Information about Contributors
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Thomas A. Green is an Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at Texas A&M University. Among his publications are Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music and Art, Martial Arts in the Modern World, and Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia of History and Innovation. He has served as Film Review Editor and Special Issue Editor (Folk Drama) for the Journal of American Folklore. His most recent research focuses on martial arts as cultural symbols. Current fieldwork projects focus on vernacular martial arts in Shandong Province, China.
John Laudun is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisiana. His research focuses on culture and creativity. He is currently working on a detailed examination of a material folk culture tradition, an indigenous amphibious vehicle that occurs in south Louisiana, trying to understand how landscape, imagination, and tradition intersect across a diffuse network of individuals. His work appears in a number of journals, including Southern Folklore, Midwestern Folklore, Folklore Forum, and African American Review, as well as in a number of anthologies and trade publications.
J. Akuma-Kalu Njoku is an Associate Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology in the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology at Western Kentucky University. His research interest focuses on issues and folklore surrounding forced relocations and settlement patterns, group survival, and re-establishment of ethnic community traditions. His goal is to reconnect, in culturally significant ways, the Igbo people and African Americans of Igbo descent. Njoku is the author of Amamihe: The Basis of Igbo Culture and Character Formation, ENYI BIAFRA: Regimental Drill, Duty Songs, and Cadences from Biafra, and the forthcoming book From Freedom to Freedom: Journeying Back to Heal the Wounds of the Atlantic Slave Trade. His work has also appeared in Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Interior of the Bight of Biafra and the African Diaspora, Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World, and Th e Aftermath of Slavery: Transitions and Transformations in Southeastern Nigeria.
Teresa N. Washington is the Ann Petry Endowed Professor in English at Grambling State University. She is the author of Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Àjẹ́ in Africana Literature. Her work has also been published in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations); Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature; African American Review; Journal of Pan-African Studies; and FEMSPEC, among other publications. At present she is writing a booklength analysis of masculine magnificence in Africana life, lyrics, and literature, wherein the issues addressed in this article find greater elaboration. [End Page 386]
