Brother to Brother and the “Place” of Film in Black Queer History

2021 ◽  
pp. 765-776
Author(s):  
Kara Keeling
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Black Film ◽  
Visual Form ◽  
The Past ◽  
Spatial Metaphors ◽  
Queer History ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter considers the ways in which Black film enlists the past when engaging in present struggles. It demonstrates how Rodney Evans’s film Brother to Brother (2004) redresses the elision of queer history from accounts of the Harlem Renaissance. Through a close reading of the film’s spatial metaphors, sound design, and visual form, the chapter shows how realism and the disruption of habituation exist side by side as mechanisms for new visions of Black queer life. It concludes that Evans harnesses the power of sound and image to remake history and to account for Black queer desire and erotic life.

scholarly journals A Magnificent Blond Beast: Exploring the Implications of Harlem Renaissance Writer Wallace Thurman as Ghostwriter of a Forgotten Celebrity Gossip Memoir

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-241
Author(s):  
Whit Frazier Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Saturday Evening ◽  
Celebrity Gossip ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the original blonde bombshell Peggy Hopkins Joyce. According to Hopkins’ biographer, however, Basil Woon, an English playwright and gossip columnist was supposed to have been the ghostwriter of this book. My paper will address this discrepancy by focusing on the lack of evidence supporting the Woon theory, and through an analysis using stylometry, close reading and an examination of historical documents, I will argue that Thurman is the more likely candidate as a ghostwriter for Hopkins’ memoirs, just as Hughes suggests. I will be looking specifically at the way the text, which is presented to the reader as a diary written by Hopkins from her early youth to the present day, satirizes the shallowness and excesses of the “roaring twenties.” I will argue that the text is clearly ironic and satirical in style and approach and not only satirizes celebrity, but also a society that unselfconsciously celebrates celebrity, much the way Thurman satirizes the excesses of the Harlem Renaissance in his novel Infants of the Spring. In conclusion, I will show how this book, which has been largely dismissed as celebrity gossip, is transformed into something highly literary by the way Thurman, as ghostwriter and editor, takes Hopkins’ life story and turns it into a satire of the excesses of an era.

Wages for Soundwork

Resonance ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-210
Author(s):  
Joshua Hudelson
Keyword(s):  
Panic Attacks ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Financial Independence ◽  
Reproductive Labor ◽  
The Past ◽  
Labor Power ◽  
Sales Clerks

Over the past decade, ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) has emerged from whisper-quiet corners of the Internet to become a bullhorn of speculation on the human sensorium. Many consider its sonically induced “tingling” to be an entirely novel, and potentially revolutionary, form of human corporeality—one surprisingly effective in combating the maladies of a digitally networked life: insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks, and depression. Complicating these claims, this article argues that ASMR is also neoliberal repackaging of what Marx called the reproduction of labor power. Units of these restorative “tingles” are exchanged for micro-units of attention, which YouTube converts to actual currency based on per-1,000-view equations. True to the claims of Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati, this reproductive labor remains largely the domain of women. From sweet-voiced receptionists to fawning sales clerks (both of whom are regularly role-played by ASMRtists), sonic labor has long been a force in greasing the gears of capital. That it plays a role in production is a matter that ASMRtists are often at pains to obscure. The second half of this article performs a close reading of what might be considered the very first ASMR film: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Through this film, the exploitative dimensions of ASMR can be contrasted with its potential for creating protected spaces of financial independence and nonnormative corporeal practices.

The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White

1997 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 166
Author(s):  
Peter Powers ◽  
George Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance
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