Afro-Diasporic Culture In Joseph Roach's 'Cities Of The Dead'

August Wilson’s plays relate directly to his African heritage, and were and are a part of his success. His expression of the struggles of the blacks

August Wilson was one of the most accomplished African-American playwrights of this century and was one of only seven to win the Pulitzer Prize. He dedicated his entire career to documenting the 20th century struggles of African-Americans in a cycle of ten plays. He completed the cycle shortly before he died on October 2, 2005. His plays were themed around The Middle Passage, The Underground Railroad, The Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, The Northern Migration, Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Oppression , Civil Rights Movement and Black Nationalism, Developing Personal “Songs” and Cultural Mythologies, Sports Discrimination, and City Politics Wilson’s main goal in life was to make sure a realistic view of how the African-Americans was put on stage for everyone to see the struggles of African-American. He bridged the gap in tradition, modified tradition when experience demanded it, and he translated experience into meaning and meaning into belief. He deserves a lot of praise, but did he also backtrack on his original thoughts? In this paper, I will give a short biography of him, discuss his plays, and discuss how his plays and his paper/film The Ground on Which I Stand contradicts each other.

America has had a longstanding problematic relationship with black people. Not only, have they been subjected to the atrocious lifestyle of slavery, they have been the subject of constant ridicule and injustice. The history of minstrel shows and minstrelsy reflect one of the many ways black people have been exploited. Though the practice or tradition of minstrelsy no longer exists in the way it did in the past, its long term effects are still present in today’s music culture and society.

The theme of power is also established through the examination of the relationship between black artists and the world of mass communications in the early twentieth century. This relationship mirrors the position of black people in the society at large—a society dominated by white racism. Wilson establishes this early in the play through a series of musical imagery and idiomatic language, in which he uses both the style

Symbolism and reality have a strange way of relating due to the fact that anyone can take a symbol and make it mean something completely different from its intended meaning. Moreover, the individual that does so has the right to do so because the symbol resonated with them in a certain way the same way symbols resonate with others in their own way. However, what does the individual do when the symbol presented only has one way of being interpreted? Furthermore, what does the individual do when the symbol cannot be taken off into a dream-like land and the interpreter is forced to realize that its meaning is right in their own home? Ta-Nehisi Coates discussion of how the “black body” of the African American is mistreated provides a better understanding of Amiri Baraka’s The Dutchman and the different uses of symbolism.

During the dawn of the new century, a young black woman taps on her microphone, surrounded by everything from the romantic twang of a harp to the rustic beat of the timpani drum. Her hair twisted in locks, envelopes her face – the studio lights streaming on her face make her look like a lion, courageous and proud of herself, her ideals and her vision. This isn’t even the beginning.

This article talks about a rap group called Little Brother, who in 2006 released an album called “The Minstrel Show.” It is discussed that the minstrelsy within hip-hop and rap is not random, but something that is there to maintain white supremacy by America's media elite. Using minstrels as a reference, Little Brother than points out the historical continuation of how blacks are mistreated throughout periods of time in America. He than concludes that rap shares many historical similarities with minstrel performance and should be separated from music

When a genre of music becomes mainstream, its creation is no longer dictated by art and the need to create art, but instead, for commercial gain. Thus the music loses its originality, it loses its authenticity, and worst of all it loses its culture, without culture, the music can be likened to a BLT sandwich without bacon, for no matter how skillfully prepared, it lacks an integral part of itself, and cannot possibly be whole. This is exactly the phenomenon I observed when I attended the Miami University Jazz Ensemble’s concert for my ethnographic research. This phenomenon is evident in the way the musicians interacted with one another and their audience, the demographic of the audience, and the manner in which the show flowed. Before attending the concert, I anticipated a powerful performance guided by a deep culture cultivated over the ages by the likes of Cab Calloway and Dizzy Gillespie; I expected the culture to coat each note and the history to pierce each chord. But instead, I was met with a vapid, yet skillful performance of well-known Jazz pieces from different styles of Jazz ranging from classic blues to Latin jazz.

Yee Yang ynjyang@ucdavis.edu CeeLo’s tune, “Fuck You,” presents a sonnet complexion combined with a soul dance beat. Although not bluntly visible, the song holds meaning towards how black cultures are read differently in American culture. “Fuck You” is representative of the visual event, struggles, and discourses of CeeLo’s music career. The freedom of expressing profanity for CeeLo celebrates not only his interpretation of soul, but of his multi-queer body.

Consisting of ten plays which are each dedicated to a different decade, August Wilson’s The Pittsburgh Cycle sketches the African-American experience in the 20th century. As the second and fourth plays of the series, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson both explore African-American identity and inheritance in the first half of the 20th century. Wilson’s two plays embody a feature different from the naturalistic or realistic plays of the Bourgeois Theatre. As is said in the American essayist Frank Rich’s comment on Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, “Mr. Wilson 's play is a mixture of the well-made naturalistic boardinghouse drama and the mystical, non-Western theater of ritual and metaphor” (Rich 2812), Wilson’s two plays blend the realistic life with magic to evoke resonance with African-American experience and history. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer who is thought to be a predecessor of magical realists, Wilson once explained his influence: “From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc” (Hussein 30). Borges’s influence is shown in Wilson’s use of magic to reflect the racial and even universal experience in the individual lives in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson. The magical elements of the mystic ritual, spiritual songs, haunted piano and ghosts combine with

In the context of the documentary ‘Paris is Burning’, hooks argues that not only is the drag portrayed fundamentally misogynistic but it is also personified by whiteness, that the film reveals “black men[’s] obsession with an

A fascination with the Black female body dates back to the early 19th century. During this time, a South African woman, Saartjie Baartman, was exhibited in France and England as a show attraction for her ‘unusual’ body shape which featured wide hips and large buttocks (Spies). The historical allure of Black female bodies continues in present day. Representations that are frequently present in the media have revealed an assumed sexualized appeal of the Black woman. Hooks explores this phenomenon in her book “Black Looks: Race and Representation”. She describes a desire for the “Other’ as a tactic which coincides with exploitation. “The hope is that desires for the ‘primitive’ or fantasies about the Other can be continually exploited, and that such exploitation will occur in a manner that reinscribes and maintains that status quo” (Hooks 22). This fascination reveals itself in the analyzed music videos. While several frames of the “We Can’t Stop” video feature a diverse crowd of party-goers, other frames feature three Black females whose bottoms Cyrus slaps while singing the lyrics “to my home girls here with the big butt, shaking it like we at a strip club.” Taylor Swift crawls under the legs of dancers and stares up at the bottom of a Black female dancer almost as if to be in awe during the video for “Shake it off”.

Accord to me, the originality of artistry who is inborn for talent by empowering to every person’s background will have some influence on their styles of presenting their talent. However, the. before we can even think about the character of Uncle Tom in this novel, but we should discuss what “Uncle Tom” has come to mean as a catchword in American Today. Because calling a black American an “Uncle Tom” is a serious insult, usually meaning that the person is submissive to the whites or has betrayed other blacks. It sometimes means that the person is complicit in his own suffering and subjection. It also become a general term for anyone who is submissive toward their enemies and a defector to their friends. For example: Kayne West, the rapper

What Connerton calls incorporating practices and Taylor calls the repertoire affirms the need to prioritize unstable pieces of evidence, traditionally ignored or skeptically criticized in histories of Williams which favor normative assessment. Taylor describes that “the rift, I submit does not lie between the written and spoken word, but between the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).” For this study, Taylor’s point is well-taken as a means of dismembering critical hegemony. Taylor’s research highlights the archive as a site of several myths concerning how authoritarian

Pop-culture’s use of “cultural appropriation” is a topic that sparks worldwide conversation and controversy. Though modern societies are based on interpretations of ancient schools of thought, reinterpretation becomes problematized when ancient cultures or traditions fail to be adequately represented throughout. Western pop-culture often amalgamates minority cultures into an ‘other,’ failing to dignify, properly exemplify, or even acknowledge the respective cultures. The West does so to perpetuate popular demand and reinforce its prevailing ideologies through lenses which poorly reference “fascinating” cultures. This essay will argue that cultural appropriation is problematic when majority cultures reinterpret the minority experience, and further, that minority reinterpretations are positive and progressive signals of post-colonial development. In uncovering the ways in which cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation differ, this essay will then explore the significance of this topic, how minority adaptations, such as Tegonni: An African Antigone, add to the existing cultural significance of Classics, while contemporary pop-culture examples of majority adaptations serve to degrade and impede the development of minority cultures. This essay will do so while acknowledging the tumultuous nature of its post-colonial context. Cultural appropriation is only progressive and necessary when it appreciates and acknowledges the development of the history and culture it is