This article looks at the ways jazz legend John Coltrane was a muse for many Black Arts era poets and proceeds to discuss how Michael Harper rendered Coltrane in his work, focusing on editorial ...changes between the 1970 and 2000 versions of Michael Harper’s poem, “Alone”. In it, the author argues that the change marks a revision of the centrality of Coltrane as Harper’s muse from his early to later career.
The years 1865 and 2017 are two of the eight years Shapiro isolates out to structure his book in a variation on the calendrical approach he applied in A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599 and The ...Year of Lear: 1606. Why, even more, in a book that starts out treating matters of such serious and enduring concern as race, class warfare, and immigration, expend time and space on a chapter titled "1998: (Consider only how conflicts about race and power between older and newer migrants to New York play out and play into the 1957 production of West Side Story, a thoroughly "classed" and "ethnicized" adaptation of Romeo & Juliet, brilliantly scripted, scored, lyricized, choreographed, and directed by four gay Jewish American men.) One of these resurfacing problems, immigration, Shapiro oddly chooses to treat by recycling facts, insights, and observations Coppélia Kahn and I presented over twenty years ago in what he refers to (on p. 251 of a back-of-the-book bibliographical essay) as our "trailblazing" published work on Percy MacKaye's Caliban by the Yellow Sands (251) instead of using his proven research skills to find and develop fresh material of his own. Understandably fastening on Edwin Forrest's unforgivable association with nativist rabblerousers, the chapter fails to give an adequate accounting of the egalitarian principles that motivated many participants in the attack on the Astor Place Opera House-as prominent a symbol of inequality then as the Hudson Yards development is now-and which led to the killing of 30 and wounding of hundreds of mainly workingclass New Yorkers by their own National Guard.
Across these events, the author analyzes—despite the success of V-Day for raising awareness and funds for women’s organizations—a shifting feminist critique of these events, from an essentialist ...(white) feminism centered on the bodies of women to a (colonizing but) inclusive transnational theorizing. In the essay, the author focuses on the theme of black intellectualism that resounds in these plays and in the political climate of those early 1960s, as black Americans were too often caught between conflicting (white) forces. The analyses of these foundational plays reminds us that, as Krasner expresses, “political domination is tethered to social hierarchy, where authority figures such as teachers, politicians, parents, and social peers use the benignly disguised altruism . . . to chip away at confidence, self-awareness, self-reliance, and the mobility required to advance socially, economically, and, in the case of Sarah and Clay, intellectually and artistically.” ...the issue concludes with Patrick McKelvey’s “A Disabled Actor Prepares: Stanislavsky, Disability, and Work at the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped,” which also contains a political dimension—that of a specific theatrical history of actor training, the visibility of disability, and the laboring body.
In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Criticism,’ Amiri Baraka was formulating his own version of nuclear futurity in Primitive World: An ...Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical. Baraka's musical manifests and conceptualises atomic afrofuturism, a historically specific affirmation of black existence that was forged while facing nuclear apocalypse. Nuclear Criticism, which lost much of its exigency after the end of the Cold War, needs to evolve to account for the present nuclear era, as its focus on totalities leaves it ill-equipped for incorporating the disparate lived experiences of those who have already experienced the apocalypse and for whom nuclear apocalypse is a repetition or extension of white supremacy's agenda of extinction. This article offers a genealogy of atomic afrofuturism, examining how throughout the cold war period African American artists like Sun Ra, Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were exploring the post-apocalyptic conditions of black existence, including its conflicting temporalities and tenses, while much of America still believed the apocalypse was imminent, not immanent. And so it is Derrida's anti-apocalyptic missives together with Baraka's anti-nuclear musical that can offer the framework Nuclear Criticism so desperately desires for imagining the unimaginable.
The Cry of Jazz, initially released in 1959, has come to be recognized as a major landmark in independent Black cinema. An early influence on 1960s-era intellectuals Amiri Baraka and Harold Cruse, ...this "lost film" still confounds conventional histories of African American moviemaking even after its inclusion on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. It also remains an unsettling and surprisingly understudied cultural artifact. Shot and produced in late-1950s Chicago, the 16-millimeter film failed to gain widespread distribution at the time of release but elicited strong reactions from the audiences who managed to see it. Many white viewers were stunned by the confrontational attitudes of the movie's Black characters; even a sympathetic review called the picture "the first anti-white film made by American Negroes." A post-screening debate in New York became racially incendiary enough for the police to take down the names of the participants. Criticism at the time fastened on a range of perceived flaws, from wooden acting and amateurish direction to unfair portrayals of the club's white members. Film commentators today are more likely to appreciate Bland's gleeful puncturing of liberal pieties about racial "sameness under the skin" - while also noting that the movie's own race politics often center on a contest between Black men and white men for the possession of white women.
This essay takes racism and race relations as a central theme, with a focus on Amiri Baraka's "Dutchman." In recognizing Amiri Baraka's celebrated One-Act Play, "Dutchman" as, not a tragedy as ...normally conceived, but as a sacrifice ritual, this essay breaks dividing lines in dramatic genres by recognizing Artaudian Cruelty in the incitement of emotions associated with the Protest Play against the traditional model of the "purging" of emotions of pity and fear associated with Tragedy. This essay employs Deconstruction via Jacques Derrida and his interpretation of the pharmakon, as well as the analysis of René Girard, to find the double meaning of catharsis: that the ancient Greek pharmakos (sacrificial victim) is intimately related to the term for the ritual of extracting emotions via a ritual, katharma, or catharsis. Finally, against the backdrop of these arguments, including those of Maurice O. Wallace, this essay re-examines W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk and its concept of "double consciousness" using a psychoanalytical lens via Eugene Victor Wolfenstein and Jacques Lacan, mapped onto theories of Performance via Herbert Blau to analyze the spectragraphic and solipsistic blindness of racism that DuBois and Baraka's work describes and confronts.
This essay was originally posted on Sean Bonney’s blog ’Round Midnight: Notes on Baraka, subtitled ‘notes and essays on militant poetry and poetics’, on 26 July 2019. It was delivered as a talk for ...Cesura/Acceso: Journal for Music and Experimental Politics in 2014, a recording of which can be found at the following link: https://soundcloud.com/cesura-acceso/sean-bonney-time-negatives-of-variable-universe-on-sun-ra-and-amiri-baraka.
Isaac Hayes provides a vital public figure through which scholars can analyze, evaluate, and more fully understand the comprehensive nature of the black freedom struggle as it progressed into the ...1970s. Hayes merged the integrationist political objectives of mainstream civil rights organizations and leaders with the notions of racial pride, assertiveness, and autonomy that characterized the popular appeal of the black power movement. Hayes, through his “Black Moses” persona and LP of the same name, moved those freedom struggle promises and opportunities into the cultural realm, where he personified African American artistic self-determination. In doing so, he demonstrated that the contemporary conceptualization of black masculinity was not monolithic, as Hayes introduced and embodied an ideal that countered the prevailing notion of black manhood which pervaded popular culture and remains a central component of popular memory concerning black power. Most importantly, Isaac Hayes embodied a model of black masculinity that contradicted the prevailing “black macho” ideal. “Black Moses,” therefore, embodied the freedom of African Americans to move beyond contemporary racial classifications in a cultural capacity and presents scholars with an intriguing model through which to examine the evolution, possibilities, and accomplishments of the post-1960s American black freedom struggle.
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