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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Exploring the Public Domain & Week 2 ICP Class

by Kim Hall 2 Comments

The Travelers’ Green Book: 1963-64 International Edition. From the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division. NYPL Digital Collections

How many times have you sung “Happy Birthday” in your life? Did a representative from Warner Music show up and ask you to pay  a fee?  I’m guessing not. However, until the beginning of this academic year when the song was ruled to be in the public domain, if you showed characters singing “Happy Birthday” in a TV show, film, greeting card or any media that was either public or commercial, Warner Music would have vigorously asserted its right to that material and you would need to pay for something that many assumed was just “public property.”

Finding magic behind the lens (in your backyard)

by Danielle 1 Comment

I was really taken by Bradley’s final anecdote about learning to take photos in your own backyard, and how humbling that can be. Often our everyday blurs into the mundane. Holding a camera, I think there’s always an initial desire to capture something fresh and new; something you’ve never seen before. But I believe the most empowering kind of photography requires using your lens to kindle the magic of your mundane.

Shange, DeCarava, and the mundane

by Sophia 2 Comments

I was very excited by our class visit to the ICP. I have practically no experience with either the technical or historical practices of photography, and it was incredibly special to be taught by someone who was clearly a passionate expert, and who integrated so much of his personal relationship to the medium into his instruction. I’ve never looked at an image with such love and intensity as I did this past Monday, and I am looking forward to getting to do so more often, and with more developed tools.

The Things An Image Can Say

by Nadia 1 Comment

I was really blown away by Bradly Dever Treadaway’s presentation at the International Center for Photography. Last semester in the Shange course, I learned how text creates images and last Monday I learned images can create text! The images by Robert Frank Bradly showed us was a prime example of this. I found the image of the trolley in New Orleans particularly striking because of the way in which a simple, candid shot was able to say so much about the social hierarchies of the time and the linear space in which people lived.

Robert Frank | Trolley — New Orleans (1955)

Black Presentation and Authenticity through Photography

by Clarke 1 Comment

who’s hair isn’t done / let me get in that head honey / the day is lace and crinolines / curls, satins, and layers of beauty / who’s mama wouldn’t be proud / who’s eye won’t be turned when / i saunter outta this room where / the magic is and become it – The Sweet Breath of Life

 

And they has a party every Saturday night / usually not no big party / Just neighbors and home folks…But it’s nice to young folks all dressed up going somewhere–maybe to a party. But it’s sad if you ain’t invited.

The Sweet Flypaper of Life

A number of continuities exist between Shange and Kamoinge’s The Sweet Breath of Life and Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life, including authentic representations of black families and neighborhoods, and the power of pairing image and text.

much ado abt black photography

by Kiani 2 Comments

This week’s introduction to Shange’s work and black photography at the International Center of Photography was exciting and enlightening for so many reasons. As a student of photography and a visual arts major, I have visited the facilities on a number of occasions for classes and shows. It was particularly interesting and relevant to experience the Center in this specific way. My work for my thesis and as a practicing art is so intertwined with my identity and my experiences as a queer person of color from the South in New York at Barnard/Columbia and abroad.

Images and Text: Questions of Identity and Meaning

by Nicole 1 Comment

I learned in a photography class at Barnard that early photography began to flourish among the masses with the adoption of portraiture by the middle class in the mid-1800s. Disderí, the European photographer who became famous for photographing the masses, created small photos of people called carte de visite that were more accessible to the middle class. He was often contrasted with other photographers who only photographed the rich. The professor argued that the middle class used photography as a statement of their status and as a way of self-fashioning. We, the students in the class, were prompted to inquire as to what the subjects of photographs were trying to say. Most of the photographs we looked at in this class were not created by black Americans nor did they feature people of color.

We’ve only just begun! Our first ICP class

by Kim Hall 4 Comments

One of my favorite images from *Sweet Breath of Life.* I’m determined to make a quilt from it one day. The blogpost “Intimate Moments in the African Diaspora,” gives a peek into the Kamoinge process. (Click the photo).

Welcome Back to “The Worlds of Ntozake Shange & Digital Storytelling”! On Monday we’ll start a new phase of our adventure.  We talked about how Zake moved knowledge from the body to the page/stage; how do we move “carnal intellectuality” to the visual and the digital?  We’ve talked (and felt) a lot about art and various forms of embodiment; this semester we’ll begin talking more about visuality—both about how we make stories from objects/things we see and how we read differently when we see text on screen as opposed to a book or paper.  How do we make visual knowledges that come with motion, that emerge from connections between people, and that reside in everyday acts like cooking or everyday objects that are not usually recorded?

If I Can Cook, You Know God Can: Food, Histories and Memory

by Dania 0 Comments

In If I Can Cook, You Know God Can, Ntozake Shange attaches specific dishes with specific experiences and histories. In doing so, Shange gives depth about a particular recipe and thus connecting how it shapes a people’s existence. Integrating the histories of foods and its impact is essential as the stories and movement of people across the diaspora is shared and better understood. Shange expresses a fluidity of exchange of foods and methods of preparing said foods, from Cuba to Venezuela to Guadeloupe, which is indicative of familiarity and fundamental relations. The fundamental similarities in the preparation of foods is translated to the colloquialisms that are used to describe foods and actions as Grosvenor mentions in the foreword:

Shange’s Visit- Language, Creolization, Memory: The importance of Combative breathing.

by Dania 0 Comments

“You can’t depend on the sunshine for symmetry”

“If I could I go through a day and not have an evil thought or hurt anybody, I have a good day”

“A part of being a feminist is to discover how to dress like a woman”

(Shange)

Shange’s visit was one that was both an “out of body” experience and one that felt very real and inescapable because her ability to capture one’s attention in person, just as she does in her work. It was a very compact and I am still in awe of her humbleness and her willingness to be a vessel both in her works and her being.

 

You cd try direct

When i’m vulnerable & survivin

I get each moment back/ i want to know

what we make

in the world/survivin us/makes us

non-fiction/unless yr holdin back

then you are fiction & i am a plot

so my silence is a kind of gratitude how often am i understood if i open my mouth

we give each other empty paper bags & ticket stubs

we’ve been someplaces or are going

this not camp

 

this is a wide open hand/ unsettled unclaimed

in the hinderlands of ordinary/we cd homestead it we cd save it till the next time

we cd burrow our feet in soil & gather up sky wine& music

 

you know whatta breeze is at twilight in autumn

the horizon lays out in violet & sepia

jets of orange wisk thru our hands

that’s why my neck gets so hot when you touch me

the last heavy breaths of the day belong to us

non-fiction/

 

-Fiction/Non-Fiction (Okra’s intellect addresses Green’s mind)

 

 

 

Poetry is mobile. Okra and Greens showed that poetry is transferrable spatially and temporally. Through its transferability it creates room and the necessity for archival spaces. Archival spaces illuminate the importance of memory and storytelling. As it is a recollection of experiences that create an arsenal of one’s life. The dynamism of storytelling and archiving encourages conversations across disciplines.

Archival spaces serve as sites for remembrance, accountability, documentation of empires, preservation of knowledge and the control of knowledge within the context of imperialism. Poetry’s ability to create memory and record the sentimental emotion allows the a space for sentimental archiving. Within the context of Shange’s work and her decision to donate her work to Barnard’s archive speaks to the importance of referential work for black women and students at predominantly white institutions. Shange’s archival materials despite it’s magnitude and multiple genres felt personal due the intimacy and the honesty that lives in boxes. It removes the formality and rigidity from the research process and personalizes the experiences. Though the formality and rigidity is removed the process of archiving Shange’s work, these is a reverence in the way that I, along with my peers handled her possessions which is attributed to the gravity and the depth of writing. The organization of Shange’s archival materials reflects her concept of “carnal intellectuality” as it incorporates both spatial and the temporal component, which extends across borders. Her archives are self-defined. Shange’s archival material are interactive and multidisciplinary. For example, combining both her work, works that have been inspirational as well as personal items- the nipple duster.

 

Post our class with Shange, I had a conversation with a friend and the topic of patience surfaced and she repeated a cultural proverb, which states “the fruit of patience is sweet” which is directly related Shange’s encouragement to be patient with ourselves as young writers, artists and intellectuals. Patience is essential to practicing combative breathing, which was reflective in the breathing exercise with Shange.

Shange states, “you have to ready your body for language”. Language is not static. It is translatable perhaps not verbatim but by integrating tools such as histories, memories and movements, Shange makes the claim that people across the African diaspora can communicate and relate by using the colonizers’ languages or a mixture of the colonizers’ languages which Shange does in her work. Which puts the importance of creolization on the forefront. Shange’s words forces us to interact with words with movement. In addition to that Shange’s work both in content and style, queers the representation of language by coining terms and combining languages of theAfrican Diaspora which allots an openness and the selflessness that Shange presents in her work and its is reflected in her archives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sQjh261rU8- To zion lauryn Hill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qWuKSGii8o-sing- Sing to the moon Laura Mvula