1st Edition
Infectious Rhythm Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture
By Barbara Browning
Copyright 1998
248 Pages
by
Routledge
248 Pages
by
Routledge
256 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Barbara Browning follows the trail of "infectious rhythm" from the ecstatic percussion of a Brazilian carnival group to the eerily silent video image of the LAPD beating a man like a drum. Throughout, she identifies the metaphoric strain of contagion which both celebrates the diasporic spread of African culture, and serves as the justification for its brutal repression. The essays in this book... Read more
Introduction; Chapter 1 Babaluaiyé; Chapter 2 Compact World; Chapter 3 Lutte contre les moustiques; Chapter 4 African Medicine Men; Chapter 5 Voodoo Economics; Chapter 6 Mixing Bloods; Chapter 7 Cyberspace, Voodoo Sex, and Retroviral Identity; Chapter 8 Benetton; Chapter 9 Penetrable Selves (“;Paris Is Burning”); Chapter 10 The Closed Body; NOTES; INDEX;
Biography
Barbara Browning is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. She is the author of Samba: Resistance in Motion.
"Infectious Rhythm fills an important gap in the literature on AIDS and international race relations. In a style as lyrical as it is tough-minded, Browning offers a brilliant reading of figures of transmission, both viral and cultural. This eloquent book provides the most powerful testimony yet to how metaphors of seepage and contamination are, from the outset, expresssions of social fear and political anxiety." -- Diana Fuss
"Browning is a clear writer and a creative thinker who eschews postmodern jargon to a large degree, even while elaborarting on concepts at the movement's core." -- Journal of Cultural Geography, Steven C. Dinero, Philadelphia College
