[PDF] Song Of The Shank eBook

Author : Jeffery Renard Allen
Publisher : Graywolf Press
Page : 567 pages
File Size : 46,6 MB
Release : 2014-06-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1555970923

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A contemporary American masterpiece about music, race, an unforgettable man, and an unreal America during the Civil War era At the heart of this remarkable novel is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century slave and improbable musical genius who performed under the name Blind Tom. Song of the Shank opens in 1866 as Tom and his guardian, Eliza Bethune, struggle to adjust to their fashionable apartment in the city in the aftermath of riots that had driven them away a few years before. But soon a stranger arrives from the mysterious island of Edgemere—inhabited solely by African settlers and black refugees from the war and riots—who intends to reunite Tom with his now-liberated mother. As the novel ranges from Tom's boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers and militant prophets. In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him.

Author : Emily Ruth Rutter
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 35,42 MB
Release : 2021-11-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1644532468

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Black Celebrity examines representations of postbellum black athletes and artist-entertainers by novelists Caryl Phillips and Jeffery Renard Allen and poets Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, Adrian Matejka, and Tyehimba Jess. Inhabiting the perspectives of boxer Jack Johnson and musicians “Blind Tom” Wiggins and Sissieretta Jones, along with several others, these writers retrain readers’ attention away from athletes’ and entertainers’ overdetermined bodies and toward their complex inner lives. Phillips, Allen, Young, Walker, Matejka, and Jess especially plumb the emotional archive of desire, anxiety, pain, and defiance engendered by the racial hypervisibility and depersonalization that has long characterized black stardom. In the process, these novelists and poets and, in turn, the present book revise understandings of black celebrity history while evincing the through-lines between the postbellum era and our own time.

Author : Barry Shank
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 49,68 MB
Release : 2012-01-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 0819572675

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Music of the bars and clubs of Austin, Texas has long been recognized as defining one of a dozen or more musical "scenes" across the country. In Dissonant Identities, Barry Shank, himself a musician who played and lived in the Texas capital, studies the history of its popular music, its cultural and economic context, and also the broader ramifications of that music as a signifying practice capable of transforming identities. While his focus is primarily on progressive country and rock, Shank also writes about traditional country, blues, rock, disco, ethnic, and folk musics. Using empirical detail and an expansive theoretical framework, he shows how Austin became the site for "a productive contestation between two forces: the fierce desire to remake oneself through musical practice, and the equally powerful struggle to affirm the value of that practice in the complexly structured late-capitalist marketplace."

Author : Jeffery Renard Allen
Publisher : Harvest Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 20,35 MB
Release : 2001
Category : African American families
ISBN : 9780156014151

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A dazzling family saga that brilliantly reflects the reality of the African-American experience in the United States Hatch and Jesus Jones are cousins on their fathers' side and on their mothers' side, and you can't have a family much more bound than that. And family is the most important entity for these young men, even when family seems to be defined by abandonment. Rails Under My Back traces these two men from one form of bondage or freedom to another, from one job to another, as they face down danger and try to come to terms with their family's past. This ambitious novel, which has been hailed by critics nationwide as a rare achievement on the level of fiction by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, is the communal expression of a century of African-American life in America, with its imagery of exodus and exile, departure and destiny. It wields extraordinary literary, religious, and historical power, and announces the triumphant debut of a most powerful and utterly original voice.

Author : Barry Shank
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 28,49 MB
Release : 2014-03-17
Category : Music
ISBN : 082237675X

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In The Political Force of Musical Beauty, Barry Shank shows how musical acts and performances generate their own aesthetic and political force, creating, however fleetingly, a shared sense of the world among otherwise diverse listeners. Rather than focusing on the ways in which music enables the circulation of political messages, he argues that communities grounded in the act and experience of listening can give rise to new political ideas and expression. Analyzing a wide range of "beautiful music" within popular and avant-garde genres—including the Japanese traditions in the music of Takemitsu Toru and Yoko Ono, the drone of the Velvet Underground, and the insistence of hardcore punk and Riot grrrl post-punk—Shank finds that when it fulfills the promise of combining sonic and lyrical differences into a cohesive whole, musical beauty has the power to reorganize the basis of social relations and produce communities that recognize meaningful difference.

Author : Antonya Nelson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 10,8 MB
Release : 2014-05-20
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1620408635

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Michael Chabon once said, “I scan the tables of contents of magazines, looking for Antonya Nelson's name, hoping that she has decided to bless us again.” And now she has blessed us again, with a bounty of the stories for which she is so beloved. Her stories are clear-eyed, hard-edged, beautifully formed. In the title story, “Funny Once,” a couple held together by bad behavior fall into a lie with their more responsible friends. In “The Village,” a woman visits her father at a nursing home, recalling his equanimity at her teenage misdeeds and gaining a new understanding of his own past indiscretions. In another, when a troubled girl in the neighborhood goes missing, a mother worries increasingly about her teenage son's relationship with a bad-news girlfriend. In the novella “Three Wishes,” siblings muddle through in the aftermath of their elder brother's too-early departure from the world. The landscape of this book is the wide open spaces of Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. Throughout, there is the pervasive desire to drink to forget, to have sex with the wrong people, to hit the road and figure out later where to stop for the night. These characters are aging, regretting actions both taken and not, inhabiting their extended adolescences as best they can. And in Funny Once, their flawed humanity is made beautiful, perfectly observed by one of America's best short story writers.

Author : Nicholas Meriwether
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 299 pages
File Size : 33,14 MB
Release : 2021-04-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1527568520

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All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead Phenomenon gathers thirteen representative essays from a wide array of fields into an interdisciplinary anthology that reveals the depth and extent of this fascinating, variegated cultural phenomenon. Contributors use the techniques of literary criticism, musicology, sociology, philosophy, business theory, and more to explore the meaning and significance of the music of the Grateful Dead, the implications of their artistic and commercial success, and the social dimensions of their following, the Deadheads. For scholars and students of American history and culture, this book makes a convincing case for why the Grateful Dead phenomenon is worthy of academic attention and what that study can offer. By focusing a wide array of critical approaches on a single, discrete subject, All Graceful Instruments provides a refreshing approach to interdisciplinary studies that should appeal to a wide audience.

Author : Ed Bell
Publisher :
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 25,22 MB
Release : 2017-07-28
Category : Popular music
ISBN : 9780998130200

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'The Art of Songwriting' is a comprehensive guide to life, art and making great songs.It's not about chasing a hit song. It's not about theories that are interesting but no use filling the blank page. And most of all -- it's not just about the craft of songwriting.It's about how to create, think and live like a songwriter. It's about being resilient, innovative and passionate about what you make. It's about how artists can change the world -- and why they should.

Author : Jeffery Renard Allen
Publisher : Graywolf Press
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 13,33 MB
Release : 2014-09-16
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1555973477

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The world of Jeffery Renard Allen's stunning short-story collection is a place like no other. A recognizable city, certainly, but one in which a man might sprout wings or copper pennies might fall from the skies onto your head. Yet these are no fairy tales. The hostility, the hurt, is all too human. The protagonists circle each other with steely determination: a grandson taunts his grandmother, determined to expose her secret past; for years, a sister tries to keep a menacing neighbor away from her brother; and in the local police station, an officer and prisoner try to break each other's resolve. In all the stories, Allen calibrates the mounting tension with exquisite timing, in mesmerizing prose that has won him comparisons with Joyce and Faulkner. Holding Pattern is a captivating collection by a prodigiously talented writer.

Author : Josh Kun
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 25,2 MB
Release : 2017-09-12
Category : History
ISBN : 0520294394

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"Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation"--Title page