6050 WLF Guide
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
words like Thereare freedom wordslike ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ ○○○○○○○○○○○○○ freedom, sweetand sturdy black wonderful bridges tosay… mymother… asturdyBlack bridgethatI crossed overon. Viewer’s Guide The Kentucky Network Words Like Freedom/Sturdy Black Bridges is a 1997 production of KET, The Kentucky Network: Vince Spoelker, producer-director; Mary Beth Marshall, associate producer; Nancy Carpenter, executive pro- ducer. For more information about the program and air dates, contact KET at 600 Cooper Drive, Lexington, KY 40502-2296, (606) 258-7000. Viewer’s Guide © 1997, KET Foundation, Inc. ISBN: 881020-29-0 This viewer’s guide was prepared by Priscilla Hancock Cooper and produced with the support of the Kentucky Humanities Council through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Design/layout by Angela Lewis Photos by Dave Crawford The Kentucky Network Contents Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 4 Scholar’s Commentary.................................................................................................. 5 About the Artists ........................................................................................................... 7 Program Overview Words Like Freedom .................................................................................................... 8 Sturdy Black Bridges ...................................................................................................... 8 Program Elements: Oral Tradition, Poetry, and Music .................................. 9 Suggested Activities .................................................................................................... 10 Poems Included in the Program ............................................................................ 11 About the Authors ....................................................................................................... 12 Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 14 Introduction Words Like Freedom and Sturdy Black Bridges are two 30-minute programs that celebrate the African-American legacy of both the written and the spoken word. Produced by KET, the programs feature poets and performers Priscilla Hancock Cooper and Dhana Bradley-Morton, who use oral performance to breathe life into the words of African-American writers. Words Like Freedom explores the historic struggle of black people in this country for freedom and equality. Sturdy Black Bridges highlights both the pleasant and the painful realities faced by women, through the particular experiences of African-American women. Both the subject matter and the format of this video presentation provide excellent opportunities for inter- disciplinary study in literature, theatre, history, and social studies, as well as discussions of music, philosophy, and religion. At the post-secondary level, instructors in Afri- can-American, American, and women’s studies will find relevant material for study and discussion. This program can be used to address Kentucky’s Core Content for Arts and Humanities. It shows the relationship of the arts to the humanities because the poetry becomes a vehicle for articulating complex issues and concepts about human relations and behavior. In addition to helping students respond to the video program, this guide provides suggestions for activities that will allow students to create and perform as well. In particular, the program and guide address these specific Kentucky learning goals and academic expectations: GOAL 1—Students are able to use basic communica- tion … skills for purposes and situations they will encounter throughout their lives. (objectives 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.11, 1.12) GOAL 2—Students shall develop their abilities to apply core concepts and principles from … the arts, the humanities, social studies … to what they will encounter throughout their lives. (social studies objectives 2.14, 2.17, 2.20 and arts and humanities objectives 2.23, 2.24, 2.26) GOAL 5—Students shall develop their abilities to think and solve problems in school situations and in a variety of situations they will encounter in life. (all objectives) 4 ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ Commentary “beinalive&beinawoman&bein unsilenced voices of African Americans generally, and of African-American women particularly, in the New World. coloredisametaphysicaldilemma/ Cooper and Morton’s careful selections and professional Ihaven’tconqueredyet”1 performances of canonical and original African-American literary pieces highlight the diversity and the complexity of African-American experience. A celebration of history and (her)story, rhythm, music, song, and language, their program affords both secondary school teachers and A Scholar’s Commentary on Words Like students an opportunity to explore other multilayered Freedom/Sturdy Black Bridges textures of the human condition and to witness the artis- tic, political, and individual triumphs of the human spirit. By Neal A. Lester, Ph.D., Arizona State University The video format allows teachers and students to experience the rich cadences and nuances of African- Not one African-American author is included in the American language. The video component especially dem- 1990 revised edition of Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great onstrates the centrality of performance and movement in Books of the Western World—a 37,000-page, 60-volume African-American culture evidenced in everything from collection of “great classics on topics from physics to the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s rhyming rhythms and singer Patti philosophy and everything in between.”2 Given that every- LaBelle’s physical contortions to Johnnie Cochran’s thing from aesthetics of beauty to standards regarding preacherly persona in the closing arguments of the O.J. English language is Eurocentric and Anglo-middle-class-, Simpson criminal trial. The rest of this guide further makes white-male-dominated in American society, it’s little won- the poems accessible by offering various suggested activi- der that Great Books Editor Philip Goetz would “justify” ties to excite students’ imaginations and encourage their the exclusion of black writers from this massive work, own exercises in independent critical thinking, research, insisting that “Blacks generally only write one to two item and performance. [idea] books, but we don’t consider those to be great in Cooper and Morton have assembled here in selection the sense that others are” (emphasis mine). and presentation a cultural feast, one that invites the Supporting Goetz’s philosophical and ultimately politi- participation of all. In the process of offering spiritual cal position, Editor-in-Chief Mortimer Adler offhandedly nourishment, their program not only identifies, explains, dismisses: “I think probably in the next and legitimizes a “colloquial universal,” but also challenges century there will be some Black that writes a great book, but there hasn’t been so far” (emphasis mine).3 Among the 130 authors in the collection are only four women, all white—Jane Austen, Willa Cather, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.4 If texts written by women and minorities about their experi- ences are discovered, they are subjectively deemed “marginal” and less important than white middle-class males’ texts with their alleged “universals.” In their poetic performances Words Like Freedom and Sturdy Black Bridges, Priscilla Hancock Cooper and Dhana Bradley- Morton challenge head-on the Western imperialist notions represented by such an icon as Great Books by showcasing the 5 ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ Commentary continued the historical and cultural neglect and misrepresentation of African-American experiences, substantiating what 1993 Nobel Prize recipient and black female author Toni Morrison offers as personal testimonial: “Whatever I know as a Black person, and whatever my perceptions are as a woman, it is not marginal in any sense of the word. It’s an enhancement.” Notes 1Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (New York: Bantam, 1980), p. 48. 2Michelle McCalope, “Blacks Furious Over Exclusion from New Great Books of the Western World,” Jet (19 No- vember 1990), p. 14. 3Ibid. 4Edwin McDowell, “Great Books Takes in Moderns and Women,” New York Times (25 October 1990), p. C26. Dr. Neal A. Lester is a professor of English at Ari- zona State University, where he teaches African-American literature. He has published widely on African-American culture and on the works of such black women writers as Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ntozake Shange. His book Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays (Gar- land, 1995) is the first comprehensive examination of the dramas of this important contemporary African-American poet-playwright. 6 ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ AbouttheArtists Priscilla Hancock A Virginia Cooper and Dhana native and gradu- Bradley-Morton are ate of Western spoken-word artists Kentucky Univer- whose creative col- sity, Dhana has laboration began in taught reading Louisville, Kentucky and English and more than 15 years served as poet-in- ago. Their first “poetic residence for concert,” I Have Been various school Hungry All My Years, was systems. She is presented at the 1981 Priscilla Dhana founder, president, National Conference Hancock Bradley- and HSIC (Head on the Black Family. In Cooper