Josef Sorett, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 312 ISBN: 9780199844937 (hardcover) Laura Visser-Maessen The “worship of spirit,” ...renowned black author Amiri Baraka once wrote, “is always at the root in Black art…or at least the summoning of or by such force” (181). That this remained true even as the black communities in the US that produced such art were tied to the sweeping powers of both secularization and Americanization is e...
This paper offers close textual readings of poems from James Weldon Johnson's 1927 collection, God's Trombones, uncovering in Johnson's language resonant clues to his thought. In contrast to his ...disaffected novel The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912), Johnson's sermon–poems, through reengagement with the folkways of traditional African American worship, forge out a more potent creative space. As hybrid works, they diminish the gap between text and speech, and demand careful and lively ways of reading. My argument situates Johnson's practice in the contexts of sound recording, ragtime, and programmes for African American uplift at the turn of the century.
What modalities of spectatorship and performance are emerging today, and why? How do we gather in the face of crisis-ordinary and extraordinary-and violence-traumatic and not-quite-traumatic? What ...might be gleaned from contemporary performance for other genres of response to crisis, whether clinical, critical, or political? To what extent are psychoanalytic theories of trauma helpful for describing modalities of historical violence in the present? This essay approaches questions such as these by turning to 3 disparate yet resonant sites of recent performance: Combatant Status Review Tribunal, pp. 002954-003064: A Public Reading by Andrea Geyer et al. (2012); Thomas Hirschhorn's Gramsci Monument (2013); and Rashid Johnson's production of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's play, Dutchman, at the East Village's Russian and Turkish Baths (2013).
This article looks at the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early philosophy of language on the Black Arts Movement. Amiri Baraka’s essay / prose poem “Expressive Language” ends with a quotation ...from Wittgenstein: “Can the concept of God exist in a perfectly logical language?” The problem is that Wittgenstein never wrote this. In tracking the meaning of Baraka’s pseudo ascription, this essay situates Baraka’s early work in the context of midcentury philosophy of language and the linguistic turn. It argues that Baraka’s extensive engagement with the form and thought of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is crucially important in Baraka’s narration of his conversion from Beat bohemianism to Black nationalism. Baraka’s argument with Wittgenstein anticipates the concerns of a debate that occurred several years later between Hans Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas. Reading “Expressive Language” and Baraka’s poetry and autobiographical writing alongside the exchanges of the Gadamer-Habermas debate, the essay argues that Baraka’s writings challenge the identification of critique with progressive politics that informs the work of Habermas and Paul Gilroy.
Hell is Definitions Peterson, Victor
The Comparatist,
10/2022, Volume:
46, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Parts of that work were previously published in the Jones and Diane Di Prima editions of Floating Bear (1961-62) during a massive cultural-political and social identity shift in the U.S. Their ...publishing it resulted in them being arrested for obscenity charges in 1961. The use of this term by Sartre signals a treatment of existence as a relation between expressions, what's allowed to leave the closet, and what's on the other side, the content of those arguments. Hell, then, is reduced to one's form of life being identical to the frame of reference itself. Akin to scientific models which, for all intents and purposes, are useful fictions mapping relations between features of the world, certain statements about the world it frames are licensed or not relative to that model. ...a fiction within a fiction would be determinately false but we can explain, via that model of the world we present, why statements therein apply given that
This article delineates Sean Bonney’s ambivalence towards 20th Century sound poetry and his complex relationship with sound and visual poet Bob Cobbing (1920-2002). To do this the article reads one ...of Bonney’s early poems ‘For Bob, Cobbing Through the Soundhole, Where Cobbing IS’ – a poem Bonney read at Cobbing’s funeral – alongside Our Death, Bonney’s last book. The way Bonney responded to Cobbing’s life and death may offer a guide to how we respond to Our Death after Bonney’s. In their shared commitment to counter state violence, the article identifies an anti-Thatcherite politics alongside a poetics of vulnerability and hospitality, which they extend to each other, to the interned, the displaced and the dispossessed.
The essay considers Sean Bonney's work in the period 2008-2014. It focuses on his PhD thesis on Amiri Baraka (completed in 2013) and the publications Baudelaire in English (2008) and Letters Against ...the Firmament (2015). The thesis explored tensions between aesthetic and political commitment in Baraka's work during the 1960s, a period of particular importance in Baraka's development, as it marked his shift from 'beatnik' bohemianism to black nationalism. The essay uses the thesis to examine Bonney's own exploration of the possibilities of a revolutionary poetics in this period. in the context of the political events of the time. It traces his attempts to dissolve bourgeois subjectivity and the transformation of the individual subject into a collective subjectivity through his engagement with Baudelaire and Rimbaud and his arrival at a militant poetics which aims to express 'complex, multiple ideas ... with a singular directness'.
McGregory reviews Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation, an Internet resource available at https://jackdappabluesradio.tv/lamont-jack-dappa-pearley/.
John Rozelle Rozelle, John
Black renaissance,
04/2014, Volume:
14, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Most of the typical spiritual practices having to do with birth, puberty, death and other important life events stem from numerous ethnic groups in West Africa.
Historian Daniel S. Luck has noted in Selma to Saigon that “the civil rights movement and the debates over the Vietnam War were at the center of the turbulence of the 1960s” (1). While true, one also ...recognizes that the afterlives of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War are momentous historical events with which America continues to contend. Several African American writers of the post-civil rights/post-Vietnam era, including Percival Everett, have written works of fiction that continue to grapple with the afterlives of these cataclysmic historical events. Set in the American West, Everett’s 1985 novel Walk Me to the Distance finds its protagonist, David Larsen, a returning Vietnam veteran, at loose ends. David winds up stranded in a small, remote town, Slut's Hole, Wyoming, where he eventually decides to stay. His decision to settle in the West is as much influenced by his romanticization of life on the American Frontier as it is with his disgust for a rapidly changing country where he feels he no longer belongs. In this essay, I argue that Walk Me to the Distance is not only an astute meditation on Frontier Mythology and Frontier justice associated with the early settlement of the American West but also that the novel reveals that these foundational myths and ideas continue to be paradigmatic features of American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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