Browse

Images of upraised fists, afros, and dashikis have long dominated the collective memory of Black Power and its proponents. The “guerilla” figure—taking the form of the black-leather-clad revolutionary within the Black Panther Party—has become an iconic trope in American popular culture. That politically radical figure, however, has been shaped as much by Asian American cultural discourse as by African American political ideology. From the Asian-African Conference held in April of 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, onward to the present, Afro-Asian political collaboration has been active and influential. This book uses the guerilla figure as a point of departure, and shows how the trope’s rhetoric animates discourses of representation and identity in African American and Asian American literature and culture. In doing so, it examines the notion of “Power” in terms of ethnic political identity, and explores collaborating—and sometimes competing—ethnic interests that have drawn ideas from the concept. The project brings together a range of texts—editorial cartoons, newspaper articles, novels, visual propaganda, and essays—that illustrate the emergence of this subjectivity in Asian American and African American cultural productions during the Power period, roughly 1966 through 1981. After a case study of the cultural politics of academic anthologies and the cooperation between Frank Chin and Ishmael Reed, the book culminates with analyses of this trope in Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Alice Walker’s Meridian, and John Okada’s No No Boy.

To visiting geologists, Black Rock, New Mexico, is a basaltic escarpment and an ideal natural laboratory. To hospital workers, it is a picturesque place to earn a living. To the Zuni, the mesas, arroyos, and the rock itself are a stage on which the passion of their elders is relived. This book explores how a shared sense of place evolves over time and through multiple cultures that claim the landscape. Through stories told over many generations, this landscape has given the Zuni an understanding of how they came to be in this world. More recently, paleogeographers have studied the rocks and landforms to better understand the world as it once was. Archaeologists have conducted research on ancestral Zuni sites in the vicinity of Black Rock to explore the cultural history of the region. In addition, the Anglo-American employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs came to Black Rock to advance the federal Indian policy of assimilation and brought with them their own sense of place. Black Rock has been an educational complex, an agency town, and an Anglo community. Today it is a health care center, commercial zone, and multi-ethnic subdivision. By describing the dramatic changes that took place at Black Rock during the twentieth century, the book weaves a story of how the cultural landscape of this community reflected changes in government policy and how the Zunis themselves, through the policy of Indian self-determination, eventually gave new meanings to this ancient landscape.

Many Southerners enjoy conversations about food, quickly jumping in with likes and dislikes, regional preferences, and food-related stories. The subject of food often crosses lines of race, class, gender, and region, and provides an opportunity for a common discussion point. This book explores the types of identities, allegiances, and bonds that are made possible and are strengthened through Southern foods and foodways. It adds to the growing list examining Southern food, but its focus on the cuisine’s rhetorical nature and the communicative effect that the food can have on Southern culture makes a significant contribution to that important conversation. The book tells the stories of Southern food that speak to the identity of the region, explaining how food helps to build individual identities, and exploring the possibilities of how food opens up dialogue. The authors show how food acts rhetorically, with the kinds of food that we choose to eat and serve sending messages about how we view ourselves and others. Food serves an identity-building function, factoring heavily into the understanding of who we are. The stories surrounding food are so important to Southern culture, they provide a significant and meaningful way to open up dialogue in the region. By sharing and celebrating the stories and actual food of Southern foodways, Southerners are able to focus on similar histories and traditions, despite the division that has plagued and continues to plague the South. Taken together, the book shows how Southern food provides a significant starting point for understanding food’s rhetorical potential.

Global in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, this book explores the expressive forms and performances that come into being when cultures encounter one another. Creolization is presented as a powerful marker of identity in the postcolonial creole societies of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the southwest Indian Ocean region, as well as a universal process that can occur anywhere cultures come into contact. An extraordinary number of cultures from Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, the southern United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Réunion, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Suriname, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone are discussed in these essays. Drawing from the disciplines of folklore, anthropology, ethnomusicology, literary studies, history, and material culture studies, essayists address theoretical dimensions of creolization and present in-depth field studies. Topics include adaptations of the Gombe drum over the course of its migration from Jamaica to West Africa; uses of “ritual piracy” involved in the appropriation of Catholic symbols by Puerto Rican brujos; the subversion of official culture and authority through playful and combative use of “creole talk” in Argentine literature and verbal arts; the mislabeling and trivialization (“toy blindness”) of objects appropriated by African Americans in the American South; the strategic use of creole techniques among storytellers within the islands of the Indian Ocean; and the creolized character of New Orleans and its music. In the introductory essay, the editors address both local and universal dimensions of creolization, and argue for the centrality of its expressive manifestations for creolization scholarship.

Rebuilding in Louisiana and Mississippi after hurricanes Katrina and Rita presented some very thorny issues. Certain cultural projects benefited from immediate attention and funding while others, with equal cases for assistance but with less attractiveness to future tourist dollars, languished. New Orleans and its surroundings contain a diverse mixture of Native Americans, African Americans, Creoles, Cajuns, Isleños with roots in the Canary Islands, and the descendants of Italian, Irish, English, Croatian, and German immigrants, among others. After 2005, much is now different for the people of the Gulf Coast, and much more stands to change as governments, national and international nonprofit organizations, churches, and community groups determine how and even where life will continue. This collection elucidates how this process occurs and seeks to understand the cultures that may be saved through assistance or which may be allowed to fade away through neglect. It examines the ways in which a wide variety of stakeholders — community activists, elected officials, artists, and policy administrators — describe, quantify, and understand the unique assets of the region. Contributors question the process of cultural planning by analyzing the language employed in decision making. They attempt to navigate between rhetoric and the actual experience of ordinary citizens, examining the long-term implications for those who call the Gulf Coast home.

Since its origins in 1967, The Smithsonian Folklife Festival has gained national and international recognition as a model for the research and public presentation of living cultural heritage and the advocacy of cultural democracy. Festival curators play a major role in interpreting Festival principles and shaping its practices. Curatorial Conversations brings together for the first time in one volume the combined expertise of Festival curatorial staff—past and present—in examining the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s cultural heritage representation practices and their critical implications for issues of intangible cultural heritage policy, cultural pluralism, and identity. This volume represents the first concerted project by Festival staff curators to systematically examine institutional principles and philosophical underpinnings and claims as they have evolved over time, and to address broader debates on cultural representation from their own experiences at the Festival.

According to this book, you smell Gilroy, California, before you see it. The book examines the role of food and festivals in creating a place brand or marketable identity. The author scrutinizes how Gilroy successfully transformed a negative association with the pungent garlic bulb into a highly successful tourism and marketing campaign, and explores how local initiatives led to the iconization of the humble product there. The city, a well-established agricultural center and bedroom community south of San Francisco, rapidly built a place-brand identity based on its now-famous moniker, “Garlic Capital of the World.” To understand Gilroy’s success in transforming a local crop into a tourist draw, the book contrasts the development of this now-thriving festival with events surrounding the launch and demise of the PigFest in Coppell, Texas. Indeed, the Garlic Festival is so successful that the event is all that many people know about Gilroy. The author explores the creation and subsequent selling of foodscapes or food-themed place identities. This seemingly ubiquitous practice is readily visible across the country at festivals celebrating edibles such as tomatoes, peaches, spinach, and even cauliflower. Food, the author contends, is an attractive focus for image makers charged with community building and place differentiation. Not only is it good to eat; food can be a palatable and marketable symbol for a town or region.

Beauty pageants are wildly popular in the U.S. Virgin Islands, outnumbering any other single performance event and capturing the attention of the local people from toddlers to seniors. Local beauty contests provide women with opportunities to demonstrate talent, style, the values of black womanhood, and the territory’s social mores. This book is a comprehensive look at the centuries-old tradition of these expressions in the Virgin Islands. It maps the trajectory of pageantry from its colonial precursors at tea meetings, dance dramas, and street festival parades to its current incarnation as the beauty pageant or “queen show.” For the author, pageantry becomes a lens through which to view the region’s understanding of gender, race, sexuality, class, and colonial power. Focusing on the queen show, the author reveals its twin roots in slave celebrations that parodied white colonial behavior and created creole royal rituals and celebrations heavily influenced by Africanist aesthetics. Using the U.S. Virgin Islands as an intriguing case study, she shows how the pageant continues to reflect, reinforce, and challenge Caribbean cultural values concerning femininity. The book examines the journey of the black woman from degraded body to vaunted queen, and how this progression is marked by social unrest, growing middle-class sensibilities, and contemporary sexual and gender politics.

As children wrestle with culture through their games, recess itself has become a battleground for the control of children’s time. Based on dozens of interviews and the observation of over a thousand children in a racially integrated, working-class public school, this book is a reflection of urban childhood at the turn of the millennium. It debunks myths about recess violence and challenges the notion that school yard play is a waste of time. The author videotaped and recorded children of the Mill School in Philadelphia from 1991 to 2004 and asked them to offer comments as they watched themselves at play. These sessions in the book raise questions about adult power and the changing frames of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. The grown-ups’ clear misunderstanding of the complexity of children’s play is contrasted with the richness of the children’s folk traditions. The book is an ethnographic study of lighthearted games, a celebratory presentation of children’s folklore and its conflicts, and a philosophical text concerning the ironies of everyday childhood. Rooted in video micro-ethnography and the traditions of theorists such as Bourdieu, Willis, and Bateson, it is written for a lay audience with extensive academic footnotes. International scholar Dr. Brian Sutton-Smith contributes a foreword, and the children themselves illustrate the text with black and white paintings.

“Yo’ Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux” presents a forty-four year study of South Louisiana African American children’s performance lore, from the last third of the twentieth century to the first ten years of the twenty-first, beginning with the era of integration in New Orleans and ending with the age of computers and the internet. Using a set of simple questions like “What jokes do you tell?” and “Can you do a hand clap for me?” the author recorded the voices of African American children and their friends playing “dozens,” telling jokes, and performing verbally for each other. Over time the media influenced play, as movies, television, music videos, all provided powerful models for African American children and their schoolmates. Kung fu and break dancing became part of the play vocabulary. The music of Michael Jackson entered handclap chants, and his dance moves became schoolyard performances. The chapter “To Infinity and Beyond: Children’s Play in the Electronic Age” presents the children as conservators of traditional schoolyard games, while adding play on YouTube, Facebook, smartphones, Xboxes, video games, and more. In the lifetime of a person, the years three (the earliest years where verbal art is shared) to twelve (about seventh or eighth grade) are those in which children learn, share, and practice what is called “children’s folklore.” Shared child lore is a treasured outlet for artistic expression. Children learn rhyme, rhythm, public speaking, game rules, cultural expectations, and self-assurance through play shared with their peers.