Description
Book SynopsisImani D. Owens recasts Black creators’ relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world.
Trade ReviewTurn the World Upside Down profoundly recreates the literary and cultural history of Black diasporic modernism. Working across national and linguistic borders, the book brings a richly comparative method to texts too often siloed in disciplinary and area studies scholarship, from works by U.S. literary icons like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston to less-studied figures like the Cuban performer Eusebia Cosme. Imani D. Owens’s ‘critical return to folk culture’ will forever change how readers approach the beautiful ‘unruliness’ and asymmetry of Black cultural expression. -- Sonya Posmentier, author of
Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black LiteratureOriginal and compelling,
Turn the World Upside Down invests in and expands Black diaspora studies, displays stunning archival research, and highlights heretofore unseen connections and underread texts next to highly known figures in the field. -- Samantha Pinto, author of
Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of RightsTurn the World Upside Down is a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on early twentieth-century Black folk culture in the Americas. This truly innovative and complex study ranges across linguistic and national boundaries and represents a major contribution to the fields of African diaspora studies, Caribbean studies, and American studies -- Aaron Kamugisha, author of
Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual TraditionThoughtfully written and creatively argued,
Turn the World Upside Down is both fascinating and timely. Imani Owens innovatively theorizes the idea of folk culture to bring new insights to the field by helping us to
rethink our understanding of “folk culture” and its manifold functions in African diasporic cultures. In fact, Owens performs a disruption of her own by bringing together US empire studies and New Southern Studies to offer a multilingual, comparative, transnational analysis that enriches and deepens our readings of African diasporic literatures and cultures. -- Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, author of
Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian FictionTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Prologue
Part I. Writing the Crossroads1. Georgia Dusk and Panama Gold: Jean Toomer, Eric Walrond, and the “Death” of Folk Culture
2. Compelling Insinuation and the Uses of Ethnography: Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Price-Mars, and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti
Part II. Performing the Archive3. “Cuban Evening”: The Poetics of Translation in the Work of Eusebia Cosme, Nicolás Guillén, and Langston Hughes
4. Reinterpreting Folk Culture at the “End of the World”: Sylvia Wynter’s Dance and Radio Drama
Coda: Toward an Ontological Sovereignty
Notes
Bibliography
Index
