rumor and history in colonial Africa 
Author: White, Luise
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: African Studies | African History | African Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: During the colonial period, Africans told each other terrifying rumors that Africans who worked for white colonists captured unwary residents and took their blood. In colonial Tanganyika, for example, Africans were said to be captured by these agents of colonialism and hung upside down, their throats cut so their blood drained into huge buckets. In Kampala, the police were said to abduct Africans and keep them in pits, where their blood was sucked. Luise White presents and interprets vampire stories from East and Central Africa as a way of understanding the world as the storytellers did. Using gossip and rumor as historical sources in their own right, she assesses the place of such evidence, oral and written, in historical reconstruction. White conducted more than 130 interviews for this book and did research in Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia. In addition to presenting powerful, vivid stories that Africans told to describe colonial power, the book presents an original epistemological inquiry into the nature of historical truth and memory, and into their relationship to the writing of history.   [brief]
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Title: Race music: black cultures from bebop to hip-hop
Author: Ramsey, Guthrie P
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Music | American Music | American Studies | Popular Music | United States History | Ethnomusicology | African American Studies
Publisher's Description: This powerful book covers the vast and various terrain of African American music, from bebop to hip-hop. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., begins with an absorbing account of his own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago, evoking Sunday-morning worship services, family gatherings with food and dancing, and jam sessions at local nightclubs. This lays the foundation for a brilliant discussion of how musical meaning emerges in the private and communal realms of lived experience and how African American music has shaped and reflected identities in the black community. Deeply informed by Ramsey's experience as an accomplished musician, a sophisticated cultural theorist, and an enthusiast brought up in the community he discusses, Race Music explores the global influence and popularity of African American music, its social relevance, and key questions regarding its interpretation and criticism. Beginning with jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel, this book demonstrates that while each genre of music is distinct - possessing its own conventions, performance practices, and formal qualities - each is also grounded in similar techniques and conceptual frameworks identified with African American musical traditions. Ramsey provides vivid glimpses of the careers of Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, Dizzy Gillespie, Cootie Williams, and Mahalia Jackson, among others, to show how the social changes of the 1940s elicited an Afro-modernism that inspired much of the music and culture that followed. Race Music illustrates how, by transcending the boundaries between genres, black communities bridged generational divides and passed down knowledge of musical forms and styles. It also considers how the discourse of soul music contributed to the vibrant social climate of the Black Power Era. Multilayered and masterfully written, Race Music provides a dynamic framework for rethinking the many facets of African American music and the ethnocentric energy that infused its creation.   [brief]
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Title: Black workers remember: an oral history of segregation, unionism, and the freedom struggle
Author: Honey, Michael K
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | United States History | Labor Studies | African American Studies
Publisher's Description: The labor of black workers has been crucial to economic development in the United States. Yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely unknown. Spanning the 1930s to the present, Black Workers Remember tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words. It provides striking firsthand accounts of the experiences of black southerners living under segregation in Memphis, Tennessee. Eloquent and personal, these oral histories comprise a unique primary source and provide a new way of understanding the black labor experience during the industrial era. Together, the stories demonstrate how black workers resisted racial apartheid in American industry and underscore the active role of black working people in history.The individual stories are arranged thematically in chapters on labor organizing, Jim Crow in the workplace, police brutality, white union racism, and civil rights struggles. Taken together, the stories ask us to rethink the conventional understanding of the civil rights movement as one led by young people and preachers in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, we see the freedom struggle as the product of generations of people, including workers who organized unions, resisted Jim Crow at work, and built up their families, churches, and communities. The collection also reveals the devastating impact that a globalizing capitalist economy has had on black communities and the importance of organizing the labor movement as an antidote to poverty.QQ Michael Honey gathered these oral histories for more than fifteen years. He weaves them together here into a rich collection reflecting many tragic dimensions of America's racial history while drawing new attention to the role of workers and poor people in African American and American history.   [brief]
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