Characteristics of Negro Expression

Hurston, Zora Neale

doi:10.2307/j.ctv1134fjj.12

Cited by 19 publications

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“…In a particularly dissonant juxtaposition, the opening page of Hurston's essay, with its emphasis upon the creative act of improvisation or what she terms 'the will to adorn', in which storytellers, musicians, and dancers transpose and reconstitute cultural fragments into new contexts and combinations, is printed alongside a shocking photograph featuring two lynching victims hanging from a tree surrounded by a crowd of spectators whose jubilant mood is sharply at odds with the stark reality of the two murders. 10 Pickens' essays employ documentary journalism and photography to bring readers face to face with the disturbing realities of racial violence. An unflinching account of the 'distressingly deliberate' and 'studiedly savage' murder of Henry Lowry, who was 'burned "by inches"' with his mouth and nostrils 'stuffed' full of mud in order to keep him alive and prolong the spectacle of his suffering under the glare of 'spotlights', appears amid indictments of a justice system where 'lynchers invariably go scot free' 11 and trenchant analysis of the 'cunningly contrived debt-slavery' 12 that followed slavery as a mode of colonial exploitation that makes the Mississippi delta analogous to the Congo.…”

Section: A Politics Of Juxtaposition and Exposure Of 'The Underneath Of History'mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…14 Specific cultural 'characteristics' -'the will to adorn', 'angularity', 'asymmetry', and 'drama' among themare described in brief sections, illustrated by vignettes, or 'hieroglyphics' as Hurston calls them (a dancer in a warrior pose, a wall covered with 'gaudy calendars, wall pockets and advertising lithographs' and so on). 15 'Characteristics of Negro Expression' embodies an aesthetic of assemblage: even in terms of its formal qualities, there is productive juxtaposition of voices and examples, with folktales, songs, and expressions jostling for attention with ethnographic analysis. When Hurston's essay, with its unexpected tonal shifts and jagged edges, is read in dialogue with Pickens's hard-hitting essays on lynching, interpretation is pushed in new directions.…”

Section: A Politics Of Juxtaposition and Exposure Of 'The Underneath Of History'mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A ‘panorama’ of black internationalism: resistance and antagonism in Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology (1934)

Farebrother¹

2020

Slavery & Abolition

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When discussing Nancy Cunard's landmark anthology Negro, it has become almost obligatory to start by making two observations that are perhaps not unrelated. First, scholars tend to emphasise the size of this expansive, multidisciplinary volume, which includes 385 illustrations and essays by over 150 international contributors, with commentary on topics as diverse as history, education, anthropology, colonialism, lynching, music, boxing, and debt peonage in Europe, the United States, South America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Secondly, they note the anthology's critical neglect.Published in London in 1934, Negro has been described by Brent Hayes Edwards as the only anthology to emerge in the interwar period that 'attempt [ed] to document discourses of black internationalism in a manner that would combine the political -and more particularly the communist -with the poetic, the musical, the vernacular, the historical, the sculptural, and the ethnological'. 1 If Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (1925) secured its canonical status by reinforcing the cultural nationalist agenda of the New Negro Renaissance, Negro, with its uneasy assemblage of Communist politics, anthropological cultural description, and exoticism, has occupied a marginal position in accounts of black history and culture, and transcultural modernisms. Recent critical interventions by Jeremy Braddock, Carla Kaplan, and Peter Kalliney demonstrate that interest in the transnational and conceptual implications of Negro is gathering pace, but there is still no comprehensive analysis of the anthology, which pays detailed attention to patterns of incongruity and juxtaposition or the relationships established between specific contributions and between part and whole. 2 Moreover, with the notable exceptions of Maroula Joannou and Peter Kalliney, few critics have attended to the political and cultural networks from which the anthology

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Section: A Politics Of Juxtaposition and Exposure Of 'The Underneath Of History'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Politics Of Juxtaposition and Exposure Of 'The Underneath Of History'mentioning

confidence: 99%

A ‘panorama’ of black internationalism: resistance and antagonism in Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology (1934)

Farebrother¹

2020

Slavery & Abolition

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“…Henry Louis Gates, Jr. refers to the phenomenon, within European literature and rhetoric, of “master tropes,” to which signifyin(g) stands in contradistinction as “the slave's trope, the trope of tropes … subsum[ing] other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony … and also hyperbole, litotes, and metalepsis” (Gates , 686). Far earlier in 1933, before the term had been so codified, Zora Neale Hurston described many of the aspects of Black speech now understood as signifyin(g), praising “the Negro's universal mimicry” and use of “rich metaphor and simile” (Hurston , 293).…”

Section: The Practice Of Signifyin(g)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Signifyin(g) within African American Classical Music: Linking Gates, Hip‐Hop, and Perkinson

Jenkins

2019

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

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Many authors have had occasion to explore the practice of signifyin(g), a seminal expressive concept within African American culture most often described as a rhetorical and literary device. Few, however, have examined the practice of signifyin(g) within African American musical composition in the European, or “classical,” style. This article explores the application of signifyin(g) as an analytical lens in the examination of “classical” music by African American composers, beginning with the previous investigation of signifyin(g) practices within other forms of African American music, ranging from Miles Davis's jazz standards to the lyrics of Nas and Cardi B. This exploration concludes with the analysis of a specific classical work by an African American composer (Coleridge‐Taylor Perkinson's Lament for Viola and Piano) as a case study.

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“…An astute participant-observer of African-American life, Hurston focused on black vernacular traditions in much the same way that hip hop, according to Dyson, foregrounds everyday experiences of the "so called [black] underclass, romanticizing the ghetto as the fecund root of cultural identity" and principal site of black creativity (quoted in McLaren 1997, p. 158). The enduring confluences between Hurston's (1934) identified black aesthetics and those celebrated within hip hop include:…”

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confidence: 99%

Hip-Hop Ethos

Harrison

Arthur

2019

Humanities

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This article excavates the ethos surrounding hip hop, starting from the proposition that hip hop represents a distinct yet pervasive expression of contemporary black subjectivity, which crystalized in 1970s New York City and has since proliferated into a potent ethos of the subaltern embraced within socially marginalized youth communities throughout the world. The article begins by outlining the black diasporic traditions of expressive performance that hip hop issues from, as discussed through the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Amiri Baraka. In the remainder of the article, a blueprint of hip hop’s ethos is presented based on five fundamental tenets: (1) properties of flow, layering, and rupture; (2) a principle of productive consumption; (3) the production of excessive publicity or promotion—what hip-hop affiliates refer to as “hype”; (4) embracing individual and communal entrepreneurship; and (5) a committed politics of action and loyalty. While acknowledging hip hop’s malleability and refusal to be neatly characterized, the article maintains that its characteristic spirit embodies these core doctrines.

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Characteristics of Negro Expression

Cited by 19 publications

References 0 publications

A ‘panorama’ of black internationalism: resistance and antagonism in Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology (1934)

A ‘panorama’ of black internationalism: resistance and antagonism in Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology (1934)

Signifyin(g) within African American Classical Music: Linking Gates, Hip‐Hop, and Perkinson

Hip-Hop Ethos

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