If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture

If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture
ISBN-10
0252090748
ISBN-13
9780252090745
Category
Social Science
Pages
312
Language
English
Published
2010-10-01
Publisher
University of Illinois Press
Author
Robert Cantwell

Description

Demonstrating the intimate connections among our public, political, and personal lives, these essays by Robert Cantwell explore the vernacular culture of everyday life. A keen and innovative observer of American culture, Cantwell casts a broad and penetrating intelligence over the cultural functioning of popular texts, artifacts, and performers, examining how cultural practices become performances and how performances become artifacts endowed with new meaning through the transformative acts of imagination. Cantwell's points of departure range from the visual and the literary--a photograph of Woody Guthrie, or a poem by John Keats--to major cultural exhibitions such as the World's Columbian Exposition. In all these domains, he unravels the implications for community and cultural life of a continual migration, transformation, and reformulation of cultural content.

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