RAMCAT READS #13
DeVito, Chris, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane
Interviews. Chicago: Chicago Review
Press, 2010.
A recommended prelude or follow-up to viewing John Scheinfeld's fine
documentary CHASING TRANE (2017).
Foley, Barbara. Jean
Toomer: Race, Repression and Revolution.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.
A critical reading of
Jean Toomer: Race, Repression and
Revolution enables one to gain remarkable insights about Toomer (1894 -1967), his complex personality, and his
canonical masterpiece Cane (1923); it
invites one to reassess Toomer's location in American literary history before,
during and after the fabled Harlem Renaissance.
In addition, the more one weighs the nature of Foley's argument and her
rhetorical gestures, the more aware one becomes of how literary study, over the last thirty
years, has morphed into cultural study.
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 aesthetic. The lack of felicity is mainly the
result of Foley's using Fredric Jameson's The
Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) as a
methodological guide to reading. 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 Jean Toomer: Race, Repression and Revolution .
Fulton, Sybrina and
Tracy Martin. Rest in Power: The Enduring
Life of Trayvon Martin.
New York: Spiegel &
Grau, 2017.
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. Fulton and Martin
are exemplars of that fact. In Rest in
Power, 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. Faith is
what we usually call the emotional space
or place from which they speak. As
poised as scholars who know their subject matter intimately, they teach us a
great deal about the qualities of individual grief. Fulton and Martin have created a powerful
tool for continuing the legacy of their son.
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 the father's questions are
definitive. The magnanimous control of
grief is transformed into a weapon.
Trayvon Martin's parents teach us
what must be done if we are to ever rest in power.
Harvey, William R. Principles of Leadership: The Harvey
Leadership Model. Hampton, VA:
Hampton University Press, 2017.
Convinced that able leadership has the potential to "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). 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). President of Hampton Institute (now Hampton
University) since July 1, 1978, Harvey avoids contextualizing his leadership in
reflections on American history or the public
histories of American higher education.
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. All things
considered, Principles of Leadership has
greater merit as an example of autobiography and identity politics than as a
treatise on contemporary leadership.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. May 4, 2017
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