{"product_id":"turn-the-world-upside-down-9780231208895","title":"Turn the World Upside Down","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eImani 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTurn the World Upside Down \u003c\/i\u003eprofoundly 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 \u003ci\u003eCultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOriginal and compelling, \u003ci\u003eTurn the World Upside Down\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eInfamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTurn the World Upside Down\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eBeyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThoughtfully written and creatively argued, \u003ci\u003eTurn the World Upside Down \u003c\/i\u003eis both fascinating and timely. Imani Owens innovatively theorizes the idea of folk culture to bring new insights to the field by helping us to\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003erethink 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 \u003ci\u003eLooking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgments\u003cbr\u003ePrologue\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePart I. Writing the Crossroads\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1. Georgia Dusk and Panama Gold: Jean Toomer, Eric Walrond, and the “Death” of Folk Culture\u003cbr\u003e2. Compelling Insinuation and the Uses of Ethnography: Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Price-Mars, and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePart II. Performing the Archive\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e3. “Cuban Evening”: The Poetics of Translation in the Work of Eusebia Cosme, Nicolás Guillén, and Langston Hughes\u003cbr\u003e4. Reinterpreting Folk Culture at the “End of the World”: Sylvia Wynter’s Dance and Radio Drama\u003cbr\u003eCoda: Toward an Ontological Sovereignty\u003cbr\u003eNotes\u003cbr\u003eBibliography\u003cbr\u003eIndex","brand":"Columbia University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49400375017815,"sku":"9780231208895","price":25.2,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780231208895.jpg?v=1730470534","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/turn-the-world-upside-down-9780231208895","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}