«Lemma»: Jay Wright’s Idiorrhythmic American Theater

This essay presents Jay Wright’s play Lemma as a historiographical challenge and also as a piece of idiorrhythmic American theater. Consonant with his life’s work of poetry, dramatic literature, and philosophical writing, Lemma showcases Wright’s expansive intellectual framework with which he constructs vivid, dynamic, and complex visions of American life. The “America” conjured here is steeped in many traditions, traditions typically kept distinct by academic discourse, such as West African cosmology, Enlightenment philosophy, jazz music theory, Ancient Greek theater, neo-Baroque modifications of Christian theology, pre-Columbian indigenous ways of knowing, etymological connections between Spanish and Gaelic, the materiality of John Donne’s poetry, and the lives of enslaved Africans in the New World. What is the purpose of Wright’s theatrical conjuration? How do we approach a text with such a diverse body of intellectual and literary sources? The author answers these questions and ends with a call to treat Lemma as a much needed point of view that opens lines of sight into Black and American theater far outside the well-worn territory of the Black Arts Movement.

Black Youth Poetry of 2020 and Reimagined Literacies

In response to anti-Black policing in 2020 that led to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Black children and teens turned to poetry as a means to channel their self-described terror, rage, pain, horror, tiredness, and need for change. Reminiscent of the poetry of the Black Arts Movement and works published in The Black Panther newspaper, these poems, many of which call for a “revolution,” are reflective of young people’s critical engagements with the world and the word. With critical literacy as a framework, I engage in critical discourse analysis to determine how the young poets reimagine literacy as they protest anti-Black policing and racism. By focusing on young people’s own grassroots literacy initiatives, which call for the reimagination of blackness and whiteness, and demand truth, justice, and reimagined futures, I demonstrate how educators can reimagine literacy practices to center students’ criticalities and prioritize racial justice.

The Sonic Undercommons: Sound Art in Radical Black Arts Traditions

This chapter responds to Sara Ahmed’s powerful assertion that ‘to account for racism is to offer a different account of the world’ (Ahmed, 2012). Its premise is that artists of colour have been largely neglected within existing accounts of sound art, and that sound art discourses would change substantially if they accounted for the work of such artists as Terry Adkins, Charles Gaines, Jennie C. Jones, George Lewis, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Clifford Owens, Benjamin Patterson, and Adrian Piper, among many others. Focusing in particular on the sound works of African American artists, this article investigates what Lock and Murray (2009) have described as a racially biased ‘selective hearing’ in relation to emerging canons of sound art. It puts under pressure sound art histories—purported traditions, genres, aesthetic lineages, genealogies—and, equally, confronts the philosophical and intellectual paucity that has resulted from the lack of critical and scholarly attention to the work of black artists. What is missing from ‘whiteness-imbued histories’ (Lewis, 2012) of sound art? How does selective hearing limit what we know and understand about sound art, and how we come to know it?

Festac 77: A Black World’s Fair

From January 15 to February 12, 1977, Nigeria hosted an extravagant international festival celebrating Africa’s cultural achievements and legacies on the continent and throughout its diaspora communities. Named the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (or Festac 77), it was modeled on Léopold Senghor’s inaugural Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (World Festival of Black Arts, or Fesman) held in Dakar in 1966 but expanded its Atlantic horizons of Africanity to include North Africa, India, Australia, and Papua New Guinea. Festac’s broader vision of the Black and African world was further bolstered by Nigeria’s oil boom, which generated windfall revenues that accrued to the state and underwrote a massive expansion of the public sector mirrored by the lavish scale of festival activities. Festac’s major venues and events included the National Stadium with its opening and closing ceremonies; the state-of-the-art National Theatre in Lagos, with exhibits and dance-dramas linking tradition to modernity; the Lagos Lagoon featuring the canoe regattas of the riverine delta societies; and the polo fields of Kaduna in the north, celebrating the equestrian culture of the northern emirates through their ceremonial durbars. If Festac 77 invoked the history of colonial exhibitions, pan-African congresses, Black nationalist movements, and the freedom struggles that were still unfolding on the continent, it also signaled Nigeria’s emergence as an oil-rich regional and global power. Festac’s significance lies less in its enduring impact than in what it reveals about the politics of festivals in postcolonial Africa.