Description
Part history, part fiction, and part musical archive, this ambitious collection gives voice to African American performers who lived and worked from the era of emancipation through the early twentieth century. Through sonnets, songs, interviews, newspaper fragments, and narrative, it reimagines figures such as Scott Joplin and Blind Boone while exploring how Black artists resisted, reshaped, and survived the pressures of minstrelsy and racist representation. A wounded World War I veteran’s search for stories about Joplin provides a loose thread through this polyphonic work, linking personal memory to a broader cultural history. Inventive, formally daring, and deeply attentive to language and performance, the collection examines identity, erasure, resilience, disability, and the reclamation of voices long left out of the historical record.
Available Editions
hardcover
Wave Books
Published Apr 5, 2016
256 pages
ISBN: 9781940696225
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Details
First Published
2016
Language
eng
Content Warnings
Content and trigger warnings for Olio by Tyehimba Jess.