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.