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Anansi's journey : a story of Jamaican cultural resistance
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ISBN: 9789766402617 Year: 2012 Publisher: Kingston : University of the West Indies Press,

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This interdisciplinary study examines the cultural and historical significance of the Jamaican Anansi folktales. Anansi the spider is the trickster folk hero West African slaves transported to the Caribbean. He symbolizes key aspects of Afro-Caribbean culture and is celebrated as a vital link with an African past. Anansi stories, in which the small spider turns the tables on his powerful enemies through cunning and trickery, are now told and published worldwide. This original book traces Anansi's journey from West Africa to Jamaica, where he is celebrated as a national folk hero. Anansi survived a cultural metamorphosis and came to symbolize the resistance of the Jamaican people. Anansi's Journey begins by examining Anansi's roots in Ghana. It moves on to detail the changes Anansi underwent during the Middle Passage and his potential for inspiring tactics of resistance in a plantation context. It ends with an analysis of Anansi's role in postcolonial Jamaica, illustrating how he is interpreted as a symbol of individualism and celebrated as an emblem of resistance. With its broad historical sweep, tracing Anansi from Ghana through to his contested position in contemporary Jamaica, this book makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate about whether the slave trade transmitted or destroyed the culture of the enslaved.


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Trickster and hero : two characters in the oral and written traditions of the world
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ISBN: 0299290735 1283976137 9780299290733 9781283976138 0299290743 9780299290740 Year: 2012 Publisher: Madison : University of Wisconsin Press,


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The trickster brain : neuroscience, evolution, and narrative
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ISBN: 1280687185 9786613664129 0739143999 9780739143995 9781280687181 9780739143971 0739143972 Year: 2012 Publisher: Lanham, Md. : Lexington Books,

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The Trickster Brain: Neuroscience, Evolution, and Nature by David Williams looks at literature from an evolutionary, biological, and neurological perspective. He uses the Trickster character as he/she appears across cultures to demonstrate how stories reveal universal aspects of the biological mind. Williams brings together science and the humanities, demonstrating a critical way of approaching literature that incorporates scientific thought.


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The Ponzi scheme puzzle : a history and analysis of con artists and victims
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ISBN: 0190258519 1283577259 9786613889706 019992662X 9780199926626 9781283577250 9780199926619 0199926611 0199977224 Year: 2012 Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press,

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Charles Ponzi perpetrated his infamous scheme almost a hundred years ago. But his method of using new investments to pay existing investors and finance a highflying lifestyle is alive and well: just as much money is lost in the United States today from Ponzi schemes as from shoplifting. Somehow, con artists are able to dazzle wealthy, educated individuals and sophisticated institutions and convince them to hand over huge sums of money. How? This book explores these con artists' fascinating power of persuasion and deception, uncovering the subtle signals that mimic truth and honesty.


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Moses, Jesus, and the trickster in the evangelical South
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ISBN: 128049171X 9786613586940 0820343749 9780820343747 9781280491719 9780820334110 0820334111 082034592X Year: 2012 Publisher: Athens : University of Georgia Press,

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Paul Harvey uses four characters that are important symbols of religious expression in the American South to survey major themes of religion, race, and southern history.The figure of Moses helps us better understand how whites saw themselves as a chosen people in situations of suffering and war and how Africans and African Americans reworked certain stories in the Bible to suit their own purposes. By applying the figure of Jesus to the central concerns of life, Harvey argues, southern evangelicals were instrumental in turning him into an American figure. The ghostly presence of the Trickster, hovering at the edges of the sacred world, sheds light on the Euro-American and African American folk religions that existed alongside Christianity. Finally, Harvey explores twentieth-century renderings of the biblical story of Absalom in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom and in works from Toni Morrison and Edward P. Jones.Harvey uses not only biblical and religious sources but also draws on literature, mythology, and art. He ponders the troubling meaning of "religious freedom" for slaves and later for blacks in the segregated South. Through his cast of four central characters, Harvey reveals diverse facets of the southern religious experience, including conceptions of ambiguity, darkness, evil, and death.

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