Product Description: In the humanities, the term 'diaspora' recently emerged as a promising and powerful heuristic concept. It challenged traditional ways of thinking and invited reconsiderations of theoretical assumptions about the unfolding of cross-cultural and multi-ethnic societies, about power relations, frontiers and boundaries, about cultural transmission, communication and translation...read more

Product Description: Arising out of the context of the re-configuration of Europe, new perspectives are applied by the authors of this volume to the process of nation-building in the United States. By focusing on a variety of public celebrations and festivities from the Revolution to the early twentieth century, the formative period of American national identity, the authors reveal the complex interrelationships between collective identities on the local, regional, and national level which, over time, shaped the peculiar character of American nationalism...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: The Harlem Renaissance is rightly considered to be a moment of creative exuberance and unprecedented explosion. Today, there is a renewed interest in this movement, calling for a re-evaluation and a closer scrutiny of the era and of documents that have only recently become available...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: This collection of essays offer a close reading of Jean Toomer's work, Cane, a book hailed by many as the harbinger of the Harlem Renaissance and as a model for modernist writing that eludes categorization. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Jazz funerals in New Orleans, Halloween parades in Greenwich Village, harvest rituals, Easter pilgrimages, and folk pageants all serve to reaffirm the cultural vitality of ethnic communities and simultaneously permit them to challenge the established order and beliefs...read more

An analysis of Black American drama includes examinations of the plays of writers, such as Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Ed Bullins, and Melvin Van Peebles