The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, by Mary Helen Washington

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-64
Author(s):  
Brian Dolinar
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Marovich

This chapter examines the continued evolution of the Chicago gospel music in the mid-twentieth century, led by the Good Shepherd Singers, re-christened the Gospel Caravan or simply Caravans. By the 1950s, gospel music had become the predominant sound of the semi-demonstrative, as well as some deliberative, or sermon-centered, African American churches in the urban North. Recognizing the financial upside of gospel music, independent record company owners, religious disk jockeys, and promoters sought to commodify it for mass consumption. This chapter first discusses the performances and recordings of the Caravans, along with members who came and went, before turning to some of the other important figures on the gospel music circuit, including Alex Bradford and his Bradford Specials, the Maceo Woods Singers, the Staple Singers, artists under Vee Jay Records, the Duncanaires, the Little Lucy Smith Singers, Sammy Lewis, and Mahalia Jackson.


Author(s):  
José Endoença Martins

This article compares two different Brazilian translated versions of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved: the first published in 1994, the other in 2007, both as Amada. The analysis concentrates on the speech delivered by Baby Suggs, in which she exhorts her listeners to care for their bodies. The main idea behind this article is that Beloved and the Amadas converse or talk, thus performing signifyin(g), a concept which, in Henry Louis Gates's words, explains how intertextual conversation happens through “repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal of difference” (xxiv). Its general theoretical foundations include interconnections involving several instantiations of signifyin(g): between Black nationalism and negritude, postcolonialism and African Americanism. In its specific concern with translation, the conversation that the source keeps with the target texts involves two translation theories: fluency and resistance; two kinds of translating interventions: omission and addition; and three types of strategies: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. These distinct categories help readers grasp translation as a continuum by means of which a specific source text encounters its target equivalents and, then, returns to its origin. The original article is in English.


Author(s):  
Jane Caputi

The proposed new geological era, The Anthropocene (a.k.a. Age of Humans, Age of Man), marking human domination of the planet long called Mother Earth, is truly The Age of the Motherfucker. The ecocide of the Anthropocene is the responsibility of Man, the Western- and masculine-identified corporate, military, intellectual, and political class that masks itself as the exemplar of the civilized and the human. The word motherfucker was invented by the enslaved children of White slave masters to name their mothers’ rapist/owners. Man’s strategic motherfucking, from the personal to the planetary, is invasion, exploitation, spirit-breaking, extraction and toxic wasting of individuals, communities, and lands, for reasons of pleasure, plunder, and profit. Ecocide is attempted deicide of Mother Nature-Earth, reflecting Man’s goal to become the god he first made in his own image. The motivational word Motherfucker has a flip side, further revealing the Anthropocene as it signifies an outstanding, formidable, and inexorable force. Mother Nature-Earth is that “Mutha’ ”—one defying translation into heteropatriarchal classifications of gender, one capable of overwhelming Man, and not the other way around. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American scholarship; ecofeminism; ecowomanism; green activism; femme, queer, and gender non-binary philosophies; literature and arts; Afrofuturism; and popular culture, Call Your “Mutha’ ” contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence of Man’s supremacy over nature, but that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is going away. It is imperative now to call the “Mutha’ ” by decolonizing land, bodies, and minds, ending rapism, feeding the green, renewing sustaining patterns, and affirming devotion to Mother Nature-Earth.


Author(s):  
Cathy Curtis

In 1942, at age twenty, after a vision-impaired and rebellious childhood in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine decamped for New York. Operations had corrected her eyesight, and she was newly aware of modern art, so different from the literal style of her youthful drawings. In Manhattan, she met rising young artists and poets. Her life was hectic, with raucous parties in her loft, lovers of both sexes, and freelance design jobs, including a stint at the Village Voice. Initially drawn to the rigorous formalism of Piet Mondrian, she received critical praise for her jazzy abstractions. During the 1950s, she began to paint interiors and landscapes. By 1959, when the Whitney Museum purchased one of her paintings, her career was firmly established. That year, she contracted a severe form of polio on a trip to Greece; suddenly, she was a paraplegic. Undaunted, she taught herself to paint in oil with her left hand, reserving her right hand for watercolors. In her postpolio work, she achieved a freer style, expressive of the joy she found in flowers and landscapes. Living half the year in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the other half in New York, she took special delight in painting the views from her windows and from her country garden. Critics found her new style irresistible, and she had a loyal circle of collectors; still, she struggled to earn enough money to pay the aides who made her life possible. At her side for her final twenty-nine years was her lover, painter Carolyn Harris.


Author(s):  
Mark Slobin

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.


Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Zabus

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.


Quest ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia A. Eisenman ◽  
C. Robert Barnett
Keyword(s):  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document