If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780252075667)

Demonstrating the intimate connections among our public, political, and personal lives, these essays by Robert Cantwell explore the vernacular culture of everyday life. A keen and innovative observer of American culture, Cantwell casts a broad and penetrating intelligence over the cultural functioning of popular texts, artifacts, and performers, examining how cultural practices become performances and how performances become artifacts endowed with new meaning through the transformative acts of imagination. Cantwell's points of departure range from the visual and the literary--a photograph of Woody Guthrie, or a poem by John Keats--to major cultural exhibitions such as the World's Columbian Exposition. In all these domains, he unravels the implications for community and cultural life of a continual migration, transformation, and reformulation of cultural content.

Author: Robert Cantwell
ISBN-10: 0252075668
ISBN-13: 9780252075667
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Language: English
Published: 09/01/2008
Pages: 312
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2009