African Studies

Black Cultural Traffic by Henry J. Elam and Kennell Jackson

Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture

Harry J. Elam and Kennell Jackson

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture is a collection that tackles the central questions about the meanings, uses, and representations of blackness in performance and popular culture, and traces how blackness travels globally, particularly in Africa, Europe, and the United States. The essays provide nuanced and complex perspectives on black culture, not as a static set of shared beliefs and customs inherited by people of the same ethnic descent, but as something that is contingent and dynamic.

Black Cultural Traffic engages the work of an international, interdisciplinary mix of scholars, critics, and artists, juxtaposing scholarly essays with statements by practicing artists. Contributors include W.T Lhamon, Manthia Diawara, Herman Gray, and Jennifer DeVere Brody, as well as spoken-word artist Michael Franti, jazz bassist Christian McBride, performance artist Rhodessa Jones, and hip-hop theater artist Will Power.

Harry J. Elam is Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities and Professor of Drama at Stanford University. He is the author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka and The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson; and editor of African American Performance and Theatre History, Colored Contradictions, and The Dire This Time.

Kennell Jackson is Associate Professor of History at Stanford, and the author of America Is Me.

Fall 2005
408 pages