Afro Nostalgia

As early as the eighteenth century, white Americans and Europeans believed that people of African descent could not experience nostalgia. As a result, black lives have been predominately narrated through historical scenes of slavery and oppression. This phenomenon created a missing archive of romantic historical memories. Badia Ahad-Legardy mines literature, visual culture, performance, and culinary arts to form an archive of black historical joy for use by the African-descended. Her analysis reveals how contemporary black artists find more than trauma and subjugation within the historical past. Drawing on contemporary African American culture and recent psychological studies, she reveals nostalgia’s capacity to produce positive emotions. Afro-nostalgia emerges as an expression of black romantic recollection that creates and inspires good feelings even within our darkest moments. Original and provocative, Afro-Nostalgia offers black historical pleasure as a remedy to contend with the disillusionment of the present and the traumas of the past.

Challenging the stereotype that black people who lived under South African apartheid have no happy memories of the past, this examination into nostalgia carves out a path away from the archetypical musings. Even though apartheid itself had no virtue, the author, himself a young black man who spent his childhood under apartheid, insists that it was not a vast moral desert in the lives of those living in townships. In this deep meditation on the experiences of those who lived through apartheid, it points out that despite the poverty and crime, there was still art, literature, music, and morals that, when combined, determined the shape of black life during that era of repression.

Whether invisible or hyper-visible, adored or reviled, from the inception of American literature the Black body has been rendered in myriad forms. This volume tracks and uncovers the Black body as a persistent presence and absence in American literature. It provides an invaluable guide for teachers and students interested in literary and artistic representations of Blackness and embodiment. The book is divided into three sections that highlight Black embodiment through conceptual flashpoints that emphasize various aspects of human body in its visual and textual manifestations. This Companion engages past and continuing debates about the nature of embodiment by showcasing how writers from multiple eras and communities defined and challenged the limits of what constitutes a body in relation to human and nonhuman environment.

Black Magic Woman and Narrative Film examines the transformation of the stereotypical 'tragic mulatto' from tragic to empowered, as represented in independent and mainstream cinema. The author suggests that this transformation is through the character's journey towards African-based religions.

An exploration of how Senegal has decolonised its cultural heritage sites since independence, many of which are remnants of the French empire.

This thought-provoking cultural history explores how psychoanalytic theories shaped the works of important African American literary figures. Badia Sahar Ahad details how Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, Adrienne Kennedy, and Danzy Senna employed psychoanalytic terms and conceptual models to challenge notions of race and racism in twentieth-century America. Freud Upside Down explores the relationship between these authors and intellectuals and the psychoanalytic movement emerging in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. Examining how psychoanalysis has functioned as a cultural phenomenon within African American literary intellectual communities since the 1920s, Ahad lays out the historiography of the intersections between African American literature and psychoanalysis and considers the creative approaches of African American writers to psychological thought in their work and their personal lives.

The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding history in moving images. It engages this popular and dynamic field that has evolved rapidly from film and television to digital streaming into the age of user-created content. The volume addresses moving image history through a theoretical lens; modes and genres; representation, race, and identity; and evolving forms and formats. It brings together a range of scholars from across the globe who specialize in film and media studies, cultural studies, history, philosophy of history, and education. Together, the chapters provide a necessary contemporary analysis that covers new developments and questions that arise from the shift to digital screen culture. The book examines technological and ethical concerns stemming from today’s media landscape, but it also considers the artificial construction of the boundaries between professional expertise and amateur production. Each contributor’s unique approach highlights the necessity of engaging with moving images for the academic discipline of history. The collection, written for a global audience, offers accessible discussions of historiography and a compelling resource for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates in history, film and media studies, and communications. Both Chapter 17 and the Afterword of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

M. de Rênal is the mayor of a provincial town named Verrières, who hires Julien Sorel as a private teacher for his child. Sorel desires to become a real man and follow the steps of his hero – Napoleon. The young man thinks that it is his duty to seduce the mayor’s wife and they become lovers. However, their little secret will soon be revealed. Who will find out about the love affair? What is going to happen with the two lovers? Will mayor M. de Rênal also find out or the truth will be hidden from him? Find all the answers in Stendhal’s novel "The Red and the Black" from 1830. Stendhal (1783-1842), the pseudonym of Marie-Henry Beyle, was a French writer. A pioneer of literary realism, he is best known for his novels "The Red and the Black" (1830) and "The Charterhouse of Parma" (1839).