Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} King Comus by William Demby King Comus by William Demby. UPDATED. CALL FOR PAPERS. WILLIAM DEMBY INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM. May 31-June 1, 2018. University of Rome, La Sapienza. In his foreword to a reissue of William Demby’s landmark novel The Catacombs (1965), Nathan A. Scott, Jr., bemoaned that “by some unfortunate miscarriage of advertisement the fiction of William Demby over more than a generation has remained little known and is not today generally accorded the prominence in the canon of Afro-American literature that it deserves” (Northeastern Library of Black Literature, 1991, ix). This two-day symposium will address this critical gap and commemorate the life and work of the late African American author William Demby (1922-2013). Demby spent decades living in Rome following his service in Italy during World War II. Scholars will discuss Demby’s work as a novelist, reporter, and screenwriter, translator, and actor for the Italian cinema. The symposium will pay particular attention to Demby’s final novel, King Comus , which was completed in 2007, but remained in manuscript form at the time of Demby’s death in 2013. The author’s son, James Demby, will deliver a reading from the novel, which the Ishmael Reed Publishing Company will release in November 2017. We welcome papers devoted to Demby’s literature written in Italy, including Beetlecreek (1950), The Catacombs (1965), and King Comus (2017), and his work in the Italian cinema, as well as papers that provide historical context for the postwar cultural scene in Rome. In addition to panels and plenary talks, the symposium will present evening screenings of some of Demby’s films, including Il Peccato di Anna (1953), a retelling of Othello set in Rome, in which Demby played a supporting role, and Congo Vivo (1962), co-written with his wife, Italian writer Lucia Drudi Demby. The symposium will take place at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, Rome’s largest university, and will be conducted in English. Participants will have a unique opportunity to consider Demby’s cultural achievements and legacy in the inimitable setting of the Eternal City, home for decades to Demby and inspiration for much of his work. The event will be co-organized by Ugo Rubeo (University of Rome, La Sapienza) and Melanie Masterton Sherazi (California Institute of Technology). Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to Ugo Rubeo’s and Melanie Masterton Sherazi’s attention at: [email protected] by December 1, 2017. General inquiries about the event may also be sent to this email address. Notifications will be made by December 20, 2017. Topics may include, but are not limited to: -Form, style, and content, and/or socio-political and historical contexts, etc., in Beetlecreek (1950), The Catacombs (1965), and/or King Comus (2017) -Demby’s work’s relationship to Rome and/or Italy. -Demby’s leftist cohorts in literature and/or film. -Demby’s work in the Italian cinema as a screenwriter, translator, and/or actor. -Demby’s work’s experimentalism. -Demby and modernism. -Demby and postmodernism. -Demby and postwar black internationalism. -Demby’s transnational work in journalism for periodicals including Epoca , Harper’s , etc. 2 Books Published by Ishmael Reed Publishing on Our Site — Book Cover Mosaic. With this publication of the novel “King Comus,” William Demby caps his already great literary achievements as the author of the now classic novels “Beetlecreek (1950),” “The Catacombs (1965),” and “Love Story Black (1978).” The product of twenty years of literary labor, “King Comus” was completed in 2007, and remained in manuscript form at the time Demby died in 2013. The last of the Black novelists who served in World War II, Demby was honored with the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. In “King Comus,” William Demby employs a cinematic-like style to track the paths of an escaped slave, two African American World War II servicemen, their white commanding officer and a black female gospel singer as they converge in a time-bending tale of survival and kinship. Narrated in part by his descendant, Tillman, a World War II GI serving in Italy, it follows the escaped slave and master musician, known as King Comus, on his extraordinary journey to freedom. Tillman relates his family’s history to a fellow serviceman named D., whose role in this mysterious tale includes some parallels to the author’s life story. When the plotline turns to the twenty-first century, these veterans unite in Italy with their white commanding officer, Joe Stabat, to stage a colossal global gospel summit in Rome, featuring the gospel star, Little Antioch. “King Comus” weaves elements of the neo-slave narrative and Afrofuturism into a panoramic vision encompassing the forces of empire, race, gender, and religion. It may well come to be considered Demby’s masterpiece. NN Today. Once every decade or so, a classic novel is rediscovered from the heap pile of obscurity, casting new light on an author who has been grievously overlooked, undervalued or simply unpublished. Ambitious in scope, epic in its timebend narratives that range from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to World War II in Italy to modern-day neo- slave narratives and black speculative fiction, and absolutely dazzling in its comical clash between debauchery and redemption, William Demby’s posthumously published King Comus is such a novel for our generation. Honored with the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, Demby has been recognized as one of the great post-modernist writers— or anti-modernist, according to some critics—whose experimental novel based in Rome, The Catacombs, was hailed by the New York Times as “one of the two important black novels of the 1960s.” Dividing his time between Italy and New York, Demby died in 2013, at the age of 90, leaving behind the King Comus manuscript, decades in the making, of what he called “a world yearning and primed for a new wave of belief.” Thanks to Ishmael Reed Publishing, the recovered King Comus has just been released. King Comus is Demby’s final masterpiece, a Miltonesque refashioning of the ancient myth of revelry that abandons, in the words of the narrator’s ironic homage to Renaissance pageantry, “certain vain and useless literary conventions as to the nature or not of narrative realism”: But forgive me for I am rambling and the truth is I don’t know quite how to proceed, for I am an ant traveling over one of those enormous Tapestries of Time, and I shall make mistakes of fact and observation, and may not see in time what was there to see before attempting to climb up yet another mountain of colored thread. and so, therefore, and without further ado and unseemly apologies before the fact, let us now hasten swiftly back in time to a certain night in Vienna, the night of June 8, 1815. A visionary at heart, and witty, complex and wily in his aspirations, Demby abandoned those useless literary conventions back in the late 1940s, when he decided as a Fisk University graduate and as a former soldier in the “all-Negro horse cavalry battalion” in Italy to leave the United States and return to Rome with a suitcase of fancy clothes, a clarinet and the literary dreams of reinventing himself in the aftermath of World War II. Based in Rome’s vibrant post-war film and arts community, Demby became a collaborator and translator for Italy’s famed neorealism film directors, including Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Federico Fellini, served as a reporter for various Italian and American newspapers, and soon published a groundbreaking first novel on race relations and fundamentalism in West Virginia in 1950. In its review of Beetlecreek, which had taken its title from a Thomas Wolfe story, The New Yorker hailed the emerging novelist’s entrance onto the literary stage: “It would be hard to give Mr. Demby too much praise for the skill with which he has maneuvered the relationships in this book.” “Demby’s troubled townsfolk of the West Virginia mining region foreshadow present dilemmas,” fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps noted. “The pressing and resisting social forces in this season of our discontent and the fatal paralysis of those of us unable or unwilling to act are clearly anticipated with the dependable second sight of a true artist.” The true artist, however, clearly ahead of his times and defiant of any literary or cultural pigeonhole, somehow disappeared from the canons of American literature. Featuring Demby as his own narrator, aside the soliloquies of his war-time pal Tillman, King Comus unfolds through wildly interchanging and entertaining narratives and sweeping plot lines from the concert halls of Europe, the markets of enslaved Africans in New Orleans and a harrowing escape of an enslaved musician across the Mississippi River to the machinations of a cadre of WWII soldiers in Italy to a re-enactment of Ancient Roman Emperor Constantine’s ’Vision of the Cross” and the reincarnation of Prester John, “that wise Ethiopic king of antiquity.” “When complexity becomes simplicity, when we think everything is clear, we say, now I understand,” Demby told me in an interview for The Bloomsbury Review years ago. “But the moment it becomes clear, another set of complexities emerges. This is the cycle of history.” The novel should return William Demby to his rightful place in avant garde 20th Century literature, if only for the reader to experience its epic gospel finale: “A unique once in a lifetime media event featuring thirty-three gospel/rock choirs from