scholarly journals Syllabic Gasps: M. NourbeSe Philip and Charles Olson’s Poetic Conspiration

2021 ◽  
pp. 463-483
Author(s):  
Stefanie Heine
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Legal Document ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Unborn Baby

AbstractIn her essay ‘The Ga(s)p’, M. NourbeSe Philip sketches a respirational poetics that embeds the precarity of African American breath in a natal scene of conspiration. In a gesture of ‘radical hospitality’, every mother breathes for the unborn baby. Her book Zong!, consisting of words torn from a legal document about a massacre on a slave ship, is described as a ‘series of ga(s)ps for air with syllabic sounds attached or overlaid’. In the moment when Philip’s reflections turn to syllables, a striking resonance with Charles Olson’s poetics of breathing from the 1950s can be observed. Both Olson and Philip develop their thoughts on breath and syllables around the act of taking over word-material from a problematic ‘mother-text’. The essay investigates the tensions between the ethical act of ‘breathing with’ as Philip outlines it and the more common sense of ‘conspiration’ (conspiring, conspiracy).

Merging Traffic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Slobin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Auto Industry ◽  
General Motors ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
United Auto Workers ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Auto Workers ◽  
The Media ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Special Case

This chapter surveys the institutions and movements that brought together the city’s musical life with the aim of merging disparate styles, trends, and personnel. First comes the auto industry, based on archival sources from Ford and General Motors that show how the companies deployed music for worker morale and company promotion. The complementary work of labor follows, through the United Auto Workers’ songs. Next comes the counterculture’s musical moment in the age of the folk revival and the artist collectives of the 1950s–1960s. Motown offers a special case of African American entrepreneurial merging of musical talent and style. The chapter closes with a look at the media—radio and newspapers—with their influential role in bringing audiences together, through music, in a city known for segregation, oppressive policing, and occasional outbursts of violence.

Appeal to Philosophers

Philosophy ◽  
1940 ◽  
Vol 15 (60) ◽  
pp. 400-416
Author(s):  
C. E. M. Joad
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The State ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Dual Purpose ◽  
Conduct Of Life ◽  
The Moment

I want in this paper to enter a protest against the preoccupations of many contemporary philosophers, and to put in a plea for a return to the classical tradition in philosophy. According to this tradition, philosophy is, or at least should be, concerned with the whole conduct of life. It has two main functions, to clarify the wisdom of common-sense people, and to increase it. To put it technically, philosophy, as traditionally conceived, is an activity of self-conscious beings which seeks, among other things, critically to examine the manifestations of human consciousness and the principles which guide human activity; to examine not disinterestedly, but in order to illuminate, to assist, and to reform. Philosophy has, therefore, the dual purpose of revealing truth and increasing virtue. One of the methods traditionally employed for achieving these two purposes consists in the attempt to discover those values which are ultimate in the sense that, while other things are desired for the sake oi them, they alone are desired for their own sakes, to uncover by a process of analysis the values which underlie the judgments commonly passed by contemporary society—as for example, in our own society, the values implied by the judgment that increase of efficiency in slaughter is desirable, especially if combined with a readiness to undertake it whenever the State to which one happens to belong deems the moment expedient for the mass slaughter of the citizens of some other State—and to show how the latter deviate from the former.

Quare Times: An Introduction to a Queer Perspective on Afrofuturism and a Reading of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Stüttgen
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Sun Ra ◽  
Oriented Response ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
American Vernacular ◽  
Paul Gilroy

The film Space Is the Place (1974), directed by John Coney, stars Sun Ra who was also co-author of the script. This chapter explores Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism as shown in the film, bringing it into relation with José Muñoz’s notion of a queer future. Rather than focusing on Sun Ra’s sexuality, this chapter argues that his quareness (E. Patrick Johnson’s useful term drawn from African American vernacular) emerges in the sonic and performative aspects of his work. Sun Ra’s spaceship offers a future-oriented response to the slave ship and Middle Passage (as described by Paul Gilroy) and to the limitations of the here and now. The notion of assemblage (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) articulates the quareness of Sun Ra’s collective improvisational practices.

Subversive Invisibility during the Cold War: Paule Marshall’s “Brooklyn”

MELUS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-184
Author(s):  
Shirley Parry
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Paule Marshall ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Political Statement ◽  
Existential Choice ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This essay explores how Paule Marshall engages issues of leftist politics and homosexuality in “Brooklyn,” her only fiction set during the Cold War. On the surface, this novella, the second in Marshall’s 1961 collection Soul Clap Hands and Sing, is a story of sexual harassment that, she has explained, was based on an experience she had at Brooklyn College. Marshall’s boldness in confronting the sexual and racial politics of the 1950s in the story’s depiction of an African American woman’s sexual harassment by her white professor has been noted by many. But less remarked is the fact that beneath the surface narrative of this story, Marshall has incorporated transgressive subtexts that address leftist politics and homosexuality, two issues that were deeply contested during the McCarthy years. A close examination of “Brooklyn” highlights the previously unrecognized narrative strategies that Marshall employs to both produce and conceal these subversive subtexts, thus creating a story that seems to reject communism at the same time that it incorporates a pro-communist political statement, and that seems to reflect the dominant culture’s assumption of heteronormativity while simultaneously endorsing the necessity of existential choice in the area of sexuality. In addition, Marshall shapes her characters so as to make existential choice more broadly the core theme of the story. This essay also situates the narrative in the context of Marshall’s own political activism as well as in the context of the negative impact that the Cold War political tensions had on African American writers during the 1950s.

scholarly journals Christianity’s Last Stand: Visions of Spirituality in Post-1970 African American Women’s Literature

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 369
Author(s):  
Trudier Harris
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
The Moment

Christianity appealed to writers of African descent from the moment they set foot on New World soil. That attraction, perhaps as a result of the professed mission of slaveholders to “Christianize the heathen African,” held sway in African American letters well into the twentieth century. While African American male writers joined their female counterparts in expressing an attraction to Christianity, black women writers, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, consistently began to express doubts about the assumed altruistic nature of a religion that had been used as justification for enslaving their ancestors. Lorraine Hansberry’s Beneatha Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959) initiated a questioning mode in relation to Christianity that continues into the present day. It was especially after 1970 that black women writers turned their attention to other ways of knowing, other kinds of spirituality, other ways of being in the world. Consequently, they enable their characters to find divinity within themselves or within communities of extra-natural individuals of which they are a part, such as vampires. As this questioning and re-conceptualization of spirituality and divinity continue into the twenty-first century, African American women writers make it clear that their characters, in pushing against traditional renderings of religion and spirituality, envision worlds that their contemporary historical counterparts cannot begin to imagine.

‘A Dubious Twilight’: Reflections on Dreams in Patristic Literature

1986 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Cox Miller
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Falling Asleep ◽  
Patristic Literature ◽  
Waking Up ◽  
The Moment

As Wendy O'Flaherty has argued persuasively in her recent book, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities, it is possible to falsify the hypothesis that one is dreaming—by waking up; but it is not possible to verify that one is awake by falling asleep. The thought that one cannot verify the fact that one is awake but only only falsify the fact that one is asleep (by waking up) delivers something of a jolt to Western “common sense,” which typically takes for granted the distinctness of such categories as “real” and “unreal,”“conscious” and “unconscious,”“dream” and “waking life.” Yet, as O'Flaherty points out, we know that we cannot see ourselves seeing an illusion, just as we cannot verify the “reality” of ourselves in the moment when we are engaged in testing our reality.

Race, Photography, Labor, and Entrepreneurship in the Life of Maurice Hunter, Harlem’s “Man of 1,000 Faces”

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (132) ◽  
pp. 144-171
Author(s):  
Clare Corbould
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Art Students ◽  
York Public Library ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
The 1950S

Abstract In 1925, African American newspapers began reporting on Maurice Hunter’s work as a model for prominent visual and commercial artists, illustrators, and art students. By the 1950s, Hunter’s image had appeared on millions of advertising billboards, in all the major magazines, and in murals and statues in banks, parks, and department stores from Wall Street to Rochester to Cincinnati. Because no agency would represent a black model, Hunter was forced to raise his own public profile and create work opportunities. He did so by emphasizing his authenticity as a performer of nonwhite roles and at the same time his versatility as someone who could model for any role, including female and/or white. As well as permitting Hunter some degree of creative control over his work, his approach garnered him considerable esteem among elite African Americans. They also admired Hunter’s effort to control use of his image whenever photographed. This article examines Hunter’s labor, including his own effort to record it through scrapbooks he donated to the New York Public Library.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document