In this unusual collection of stories and fables, Goncourt prize-winner Patrick Chamoiseau re-creates in truly magical language the stories he heard as a child in Martinique....

A collection of tales about trickery, prosperity, hunger, and chicanery

A collection of twenty-six traditional Cajun tales, including animal stories, fairy tales, ghost stories, and humorous tales.

Spirituals performed by jubilee troupes became a sensation in post-Civil War America. First brought to the stage by choral ensembles like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, spirituals anchored a wide range of late nineteenth-century entertainments, including minstrelsy, variety, and plays by both black and white companies. In the first book-length treatment of postbellum spirituals in theatrical entertainments, Sandra Jean Graham mines a trove of resources to chart the spiritual's journey from the private lives of slaves to the concert stage. Graham navigates the conflicting agendas of those who, in adapting spirituals for their own ends, sold conceptions of racial identity to their patrons. In so doing they lay the foundation for a black entertainment industry whose artistic, financial, and cultural practices extended into the twentieth century. A companion website contains jubilee troupe personnel, recordings, and profiles of 85 jubilee groups. Please go to: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/graham/spirituals/

In the foreword to the first edition, renowned anthropologist Victor Turner wrote that this book was a succinct and lucid account of the sporadic growth of political anthropology over the past four decades . . . the introduction we have all been waiting for. Unique in its field, this book offers a comprehensive overview of political anthropology, including its history, its major research findings, and its theoretical concerns both past and present. The third edition has been significantly updated and expanded, with extensive changes in many chapters, two new chapters, a new Preface that replaces the Introduction of the first two editions, an updated Glossary and Suggested Readings list, and an expanded Bibliography. In a clearly written style, this introduction also provides the background necessary for further study. The new chapters cover such topics as the politics of identity, and the transition from modernism to postmodernism. As with the earlier editions, this third edition of what has become a classic in the discipline still serves as a basic text and structure for a full course.

This wide-ranging book presents the first comprehensive and comparative account of the slave trade within the nations and colonial systems of the Americas. While most scholarly attention to slavery in the Americas has concentrated on international transatlantic trade, the essays in this volume focus on the slave trades within Brazil, the West Indies, and the Southern states of the United States after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade. The contributors cast new light upon questions that have framed the study of slavery in the Americas for decades. The book investigates such topics as the illegal slave trade in Cuba, the Creole slave revolt in the U.S., and the debate between pro- and antislavery factions over the interstate slave trade in the South. Together, the authors offer fresh and provocative insights into the interrelations of capitalism, sovereignty, and slavery.