Africana Studies Commons^™

Africana Studies Student Research Conference 2019 Flyer, Bowling Green State University

Africana Studies Student Research Conference

Flyer for the 2019 Africana Studies Student Research Conference & Luncheon.

Africana Studies Student Research Conference: Uploading Your Paper, Bowling Green State University

Africana Studies Student Research Conference

Instructions for students submitting proposals for the 2019 Africana Studies Student Research Conference & Luncheon.

Africana Studies Student Research Conference 2019 Program, Bowling Green State University

Africana Studies Student Research Conference

Program from the 21st Annual Africana Studies Student Research Conference & Luncheon.

Amjambo Africa! (February 2019), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue...

Pihcintu at the UN..................Page 2

Attitude by A. Okafor............Page 5

South Sudanese Community...Page 8

Rwandese Community...........Page 9

Governor Mills ..............Pages 12/13

Mahoro Maine......................Page 15

“In The Beginning Was Body Language” Clowning And Krump As Spiritual Healing And Resistance, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In the neighborhood of HollyWatts in Los Angeles, dance allows a shift from existing as bodies presented as sites of threat and extinction to sources of spiritual empowerment. Clowning and Krump dancers—their subjectivity and their dancing bodies—negotiate survival from trauma and socioeconomic marginalization. I argue that the dancers’ performances act as embodied narratives of “re-membering in the flesh.” The performance acts as a spiritual retrieval and re-integration of traumatic memories and afflictions into memory through the body. Choreography and quotes from dancers support the claim that Krump and Clowning is “re-membering in the flesh” that enacts self-worth, self-defined sexuality, and …

The Multiracial Bronx: A Unique Cultural Incubator In Post War America, Mark Naison

Occasional Essays

No abstract provided.

Multicultural Women Writers, Nashieli Marcano, Jennifer Jacobs

Research Guides & Subject Bibliographies

No abstract provided.

Post Colonial Studies, Nashieli Marcano, Kyle Brooks

Research Guides & Subject Bibliographies

No abstract provided.

Living Objects Essays: Prologue, John Bell

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Living Objects: African American Puppetry co-curator John Bell describes the team responsible for the Living Objects exhibition, festival, symposium, and online catalogue.

Embracing Complexity In Performing The Other, Valeska Maria Populoh

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

"Embracing Complexity in Performing the Other" is a personal essay by a white, Baltimore-based cultural organizer, puppeteer and educator, reflecting on three scenarios that have catalyzed her thinking about white people performing Black puppets. The author shares her own experience of navigating the complex, and at times highly combustible, issues about representation, appropriation and racial identity in the realm of puppetry, and concludes with a few questions to stimulate further dialogue in the puppetry community about these issues.

Power Puppets In Portable Pulpits: A Personal Account Of Puppet Ministry In The African American Community, Yolanda Sampson

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Yolanda Sampson relates the history of her path into puppet ministry and her PuppeTainment Productions company, which presents Christian stories in a “hip, entertaining way,” bringing “biblical principles to life for twenty-first century children.” She recounts her initiation in puppet ministry at the age of twelve, and her development of stories about the dangers of drug culture in the Washington, D.C. area, as well as her use of puppetry in beauty pageant competitions, and her ventures into puppet video productions such as What Time is It? and Tell It Like It Is. Sampson took a three-year hiatus to earn her …

Race And Representation: Creating A Puppet Production For The Smithsonian Institution, Brad Brewer

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

The Brewery Puppet Troupe was commissioned by the Smithsonian Museum’s Lemelson Center to undertake new creative challenge: a show featuring African American scientist Lewis Latimer, the nineteenth-century inventor instrumental in creating the electric light bulb. Brad Brewer was committed to showing how Latimer’s life was affected by America’s struggle with slavery and racial inequality, issues he considered equally important to Latimer's scientific achievements. Staff historians read and commented on all the drafts of the script, but the production still included comedic elements typical of a Brewery Troupe production. The project allowed the author to explore some of the hard realities …

Egg Whites: A Short Puppet Film Script, Alva Rogers

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Alva Rogers’ script for a short puppet film is a magical realist treatment of a mother’s efforts to help her young daughter, an unnamed African American girl, fall asleep in their New York apartment. The mother explains straightforwardly how she will make muffins for the girl’s breakfast, but the film then shifts into a surreal territory where the girl travels on a moonbeam to the sun, and then appears in a rowboat in a vast ocean, where she wants to plant a flower—all while the mother is baking in the kitchen. The sea explains that the girl’s flower will not …

An Email Interview With Alva Rogers, Paulette Richards

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Actor, writer, and puppeteer Alva Rogers recounts her long-standing interests in theater, and her early performances combining dolls with texts by Zora Neale Hurston and others. Her work as a performance artist led to her role as Eula in the film Daughters of the Dust. She then studied playwriting, musical theater, and history at Brown University, NYU, and Bard College respectively. Rogers’s influences include surrealist painters, magic realism, such writers as Adrienne Kennedy, Ralph Ellison, and Federico Garcia Lorca, and the Gullah/Geechee culture of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. She uses both dolls and puppets in …

Servance Dancers, Paulette Richards

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

How many African American folk artists have created performing objects outside the purview of formal theater? Master woodcarver George Servance is one such 20th-century artist who used his skills to counter minstrel stereotypes and present African Americans as elegant and accomplished entertainers.

Raceless Racism: Blackface Minstrelsy In American Puppetry, Amber West

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Blackface minstrelsy has long been recognized as one of the major elements of 19th and early 20th-century popular performance in the U.S., but its central role in U.S. puppetry has not been explored. West debunks the idea that puppets are “raceless”, examining the origins of blackface minstrelsy in American puppetry, including traditional Punch and Judy performances, William John Bullock’s 19th-century puppet minstrel shows, the creation of “realistic” Black puppets by white puppeteers in the early 20th century, and contemporary examples of exaggerated Black puppet characters, for example in a music video directed by Black artist Boots Riley. West points out …

Schroeder Cherry And His Puppets: Playing With Puppets, From Childhood To Adulthood, Schroeder Cherry

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Schroeder Cherry relates his path into puppetry, from childhood television shows to his exposure to European puppetry in Switzerland; and later an apprenticeship with Chicago puppeteer Gary Jones. After earning a master’s degree in museum education at George Washington University, Cherry began developing puppet performances for the Smithsonian Institution and other museums. Travels in Africa furthered his appreciation of that continent’s puppetry, and influenced his creation of such shows as How the Sun Came to the Sky. Cherry has developed an array of rod-puppet characters (including DiAndre, Ms. Lily, and Tevin) which he incorporates into museum performances and such …

Storytelling And Puppetry, Susan Fulcher

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Librarian Susan Fulcher recounts the creation of a storytelling with puppets program she developed with puppeteer Dave Herzog, in which kids create their own puppet characters to be incorporated into existing stories such as Stone Soup.

Teeth, Tau Bennett

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Brooklyn-based puppeteer Tau Bennett’s shooting script for a television puppet comedy employs dark humor and surreal slapstick to tell the story of a man whose offhand wish to lose his “pesky teeth” becomes unfortunately true, thanks to larger-than-life forces, two bumbling hoodlums, and a boss looking for teeth.

Living Objects: Introduction, Paulette Richards

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

In her introduction to this collection of Living Objects: African American Puppetry online texts, co-curator Paulette Richards gives an overview of “the power of performing objects to disrupt dehumanizing views of blackness,” and the continuing history of African American object performance in relation to other aspects of popular culture and writing, despite the suppression of African figurative sculpture and object performance, and the persistence of racist stereotypes born of blackface minstrelsy. Relating W. E. B. DuBois’s sense of African American “double consciousness” to the inherent “double vision” of puppet and object performance, Richards proposes a “distinct lineage of African American …