Cultural Studies

This contemporary portrait of folkloric traditions in Cuba, focusing on the everyday life of musicians and dancers.

This video follows the world-famous Chicago Children's Choir on their 1996 tour of South Africa and shows how music can convey a message of peace.

This video, which documents one of the oldest cultural festivals in the Western Hemisphere, celebrates the vitality of calypso music today on the island of Barbados.

This second video from the "Journey in Music" series chronicles the philosophy, history, and techniques of percussion instruments, focusing on drums and other musical instruments from West Africa, the Caribbean, Japan and India.

This first video from the "Journey in Music" series surveys the history and musical heritage of string instruments, from ancient times to the present day, including string instruments from China (Zheng), Iran (Santuri), Greece (Bouzuki) and Spain (Guitar), among others, and concludes with an unusual jam session featuring all of these classic instruments.

This video traces the forgotten roots and celebrates the continuing legacy of Blues music in the Mississippi Delta, interweaving rare archival footage of the South's sharecropping era with performances by Blues veterans Muddy Waters, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Howlin' Wolf.

Hosted by Cheech Marin, this documentary examines the work of several Hispanic- American writers and how their poems, short stories and novels reflect what it means and what it's like to grow up Hispanic in America.

Set against a background of farming, saw-milling and moonshining activities in rural Kentucky during the Depression, this short film dramatizes the use of violence as a socially accepted form of "folk justice."

Celebrates the traditional art of storytelling through profiles of three storytellers--Judith Black, whose stories explore the Jewish immigrant experience; Michael Cotter, a Minnesota farmer whose stories focus on the extraordinary qualities of ordinary people; and Rex Ellis, whose stories deal with the historical period of enslavement of Afro- Americans.

Portrays the day-long Bloomsday celebration, when James Joyce devotees annually recreate and relive, through role-playing and readings, the famous odyssey of Leopold Bloom around Dublin on June 16th, 1904, as immortalized in Joyce's classic novel, Ulysses.

Scandalize My Name examines the way Red Scare politics were used to impede the emergence of African-Americans as full participants in the political, social, and cultural aspects of postwar American life. Because television was born into this era and adopted the political attitudes of the time, the story is told through the confrontations of African-American performers with blacklists, loyalty oaths, and discrimination in casting.