The world of Sub-Saharan African music is immensely rich and diverse, containing a plethora of repertoires and traditions. In The African Imagination in Music, renowned music scholar Kofi Agawu offers an introduction to the major dimensions of this music and the values upon which it rests. Agawu leads his readers through an exploration of the traditions, structural elements, instruments, and performative techniques that characterize the music. In sections that focus upon rhythm, melody, form, and harmony, the essential parts of African music come into relief. While traditional music, the backbone of Africa's musical thinking, receives the most attention, Agawu also supplies insights into popular and art music in order to demonstrate the breadth of the African musical imagination. Close readings of a variety of songs, including an Ewe dirge, an Aka children's song, and Fela's 'Suffering and Smiling' supplement the broader discussion. The African Imagination in Music foregrounds a hitherto under-reported legacy of recordings and insists on the necessity of experiencing music as sound in order to appreciate and understand it fully. Accordingly, a Companion Website features important examples of the music discussed in detail in the book. Accessibly and engagingly written for a general audience, The African Imagination in Music is poised to renew interest in Black African music and to engender discussion of its creative underpinnings by Africanists, ethnomusicologists, music theorists and musicologists.

The world of Sub-Saharan African music is immensely rich and diverse, containing a plethora of repertoires and traditions. In The African Imagination in Music, renowned music scholar Kofi Agawu offers an introduction to the major dimensions of this music and the values upon which it rests. Agawu leads his readers through an exploration of the traditions, structural elements, instruments, and performative techniques that characterize the music. In sections that focus upon rhythm, melody, form, and harmony, the essential parts of African music come into relief. While traditional music, the backbone of Africa's musical thinking, receives the most attention, Agawu also supplies insights into popular and art music in order to demonstrate the breadth of the African musical imagination. Close readings of a variety of songs, including an Ewe dirge, an Aka children's song, and Fela's 'Suffering and Smiling' supplement the broader discussion. The African Imagination in Music foregrounds a hitherto under-reported legacy of recordings and insists on the necessity of experiencing music as sound in order to appreciate and understand it fully. Accordingly, a Companion Website features important examples of the music discussed in detail in the book. Accessibly and engagingly written for a general audience, The African Imagination in Music is poised to renew interest in Black African music and to engender discussion of its creative underpinnings by Africanists, ethnomusicologists, music theorists and musicologists.

Tanure Ojaide is an award-winning writer, both creative and academic. This collection of his essays and lectures from over the past decade, addresses issues of culture and literature from a personal African perspective. The focus of this book is African culture and its imaginative productions in the arts, especially in literature. The author also examines the direction of African culture and its artistic creations in a global age. The titles of the essays and lectures are: the challenges of the African writer today; African culture and the New World Order; nativity and the creative process: the Niger Delta in my poetry; African culture today; divine mentoring in poetry and its performance; self, myth and historical consciousness: an African writer's reflection; Nigerian literature in the 21st century: what direction?; whose English?: the African writer and the language issue; countering terror in the literary world: the example of activism; and anxieties and hopes: recent African poetry. Tanure Ojaide's awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (1987), the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988, 1997), the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988), and the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Award (1988, 1994, and 2003). He is also the recipient of the 2006 UNC Charlotte's First Citizens Bank Scholar Medal Award for his writing and academic accomplishments, and is a Fellow in Writing of the University of Iowa. He taught for many years at the University of Maiduguri, and is currently Professor of African-American and African Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he teaches African/Pan-African literature and art.

In this book, Tanure Ojaide explains the uniqueness of modern African poetry, which he sees as a product of African orature and the Western literary tradition. The volume fittingly begins with "African Literature and Cultural Identity," which establishes areas of cultural identity of modern African literature in general. The next chapter strives to define modern African poetic aesthetics. The book then examines both the oral and the rhythmic aspects of modern African poetry. Having established the defining characteristics of modern African poetry, Ojaide takes on the history of the art form. "The Changing Voice of History: Contemporary African Poetry" and "New Trends in Modern African Poetry" contrast the newer poetry to that of the older generation while acknowledging the influence of the old on the new. The book then goes on to highlight African women's poetry and compare African-American poetry with modern African poetry. After the author -- himself a poet -- talks about his background and generation, the collection concludes with "Poetic Imagination in Black Africa." Ojaide brings the intuitive knowledge of a practitioner and scholar to his literary criticism of poetry, examining and interpreting modern African poems with lucidity, passion, and freshness. His knowledge of American and English literatures allows him to make apt comparisons and bring out the uniqueness of modern African poetry. Touching on the themes, techniques, and other areas, Poetic Imagination in Black Africa will help readers achieve a deeper understanding of the complex and diverse world of modern African poetry.

Drawing together scholars from communication, literature, philosophy, linguistics, and other fields, this edited collection examines the current thinking on African American literature and language. Some of the most significant writers and thinkers in the field have contributed their views on all major aspects of the topic. The widespread debate over the canon in American literature, the issue of cultural diversity, and the need to have books with critical inquiry into African American culture make this collection suitable for scholars and students in diverse fields.

Characterized by oral expression and ritual performance, the black church has been a dynamic force in African American culture. In The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination, Dolan Hubbard explores the profound influence of the sermon upon both the themes and the styles of African American literature. Beginning with an exploration of the historic role of the preacher in African American culture and fiction, Hubbard examines the church as a forum for organizing black social reality. Like political speeches, jazz, and blues, the sermon is an aesthetic construct, interrelated with other aspects of African American cultural expression. Arguing that the African American sermonic tradition is grounded in a self-consciously collective vision, Hubbard applies this vision to the themes and patterns of black American literature. With nuanced readings of the work of Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, Hubbard reveals how the African American sermonic tradition has influenced black American prose fiction. He shows how African American writers have employed the forms of the black preaching style, with all their expressive power, and he explores such recurring themes as the quest for freedom and literacy, the search for identity and community, the lure of upward mobility, the fictionalizing of history, and the use of romance to transform an oppressive history into a vision of mythic transcendence. The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination is a major addition to the fields of African American literary and religious studies.