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Articles 1 - 30 of 49
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Listening To Afro-Latinidad: The Sonic Archive Of Olú Clemente, Patricia Herrera
Listening To Afro-Latinidad: The Sonic Archive Of Olú Clemente, Patricia Herrera
Theatre and Dance Faculty Publications
For many Puerto Ricans and other Latinos, Roberto Clemente was more than just a baseball star. Above all, he was a symbol of hope and humanitarianism, succeeding despite the overt racial discrimination he encountered as a Black Puerto Rican. Off the field, Clemente was renowned and beloved for his involvement in charity work in Puerto Rico and other Latin American countries. His final humanitarian act came about in 1972 on New Year’s Eve when the plane chartered to deliver aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua crashed into the ocean off the coast of Isla Verde, Puerto Rico. His sudden and …
"The Color Purple" Takes Us On Emotional Journey Of Self-Discovery (Performance Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
"The Color Purple" Takes Us On Emotional Journey Of Self-Discovery (Performance Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Extraordinary. That's the only way to describe the Virginia Repertory Theatre's musical version of "The Color Purple." Based on Alice Walker's classic novel, this Broadway-class show takes the audience on a moving, soulful journey of self-discovery with the heroine, Celie.
African American Literature By Writers Of Caribbean Descent, Daryl Cumber Dance
African American Literature By Writers Of Caribbean Descent, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
They dubbed it the Port of No Return. When their ancestors left that port at Elmira Beach, Ghana – or Goree Island, Senegal, or any of a number of similar African ports – and set out on the perilous journey over the ocean to the Americas, there was no going back for the New World Negroes. That is what for most Africans in the Americas was the beginning of their history. Whether resident in a small island nation or in the American colonies, whether under the domain of a British, Spanish, French, or Dutch colonial power, and whether shuttled back …
Emily And Annie: Doris Lessing's And Jamaica Kincaid's Portraits Of The Mothers They Remember And The Mothers That Might Have Been, Daryl Cumber Dance
Emily And Annie: Doris Lessing's And Jamaica Kincaid's Portraits Of The Mothers They Remember And The Mothers That Might Have Been, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
In 2008 at the age of eighty-nine, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing returned to the mother who has haunted her life and her literature in order to rewrite a fictional account of the life that might have been and a biographical account of the life that she actually lived in Alfred & Emily. Her efforts to finally exorcise the powerful and hated figure that has hounded her for most of her eighty-nine years call to mind similar efforts throughout the canon of fifty-nine-year-old celebrated Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid to free herself. Both writers take advantage of and seek to find …
"I Going Away. I Going Home.": Austin Clarke's "Leaving This Island Place", Daryl Cumber Dance
"I Going Away. I Going Home.": Austin Clarke's "Leaving This Island Place", Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Austin Clarke’s “Leaving This Island Place” is one of scores of Caribbean autobiographical works that focus on a bright, young, lower-class islander leaving his/her small island place and setting out on “Eldorado voyages.” The narrative of that journey away from home to Europe or Canada or the United States and the later efforts to return may be said to be the Caribbean story, as suggested in the subtitle of Wilfred Cartey’s study of Caribbean literature, Whispers from the Caribbean: I Going Away, I Going Home, which argues that while in Caribbean literature there is much movement away, there is …
A Birth And A Death, Or Everything Important Happens On Monday, Daryl Cumber Dance
A Birth And A Death, Or Everything Important Happens On Monday, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
I was going to be a grandmother. It had taken all too long. I gave birth to my first child, Warren Dance Jr., when I was only twenty-one, but Warren Jr. was going to be almost thirty-six when his first child was born. As excited as I was, I decided to wait until a week after the July 4, 1995, appearance of my new grand to visit him in Houston, Texas. Other members of the family were going to be there for the birth, and I wanted time to enjoy this baby all by myself, so I planned to arrive …
'Grung Tell Me Wud': An Introduction To Karl, Daryl Cumber Dance
'Grung Tell Me Wud': An Introduction To Karl, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Olive Senior informs us in 'The Poem as Gardening, the Story as Su-Su: Finding a Literary Voice' that Jamaican elders believe the ground is the place where ancestral wisdom is located and they will explain and validate their warning or advice by saying, 'Grung tell me wud' (36). Jamaican linguist/literary critic/poet/and novelist Velma Pollard has put her ear to the ground of Jamaica and shared many important words of ancestral wisdom with us. This was a natural development for the talented girlchild born into an artistic family in Woodside, Jamaica, a rural community rich in folk traditions: her father was …
"I Put The Tale Back Where I Found It": Feeling The Past Through "The Warmth Of The Human Voice", Daryl Cumber Dance
"I Put The Tale Back Where I Found It": Feeling The Past Through "The Warmth Of The Human Voice", Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
In this article, I examine my revelations and growth related to folk culture and literature connected to the African American community. I borrow from and play on the Sudanese formulaic ending for the folktale; it seemed to me appropriate - even obligatory- that "I put the tale back where I found it." This maxim is symbolic, reflecting what I find one of the most characteristic elements of Black folklore - that is, the focus on the group, the community, in terms of the source of the historical situation of the tale; the moral lesson; the content, style, and delivery; and …
Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives And The Second Generation By Lisa D. Mcgill (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives And The Second Generation By Lisa D. Mcgill (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Using second generation Americans Harry Belafonte, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Piri Thomas, and the meringue hip hop group Proyecto Uno, Lisa D. McGill considers in Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation the issues of identity formation of those whose heritage ultimately includes Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, most often New York City. Though her subjects come from different national, racial, and language backgrounds; though they have made their names in different media; and though they have different views of race, identity, and culture, she convincingly makes the argument that "African America becomes powerful site …
Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, And Survival By Meredith M. Gadsby (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, And Survival By Meredith M. Gadsby (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
The folk will tell you that salt can either save you or destroy you. Toni Cade Bambara's Velma of The Salteaters realized that her survival depended on learning "the difference between eating salt as an antidote to snakebite and turning into salt, succumbing to the serpent." The lesson of similar folk wisdom is the subject of Meredith M. Gasby's Sucking Salt, where she propses as a new framework for the examination of Caribbean women's writing the survival techiniques implied in "sucking salt," techiniques suggested in her aunt's reflections on people she knew. Tantie expounded: "Little salt won't kill …
Who Was Cock Robin? A New Reading Of Erna Brodber's Jane And Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Daryl Cumber Dance
Who Was Cock Robin? A New Reading Of Erna Brodber's Jane And Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Much has been written about the quest of Brodber's protagonist Nellie for identity, for wholeness, for balance, for sanity, for finding her way back home into the community. Nellie's efforts to find herself and to integrate into the community will be easier, Brodber declared in a speech in 1988, "when Jane and Louisa come home, i.e., when the women find themselves" (Notes). Brodber also observed in that same speech, "'coming' rather than 'being' is the appropriate action word with which to address the issue of integration into the community," a fact suggested by the game that gives the title to …
In Search Of Nella Larsen: A Biography Of The Color Line By George Hutchinson (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
In Search Of Nella Larsen: A Biography Of The Color Line By George Hutchinson (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
With In Search of Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson makes the third major attempt to provide a biography of the elusive Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891-1964), the mulatto daughter of immigrants from Denmark and the Danish West Indies whose life and fiction were shaped largely by her mixed emotions about her racial heritage and her feelings of abandonment by her white mother, stepfather, and sister. In his introduction, Hutchinson makes much of the errors of prior Larsen biographers Charles R. Larson (Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen [1993]) and Thadious M. Davis (Nella Larsen, Novelist of …
Ismith Khan (1925-2002), Daryl Cumber Dance
Ismith Khan (1925-2002), Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Trinidadian novelist who explored the conflicts experienced by East Indians in the Caribbean as well as the racial diversity that characterizes the region. A brilliant storyteller, he created memorable characters through whom the sights and cadences of Trinidad will forever live.
Jasper, John, Daryl Cumber Dance
Jasper, John, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Perhaps the most famous of all the slave preachers, John Jasper was born in Fluvanna County, Virginia, on July 4, 1812, the youngest of twenty-four children born to Phillip and Tina Jasper. His father, also a slave preacher, died two months before John was born, but he prophesied that his son would become a famous preacher.
Bennett, Louise, Daryl Cumber Dance
Bennett, Louise, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Louise Bennett, affectionately called Miss Lou, is Jamaica's most beloved folk poet, performer, and collector; she was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on September 7, 1919. Her father, a baker, died when she was seven years old, and her mother worked as a dressmaker to provide for her only child. She was educated in Jamaica at Calabar Elementary School, Excelsior High School, and St. Simon's College, after which she received a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in England.
A Conversation With Velma Pollard, Daryl Cumber Dance
A Conversation With Velma Pollard, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Noted poet, novelist, linguist, and educator, Velma Pollard was Visiting Professor of English at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia, during the fall semester of 2001 when I conducted the following interview. John Martin, my graduate assistant at the time, assisted me in videotaping and transcribing our conversation, which took place in her cottage at the University on December 3, 2001.
Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life By Bruce King (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life By Bruce King (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
In Another Life Derek Walcott wrote, "I had entered the house of literature as a houseboy"; Jamaican poet Mervyn Morris signified on this image in his The Pond when he declared, "And these are my rooms now." The journey that Walcott makes from "houseboy" to master/ruler/owner of the house of literature (the Nobel Laureate is frequently acclaimed the greatest poet writing in the English language) is painstakingly detailed in Bruce King's tome Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life.
The Colored Girl In The Ring: A Guyanese Woman Remembers By Brenda Chester Doharris (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
The Colored Girl In The Ring: A Guyanese Woman Remembers By Brenda Chester Doharris (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Brenda Chester DoHarris's The Colored Girl in the Ring: A Guyanese Woman Remembers joins the company of some of the most memorable works of Caribbean literature, those classic accounts of coming-of-age, such as George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, Michael Anthony's The Year in San Fernando, Merle Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey, Erna Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Zea Edgell's Beka Lamb, Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, and Beryl Gilroy's Sunlight on Sweet Water. Like most of the bildungsromans - and …
My Brother By Jamaica Kincaid (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
My Brother By Jamaica Kincaid (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
In Jamaica Kincaid's six previous autobiographical novels and essays (At the Bottom of the River, 1984; Annie John, 1985; A Small Place, 1988; Annie, Gwen, Lily, Pam and Julie, 1989; Lucy, 1990; and The Autobiography of My Mother, 1996), her readers have the feeling that she has told all about her troubled life in Antigua and her painful emotional conflicts with her family (especially her mother). We discover with her new memoir, My Brother, however, that some things have been just too painful to tell - until now. Clearly the most obvious …
Beryl Gilroy: A Bio-Literary Overview, Daryl Cumber Dance
Beryl Gilroy: A Bio-Literary Overview, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
In 1992 when I joined the faculty at the University of Richmond, I taught a class in black women's literature to a group of mainly white students who had previously read little or nothing in this body of literature. One young senior--a white male--did a paper comparing the sympathetic portrayal of the white male character in Beryl Gilroy's Stedman and Joanna and Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine. His enthusiasm for the rich body of literature to which I had introduced him continued after he graduated, and he often wrote to me about books he was reading …
African-American Proverbs In Context By Sw. Anand Prahlad (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
African-American Proverbs In Context By Sw. Anand Prahlad (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Growing up in Hanover, Virginia, "surrounded by people who cast the world in vibrant and poetic colors," Sw. Anand Prahlad "fell in love with proverbs at an early age" (ix). This lifelong love affair has resulted in a rich collection of African American proverbs that expanded as Prahlad went through college and graduate school, and did postgraduate research. All the while, he was sharpening his critical skills and developing the theoretical framework to establish a model for use in examining the varied components of proverbial speech in the African American community, proceeding on the assumption that in order to understand …
"Journey To An Expectation:" A Reflection And A Prayer, Daryl Cumber Dance
"Journey To An Expectation:" A Reflection And A Prayer, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
From Francis Williams in the first quarter of the 18th century to Phillis Wheatley in 1773 to C. L. R. James in 1932, to Sam Selvon and George Lamming in 1950, they pack their manuscripts and head to the Mother Country seeking the approval of the Colonialist Publisher, carrying a dream that cannot come true for the Black Colonial on this side of the ocean, certainly not in a little island where all too often people think the only artists are calypsonians or reggae stars. I can envision those budding writers setting out on what Lamming called their "journey to …
Moore, Opal, Daryl Cumber Dance
Moore, Opal, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Moore, Opal (b. 1953), poet, short story writer, essayist, educator, and critic of children's literature. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Opal Moore was influenced from childhood by the particular dynamics of the Pentecostal church; echoes of that institution reverberate in her plots, themes, characters, tone, and language. When Moore entered Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Art in 1970, she was so shocked by her first real encounter with racism and her sens~ of powerlessness in the face of it that she sought some control over what was happening to her by writing, thus initiating her first journals. She also …
Notice The Mistletoe, Daryl Cumber Dance
Notice The Mistletoe, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Selection of African-American folklore on the winter holidays.
The Zea Mexican Dairy: 7 Sept 1926 - 7 Sept 1986. By Kamau Brathwaite (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
The Zea Mexican Dairy: 7 Sept 1926 - 7 Sept 1986. By Kamau Brathwaite (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
I may be hard put to classify the latest work of noted poet, historian, literary critic, linguist, and Africanist Kamau (Eddie) Brathwaite, but I have no problem describing it - compelling, riveting, unforgettable! Begun when Brathwaite received the devastating news that his wife Doris (his Zea Mexican) was dying of cancer, it is a paean to her, a record of his efforts to deal with her dying, death, and absence, an account of their relationship, and an autobiographical confessional. The Zea Mexican Diary includes diary entries, letters, memorates, an epigraph, expressions of sympathy, confessions, autobiographical narrative, poems - but whatever …
Seeking Polly, Pretty Polly, Poor Polly, Or The Granddaughter Seeks To Remember What The Grandfathers Sought To Forget, Daryl Cumber Dance
Seeking Polly, Pretty Polly, Poor Polly, Or The Granddaughter Seeks To Remember What The Grandfathers Sought To Forget, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
My great-great-great-grandmother is so special to me because I found her despite the fact that she was deliberately written out of my his-tory. And this is the story of our meeting.
Various Black Virginians As Told To Daryl Cumber Dance, Daryl Cumber Dance
Various Black Virginians As Told To Daryl Cumber Dance, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Shuckin' and Jivin': Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans, published in 1978, derived from fieldwork done far a doctoral dissertation at Virginia Commonwealth University by Daryl Cumber Dance (the only woman named Daryl I have heard of aside from Daryl Hannah). She gathered stories and verses from black Virginians in colleges, senior citizens' centers, and a penitentiary. Though she doesn't bring to the party an editorial touch as enlivening as Zora Neale Hurston's, she has an ear and-unlike far, far too many assiduous collectors of folktales - knows how to capture vocal rhythms on a page.
Matriarchs, Doves, And Nymphos: Prevalent Images Of Black, Indian, And White Women In Caribbean Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance
Matriarchs, Doves, And Nymphos: Prevalent Images Of Black, Indian, And White Women In Caribbean Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Universally, male writers have tended to create images of women which reveal the familiar male tendency to view women merely as functionaries whose role basically is determined by male needs, male motivations, male fears, and male fantasies. When woman is submissive, docile and pure, she is to be protected and revered; then, she is the virgin/goddess. When she is assertive and strong, she is to be avoided and despised; then, she is the bitch/shrew. When she is passionate and active, she is to be resisted and feared; she is the whore/temptress. While this genera] categorizing of women characters carries over …
"He's Long Gone": The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore And Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance
"He's Long Gone": The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore And Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
Throughout their experiences in this country, certain segments of the Black population have viewed themselves as enslaved, whether they were chattel owned by slaveowners prior to emancipation, whether they were impressed into peonage and forced to work on white plantations and in chain gangs after slavery, whether they were victims of sharecropping systems that virtually reenslaved them during the twentieth century, whether they were the repressed and disfranchised and persecuted in Southern Jim Crow towns throughout the first half of the twentieth century, whether they are those trapped by unemployment and poverty today, or whether they are among the Blacks …
An Interview Of Paule Marshall, Daryl Cumber Dance
An Interview Of Paule Marshall, Daryl Cumber Dance
English Faculty Publications
This Interview was conducted at the home of Paule Marshall in Richmond, Virginia, on June 14, 1991. Much of our discussion focused on Ms. Marshall's recently completed novel, Daughters, published this fall by Atheneum, which she characterizes here as "perhaps my most personal novel." There are, of course, frequent references to her earlier works, which include Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961). The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1983), and Reena and Other Stories (1983).