Musician-Artist Don Dean's Eclectic Human Condition (Part 3): All One People

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Created by author, poet, artist, and historian Aberjhani, The CREATIVE SPIRIT OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE is presented with the same inspired and joy-filled intentions that gave the world one of the most dynamically rich periods of art, music, literature, theatre, and progressive social activism it has ever known.(Original writings copyrighted by author. Artwork copyrighted by individual artists.)

Musician-Artist Don Dean's Eclectic Human Condition (Part 3): All One People

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Musician-Artist Don Dean's Eclectic Human Condition (Part 3): All One People

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The Enigmatic Genius of Author Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man, Shadow and Act, and Going to the Territory, all books by that quintessential twentieth century literary artist Ralph Waldo Ellison, remain towering masterworks of American literature for their penetrating explorations of racial identity, cultural complexity, and historical consequences in the United States. With Senator Barack Obama’s historic bid for the White House evolving daily into the possibility of an historic win, Ellison’s brilliantly charged writings, which first catapulted him to fame in the 1950s, are perhaps more relevant now than ever before, making Arnold Rampersad’s detailed biography of the great writer one of the best reads around during these very exciting times. Biographies of high-achieving African Americans have too often in the past fallen into one of two categories: those that romanticized their subjects as cultural heroes and those that condemned them as embarrassing villains. Fortunately, in Rampersad, we have a biographer who assigned himself t...

Guerrilla Decontextualization and King of Pop Michael Jackson - by Aberjhani

Image still from the video-poem Notes for an Elegy in the Key of Michael . “It’s very important to keep the historical context in mind as you contemplate the nature of love and service required in the 21st century.” –Cornel West, Hope on a Tightrope To what extent might the phenomenal entertainer and humanitarian Michael Joseph Jackson have been the target of an extended guerrilla decontextualization campaign throughout the second half of his life? Hardcore devotees to Jackson’s music and altruistic humanitarian vision would say there can be no question that he was targeted in such a manner. Hardcore doubters might say maybe he was the one doing the guerrilla decontextualizing through the evolving manipulations of his public profile as a performance artist. They point to his chameleon-like shift from a distinctly afrocentric appearance in one decade to androgynously multi-ethnic in the next, and in his final years to an almost ethereal projection––a figure solidly in...

This is why hip-hop icons like LL Cool J tweet positive quotes - by Aberjhani

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Now Observing the Harlem Renaissance Centennial

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Skylark in Contemplative Creative Flight: I am a visual artists whose works can be found on Fine Art American and an author whose books are as follows: --Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah (2019) --I Made My Boy Out of Poetry (1998) --The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003/2017) --Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (2003/2010) --Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World (2007) --The American Poet Who Went Home Again (2008) --ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love (2008) --The River of Winged Dreams (2010) Savannah: The Immortal City (Editor, 2010) --Savannah: Brokers, Bankers, and Bay Lane, Inside the Slave Trade (Editor, 2011) --Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black (2012)

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