In Africanness in Action, author Juan Diego Díaz examines musicians' agency, constructions of blackness and Africanness, musical structure, performance practices, and rhetoric in Brazil, and provides a model for the study of African-derived music in other diasporic locales.

At a time of transformation in the music history classroom and amid increasing calls to teach a global music history, Navigating Stylistic Boundaries in the Music History Classroom adds nuance to the teaching of varied musical traditions by examining the places where they intersect and the issues of musical exchange and appropriation that these intersections raise. Troubling traditional boundaries of genre and style, this collection of essays helps instructors to denaturalize the framework of Western art music and invite students to engage with other traditions—vernacular, popular, and non-Western—on their own terms. The book draws together contributions by a wide range of active scholars and educators to investigate the teaching of music history around cases of stylistic borders, exploring the places where different practices of music and values intersect. Each chapter in this collection considers a specific case in which an artist or community engages in what might be termed musical crossover, exchange, or appropriation and delves deeper into these concepts to explore questions of how musical meaning changes in moving across worlds of practice. Addressing works that are already widely taught but presenting new ways to understand and interpret them, this volume enables instructors to enrich the perspectives on music history that they present and to take on the challenge of teaching a more global music history without flattening the differences between traditions.

This book is part of a three-volume book-set published under the general title of Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre. Each of the three books in the set has a unique subtitle that works to better focus its content, and differentiates it from the other two volumes. The contributors’ backgrounds and global spread adequately reflect the international focus of the three books that make up the collection. The contributions, in their various ways, demonstrate the many advances and ingenious solutions adopted by African theatre practitioners in tackling some of the challenges arising from the adverse colonial experience, as well as the “one-sided” advance of globalisation. The contributions attest to the thriving nature of African theatre and performance, which in the face of these challenges, has managed to retain its distinctiveness, while at the same time acknowledging, contesting, and appropriating influences from elsewhere into an aesthetic that is identifiably African. Consequently, the three books are presented as a comprehensive exploration of the current state of African theatre and performance, both on the continent and diaspora. Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre 1: Diaspora Representations and the Interweaving of Cultures explores the idea that, in and from their various locations around the world, the plays of the African diaspora acknowledge and pay homage to the cultures of home, while simultaneously articulating a sense of their Africanness in their various inter-actions with their host cultures. Contributions in Diaspora Representations and the Interweaving of Cultures equally attest to the notion that the diaspora – as we see it – is not solely located outside of the African continent itself, but can be found in those performances in the continent that engage performatively with the West and other parts of the world in that process of articulating identity.

This book is part of a three-volume book-set published under the general title of Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre. Each of the three books in the set has a unique subtitle that works to better focus its content, and differentiates it from the other two volumes. The contributors’ backgrounds and global spread adequately reflect the international focus of the three books that make up the collection. The contributions, in their various ways, demonstrate the many advances and ingenious solutions adopted by African theatre practitioners in tackling some of the challenges arising from the adverse colonial experience, as well as the “one-sided” advance of globalisation. The contributions attest to the thriving nature of African theatre and performance, which in the face of these challenges, has managed to retain its distinctiveness, while at the same time acknowledging, contesting, and appropriating influences from elsewhere into an aesthetic that is identifiably African. Consequently, the three books are presented as a comprehensive exploration of the current state of African theatre and performance, both on the continent and diaspora. Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre 3: Making Space, Rethinking Drama and Theatre in Africa offers essays that seek to re-conceptualise notions of drama and theatre in Africa, and therefore redefine our understanding of the practice, role, and place they occupy in a constantly evolving African socio-cultural contexts. Contributions in Making Space, Rethinking Drama and Theatre in Africa range from essays that explore notions of space in performance, to those that challenge the perceived orthodoxy of conventional forms and approaches to theatre.

This book is part of a three-volume book-set published under the general title of Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre. Each of the three books in the set has a unique subtitle that works to better focus its content and differentiates it from the other two volumes. The contributors’ backgrounds and global spread adequately reflect the international focus of the three books that make up the collection. The contributions, in their various ways, demonstrate the many advances and ingenious solutions adopted by African theatre practitioners in tackling some of the challenges arising from the adverse colonial experience, as well as the “one-sided” advance of globalisation. The contributions attest to the thriving nature of African theatre and performance, which in the face of these challenges, has managed to retain its distinctiveness, while at the same time acknowledging, contesting, and appropriating influences from elsewhere into an aesthetic that is identifiably African. Consequently, the three books are presented as a comprehensive exploration of the current state of African theatre and performance, both on the continent and diaspora. Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre 2: Innovation, Creativity and Social Change contains essays that address performativity as a process, particularly in the context of theatre’s engagement with contemporary realities with the hope of instigating social change. The innovativeness of the examples explored within the book points to the ingenuity and adaptive capacity of African theatre in ways that engage indigenous forms in the service of contemporary realities. Contributions in Innovation, Creativity and Social Change explore forms such as Theatre for Development, community and applied theatre, and indigenous juridical performances, as well as the work of contemporary dramatists and performers who set out to instigate change in society.

With a booming economy that afforded numerous opportunities for immigrants throughout the 1990s, the Twin Cities area has attracted people of African descent from throughout the United States and the world and is fast becoming a transnational metropolis. Minnesota's largest urban area, the region now also has the country's most diverse black population. A closely drawn ethnography, Creating Africa in America: Translocal Identity in an Emerging World City seeks to understand and evaluate the process of identity formation in the context of globalization in a way that is also site specific. Bringing to this study a rich and interesting professional history and expertise, Jacqueline Copeland-Carson focuses on a Minneapolis-based nonprofit, the Cultural Wellness Center, which combines different ethnic approaches to bodily health and community well-being as the basis for a shared, translocal "African" culture. The book explores how the body can become a surrogate locus for identity, thus displacing territory as the key referent for organizing and experiencing African diasporan diversity. Showing how alternatives are created to mainstream majority and Afrocentric approaches to identity, she addresses the way that bridges can be built in the African diaspora among different African immigrant, African American, and other groups. As this thoughtful and compassionate ethnographic study shows, the fact that there is no simple and concrete way to define how one can be African in contemporary America reflects the tangled nature of cultural processes and social relations at large. Copeland-Carson demonstrates the cultural creativity and social dexterity of people living in an urban setting, and suggests that anthropologists give more attention to the role of the nonprofit sector as a forum for creating community and identity throughout African diasporan history in the United States.

perspectives on The Caribbean perspectives on The Caribbean “Genuflecting to no tired metaphors, this is a refreshing collection of cross-disciplinary voices that compel new ways of seeing and thinking about the still undiscovered Caribbean.” Patricia Mohammed, University of the west Indies, St Augustine Presenting a broad understanding of the complex region of the Caribbean, Perspectives on the Caribbean: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation provides a variety of viewpoints on the rich spectrum of Caribbean culture. Essays, carefully chosen from a vast body of existing literature, expose readers to a variety of approaches, voices and topics that have emerged in Caribbean studies. Readings are interdisciplinary in nature and integrate themes from history, folklore, sociology, anthropology and political economy. Both contemporary viewpoints and classic readings reveal how the Caribbean has led scholars to new ways of exploring cultural hybridity in contemporary society. Each section includes brief introductions to put the readings in context with the connections between modern Caribbean culture and its historical roots, and also includes suggested readings for more in-depth study. Perspectives on the Caribbean offers revealing insights into one of the most diverse and complex regions in the Americas.

Boosting the bass guitar, blending the vocals, overdubbing percussion while fretting over shoot-outs in the street. Grumbling about a producer, teasing a white engineer, challenging an artist to feel his African beat. Sound of Africa! is a riveting account of the production of a mbaqanga album in a state-of-the-art recording studio in Johannesburg. Made popular internationally by Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, mbaqanga's distinctive style features a bass solo voice and soaring harmonies of a female frontline over electric guitar, bass, keyboard, and drumset. Louise Meintjes chronicles the recording and mixing of an album by Izintombi Zesimanje, historically the rival group of the Mahotella Queens. Set in the early 1990s during South Africa’s tumultuous transition from apartheid to democratic rule, Sound of Africa! offers a rare portrait of the music recording process. It tracks the nuanced interplay among South African state controls, the music industry's transnational drive, and the mbaqanga artists' struggles for political, professional, and personal voice. Focusing on the ways artists, producers, and sound engineers collaborate in the studio control room, Meintjes reveals not only how particular mbaqanga sounds are shaped technically, but also how egos and artistic sensibilities and race and ethnicity influence the mix. She analyzes how the turbulent identity politics surrounding Zulu ethnic nationalism impacted mbaqanga artists' decisions in and out of the studio. Conversely, she explores how the global consumption of Afropop and African images fed back into mbaqanga during the recording process. Meintjes is especially attentive to the ways the emotive qualities of timbre (sound quality or tone color) forge complex connections between aesthetic practices and political ideology. Vivid photos by the internationally renowned photographer TJ Lemon further dramatize Meintjes’ ethnography.