Pressestimmen
""Get your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me is a seminal work in both the collection and analysis of African American oral culture, indispensable to all students of American popular culture..""
-Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
"A stone cold classic! All you Hip Hop heads need to know this book if you want to know your roots.""
-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
"Bruce Jackson's Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me is a pioneering work that is as fresh today as when it was first published. As this collection, and Jackson's astute analyses make clear, black oral poetry and folklore are great literature. Funny as all get out, full of biting wit and dazzling wordplay, this book drops more science than Einstein while proving the genius of black folk who created meaning and defended their lives through signifying words. I hope the hip-hop generation takes a look at this book that documents where it all got started!"
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-Michael Eric Dyson, author of Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves & Demons of Marvin Gaye.
Kurzbeschreibung
Originally published in 1975 and regarded as one of the great collections of African-American literature and folklore, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me brings together some of the best examples of the black folk poetry known as 'toasts'. Probably the only surviving form of oral narrative poetry in the US, the 'toasts' collected here tell the myths of African-American culture, from the 'bad man' Stackolee to the black boxer refused a ticket for the Titanic, taking in the African roots tradition and contemporary rap music.
