The production schedule is on a page in the upper right corner of the blog. Brad suggests that we/you start editing and uploading photos into WordPress even if you don’t quite have your eventual layout/flow established, so I have listed that as a task for the day in addition to our production meetings, etc.
As you can tell, unexpected glitches happen; I will update the production schedule as needed.
Ntozake on Supersisters Feminist Trading card. (1979)
With Mellon Foundation funding, the BARNARD TEACHES: REAL PLACE + DIGITAL ACCESS grant is offering two paid internships for the summer of 2016. Each intern will split her time between the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (20-25 hours) and the Barnard College Archives (10-15 hours). This is an opportunity to see the inner workings of the premier archive of black life in the US as well as to work with world-class collections and experts in their respective fields. Each interns will work with either the Communications Division or the Jean Blackwell Hutson Reference and Research Division, occasionally shadow Steven G. Fullwood, Associate Curator of the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, and work with collaboratively with the Barnard Archivists. (See attached description of expected skills & duties.)
You can find complete description and application here and on Courseworks.
” i sat up one nite walkin a boardin housescreamin/ cryin/ the ghost of another womanwho waz missin what i waz missini wanted to jump up outta my bones& be done wit myselfleave me alone& go on in the windit waz too muchi fell into a numbnesstil the only tree i cd seetook me up in her branchesheld me in the breezemade me dawn dewthat chill at daybreakthe sun wrapped me up swingin rose light everywherethe sky laid over me like a million meni waz cold/ i waz burnin up/ a child & endlessly weavin garments for the moonwit my tearsi found god in myself& i loved her/ i loved her fiercely
All of the ladies repeat to themselves softly the lines ‘i found god in myself & i loved her.’ It soon becomes a song of joy, started by the lady in blue. The ladies sing first to each other, then gradually to the audience. After the song peaks the ladies enter into a closed tight circle.” (62/)
–For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf
Since my last archival find, I have been focusing on letters and the intimacy and the truth they hold and how it relates to Shange’s life and work I am engaging with. This has been instrumental to my focus on self-portraiture and black girlhood as it allows me to gain insight on the intimacies and the key individuals who have been instrumental in her creative processes and personal growth. I also feel confident in saying that in the works of Shange, they are not separate entities.
In the letter addressed to Shange, her mother states “You have brains, talent, education, money and a pretty face. Please take care of all these gifts. Acting as if they are not there will not make them go away. Please, please think about yourself. Find God, in yourself. Don’t add insult to injury!” This sentence takes me back to Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide Considered When The Rainbow is Enuf and her encouragement to herself and women beyond to find god in herself is coming from a place that is saturated with love and care. This letter is affirming as it solidifies my argument. Black girls self-portraiture is relational to representations that are resonant in their daily lives. That is not to say that black girls are not able to create people who they want to be outside of the “home” or their place of “belonging”. It is evident that Shange’s mother was instrumental in her processes of healing and of growth. Here we see Shange’s mother is earnest in asking her to find wellness and having gratitude for herself and her fruitfulness.
If we are drawn for a number of reasons/ to the lives & times of black people who conquered their environments/ or at least their pain/ with their art, & if these people are mostly musicians & singers & dancers/ then what is a writer to do to draw the most from human & revealing moments from lives spent in nonverbal activity.
(Shange, Ntozake. Lost in Language & Sound 14)
From there, Shange calls upon us to syncretize all of our forms of creation. Writing and dancing are indispensable to each other as form of making, breathing with, moving to, listening to rhythm. Writing itself is a rhythmic effort that calls upon the body to breathe and move through sets of unrecognizable grammars until we can form our own language. Dance is a polysyllabic, multi-form, amalgamation of syncopated heartbeats – an effortful, physical calligraphy etched onto the living landscape of breath. Music somehow conveys all that we have always known about ourselves, the world, and each other.
Ntozake Shange has always insisted on calling upon all of her capacities to stir up joy to write, dance, and make music with her breath and body. I respond to Shange’s call to move and invite my fellow lovers of Shange to join me for a workshop on collaborative dance and writing through collective writing, reading, and movement. I hope this workshop will fit into the context of my peers’ work, picking up from where Michelle Loo started in her collaborative zine happenin’ Time to Greez.
My hope is that through movement, we will put together the fragmented pieces of our memories to create an embodied narrative that continues the legacy of Shange, and countless Black women writers, dancers, movers, and thinkers through the timelessness of the choreopoem.
Saturday April 30, 2016
Studio 1, Basement of Barnard Hall
10am-12pm
7pm-9pm
bring hydrated bodies, bare feet, and kind spirits
–MUSIC– This is a really long youtube video of David Murray/Black Saint Quartet performing live in Berlin, but the energy shared between the musicians makes it well worth watching.
“There’s no music I hear without sensing you.”
This line is written in a letter Zake addresses to and in memory of her father–later to be used/edited for inclusion in Gloria Wade-Gayles anthology Father Songs. The quote made a circle in my mind that brought me to my first post rewriting Fanon, in which I talked about how laying claim to history and looking to the past as a way of informing one’s future is an important healing practice. This quote brings forth that feeling as truth. It brings forward the feeling that music is an art form capable of being inhabited (by soul/reality/existence/being/life) for healing. & to listen to music//really//listen to the music/ is to open oneself up to the voices & presence of the sacred.
Hello Zakettes, yesterday the New York Times arts blog announced Zake’s contribution of her collection to the college. You now have official recognition that you are the first scholars to access this archive! Please do share this news in your social media outlets.
“Ntozake Shange Archive Goes to Barnard” https://t.co/N8Bewgrljj #art #music #pop #jazz #streetart #banksy #graffiti #music #graff #fashio…
— Heart JacKing (@HeartJacking) April 15, 2016
Monday’s class schedule (Meet at ICP)
Discussion of Amanda’s blogpost
Introduction of ICON WordPress theme we will use for the class (Sarah)
Discussion of remaining schedule (including team meetings), final project criteria (please review). Design team (SG, KFH, Amanda, Danielle, Dania or Melissa); Text team: (BT, TR, Nicole, Sophia, Dania or Melissa)
Open time for editing projects
In the following passages from “why i had to dance//” Shange speaks of the relationship between her dancing and her writing process:
this is a critical moment/ when i decided that dance was as important to me as writing/ that in order to write, i had to sweat/ to reach some endorphin high to get to the truth/ which was the word/ this would change over time// (56)
in my early adulthood/ politics and the arts were truly wed at the hip or thereabouts// (57)
our commitment to the movement meant that all our resources intellectual as well as physical had to be dedicated to the liberation movement/ which is one of the reasons i had to dance/ (57)
it is possible to start a phrase with a word and end with a gesture/ that’s how i’ve lived my life/ that’s how i continue to study/ produce black art/ (58)
Michelle’s Zine cover!
How do you like this quote? Michelle recalled Zake saying this during our first meeting and I suggested that we adopt it as the banner quote for the site if we want one. We had multiple people missing last week, so do speak up in class on Monday.
We are meeting in the Digital Lab in Barnard Hall. Unfortunately, Steven Fullwood has to leave the session for a meeting at the Schomburg at 3:30. To make sure we maximize his input, we are going to have to rearrange things and be a little more rigid about time, so I’ll unfortunately have to ask the presenters to be quick and I’ll move discussion on after about 10 minutes. (see schedule at the end of this post.
Business: I’ve put a hard drive of materials scanned created at ICP in the Barnard archive. Please feel free to use and save any materials there, but do not remove the hard drive from the archive. Also, if you are editing an image scanned by another person, make a copy and then edit.
I’ve started a Google Doc for the website’s opening/introduction (“About”)with a few ideas thrown in. Please feel free to write & comment (it helps to use the comment function if responding to something already written there). Do be mindful about erasing other people’s work. Read More
Our Schomburg partner has come through again with some advice on Fair Use in this very quick Power Point. This information is particularly important for those of you adding non-Schomburg content (like music) to your projects.
Also available in Courseworks and here for download
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zHpH0SbpsZL0W0qB5O38N3J8UOjp47mR4X-0LqKAmXs/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=10000
I didn’t realize how big of a role social media played in my education until I began trying to cite sources from Facebook and Youtube. Social media is a pervasive source of communication, information, and education. By the time I graduated from high school, I had already learned to navigate social media platforms like Facebook with ease and it was the main source through which I got the news as opposed to my parents who primarily read newspapers and watched the news on television. The ability to share videos and articles as well as read people’s reactions to them made social media platforms particularly attractive. I find myself using wikipedia much less now than I did in middle and high school. Social media platforms today are a similar collective collaborative accumulation of knowledge with the added plus of news being updated and commented upon in real time.
As laptops are allowed in most classes, information is easily accessible as many students do wander onto social media sites instead of taking notes. The ability to access social media platforms via mobile devices makes information accessible almost anywhere at anytime. When introducing articles and Youtube videos into a paper or class discussion, I do what I did in high school by siting the original source and leaving out the fact that I first encountered the information through wikipedia, Facebook or Youtube. Based on my experiences, Barnard has not made explicit the type of media that is disallowed. As a Mellon Fellow I find that social media platforms are being transparently used to discuss and site social phenomena where on the other hand my intro Africana Studies courses focus primarily on written text such as books and published articles. However, as our world begins to digitize, I would be interested to see how academic institutions deal with the reality that students may be using social media platforms to get their information and the rules and regulations they may put around such usage.
