DOCSLIB.ORG

Jazz & Democracy: This Course Is a Hybrid Cultural Studies Seminar And

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Jazz & Democracy: This Course Is a Hybrid Cultural Studies Seminar And AAS 168-001 (also ENG 168): Jazz & Democracy: This course is a hybrid cultural studies seminar and creative composition course that explores jazz theory as a philosophical artistic practice rooted in American democracy. It investigates jazz aesthetics as a literary, visual, and musical art form, and it examines theories of jazz composition as philosophical statements in direct conversation with the principles of U.S. democracy. The course also explores the philosophical and aesthetic connections of jazz literature to surrealist and existentialist artistic movements in modern and postmodern cultural contexts. Artists to be discussed include James Baldwin, Harryette Mullen, and others. The theoretical aspects of this course will demonstrate how jazz has been a source of inspiration for a variety of twentieth-century literatures and theoretical practices. The readings include selections of fiction, poetry, drama, and essays with emphasis on jazz literary modes, creative trends, and political connotations specific to African American literature and culture. DaMaris Hill, MW 4:00-5:15pm AAS 200-001: Introduction to African American Studies: explores the historical, social, economic, cultural and political realities of black people in the African Diaspora with an emphasis on the United States. This class explores how macro structures such as slavery, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and globalization shaped and continue to circumscribe the lives of Black people across various geographic regions. In addition the class discusses the multiple strategies/efforts Black people employ, both past and present, to ensure the survival of the self and the community.Chamara Kwakye, TR 12:30-1:45pm. AAS 235 (also SOC 235): Inequalities in Society: This course seeks to promote an understanding of inequalities in American society by considering them in the context of the social origins development and persistence of inequalities in the United States and other societies. Bases of inequality that may be considered include race/ethnicity, class/status, gender/sexuality, age, political, and regional differences as these relate to politics, social justice, community engagement, and/or public policy. Sections: AAS 235-001: TBD, MWF 12:00-12:50 I AAS 235-002: Allison Adair, TR 6:00-8:00pm AAS 264 (also ENG 260): Introduction to Black Writers: This course seeks to introduce students to the history of African American and African Diaspora literature through novels, plays, poetry, and short fiction. The material focuses different understandings of black experiences, life, and motivations in relation to history, culture, and the literary legacy. By examining how the literature reflects contemporaneous issues concerning black life, we will study how black literary themes presented throughout the last 200 years have a ripple effect all the way to our world today. We work with the “heavy hitters” of African, Caribbean, and African American literary world to understand traditional constructs of the tradition of black literature. By examining these texts, we’ll develop an understanding of critical and public reception when they were published, how they influence and are influenced by other black writers, and why they now are considered canonical texts. Major assignments include three essays, a class presentation, and a final exam. Sections: AAS 264-001: Matthew Godbey TR 12:30-1:45pm/AAS 264-002: Matthew Godbey, TR 2:00-3:15pm AAS 328-001 (also GEO 328): Geography of the Middle East and North Africa: A comprehensive regional overview, emphasizing cultural adaptation to desert environments. The interrelationships among religions, cultures, and the physical environment will be examined, along with the region’s position and influence in the global system. Christine Smith, MWF 9:00-9:50am AAS 400-001: Special Topics in AAAS: Race, Gender, and the Classics: Cleopatra in Black & White: Jackie Murray, TR 2:00-3:15pm AAS 400-002 (also GWS 595): Issues in GWS: Wicked Souls & Bodies: Evil Spirits, Sexuality, Gender, and Violence in Tales for the African Diaspora in the Americas: This course will examine folktales and folktale-like stories as sites of both abjection and healing. Students will study stories that illustrate how individuals protect their identity and bodily integrity. They will discover how storytellers from the Americas have responded to the effect of colonization and colonialism through oral and literary works that underscore the cultural and psychological characteristics as well as the resilience of their communities. Students will examine the carnal violence and brutality associated with sex and gender in folktales and fairytales from the Americas. In so doing, this course will put European and African folklore in conversation with the New World’s oral and literary traditions. For instance, in French Caribbean lore, the nocturnal violation of female bodies by male evil spirits (incubi) resembles the supernatural assault tradition called cauchemar or witch-riding in southwest Louisiana. The Caribbean vampire is often an old woman (a soucougnant or soucouyant) who, at night, sucks people's blood seeking vital energy and, in so doing, recalling the West African witch. Moreover, the consequences of sexual violence do not spare men either. In French Caribbean folklore, the diablesse (She-devil) often eats men’s hearts while succubi (or other devil spawns) petrify them to death. The dialogues between the various spaces are intriguing to say the least. Jacqueline Couti, W 4:00-6:30pm. AAS 401-001: Independent Reading/Research in AAAS: For African-American & Africana Studies minors. The student pursues a course of reading and research under the guidance of a faculty/staff member, completes a major research project, and takes an examination. A written contract defining the area of study is negotiated between student and instructor at the beginning of the course. DaMaris Hill, MWF 2:00-2:50pm AAS 432-001 (same as SOC 432): Race and Ethnic Relations: Analysis of relationships between racial and ethnic groups and the behavioral products thereof: sources and consequences of prejudice and discrimination; situation and prospects of minorities; strategies of change and tension reduction. Ana Liberato, TR 12:30-1:45pm AAS 635-001 (same as SOC 635): Seminar in Social Inequalities: Global Racism: This interdisciplinary seminar studies racism globally and historically. We will analyze anti-Semitism and the Nazi’s final solution, anti-black U.S. racism, the denial or racism and the persistence of paternalist racism and colorism in Latin America, and the transformations of racism in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe. We will also review critical race theory debates. We will focus on Aníbal Quijano’s coloniality of power, Omni and Winant’s racial formation theory, the debate between Eduardo Bonilla Silva and Mara Loveman, and Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant debate with Michael Hanchard. Carlos De La Torre, R 4:00-6:30pm AAS 656-001 (same as ENG 656): The Black Intellectual: “Traditions and the canons that confirm them are made not born, constructed not spawned…the African American literary canon is an exclusive club whose roster is determined by the tastes of a handful of intellectuals.” -Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention (1995). This course surveys key texts of African American literature and culture from 1900 to 2015. We will explore the modernist and postmodernist works of black fiction writers, essayists, filmmakers, visual artists and poets, and consider the strategies and rhetorical resonances that contribute to the formation of the Black Intellectual. Literary texts will include foundational essays on black intellectualism by Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Anna Julia Cooper, and W. E. B. Du Bois; award-winning fiction from Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin; poems by Pulitzer Prize winner Gwendolyn Brooks; texts from the Nobel Peace Prize winner Toni Morrison; and celebrated works by MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipients Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Alongside literary texts, students will examine a range of our nation’s most praised cultural productions. These include Jacob Lawrence’s panoramic paintings in The Migration Series, Kara Walker’s celebrated sculptures in A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby and Steven McQueen’s Academy Award-winning film 12 Years a Slave. For each text, students will consider gender, sexuality, migration, freedom and equality; interrogate ideological aims; and address placement within a sociohistorical and political era. Students will learn how black intellectuals offer corrective historical interventions that reveal the complexity of black humanity. We will examine the New Negro Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the tensions between U.S.-born and Caribbean black people, the Black Arts Movement, the feminist movement, LGBTQ issues, and what some consider a post-racial moment in the age of Obama. To frame class discussions, we will engage a wide selection of recent, critical scholarship. Course requirements include thoughtful and engaged participation and a final seminar paper of 25 pages. Each seminar member is responsible for choosing a primary text and leading the discussion of that text in one class meeting. Required Texts: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928); Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938); Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen (1949); Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953); Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952); James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry
    0/-*/&4637&: *ODPMMBCPSBUJPOXJUI6OHMVFJU XFIBWFTFUVQBTVSWFZ POMZUFORVFTUJPOT UP MFBSONPSFBCPVUIPXPQFOBDDFTTFCPPLTBSFEJTDPWFSFEBOEVTFE 8FSFBMMZWBMVFZPVSQBSUJDJQBUJPOQMFBTFUBLFQBSU $-*$,)&3& "OFMFDUSPOJDWFSTJPOPGUIJTCPPLJTGSFFMZBWBJMBCMF UIBOLTUP UIFTVQQPSUPGMJCSBSJFTXPSLJOHXJUI,OPXMFEHF6OMBUDIFE ,6JTBDPMMBCPSBUJWFJOJUJBUJWFEFTJHOFEUPNBLFIJHIRVBMJUZ CPPLT0QFO"DDFTTGPSUIFQVCMJDHPPE The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry Howard Rambsy II The University of Michigan Press • Ann Arbor First paperback edition 2013 Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2011 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2016 2015 2014 2013 5432 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rambsy, Howard. The black arts enterprise and the production of African American poetry / Howard Rambsy, II. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-472-11733-8 (cloth : acid-free paper) 1. American poetry—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. Poetry—Publishing—United States—History—20th century. 3. African Americans—Intellectual life—20th century. 4. African Americans in literature. I. Title. PS310.N4R35 2011 811'.509896073—dc22 2010043190 ISBN 978-0-472-03568-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-472-12005-5 (e-book) Cover illustrations: photos of writers (1) Haki Madhubuti and (2) Askia M. Touré, Mari Evans, and Kalamu ya Salaam by Eugene B. Redmond; other images from Shutterstock.com: jazz player by Ian Tragen; African mask by Michael Wesemann; fist by Brad Collett.
    [Show full text]
  • María Rocío Cobo Piñero 67.Indd
    http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2014n67p37 GAYL JONES’S CORREGIDORA AND SONG FOR ANNINHO: HISTORICAL REVISION, FEMALE DIASPORA, AND MUSIC María Rocío Cobo Piñero* Universidad de Sevilla Abstract In this article I analyze how black music may be used to (re)interpret the legacy of slavery in Gayl Jones’s literary works Corregidora (1975) and Song for Anninho (1981). I argue that female Classic Blues from the 1920s functions as a testimony of resistance and as a means to recount the stories featured in these two texts. The U.S. black author uses the cadences, themes, and tropes of the blues in order to decode female versions of the black diaspora in the Americas. In addition, by setting her literary work in Brazil, Jones establishes an inter-American dialogue and imagines polyphonic and syncretic spaces where the blues is the model for historical revision. Inscribing my study within the theoretical frame of black feminist cultural studies, I emphasize the importance of the first person enunciative voice in female blues, as well as in the texts selected. Keywords: Gayl Jones; classic blues; diaspora; black feminism; historical revision. No time to marry, no time to imposed on black womanhood. From the time of settle down slavery, music has contributed to the performance I’m a young woman and ain’t done running’ ‘round I’m a young woman and ain’t done running’ ‘round of cultural agency within black communities in the (Bessie Smith)1 United States; spirituals, gospel, blues, jazz, freedom songs, and rap have provided spaces for protest and Introduction2 affirmation.
    [Show full text]
  • James Baldwin and Black Womenʼs Fiction
    -DPHV%DOGZLQDQG%ODFN:RPHQ૷V)LFWLRQ &RXUWQH\7KRUVVRQ African American Review, Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 2013, pp. 615-631 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/afa/summary/v046/46.4.thorsson.html Access provided by University of Oregon (4 Apr 2016 15:47 GMT) Thorsson_Thorsson 7/23/2014 4:40 PM Page 615 Courtney Thorsson James Baldwin and Black Women’s Fiction fricanAmericanwomennovelistsofrecentdecadesrecognizeJamesBaldwin Aasacrucialinfluence.AliceWalkerwritesthatafterencountering abookrackcompletelyfilledwithcopiesof Another Country in1963....Baldwin’sworld becamemyprivacy...heprovedseveralthingstomethatI needed tobeproved;thatbeing blackaddedtreasuretothealreadyrichartofwritingwell;thattobevulnerablewithone’s selfisagiftothersdesperatelyneed;andthatitwasindeedpossibletobeblack,awriter, andsomeonewhocouldmakealivingbeingboth.(“Typescript”) Manywomenwritersrecollectexperiencingsimilarlyintimateconnectionsupon readingBaldwin’swords.ReflectionsonBaldwinaroundthetimeofhisdeathare particularlythickwithcelebrationsofhisworkandlife.ToniCadeBambara,Paule Marshall,MayaAngelou,andSoniaSanchezparticipatedinthefinalcelebrationof Baldwin’slife(Smith77).HisfuneralprogramlistsMarshall,VertamaeGrosvenor, RosaGuy,andLouiseMeriwetheramonghis“honorarypallbearers.”Inhereulogyfor Baldwin,ToniMorrisonsays,“Yougavemealanguagetodwellin,agiftsoperfectit seemsmyowninvention....Youwentintothatforbiddenterritoryanddecolonized it...un-gateditforblackpeoplesothatinyourwakewecouldenterit,occupyit,
    [Show full text]
  • African-American Psychology and the Works of Gayl Jones
    AFRICAN-AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY AND THE WORKS OF GAYL JONES ABDUL QUADIR Research Scholar Department of English Jai Prakash University, Chapra (BH) INDIA Jones’ work has frequently been challenged on account of her questionable subjects just as news inclusion of her own life, her work keeps on awing peruses with its unpredictable style and profundity of feeling. She attracts a significant number of the subjects her accounts from her African-American legacy just as her very own life and battles. Maybe generally significant all through the mental advancements in the characters are their voices which yell from the pages of her work their story, their melody, and their fact. Her peruses can't hold back to hear what will come next from this calm lady who works so anyone can hear. Keywords: Gayl Jones, Slavery, Brutality, Racism, Classic Blues, Diaspora, Black INTRODUCTION A profoundly respected and inventive voice of African-American women author, Gayl Jones is a Black American Poet, Novelist, Play Wright, Short Story Writer, Professor and scholarly critic and was destined to Franklin and Lucille Jones on November 23, 1949 in Lexington, Kentucky, Jones early associations with the south are reflected unequivocally in her own life just as in her composition, which frequently rejuvenates Kentucky culture and characters for the peruses. As a striking novelistic voice apparently at progress with her tranquil, baffling persona, Gayl Jones shocked the abstract world during the 1970s with various books of African Americans battling to adapt to the tradition of Race, Violence, Slavery and Female Subjectivity. Both the structure and topic of her work are drawn from the dark oral custom.
    [Show full text]
  • Redalyc.GAYL JONES's CORREGIDORA and SONG FOR
    Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies E-ISSN: 2175-8026 [email protected] Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Brasil Cobo Piñero, María Rocío GAYL JONES’S CORREGIDORA AND SONG FOR ANNINHO: HISTORICAL REVISION, FEMALE DIASPORA, AND MUSIC Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, núm. 67, julio-diciembre, 2014, pp. 37-49 Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Florianópolis, Brasil Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=478347656004 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2014n67p37 GAYL JONES’S CORREGIDORA AND SONG FOR ANNINHO: HISTORICAL REVISION, FEMALE DIASPORA, AND MUSIC María Rocío Cobo Piñero* Universidad de Sevilla Abstract In this article I analyze how black music may be used to (re)interpret the legacy of slavery in Gayl Jones’s literary works Corregidora (1975) and Song for Anninho (1981). I argue that female Classic Blues from the 1920s functions as a testimony of resistance and as a means to recount the stories featured in these two texts. The U.S. black author uses the cadences, themes, and tropes of the blues in order to decode female versions of the black diaspora in the Americas. In addition, by setting her literary work in Brazil, Jones establishes an inter-American dialogue and imagines polyphonic and syncretic spaces where the blues is the model for historical revision.
    [Show full text]
  • The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary
    Introduction The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches is a sociohistorical, sociocultural, and sociopsychological critical history of the contemporary African American novel as a socially symbolic act of cultural politics and narrative discourse. The strategic essentialism and oppositional discourse for interpreting African American narratives that I proposed in the introduction and first chapter of The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition in 1987 has its origins in two interrelated theories. The first is a sociohistorical, sociocultural, and sociopsychological theory of Du Boisian double consciousness and double vision. And the second is a vernacular theory of residual oral forms: oratory (including everyday speech acts), myth (including its ritual reenactment), legend, tale, and song or music. In the earlier book I analyzed the relationship of the double consciousness and five vernacular oral forms to the distinctive thematic, stylistic, and structural characteristics of the African American novel from its beginnings in 1853 to major achievements in the genre in 1983. For example, in 1983 Alice Walker’s National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize–winning Color Purple marked the culmination of the achievement of black female novelists, and John Edgar Wideman’s Homewood trilogy revitalized the power of an Afrocentric aesthetic for black male novelists. Because this book begins in 1962 but focuses primarily on novels and romances published between 1983 and 2001, chapter 1 maps the terrain and definition of the terms for understanding the book’s rhetoric, politics, and poetics of representation. Chapters 2–5 are revisions and summaries of chapters 1–8 in The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition.
    [Show full text]
  • "Their Past in My Blood": Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler's Response to the Black Aesthetic
    The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Dissertations Fall 12-2010 "Their Past in my Blood": Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler's Response to the Black Aesthetic Williamenia Miranda Walker Freeman University of Southern Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, and the Modern Literature Commons Recommended Citation Freeman, Williamenia Miranda Walker, ""Their Past in my Blood": Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler's Response to the Black Aesthetic" (2010). Dissertations. 458. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/458 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The University of Southern Mississippi “THEIR PAST IN MY BLOOD”: PAULE MARSHALL, GAYL JONES, AND OCTAVIA BUTLER’S RESPONSE TO THE BLACK AESTHETIC by Williamenia Miranda Walker Freeman Abstract of a Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2010 ABSTRACT “THEIR PAST IN MY BLOOD”: PAULE MARSHALL, GAYL JONES, AND OCTAVIA BUTLER’S RESPONSE TO THE BLACK AESTHETIC by Williamenia Miranda Walker Freeman December 2010 Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) enhance our conceptualization of black aestheticism and black nationalism as cultural and political movements.
    [Show full text]
  • Transgression in Postwar African American Literature Kirin Wachter
    Unthinkable, Unprintable, Unspeakable: Transgression in Postwar African American Literature Kirin Wachter-Grene A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Louis Chude-Sokei, Chair Eva Cherniavsky Sonnet Retman Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English ©Copyright 2014 Kirin Wachter-Grene University of Washington Abstract Unthinkable, Unprintable, Unspeakable: Transgression in Postwar African American Literature Kirin Wachter-Grene Chair of Supervisory Committee: Professor Louis Chude-Sokei English This dissertation argues that African American literary representations of transgression, meaning boundary exploration, reveal a complex relationship between sex, desire, pleasure, race, gender, power, and subjectivity ignored or dismissed in advantageous yet constrained liberatory readings/framings. I trace transgression to confront the critical dismissal of, or lack of engagement with African American literature that does not “fit” ideologically constrained projects, such as the liberatory. The dissertation makes a unique methodological intervention into the fields of African American literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural history by applying black, queer writer and critic Samuel R. Delany’s conceptualizing of “the unspeakable” to the work of his African American contemporaries such as Iceberg Slim, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones, Hal Bennett, and Toni Morrison. Delany theorizes the unspeakable as forms of racial and sexual knowing excessive, or unintelligible, to frameworks such as the liberatory. The unspeakable is often represented in scenes of transgressive staged sex that articulate “dangerous” practices of relation, and, as such, is deprived of a political framework through which to be critically engaged. I argue that the unspeakable can be used as an analytic allowing critics to scrutinize how, and why, much postwar African American literature has been critically neglected or flattened.
    [Show full text]
  • The Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Literature
    Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67582-6 - The Cambridge Companion to African American Women’s Literature Edited by Angelyn Mitchell and Danille K. Taylor Frontmatter More information the cambridge companion to african american women’s literature The Cambridge Companion to African American Women’s Literature covers a period dating back to the eighteenth century. These specially commissioned essays highlight the artistry, complexity and diversity of a literary tradition that ranges from Lucy Terry to Toni Morrison. A wide range of topics are addressed, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts movement, and from the perform- ing arts to popular fiction. Together, the essays provide an invaluable guide to a rich, complex tradition of women writers in conversation with each other as they critique American society and influence American letters. Accessible and vibrant, with the needs of undergraduate students in mind, this Companion will be of great interest to anybody who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of this important and vital area of American literature. angelyn mitchell is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies, Georgetown University. danille k. taylor is Dean of Humanities, Dillard University. A complete list of books in the series is at the back of this book © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67582-6 - The Cambridge Companion to African American Women’s Literature Edited by Angelyn Mitchell and Danille K. Taylor Frontmatter More information THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S LITERATURE EDITED BY ANGELYN MITCHELL Georgetown University, Washington, DC AND DANILLE K.
    [Show full text]
  • Zealous Watchmen: Racial Authenticity, Masculine Anxiety and the Black Arts Movement
    Zealous Watchmen: Racial Authenticity, Masculine Anxiety and the Black Arts Movement By Zachary Daniel Manditch-Prottas A dissertation in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Darieck B. Scott, Chair Professor Leigh Raiford Professor Waldo E. Martin Spring 2018 Zealous Watchmen: Racial Authenticity, Masculine Anxiety and the Black Arts Movement © 2018 by Zachary Daniel Manditch-Prottas i Abstract Zealous Watchmen: Racial Authenticity, Masculine Anxiety and the Black Arts Movement by Zachary Daniel Manditch-Prottas Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Darieck B. Scott, Chair This project complicates and deepens black feminist and queer critiques that the Black Arts Movement (BAM) deployed misogyny and homophobia in the service of a masculinist vision of black liberation. Specifically, emphasizing the role of homosocial discourse in marshaling intraracial terms of black (in)authenticity. Zealous Watchmen proposes that key themes that mark Black Arts works—homophobic language, accusations of race treachery and of mimicry of purportedly white literary style, ambivalent observations of the “misguided masculinity” of black street hustlers—mutually constitute one another’s meaning around a common axis: the intent of the Black Arts authors not only to discipline but to emasculate other black men. I argue that bold proclamations regarding one’s status as a real black man were coupled with habitual accusations of failed black manhood articulated through a range of literary signifiers. Taking on the Black Arts’ most bombastic assertions of masculinity, as well as some of its more subtle rhetorical formulations, my analysis of textual discourse takes seriously the colloquial plea of “that’s not what I mean by that word(s),” probing it further, then, to ask what they did mean.
    [Show full text]
  • Abuse, Resistance and Recovery in Black Women's Literature
    It’s Time to Tell: Abuse, Resistance and Recovery in Black Women’s Literature DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Candice Linette Pipes Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2010 Dissertation Committee: Valerie Lee, Advisor Adeleke Adeeko Debra Moddelmog Copyright by Candice Linette Pipes 2010 The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. Abstract This project examines how black women writers, specifically by writing scenes of violence, explore the sociopolitical, racial, economic, and gender exploitation through the abuse of black women within their texts. Part of the goal of this project is to reclaim the literature of black women from the clutches of a black masculinist understanding and reject these superficial readings in an effort to make sense of the black-on-black violence documented in the works of black women authors. To be more specific, the intent of this study is to investigate the ways in which collective emotional trauma and individual physical and sexual abuses against black women exist as power performances. These violences enacted against black women in black women’s writing serve as a way for socially, economically, and culturally disempowered bodies to claim power by overpowering a body even more marginalized. The extensive pattern in
    [Show full text]
  • The Outraged Mother Joanne Braxton
    S&F Online www.barnard.edu/sfonline Double Issue: 3.3 & 4.1 The Scholar & Feminist XXX: Past Controversies, Present Challenges, Future Feminisms Document Archive Reprinted from: Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance Joanne M. Braxton and Andre Nicola McLaughlin, Editors New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990 The Outraged Mother By: Joanne Braxton In an essay called “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” novelist Toni Morrison speaks of her attempt to “blend the acceptance of the supernatural and a profound rootedness in the real world . with neither taking precedence over the other.” In Morrison’s view this artistic goal is indicative of the cosmology, the way in which Black people looked at the world. We are a very practical people, very down to earth, even shrewd people. But within that practicality we also accepted what I suppose could be called superstition and magic, which is another way of knowing things. But to blend those two worlds together at the same time was enhancing, not limiting. And some of those things were ‘discredited knowledge’ that Black people had; discredited only because Black people were discredited and therefore what they knew was ‘discredited.’1 Other aspects which Morrison uses to define the literary tradition of Black Americans include the “oral quality” of that body of writing and “the presence of an ancestor.” Morrison views the inclusion of this figure as a “deliberate effort, on the part of the artist, to get a visceral, emotional response as well as an intellectual response as he or she communicates with the audience” in a literary pattern of “call and response” (341, 343).
    [Show full text]