While visiting Barnard’s Archive this past week, I happened across a jazz poem by a contributor to “Phat Mama”. The poem, entitled me & miles, contributed by Thulani Davis (formerly Barbara Davis) talks about the way Miles Davis’ music influenced the narrator beginning as early as childhood– “when i was a childhood/then and oh yeah now/ me and miles/ had a/ real/ thing.”
Making Images vs. Taking Photos
Visiting the International Center for Photography last Monday for class was a truly inspirational and motivational experience for me!
It feels appropriate for me as I took Photography 1 last semester with the Visual Arts department at Columbia University. It is cool to contextualize the world of photography and understand the limited accessible spaces for dark rooms and film processing. I am excited to be able to use these facilities for our final project!
The presentation on photography was also interesting and reminded me of the ways in which we talked about art and photography in the art history classes I have taken. In fact, Bradley, with whom we will be working closely, concluded the presentation with works by Brooklyn- based artist, Lorna Simpson, an artist I have written about for the class, Feminism and Postmodernism in Art. Read More
Books for borrowing
From Ellington Was Not A Street, a children’s book based on the “Mood Indigo” poem in *A Daughter’s Geography*. Illustrated by Kadir Nelson.
Hi all,
While you described your future projects, I suggested some books that might be helpful for you. Given the library/archive move, I’ve placed these books in a box in the Barnard Center For Research on Women (BCRW) for informal loan. PLEASE TAKE CARE OF MY BOOKS. Some of them I’ve had for 20+ years and others are just difficult to get. Most of you might find Neal Lester’s Ntozake Shange : A Critical Study of the Plays useful. It is very thoroughly documented and the bibliography/notes might lead you to some interesting primary sources. There are several books on Black Women’s Health and the Black Arts Movement. (FYI, I am also loading items in our group Zotero folder as I find things that are related to your project.)
Bracey, John H., Sonia Sanchez, and James Edward Smethurst, eds. SOS/Calling All Black People : A Black Arts Movement Reader. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.
Clarke, Cheryl. “After Mecca” : Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c2005.
Collins, Lisa Gail, and Margo Nathalie Crawford, eds. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c2006.
hooks, bell. Sisters of the Yam : Black Women and Self-Recovery. Boston, MA: South End Press, c1993.
Lester, Neal A. Ntozake Shange : A Critical Study of the Plays /. New York : Garland Pub., 1995.
Shange, Ntozake. Coretta Scott. New York: Katherine Tegen Books, 2011.
———. Ellington Was Not a Street. 1 edition. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2004.
———. Freedom’s a-Callin Me. New York: Amistad, 2012.
———. Lost in Language and Sound: Or, How I Found My Way to the Arts; Essays (audio Book). Unabridged edition. North Kingstown, RI: AudioGO, 2012.
———. The Sweet Breath of Life : A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family. New York: Atria Books, 2004.
———. We Troubled the Waters. New York: Amistad, 2009.
Smethurst, James Edward. The Black Arts Movement : Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c2005.
Van Deburg, William L. New Day in Babylon : The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c1992.
Villarosa, Linda, ed. Body & Soul: The Black Women’s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.
White, Evelyn, ed. The Black Women’s Health Book : Speaking for Ourselves. Seattle, Wash: Seal, c1994.
Shange says Dance! Shange says Write! Keep on pushing on
When Ntozake Shange came to class we had the privilege of the archivist, the scholar, and the creator all in one room. We had someone to guide us through the materials, we had the written work, we had our own motivation to learn, but most importantly we had the living spring, the touchstone to which we could understand, the body to which we could trace back years of experience and extrapolate an abundance of meaning. With this dynamic it seemed like we could solve all problems and address all nuances of the black experience that may have once slipped by us.
Ntozake Shange in front of Barnard gates (10/23/15)
… (Reflections) … (continue) … (below) …
Much of Shange’s defiance of the Black Arts Movement was because it was for “macho males.” In a similar way she went to alternative dance teachers spaces and because she wanted to learn a dance “other than yoruba.” How did Shange choose which movements to be a part of? Which dance to dance? Was the nature of her defiance simply to move against the grain in every way? I had always wondered about the strategy of rejection and how refusal would effect politics and thus effect history. Shange answered my questions and unearthed the meaning behind her actions by explaining: “When you accept something/ don’t accept, it controls the historical narrative.”
Refusing the Black Arts Movement was a fight for women to not only be considered, but to be recognized as essential to the progress of any black agenda. Learning dances outside of Yoruba, meant that countries which fell outside the demarcations of West Africa could be represented in America and more importantly in the New World, which housed many nations and black aesthetics, that Shange was creating.
The purpose of arts, dance and writing, is to use individual creativity to get to a place where “we [the black collective] can restructure and reconstitute the universe” to be one that is inclusive of us. That is why Shange challenges African Americans to pick up another language, so we are not defaulting to the language of the oppressor. “When you take control of the language, you take control of your life.”
The Spyra piece describes Shange’s Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter and the way in which purposefully using language is an act of distancing one’s self from the historical narrative of slavery and the chains that identify the black body and black life as without form or distinction: “there’s no words for us (Spyra, 765).” In the same way that language breaks the historical narrative, so does dance. Though Shange distances herself from Yoruba dance because it only upholds one African cultural group, the fact that the dance appears in Black American culture is a victory. The distance between continent of origin and the diaspora is closing. The gap of okra and greens becomes tighter. The arts bridges continents and claims a trajectory of history that was stolen. In this video Shange defines black dance as “how we remember what cannot be said.”
reviving and reactivating
In pondering the influence and impact of the Black Arts Movement on young writers across the United States– the magazines, writing collectives, newspapers and newsletters that were born of the movement, I can’t help but recall something Ntozake Shange mentioned about her own writing process. She talked about about how there was a period in her life when she could only write poems when she was in love — that her process existed in her relationships with lovers. Her process didn’t change until she had her daughter– her experience of love and loving shifted from an external process to an internal process– the nurturing of one’s own creation. A nurturing that would come to include introducing her daughter to the world of art she helped to build and foster. While this intimate bit of her life may seem removed from one’s considerations about the spread of information, it is so indicative to me about the nature of art– creating and sharing. I become wholly aware of the constant shifting and mindfulness that is necessary in creating work of oneself with the intent that it will touch others.
I’ve spent some time considering last week’s rereading of ‘A Daughter’s Geography,’–comparing it to works like ‘for colored girls’ and ‘nappy edges,’ and considering the Black Arts Movement and Decolonization efforts of the time. What they all have have in common is Shange, herself, of course. Shange’s passion for telling stories and for hearing stories drove her across the country to engage with the creative process. In participating in her work and understanding the history of it we have revived the conversation and included ourselves. We have reactivated an archive, if you will.
We didn’t have time in class to flesh out a question I posed during my presentation that I think speaks to this idea of reactivating and re-visioning the “archive.” The question read:
The Black Arts Movement — collectives, publications, aesthetic tradition, the prioritizing of the Black experience — spread across the country over the course of ten years when prominent figures Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange and others migrated to the West Coast to teach, perform, and create.
How would we envision such an exchange today considering the possibilities of technology? Could we compare this spread of information to movements today, or not?
I can’t help but giggle because this act that I’m performing right now — contributing knowledge to a blog; an online platform for sharing with others, is almost an answer to my question. I consider current movements that have been born of the Internet, or gained considerable following via the Internet, that have garnered worldwide attention– Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Occupy, etc. and wonder if they are comparable to something like the Black Arts Movement– I wonder if we’re writing ourselves into “history books” so to say. And further ponder what that even means… If we are to change conceptions of an archive by understanding its carceral origins can’t we also re conceptualize how we create history by engaging with history.. in the fullest way?
looking further into Felipe Luciano’s “Jíbaro, My Pretty Nigger”
“There’s a move to divide us. It’s being done by Afro-saxons and coconuts. People who would have us believe that there’s a separate gulf between two nations: Black and Latino. This is not the poem, y’all. I’m telling you there’s no difference between Buford, South Carolina and Ponce, Puerto Rico…Mambo is Black, merengue is Black, R&B is Black, joropo is Black, flamenco is Black, guaguanco is Black, bomba is Black, be careful. They will come to you and say be careful with those hoards of Spanish people. Fuck them.”
Felipe Luciano opens his appearance on Def Jam in this way. Audience members cheer as though the poem has already begun before he tells them that he’s just going off. In “To Make a Poet Black,” Wilkinson concludes that Luciano’s place in the Black Arts Movement “should serve less to conceal cultural nuances, but work more to convey a cultural milieu in which poetry by African Americans and Puerto Ricans shared a communal residence” (330). Whether or not this statement applies to his self-image and artistic mission is obviously impossible to glean without consulting him, but judging by this performance, he seems to be acting first and apologizing later –making a radical point by saying that Black and Latino cultures ought not to be divided or even nuanced, but are one and the same.
I speak only intermediate-level Spanish, but for those who don’t at all, I’ve translated his first four lines:
“Jíbaro, mi negro lindo
De los bosques de caña
Caciques de luz
Tiempo es una cosa cómica.”
Jíbaro, my pretty negro
From the cane forests
Chiefs of light
Time is a funny thing
Read about the modern connotations of “jíbaro” here
As was briefly discussed in “To Make a Poet Black,” the poem is about the Black/Puerto Rican/Nuyorican experience as single, fluid, and inclusive. The use of “jíbaro” and “nigger” as relatively interchangeable or at least cohabitating terms suggests a cultural history and relationship so familial that each group is permitted to reappropriate the other’s slurs.
The majority of the poem reminisces about a decolonized state, so outside the realm of present possibility that most of it takes place in the womb of a universal mother. The images he uses are commonly resonant: one set of “mother” and “father,” shared “ancient empires” that have since been lost, “thoughts of freedom,” interchangeable use of “black” and “brown,” “the foul bowels of the ship/That vomited you up on the harbors of a cold metal city to die,” referencing both the colonization of Puerto Rico and The Middle Passage.
It ends with an ardent demand for community, addressing the division Luciano mentions in his preface to the reading, in which everyone ought to live in fear and division, being “careful” of each other –which really translates to “Fuck them.”
Jíbaro, did you know you my nigga?
I love the curve of your brow,
The slant of your baby’s eyes
The calves of your woman dancing;
I dig you!You can’t hide.
I ride with you on subways.
I touch shoulders with you in dances.
I make crazy love to your daughter.
yea, you my cold nigga man.
And I love you ’cause you’re mine.And I’ll never let you go.
And I’ll never let you go.
(You mine, nigga!)
And I’ll never let you go.
Forget about self.
We’re together now.
And I’ll never let you go!
Uh’uh
Never, Nigga.
The descriptions of collective love with terms typically reserved for romantic love are particularly effective. I love the use of “baby’s eyes,” as it could be interpreted to literally refer to the subject’s child as well as the image of the subject as pure love-object. The self/other line becomes very blurred (very directly!), as Luciano begs the reader to “Forget about self./ We’re together now.”
BAM, Multiculturalism & the “Languages” of Ntozake Shange
Black, white Chicana/o, and Asian American artists within the avant-garde theater movement shared similar interests in popular theatrical forms, particularly satire and farce, as well as nonnaturalist and often non -European dramatic norms that emphasized gesture, ritual and spectacle over plot and character development– Edward Smethurst “Bandung World . . .” 264
Well, this has been quite a week! I heard that the Friday session was quite exciting. Thanks again to Tiana and
Richard Wright’s essays reporting on the 1955 Bandung Conference: “They were getting a new sense of themselves, getting used to new roles and new identities.”
Sydnie for leading the group whike I was across the street talking about race and the seventeenth century stage. When I put together the syllabus, I had grouped several BAM-linked phenomena through the rubric “Decolonization,” perhaps because when I was writing it, I was thinking about how the decolonization movements of the 50s, particularly the 1955 Bandung Conference, an Afro-Asian conference of 29 African and Asian nations that excluded the Western powers, set the stage for the Black Power Movement and other liberation movements.
Alvin Ailey, BAM and Shange
I am really interested in Alvin Ailey’s ballet, Revelations, which Shange mentions in “why I had to dance” in Lost in Language and Sound. Growing up it was a tradition between my mother and I to go see Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater each year around Christmas when they perform at City Center. My mother would always choose a performance date on which they would be performing Revelations. Even before I was able to understand the importance of the ballet, I was aware that something about this piece in particular was sacred to many black dancers and black people who enjoy dance.
Michelle Wallace, the Black Superwoman, and Storm
http://prezi.com/4jn9gerobtdh/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy
By: Gabrielle Smith
This weeks readings put Michelle Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Black Superwoman and Larry Neale’s The Black Arts Movement in contact with each other. Some of the quotes I found the most interesting from Black Macho were:
“Ever since then it has really baffled me to hear black men say that black women have no time for feminism because being black comes first.” pg. 20
“But what he really wants was to be a man.” pg. 30
“Some black women are beginning to be honest with themselves about seeing themselves as victims rather than superwomen.” pg. 174
One theme that Michelle Wallace and Larry Neal carried throughout both works relates to race relations. Detailing the impact that white/black women had on white/black men and vice versa. In showing Amiri Baraka’s The Dutchman in class I aimed to highlight the interaction between Clay and Lola. Brining into the conversation about black and white America that Neal reminds us exist. Thinking about race relations allows us to connect the dots as to why black women have acquired this identity for being the “superwomen.”
Speaking of black superwomen Storm is one of the most famous. This character was created by Marvel Comics in 1975. Storm first appeared in Giant-Size X-man #1. Storm has the ability to control the weather and she can fly. She eventually got married to her fellow superhero Black Panther. I can’t help but wonder if the Black Arts Movement has any influence of Storm’s characterization. O yeah, also, she was raised Harlem.
Black Macho and SOS readings
The page numbers on the syllabus for Black Macho translate into: Part 1, chapter 1, Part II, chapters 1 & 3
from SOS Calling All Black People! A Black Arts Movement Reader:
Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement” (essay) 55
Amira Baraka, “Black Art” (essay)
Read one of these three: