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Rambling blues: mapping contemporary North American blues literature

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Ferguson, Josh-Wade

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Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature revises the methodological assumptions that have underwritten our understanding of blues literature and the politics of race and region that surround it. Where previous commentators have defined blues literature primarily through its formal and thematic connections with blues music and with the sociohistorical contours of black southern life more generally this dissertation expands the boundaries of how we conceive blues literature by examining Langston Hughes poems The Weary Blues (1925) and Po Boy Blues (1926) August Wilsons Ma Raineys Black Bottom (1984) Jesmyn Wards Salvage the Bones (2011) James Hannahams Delicious Foods (2015) Kiese Laymons Long Division (2013) Joy Harjos Everybody Has a Heartache: A Blues (2014) Sherman Alexies Reservation Blues (1995) Richard Wagameses Keepern Me (1994) Drew Hayden Taylors The Bootlegger Blues (1991) The Baby Blues (1999) The BuzGem Blues (2002) The Berlin Blues (2007) and Cerulean Blue (2015) and George Elliott Clarkes Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (1983) and Whylah Falls (1990). In contemporary African American literature the blues through representations of music musicians and aesthetics enables a cross-generational connection that focuses on how precarity in the wake of slavery and its afterlives continue to plague black working-class communities; the blues in contemporary African American literature animates a cultural memory. Understanding the development of the blues as a form of cultural remembering as well as an idiom of resistance and self-expression provides an important critical framework to articulate the allure of the blues for Indigenous and African-Canadian writers. What develops...
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Created Date:
2019 01 01 T08:00:00 Z
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