Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture - Hardcover

Dodson, Howard; Baraka, Amiri; Buckley, Gail Lumet; Gates Jr., Henry Louis; Gordon-Reed, Annette

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0792269829 ISBN 13: 9780792269823

Publisher: National Geographic, 2003

Synopsis

A richly illustrated study identifies the social, cultural, political, and economic factors that helped slaves from various regions of the African continent integrate their individual religions, artistic expressions, and languages into a rich and distinctive African-American culture, in a volume that includes contributions by Amiri Baraka, Gail Lumet Buckley, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among others.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

This is that rare title that effortlessly spans audience and age-group divides while it popularizes serious and compelling scholarship, in this case challenging widely held conceptions about modern culture in the Americas. In clean, almost terse prose Dodson presents a welter of facts showing the extent to which the colonization of North and South American depended on slave labor. A page-long foreword from Wynton Marsalis recalls the New Orleans culture of his youth. Next, Dodson (who has been director of Harlem's Schomberg Center for Research and Black Culture at the New York Public Library since 1984), along with his stellar team of scholars and poets, zeroes in on the Americas of the 17th and 18th centuries, when there were far more Black Americans than white. More than 200 photos and illustrations from the Schomberg's collection of more than five million work terrifically, selected specifically to counteract endlessly repeated images of victimization and document Black economies. They keep the story moving quickly and forcefully, and show concretely how black resistance resulted in cultural adaptations that now form the basis of cultures in the Americas: African and African-American carvings; portraits of prominent business and cultural figures; close-ups of irons and other implements of torture; marriage and other documents; contemporary press and poetry-there is an impressive amount of documentation here, culminating in the end of the Civil War. Never before have the economic and cultural histories of slavery come together so concisely and accessibly. This is an explosive, necessary book.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: National Geographic
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0792269829
• ISBN 13: 9780792269823
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192