Language, Rhythm, and Sound: Black Popular Cultures into the Twenty-first Century - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822956209 ISBN 13: 9780822956204

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997

Synopsis

Focusing on expressions of popular culture among blacks in Africa, the United States, and the Carribean this collection of multidisciplinary essays takes on subjects long overdue for study. Fifteen essays cover a world of topics, from American girls\u2019 Double Dutch games to protest discourse in Ghana; from Terry McMillan\u2019s Waiting to Exhale to the work of Zora Neale Hurston; from South African workers to Just Another Girl on the IRT; from the history of Rasta to the evolving significance of kente clothl from rap video music to hip-hop to zouk. The contributors work through the prisms of many disciplines, including anthropology, communications, English, ethnomusicology, history, linguistics, literature, philosophy, political economy, psychology, and social work. Their interpretive approaches place the many voices of popular black cultures into a global context. It affirms that black culture everywhere functions to give meaning to people\u2019s lives by constructing identities that resist cultural, capitolist, colonial, and postcolonial domination.

About this title

About the Author

Joseph K. Adjaye is associate professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Diplomacy and Diplomats in Nineteenth-century Asante, Time in the Black Experience.

From the Back Cover

This book focuses on expressions of popular culture among blacks in selected areas of Africa and its diaspora--specifically, the United States and the Caribbean. Proceeding from the dual premise that culture is a complex system of signification as well as a socially constructed product, the contributors to this volume, through their respective disciplinary prisms, seek to penetrate the hidden language of symbols in black popular culture in order to decode, decipher, and 'translate' them, to reveal their multiple meanings, functions, and roles.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822956209
• ISBN 13: 9780822956204
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Adjaye Joseph K., Andrews Adrianne R.