Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman

Black History and Poetics in Performance

Gale P. Jackson

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781496217684
• eBook ISBN: 9781496220905
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Performing Arts
• Index: Social Sciences

In a gathering of griot traditions fusing storytelling, cultural history, and social and literary criticism, Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman “re-members” and represents how women of the African diaspora have drawn on ancient traditions to record memory, history, and experience in performance. 

These women’s songs and dances provide us with a wealth of polyphonic text that records their reflections on identity, imagination, and agency, providing a collective performed autobiography that complements the small body of pre-twentieth-century African and African American women’s writing.

Gale P. Jackson engages with a range of vibrant traditions to provide windows into multiple discourses as well as “new” and old paradigms for locating the history, philosophy, pedagogy, and theory embedded in a lineage of African diaspora performance and to articulate and address the postcolonial fragmentation of humanist thinking. In lyrically interdisciplinary movement, across herstories, geographies, and genres, cultural continuities, improvisation, and transformative action, Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman offers a fresh perspective on familiar material and an expansion of our sources, reading, and vision of African diaspora, African American, and American literatures.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Past and Prologue as Prelude
• 1. The Way We Do
• 2. Juba Danced
• 3. The Ancestors and the Lullaby
• 4. Put Your Hands on Your Hips
• 5. Rosy, Possum, Morning Star
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Gale P. Jackson