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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton May 2021

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton

Publications and Research

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …


Recontextaulizing Literature: A Podcast Project Dedicated To Celebrating And Broadcasting The Voices Of Indigenous Authors And Storytellers, Xavier Hickey Jan 2021

Recontextaulizing Literature: A Podcast Project Dedicated To Celebrating And Broadcasting The Voices Of Indigenous Authors And Storytellers, Xavier Hickey

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This project is conducted with intention of exploring the sociocultural implications of a decentralized canon. Designed with Indigenous authors and storytellers in mind, this project perceives the way that literature and storytelling are improved by abandoning the universalized and Eurocentric literary canon and replacing it with complex and unique personal cultural contexts. As part of the overarching podcast project, this document looks to lay out a reading list that represents and enforces the power of recontextualized literature.


Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern 'Primitivist' Uses Of African And Oceanic Art, 1905-8, Joshua I. Cohen Jun 2017

Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern 'Primitivist' Uses Of African And Oceanic Art, 1905-8, Joshua I. Cohen

Publications and Research

Fauve painters “discovered” African and Oceanic sculpture beginning in 1905. From that time, Vlaminck first collected African art; Derain studied Oceanic works at the British Museum in spring 1906; and Matisse struggled to paint a Kongo-Vili statuette he purchased in fall 1906. Fauve interests in shallow-relief, relatively naturalistic, and surface-ornamented sculptural works suggest conformity with turn-of-the-century artistic and scientific ideas conflating heterogeneous strains of so-called “primitive” material culture. Nevertheless, the dominant conceptual framework of “primitivism” has tended to limit art-historical understandings of external formal influences on modernism, which can be gleaned here by investigating the particular objects the Fauves appropriated.


The Symphony Of State: São Paulo's Department Of Culture, 1922-1938, Micah J. Oelze Jun 2016

The Symphony Of State: São Paulo's Department Of Culture, 1922-1938, Micah J. Oelze

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1920s-30s São Paulo, Brazil, leaders of the vanguard artistic movement known as “modernism” began to argue that national identity came not from shared values or even cultural practices but rather by a shared way of thinking, which they variously designated as Brazil’s “racial psychology,” “folkloric unconscious,” and “national psychology.” Building on turn-of-the-century psychological and anthropological theories, the group diagnosed Brazil’s national mind as characterized by “primitivity” and in need of a program of psychological development. The group rose to political power in the 1930s, placing the artists in a position to undertake such a project. The Symphony of State …