Turn the World Upside Down - Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future by Imani D Owens

About the Book

Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators' relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world.

Book Synopsis

Honorable Mention, 2024 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award, Caribbean Studies Association

Shortlisted, 2024 MSA Prize for a First Book, Modernist Studies Association

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday "folk." Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators' relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world.

Turn the World Upside Down explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly--that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive--from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince--Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture--and Blackness itself--as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making.

Review Quotes

Turn the World Upside Down profoundly recreates the literary and cultural history of Black diasporic modernism. Working across national and linguistic borders, the book brings a richly comparative method to texts too often siloed in disciplinary and area studies scholarship, from works by U.S. literary icons like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston to less-studied figures like the Cuban performer Eusebia Cosme. Imani D. Owens's 'critical return to folk culture' will forever change how readers approach the beautiful 'unruliness' and asymmetry of Black cultural expression.--Sonya Posmentier, author of Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature

Turn the World Upside Down is a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on early twentieth-century Black folk culture in the Americas. This truly innovative and complex study ranges across linguistic and national boundaries and represents a major contribution to the fields of African diaspora studies, Caribbean studies, and American studies--Aaron Kamugisha, author of Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition

Original and compelling, Turn the World Upside Down invests in and expands Black diaspora studies, displays stunning archival research, and highlights heretofore unseen connections and underread texts next to highly known figures in the field.--Samantha Pinto, author of Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights

Thoughtfully written and creatively argued, Turn the World Upside Down is both fascinating and timely. Imani Owens innovatively theorizes the idea of folk culture to bring new insights to the field by helping us to rethink our understanding of "folk culture" and its manifold functions in African diasporic cultures. In fact, Owens performs a disruption of her own by bringing together US empire studies and New Southern Studies to offer a multilingual, comparative, transnational analysis that enriches and deepens our readings of African diasporic literatures and cultures.--Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, author of Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction

About the Author

Imani D. Owens is associate professor of English at Rutgers University.