1 Abstracts I.POETRY America Has Still Got The

Home , Ed Dorn, Pieces of a Man, The Bottle, Thomas McGrath (poet), Winter in America

Abstracts

I.POETRY

America has still got the blues…

Patricia Kabous, Bordeaux Montaigne University

This paper analyses the poem/song “Bicentennial Blues” written in 1976 in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the American republic by the poet, novelist, and musician Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011). As the birth of the nation is the matrix, Gil Scott-Heron redraws the history of America from his own perspective in relation to the tradition of the blues to make his point and to conclude that America has got the blues. By examining the poem/song, I will show that the poem/song redraws the history of the blues, which is a clear reflection of the history of the American nation. It allows Gil Scott-Heron to play on the word blues as the poem/song is a blues (the story of how the blues came to be and what it signifies in American culture date back to slavery), adopts the shape of a blues, and says/sings the blues of the nation on that particular year. The central message Scott-Heron wants to voice is that the Declaration of Independence (1776) and its three principles of equality, liberty and justice are still hampered for his community, the Black community, within the nation. The dream enshrined in the Declaration of Independence is still a dream deferred, hence the political and social setting which inspires “Bicentennial Blues.” Key events, major figures in Black history are mentioned; references are made to current events while Gil Scott-Heron manages to convey a clear and poetic view of his society.

An Alphabet for Gil Scott-Heron

Vincent Dussol, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier3

Gil Scott-Heron was very much a man of his time. As a black man, he was willing to consider the more radical alternatives in order to bring on change, now! As an American poet, he responded to the national and international issues of the day. Although he made no mystery of his personal and cultural debts to heritage, he had no patience with nostalgia and distrusted determinism. His life was his own. Being of his time meant that he was focused on tomorrow as a forever possible new morning. This made him, in important ways, a man ahead of his time, a whistleblower. He ran fast, he ran too fast, knew about the hazards involved and kept carving out pauses in his seeker’s rush towards a mysterious and elusive goal but he would not dodge the consequences of his choices. Those are some of the points my alphabet will go through, or, rather, run through.

1 II.MUSIC and LIFE WRITING

“But Is That Jazz?”: Genre and Identity in the Music of Gil Scott-Heron

Bertram D. Ashe, Professor of English and American Studies, University of Richmond

Gil Scott-Heron’s most famous song, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” could be classified as jazz, as could less obvious tunes like “Pieces of a Man.” “Is That Jazz?” is easily his most straight-ahead jazz tune. At the same time, however, his own relationship to the word “jazz”—and to the sound of jazz—is exceedingly complicated. (Here, for example, is a YouTube comment on “Lady Day and John Coltrane”: “you know what i like about this song? it's not a jazz song, but it's a song about jazz.”) Scott-Heron’s music operates in a zone that defies easy generic categorization, a situation he obliquely addresses on “Is That Jazz?,” from the 1984 album Reflections. During the era of Scott-Heron’s greatest productivity jazz itself was undergoing what might be called a prolonged identity crisis, and Scott-Heron could be said to have weighed in—with his lyrics, and with his musical sound—on what jazz was, where it came from, where it was headed, what it was for, and what black folk should think about it. Since Scott-Heron was never one to shy away from offering his thoughts and opinions about whatever was on his mind, what’s fascinating about jazz and Gil Scott-Heron is that his “argument,” if you will, while forthright, is not exactly coherent. As a result, much of what can be gleaned from his words and music must not only be heard but must be inferred. “‘But Is That Jazz?’: Genre and Identity in the Music of Gil Scott-Heron” will straighten out and clarify Scott-Heron’s seemingly sideways and murky relationship to the sound of jazz and the term “jazz”—profitably grappling with the complicated layers of genre and identity in Scott- Heron’s music.

Gil Scott-Heron: Life/Live writing

Claudine Raynaud, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier3

Gil Scott-Heron’s The Last Holiday. A Memoir was published posthumously in 2012. The publisher Jamie Byng and the editor Tom Mohr have transformed the notes given piecemeal from the late 90s to Scott-Heron’s death into a chronological narrative. The text is divided into two sections: the first part, devoted to his childhood memories and schooling, and the second part that focuses on the concert tour of the 80s with Steve Wonder to have Martin Luther King’s birthday proclaimed a national holiday. An “Interlude” gives the reader an overview of what the initial draft was like at the core of the volume. The book’s intent was to omit the period of drug addiction and the jail sentences, hence the question of the status of this text as autobiography. The lyrics of the songs-poems can thus be more illuminating than the “memoir” to relate the musician’s moods, life trials and thoughts, while other narrative sections echo some of the lyricism of the poetry. In the image of the poem “Pieces of a Man,” the text is ultimately made up of fragments, of patches. The broken-up narrative, interspaced with poems and nostalgic of Scott-Heron’s initial vocation as a novelist, resounds with the voice, the sounds, and the wordplay of the live performances. Like them, they reach out to the reader-“brother” to tell him/her “Don’t Give Up.”

2 III.HISTORY

“There Will Be No Pictures of Pigs Shooting Down Brothers on the Instant Replay”: Surveillance, Death, and Black Power ethos in the works of Gil Scott-Heron.

Indya J. Jackson, Department of English, Ohio State University

For this project I am chiefly interested in assessing how, what I locate as a “Black Power ethos,” 1) characterizes the work of Gil Scott-Heron and 2) how this ethos is informed by Heron’s first and secondhand encounters with racialized targeting by the white power structure. Necessarily then, my work examines songs, poems, memoir, interviews, FBI records and additional government records authored by and about Heron.

In following, I am thinking about the author’s responses as linked to two thematic categories: surveillance and (social) death. For my purposes, I envision surveillance as a category which encompasses Heron’s responses to criminalization, servitude, invisibility, isolation, alienation and imprisonment. Likewise, I am envisioning death as a category which also encompasses the author’s responses to imprisonment1 in addition to violence, depravation, and fear.

Importantly, I examine the Black Power Era as its emergence at the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement exemplifies a changing ethos within the Black community. I read this emergent “Black Power ethos” as inextricably bound to changes in the community’s collective understanding of and responses to death and surveillance. Though a multifaceted artist with a career expanding several decades, Gil Scott-Heron is most often associated with poetry, writings, and music conducted during the Black Power Era (1965-1981). Arguably, the preeminent Black Power Era musician, Heron has produced works which offer a rich, diverse archive of sociopolitical thought representative of the era’s zeitgeist — a Black Power ethos.

Engaging in this project, then, will allow for an examination of the Black Power ethos by means of assessing Heron’s discussions of surveillance and death. “How does Heron discuss surveillance?” “How does Heron discuss death?,” "How does Heron respond to surveillance and death?" These are the questions that will primarily guide my work.

Ultimately, as this project continues to take shape, I envision generating a document which expands upon existing treatment of Black Power Era literature by improving knowledge of how the Era’s character/ethos/zeitgeist developed in response to the ever-salient themes of death and surveillance.

1 While I locate imprisonment as a tool for surveillance, I also recognize imprisonment a form

Writing America: A Comparison between Gil Scott-Heron’s “Winter in America” and Childish Gambino/Donald Glover’s “This Is America”

Melba Joyce Boyd, Wayne State University, Detroit

Gil Scott-Heron was a multi-talented force and a dominant influence during the Black Arts Movement. Likewise, Donald Glover/Childish Gambino is a multi-talented artist, who was

3 named by Time Magazine in 2017 as one of the 100 most influential figures in the world. As major cultural figures, their creative expressions engage political radicalism, project authentic voices and demonstrate commitment to progressive change during their respective time periods. This presentation will consider how Heron’s complicated career influenced artistic expression across genres, which was reflective of the interdisciplinary collaboration between musicians, visual artists and poets that some African American artists, such as myself, incorporated in the post Black Arts periods. But more specifically, a comparison of Heron’s “Winter in America” to Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” will demonstrate striking similarities in theme, creative approaches and styles. Artistic performance and the aesthetics of the lyrics of both songs will be examined to delineate the patterns and parallels that demonstrate the connections between Heron and Glover, one of today’s most talented and provocative artists.

Gil Scott-Heron and Washington, DC

Giovanni Russonello, jazz critic, New York Times

Gil Scott-Heron is widely understood as one of the major griots in U.S. history. A witness, a soothsayer and an advocate, he told the stories of his community at a time of great promise and change. For that reason, there is no way to tell the story of Scott-Heron’s life and work without also telling a broader story of the United States at that time—and particularly that of Washington, D.C., his adopted hometown, a place bursting with its own historical importance throughout the 1970s and ’80s. This was the city that gave him strength and inspiration; he had the people of D.C. in mind when he composed many of his most popular and stirring songs, such as “The Bottle,” “Winter in America” and “Angel Dust.”

Proudly known as “Chocolate City,” Washington, D.C. was then the crown jewel of Black America, and in the decades that followed the Civil Rights Movement it became an open experiment in Black self-governance, activism, entrepreneurship and radical art. As the United States awoke in a hangover from the 1960s, D.C. stood as a beacon of promise, a majority- Black town finally ready to elect its own leaders and determine its own future. As James Forman, Jr. wrote in Locking Up Our Own, “D.C. was becoming increasingly attractive to a generation of educated, politicized blacks … a domestic front in the global black nationalist struggle.” There is an entire history waiting to be written of Black Washington during this era, and the creative storytelling of Gil Scott-Heron provides a perfect lens through which to view it. This paper will explore how the music venues, city blocks, artist collectives and political gathering spots of Black Washington — each one vested with its own rich history — shaped Scott-Heron’s understanding of American politics and life, and how his music gave voice to the experiences of Black Washingtonians. It will also make significant strides toward assembling a history of the local leaders, artists and cultural institutions that made D.C. such a hotbed of Black organizing and political imagination at a time when the nation’s African-American community was establishing a new roadmap toward self-governance and autonomy.

4 IV. MEDIA and the MOVIES

The Medium is the Message but there is a Message for the Messenger

Justin Randolph Thompson, New Media Artist, Professor and Lecturer of Art at New York University Florence, Santa Reparata International School of Art and Lorenzo De Medici Institute and Director of Post Bac in Studio Art at Studio Arts College International, Director and Co-Founder of Black History Month Florence

Gil Scott-Heron took on the role of the urban griot focused on the language and exchange of the streets to mitigate mass media’s political omissions and falsified version of Black agency. His consistent socio-political re-tellings and his critique of media from B-Movie to The Revolution Will Not Be Televised anchor a critique of media oppression which carries through the contemporary moment and its media saturation. This paper examines the legacy of Gil Scott Heron as an anti media mediator translating socio-political discourse and current events into poignant critique. Scott-Heron’s legacy is crossfaded through the media theory of Marshall McCluhan as a means for examining the subversive nature of the mass media he dismantled through the eternal The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The trajectory from Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of media through the poignant rejection of the media of television in Scott-Heron’s work on through The Disposable Heroes of Hypocrisy’s Television the Drug of the Nation invigorates a much-needed critical examination of the effects of media on politically dissonant critique and vision. Positioning the artist as an advocate for Black thought, I examine the necessity of poetic language as linked to a broader realm of artistic expression across mediums as a powerful means for evading the trappings and shortcomings of the systematic control of Blackness and the steadying of its legibility. The re-calibration of value is the work of the artist unsettling cultural and economic values and tripping the default on the image of Blackness as sold unflinchingly through flattened portrayals or outright omissions. Gil Scott-Heron gifts to us a demand for “wokeness” and a “de-colonization of the mind” before we had a language to theorize this and McLuhan provides pivotal insight to the ethereal and insidious role of media in shaping a political “un-consciousness”.

From Reel to Real: Scott-Heron's Engagement with the Movies

Laurent Tamanini, University of Poitiers

The aim of this paper is to question the multifaceted artist's relationship with the movies and visual culture, by exploring the various fields of Scott-Heron's artistic production (poems, novels, songs, stand-up acts and film performances). Despite his distrust of the image-making industry and his reluctance to take part in a commodified mass-culture, Scott-Heron has collaborated on several occasions with filmmakers: writing the musical score for a blaxploitation movie with The Baron, (1977) or appearing in concert films interspersed with spoken-word performances (Black Wax, 1982, Cool Runnings: the Reggae Movie, 1983). We will ask to what extent these innovative forms of filmmaking offered the artist an appropriate counter-model to mass-media representations and allowed him to convey radical discourses to a larger audience.

5 As a poet, a novelist or a songwriter, Scott-Heron has used intertextual references to the movies in order to question the state of politics of his time and to expose the extensive use of public relations techniques based on myths conveyed by Hollywood. From his debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970) to the “B-Movie” and “Re-Ron” poems of the 80s, Scott- Heron has compellingly re-appropriated the narratives and icons of mass culture in order to reveal the counterfeit nature of the real that was presented to American audiences. Elaborating with sardonic wit on the embodiment by Ronald Reagan of western hero archetypes or subverting the conventions of science-fiction B-movies of the Cold War era, the poet-performer has relied on a wide range of rhetorical strategies and poetic devices so as to highlight and counter the manufacturing of illusions that promotes Conservative ideologies. We wish to demonstrate that, when dealing with the filmic and the visual, words (written, spoken, accompanied or not with music) offer perspectives which Scott-Heron recognized as both liberating and efficient to inform and educate the community.

6 Bios (following the order of the program)

Aldon Lynn Nielsen is a poet and critic. He was a student in the classes Gil Scott-Heron taught at Federal City College. Nielsen currently serves as the George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature at The Pennsylvania State University. His critical works include Reading Race, Writing between the Lines, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction, Black Chant, and Integral Music. His books of poetry include Heat Strings, Evacuation Routes, Stepping Razor, VEXT, Mixage, Mantic Semantic, A Brand New Beggar, Tray, and You Didn't Hear This from Me. Nielsen was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for Poetry, and has also received the Darwin Turner Award, The Kayden Prize, the SAMLA Studies Prize, the Josephine MIles Award, and two Gertrude Stein Awards. With Lauri Ramey he has edited two anthologies of innovative poetry by African American writers. With Laura Vrana, he has edited The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas, which will appear later this year. He has taught previously at George Washington University, Howard University, San Jose State University, UCLA and Loyola Marymount University. In the summers, he teaches at Central China Normal University in Wuhan.

Patricia Kabous, holds a Ph.D in American literature. She teaches English in high school in Bordeaux and at the University of Bordeaux. She completed her doctoral dissertation from the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne. Her doctoral work was on John Edgar Wideman (John Edgar Wideman: Beyond Heritage). As a member of Passages at the University of Bordeaux- Montaigne, she has taken part in the translation of poems and in the editing of two collections of poetry A Little Bird Told Me (2014) by Olive Senior and The Mango of Poetry (2019) by Lorna Goodison. She has also translated short stories by John Edgar Wideman and two unpublished plays by Tennessee Williams, A Lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur (1979) and The Two Character- Play (1967).

Vincent Dussol is Associate Professor of American Literature at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. His field is American poetry. He is the author of articles on H.D., Black Mountain (Ed Dorn), the Beats (Lew Welch, Philip Whalen), Language poets (Ray Di Palma), Thomas McGrath, Leland Hickman, Merrill Gilfillan and Eleni Sikelianos. He has edited a volume on epic The Epic Expands/ Elle s’étend l’épopée, P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2012. He recently contributed a chapter to Whitman & Dickinson: a colloquy, a volume edited by Éric Athenot & Cristanne Miller for The Iowa Whitman Series published by the University of Iowa Press. He has translated seven collections of poetry (by Fanny Howe, Ray DiPalma, Chuck Miller) as well as Charles Olson’s Mayan Letters. A volume of essays entitled Poetry/Translation/Film coedited (with Adriana Şerban) came out this year. His translation of Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend is under way. Prose writers he has written on include James Kelman, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Ayn Rand. He is currently completing (with Jacques-Henri Coste) the edition of a volume entitled The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel to be published by Palgrave/Macmillan in 2020. He gave his first talk on Gil Scott-Heron at Palacký University Olomouc in the Czech Republic in 2016.

7 Bertram Ashe’s research focuses on late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literature and culture. Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles (Agate, 2015), his current book, explores issues of black male identity, black vernacular culture, and black hair by narrating the journey of locking his hair while also exploring the history and cultural resonances of the dreadlock hairstyle in America. He teaches and writes about contemporary American culture, primarily post-Civil Rights Movement African American literature and culture (often referred to as “post-blackness” or the “post-soul aesthetic”), as well as the black vernacular triumvirate of black hair, basketball, and jazz. His first book, From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African- American Fiction (Routledge, 2002) tracks the development of the African American “frame text,” from Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman through John Edgar Wideman’s “Doc’s Story,” with chapters that focus on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man along the way.

Claudine Raynaud, Professor of American Studies at Paul-Valéry University Montpellier 3, has taught in England (Birmingham and Liverpool) and the United States (Michigan, Northwestern and Oberlin). A Fellow at the Du Bois Institute (Harvard, 2005), she was vice president of the CEAA when Michel Fabre was its president, has headed GRAAT, the nationwide African American Studies Research Group in Tours, and works at the CNRS (ITEM). She is the author of Toni Morrison: L’Esthétique de la survie (1996) and numerous articles on black autobiography (Hurston, Wright, Baldwin, Lorde, Angelou), Joyce and feminist theory. Her most notable publications are two contributions to Cambridge Companions: ‘Coming of Age in the African American Novel’ (2004) and ‘Beloved or the Shifting Shapes of Memory’ (2007), the co-edition of a collection of essays on Gloria Naylor (L’Harmattan, 2012) and a book chapter on Hurston’s Tell my Horse in Afromodernisms (Edinburgh UP, 2013). She has just coedited two volumes of Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ (PULM, 2014, 2016) and the anthology Troubled Legacies: Heritage/Inheritance in Minority American Literatures (with Michel Feith, CSP, 2015). Her translation with a scholarly introduction of Sojourner Truth’s Narrative (PURH) came out in 2017. In 2018 she coedited an issue of ELA (#44) on Afropolitanism and RFEA (#154) on African American Modernism and, in 2019, The Self as Other in Minority American Life Writing with Nelly Mok (CSP).

Indya J. Jackson is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at The Ohio State University where she specializes in African-American literature post-1945 with an interest Black Power Era literature, literature of mass incarceration, social death and Afro-Pessimism. She holds a master's degree in English literature from The Ohio State University (2015) and a bachelor's degree in English literature from Tuskegee University (2013). A founding member of the OSU Coalition for Black Liberation and lead organizer of the 2017 Columbus Pride Demonstrations, the impact of Jackson's activism has been covered by news media outlets such as CBS, Teen Vogue, Al-Jazeera, The Socialist Worker, & TV One.

Melba Joyce Boyd is a Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, which is also where she earned her doctorate in English in 1979. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Germany in 1983-4, and a Visiting Professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, China in 2009. She is a

8 filmmaker, biographer, editor and author of nine books of poetry. Her book, Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall (2009), won the 2010 Independent Publishers Award, the 2010 Library of Michigan Notable Books Award, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award and the ForeWord Book Award for Poetry. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press received a 2004 Honor Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Her subsequent work, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911 (1994) was widely reviewed and praised by literary critics and historians. She is also the author of 65 essays on African American literature, film and culture. Her last collection of poems, Death Dance of a Butterfly, was published in 2012, received the 2018 Library of Michigan Notable Book Award for Poetry.

Giovanni Russonello serve as the jazz critic for the New York Times, and is currently at work on a book about Scott-Heron's life—with a particular focus on his years in Washington, D.C. (He is represented by the McKinnon McIntyre agency; they plan to go out with the proposal this year.) The book, tentatively titled "Season of Ice," tells the story of both Gil Scott-Heron and the D.C. community that inspired and fortified him during his most productive and popular years. You can't tell the story of any great griot without telling the story of the community that he loved and chronicled, and the tale of "Chocolate City" in the post-Black Power years is of crucial importance if we are to understand the contours of Scott-Heron's work and worldview.

Abdourahman A. Waberi was born in Djibouti City in the French Somali Coast, the current Republic of Djibouti. He went to France in 1985 to study English literature. Waberi worked as a literary consultant for Editions Le Serpent à plumes, Paris, and as a literary critic for Le Monde Diplomatique. He has been a member of the International Jury for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage (Berlin, Germany), 2003 & 2004.

Bibliography Le Pays Sans Ombre, Serpent à plumes, Paris, 1994. The Land Without Shadows (short-story collection), translated by Jeanne Garane, prefaced by Nuruddin Farah, University of Virginia Press, 2005. Balbala, Serpent à plumes, Paris, 1998. Cahier nomade. Serpent à plumes, Paris, 1999. L'Oeil nomade. CCFAR, Djibouti, 1997. Les Nomades, mes frères vont boire à, la Grande Ourse. Pierron, Sarreguemines, 2000 et Mémoire d'encrier, Montréal, 2013. The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper (poems), translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, Seagull Books, 2015. Rift, routes, rails. Gallimard, Paris, 2001. Transit, Gallimard, Paris, 2003. Transit (novel), translation by David and Nicole Ball, Indiana University Press, 2012. Moisson de cranes. Serpent à plumes, Paris 2004. Aux Etats Unis d'Afrique. Lattès, Paris 2006 In The United States of Africa (novel), translation by David and Nicole Ball, prefaced by Percival Everett, University of Nebraska Press, March 2009. Passage des larmes, Lattès, Paris, 2009. Passage of Tears (novel), translation by David and Nicole Ball, Seagull Books, 2011. Naming the Dawn (poems), translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, Seagull Books, 2018.

Justin Randolph Thompson is a new media artist, organizer and educator born in Peekskill, NY in ’79. Living between Italy and the US since 2001, Thompson is a Co-Founder and Director of Black History Month Florence, his work and scholarship engages local communities as living yet fleeting monuments. Thompson teaches art at several universities and develops strategies for the initiation of annual and biennial cultural projects of international collaboration. His art has been exhibited internationally in venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Reina Sofia, the American Academy in Rome and more. Thompson is the recipient of numerous awards including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Franklin Furnace Fund Grant and a Visual Artist Grant from the Marcelino Botin Fundation. Thompson teaches at SACI, SRISA, NYU Florence and Lorenzo de' Medici Institute and is an Advisor to the Fellows at the American Academy of Rome since 2017. He has lectured at the Black Portraitures Conference in Florence, Italy, at Harvard and in Palermo as well as at numerous other institutions in Italy and the United States of America and orchestrated a tribute event to Gil Scott-Heron with a film screening and concert at NYU Florence’s Villa La Pietra in 2018.

Laurent Tamanini is agrégé d’anglais and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Poitiers. His doctoral work was on cinephilia in Anglo-American fiction, focusing on the presence of film in novels and short stories through the 20th century (scenes featuring the shooting or the screening of a movie, apocryphal biographies of movie-directors), and on the narratological, linguistic and aesthetic influence of film on literary writing. His field of research includes contemporary literature (Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Robert Coover), American and European film and the relationship between text and film.