Based on eighteen months of intensive participant-observation, Ring of Liberation offers both an in-depth description of capoeira-a complex Afro-Brazilian martial art that combines feats of great strength and athleticism with music and poetry-and a pioneering synthetic approach to the analysis of complex cultural performance. Capoeira originated in early slave culture and is practiced widely today by urban Brazilians and others. At once game, sport, mock combat, and ritualized performance, it involves two players who dance and "battle" within a ring of musicians and singers....
Based on eighteen months of intensive participant-observation, Ring of Liberation offers both an in-depth description of capoeira-a complex Afr...
This landmark book shows how five African civilizations--Yoruba, Kongo, Ejagham, Mande and Cross River--have informed and are reflected in the aesthetic, social and metaphysical traditions (music, sculpture, textiles, architecture, religion, idiogrammatic writing) of black people in the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, Mexico, Brazil and other places in the New World.
This landmark book shows how five African civilizations--Yoruba, Kongo, Ejagham, Mande and Cross River--have informed and are reflected in the aesthet...
In this generously illustrated book, world-renowned Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson gives us the definitive account of tango, "the fabulous dance of the past hundred years-and the most beautiful, in the opinion of Martha Graham." Thompson traces tango's evolution in the nineteenth century under European, Andalusian-Gaucho, and African influences through its representations by Hollywood and dramatizations in dance halls throughout the world. He shows us tango not only as brilliant choreography but also as text, music, art, and philosophy of life. Passionately argued and...
In this generously illustrated book, world-renowned Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson gives us the definitive account of tango, "the fa...
Merengue is a quintessential Dominican dance music. This work aims to unravel the African and Iberian roots of merengue. It examines the historical and contemporary contexts in which merengue is performed and danced, its symbolic significance, its social functions, and its musical and choreographic structures.
Merengue is a quintessential Dominican dance music. This work aims to unravel the African and Iberian roots of merengue. It examines the historical an...
In 1982, Harvard-trained ethnobotanist Wade Davis traveled into the Haitian countryside to research reports of zombies--the infamous living dead of Haitian folklore. A report by a team of physicians of a verifiable case of zombification led him to try to obtain the poison associated with the process and examine it for potential medical use.
Interdisciplinary in nature, this study reveals a network of power relations reaching all levels of Haitian political life. It sheds light on recent Haitian political history, including the meteoric rise under Duvalier of the Tonton Macoute. By...
In 1982, Harvard-trained ethnobotanist Wade Davis traveled into the Haitian countryside to research reports of zombies--the infamous living dead of Ha...
Hailed as the seminal study of spray can art of the 1970s and 1980s, Aerosol Kingdom explores the origins and aesthetics of graffiti writings.
From a vast array of inherited traditions and gritty urban lifestyles talented and renegade young New Yorkers spawned a culture of their own, a balloon-lettered shout heralding the coming of hip-hop. Though helpless in checking its spreading appeal, city fathers immediately went on the attack and denounced it as vandalism. Many aficionados, however, recognized its trendy aesthetic immediately. By the 1980s spray-paint art hit the...
Hailed as the seminal study of spray can art of the 1970s and 1980s, Aerosol Kingdom explores the origins and aesthetics of graffiti writing...
