The Artist's Hand

This paper explores the power of portraits and their ability to redefine race and identity in time. In times of exploitation and disregard, black culture has been defined by the lends and hands of others. However, the emergence of black artists is now bringing light to a more personal perspective of their identity and culture. Artists such as Gayl Jones in her book Corregidora, Oneika Russell's new Olympia 7, and John B. Martin's Portrait of James Armistead Lafayette create and redefine a people who tried to be erased. Through these self-portraits, the importance of art and its creator are brought to life.

Black Gathering

In Black Gathering Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and ownership.

RESEÑA: SONIDOS DE LA DIÁSPORA. BLUES Y JAZZ EN TONI MORRISON, ALICE WALKER Y GAYL JONES. MARÍA ROCÍO COBO PIÑERO

.

Música y oralidad como formas de arqueología literaria memorias silenciadas de la esclavitud

Este artículo se propone analizar la arqueología literaria acometida por la escritora estadounidense Gayl Jones, quien utiliza la literatura como medio de revisión histórica. En el poema narrativo Song for Anninho, Jones combina música, poesía y oralidad para reconstruir -por medio de la imaginación y de hechos históricos, y desde un punto de vista femenino que incorpora los significados modernos del blues- la memoria de resistencia del Quilombo de Palmares, un conjunto de asentamientos de esclavos fugitivos fundados en el nordeste de Brasil a comienzos del siglo XVII. Así, este poema épico es, en realidad, una canción híbrida que, cantada por una mujer, vincula a Brasil y Estados Unidos a través de la diáspora y la esclavitud.