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Sistren Theatre Collective
The Sistren Theatre Collective, established in 1977, is a Jamaican community theatre group, whose work has been widely influential throughout the Caribbean. Their dramaturgy tends to focus on the oppression of women, on poverty, and race and imperialism. __TOC__ Founding and activism The Collective was founded in Kingston in 1977. The group was formed out of a Jamaican government programme to help impoverished populations improve their job skills. Assisted by playwright and actor Honor Ford-Smith, the Collective performed their first play, ''Downpression Get a Blow'', for a 1977 national worker's festival. The play was about conditions in a women's garment factory and the struggle to unionize against management opposition. ''Downpression Get a Blow'' established the Sistren Theatre Collective's focus on women's and labour issues. The term Sistren was chosen as a name for the group because it means "sisters" or "sisterhood", and is particularly associated with Jamaica's rasta cu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jamaica
Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola (the island containing the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic); the British Overseas Territory of the Cayman Islands lies some to the north-west. Originally inhabited by the indigenous Taíno peoples, the island came under Spanish rule following the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1494. Many of the indigenous people either were killed or died of diseases, after which the Spanish brought large numbers of African slaves to Jamaica as labourers. The island remained a possession of Spain until 1655, when England (later Great Britain) conquered it, renaming it ''Jamaica''. Under British colonial rule Jamaica became a leading sugar exporter, with a plantation economy dependent on the African slaves and later their descenda ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system in which positions of dominance and privilege are primarily held by men. It is used, both as a technical anthropological term for families or clans controlled by the father or eldest male or group of males and in feminist theory where it is used to describe broad social structures in which men dominate over women and children. In these theories it is often extended to a variety of manifestations in which men have social privileges over others causing exploitation or oppression, such as through male dominance of moral authority and control of property. "I shall define patriarchy as a system of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women." "There are six main patriarchal structures which together constitute a system of patriarchy. These are: a patriarchal mode of production in which women's labour is expropriated by their husbands; patriarchal relations within waged labour; the patriarchal state; male viole ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louise Bennett-Coverley
Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley or Miss Lou (7 September 1919 – 26 July 2006), was a Jamaican poet, folklorist, writer, and educator. Writing and performing her poems in Jamaican Patois or Creole, Bennett worked to preserve the practice of presenting poetry, folk songs and stories in patois ("nation language"), establishing the validity of local languages for literary expression. Early life Bennett was born on 7 September 1919 on North Street in Kingston, Jamaica. She was the only child of Augustus Cornelius Bennett, the owner of a bakery in Spanish Town, and Kerene Robinson, a dressmaker. After the death of her father in 1926, Bennett was raised primarily by her mother. She attended elementary school at Ebenezer and Calabar, continuing to St. Simon's College and Excelsior College, in Kingston. In 1943, she enrolled at Friends College in Highgate, St Mary where she studied Jamaican folklore. That same year her poetry was first published in the '' Sunday Gleaner''. In 1945, Be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jamaican Patois
Jamaican Patois (; locally rendered Patwah and called Jamaican Creole by linguists) is an English-based creole language with West Africa West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Mau ...n influences, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora. A majority of the non-English words in Patois come from the West African Akan language. It is spoken by the majority of Jamaicans as a First language, native language. Patois developed in the 17th century when enslaved people from West and Central Africa were exposed to, learned, and nativized the vernacular and dialectal forms of English spoken by the slaveholders: British English, Scots language, Scots, and Hiberno-English. Jamaican Creole exhibits a gradation between more conservative Creole language, creole forms t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anansi
Anansi ( ; literally translates to ''spider'') is an Akan folktale character and the Akan God of Stories, Wisdom, Knowledge, and possibly creation. The form of a spider is the most common depiction of Anansi. He is also, sometimes considered to be God of all knowledge of stories. Taking the role of trickster, he is also one of the most important characters of West African, African American and West Indian folklore. Originating in Ghana, West Africa, these spider tales were transmitted to the Caribbean by way of the transatlantic slave trade. Anansi is best known for his ability to outsmart and triumph over more powerful opponents through his use of cunning, creativity and wit.Respond to this article at Despite taking on the role of the trickster, Anansi's actions and parables often carry him as protagonist due to his ability to transform his apparent weaknesses into virtues. He is among several West African tricksters including Br'er Rabbit and Leuk Rabbit, who have persisted ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Little Miss Muffet
"Little Miss Muffet" is an English nursery rhyme of uncertain origin, first recorded in 1805. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 20605. Wording The rhyme first appeared in print in ''Songs for the Nursery'' (1805), and there have been many variants since. ''The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes'' gives the following: :Little Miss Muffet :Sat on a tuffet, :Eating her curds and whey; :There came a big spider, :Who sat down beside her :And frightened Miss Muffet away. Older versions sometimes use "of" rather than "her" in line 3, and refer to a "little spider" as in this example dating between 1837 and 1845: :Little Miss Muffet :She sat on a tuffet, :Eating of curds and whey; :There came a little spider, :Who sat down beside her, :And frighten'd Miss Muffet away. There are several early-published versions with significant variations including "Little Mary Ester sat upon a tester" (1812) and "Little Miss Mopsey, Sat in the shopsey" (1842). Other collected variant ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mime
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Message bodies may consist of multiple parts, and header information may be specified in non-ASCII character sets. Email messages with MIME formatting are typically transmitted with standard protocols, such as the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the Post Office Protocol (POP), and the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). The MIME standard is specified in a series of requests for comments: , , , , and . The integration with SMTP email is specified in and . Although the MIME formalism was designed mainly for SMTP, its content types are also important in other communication protocols. In the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for the World Wide Web, servers insert a MIME header field at the beginning of any Web transmission. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reggae
Reggae () is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, "Do the Reggay" was the first popular song to use the word "reggae", effectively naming the genre and introducing it to a global audience. While sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to most types of popular Music of Jamaica, Jamaican dance music, the term ''reggae'' more properly denotes a particular music style that was strongly influenced by traditional mento as well as American jazz and rhythm and blues, and evolved out of the earlier genres ska and rocksteady. Reggae usually relates news, social gossip, and political commentary. It is instantly recognizable from the counterpoint between the bass and drum downbeat and the offbeat rhythm section. The immediate origins of reggae were in ska and rocksteady; from the latter, reggae took over the use of the bass as a percussion instrument. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dennis Scott (writer)
Dennis Scott (16 December 1939 – 21 February 1991) was a Jamaican poet, playwright, actor (best known for appearances on ''The Cosby Show'') and dancer. His well-known poem "Marrysong" is used in the IGCSE syllabus. He was also a theatre director and drama teacher. Biography Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Scott attended Jamaica College, where he became headboy. He was further educated at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, and taught in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago (at Presentation College), and at Yale University in the United States. While at UWI he was the assistant editor of ''Caribbean Quarterly''. Thereafter, he went to Athens, Georgia, on a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship (1970–71), and was later awarded a Commonwealth Fellowship to take an education diploma course in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He returned to teach at Jamaica College, and then became director of the School of Drama at the Cultural Training Centre in Kingston. Scott taught at the Yale School ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Distancing Effect
The distancing effect, also translated as alienation effect (german: Verfremdungseffekt or ''V-Effekt''), is a concept in performing arts credited to German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht first used the term in his essay "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" published in 1936, in which he described it as performing "in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious". Origin The term ''Verfremdungseffekt'' is rooted in the Russian Formalist notion of the device of ''making strange'' (приём отстранения ''priyom otstraneniya''), which literary critic Viktor Shklovsky claims is the essence of all art. Lemon and Reis's 1965 English translation of Shklovsky's 1917 coinage as "defamiliarization", combined with John Willett's 1964 translation of Brecht ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Class
A social class is a grouping of people into a set of Dominance hierarchy, hierarchical social categories, the most common being the Upper class, upper, Middle class, middle and Working class, lower classes. Membership in a social class can for example be dependent on education, wealth, occupation, income, and belonging to a particular subculture or social network. "Class" is a subject of analysis for List of sociologists, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and Social history, social historians. The term has a wide range of sometimes conflicting meanings, and there is no broad consensus on a definition of "class". Some people argue that due to social mobility, class boundaries do not exist. In common parlance, the term "social class" is usually synonymous with "Socioeconomic status, socio-economic class", defined as "people having the same social, economic, cultural, political or educational status", e.g., "the working class"; "an emerging professional class". H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Racism
Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity. Modern variants of racism are often based in social perceptions of biological differences between peoples. These views can take the form of social actions, practices or beliefs, or political systems in which different races are ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. There have been attempts to legitimize racist beliefs through scientific means, such as scientific racism, which have been overwhelmingly shown to be unfounded. In terms of political systems (e.g. apartheid) that support the expression of prejudice or aversion in discriminatory practices or laws, racist ideol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
