Explains how different African peoples interacted during the nineteenth century to achieve a common culture and provides revealing insights into W.E.B DuBois, Paul Robeson, and other nationalist leaders

Although Herman Melville's masterworks Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno have long been the subject of vigorous scholarly examination, the impact of African culture on these works has received surprisingly little critical attention. Presenting a groundbreaking reappraisal of these two powerful pieces of fiction, Sterling Stuckey reveals how African customs and rituals heavily influenced one of America's greatest novelists.The Melville that emerges in this innovative, intertextual study is one profoundly shaped by the vibrant African-influenced music and dance culture of nineteenth-century America. Drawing on extensive research, Stuckey reveals how celebrations of African culture by black Americans, such as the Pinkster festival and the Ring Shout dance form, permeated Melville's environs during his formative years and found their way into his finest fiction. Also demonstrated is the extent to which the author of Moby-Dick is indebted to Frederick Douglass's depiction of music, especially the blues, in his classic slave narrative. Connections between Melville's work and African culture are also extended beyond America to the African continent itself. With readings of hitherto unexplored chapters in Delano's Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and other nonfiction sources--such as Joseph Dupuis's Journal of a Residence in Ashantee --Stuckey links Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick , pinpointing the sources from which Melville drew to fashion major characters that appear aboard both the Pequod and the San Dominick .Combining inventive literary and historical analysis, Stuckey shows how myriad aspects of African culture coalesced to create the unique vision conveyed in Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno. Ultimately, African Culture and Melville's Art provides a wealth of insight into the novelist's expressive power and the development of his distinct cross-cultural aesthetic.

Product Description: Life with Margaret The Official Autobiography is a true story of a woman who dreamed big and made things happen on her terms. Through poetry and stories. Dr. Margaret T G Burroughs founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History, the first musen of its kind in America.

Product Description: Never used. Some cover wear from storage

Product Description: American History to 1877. Young Adult.

(view table of contents)

Upon his arrival in the North, Frederick Douglass found, to his utter astonishment, "persons who could speak of the singing among slaves as the evidence of their contentment and happiness." As late as 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois observed that African American spirituals had led naive whites to believe that "life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy." While these misconceptions have largely disappeared, the history of African American culture--and its importance to American history as a whole--is still a subject little understood by the majority of Americans. In Going through the Storm, Sterling Stuckey offers a compelling look at one of the world's richest cultural traditions. He traces the fertile legacy of African American art from its roots in tribal myth, through its blossoming in slave music and dance, to its fruition in the great gospel-singing movements of the 1960s. In the process he shows how this tradition, grounded as it was in adversity, represents one of the great triumphs of the human spirit: slaves and their descendants, by way of Negro spirituals, the blues, and jazz, transformed the pain of oppression into a transcendent and timeless beauty. And, as he explores these various styles, Stuckey reveals that the development of a distinctive African American aesthetic follows (and helps illuminate) the course of the nation's history. In a series of engaging, lucidly written essays, Going through the Storm covers the entire spectrum of African American culture, offering along the way many fresh and important insights. Within the context of slavery and slave music, Stuckey presents a new look at the foundations of black nationalism and the civil rights movement. In his eloquent reflections on Paul Robeson, he shows how black art offers a commentary on the human spirit so genuine and resonant that its appeal has reached across the boundaries of race to touch most of humanity. Writing of Herman Melville, he demonstrates how the great novelist was struck with the importance of African culture in history--and the reciprocal relationship of history to African culture--and carefully explored this theme in Benito Cereno. Frederick Douglass is presented for the first time as a major theorist of African American culture, one whose thought is profoundly relevant to our current debates on culture and race. And, perhaps most important, Stuckey explains that because black artists have been deeply interested for so long in the question of oppression, their art is of particular use to historians. In what amounts to nothing less than a revolutionary approach, Stuckey considers the uses of music as history, arguing that an easing of barriers between academic disciplines will lead to a better understanding of human life in general. A timely, readable, and often moving volume, Going through the Storm not only expands our understanding of black music, dance, literature, and folklore, but provides a new vantage point from which to view the entire landscape of American culture.