Daryl Cumber Dance (born January 17, 1938) is an American academic best known for her work on black folklore.
Daryl Veronica Cumber was born in Richmond, Virginia, to Allen and Veronica Bell Cumber. She attended Ruthville High School in Ruthville, Virginia, and earned a bachelor's degree in English from Virginia State College in 1957. She then taught at Armstrong High School in Richmond until 1962, when she returned to Virginia State College as an instructor. The next year, she completed a master's degree from Virginia State. In 1971, she graduated from the University of Virginia with a doctorate in English, and was named an assistant professor at Virginia State. She taught at Virginia Commonwealth University between 1972 and 1993, when she joined the University of Richmond faculty. In 2013, she was appointed Sterling A. Brown Professor of English at Howard University. [1]
Dance has served as advisory editor of the Black American Literary Forum and editorial advisor of the Journal of West Indian Literature. [2]
Jumping the broom is a phrase and custom relating to a wedding ceremony in which the couple jumps over a broom. It is most widespread among African Americans and Black Canadians, popularized during the 1970s by the novel and miniseries Roots, and originated in mid-19th-century antebellum slavery in the United States. The custom is also attested in Irish weddings.
Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade, was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor.
Shuckin' and jivin' is African-American slang for joking and acting evasively in the presence of an authoritative figure. It usually involves clever lies and impromptu storytelling, to one-up an opponent or avoid punishment. In Ribbin', Jivin', and Playin' the Dozens: The Persistent Dilemma in Our Schools, Herbert L. Foster writes: "Shuckin' and jivin' is a verbal and physical technique some blacks use to avoid difficulty, to accommodate some authority figure, and in the extreme, to save a life or to save oneself from being beaten physically or psychologically."
Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University during the academic year.
Carter Godwin Woodson was an American historian, author, journalist, and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). He was one of the first scholars to study the history of the African diaspora, including African-American history. A founder of The Journal of Negro History in 1916, Woodson has been called the "father of black history." In February 1926, he launched the celebration of "Negro History Week," the precursor of Black History Month. Woodson was an important figure to the movement of Afrocentrism, due to his perspective of placing people of African descent at the center of the study of history and the human experience.
Paule Marshall was an American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant.
Bertice Berry is an American sociologist, author, lecturer, and educator.
The HonourableSylvia Wynter, O.J. is a Jamaican novelist,[1] dramatist,[2] critic, philosopher, and essayist.[3] Her work combines insights from the natural sciences, the humanities, art, and anti-colonial struggles in order to unsettle what she refers to as the "overrepresentation of Man." Black studies, economics, history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, literary analysis, film analysis, and philosophy are some of the fields she draws on in her scholarly work.
Merle Hodge is a Trinidadian novelist and literary critic. Her 1970 novel Crick Crack, Monkey is a classic of West Indian literature, and Hodge is acknowledged as the first black Caribbean woman to have published a major work of fiction.
Martha Warren Beckwith was an American folklorist and ethnographer who was the first chair in folklore at any university or college in the U.S.
At the Bottom of the River is a collection of short stories by Caribbean novelist Jamaica Kincaid. Published in 1983, it was her first short story collection. The collection consists of ten inter-connected short stories, seven of which were previously published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review between 1978 and 1982. Kincaid was awarded the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 for the collection.
Alfred Hubert Mendes MM was a Trinidadian and Tobagonian novelist and short-story writer. He was a leading member of the 1930s "Beacon group" of writers in Trinidad and Tobago which included Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James and Ralph de Boissière. Mendes is best known as the author of two novels — Pitch Lake (1934) and Black Fauns (1935) — and for his short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s. He was "one of the first West Indian writers to set the pattern of emigration in the face of the lack of publishing houses and the small reading public in the West Indies." Mendes' experiences in World War I would serve as the inspiration for the 2019 film 1917, written and directed by his grandson Sam Mendes.
"Run, Nigger, Run" is a folk song first documented in 1851. It is known from numerous versions. Responding to the rise of slave patrols in the slave-owning southern United States, the song is about an unnamed black man who attempts to run from a slave patrol and avoid capture. The song was released as a commercial recording several times, beginning in the 1920s, and it was included in the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave.
Jean Constance D'Costa is a Jamaican children's novelist, linguist, and professor emeritus. Her novels have been praised for their use of both Jamaican Creole and Standard English.
Flying Africans are figures of African diaspora legend who escape enslavement by a magical passage back over the ocean. Most noted in Gullah culture, they also occur in wider African-American folklore, and in that of some Afro-Caribbean peoples.
Marion Patrick Jones was a Trinidadian novelist, whose training was in the fields of library science and social anthropology. She is also known by the names Marion Glean and Marion O'Callaghan. Living in Britain during the 1960s, she was also an activist within the black community. She was the author of two notable novels – Pan Beat, first published in 1973, and J'Ouvert Morning (1976) – and also wrote non-fiction.
Kirin Narayan is an Indian-born American anthropologist, folklorist and writer.
Song for Mumu is the debut novel of Jamaican-born writer Lindsay Barrett. Written between April of 1962 and October of 1966 while the author lived in Frankfurt, Germany, Paris, and Accra, Ghana, it was published in 1967 in London, where Barrett participated in readings alongside writers associated with the Caribbean Artists Movement.
Opal J. Moore is an African-American poet, short-story author, and professor.