tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40406917402207737072024-03-13T12:52:56.276-07:00Jerry Wardjwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.comBlogger560125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-89823568860857952042017-07-10T00:30:00.001-07:002017-07-10T00:30:44.998-07:00invisible worms in roses
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">INVISIBLE WORMS IN ROSES</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">There's a bit of relief to be had from the intense heat
of Trumpism by coldly reading </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Death
of White</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Sociology</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New York:
Vintage, 1973), edited by Joyce A. Ladner.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is a matter of common sense.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Conflicting premises, murky motives for doing one kind of research
rather than another, blind spots sprawling in humanistic and social science
projects in 2017, the rainbow colors of methodologies ----these all highlight
the rightness of Ladner's claim in 1973 that "sociology, like history,
economics and psychology, exists in a domain where color, ethnicity, and social
class are of primary importance.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And as
long as this holds true, it is impossible for sociology to claim that it
maintains value neutrality in its approaches" (xix).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is equally impossible for humanities to
possess value neutrality. As Trumpism ups the ante for indigenous knowing as
well as convoluted theoretical interrogations and interventions, being cold
matters greatly.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We are not detached
from our thinking.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And after four
decades, I suspect that white sociology in the USA is not sufficiently dead.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As I work on </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Reading Race Reading America:</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Literary
and Social Essays</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> and another project on ideological shuttling between
democracy and fascism, I find the cautions in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Death of White Sociology</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> to be at once helpful and
troubling.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I ask myself if intellectual
projects are somewhat quixotic, permanently incapable of detecting invisible
worms in roses (see William Blake's magnificent poem "The Sick Rose,"
1794).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I will not be denied the
"true fact" of the worm, the "magic" of Trumpism
notwithstanding.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A fellow writer notified me
yesterday about </span><a href="https://milwaukee.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_39N3sncRkRol/15Lf"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">a survey
of nomenclature in Black Studies</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (</span><sub><span style="color: #f4f4f4; font-family: wf_segoe-ui_normal; font-size: 11.5pt; margin: 0px;"><a href="https://milwaukee.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_39N3sncRkRoI5Lf" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="color: blue;">https://milwaukee.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_39N3sncRkRoI5Lf</span></span></a>
))</span></sub><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> )proposed by Nolan Kopkin and Erin N. Winkler, members of the
Department of Africology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. A butterfly
zoomed through my mind.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Is there a
Department of Europology at any institution in the USA?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Would such a department undertake a survey of
nomenclature in White Studies or Jewish Studies as subsets of American Studies?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The butterfly asked and would not stay for an
answer.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Why do I smell a worm I can't
see?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Why at </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">just this
moment</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> does Kopkin, who uses econometric techniques to pursue his work in
political economy and public policy, racial prejudice and entrepreneurship, and
substantive black political representation, express interest in nomenclature or
identity-naming?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And why has his
colleague Winkler, who uses the qualitative methods of Africology to study
(among other things) childhood and learning about race, partner with him in the
undertaking?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the name of digital
humanities, I am deeply interested in where to locate the value investment of
their motives and their enterprise.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Why
do I smell the familiar aroma of the rose that once studied the Black Subject
into near oblivion and bloomed without giving a nanosecond of notice to its own
compromised subjectivity?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Perhaps a cold
rereading of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Death of White Sociology</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
can help me discover an answer.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">July 10, 2017</span></b></div>
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-78276241279188756422017-07-07T22:40:00.002-07:002017-07-07T22:40:11.851-07:00Aesthetic Suicide
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">ADVICE TO THE WANNABE
</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">RICH</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">When you must die,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">duplicate </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">an
aristocrat.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Plate death artfully</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">on Limoges (Bernardaud, of course).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Your appetite must dare not refuse,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">must pair the course </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">with absinthe (Pernod Fils, of course).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Gourmet thyself</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">in a green hour</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">to Elysian Fields.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">July
8, 2017</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-85943826128364799452017-07-06T00:26:00.001-07:002017-07-06T00:26:43.330-07:00Poems by Clint Smith
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">On Poems by Clint Smith</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">One of my friends who protests, much to my amusement and
my dismay, that poetry should be plain enough for </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">lumpenprolitariat</span></i><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">readers to
understand would like</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Smith, Clint. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Counting
Descent</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Los Angeles: Write Bloody
Publishing, 2016.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">He and Smith are natives of New Orleans, and they share
cultural kinship from the angles of tradition and attitudes.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Smith's poems would seem at first glance to
satisfy my friend's demands for transparency and easy recognition. Smith and my
friend seem to be brothers. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">"Seem" is the operative word,
because Smith's poems are not scripts for greeting cards. They do not confuse
respect for integrity with deceptive sentiment.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What my friend would assume is the inviting easiness of Smith's work is
the complex simplicity that informs the genuinely American </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">poems of Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. Smith's
poems, like those of Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, are
tools for actual rather than passive thinking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Unlike the poetry of some modernist and post-modern
writers, Smith's poems can be read and understood without referring to
dictionaries and encyclopedias or obscure texts and unfamiliar belief
systems.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They are vernacular for our
time, without resort to artificial neo-dialect, in the very sense that Paul
Laurence Dunbar's late nineteenth century poems were affirmations of
unconditional humanity .</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I have yet to
figure out why people like my friend think they must broadcast
misinterpretation of </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Karl Marx's
definition of</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> lumpenprolitariat</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">in order to say they like vernacular </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">literature.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Their comments strike me as a pretentious
blending</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">of </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">radical desire with stereotyped laziness, a
vulgar embracing of low valuation of Self.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Many of Smith's artfully constructed poems in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Counting Descent</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, especially those which focus on the
subjectivities of black boys, are aesthetic instruments to counter an uncritical
embrace of nihilism and psychological destruction. He uses wit, the epitome of
complex simplicity, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">to reject the
temptations of </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">despair. His book
contains poetry for everyday use rather than innovative fossils for a canonical
museum.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Two companion poems in this collection, "James
Baldwin Speaks to the Protest Novel" and "The Protest Novel Responds
to James Baldwin," are touchstones of Smith's prescient imagination as
well as his superior knowledge of African American literary history.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They are forecasts of the brilliant writing,
plain and not so plain, that Smith might contribute to a future for the
republic of American letters.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Read </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Counting Descent</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> to fight before you
fiddle, to empower your mind to rise and take control.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">July 6, 2017</span></b></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-67128755473843835562017-07-02T20:36:00.001-07:002017-07-02T20:36:03.344-07:00President Obama
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">President Obama ---The Man/The Icon</span></b></div>
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<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">David
J. Garrow's</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama</span></i><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">(New York: William Morrow, 2017) is a big
book.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Its ten chapters of narrative
occupy 1078 pages; the remaining 383 pages consist of the acknowledgement (1079-1084),
the copious chapter notes (1085-1356), the bibliography (1357-1391), the index
(1393-1460) and the "About the Author" page (1461).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Are so many pages needed to cover the life of
Barack Hussein Obama II from August 4, 1961 to January 19, 2017?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Yes.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Do so many pages adequately provide full disclosure of Obama's rise as
our most noteworthy Kenyan American and 44th President?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">No.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A
single book</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">can't possibly give us all
the contextualized facts we either need to know or think we need.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A trenchant analysis of anything in our
everyday lives, especially of major figures and events in American politics, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">requires a crunching of big data and the
writing of persuasive narratives.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Rising</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Star</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> is Garrow's effort to make a compelling statement about our rage
for social, political, and cultural information.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">His success, however, compounds the
difficulty of knowing what is truly necessary and sufficient.</span></div>
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<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Reading
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Rising Star</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> cover to cover is
probably not the path many readers will take.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They will sample chapters and depend on the index to guide them to
topics which seem to be of immediate relevance.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Unlike their nineteenth-century ancestors, most contemporary readers
lack the patience and discipline to engage a big book ---unless the book
pertains directly to a job, career advancement or retrofitting, and a
paycheck.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Even for readers who work in
the arena of politics, policy decisions may be of greater importance than
expanding their sense of history.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Rising Star</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> will be relegated to a shelf
of reference books and consulted only when a search engine doesn't provide
immediate access to specialized information or "factoids" about
President Obama and his eight years in office.</span></div>
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<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We
can anticipate that </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Rising Star</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> will
eventually appear on the collateral reading lists for advanced graduate courses
in American government, political theory, historiography, or</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the politics of race.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Special, limited audiences of teachers and
students will explore Garrow's artistry in aligning snapshots of Obama the man
(organic human being) with formal photographs of Obama the president (the
fashioned or constructed political being).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They will be positioned to make sense of Garrow's pragmatic </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">coup de
gr</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">â</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">ce</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> :</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In Springfield too
a perceptive woman understood how Barack "is an invention of himself."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But it was essential</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">to appreciate that while the crucible of
self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core.
"You didn't let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions --like hurt or
fear ---you didn't want them to see," Barack long ago had taught himself,
yet hand in hand with that resolute self-discipline came a profound emptiness</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.
(1078) [my italics]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Irony of irony that what is imagined to be hollow and
empty will in time be seen to be solid and full. We shall need yet another 1461
pages to begin to understand the quintessential American irony that Garrow
invites us to ponder.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">July 2, 2017</span></b></div>
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-41491844728967075892017-07-02T07:36:00.000-07:002017-07-02T07:36:04.944-07:00Poem for my birthday
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">POEM 74</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">But for this
unhappy man there is not clear path leading out of the blind alleys of the
world.</span></div>
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<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Nathan
A. Scott, Jr., </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Poetry of Civic Virtue</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Immune to</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">ghetto</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">glittering</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">gutter</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">glorification</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">the attic</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">of the bone house</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">of seven senses</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">eternalizes</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ella's </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">essential</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">excellence</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">leaves</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">this bitter earth</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">a better world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">July 2, 2017</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-19873600781448679092017-06-30T17:15:00.001-07:002017-06-30T17:15:39.607-07:00Appreciating Gwendolyn Brooks
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Appreciating Gwendolyn Brooks</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Readable prose is hard to come by in 2017.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We are drenched with tweets.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Poison-tipped arrows,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">jargon-laden bullets, and ideological rocks
violate our minds.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Thus, it is most
pleasant to discover that</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jackson, Angela. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A Surprised
Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Boston: Beacon Press, 2017</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">is delightfully readable and intellectually
refreshing.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">One imagines Gwendolyn
Brooks would bless the accomplishment.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The book produces a bright moment when the civility of poetic virtue
ascends.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is easy to forget that appreciation complements
evaluation.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jackson, herself an
accomplished poet and novelist,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">was
mentored by Brooks.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I recall that Brooks
admonished Jackson to "</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">crispen</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
the edges" of delivery prior to a 1985 poetry reading in Washington, D.
C.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jackson absorbed the good advice and
still uses it wisely.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The evidence is
located in the style and tone she employs in writing a judicious appreciation
of her mentor's life and legacy.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Without
falling into the traps of uncritical hagiography, Jackson details key moments
in Brooks's life as a total, brilliantly gifted human being who chose to
write.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">She supports key points about
Brooks's evolving poetics with well-chosen anecdotes and quotations.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jackson's prose is discriminating; her
rhetorical strategies help us to better appreciate why in the realms of
American literature and intellectual history Brooks's works have an honored
place.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A Surprised
Queenhood in the New Black Sun</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> provides a fine introduction for readers who
may know the name Gwendolyn Brooks but who have never read </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Maud Martha</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, her two autobiographies, and collected poetry, who
have never engaged her legacy.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The book
also puts those who have expert knowledge about African American writing on
notice:</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">they may know a bit less than
they believe they know, especially about how furiously literature flowers from
one aesthetic /political season to another.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The pleasure of reading this book is an act of cognitive renewal.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">June
30, 2017</span></b></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-88046963207874336812017-06-23T08:23:00.003-07:002017-06-23T08:24:15.393-07:00RELENTLESS READING MATTERS<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">RELENTLESS READING MATTERS</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Lebron, Christopher J. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Lebron's book is eloquent, refreshingly readable,
philosophically nuanced, and profoundly troubling.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">It is "radical" in a judicious
sense of that word, because it exposes roots. We commend his turning back to
the rootedness in the writings of Anna Julia Cooper and Audre Lorde. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">His argument is superbly constructed and
provocative, an excellent invitation for a reader to confess her or his
prejudices in concert with Lebron's confession of his own preferences. </span></div>
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<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Lebron uses James
Baldwin's moral compass with greater precision than Ta-Nehisi Coates uses it in
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Between the World and Me</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">, and that
fact magnifies both the necessity and the horror of a reader's making cultural
and political choices.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Coates allows us
to eavesdrop as he saturates his son with advice, straight out of his private </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">agon</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> with black masculinity.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Lebron addresses his readers directly, straight
out of his need to articulate his investment in moral philosophy. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">He forces them to dwell on the vaporous efficacy
of Baldwin's compass and to question why , in the last decade or so, Baldwin is
so frequently referenced in discourses on race and moral correctness and so
seldom mentioned in robust, unromantic </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">discussion of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Realpolitik</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">If a reader is
honest and admits that she or he is guided more by the political wisdom</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">or pragmatism of Machiavelli and by the logic
of Nietzsche's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">On the Genealogy of Morals</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">
</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">than by always delayed Biblical
platitudes and promises, he or she will live with bracing discontent </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">during and after reading Lebron.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Lebron's accounting for the history of an idea is
scholarly.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">It is responsible, but it's a
little short of being the corkscrew of specificity that non-academic
participants might need to shape a constellation of emotive responses (i.e.,
#BlackLivesMatter ) into the black hole of a viable movement. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">We might suspect academic readers will be
happy with how the book puts them </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">in
conversation</span></i><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">(to use threadbare
jargon), puts them</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">in a safe,
evasive</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">conversation</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">with people they would never invite to
dinner. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Only an inattentive reader would
miss the class biases in Lebron's rhetorical gestures. Thus, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">The Making of Black Lives Matter</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> stands
as an example of our need to transform language into actions which reduce the death-inviting
risk of being respectable, magnanimous, and morally correct all the time.
Failure to channel resentment sufficiently is the book's venial flaw. </span></div>
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<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Lebron is
forthright in his introduction about his motives for writing. He desires
"to provide the philosophical moorings of #BlackLivesMatter," and he
tries "to contribute to our moment by bringing to bear the forefathers and
foremothers of black American social and political thought on an urgent claim:
that black Americans are humans, too" (xiii).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">His aim is to provide just that analytic
narrative "we need to fully appreciate the depth of 'black lives
matter'</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">" (xv). </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">STOP</span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri";">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">
</span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">In confronting the unavoidable messiness of inter-racial and
intra-ethnic features of intellectual histories, readers must ask to whom
"we" actually refers in the unfolding of the book.</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> RESTART</span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri";">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The structure of Lebron's unfolding is fascinating.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">He begins Chapter 1 (American Shame and Real
Freedom) with timely remarks on the writings of</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">
</span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">
</span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">He moves in Chapter 2 (Cultural Control against Social Control: The
Radical Possibilities of the Harlem Renaissance) to refreshingly intelligent
albeit debatable</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">commentary on Alain
Locke, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">
</span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">and the characteristics of the era of the New Negro.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">He focuses on "the present uses of black
urban performance to make a stand for social progress and then goes back to a
foundationalist moment in black arts and letters</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">---the Harlem Renaissance" (xvi).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">It is not original for Lebron to contend that
Kendrick Lamar's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">To Pimp a Butterfly</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">
is an act of rebellion, an act that may have forecast the making of
revolutionary lemonade.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">It is original
for him to not consider that Lamar's performance may not be quite so free as it
seems, particularly in light of how an overwhelmingly non-black entertainment
industry manipulates consumers, and it is likewise original that he directs no
attention to the lessons Harold Cruse taught in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual</span></i><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">(1967)about how myopic the Harlem Renaissance
was with regard to social control or to the lessons Houston A. Baker, Jr.
taught</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">two decades later in his extended
essay </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Modernism and the Harlem
Renaissance</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> (1987) regarding cultural control.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">The idea of "renaissance" or
"rebirth" is far too central an issue in what matters about black
life to avoid swiping cognitive fingers over its jagged grains.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Lebron does a better job of according due diligence to
gender and sexuality in Chapter 3 (For Our Sons, Daughters, and All Concerned
Souls) by way of examining the arguments and struggles of Anna Julia Cooper and
Audre Lorde, dwelling appropriately on their groundbreaking work.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">He set the stage for more sustained inquiry
about what is groundbreaking and exceptionally relevant for #BlackLivesMatter
in the writings of Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, bell hooks,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Barbara Smith, Mari Evans,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Angela Y. Davis, and numerous other writer/activists
for whom lives mattered/matters tremendously.</span></div>
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<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Chapter 4 (Where Is the Love? The Hope for America's
Redemption) deals fairly with the ideas of James Baldwin and Martin Luther
King, Jr. and with the painful moral assessment that begs to be made of what
Dylann Storm Roof did on June 17, 2015 at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Charleston, South Carolina.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">
</span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Even if one concedes that Lebron is fair in dealing with the ideas of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">agape</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">philia</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">, the chapter leaves a most agonizing question without an
answer:</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Does Malcolm X matter so little
in philosophical mooring and concern for love and redemption that he receives
only scant mention on pages 119-120, 122?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">
</span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">The absence speaks volumes about our needs and the contours of Lebron's
thinking.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Chapter 5 (The Radical Lessons We Have Not Yet Learned)
directs us to black conservative arguments (Thomas Sowell, Randall Kennedy and
black respectability politics, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter) in order to alert
us "to the need for a refreshed black radical politics" (129).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Lebron rings the alarm bell gingerly,
however, because he writes nary a word about a premature forgetting of lessons
in radical politics created by</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Cornel
West!</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">He does give us an indirect clue
about why there may be no space for West in the kind of intellectual history he
wants to write.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">He uses what he calls
the mechanics of Nietzsche's accusations about </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">ressentiment</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> to critique errors in conservative discussions of
#BlackLivesMatter.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">It might be argued
that Nietzsche was a quintessential pragmatist, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">and mentioning West would make it necessary to
comment on </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">The American</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> Evasion </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">
(1989) and West's conviction that a deep investment in pragmatism is essential
for a revolution in American society and culture. Such notice would deconstruct
what Lebron seems to want us to remember about reform, reforming, and what
matters.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">In the coda (Afterword: Nobody's Protest Essay) , Lebron
most accurately predicts how many of us will misread his unfolding of
intellectual history.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">The most likely
misreading of this essay</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">--- and likely
due to some fault in my presentation --- is that I am ultimately calling for
black Americans to turn the other cheek, but really, nothing could be farther
from the truth.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Rather, it is me trying
to make my anger more intelligent and precise, and nothing has ever been more
destabilizing to the status quo than that ---the discipline to smile to keep a
conversation going just so you may ultimately win the argument rather than
storm off without the goods you came for in the first place….</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">If the discipline
is well-honed then we also come to realize when it's really revolution time,
which is something quite opposite from turning the other cheek.</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> (164)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Lebron gives us one frame of reference for critical
thinking about what Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi set flowing
in 2013 under the sign of #BlackLives Matter, but it may be necessary to
misread the frame in order to take appropriate action.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Like Baldwin, Lebron insists on believing
"the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice" (159).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Lebron does not incorporate Amiri Baraka's
2001 poem "Somebody Blew Up America" in his discussion of what it is
essential for us to know, but that</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">
</span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">evidence of what is not seen in his text doesn't provide reason to
believe the status quo he would destabilize is still standing.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">When we read </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">The Making of Black Lives Matter</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> relentlessly, we recognize the arc
of the moral universe bends toward chaos and the status quo in the United
States of America is a dystopian wasteland, the civility of philosophy
notwithstanding.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">June 23, 2017</span></b></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-13210454896492579282017-06-21T01:07:00.002-07:002017-06-21T01:07:26.538-07:00Prelude to reading the Fourth of July
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Preface to Reading
Frederick Douglass</span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">(for whom it
indeed concerns)</span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Go thou, and like
an executioner</span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Cut off the heads
of too fast growing sprays,</span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">That look too
lofty in our commonwealth:</span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">All must be even
in our government</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Richard II</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.
III.iv. 33-36</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In a chapter on Shakespeare's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Richard II</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, James Boyd White proposed "that every claim of
authority we can make, on any subject and in any language, should be regarded
as marked by a kind of structural tentativeness, for every claim implies its
counter within its language and every language implies a host of others
answering it" ( </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Acts of Hope:
Creating Authority in Literature, Law and Politics. </span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994: 77).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">If there is
validity in this positioning of claim and language, it is obvious that our
speaking, our struggles to transform the actual into the materiality of
American English sounds, is a defense mechanism (either a learned motion or an
instinctive reflex) to conquer abject insanity.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">White's statement may reduce fear of political language, but it
intensifies dread of devastating political action.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Should we commend White for arming our minds
to deal with the disconnection of language and action since January 20, 2017?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">White's civility and Donald Trump's barbarity arrive at
an identical point of structural tentativeness as we make choices about</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> what</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> we can tolerate in a democracy
and </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">what</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> ( not </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">who</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> I hasten to note) we should murder therein. Our priority is to
defend ourselves and </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">to murder systems
not human beings.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Neither the aesthetic enlightenment of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Richard II</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> nor the rhetorical insight of
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Acts of Hope</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> is sufficient, because
we are condemned by common sense and existential necessity (if we do want to
survive) to deal brutally with the New Fascism which has replaced the Old Jim
Crow and the debatable efficacy of an American Dream.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Should we not master the structural tentativeness of
Frederic Douglass's oration, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?: An
Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852," and treat it as
more than ritual remembering or historical ceremony?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Contemporary slaves are rainbow----
indigenous, African, Hispanic, Caucasian, Hebraic, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">of Islamic ancestry, Asian, and diversely
gendered.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">These slaves constitute the
total population of the United States of America.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Should our bodies follow our minds through
the portals of Douglass's language and fight in the toxic combat zones
engineered each day by the Tribe of Trump?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The answer is in your brain.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Do
you believe that "all must be even in our government"?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">June
21, 2017</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-60112606612987578072017-06-18T13:33:00.001-07:002017-06-18T13:33:20.289-07:00Between the World and Ta-Nehisi Coates
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Between the World and Ta-Nehisi Coates</span></b></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">During the final session of the "Generations of
Struggle" series at the New Orleans Public Library on June 15, 2017, we
arrived at diverging opinions about two four-letter words ----</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">hope</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> and </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">love</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">. The catalyst was Ta-Nehisi Coates's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Between the World and Me</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As overlapping
abstractions, hope and love may inspire some African American </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">readers to think of universal </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">virtues, to dwell ---however momentarily ---in
a realm of ideals.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">These readers are
optimists.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They believe we can hear the
harmony of liberty</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">above the cacophony
of the United States of America.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We can
hear the harmony if we are true to our God and to our native land.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The song "Lift Every Voice and
Sing," co-authored by the brothers James Weldon and Rosamond Johnson, is
an anthem, a hymn</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">of faith. The same
readers faithfully embrace Arna Bontemps's admonition to hold fast to dreams.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Their thinking habits as dreamers </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">align them oddly with the Dreamers, who Coates
describes at one point, as people who "plunder not just the bodies of
humans but the body of the Earth itself" (150).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">When African spirituality is integrated with
New World religiosity, these Christ-haunted readers thrive. They are romantics.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Among the readers in our group who occupy the middle of a
spectrum, love and hope are philosophical possibilities not eschatological,
historical givens.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The readers are as
judicial as Jesuits.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They are
tolerant.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They have compassion both for
readers who are locked in bubbles of faith and routine and for readers who are
bubble-busters, who reject rose-colored visions of what is actual.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They hear in Coates's appropriation of
Richard Wright's superb lynching poem a warning against uncritical,
unconditional embracing of hope and love.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They are aware of how Coates borrowed and modified the form and content
of James Baldwin's "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One
Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation" and "Down at the Cross:
Letter from a Region in My Mind" (</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The
Fire</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Next Time</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">. New York: The
Dial Press, 1963).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They do not worry
that Coates is more "commercial" than Baldwin was (and continues to
be).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They give passionate attention to
Baldwin's claim that "it is not permissible that the authors of
devastation should also be innocent.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It
is the innocence which constitutes the crime" (19-20).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They weigh that claim against Coates's
assertion that "The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to
understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted
themselves white, is the deathbed of us all" (151).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They will neither pit Coates against Wright
nor Baldwin against Coates in the discourse on systemic racism.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They are aware that </span><a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/systemic-racism-could-care-less-about-your-respectability-politics"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">systemic
racism</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> is blind and deaf and dumb in its rejection of civility, in its
embrace of barbarity.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They know that the
words </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">guilt, hope, love, innocence</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
are unstable signifiers in a human being's descriptions of existence and
choices of identity.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">At the end of the reader's rainbow that is remote from
those who pursue either neutrality or romance are the strong readers who
contend that discussions of hope and love are compulsively fractal.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They are relentlessly </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">critical of how Baldwin and Coates wrote
jeremiads for the unregenerate.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They do
respect how Coates and Baldwin, in greater and lesser degrees, championed the
need for love of Self prior to love for the Others, but they do not believe
that faith transcends Darwinian action or deep knowledge about the eternal
struggle to combat the corrosive properties of all that dehumanizes.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They inhabit the region between the world and
Coates and fill the void that plagues and limits Coates's book as equipment for
living.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Those readers are my comrades.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">June
18, 2017</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-21097679616057098812017-06-13T08:41:00.000-07:002017-06-13T08:41:01.885-07:00Ramcat Reads #14
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ramcat Reads #14 </span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Benforado, Adam.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Unfair: The New Science of Criminal
Injustice</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">New York: Crown, 2015.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Whether we are trying to make sense of vice or holiness,
innocence or guilt, stupidity or intelligence, we are condemned to think </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">with</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> rather than </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">against</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> the tides of media.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Our contemporary fascination with social networking positions us to be
complicit.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We resist, then discover
resistance does not suffice.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The labels
or ideological stances we adopt ----independent, conservative, liberal
---eventually collapse under what both David Walker and Frantz Fanon understood
wretchedness to be.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Our souls may escape
to elsewhere, but our minds cannot. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Given
this scenario, Adam Benforado's work should be required reading for the
temporary relief it offers.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The book
should be required reading in our nation for President Donald J. Trump and his
tribe, for members of Congress (especially for those who pretend to be
Democrats), for public school and university students and teachers, for all of
us inclined to resist from diverse angles.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Cushman, Ellen et al., eds. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A good collection of essays to promote thinking about
technologies and diverse forms of literacy.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Harris, Jessica B. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">My
Soul Looks Back: A Memoir</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">New York:
Scribner, 2017.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Harris's
"confessional" memoir is innovative.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It deserves special attention for what it reveals about the presentation
of self and how dependent the shaping of identity can be on reference to famous
persons.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Harris also embeds recipes in
her text to emphasize how cuisine is related to language, affection, and social
bonding.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Long, Richard A.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ascending and Other Poems</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Chicago: DuSable Museum of African American
History, 1975.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">With an introduction by
Hoyt W. Fuller and Margaret T. Burroughs' note "about the author," </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ascending and Other Poems</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> is a rare
volume of sixteen poems, which should be accounted for in histories of the
Black Arts Movement.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Nolan, James.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Reinventing Justice: The American Drug Court
Movement</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. For people who have
professional investment in the American criminal justice system and special
knowledge of legal reasoning and practices,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Nolan's study may be lucid and nuanced.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">For those who do not, the book may seem to be dense.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is not easy to understand how radical
replacing "just desert" with "just treatment" might be.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Nevertheless, lay readers will grasp that
displacing retributive procedures with therapeutic practices entails</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">"fundamental role transformations for
the major actors in the courtroom drama"(89) -----the judge, the
defendant,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the prosecutor, and the
defense lawyer.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Nolan's exposure of how
theatrical the justice system might become is sobering.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Taylor, Elizabeth Dowling. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Original Black Elite: Daniel Murray and the Story of a Forgotten
Era</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">New York: Amistad, 2017.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">While the topic of black elitism has low priority in African American
historiography, it serves as a counterweight to emphasis on the underclass and
cycles of deprivation in studies of black social and cultural history.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">According to Taylor, the primary focus of her
book is designed "not only to highlight the heterogeneity of the black
experience but to put into highest relief the absurdity of the notion of white
supremacy" (409). More studies of class as a racialized category of
analysis are needed to expand our understanding of how assimilationist values
and thinking continue to function in the evolving of American society.</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-16809113662696824112017-06-09T21:46:00.002-07:002017-06-09T21:46:55.461-07:00Meditating on Wretchedness under a Stawberry Moonv
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<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Meditating on Wretchedness under a
Strawberry Moon</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Whether we are trying to make sense of vice or holiness,
innocence or guilt, stupidity or intelligence, we are condemned to think </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">with</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> rather than </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">against</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> the tides of media.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Our contemporary fascination with social networking positions us to be
complicit.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We resist, then discover
resistance does not suffice.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The labels
or ideological stances we adopt ----independent, conservative, liberal
---eventually collapse under what both David Walker and Frantz Fanon understood
wretchedness to be.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Our souls may escape
to elsewhere, but our minds cannot. </span></div>
<br />
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Given this scenario, Adam Benforado's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Unfair: The New Science of Criminal
Injustice</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New York: Crown, 2015) should be required reading for the
temporary relief it offers.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The book
should be required reading in our nation for President Donald J. Trump and his
tribe, for members of Congress (especially for those who pretend to be
Democrats), for public school and university students and teachers, for all of
us inclined to resist from diverse angles.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Benforado pricks consciousness.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Is he selling a fake post-truth or an
undeniable fact in the following paragraph?</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The news media
further distorts our perceptions because our threat-detection system tends to
rely heavily on whatever is within easy reach.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Incidents that are prominent in our memories end up taking on an outsize
role.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And how easily we can recall an
event influences not only our sense of how frequently that event occurs but
also our sense of how important it is.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It makes a difference, then, that there is far more coverage of serial
rapists and child kidnappings than of diabetes deaths.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Likewise, the disproportionate number of
stories on the local news about crimes committed by young African American men
increases people's fear of black men and leads to an overvaluation of the
threat they pose, which may in turn affect how police officers, prosecutors,
judges, and jurors treat them</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">. (xvi)</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Is Benforado providing a description of why deliberate
suppression of stories about crimes committed by white women and men cultivates
fears among non-whites of the collective threat so-called white people present
to humanity?</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In this instance, it is prudent to use the standard of
reasonable doubt in any engagement with </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Unfair:</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The New Science of Criminal Injustice</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">,
because Benforado backs his claims with testable evidence from research in
psychology and neuroscience.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Science
does have reasonable credibility, does it not?</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The importance of his book pivots on the credibility of
"Benigne faciendae sunt interpretationes, propter simplicitatem laicorum,
ut res magis valeat quam pereat; et verba intentioni, non e contra, debent
inservire" ((trans. Constructions [ of written instruments ]are to be made
liberally, on account of the simplicity of the laity [or common people], in
order that the thing [or subject matter] may rather have effect than perish [of
become void]; and words must be subject to the intention, not the intention to
the words.))</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There is a reason that the
American legal system buries its treasures in Latin. See </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Black's Law</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Dictionary</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Benforado's book is a tool for meditating on
wretchedness under a strawberry moon.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It
is not a solution.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is guide for
action, for bending the arc of history toward elusive justice (286). It tells
us what many African Americans know from historical experience, what
non-African Americans have yet to learn.</span></div>
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<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">June 9, 2017</span></b></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-67564366003694035972017-06-06T16:45:00.000-07:002017-06-06T16:45:08.152-07:00Generations of Struggle, Part Threev
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">GENERATIONS OF STRUGGLE: Discussion Notes, Part Three</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Session 4, June 15: Between the World and Me: A Father's
Message to His Son. </span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Discussion prompt
and questions from the African American Research Collection, New Orleans Public
Library:</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">As a father, Coates emphasizes the threats of police
violence, systemic racism, and economic uncertainty, but also the power of his
son's potential despite the odds.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Racial
injustice is seen as permanent; the American dream is out of reach.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">1. Coates directs the book to his son.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">How does this shape his message? </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What are his greatest fears for his son?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">How do we learn about race from our families?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">2.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">How does
Coates define the American Dream?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Why
does he believe it is unattainable for African Americans?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Do you think the American Dream is alive
today?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">3.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Coates writes
from the perspective of a lifelong resident of the northeast.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">How do his descriptions of urban life differ
from that of a Southerner?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What does he
learn in New York?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In Paris?</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I had partially
answered these questions </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">when Ta-Nehisi
Coates published </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Between the World and Me</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
(New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015)--------</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates is not easy.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The difficulty is </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">constituted neither by his prose style nor his
subject matter, because the subject matter is familiar and his sentences are
music for the inner ear. Difficulty slams into you from a place he is not
exploring, from the badlands where signs defy decoding. You feel that his
having borrowed the title </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Between the
World and Me</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> from one of the stellar poems of 20th century American poetry
transports you to a desert where the bones of David Walker, Herman Melville, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Walt Whitman, Alexander Crummell, Mark Twain,
and Ralph Ellison are strewn helter-skelter and the air smells like Theodore
Bilbo's breath.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In that arid, alienating
place, you are hearing footsteps from </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In
the American Grain</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> by Williams Carlos Williams and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Brothers and Keepers</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> by John Edgar Wideman, although ultra-orthodox
literary </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">criticism wants you to hear a
sermon from James Baldwin that simply is not available. The difficulty is
constituted by the idiosyncrasy </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">of how
your mind reads, by your affinity with Richard Wright.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">August 6, 2015 12:42 AM</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Idiosyncrasy begets temptations.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Under the influence of Coates's tip of the
hat to Richard Wright and the space/time where an enormous number of males have
no sanctuary, you are tempted to listen once more to Billie Holiday sing
"Strange Fruit."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But wouldn't
the mood produced actually prejudice your reading of how Coates depicts the
hard place and the rock?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Listen to
Thelonious Monk, October and November 1947, Blue Note LP 5002.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Monk and Art Blakey sound you to read.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You are tempted to ask why Coates
romanticizes life at Howard University beyond the classroom as the Mecca.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">His idea of Mecca is a translation of
comments on a pilgrimage by a man whom Ossie Davis eulogized as one who made
the cowardly "thoroughly ashamed of the urbane and smiling hypocrisy we
practice merely to exist in a world whose values we both envy</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">and despise."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Is it urbane or cosmopolitan to tell your son
about that Mecca and tell him nary a word about Chicago's</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Mecca, the 1891 apartment building, and what
Gwendolyn Brooks said about that Mecca?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">She ordered us to "Sit where the light corrupts your
face."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">When you drop knowledge for
your son, employ economy.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Aretha
Franklin's beautiful phrasing of "And temptation's strong" cuts
across Monk's "Humph."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Trying
to accord Mr. Coates the sympathy and respect he accorded Wright's illuminating
habitation of the black male body, you are tempted to say unto him invest more
in the vengeance of the Old Testament God for whom the pen is the sword.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">After Ferguson and the white magic of daily
systemic murder in the United States, you are tempted to suggest that the human
body in our nation professes the New Testament God to be an invisible shadow
and act.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">After all, who told Jesus he
could change his name?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Who?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ah, Mr. Coates you use the word "body"
too much in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Between the World and Me</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
and are too stingy in using the word "mind."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Temptations strengthen idiosyncrasy.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">August 7, 2015 9:27 AM</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">You find it tantalizingly informative that Ta-Nehisi Coates
chose not to imprison his letter to his son in the ancient form that letters
can still assume.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He begins
"Son," (page 5) and ends "Through the windshield I saw the rain coming
down in sheets." (page 152)</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He did
not begin "Dear Son," and end "Your father,
Ta-Nehisi".</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The lack of formality
says something about the 21st century, about the distance between what Mr.
Coates deems to be the proper shape of correspondence and the outmoded
antiquity</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">of your ideas about how
courtesy ought to be signaled.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So be
it.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Although generic form is an action,
it is superseded by substance.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Substance
is what you are looking for in Coates's book.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">You find it in the possibility that Coates is saying
something to his son from the region of mind that only he can access, that is
curiously represented when he writes of becoming a writer without a degree from
Howard University:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I felt that it was time to go, to declare myself a graduate
of The Mecca, if not the university.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I
was publishing music reviews, articles, and essays in the local alternative
newspaper, and this meant contact with more human beings.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I had editors ---more teachers --- and these
were the first white people I'd ever really known on any personal level.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They defied my presumptions --- they were
afraid nether for me nor of me.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Instead
they saw in my unruly curiosity and softness something that was to be treasured
and harnessed (62).</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The slave trade </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">treasured
</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">black bodies and </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">harnessed</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> them
on plantations in a new world of capitalism.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">You write on the margins of page 62: "Reconstructing
the tragic chain of circumstances...." and "In the hope that there is
something to learn from this account, something to salvage from the grief and
waste, I've striven for accuracy and honesty."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You quote from John Edgar Wideman, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Brothers and Keepers </span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">(New York: Vintage,
1984), page xi, hoping (with genuine desperation) that Wideman's honesty will
anoint your reading of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Between the World
and Me</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You begin to fear that
Coates is 100% American. You write words published in 1925 on a separate sheet
of paper: "Here Poe emerges --in no sense the bizarre, isolate writer, the
curious literary figure.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">On the
contrary, in him American</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">literature is
anchored, in him alone, on solid ground." This assertion comes from
William Carlos Williams, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the American
Grain</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New York: New Directions, 1956), page 226. You are annotating
Coates's book because something is emerging.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Poe became a "major" American author by not graduating from
the University of Virginia.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">William
Carlos Williams, a doctor and poet, found something American to admire in Poe.
So too did Richard Wright, who said that had Poe not lived we would have invented
him.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the back of your mind, memory
whispers: one of Wideman's early novels is entitled </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Lynchers</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Is Coates saying something to his son about narrative that
exceeds the conventional talk (recently rebaptized by necessity as THE TALK)
which non-white American fathers think they are obligated to have with their
non-white sons, saying something about the talk that ,apparently, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">white fathers never have with their white
sons?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">When it comes to how the talk and
lives of all color matter, the tongue of the white male American body is as bound
as the feet of a Chinese emperor's favorite wife.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Perhaps Coates is quite indirectly telling
his son that the so-called white mind actually is a fiction without material
references.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">August 7, 2015, 12:04 PM</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">"You have not yet grappled," Ta-nehisi Coates
writes to his son, "with your own myths and narratives and discovered the
plunder everywhere around us "(21).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">When and if the son does discover American history is an interlocked
series of subjective narratives , then he will have to weigh the commerce of
narrative and </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">violence</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">in maintaining</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">America's social and racial contracts.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Men created America by violating the minds
and bodies of men, women, and children. You think it would be good for Coates
to give his son copies of Hayden White's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The
Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Representation</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1987), Grace Elizabeth Hale's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Making</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Whiteness: The Culture
of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New York: Pantheon, 1998), Tzvetan
Todorov's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Conquest of America</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
(New York: Harper & Row, 1984), John Hope Franklin's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">From Slavery</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">to Freedom: A
History of Negro Americans</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, 3rd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967) and
Leslie Bow's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Partly Colored: Asian
Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">South</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New York: New York University Press, 2010). The son might
plunder these books at his leisure. Or he might reject them and</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">choose to plunder a very different selection
of texts. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You guess that Ta-nehisi
Coates would have his son plunder in the name of unqualified</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">love of himself.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Should he do so, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">he might indeed produce his own myths and
narratives and thereby rival those created by his father. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">He might empower himself to destroy the </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">ways the agents of mass media, social
networking,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the ubiquitous Internet, and
the American police state work feverishly to constipate his mind as well as his
body and his spiritual essence.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">August 7, 2015, 4:49 PM</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Between the World and
Me</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> is a strong, complex, provocative book.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Like all American authors, Coates could not avoid signing deals with
demons in order to have his book published commercially. You know that. You </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">have compassion for the book's instances of
class-blindness. You </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">make peace with its
flaws, the moments when specificity becomes generalization, because the book
subverts gross ignorance and exposes your nation's unique brand of denial.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is a brave book.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is a book that James Meredith, author
of</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A
Mission from God: A Memoir and Challenge for America</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New York: Atria
Books, 2012), might endorse if he is caught at just the right moment of
generosity.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is a truth-telling book
which inspires dread. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It does not
inspire promises of false hope that shall never be delivered. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Dread is the real
deal in the United States of America and elsewhere. The Dream is an evil
fiction that attempts to enslave people, and</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">too often it succeeds beyond the expectations of its authors. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ta-nehisi Coates has
produced a first-rate secular jeremiad, an honest meditation on Dread. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There is a thin but critical line between a
sermon and a jeremiad.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Coates is neither
a priest nor a preacher. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You sit in the
desert, secure in your idiosyncrasy.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You
and the ghost of Claude McKay sit in the sand and take bets on who shall be the
first to see Time's unerring terrorism, with much help from Nature, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">dispatch the millions of people who worship in
the temples</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">and cathedrals and mosques </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">of white supremacy.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">August 7, 2015, 8:25 PM</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">FOOTNOTES FOR JUNE
8, 2017*</span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">1.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We learn about
race from the conversations we have with members of our families, from the
stories transmitted from one relative to another, from wondering why there are
certain questions that older family members flatly refuse to answer.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">2.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The American
Dream is not dead. It is slowly dying as lies, fractions of truth, mass media,
and social networking prove that the dream is a vulgar nightmare that benefitted
a small percentage of the American people from 1776 to the present. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">3. Coates's writing about urban matters is edgy and
calculating.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A Southerner writing about
Atlanta, New Orleans, or Birmingham might focus more sharply on a sense of
community.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Coates learns in New York
and Paris what anyone learns in a major cultural arena: life is generous with
hellish opportunities.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">*The footnotes may be revised after the discussion
occurs.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">June 6, 2017</span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-69300798590446967772017-06-06T00:08:00.002-07:002017-06-06T00:08:42.946-07:00Generations of Struggle, Part Two
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">GENERATIONS OF STRUGGLE: Discussion Notes,
Part Two </span></b></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">As might be the case with Marilynne Robinson's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Home</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A Lesson Before Dying</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, "the religious backgrounds inhabited by
the characters and the community generate a mythology of the past and a vision
of a possible future, but the action persistently, and often frustratingly,
remains arrested in the anxious and unfulfilled present" (Ray Horton,
" 'Rituals of the Ordinary': Marilynne Robinson's Aesthetics of Belief and
Finitude. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">PMLA </span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">132.1 (2017): 126
).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Moreover, as Horton proposes
"the experience of being stretched uncomfortably between past and future
(eschatological time) and the way that such an experience, when conceptualized
in a theological or theopoetic framework, opens new avenues of aesthetic perceptivity
(aesthetics of immediacy)" (126). That Gaines's novel addresses a sliver
of African American Louisiana cultural history in tandem with the demands of
the American criminal justice system in 1948 necessitates a more perfect
interpretive union of theological and secular frames.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Interpretation of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A Lesson Before Dying</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> is </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">more vexed than interpretation of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Home</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Therein is a crucial lesson about difference between American and
African American understandings</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">of
criminal justice.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Session 3, June 8: A Lesson Before Dying: Jim Crow and
the Imprisoned Life</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Three questions supplied by the African American Resource
Collection, New Orleans Public Library:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">1.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jefferson is
convicted of murder in what appears to be a case of "wrong place, wrong
time." His defense attorney describes him as a "hog," a
description Jefferson repeats once he is imprisoned.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What prejudices are reflected in that
description?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">How does Grant combat this
blow to Jefferson's self-esteem?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Before trying to name prejudices, we ought to read the
wording of the text carefully.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Prior to
using the word "hog," the attorney informs the jury that Jefferson is
a boy, a fool, "a thing that acts on command"(7).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The word "thing" activates
pre-existing attitudes a white juror possessed about black males in a Louisiana
parish circa 1948; the black male was considered to be semi- human, possessing
limited intelligence "inherited from his ancestors in the deepest jungle
of blackest Africa…." The attorney apologizes for the error of using the
word "man."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He bids the
gentlemen of the jury to consider, whether the thing was innocent or not
innocent, "What justice would there be to take this life? Justice,
gentlemen?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Why, I would just as soon put
a hog in the electric chair as this" (8). The jury in good conscience can
find an "it" or a thing "guilty of robbery and murder in the
first degree." It is as futile for a thing to appeal a verdict as it is
for a plow to protest that it has been abused.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The prejudices reflected in the description are those which are innate
in American racism.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Pressured by his aunt (Tante Lou) and by Jefferson's
godmother (Miss Emma), Grant Wiggins reluctantly undertakes a series of verbal
and material actions to persuade Jefferson that he is not a thing or a hog but
a human being, a man who is condemned to die. He slowly persuades Jefferson to
recognize that he does possess agency, the human capacity to discriminate
between right and wrong, along with the dignity that no hog can ever possess.
Jefferson leaves evidence in his diary ( Chapter 29)</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">of how his self-esteem is restored. In terms
of literary history, we note the closing lines of Jefferson's diary parallel
the final statement Bigger Thomas makes to his lawyer in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Native Son</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">2.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Grant sees his
small town in Louisiana as a prison and yearns to escape.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What holds him back?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">How does this conflict impact his
relationship with his students?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">With
Jefferson?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">With Vivian?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is difficult for Grant to admit to himself that he is
held back by a sense of commitment and a certain recognition that no man is an
island.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">His small town, Bayonne, is
thirteen miles away from a plantation where he lives and teaches; it is a rural
scene of action in 1948, the year that President Harry Truman signed Executive
Order 9981 which "barred segregation in the Armed Forces and created the
President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed
Services, to end discrimination in military facilities and units." In
1948, "30% of all the Negroes in school in the South were educated in
buildings contracted under the Rosenwald Fund's aid programs." [Quotations
from Bergman, Peter M.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Chronological History of the Negro in
America</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New York: Mentor Books, 1969), page 516]</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The building in which Grant taught was a
church contracted by the plantation and maintained by people who lived in the
Quarter.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Commitment to those people
holds Grant back and leaves him in agony.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Grant teaches his students with tough-love, transferring
to them his desire to be liberated from the "prison" that a
plantation could be. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A Lesson Before
Dying</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> conjures memory of what is documented in the film </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Slavery by Another Name</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Although Grant is aware that his university
education has created a barrier between Jefferson and himself, he is equally
aware that both he and Jefferson are located in a mythology of rural Louisiana,
a Southscape, or in the words of Thadious M. Davis [</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Southscapes:</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Geographies of
Race, Region, and Literature </span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2011)], "the incarceral world goes on with its dividing lines, its
racist segregationist codes, its systemic injustices" (302). From the
theopoetic angle, Grant and Jefferson and Vivian remain" arrested in the
anxious and unfulfilled present" (Horton 126).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Grant's conflicted feelings create great
tension between Vivian and himself, but those feelings endow his love for
Vivian with maximum honesty.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">3.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Is the conflict
between Grant and the reverend a generational conflict or a religious one?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Do you think their arguments remain relevant
today?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The conflict between Grant and Reverend Ambrose is at
once generational and religious.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is
no mere accident that Grant teaches in a plantation church, yoking the sacred
and the secular in his personhood.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is
Reverend Ambrose who tries to complete the education that Grant did not obtain
from the university, namely that the practice of religion incorporates the
lying and hypocrisy that relieves the intense pain of living.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Listen as Reverend Ambrose
"lessons" Grant:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">"Yes, you know. You know, all right.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">That's why you look down on me, because you
know I lie.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">At wakes, at funerals, at
weddings</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">---</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">yes, I lie.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I lie at wakes and funerals to relieve pain. 'Cause reading, writing,
and 'rithmetic is not enough.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You think
that's all they sent you to school for?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They sent you to school to relieve pain, to relieve hurt</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">---and if you have to lie to do it, then you
lie.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">……</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And that's the difference between me and you, boy; that
makes me the educated one, and you the gump.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I know my people.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I know what
they gone through.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I know they done
cheated themselves, lied to</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">themself
---hoping that one they all love and trust can come back and help relieve the
pain." (A </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Lesson Before Dying</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
218)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The arguments and the lesson have extraordinary relevance
in 2017 for us and what we may think about the American criminal justice system
that vicious, subtle, and bereft of spirituality.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">June 6, 2017</span></b></div>
<br />
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-71756730718788964042017-06-04T00:12:00.003-07:002017-06-04T00:12:53.646-07:00Our American Economy
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Our Post-Truth/Pre-Future Economy</span></b></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A small portion of a sinister paragraph from</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Paul A. Baran's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Political Economy of Growth</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1957) is an apt description of the contemporary economy of the United States of
America:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Incapable of pursuing a policy of genuine
full employment and of genuine economic progress, having to abstain from
productive investment as well as from a systematic expansion of consumption, it
[ monopoly capitalism] has to rely in the main on military spending for
preservation of the prosperity</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">and high
employment on which it depends both for profits and popular support</span></i></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">…..</span></i></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">To secure popular acceptance of the
armaments program,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the existence of
external danger has to be systematically hammered into the minds of
people.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">An incessant campaign of
official and semi-official propaganda, financed by both government and big
business, is designed to produce an almost complete uniformity of opinion on
all important issues.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">An elaborate
system of economic and social pressures is developed to silence independent
thought and to stifle all "undesirable" scientific, artistic, or
literary expression. A spiderweb of corruption is spun over the entire
political and cultural life of the imperialist country and drives principles,
honesty, humanity, and courage from political life.</span></i></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (129-130)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Under the greatly admired leadership of a fake President
who tweets and excoriates with gusto and abandon, a significant number of
American citizens obediently worship in the synagogues, mosques, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">cathedrals, and evangelical </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">churches of </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">monopoly capitalism.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The new religion in our nation is a matter of fact.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">American facts are biblical; they </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">do not lie.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Unfortunately, American facts in 2017 disembowel the trinity of charity,
hope and faith.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">June
4, 2017</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-55708858842717328342017-06-02T04:10:00.003-07:002017-06-02T04:10:41.342-07:00Generations of Struggle
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">GENERATIONS OF
STRUGGLE:</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Notes on an endless process,
Part One</span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">"The legacy of slavery continues to resound in our
national conversations on race, economics, and the criminal justice
system.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">….'Generations of Struggle
[Perspectives on Race and Justice from Reconstruction to the Present]'</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">presents three critically acclaimed works,
one film and two books, that provide a continuum from the aftermath of slavery
to contemporary society, posing questions about our institutions, the changes
in race relations, and the enduring challenge to equality for all citizens."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">With these words, Jakilah Mason, the African
American Resource Collection librarian at the New Orleans Public Library,
welcomes us to a four-week long process ( May 25, June 1, June 8, June 15) of
resisting the implicit anti-intellectualism of life in the United States of
America.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We are asked to first define
for ourselves what "institutionalized racism" might be in 2017, to
ponder how it has tremendous impact on the criminal justice system and the
educational system.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ms. Mason invites us
to have an intergenerational</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">conversation that is moderated by Dr. Robin Vader (Xavier University of
New Orleans).</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The conversation focuses on </span></div>
<br />
<ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc">
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slavery by Another Name</i> --http://www.pbs.org/video/2176766758</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px;">Gaines, Ernest J. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Lesson Before Dying</i>. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px;">Coates, Ta-Nehisi. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Between the World and Me</i>. New York:
Spiegel & Grau, 2015.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The conversation focuses also on the Constitution of the
United States, Article XIII, Sections 1 and 2:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Section 1.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted, shall exist with the United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction.</span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Section 2. Congress
shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.</span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We shall have a conversation regarding an experiment in
democracy and the rule of law.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The shape
of the conversation is determined very much by the knowledge of American and
African American histories (narratives) we bring to it or don't bring. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As we engage in civil and civic discourse with
passionate attention, our literacy as American citizens is utilized and
enlarged.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We test ourselves.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We renew our commitments and obligations as political
animals. "Generations of Struggle" is a remarkable instance of education
in a public sphere.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is appropriate that we are having this conversation in
the opening months of the Age of Trump and in the divisive, energy-draining
climate of post-truth, fake news, political circus, and ideologically-motivated
disruption of morality and ethics. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">If Americans
refuse to examine both the liberal and conservative dimensions of daily life in
our nation, they are complicit in benign genocide.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">"Generations of Struggle" may help
us to understand why the contemporary drift in our nation from democratic
struggle into a deadly struggle with fascism is the human equivalent of climate
change in Nature. Nature is amoral, and some people opt to be amoral.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Is our imitating the </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">motions of Nature </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the mark of the will to be nihilistic and
stupid? </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Is the</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">conversation, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">as a shared narration inscribed by elders and
youngsters, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">an existential struggle not
to totally abandon hope and faith in our American humanity?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px 0px 13px; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">DISCUSSION NOTES</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Session 1, May 25:
Introduction</span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Understanding of "institutionalized racism"
vary widely according to one's economic status, education, and direct
experience of history as process and narration.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The old can't forgive and forget as easily as the
thoroughly Americanized young believe it is possible and right to do.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The generational tension can be discussed and
clarified, but it cannot be eradicated.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We are connected by bonds of distrust, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">suffering , misery and doubt.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Yes, we can empathize with people from different periods
in our history.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Empathy is relative and
quite temporary.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We empathize for an
hour, a day, or a week and then rapidly return to a state of caring primarily
for ourselves.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Read </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Habits of the
Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (1985) by Robert N.
Bellah et al. for some, but not conclusive, evidence that in matters of race
relations, American citizens are severely limited in making moral sense of
their lives. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Read </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">An Age of Diminishing Expectations</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (1978)
by Christopher Lasch for its critique of American capitalism and why it may be
the case that "the moral discipline formerly associated with the work
ethic still retains a value independent of the role it once played in the
defense of property rights" (236).</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is as easy to abolish "Institutionalized
racism" as it is to abolish once and forever the phenomenon of terrorism.
Reading and interpretation of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A Lesson
Before Dying</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Between the World
and Me</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> can teach us much about human limits and uncertainty.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Session 2, June 1:
Slavery By Another Name and the Criminal Justice System</span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Refer to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Black's
Law Dictionary</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, Michelle Alexander's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The
New Jim Crow</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> : </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Mass Incarceration in
the Age</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">of Colorblindness</span></i><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">(especially pages 30-35 --summary discussion
of Douglas Blackmon's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Slavery by Another
Name</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">), Richard Hofstadter's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Anti-Intellectualism
in American Life</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, John Barry's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Rising
Tide</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (comments on conscription of black labor), </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to
the Twenty-first</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Century</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> by John
H. Bracey, Jr. and Manisha Sinha</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">(especially letters by Warren S. Reese and S. D. Redmond on forced labor
in the New South, pages 121-125)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Keys</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">: </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">slavery, criminal justice, Jim Crow, domestic
terrorism from Reconstruction to the present , illegal definitions of criminal
offenses, fear of revenge, peonage, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">pensio</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">,
labor, crime and punishment, criminalization of the young,
"neoslavery" as a distributive property in the lives of Americans,
Christianity and morality as cognitive quicksand; consideration that not </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">all</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> African Americans between 1865 and
1945 were trapped.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Criminal justice system = network of courts and tribunals
which deal with criminal law and enforcement. The word "justice" is a
theoretical construct that does not exist in actuality and its application is
always a matter of relativity and situation.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jim Crow</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">----minstrelsy; </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">negative stereotypes
of African Americans and </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">reinforcement of
stereotypes by way of entertainment from the 19th century to the present ---Who
has persuasively accounted for the psychological damage that governs
contemporary behaviors?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Who has
accounted adequately for the continuing resonance of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Birth of a Nation</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (1915) in the American mindscape?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Peonage</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">=</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">servitude compelling persons to perform labor
in order to pay off a debt.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Thus,
"neoslavery" was made possible by use of the loophole in the 13th
Amendment to extend antebellum right of the slave owners to the post-Civil War
owners of the means of production North and South; sharecropping and tenant
farming particularly in the Mississippi Delta---See Margaret Walker's journal
entry on the Delta, January 28, 1941.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Historical studies of the Mississippi Delta yield epiphanies about the
still unbroken cycles of peonage.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Dr. Vander draws attention to capitalism as economic
matrix </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Latin word </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">pensio</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
= payment (rent) for the use of a thing directs notice to the rented prisoner
who was reduced to being a thing rather than person.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Even in 2017, convicted felons are dehumanized,
demonized </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">"things." </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Criminalization of the very young, racial profiling
---utter denial of innocence among black children.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The young are no longer criminalized for the
purposes of labor; they are criminalized for the purposes of ethnic cleansing.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Domestic terrorism ---the KKK and other hate groups
documented </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">by the Southern Poverty Law
Center.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Explore www.splcenter.org for
information about these groups and about the work SPLC does to fight hate,
teach tolerance, and seek justice.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Prisons in Louisiana [Angola] and Mississippi [ Parchman
]; prisons and labor in prisons; the school to prison pipeline.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Fear of revenge ---Oddly, the justifiable resentment of
freed women and men was rarely transformed into acts of violence against the
Other, against so-called whites, many of whom were their unacknowledged kinfolk.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">More frequently, the self-hatred birthed
within the peculiar institution of enslavement was violently turned inward not
outward.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There is a reason.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">People of African descent are less likely than
people of other ancestry to fully embrace </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">COSMIC EVIL.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This tendency among people of African ancestry is a devastating
handicap.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Definition of criminal offenses ---note how </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Slavery by Another Name</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> deals with the
fact that in the antebellum South criminality was often not a matter of
substantive criminal law as codified in penal codes; it was a matter of
reconstituting whiteness at the expense of black lives.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Special note to
one of the young participants in "Generations of Struggle"</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
----The fear of revenge was actually the fear of black political power, fear
that if African Americans had the political power to manage the sacred rule of
law, there would be a loss of hegemony, the myth of white supremacy, and
certainly the privileges of the "white" skin (which is really
bleached pink and tan in color). </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">During
Reconstruction, black politicians were advocates for public education,
universal literacy, health services, and enterprises unfettered by segregation
North and South. Please remember that the film </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Slavery by Another Name</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> only accounts for conditions up to 1945, as
if WWII resolved something.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It did
not.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ask very old black males who served in World War II</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Special note from
one of the young participants to the group</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> ---even in the very best charter
schools in New Orleans students are not fully exposed to the specifics of
American and African American histories.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">What positive changes have occurred in our nation since
1945?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Revisions of law to maximize the
small gains of a very long struggle in American for human and civil
rights.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is unfortunate that in the
Age of Trump there is a dedicated effort to erase the importance of such
struggles at the level of tweets. budgets, and profit-motivated policy (maximum
greed).</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">June
2, 2017</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-8301155236555227322017-05-29T23:25:00.003-07:002017-05-29T23:25:57.765-07:00
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Calibri;">Chinese questions/American Answers</span></b></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">As I explained in a recent interview with an American
colleague, building cultural bridges and participating in a culture of sharing
stimulates active thinking about the study of literature and culture.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The effort </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">reminds me, for example, that scholars can never
know enough about the growth of established disciplines or the emerging of
angles of study that involve the mixing of methodologies.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Sharing assists us to expand our forms of
knowing. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Getting questions from foreign
colleagues or students and trying to supply helpful answers are small acts of
globalizing. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">When they occur between
scholars in China and those based in the United States, some of the results are
exceptionally rewarding.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">One of my Chinese colleagues, who has been exploring the
work of twentieth-century African American literary critics, notified me his
new project will be a study of African American autobiography. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As luck would have it, I am doing preliminary
work on autobiographies written by Mississippians.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">My colleague requested that I share a list of
books he should read.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Without trying to send him a comprehensive
listing, I recommended</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="background: rgb(244, 244, 244); line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px 82px; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">1.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span></sub><sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;">Franklin, V. P. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Living Our
Lives, Telling Our Stories</i> (Scribner 1995)</span></sub></div>
<br />
<div style="background: rgb(244, 244, 244); line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px 82px; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">2.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span></sub><sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;">Andrews, William, ed. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">African
American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays</i> (Prentice Hall
1993)</span></sub></div>
<br />
<div style="background: rgb(244, 244, 244); line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px 82px; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">3.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span></sub><sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;">Braxton, Joanne. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black Women
Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition</i> (Temple UP, 1989)</span></sub></div>
<br />
<div style="background: rgb(244, 244, 244); line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px 82px; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">4.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span></sub><sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;">Mostern, Kenneth. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Autobiography
and Black Identity Politics</i> (Cambridge UP, 1999)</span></sub></div>
<br />
<div style="background: rgb(244, 244, 244); line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px 82px; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">5.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span></sub><sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;">Fabre, Genevieve and Robert O'Meally, eds<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. History and Memory in African American Culture</i> (Oxford UP, 1994)</span></sub></div>
<br />
<div style="background: rgb(244, 244, 244); line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px 82px; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">6.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span></sub><sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;">Andrews, William. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To Tell a
Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography</i> (U of Illinois
P, 1986)</span></sub></div>
<br />
<div style="background: rgb(244, 244, 244); line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px 82px; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">7.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span></sub><sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;">Butterfield, Stephen. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black
Autobiography in America</i> (U of Massachusetts P, 1974)</span></sub></div>
<br />
<div style="background: rgb(244, 244, 244); line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px 82px; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">8.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span></sub><sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;">Lionnet, Francoise. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Autobiographical
Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture</i> (Cornell UP, 1989)</span></sub></div>
<br />
<div style="background: rgb(244, 244, 244); line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px 82px; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">9.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span></sub><sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;">Eakin, Paul John, ed. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American
Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect</i> (U of Wisconsin P, 1991)</span></sub></div>
<br />
<div style="background: rgb(244, 244, 244); line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px 82px; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">10.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span></sub><sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;">Olney, James, ed. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Autobiography:
Essays Theoretical and Critical</i> (Princeton UP, 1980)</span></sub></div>
<br />
<div style="background: rgb(244, 244, 244); line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 13px 82px; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">11.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span></sub><sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; margin: 0px;">Braxton Joanne and Andree McLaughlin, eds. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wild Women in the Whirlwind</i> (Rutgers UP, 1990)</span></sub></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Readers will recognize the short list is more
foundational than cutting edge. For the purposes of cultural exchange, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">being familiar with older resources is as
important as knowing what is currently trending.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Many of the resources we take for granted in the USA are
hard to come by in China, and ordering materials from American or European
outlets can be awkward, costly, and time-consuming given the surveillance that
obtains in the Chinese postal system.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Fortunately, my colleague was in California earlier this month for his
daughter's commencement and could acquire the books more easily.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A few days after I sent the listing, he asked that I also
recommend some books or articles "about the debates in African American
literature ( or literary study),for instance the debate between DuBois and
Alain Locke about Art or Propaganda, etc."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I used his request as an opportunity to suggest research strategies
rather than compiling a list.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">To my knowledge, there is no single book on the ongoing
debates pertinent to </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the study of
African American literature.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">These debates, many of them quite
tendentious, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">occur in book reviews, in
critical exchanges among scholars and writers, in articles on why and how
African American literature should be taught, and in writing on literary
history.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The best way to pursue the
topic, I advised my colleague, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">is to </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">identify and then carefully analyze a number
of representative instances between 2000 and the present.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The best known instance </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">is contained in the positive and negative
responses to </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Kenneth Warren's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What Was African American Literature</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">?
Both </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">PMLA</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">African American Review</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> published forums on these responses</span><span style="font-size: 16pt; margin: 0px;">. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He could get the citations by accessing
Google Scholar and other databases while he was in the USA. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He already knew what I thought of Warren's
book from my comments in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The China
Lectures</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (Wuhan: Central China Normal University Press, 2014). </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I made
a special point of recommending that he print out the response Amiri Baraka
wrote shortly before his death to the Norton anthology </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Angles of Ascent</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, edited by Charles Henry Rowell.</span><span style="font-size: 16pt; margin: 0px;"> <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I
stressed that</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the topic of debates ought
to be studied with attention to methods, methodologies derived from conflicting
ideologies, and the motions of American literary politics (that is the roles
publishers often play in manufacturing reasons for debate ).</span><sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 18pt; margin: 0px;"> </span></sub></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 18pt; margin: 0px;">These small acts of exchange are marked by my concern that
Chinese scholars and students, until quite recently, have made inquiries about
African American literature and culture under the domination of European theory
and non-African American forms of literary hegemony.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>My sharing of information is one and only one
way of saying hegemony must be displaced by intellectual <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>diversity and forms of local knowing in
efforts to build cultural bridges. It is one way of trying to meet <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>what I deem to be my moral and ethical
literary responsibilities.</span></sub></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><sub><span style="color: black; font-size: 18pt; margin: 0px;">Jerry W.
Ward, Jr.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>May 30, 2017</span></sub></b></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-17504012522966646562017-05-27T11:24:00.001-07:002017-05-27T11:24:49.410-07:00Literary Tricks
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<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Literary Tricks and Politics </span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Giving more attention to James Baldwin than Richard
Wright in 2017 is a strategy in literary politics, the neat trick of asking
Baldwin for a cool drink of water because the heat in Wright's kitchen
threatens to suffocate American readers.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">One noteworthy instance of such strategy was the publication in the
March 1, 2015 issue of the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">New York Times
Sunday Book Review</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> of "James Baldwin Denounced Richard Wright's
'Native Son' as a 'Protest Novel.' Was He Right?" by Ayana Mathis and
Pankaj Mishra.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Two months later (May 25,
2015), Benjamin Anastas reported on his teaching a course on Wright and Baldwin
at Bennington College in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The New Republic</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">,
using the striking title "James Baldwin and Richard Wright in the Ferguson
Era."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There never was, of course, a
Ferguson Era; perhaps Anastas needed this legerdemain to refer to the era of
American domestic terrorism that began in 1619, to justify planning his course
"as a chance to revisit the work of two writers who loomed large in
African American literature of the twentieth century but who had fallen, in
recent years, our of favor and off of syllabi." One can only guess what
era he might have chosen had he revisited the work of Lillian Hellman and
Eudora Welty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Wright and Baldwin may not appear as frequently in
American literature syllabi as Toni Morrison and William Faulkner, but that is
not proof they have fallen out of favor.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is proof that pedagogy is not immune to ideology or political
choices.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Do not dance under the
influence of fibs and fairytales.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Mathis, author of the novel </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Twelve Tribes of Hattie</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (2012), believes that Wright's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Native Son</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> "is limited by a curious
cribbed vision that fails to extend much beyond the novel's moment in 1940.
Certainly the racism that made Bigger Thomas still exists, but, thank God,
Bigger Thomas himself does not ---he never did."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Speaking as a disciple of Marilynne Robinson
and Toni Morrison, Mathis challenges us with a near paradox.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Native
Son</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> has extended indirectly into the lives of a few twenty-first century
males who are targets of selective profiling, and Wright's social construction
lives in their psyches without losing its properties as words on a page.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Bigger Thomas never lived in the sense that
all of us who are breathing do, but the name of the character lives in and
disturbs our cultural literacy, especially if we happen to be black males of a
certain age.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Mathis, of course, has no
obligation to catch all the nuances of being male and black in America.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Mishra, on the other hand, does have an obligation that
is complexly raced and gendered.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Where
he fails to act in good faith is in a reluctance to say that the protest novel
in English is not the unique property of African Americans.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is a legacy extending from Henry Fielding
to Joyce Carol Oates.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Thus, it is truly
fascinating that Mishra should embrace Baldwin for unmasking "treacherous clichés
in ostensibly noble programs of protest and emancipation" in the very
moment he reifies a treacherous cliché by locating Wright in a battle royal
with Baldwin.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">His embrace is very white.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Anastas admits to being a Baldwinite, but he is capable
of recognizing that Wright's subtext of "police-induced terror" in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Native Son</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> remains in a nightmare
relationship with "the United States of Trayvon Martin and 'Stand Your
Ground'."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">That recognition doesn't
get him off the hook.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He is complicit in
what Baldwin identified as the crime of innocence.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Let us hope that two or three of his students
in Vermont were able to recognize a literary trick in the New England heart of
whiteness.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">May
27, 2017</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-58103447391903689122017-05-27T05:19:00.000-07:002017-05-27T05:19:04.239-07:00Poem5.27.2017
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">PRAVDA WEARS DAO</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Subaltern to the sun, the moon</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">chutzpah-possessed, enthralls the sea</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">and all that portends: code nihilism,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">genome dens, holocaustic hate</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">at discount rate, the inhuman trends</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">bitter now, bitter then</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">ebbing and flowing,</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">living beyond the rime-shot ends.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">May 27, 2017</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-21087757030227876652017-05-25T13:48:00.002-07:002017-05-25T13:48:44.701-07:00From Romance to Reality
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">FROM ROMANCE TO REALITY</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">There may be a few places in the world where people have
not heard the sentence "Black Lives Matter" in any language.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The sentence is a prototype for many
variations on the theme of "mattering," for riffs that have appeal
and utility in discordant contexts.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The
sentence is poignant.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It reverberates
with urgency and necessity.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the
United States of America, it reminds us that many versions of our history
encourage us to minimize, to never know, or to conveniently forget what
matters.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Our instinctive responses to
life ( how we might behave in a state of nature) can be compromised by social
constructions of reality.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">That fact is
inevitable. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">"Black Lives Matter" is an unavoidable</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">accusation.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The fact that American citizens need to hear it is a mark of shame, a
signal that economic violence and moral turpitude are innate in our experiments
with democracy.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The more it is repeated,
the more it becomes, like the familiar phrase "the pause that
refreshes,"</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">a tiresome slogan.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Can it be made more appealing by rewriting
the sentence as "Black Lives Have Always Mattered"?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">No.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The greater specificity makes matters worse. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The gravity of the situation is highlighted by the
publication of</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Oyewole, Abiodun, ed. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Black
Lives Have Always Mattered: A Collection of Essays, Poems, and Personal Narratives</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">New York: 2Leaf Press, 2017.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Like </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Resisting
Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (Durham, NC: Jacar Press, 2016), edited by
Tony Medina and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Fire This Time: A New
Generation Speaks about Race</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">New
York: Scribner, 2016 ), edited by Jesmyn Ward,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">this anthology expands the body of literature which pertains to race and
institutionalized death </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">(militant,
selective police brutality and criminalization) in our nation.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The classic guidebook for reading the
formation of American subjectivities dealt with in these anthologies is Abdul
R. JanMohamed's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Death-Bound-Subject</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The importance of Oyewole's anthology, it might be argued, should be
more seriously accounted for in the </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">history
of black</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">writing</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> than in the </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">history of black literature</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The nuanced difference overshadows theory and
semantics. One history exists in the panopticon of academic praxis; the other,
in the totality where life has always mattered most painfully. This
juxtaposition draws our attention to the simultaneous </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">motions of "history" and what matters
as process and recording, to the profound difficulties of cognition and consciousness
of being American.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Consider the consequences of reading </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Black Lives Have Always Mattered</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> against a narrative
"stereotyped" in 1859 by John F. Weishampel, Jr., bookseller and
publisher in Baltimore, namely the work of Rev. Noah Davis, who committed
himself to</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">"RAISE SUFFICIENT MEANS TO FREE HIS LAST TWO
CHILDREN FROM SLAVERY./ Having already, within twelve years past, purchased
himself, his wife, and five of his children, at a cost, altogether of over </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">four thousand dollars</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">"</span></div>
<br />
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">because</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">"he now earnestly </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">desires a humane and christian public to AID
HIM IN THE SALE OF THIS BOOK, for the purpose of finishing the task in which he
has so long and anxiously labored."</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">One valuable consequence of such an act of reading is
transformative recognition of why one hundred and fifty-eight years after the publication
of Davis's narrative, </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">all Americans</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
are still purchasing their lives from something and somebody. History is
eternally cruel.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As Abiodun Oyewole
suggests in his introduction, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Black Lives
Have Always Mattered</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">"offers a
thorough insight into the lives, dreams, aspirations, victories and defeats of
black people in America. Considering the times we're living in these days, this
anthology should serve as a mental compass for how we value ourselves and each
other, and ways in how we manifest our destiny" (3).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">If the anthology succeeds in convincing a
number of readers that a humane and Christian public in the United States of
America </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">neither exists nor </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">intends to help them, it shall have produced
reasonable rather than thorough insight about what matters.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">May
25, 2017</span></b></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-40103301582706482622017-05-23T00:21:00.002-07:002017-05-23T00:21:55.551-07:00Trump the Teacher
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">TRUMP THE TEACHER</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Permit a nanosecond of nonsense.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">ASSERTION/THESIS:</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Donald J. Trump is a </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">great</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
teacher.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">ARGUMENT/SUPPORT:</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As a president elected by the tyranny of the minority, Trump exercises
his absolute right as the leader of an imaginary free world to articulate great
slogans that leak from the bitch's brew of wisdom.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In Classroom America, he tweets.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He is aware that American citizens,
regardless of their political beliefs, levels of intelligence, and ethnic
postures, do pay attention to his words.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">From the maculate vantage of his mind, he believes he is doing what the
dollar bill motto "In God We Trust" compels him to do: teach the
washed and unwashed masses.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">To promote
critical thinking, Trump illuminates each day how our nation has costumed its
primitive barbarism as liberal democracy.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Only by reading and absorbing great amounts of insanity,
Trump thunders, can our nation mend the errors of its ways and once again
become a </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">great conservative democracy and
resume its divinely ordained mandate to guide the history of the brave great
world into a future.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">These are hard
times.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Abandon the dreadful audacity of
hope.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Accept the hard facts, even if an
hour or so later they prove to be factoids.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Do not squander the opportunity to be great again in dreams of the
American Dream.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Become the women and men
who have gumption, gall, and guts to spit into the eyes of nightmares. Be
post-Enlightenment, post-tritely great.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Trump is the epitome of the great teacher.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He distills the essence of the messianic </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">in a great alembic of tough love.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">His great students love him unconditionally.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They take great notes and promptly forget the
history of what they think they have heard.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Trump exercises his absolute right as a member of the secular clergy to
award each of his students a great grade at the end of class.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Trump is a great teacher because he is a great disciple
of Machiavelli, one who demands that his students navigate the unreadable prose
of Jacque Derrida's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Specters of Marx</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
(New York: Routledge, 1994) and other texts of dubious merit.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He promotes the deconstruction of
deconstruction; he terrorizes his students to consult dictionaries and to
analyze the histories of times past.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He
inspires fear and great trembling and the great possibility that soon and very
soon great Americans will abandon the fleshpots of Eden and do great work in
the fascist labs of Hell.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Whether we
like him or not, Trump is a great teacher who instructs us how to read the
great progress of our lives with great and entertaining gusto.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">May
23, 2017</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-2768520357875185102017-05-17T05:35:00.001-07:002017-05-17T05:35:29.202-07:00Reading Dystopia
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">reading the dystopia wherein you live (revisited)</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Since January 20, 2017, it is quite fashionable to talk
about Donald J. Trump under the influence of reading dystopian or apocalyptic
fictions.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There is the possibility that
what fifty years ago was accepted as "the news" is now a blatant form
of social fiction.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Broadcast from every
ideological angle, what seems to be the news is replete with alternative facts
and unacknowledged projections of imagination. There is a thin line between
description of actuality and its reception in various media.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And many readers hop across the line without
benefit of thought.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Reading is simply
automatic, a reflex action</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A few of us who stay out of touch with reality believe
genre distinctions matter, and we attempt to discriminate such dystopian novels
as Ishmael Reed's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Free-Lance
Pallbearers</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> and George Orwell's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Animal
Farm</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> from tomorrow's news that happened yesterday.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Our reading is a mission impossible.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We are the news.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">That is to say, we inhabit the dystopia we'd
like to claim is external to us.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The problem seems to defy resolution.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We can, however, take pragmatic measures to
minimize its paralyzing effects.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We can
segregate dystopian fictions from descriptive treatises by using traditional conventions
of reading.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The treatise purports to be
objective and explanatory.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The fiction is
a subjective guide </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">for analysis and
interpretation. We gain a bit of comfort from thinking we know the critical
difference between fiction and nonfiction.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Perhaps we do not, for we are characters in a "great" novel
entitled </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Acirema the Great</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Acirema the Great</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
opens with cheers of victory on 11/9.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">One disgruntled character mumbles that for the first time since Thomas
Jefferson, a real President, died in 1826 and walked into American mythology
---the comfort zone occupied by every President until 2016, voters are being
asked to make sense of a fake President who has tweeted himself out of
mythology into actuality.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Does the
signifying monkey speak his mind about </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">pravda</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The nameless character opens John Gardner's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">On Moral Fiction</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New York: Barnes &
Noble, 2009) and reads the chapters on moral fiction and moral criticism.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">He hits the motherboard.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Gardner proposed "that scrutiny of how people act and speak, why
people feel precisely the things they do…lead to knowledge, sensitivity, and
compassion.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In fiction we stand back,
weigh things as we do not have time to do in life; and the effect of great
fiction is to temper real experience, modify prejudice, humanize"
(105).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Aha.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A fake President is a great fiction, one who
tweets that every noun is "great."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">cartoon of real experience, Trump
donates the gift of moral education to the American public.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">If Gardner is to be believed, writers stand a
better chance than do non-writers of knowing to what extent Trump is an
unreliable facsimile.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Do ordinary
citizens have to become writers to arm themselves for political action?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Do they have to write themselves out of
slavery into freedom, out of the caves of Greek philosophy into the warmth of
other suns?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A fake President is a liability, a politically
reprehensible liability.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The whole world
knows that, and the terrorists among us treat the false truth as a matter of
fact. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Regardless of their political
beliefs, American citizens agree that a fake President is a work of art, a
moral fiction.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And they are condemned,
the disgruntled character remarks to treat Gardner's conclusion about moral
criticism with grains of pepper and doubt.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">"It is precisely because art affirms values," Gardner
asserted, "that it is important. The trouble with our present criticism is
that criticism is, for the most part, not important.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It treats the only true magic in the world as
though it were done with wires" (135).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Really?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Isn't the only true magic
in the world done with computers?</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Thus, the insertion of Trump within the act of reading </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Animal Farm</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> or </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Free-Lance Pallbearers</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> involves one major error. We fail to
account for the great agency of citizens, readers and non-readers alike, who
use a fake President as the heroic symbol of their lesser selves.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We should try to avoid the error as much as
we can. And if we do want to be effective in saving democracy from drowning in
fascism, we may want to permit the fake President to have the absolute right to
commit treason with immunity from impeachment </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">inside and only inside</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Acirema
the Great.</span></i></div>
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<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Reginald Martin's
remark about Reed's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Free-Lance
Pallbearers</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ishmael Reed</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">and the New Black Aesthetic Critics</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1988) invites us to be cautious: "the
contemporary indices [here the reference is 1967]in the course of the novel
certainly changed the reference points of American novels up to that
time"(42). </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Fifty years later, the indices Reed rendered as fiction
are still recognizable and operative in the dystopia of American political
economy.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">All changes.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">All remains the same.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We must use</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">prudent skepticism as we critique how our fellow Americans act and speak,
how they broadcast the news in the great and brave new world that was born on
November 9, 2016. Above all, we must vote and force real politicians to
represent real human beings not characters in dystopian or apocalyptic
fictions.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">May
17, 2017</span></b></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-66398485357931053712017-05-16T02:31:00.002-07:002017-05-16T02:31:57.634-07:00James Baldwin and Metanarratives
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<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">James Baldwin and Metanarratives</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">August 2, 2017 will the 93rd </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">anniversary of James Baldwin’s birth in Harlem
Hospital.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">December 1, 2017 will mark the
30</span><sup><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> anniversary of his successful escape from the penitentiary of
languages.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Between 1924 and 1987, Baldwin
paid the price of his ticket, using his intelligence, his ethical and moral
authority, his haunted eyes,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">and his
tragicomic imagination to create a legacy. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">That legacy has been transformed by cultural
theories and practices into </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">a gumbo. It
mixes the flavors of extreme American neo-liberalism with the fil</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">é</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> of an evangelical religiosity and
a teaspoon of essential nationalism.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The
resulting soup (which might not pass muster in a strict construction of
Louisiana cuisine) is being advertised as the cure-all for the current,
dominant American malaise.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Like any
cure-all, the legacy has a telling effect, but it proves ultimately to be
ineffectual.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">To discover what is,
without doubt,</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> authentic</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> in
Baldwin's legacy (Henry James would have called it "the real thing"),
we ought to go back to that other country whence came the ingredients.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is as useful to think of the spaces we inhabit as
locations in a panoptical prison as it is to consider those places as
coordinates on a stage.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Actors and
inmates have a shared existence with people who exercise obscene power and
people who live and die unaccounted for in the scribbling of history. You and
they and I are condemned and incarcerated by bondage, enslavement. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Had James Baldwin not recognized as much, he might
never have said to Quincy Troupe </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It's
difficult to be a legend.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It's hard for
me to recognize </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">me</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You spend a lot of time trying to </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">avoid it. A lot of the time I've
been through so many of the same experiences Miles has gone </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">through.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It's really something, to be a legend, unbearable.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I could see it had happened to Miles.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Again,
it's unbearable, the way the world treats you is unbearable, and especially if
you're black. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">(189)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">[Troupe, Quincy, ed. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">James
Baldwin: The Legacy</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989]</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As Baldwin knew by
way flesh and blood experiences and moral consciousness, or quickly learned
after he left the United States for Europe in 1948, if we want sanctuary</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">----well, we have to work and create our own
versions of damnation/ salvation by virtue of cognition and perception.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We produce metanarratives (narratives about narratives) as
we read Baldwin's fictions and essays, witness a production of one of his
plays, and view documentaries about his life or videos of his interviews and
speeches.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We normally don't talk about
metanarratives.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We talk with other
people about our reactions something Baldwin wrote or how his body language and
use of his eyes drew more than casual notice to what he was saying.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">To speak of our reactions as metanarratives
is to disturb the commonplace, to highlight that our reactions to artists and
their works belong to special categories of feeling and thinking.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Growth of interest in Baldwin derives, in
part, from </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">jouissance</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Interest in Baldwin has increased remarkably since 2000,
particularly in efforts to appropriate his legacy more for cultural discussion
than for political analysis, i.e. rewriting histories of the Civil Rights
Movement.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We come to a high point in
2015 with Toni Morrison's assertive </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">blurb
for Ta-Nehisi Coates's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Between the World
and Me</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015): "I've been wondering who
might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates."</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Morrison oiled the machinery for redemptive
jouissance, made it less creaky.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The
newer appreciations for Baldwin were preceded by a broadening of academic
criticism.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There is a slight danger,
Douglas Field noted in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">All Those
Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2015), "that some criticism veers toward a dissipated picture of
Baldwin as a writer who is 'post-categorical' and without any cohesion"
(145).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">For Field, the criticism assigns
Baldwin to an "uncertain place in American literature"(146).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The best and brightest American writers
inhabit that place where their portraits are not dissipated and their legacies
pulsate in defiance of being turned into museum objects.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Cultural memory of Baldwin is equipment for
living. It can be enhanced by reading the online, open access </span><a href="http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/journals/jbr"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">James Baldwin
Review</span></a><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I offer two examples of </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">metanarratives-in-progress.</span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">RAOUL PECK'S BALDWIN</span></b></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The book is short</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">--- 25 pages of introductory material + 109 pages of text and images + 1
blank verso + 2 pages of CREDITS +1 page of BIBLIOGRAPHY + 1 blank verso +</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">1 page of PERMISSIONS +1 blank verso +2 pages
listing ILLUSTRATIONS </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">---</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">a total of 143 pages to be read at one
sitting.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Peck, Raoul, ed. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I
Am Not Your Negro: From Texts by James Baldwin</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">New York: Vintage International, 2017.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">As the companion for Peck's film </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I Am Not Your Negro </span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">(2016), the book is a</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">mosaic of Baldwin's unfinished "Notes
Toward Remember This House, " snippets from other works by Baldwin, images
and quotations from television and film,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">and slivers of song lyrics.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">One does not read the mosaic.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">One consumes it.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Consumption is contingent on whether one
begins that task </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">before or after viewing the film.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Dealing with the book before seeing the film
prepares one to listen to Baldwin's voice, Samuel Jackson's narration, and
other archived sounds with more than usual attention and to attend with passionate
interest to the film's visual rhetoric. Using the book after witnessing the
film helps one to check nuances that one's eyes and ears missed or
misinterpreted in the darkened cave of a cinema.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">These diverging affective and efferent
experiences reveal much about the processing of past and contemporary
information, much about how one's mind navigates sight and sound.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">How one contextualizes Peck's manipulation of
Baldwin's legacy.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Witnessing is all.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the cliché-saturated ambience of "# Matters,"</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">moral judgment is a vexed affair. That is to
say the circumstances under which one witnesses Peck's reconstructive
witnessing of Baldwin's unfinished effort to locate the lives and
assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">matters greatly.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">One's age, ethnic identity, citizenship, and
depth of interest in the conditions of being human are crucial in finding
meaning and significance in the film and book versions of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I Am Not Your Negro</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They
determine, to paraphrase Peck, whether it is possible to have "a deep and
intimate personal reflection on [one's] own political and cultural mythology,
[one's] own experiences of racism and intellectual violence" (xi).</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">When a friend suggested we should set up a panel
discussion of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I Am Not Your Negro</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
after viewing the film,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I
objected.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The only panels that have
practical legitimacy, as far as I am concerned, are those constituted by people
who belong temporarily to a community of seeing and hearing at one time and in
one place.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Members of such a nonce
community should tell one another, </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">not
be told by a panel of</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">critics and
experts</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">what is important about
what and how</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the film galvanized them to
think and to feel, and perhaps to vow to do.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Raoul Peck's commendable interventions by way of film and book demand
multiple and quite diverse enactments of community, an investment in being
human that the first quarter of the 21st century tries daily to
assassinate.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">James Baldwin's gift of
brutal confrontation demands nothing more and nothing less if the world's
population is to defeat all enemies by saying "I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO"
and acting accordingly.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">KAREN THORSEN'S AND DOUGLAS DEMPSEY'S</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">BALDWIN</span></b></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Discussion Notes:</span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ash</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">é</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
Cultural Arts Center</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">6:00 p.m., May 11,
2017</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Karen Thorsen, director & co-writer</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Douglas Dempsy, co-writer</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">James Baldwin: The
Price of the Ticket</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Length of film ---1 hour, 27 minutes</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">PBS American Masters ---14 August 1989</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">James Baldwin (2 August 1924-1 December 1987)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We have a great deal to watch, to listen to, to think about,
to discuss.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Between May 9th</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">and</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">12th , the digital
restoration of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">James Baldwin: The Price
of the Ticket</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> was screened at three locations in New Orleans ---Sweet
Lorraine's Jazz Club, The Old US Mint, and Ash</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">é</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> Cultural Arts Center.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The
James Baldwin Project (access</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">jamesbaldwinproject.org ) has sponsored screenings at many sites across
the United States.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The film aired for the first time on August 14, 1989 as
part of the PBS American Masters series.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Now the citizens of New Orleans had an opportunity to produce their
metanarratives through conversations after each screening with musicians,
community people, National Park Service rangers, and the filmmakers Karen
Thorsen and Douglas Dempsey.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">At Ash</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">é</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, Monica McIntyre's lyrics and
music established a mood for viewing the documentary</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">------I'm thinking of Cassandra Wilson's
innovative performances for no apparent reason as I listen to McIntyre.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">For one hour and twenty-seven minutes, we sat
enthralled by the film.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We sat
transfixed as the devil found work.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I
moderated the conversation that followed.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Most of the metanarratives were about feelings
----amazement that the film was as relevant to the Age of Trump as it had been
to the final years of the Cold War; testimony that the film induced a state of
balance (a catharsis) grating against an assertion that the film galvanized the
amoeboid concerns of #Black Lives Matter; recommendations that the film be part
of a national conversation, that it be used in public schools and community
spaces to promote face-to-face discussions; concern that social networking
magnifies emotion and diminishes critical thinking about social problems; </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">pointed questions for Thorsen about the
genesis and making of the film.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">There was</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">my own
"losing it" by way of giving a mini-lecture on Baldwin's prophetic
moral authority.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Moderators ought not
lecture; they should manage.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">My memory
of having had a late night conversation with Baldwin in the 1980s undermined my
sticking to the script, but my transgression had a purpose.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I wanted my fellow citizens to know that the
price of our tickets was further remembering of history (the process and the
stories) </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">and</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">contextualizing the film by using our
individual sociocultural literacies, of constructing metanarratives of moral
ambiguity.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I wanted them to reconsider
the gravity of Baldwin's having shaped his legacy and his legend within the
narrow space of a black-white American social binary, minimizing how the
indigenous peoples of the Americas and Asian immigrants actually fit into the
American past, present, and promised future.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">My metanarrative focused most on Baldwin's helping us to know why, at
least for the so-called Western sector of humanity, the implacable anger of the
Old Testament God is more important than the bromides of Christian love that
flavor Baldwin's splendid legacy.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I Am Not Your Negro</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
challenges and is challenged by </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">James
Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But that is my opinion.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Watch
both of the films.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Think.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Generate your own metanarrative.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">May
16, 2017</span></b></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-88164078263713115472017-05-14T19:33:00.000-07:002017-05-14T19:33:24.219-07:00THE DECARCERATION OF BLACK AMERICA
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">THE DECARCERATION OF BLACK AMERICA: NOTES
TO A NATIVE SON </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span></b></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A Preface</span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Q: Should one give critical attention to a stylistically
and rhetorically flawed book by a self-proclaimed left-wing Conservative?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A: Yes.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Q:</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Why?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A:</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">If the book
tries to examine reasons for "mass incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness" from a black Republican or independently conservative </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">point of view, it merits attention rather than
self-righteous silence.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The book's
failure to meet the intellectual</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">standards established in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Black
Male Handbook: A Blueprint for Life</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New York: Atria Books, 2008), edited
by Kevin Powell, and Michelle Alexander's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The
New Jim Crow</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> ( New York: The New Press, 2010) is instructive.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A negative touchstone has value.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Dealing with that touchstone by way of
constructive criticism can be a habit of the heart.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Q:</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Are you guilty
of special pleading because the author of the book is African American?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Yes, very
definitely.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Attention to an imperfect
example of black socio-cultural analysis as black writing is consonant with the
broad aims of the Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW). The project
is catholic.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Q:</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Do you dare to
skate on the thin ice of what you believe to be honest?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Would you give equal attention to a flawed
book by a Caucasian, a Chinese American, or a Mohawk?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A:</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Yes.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I inhale and exhale the miasma of American
dilemmas and nightmares without fear.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">My
motives, however, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">for criticizing a book
by a non-Black thinker would be remote from criticizing Daryl Hubbard's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Decarceration of Black America: Systemic
Analyses and Strategic Plans for Our Future</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (Jackson, TN: Black
Consciousness Series, 2017).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">ISBN</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">2370000399625.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A Body</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Daryl Hubbad is the City Court Clerk for the City of
Jackson, Tennessee.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As an elected
official, he sees "firsthand the damning effect that America's criminal
justice labyrinth has on the poor and ignorant" (149), and as a concerned
citizen he has intervened by writing a book. Official duties allow him to gather
information, to produce ideas which can be used in analyses of the history and
dynamics of incarceration in America. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Apparently, he has read widely.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">His book contains quotations from and/or
references to many people ---Carter G. Woodson, Frances Cress Welsing, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Fanon, Walter Mosley, Frederick Douglass, Gore
Vidal, Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, Samuel Yette, Sista Souljah, David Walker,
Michelle Alexander, John Potash, James Baldwin, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">and a dozen or so others.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">His excessive quoting, without providing the
appropriate documentation, begets a devastating question: Has he read wisely?
Given his indebtedness to Michelle Alexander, has he examined why her sentences
are effective and her paragraphs are coherent and how skillfully she avoids
inadvertent plagiarism?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Has he given up
a lunch hour to read </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Elements of
Style</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, a book that helps many a
writer to avoid egregious errors?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And
given his hope that readers will find his book "a sort of catalyst for a
mental and social revolution in the country, bearing in mind that you cannot
spell revolution with the letters</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">L</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">O</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">V</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">E </span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">"(13), does he know what </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">argumentum ad amicitiam</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> is?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">His book is a catalyst, but it may be one that decimates
his two-fold purpose:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">1.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">To sound an
alarm akin to Paul Revere's ride to black folk to alert them that the prisons
are coming.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">2.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">To remind
white folk that too many years of colonialism, racism, dehumanization,
discrimination, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">lynching, violence, prejudice and apartheid have
traumatized Black America, but despite all of these seen and unseen forces, our
people have somehow managed to survive and find ways to transcend such a
terrible beginning in this country. (7-8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">He has too many objectives and too little mastery of the
art of writing to fulfill them persuasively.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He wants to deal with the crisis of incarceration "in a profound
and intellectual fashion" and to amplify a main theme of "how to keep
our young people from not only continuing to murder each other, but to also
keep them educated and out of the grips of our current prison industrial
complex" (12).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He sketches
attractive intentions for his eight chapters.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He promises to (1) "examine an American educational system that has
allowed the malaise of mass incarceration and senseless homicide to metastasize…";
(2) "have an honest talk with our young </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">black men" about how "they have been
hoodwinked and bamboozled…."; (3) "will attempt to have an open
conversation with our young women about why ghetto behaviors can contribute to
the death and incarceration of their own children"; (4) "take an
in-depth look at America's criminal justice system…"; (5) deal "with
white privilege" and try to explain "how the Black Lives Matter
movement also needs to look in the mirror"; (6) show "in detail how
the U.S. government has appeared to derail the development of true black
leadership"; (7) provide "an essential reading list for all black
people; (8) ask "a critical question that will hopefully serve as a road
map showing how we can escape from our current cultural morass."
(12-13)</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">When a writer attempts to
accomplish mission impossible, she or he paves a highway to disappointment.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">She or he illuminates why black writing
(whether it is vernacular or academic) that is not well-crafted deserves severe
criticism. In our tradition, the tough love of criticism produces anger and
resentment, stage one in the never ending process of trying to write.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A Tentative
Conclusion</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Daryl Hubbard needs help.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A single negative review doesn't help him enough, and a single positive
review of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Decarceration of Black
America</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> would be a regrettable disservice.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">If no workshop for established and emerging writers exists in Jackson,
Tennessee, one needs to be established posthaste. It is widely but not
universally recognized that </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">a thinker</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
who possesses Hubbard's insights can only become </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">a good writer</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> by reading wisely, sharing ideas and samples of
writing with kindred spirits (face-to-face not by email or snail mail), getting
critical feedback, and then returning to a room of his own to woodshed like a
serious jazz musician.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Daryl Hubbard
needs help of the kind he proposes to give to young women and men: real-time
conversations that truly matter.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">May
14, 2017</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-60936871379522947322017-05-06T00:53:00.003-07:002017-05-06T00:53:45.390-07:00John Coltrane and Asili Ya Nadhiri
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<div align="center" style="margin: 0px 0px 13px; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">COLTRANE AND NADHIRI</span></b></div>
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<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It might be argued that Langston Hughes's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> ( New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971 </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">) can make
readers more attentive to combinations of words and music and to the issues of
response and</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">interpretation broached in
Stephen Henderson's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Understanding the New
Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (New York:
William Morrow, 1973). More recent critical discussions of musical and verbal
aspects of African American poetry extend </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the thinking Henderson initiated, but they do
not displace the centrality of his formations in the development of theoretical
discourses.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We have yet to sufficiently </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">critique his insights about how </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">"mascon" (a massive concentration of
Black experiential energy) informed African science and currently informs
"the meaning of Black speech, Black song, and Black Poetry" (44). </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Henderson's considerations of origins play
nicely against the laughing barrel, signifying humor of Hughes's liner note
entitled "Jazztet Muted":</span></div>
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<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Because
grandma lost her apron with all the answers in her pocket (perhaps consumed by
fire) </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">certain grand- and
great-grandsons play music burning like dry ice against the ear.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Forcing cries </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">of succor from its own unheard completion</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">---</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">not resolved by Charlie Parker</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">---</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">can we look </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">to monk or Monk?</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Or let it rest with Eric Dolphy? (92)</span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">For Hughes's blues-jazz composition , Dolphy, Monk, Ornette Coleman,
Dizzy, Duke, Ella, Miss Nina, Carmen, and Hawkins revolve in the orbit of
Charlie Yardbird</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Parker, but John
Coltrane (1926-1967) remains unnamed (not called for or evoked) "in the
quarter of the Negroes/where black shadows move like shadows"(77); the
absence of Coltrane may be a cultural comment rather than an oversight. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The tacit comment, of course, signals the
limits in Hughes's imagination of the space that consciousness of theoretical
science should occupy.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">When Hughes wrote
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ask Your Mama</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, a brilliant example of
what jazz poetry can be, Coltrane had yet to be embraced by many black music
aficionados with a love supreme; </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">a
handful of Coltrane's fellow musicians might have overtly appreciated his
sustained interest in physics, although good musicians intuit physics in their </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">improvising.</span></div>
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<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The
embrace did manifest itself , three years after Coltrane's death, with the
publication of Michael S. Harper's</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Dear John, Dear Coltrane</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), as seminal a work as </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ask Your Mama</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Joyce Pettis has noted that in Harper's
collection we can find "a force crystallizes and spirals in an
unanticipated form.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">John Coltrane is
this force, negating violence and death through his inimitable music and
answering hate with a love supreme through which he enables the survival of
others more than himself" (</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">African
American Poets: Lives, Works, and Sources</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">145.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Such
books as Lewis Porter's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">John Coltrane:
His Life and</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Music</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1989) and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Coltrane
on Coltrane: The John Coltrane</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Interviews</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010), edited by Chris DeVito, and John
Scheinfeld's </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">documentary </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">CHASING TRANE</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> (2017) signal a need to
study Coltrane as more than a reference in African American poetry. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Harper gave birth to brightness.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Coltrane and his music radiate in the realm of
jazz poetry. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The import of such radiance
is explored in Stephan Alexander's </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The
Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structures of the
Universe </span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">(New York: Basic Books, 2016).</span></div>
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<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Just
as Coltrane was in the shadows of attention in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ask Your Mama,</span></i><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Asili Ya
Nadhiri's innovative poetry (tonal drawings in poetic form) remains in the dim
shades of black literary history and is known mainly by those who read his
website</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">(http://www. nadhiriwrites.com)
or one of his postings on Facebook, or who have read his chapbook </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the inner recesses of an abandoning life</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
(2004) and listened to the 39 tracks on its appended CD. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The reason may be that his poems do not
appear in widely circulated journals and anthologies. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He is mentioned in neither of the influential
anthologies of innovative poetry edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Every Goodbye Ain't</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006) and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A single poem, "hustling our absurdings
in place," appears in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Black Gold: An
Anthology of</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Black Poetry</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
(Savannah: Turner Mayfield Publishing, 2014), edited by Ja A. Jahannes. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Some Chinese readers know of his work from
Wang Zuyou's "Tonal Drawings Written in Poetic Form? --An Interview with
Asili Ya Nadhiri." </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Foreign
Literature Studies</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> 37.5 (October 2015): 1-9, or from my lecture on his
poetry at Central China Normal University in September 2011. </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There I argued that (1) </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Nadhir’s
poems exploit transitions and transformations in new representations (words) to
describe the experience of time</span><b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;">and (2)</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> ) his work is a
continuing effort to forge a new performance genre that integrates theme and
thought (the word, poem, text) with musicality (activation of the poem in
highly rhythmic renderings that may or may not involve instrumental music) and
the visual (typography). His uniqueness is not found on the page; it must be
discovered by pondering the significance of his creative process, his
aesthetic. In that lecture are seeds that may eventually become an essay on
tonal drawings as innovations.</span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Of
course, Nadhiri is but one of hundreds of unsung innovative American poets.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">His affinity with jazz musicians, including
Coltrane, and his sustained thinking about the explanatory limits of
physics</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">warrant our giving more
attention to the body of his work and, thereby, </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">expanding literary histories.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So too do the </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">parallels in his poetics with, in the words of
T. J. Anderson III, an ethnomusical tradition "that uses several of the
standard musical tools of jazz to craft a work that is distinctly individual
while also voicing the collective consciousness of the African diaspora" (</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Notes to</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Make the Sound Come Right</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> 174).</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The second stanza of Nadhiri's recently issued tonal drawing </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">"so hastily demising" brings the
right sound to the ear :</span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.5pt; margin: 0px;">imploding echoes are
snoring in the belly<br />
of all our rapaciously ajudicating verdicts<br />
our fawning marble-ling institutions<br />
and their yawning substitutions<br />
and common disdaining ablutionings<br />
are desperately devouring each other<br />
for one another’s cracked cup<br />
of some noma-nating brew<br />
on and on and on and on<br />
and always we acting like<br />
this is something brand new</span></div>
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<div align="center" style="line-height: 16.8pt; margin: 0px 0px 16px; text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.5pt; margin: 0px;">Copyright © 2017 Asili
Ya Nadhiri</span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Keeping in mind Stephen Henderson's
critical categories of theme, structure and saturation, we might use this
stanza to begin</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">inquiry </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">about points of origin in science and music </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">relevant to Nadhiri's creation of a new genre;
more precisely, we</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">might</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">ask crucial questions </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">about African American </span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">creative processes which delineate a genre of
being and thinking as works of art.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.</span><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">May 6, 2017</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4040691740220773707.post-77609594766451109372017-05-03T23:26:00.001-07:002017-05-03T23:26:10.313-07:00Ramcat Reads #13
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">RAMCAT READS #13</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;">DeVito, Chris, ed. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane
Interviews</i>.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Chicago: Chicago Review
Press, 2010.</span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>A recommended prelude or <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>follow-up to viewing John Scheinfeld's fine
documentary <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">CHASING TRANE</i> (2017).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;">Foley, Barbara.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jean
Toomer: Race, Repression and Revolution</i>.<span style="margin: 0px;">
</span>Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>A critical reading of<span style="margin: 0px;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jean Toomer: Race, Repression and
Revolution</i> enables one to gain remarkable insights about Toomer (1894<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>-1967), his complex personality, and his
canonical masterpiece <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cane </i>(1923); it
invites one to reassess Toomer's location in American literary history before,
during and after the fabled Harlem Renaissance.<span style="margin: 0px;">
</span>In addition, the more one weighs the nature of Foley's argument and her
rhetorical gestures, the more aware one becomes of<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>how literary study, over the last thirty
years, has morphed into cultural study.<span style="margin: 0px;">
</span>The consequences are not always felicitous. For example, Foley's
extensive use of archival materials to sharpen our focus on Toomer's biography
is superb, because it compels us to reject hasty or reductive conclusions. The
connections she makes between biographical facts and mimesis or literary
representation are indeed persuasive, despite the probability that those
connections are, to borrow Louise Rosenblatt's terms, more efferent than<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>aesthetic. The lack of felicity is mainly the
result of Foley's using Fredric Jameson's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act</i> (1981) as a
methodological guide to reading.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>That
choice opens a neo-Lacanian casket of possibilities and makes Foley's
exposition stylized rather than conversational. Reading as reading dominates
one's engagement of<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jean Toomer: Race, Repression and Revolution</i> . </span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;">Fulton, Sybrina and
Tracy Martin<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. Rest in Power: The Enduring
Life of Trayvon Martin</i>.</span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;">New York: Spiegel &
Grau, 2017.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;">African Americans have
no monopoly on faith, but the historical experiences of black folks in the
United States have endowed them with the ability to absorb and deploy faith
with amazing grace.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Fulton and Martin
are exemplars of that fact. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In Rest in
Power</i>, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin speak from the depths of something
that must pulsate within people who have lost a loved one as a result of
racially motivated violence.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Faith is
what<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>we usually call the emotional space
or place from which they speak.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>As
poised as scholars who know their subject matter intimately, they teach us a
great deal about the qualities of individual grief.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Fulton and Martin have created a powerful
tool for continuing the legacy of their son.<span style="margin: 0px;">
</span>They have blended love, grief, and pain-forged equanimity into a book of
alternating witnessing of the mother and the father. The mother's answers to
each of <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>the father's questions are
definitive.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>The magnanimous control of
grief is transformed into a weapon.<span style="margin: 0px;">
</span>Trayvon Martin's <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>parents teach us
what must be done if we are to ever rest in power.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;">Harvey, William R. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Principles of Leadership: The Harvey
Leadership Model</i>.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Hampton, VA:
Hampton University Press, 2017.</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Convinced that able leadership has the potential to<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>"ultimately, change the course of the
universe" and that his leadership model is valid, Harvey offers his ten
principles of leadership "to any serious student or practitioner of higher
education and to leaders in almost any organization or institution"(217). <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Harvey doesn't discriminate among traits,
strategies, and outcomes, but lumps them together as 10 "principles"
(vision, work ethic, team building, management, fiscal conservatism, academic
excellence, innovation, courage, fairness, and results).<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>President of Hampton Institute (now Hampton
University) since July 1, 1978, Harvey avoids contextualizing his leadership in
reflections on American history or the <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>public
histories of American higher education.<span style="margin: 0px;">
</span>Brief references to books and articles on management and selective
mentioning of iconic figures expose a paucity of analysis; they serve to embellish
Harvey's self-fashioning and estimation of himself as a role model for current
and future leaders of HBCUs.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>All things
considered, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Principles of Leadership</i> has
greater merit as an example of autobiography and identity politics than as a
treatise on contemporary leadership.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0px 0px 13px;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0px;">Jerry W. Ward, Jr.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>May 4, 2017</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>jwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com0