Afro-Surrealism
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Afro-Surrealism
Afro-Surrealism or Afro-surrealism is a school of art and literature. In 1974, Amiri Baraka used the term to describe the work of Henry Dumas. D. Scot Miller in 2009 wrote his famous Afro-surreal Manifesto in which he says, "Afro-Surrealism sees that all 'others' who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist..." The manifesto delineates Afro-Surrealism from Surrealism and Afro-Futurism. The manifesto lists ten tenets that Afro-Surrealism follows including how "Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past," and how "Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it." Afro-Surrealism, is practiced and embodied in music, photography, film, the visual arts and poetry. Notable practitioners and inspirations of Afro-Surrealism include Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, Krista Franklin, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, René Ménil, Kool Keith, Terence Nance, Will Ale ...
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Afrofuturism
Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic, and philosophy of science and history that explores the intersection of the African diaspora culture with science and technology. It addresses themes and concerns of the African diaspora through technoculture and speculative fiction, encompassing a range of media and artists with a shared interest in envisioning black futures that stem from Afro-diasporic experiences. While Afrofuturism is most commonly associated with science fiction, it can also encompass other speculative genres such as fantasy, alternate history, and magic realism. The term was coined by Mark Dery, an American Cultural critic in 1993 and explored in the late 1990s through conversations led by Alondra Nelson. Ytasha L. Womack, writer of ''Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture'', defines it as "an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation". She also follows up with a quote by the curator Ingrid LaFleur who defines it as ...
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Négritude
''Négritude'' (from French "Nègre" and "-itude" to denote a condition that can be translated as "Blackness") is a framework of critique and literary theory, developed mainly by francophone intellectuals, writers, and politicians of the African diaspora during the 1930s, aimed at raising and cultivating "Black consciousness" across Africa and its diaspora. Négritude gathers writers such as sisters Paulette and Jeanne Nardal (known for having laid the theoretical basis of the movement), Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Abdoulaye Sadji, Léopold Sédar Senghor (the first President of Senegal), and Léon Damas of French Guiana. ''Négritude'' intellectuals disavowed colonialism, racism and Eurocentrism. They promoted African culture within a framework of persistent Franco-African ties. The intellectuals employed Marxist political philosophy, in the Black radical tradition. The writers drew heavily on a surrealist literary style, and some say they were also influenced somewhat by the ...
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Atlanta (TV Series)
''Atlanta'' is an American comedy-drama television series created by Donald Glover. The series follows college dropout and music manager Earnest "Earn" Marks (Glover) and rapper Alfred "Paper Boi" Miles (Brian Tyree Henry) as they navigate a strange, seemingly otherworldly, Atlanta hip hop scene. ''Atlanta'' also stars Lakeith Stanfield as Darius, Earn and Alfred's eccentric friend, and Zazie Beetz as Vanessa "Van" Kiefer, Earn's on-again-off-again girlfriend and the mother of his daughter. The series produced by RBA, 343 Incorporated, MGMT. Entertainment, and FXP and is primarily set and filmed in Atlanta and the surrounding Georgia area; the third season features international filming locations. ''Atlanta'' is one of the only American cable television series to feature an all-Black writing staff (featuring Glover as writer, executive producer, and showrunner), with much of the focus set on examining race, class, identity, the American Dream, existentialism, and modern A ...
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Krista Franklin
Krista Franklin is an American poet and visual artist, whose main artistic focus is collage. Her work, which addresses race, gender, and class issues, combines personal, pop-cultural, and historical imagery. Early life and education Franklin is originally from Dayton, Ohio. She received her BA from Kent State University, and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book & Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago where, in 2013, she wrote her thesis titled ''The Two Thousand & Thirteen Narrative(s) of Naima Brown'' that brought to life a girl changeling on the precipice of young adulthood and has received recognition for her work from such prestigious programs as the Arts Incubator at the University of Chicago. She is based in Chicago, Illinois, where in 2007 she was the recipient of a Chicago Artist Assistance Program Grant for her art book ''SEED (The Book of Eve)'', which she says was based upon the dystopic visions of the award-winning African-American science-fiction writer Octavia ...
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Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka (born Everett Leroy Jones; October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University. He received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for ''Tales of the Out and the Gone''. Baraka's plays, poetry, and essays have been described by scholars as constituting defining texts for African-American culture. Baraka's career spanned nearly 52 years, and his themes range from black liberation to white racism. His notable poems include "The Music: Reflection on Jazz and Blues", "The Book of Monk", and "New Music, New Poetry", works that draw on topics from the worlds of society, music, and literature. Baraka's poetry and writing have attracted both high praise and condemnation. In the African-American community, some com ...
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Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or ''surreality.'' It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media. Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and '' non sequitur''. However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost (for instance, of the "pure psychic automatism" Breton speaks of in the first Surrealist Manifesto), with the works themselves being secondary, i.e. artifacts of surrealist experimentation. Leader Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a ...
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Beloved (novel)
''Beloved'' is a 1987 novel by American novelist Toni Morrison. Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of a dysfunctional family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. The narrative of ''Beloved'' derives from the life of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person in the slave state of Kentucky who escaped and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856. Garner was subject to capture under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and when U.S. marshals broke into the cabin where she and her husband had barricaded themselves, she was attempting to kill her children—and had already killed her youngest daughter—in hopes of sparing them from being returned to slavery. Morrison's main inspiration for the novel was an account of the event titled "A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child" in an 1856 newspaper article initially published in the ''American Baptist'' and reproduced in ''The Black Book'', an antholog ...
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Toni Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, ''The Bluest Eye'', was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed '' Song of Solomon'' (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for ''Beloved'' (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her work ''Beloved'' was made into a film in 1998. Mor ...
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Zong Massacre
The ''Zong'' massacre was a mass killing of more than 130 African enslaved people by the crew of the British slaver ship ''Zong'' on and in the days following 29 November 1781. The William Gregson slave-trading syndicate, based in Liverpool, owned the ship as part of the Atlantic slave trade. As was common business practice, they had taken out insurance on the lives of the enslaved Africans as cargo. According to the crew, when the ship ran low on drinking water following navigational mistakes, the crew threw enslaved Africans overboard. After the slaver ship reached port at Black River, Jamaica, ''Zong''s owners made a claim to their insurers for the loss of the enslaved Africans. When the insurers refused to pay, the resulting court cases (''Gregson v Gilbert'' (1783) 3 Doug. KB 232) held that in some circumstances, the murder of enslaved Africans was legal and that insurers could be required to pay for those who had died. The jury found for the slavers but at a subsequent ...
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Jacques Stephen Alexis
Jacques Stephen Alexis (Gonaïves, Haiti, 22 April 1922– Casernes Dessalines, Haiti, c. 22 April 1961) was a Haitian communist novelist, poet, and activist. He is best known for his novel ''Compère Général Soleil'' (1955). Biography Alexis was born in Gonaïves, the son of journalist, historian and diplomat Stephen Alexis and Lydia Nonez, descendant of one of Haiti's founding fathers, Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Alexis grew up in a family in which literary and political discussions were the norm. At the age of 18, he made what was regarded as remarkable literary debut with an essay about the Haitian poet, Hamilton Garoute. He collaborated on a number of literary reviews, before founding La Ruche, a group dedicated to creating a literary and social spring in Haiti in the early 1940s. After completing medical school in Paris, he traveled throughout Europe and lived for a few years in Cuba. In 1955, his novel ''Compère Général Soleil'', was published by Gallimard in Paris. ...
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Présence Africaine
''Présence Africaine'' is a pan-African quarterly cultural, political, and literary magazine, published in Paris, France, and founded by Alioune Diop in 1947. In 1949, ''Présence Africaine'' expanded to include a publishing house and a bookstore on rue des Écoles in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The journal was highly influential in the Pan-Africanist movement, the decolonisation struggle of former French colonies, and the birth of the Négritude movement. Magazine The magazine published its first issue in November 1947, founded by Alioune Diop a Senegal-born professor of philosophy, along with a cast of African, European, and American intellectuals, writers, and social scientists, including Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Alioune Sarr, Richard Wright, Albert Camus, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Théodore Monod, Georges Balandier and Michel Leiris. While not all authors published in the magazine were from the African diaspora, its subtitle (''Revue Culturelle du Monde N ...
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René Ménil
René Ménil (1907, Gros-Morne, Martinique – 29 August 2004) was a French surrealist writer and philosopher who lived on the island of Martinique. Born and raised on the island of Martinique, Ménil was one of several of the island's natives who studied in France and returned to influence the independence movement with the ideas of Marxism, and Surrealism. He was involved in helping to publish a literary journal in 1932 with Étienne Léro called ''Légitime défense, Légitime Défense.'' He also began the ''Antillanité'' movement. In the early 1940s Ménil started a journal called ''Tropiques'' along with other notable Martinique writers such as Aimé Césaire. The publication spoke very strongly against French colonialism in its essays. To avoid retaliation from their powerful critics, they portrayed the magazine as a journal of West Indian folklore. A professor and writer throughout his life, in 1981 Ménil published a book of essays entitled ''Tracées'' (). References ...
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