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Come home Charley Patton
Sales Date: 2013-02-27
A moving and imaginative memoir documenting the Civil Rights Era, contemporary southern culture, and Lemon's private and public art practice
Come home Charley Patton is a moving and an imaginative memoir documenting the Civil Rights Era and contemporary southern culture. Intricately layered and deeply arresting, Ralph Lemon's research on the African American experience intertwines personal anecdotes and family remembrances with diaristic accounts of the making of a dance, as Lemon journeys the mythic roads of migration—visiting the sites of lynchings, following the paths of Civil Rights marches, and meeting the descendants of early blues musicians. Come home Charley Patton is a rich, transcendent text, and a historically-charged meditation on memory in America. It is a formidable finale for the Geography trilogy (including Geography and Tree), three books connected thematically by racial identity and the related dance projects choreographed by Lemon. Generously illustrated with family photos, original art, and photos of the performance, the book will take its place in the canon of great African American writing.
RALPH LEMON is a distinguished dancer, choreographer, writer, and visual artist. He lives in New York City.
"Motion is intrinsic to Lemon's understanding of the world, and this graceful, meditative, and unveiling odyssey, told in dancing language and kinetic drawings and photographs, reframes and recharges still hidden, still painful stories of the perplexities of race and freedom."
~Donna Seaman, Booklist
"Critically-acclaimed choreographer and dancer Ralph Lemon's new book is a memoir, an experimental art installation, and a rigorous critical study that resonates with power and showcases his gifts as a storyteller and cultural critic. Come home Charley Patton is a poignant and imaginative work that contributes to the growing field of scholarship on African American travel and critical journeys linked to excavating the political and socio-historical past. It is at once mysterious, enigmatic, and provocative."
~Daphne Brooks, professor of English, Princeton University
"Come home Charley Patton floats between memoir and dream, history and fable, family and fantasy. Generous, informative, personal and shrewd, this is a compelling self-portrait of Lemon's art and life, love and grief. Drawings, poems, maps, lyrics, and stories are all choreographed here to stage Lemon's intoxicating life-dance."
~Peggy Phelan, professor of drama and English, Stanford University
"Critically-acclaimed choreographer and dancer Ralph Lemon's new book is a memoir, an experimental art installation, and a rigorous critical study that resonates with power and showcases his gifts as a storyteller and cultural critic. Come home Charley Patton is a poignant and imaginative work that contributes to the growing field of scholarship on African American travel and critical journeys linked to excavating the political and socio-historical past. It is at once mysterious, enigmatic, and provocative."
~Daphne Brooks, professor of English, Princeton University
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