BiblioVault - Books about New Frontiers

New Frontiers in the Study of the Global African Diaspora

Between Uncharted Themes and Alternative Representations

Rita Kiki Edozie

Michigan State University Press, 2018

This anthology presents a new study of the worldwide African diaspora by bringing together diverse, multidisciplinary scholarship to address the connectedness of Black subject identities, experiences, issues, themes, and topics, applying them dynamically to diverse locations of the Blackworld—Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States. The book underscores three dimensions of African diaspora study. First is a global approach to the African diaspora, showing how globalism underscores the distinctive role that Africa plays in contributing to world history. Second is the extension of African diaspora study in a geographical scope to more robust inclusions of not only the African continent but also to uncharted paths and discoveries of lesser-known diaspora experiences and identities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Third is the illustration of universal unwritten cultural representations of humanities in the African diasporas that show the distinctive humanities’ disciplinary representations of Black diaspora imaginaries and subjectivities. The contributing authors inductively apply these themes to focus the reader’s attention on contemporary localized issues and historical arenas of the African diaspora. They engage their findings to critically analyze the broader norms and dimensions that characterize a given set of interrelated criteria that have come to establish parameters that increasingly standardize African diaspora studies.

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Red, Black, and Jew

New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature

By Stephen Katz

University of Texas Press, 2009

Between 1890 and 1924, more than two million Jewish immigrants landed on America's shores. The story of their integration into American society, as they traversed the difficult path between assimilation and retention of a unique cultural identity, is recorded in many works by American Hebrew writers. Red, Black, and Jew illuminates a unique and often overlooked aspect of these literary achievements, charting the ways in which the Native American and African American creative cultures served as a model for works produced within the minority Jewish community.

Exploring the paradox of Hebrew literature in the United States, in which separateness, and engagement and acculturation, are equally strong impulses, Stephen Katz presents voluminous examples of a process that could ultimately be considered Americanization. Key components of this process, Katz argues, were poems and works of prose fiction written in a way that evoked Native American forms or African American folk songs and hymns. Such Hebrew writings presented America as a unified society that could assimilate all foreign cultures. At no other time in the history of Jews in diaspora have Hebrew writers considered the fate of other minorities to such a degree. Katz also explores the impact of the creation of the state of Israel on this process, a transformation that led to ambivalence in American Hebrew literature as writers were given a choice between two worlds.

Reexamining long-neglected writers across a wide spectrum, Red, Black, and Jew celebrates an important chapter in the history of Hebrew belles lettres.

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Venetian Disegno

New Frontiers

Edited by Maria Aresin and Thomas Dalla Costa

Paul Holberton Publishing, 2023

A volume that offers a fresh perspective on the art of Venice and the Veneto region of Italy by focusing on the artistic idea of disegno.

Disengo (Italian for drawing or design) refers to the philosophical relationship between the conceptual role of design and the physical act of drawing. Venetian Disegno explores this theme and its history in the Veneto artistic landscape with contributions on myriad artists and art forms including drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and architecture.

Divided into five thematic sections and sumptuously illustrated with over one hundred images, Venetian Disegno represents a significant contribution to scholarship on the art of Venice, Renaissance workshops, and drawing studies.

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