Books on Race and the Arts
Advice to a Young Black Actor (and Others) : Conversations with Douglas Turner Ward by
Cofounder and artistic director of the famed Negro Ensemble Company, Douglas Turner Ward is also the country's foremost authority on African Americans in theatre. Playwright and educator Gus Edwards talked with Ward about the opportunities for African American actors. The result is the first book to address the creative and professional challenges of acting from a specifically African American perspective. For the actor of color, these conversations reveal much about important topics, including: ethnic specificity colorblind casting cultural honesty of roles. The talks also provide immediately usable personal advice on establishing and maintaining a professional career on stage, TV, and film, and covering everything from auditions and acting workshops to dealing with and learning fromaudiences and sustaining long runs. Advice to a Young Black Actoris an indispensable book pioneering effort that is long overdue.
Art for Equality: The NAACP's Cultural Campaign for Civil Rights by
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the nation's oldest civil rights organization, having dedicated itself to the fight for racial equality since 1909. While the group helped achieve substantial victories in the courtroom, the struggle for civil rights extended beyond gaining political support. It also required changing social attitudes. The NAACP thus worked to alter existing prejudices through the production of art that countered racist depictions of African Americans, focusing its efforts not only on changing the attitudes of the white middle class but also on encouraging racial pride and a sense of identity in the black community. Art for Equality explores an important and little-studied side of the NAACP's activism in the cultural realm. In openly supporting African American artists, writers, and musicians in their creative endeavors, the organization aimed to change the way the public viewed the black community. By overcoming stereotypes and the belief of the majority that African Americans were physically, intellectually, and morally inferior to whites, the NAACP believed it could begin to defeat racism. Illuminating important protests, from the fight against the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation to the production of anti-lynching art during the Harlem Renaissance, this insightful volume examines the successes and failures of the NAACP's cultural campaign from 1910 to the 1960s. Exploring the roles of gender and class in shaping the association's patronage of the arts, Art for Equality offers an in-depth analysis of the social and cultural climate during a time of radical change in America.
Censoring Racial Ridicule: Irish, Jewish, and African American Struggles Over Race and Representation, 1890-1930 by
A drunken Irish maid slips and falls. A greedy Jewish pawnbroker lures his female employee into prostitution. An African American man leers at a white woman. These and other, similar images appeared widely on stages and screens across America during the early twentieth century. In this provocative study, M. Alison Kibler uncovers, for the first time, powerful and concurrent campaigns by Irish, Jewish and African Americans against racial ridicule in popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Censoring Racial Ridicule explores how Irish, Jewish, and African American groups of the era resisted harmful representations in popular culture by lobbying behind the scenes, boycotting particular acts, and staging theater riots. Kibler demonstrates that these groups' tactics evolved and diverged over time, with some continuing to pursue street protest while others sought redress through new censorship laws. Exploring the relationship between free expression, democracy, and equality in America, Kibler shows that the Irish, Jewish, and African American campaigns against racial ridicule are at the roots of contemporary debates over hate speech.
The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939-1966: Staging Freedom by
This book argues that African American theatre in the twentieth century represented a cultural front of the civil rights movement. Highlighting the frequently ignored decades of the 1940s and 1950s, Burrell documents a radical cohort of theatre artists who became critical players in the fight for civil rights both onstage and offstage, between the Popular Front and the Black Arts Movement periods. The Civil Rights Theatre Movement recovers knowledge of little-known groups like the Negro Playwrights Company and reconsiders Broadway hits including Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, showing how theatre artists staged radically innovative performances that protested Jim Crow and U.S. imperialism amidst a repressive Cold War atmosphere. By conceiving of class and gender as intertwining aspects of racism, this book reveals how civil rights theatre artists challenged audiences to reimagine the fundamental character of American democracy.
Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South by
In the sound of the 1960s and 1970s, nothing symbolized the rift between black and white America better than the seemingly divided genres of country and soul. Yet the music emerged from the same songwriters, musicians, and producers in the recording studios of Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama--what Charles L. Hughes calls the "country-soul triangle." In legendary studios like Stax and FAME, integrated groups of musicians like Booker T. and the MGs and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section produced music that both challenged and reconfirmed racial divisions in the United States. Working with artists from Aretha Franklin to Willie Nelson, these musicians became crucial contributors to the era's popular music and internationally recognized symbols of American racial politics in the turbulent years of civil rights protests, Black Power, and white backlash. Hughes offers a provocative reinterpretation of this key moment in American popular music and challenges the conventional wisdom about the racial politics of southern studios and the music that emerged from them. Drawing on interviews and rarely used archives, Hughes brings to life the daily world of session musicians, producers, and songwriters at the heart of the country and soul scenes. In doing so, he shows how the country-soul triangle gave birth to new ways of thinking about music, race, labor, and the South in this pivotal period.
Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music by
For almost half a century, Amiri Baraka has ranked among the most important commentators on African American music and culture. In this brilliant assemblage of his writings on music, the first such collection in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends autobiography, history, musical analysis, and political commentary to recall the sounds, people, times, and places he's encountered. As in his earlier classics, Blues People and Black Music, Baraka offers essays on the famous--Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane--and on those whose names are known mainly by jazz aficionados--Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and Malachi Thompson. Baraka's literary style, with its deep roots in poetry, makes palpable his love and respect for his jazz musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm show us again how much Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and the others he lovingly considers mattered. He brings home to us how music itself matters, and how musicians carry and extend that knowledge from generation to generation, providing us, their listeners, with a sense of meaning and belonging.
Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum by
In 1927, the Chicago Art Institute presented the first major museum exhibition of art by African Americans. Designed to demonstrate the artists' abilities and to promote racial equality, the exhibition also revealed the art world's anxieties about the participation of African Americans in the exclusive venue of art museums--places where blacks had historically been barred from visiting let alone exhibiting. Since then, America's major art museums have served as crucial locations for African Americans to protest against their exclusion and attest to their contributions in the visual arts. In Exhibiting Blackness, art historian Bridget R. Cooks analyzes the curatorial strategies, challenges, and critical receptions of the most significant museum exhibitions of African American art. Tracing two dominant methodologies used to exhibit art by African Americans--an ethnographic approach that focuses more on artists than their art, and a recovery narrative aimed at correcting past omissions--Cooks exposes the issues involved in exhibiting cultural difference that continue to challenge art history, historiography, and American museum exhibition practices. By further examining the unequal and often contested relationship between African American artists, curators, and visitors, she provides insight into the complex role of art museums and their accountability to the cultures they represent.
Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches by
"A must-read for all dancers as the invaluable historical references and in-depth coverage of the different jazz forms cannot be found in such detail in any other book on the market today."--Debra McWaters, author of Musical Theatre Training "Artfully weaves history and professional perspectives to reveal the boundaries of the jazz dance world. It invites the reader to develop a more complicated definition of jazz dance for the twenty-first century."--Susan A. Lee, Northwestern University The history of jazz dance is best understood by thinking of it as a tree. The roots of jazz dance are African. Its trunk is vernacular, shaped by European influence, and exemplified by the Charleston and the Lindy Hop. From the vernacular have grown many and varied branches, including tap, Broadway, funk, hip-hop, Afro-Caribbean, Latin, pop, club jazz, popping, B-boying, party dances, and more. Unique in its focus on history rather than technique, Jazz Dance offers the only overview of trends and developments since 1960. Editors Lindsay Guarino and Wendy Oliver have assembled an array of seasoned practitioners and scholars who trace the numerous histories of jazz dance and examine various aspects of the field, including trends, influences, training, race, aesthetics, international appeal, and its relationship to tap, rock, indie, black concert dance, and Latin dance. Featuring discussions of such dancers and choreographers as Bob Fosse and Katherine Dunham, as well as analyses of how the form's vocabulary differs from ballet, this complex and compelling history captures the very essence of jazz dance.
The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education by
The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education is the first edited volume to examine how race operates in and through the arts in education. Until now, no single source has brought together such an expansive and interdisciplinary collection in exploration of the ways in which music, visual art, theater, dance, and popular culture intertwine with racist ideologies and race-making. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, contributing authors bring an international perspective to questions of racism and anti-racist interventions in the arts in education. The book's introduction provides a guiding framework for understanding the arts as white property in schools, museums, and informal education spaces. Each section is organized thematically around historical, discursive, empirical, and personal dimensions of the arts in education. This handbook is essential reading for students, educators, artists, and researchers across the fields of visual and performing arts education, educational foundations, multicultural education, and curriculum and instruction.
Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America by
Staging Race casts a spotlight on the generation of black artists whocame of age between 1890 and World War I in an era of Jim Crowsegregation and heightened racial tensions. As public entertainmentexpanded through vaudeville, minstrel shows and world's fairs, blackperformers, like the stage duo of Bert Williams and George Walker, used the conventions of blackface to appear in front of, and appeal to, white audiences. At the same time, they communicated a leitmotif ofblack cultural humour and political comment to the black audiencessegregated in balcony seats. With ingenuity and innovation, theyenacted racial stereotypes onstage while hoping to unmask the fictionsthat upheld them offstag
Understanding Blackness Through Performance: Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity by
How does the performance of blackness reframe issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Here, the contributors look into representational practices in film, literature, fashion, and theatre and explore how they have fleshed out political struggles, while recognizing that they have sometimes maintained the mechanisms of violence against blacks.
War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art by
War Baby / Love Child examines hybrid Asian American identity through a collection of essays, artworks, and interviews at the intersection of critical mixed race studies and contemporary art. The book pairs artwork and interviews with nineteen emerging, mid-career, and established mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists, including Li-lan and Kip Fulbeck, with scholarly essays exploring such topics as Vietnamese Amerasians, Korean transracial adoptions, and multiethnic Hawai'i. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of "optional identity," this collection brings together first-person perspectives and a wider scholarly context to shed light on changing Asian American cultures. Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch'v=kJp0MDtKqyY&list=UUge4MONgLFncQ1w1C_BnHcw&index=2&feature=plcp
Art Exhibitions (Books)
Art of Jazz by
This catalogue documents the exhibition Art of Jazz, a collaborative installation at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art with one section ("Form") installed at the Harvard Art Museum. The book explores the intersection of the visual arts and jazz music, and presents a visual feast of full color plates of artworks, preceded by a series of essays. "Form," curated by Suzanne Preston Blier and David Bindman in the teaching gallery of the Harvard Art Museum, ushers in a dialogue between visual representation and jazz music, showcasing artists' responses to jazz. "Performance," also curated by Blier and Bindman, guides us through a rich collection of books, album covers, photographs, and other ephemera installed at the Cooper Gallery. "Notes," curated by Cooper Gallery director Vera Ingrid Grant, fills five of the gallery's curatorial spaces with contemporary art that illustrates how late twentieth- and early twenty-first century artists hear, view, and engage with jazz. Visual artists represented in "Form" include Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Romare Bearden, and Stuart Davis. "Performance" includes art by Hugh Bell, Carl Van Vechten, and Romare Bearden; additional album cover art by Joseph Albers, Ben Shahn, Andy Warhol, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers; and posters and photographs of Josephine Baker and Lena Horne. "Notes" includes art by Cullen Washington, Norman Lewis, Walter Davis, Lina Viktor, Petite Noir, Ming Smith, Richard Yarde, Christopher Myers, Whitfield Lovell, and Jason Moran.
Beyond Mammy, Jezebel and Sapphire: Reclaiming Images of Black Women by
Engaging a wide range of experiences, techniques and materials, the nine artists featured in this volume challenge the images of black women that continue to pervade our culture and influence perceptions: stereotypes such as the suffering mama, the angry black woman and the temptress. Brought together in this publication, works by Romare Bearden, Mildred Howard, Wangechi Mutu, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, Robert Colescott, Ellen Gallagher, Alison Saar and Mickalene Thomas disrupt expectations and replace simplistic narratives with nuanced, sophisticated meditations on contemporary identity.
Gee's Bend by
In 2002, Gee's Bend burst into international prominence through the success of Tinwood's Quilts of Gee's Bend exhibition and book, which revealed an important and previously invisible art tradition from the African American South. Critics and popular audiences alike marveled at these quilts that combined the best of contemporary design with a deeply rooted ethnic heritage and compelling human stories about the women.Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt is a major book and museum exhibition that will premiere at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), in June 2006 before traveling to seven American museums through 2008. The book's 330 color illustrations and insightful text bring home the exciting experience to readers while displaying all the cultural heritage and craftsmanship that have gone into these remarkable quilts.
Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits by
Bomber Command of the RAF fought one of the longest, most grueling and thankless campaigns of the Second World War. More than 55,000 men and women were killed serving with the Command and the bombers inflicted severe and ultimately crippling damage to the German war effort. In this powerful book Rupert Matthews, the son of a Bomber Command veteran, takes a new look at the exploits of the RAF's strike force during the Second World War. By looking at the conflict from the viewpoint of those serving in Bomber Command, he reveals the why and the how of the Bomber Command campaigns. The abilities of the aircraft and aircrew are outlined, and the limits this put on operations explained. This book will help the reader understand the conditions under which the men of Bomber Command fought, lived andtragicallyso often died.
Freedom Now!: Forgotten Photographs of the Civil Rights Struggle by
Photographers shot millions of pictures of the black civil rights struggle between the close of World War II and the early 1970s, yet most Americans today can recall just a handful of images that look remarkably similar. In the popular imagination, the civil rights movement is remembered in dramatic photographs of protestors attacked with police dogs and fire hoses, firebombs and shotguns, tear gas and billy clubs. The most famous images of the era show black activists victimized by violent Southern whites. But there are other stories to be told. Blacks changed America through their action, not their suffering. In this groundbreaking catalogue, Martin Berger presents a collection of forgotten photographs that illustrate the action, heroism, and strength of black activists in driving social and legislative change. Freedom Now! highlights the power wielded by black men, women, and children in courthouses, community centers, department stores, political conventions, schools, and streets. Freedom Now! reveals that we have inherited a photographic canon--and a picture of history--shaped by whites' comfort with unthreatening images of victimized blacks. And it illustrates how and why particular people, events, and issues have been edited out of the photographic story we tell about our past. By considering the different values promoted in the forgotten photographs, readers will gain an understanding of African Americans' role in rewriting U.S. history and the high stakes involved in selecting images with which to narrate our collective past.
Freedom's March by
Marking the forty-fifth anniversary of the desegregation of Savannah, this book celebrates the civil rights photographs of Frederick C. Baldwin. First exhibited at the Telfair in 1983 under the title, " . . . We Ain't What We Used to Be": Photographs by Frederick C. Baldwin, these historically and aesthetically important images have recently been exhibited again, accompanied by an enhanced and expanded catalogue. Baldwin's images chronicle crucial events in the civil rights movement from voter registration drives to meetings in the longshoreman's hall to public marches and demonstrations, culminating in a visit to Savannah by Martin Luther King Jr. Baldwin depicted the local Ballot Bus; the exhaustive efforts to convince potential voters to register and the resulting long lines of African Americans at the courthouse; protest marches and prayer meetings; and finally, the transcendent moment of King's visit to Savannah. Today, Baldwin's photographs serve as potent reminders of the struggle for equality in Savannah and as evidence of the powerful role of photography in documenting and validating that struggle. The book also contains numerous interviews with and comments of Savannahians who were active in the events of the period.
Playscripts
Databases:
- Black Drama (Second Edition) This link opens in a new window Black Drama contains the full text of plays written by more numerous playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print.
- North American Indian Drama, 2nd Edition This link opens in a new window This edition of North American Indian Drama contains many previously unpublished works and represents groups such as Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Lenape, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock, Hawaiian/Samoan, and others.
Individual Plays:
- A Raisin in the Sun; & The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window by Drama / 7m, 3f, 1 boy / Int. This groundbreaking play starred Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeill, Ruby Dee and Diana Sands in the Broadway production which opened in 1959. Set on Chicago's South Side, the plot revolves around the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of the Younger family: son Walter Lee, his wife Ruth, his sister Beneatha, his son Travis and matriarch Lena, called Mama. When her deceased husband's insurance money comes through, Mama dreams of moving to a new home and a better neighborhood in Chicago. Walter Lee, a chauffeur, has other plans, however: buying a liquor store and being his own man. Beneatha dreams of medical school. The tensions and prejudice they face form this seminal American drama. Sacrifice, trust and love among the Younger family and their heroic struggle to retain dignity in a harsh and changing world is a searing and timeless document of hope and inspiration. This Thirtieth Anniversary edition was revised by the late author's husband and executor, Robert Nemiroff in 1989. Winner of the NY Drama Critic's Award as Best Play of the Year "Pivotal play in the history of the American Black theatre." - Newsweek "A milestone in the American Theatre." - Ebony
- The Collected Works of Langston Hughes by Volume 1 includes the complete texts of four books of verse by Hughes, including his first book, The Weary Blues (1926), and his second, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), as well as other poems published by him during and after the Harlem Renaissance. The Weary Blues announced the arrival of a rare voice in American poetry. A literary descendant of Walt Whitman ("I, too, sing America," Hughes wrote), he chanted the joys and sorrows of black America in unprecedented language. A gifted lyricist, he offered rhythms and cadences that epitomized the particularities of African American creativity, especially jazz and the blues. His second volume, steeped in the blues and controversial because of its frankness, confirmed Hughes as a poet of uncompromising integrity. Then in the 1930s came Dear Lovely Death (1931) and the radical A New Song (1938). Poems such as "Good Morning Revolution" and "Let America Be America Again" made his pen one of the most forceful in America during the Great Depression.
- Sleep Deprivation Chamber by The newest play--and first collaboration--by renowned playwright Adrienne Kennedy.
- The First Breeze of Summer by p>Drama Characters: 8 male, 6 female Platform with area staging. This striking story of a middle class Black family in a small Northeastern city is told on two levels: events that transpire on one hot June weekend and flashbacks to the memories of the visiting grandmother as a young woman. She recalls the three men, two black and one white, who are the fathers of her three children. A resourceful woman, she feels some regrets, no shame and feels she has had a useful life. Lou
- Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks continues her examination of black people in history and stage through the life of the so-called "Hottentot Venus," an African woman displayed semi-nude throughout Europe due to her extraordinary physiognomy; in particular, her enormous buttocks. She was befriended, bought and bedded by a doctor who advanced his scientific career through his anatomical measurements of her after her premature death.
- For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf by From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange's words reveal what it means to be of color and female in the 20th century. First published in 1975 when it was praised by The New Yorker for "encompass(ing)...every feeling and experience a woman has ever had", for colored girls will be read and performed for generations to come. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.
- Jitney by Urban renewal threatens the dingy office of Becker's gypsy cab company, just as his estranged son returns.
- The Mountaintop by THE STORY: A gripping reimagination of events the night before the assassination of the civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On April 3, 1968, after delivering one of his most memorable speeches, an exhausted Dr. King retires to his room
Streaming Recordings and Performances
- Naxos Music Library This link opens in a new window Comprehensive collection of classical music available for streaming online; also includes selections from historical recordings, jazz, world, folk, and Chinese music. Contains the entire Naxos, Marco Polo, and Da Capo catalogs as well as recordings from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, BIS (Sweden), and Analekta. Updated monthly.
- Naxos Music Library Jazz This link opens in a new window Naxos Music Library Jazz features a wide range of jazz music, from jazz legends to contemporary jazz. Recordings are from various artists and labels, including Blue Note Records, Warner Jazz, EMI, Fantasy, and others. New albums are added weekly.
- Music Online: Classical Music Library This link opens in a new window Classical Music Library not only includes recordings but also program notes, composer biographies, and images cross-referenced to the recordings.
- DRAM (Database of Recorded American Music) This link opens in a new window DRAM (Database of Recorded American Music) provides on-demand streaming access to audio (192kbps Mp4), complete original liner notes and essays from independent record labels and sound archives.
- Digital Theatre Plus This link opens in a new window Digital Theatre Plus showcases British theatre, music, and dance productions from The Old Vic, Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, English National Ballet, and London Symphony Orchestra, along with rehearsal films and interviews.
- OnTheBoards.TV This link opens in a new window OntheBoards.TV delivers full-length, high quality contemporary performance films featuring the works of various artists in dance theater and music from all over the world.
