Search results for ""author brent hayes edwards""

In 1941 Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke copyrighted “Epistrophy,” one of the best-known compositions of the bebop era. The song’s title refers to a literary device—the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses—that is echoed in the construction of the melody. Written two decades later, Amiri Baraka’s poem “Epistrophe” alludes slyly to Monk’s tune. Whether it is composers finding formal inspiration in verse or a poet invoking the sound of music, hearing across media is the source of innovation in black art.Epistrophies explores this fertile interface through case studies in jazz literature—both writings informed by music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves. From James Weldon Johnson’s vernacular transcriptions to Sun Ra’s liner note poems, from Henry Threadgill’s arresting song titles to Nathaniel Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou,” there is an unending back-and-forth between music that hovers at the edge of language and writing that strives for the propulsive energy and melodic contours of music.At times this results in art that gravitates into multiple media. In Duke Ellington’s “social significance” suites, or in the striking parallels between Louis Armstrong’s inventiveness as a singer and trumpeter on the one hand and his idiosyncratic creativity as a letter writer and collagist on the other, one encounters an aesthetic that takes up both literature and music as components of a unique—and uniquely African American—sphere of art-making and performance.

Read more less

One of the towering classics of twentieth century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man's compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal--by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic, and morose--as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition to visit sub-Saharan Africa. In 1930, Michel Leiris was an aspiring poet drifting away from the orbit of the Surrealist movement in Paris when the anthropologist Marcel Griaule invited him on an ethnographic journey that traversed the African continent from 1931 to 1933. Leiris, while maintaining the official records of the Mission, also kept a diary where he noted not only a given day's activities and events but also his impressions, his states of mind, his anxieties, his dreams, and even his erotic fantasies. Upon returning to France, rather than compiling a more conventional report or ethnographic study, Leiris decided simply to publish his diary. The result is an extraordinary book: a day-by-day record of one European writer's experiences in an Africa inexorably shaded by his own exotic delusions and expectations, on the one hand, and an unparalleled depiction of the paradoxes and hypocrisies of conducting anthropological field research at the height of the colonial era on the other. First published in English by Seagull Books in 2017, Phantom Africa is an invaluable document. Now available in paperback, this important book bears witness to the full range of social and political forces reshaping the African continent in the period between the World Wars.

Read more less

'The problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color-line.' Originally published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk is a classic study of race, culture, and education at the turn of the twentieth century. With its singular combination of essays, memoir, and fiction, this book vaulted W. E. B. Du Bois to the forefront of American political commentary and civil rights activism. The Souls of Black Folk is an impassioned, at times searing account of the situation of African Americans in the United States. Du Bois makes a forceful case for the access of African Americans to higher education, memorably extols the achievements of black culture (above all the spirituals or 'sorrow songs'), and advances the provocative and influential argument that due to the inequalities and pressures of the 'race problem', African American identity is characterized by 'double consciousness'. This edition includes a valuable appendix of other writing by Du Bois, which sheds light on his attitudes and intentions. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Read more less