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Author:

Owens, Imani D., author.

Title:

Turn the world upside down : empire and unruly forms of Black folk culture in the U.S. and Caribbean / Imani D. Owens.

Publisher:

Columbia University Press,

Copyright Date:

2023

Description:

xv, 258 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Subject:

1900-1999
American literature--History and criticism.--History and criticism.
American literature--20th century--History and criticism.
Caribbean literature--History and criticism.--History and criticism.
Caribbean literature--20th century--History and criticism.
African diaspora in literature.
Black people in literature.
Imperialism in literature.
Race in literature.
African diaspora in literature
American literature
American literature--African American authors
Black people in literature
Caribbean literature
Caribbean literature--Black authors
Imperialism in literature
Race in literature
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Literary criticism
Literary criticism.
Critiques littéraires.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-244) and index.

Contents:

Writing the crossroads. Georgia dusk and Panama gold : Jean Toomer, Eric Walrond, and the "death" of folk culture -- Compelling insinuation and the uses of ethnography : Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Price-Mars, and the U.S. occupation of Haiti -- Performing the archive. "Cuban evening" : embodied poetics of translation in the work of Eusebia Cosme, Nicolás Guillén, and Langston Hughes -- Reinterpreting folk culture at "end of the world" : Sylvia Wynter's dance and radio drama -- Coda. Toward an ontological sovereignty.

Summary:

"Black hemispheric writing in the first half of the twentieth century was forged by the intertwined legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers sought to transmit the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to representations of folk culture. Many critics and scholars have perceived these representations as an effort to reclaim an authentic folk heritage as the foundation for national literary movements. In Turn the World Upside Down, Imani Owens tells a different story showing how writers and performers crafted alternatives to the tropes of authenticity and developed a different set of theories and aesthetic forms and styles to understand the relationship between folk culture and the modern Black experience. Turning to a transnational and multilingual archive, Owens considers a wide range of writers, including Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer, the experimental ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price Mars, the written and recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén and Eusebia Cosme, and finally, the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. She considers how these writers and performers depicted folk culture-and blackness itself-as a site of disruption, experimentation, ambiguity, and flux. In their attunement to Black labor, movement, speech, ritual, these figures show how "everyday folk" contributed to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. At the same time, she argues that the aim of these works is not to render the folk more knowable or worthy of assimilation into predetermined models of citizenship or resistance but rather to suggest alternatives"-- Provided by publisher.

Series:

Black lives in the diaspora : past, present, future

ISBN:

0231208898
9780231208895
023120888X
9780231208888

OCLC:

(OCoLC)1369147168

LCCN:

2022049013

Locations:

OVUX522 -- University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City)