Black Studies Readings for AALCI in June 2013

Next month, at the University of Texas San Antonio, I'll work with fellows in the African American Literatures and Cultures Institute, a program founded and directed by literary scholar and all-around-extraordinaire Joycelyn Moody. I handle the day-to-day seminar duties and reading assignments for the program.

Here are, for the most part, the works we'll read.

• Alexander, Michelle. from The New Jim Crow
• Anderson, Elijah. "Emmett and Trayvon: How racial prejudice in America has changed in the last sixty years"
• Bambara, Toni Cade. From The Black Woman: An Anthology
• Black Panther Party Platforms 1966 & 1972
• Black poetry packet
• Black poetry: A timeline, 1854 - 2013
• Combahee River Collective Statement
• DuBois, W. E. B. “On Being Crazy.”
• -----, Tom Pomplun, and Kyle Baker. “On Being Crazy.”
• Fryer, Roland. “Acting White”
• Gladwell, Malcolm. "Creation Myth"
• -----. "Small Change"
• -----. "The Tweaker"
• Harris, Trudier. “Black Nerds”
• Johnson, Charles. "The Transmission"
• Keywords List
• Knight, Keith. from Are We Feeling Safer Yet?
• Malcolm X “Message to the Grassroots”
• McGruder, Aaron. Aaron. from A Right to Be Hostile
• Middleton, Harris. The Black Book
• Morrison, Toni. “Behind the Making of the Black Book"
• Nelson, Alondra. "Afrofuturism: Past Future Vision"
• Patton, Stacey. "Black Studies: 'Swaggering Into the Future"
• Randall, Alice. "Black Women and Fat"
• Rediker, Marcus From The Slave Ship: A Human History
• Reed, Ishmael. "Flight to Canada"
• Rooks, Noliwe. "Do Black Women Really Want to Be Fat?"
• Rose, Tricia. From The Hip Hop Wars
• Sawyer, Keith. From Explaining Creativity
• Schuessler, Jennifer. “Drug Policy as Race Policy: Best Seller Galvanizes the Debate”
• Shenk, David. “The 32 Million Word Gap”
• Trethewey, Natasha. “Native Guard.”
• Whitehead, Colson. "A Psychotronic Childhood: Learning from B-movies"
• Wilson, William J. "The Economic Plight of Inner-City Black Males"

*******
• Black Studies Readings for AALCI in June 2012

Black Poetry: A Timeline, 1854 - 2013

What follows is a partial, developing timeline on the histories of black poetry:

1854 - Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's volume of poetry Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects is published. 
1864 - Frances E. W. Harper's poem "Bury Me in a Free Land" is published in Liberator, January 14.
1893 - Paul Laurence Dunbar's first collection of poems Oak and Ivy is published.
1895 - Alice Moore's Violets and other tales is published.
1896 - Dunbar's Majors and Minors and then his Lyrics of Lowly Life are published.
1900 -  "Lift Every Voice and Sing," written by James Weldon Johnson, is performed for Booker T. Washington.
1905 - John Johnson, brother of James Weldon Johnson, sets "Lift Every Voice and Sing" to music.
1913 - Fenton Johnson's first volume A Little Dreaming is published.
1918 - Georgia Douglas Johnson's The Heart of a Woman is published. "The Heart of a Woman."
1919 - The NAACP adopts "Lift Every Voice and Sing" as "The Negro National Anthem."
1919 - Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" is published in the July issue of Liberator. 
1921  - Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is published in the June issue of The Crisis magazine.
1922  - The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson, is published.
1923 - Jean Toomer's Cane is published.
1925 - The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke, is published.
1925 - Countee Cullen's first volume Color is published.
1926 - Langston Hughes's first volume The Weary Blues is published by Knopf.
1926 - Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" appears in the June issue of The Nation. 
1932 - Sterling A. Brown's Southern Road is published.
1937 - Margaret Walker's "For My People" is published in the number 1937 issue of Poetry magazine.
1942 - Margaret Walker's For My People,  recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, is published.
1945 - Gwendolyn Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville is published by Harper & Row. 

25 poems widely anthologized poems

• Amiri Baraka -- “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” “A Poem for Black Hearts,” “Black Art”
• Gwendolyn Brooks -- “We Real Cool,” “a song in the front yard,” “kitchenette building”
• Cullen, Countee -- “Incident,” “Yet do I Marvel”
• Paul Laurence Dunbar -- “We Wear the Mask,” “Sympathy”
• Nikki Giovanni -- “Ego-Tripping,” “Nikki-Rosa”
• Frances Harper -- “Bury Me in a Free Land,” “The Slave mother”
• Robert Hayden -- “Frederick Douglass,” “Runagate Runagate,” “Those Winter Sundays”
• Langston Hughes -- “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Mother to Son,” “I, Too”
• Helen Johnson -- “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem”
• Claude McKay -- “If We Must Die,” “The Lynching”
• Margaret Walker -- “For My People”
• Phillis Wheatley -- “On Being Brought from Africa to America”

Related: 
• Poetry Lists

Poems about slavery or "liberation" poems: Framing Black Poetry

Nat Turner plots revolt

This coming fall semester, what if I teach some of the same poems I have in the past that focus on slavery, but instead of referring to the pieces as poems about slavery, I tell the students that we'll be reading "liberation poems"? What difference will it make in how the students experience the poems and view the poets?

Defining the pieces as liberation poems will not be too tough of a sell since we have so many instances of modern and contemporary poets looking back on moments when black people were enslaved and writing pieces about how those people took steps to either free themselves or at least talk back in rebellious or liberating ways to their captives.  In addition, poets tend to write most often about insubordinate or unruly formerly enslaved people such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Nat Turner. Saying that poets produced "liberation poems" will of course give a sense of agency to those enslaved as well as the writers.

Referring to the poetry as "liberation poems" or even referring to slave narratives as "liberation narratives" assists in raising the issue of framing and how such practices influence interpretations. Of course, the implications of framing go even further or are already with us when we decide to refer to the works we're reading as "poetry," "black poetry," or "African American poetry." As I was noting early last week, over the decades, editors have gone from framing collections of poems as "black" to "African American," a shift that likely has subtle yet far-ranging implications for how audiences view groups of poems and individual poets.  

In a literature course that highlights concepts such as "Black Power," "the Black Freedom Struggle," "the Black Arts Movement," "black rage," "black resistance," black aesthetics, and other terms associated with the word "black" and concepts related to agency, the move to frame or label certain kinds of poetry as "liberation poems" might serve as an important connecting point for students.

Related: 
• African American Poetry and Kanye West's "New Slaves"  
• 50 Poems about Slavery, Struggles for Freedom
• Poetry, Slavery & Creativity
• 150+ Years of Antislavery Poems by Black Poets 
• Ishmael Reed's Funny Ex-slave Poem
• Evie Shockley and This Douglass Poetry Discourse 

The Big Chop

Immediately after the "big chop"

 By Briana Whiteside 

On May 17, 2013, at 12:15pm, I big chopped. I transitioned for nine long months which were planned and thought out, but spontaneously on that cloudy Saturday afternoon, out of frustration, I sat in the mirror and cut the relaxed hair off. For me, the process of cutting my hair was a symbolic ceremony of letting go of the old me and coming into a new woman. I think of it as a birthing ceremony.

[Related: On Natural Hair]

The transitioning months surprisingly taught me a lot about myself. It was through that stage that I became aware of how much I used my hair—let’s not forget the false lashes, which I’m letting go of too—as a crutch to enhance my physical appearance. While I loved the illusion of healthy, thick, beautiful hair, the truth is that my hair was unhealthy, filled with split ends and unmanageable breakage. It was time for a change because I wanted thick beautiful hair and the option of going to the gym and not worrying about sweating out my relaxer.

A few days after the big chop

The decision to big chop was easy; my hair actually made the decision for me. After long months of transitioning, using lots of moisturizers, and shea butter based products, the relaxed hair began to shed uncontrollably. I tried a protective style, the Senegalese twists for three weeks to try to manipulate my hair, but it had a mind of its own. When I took my hair out of the twists on May 16th, I noticed that the relaxed hair was missing in large sections, and it just looked horrible. The next day when I got off work I cut the stringy pieces of hair off.

If I said that I was completely confident with my big chop, I’d be lying. Though I am not completely confident and I am still learning my hair because it is new to me, I can’t help but embrace it. This was an important decision for me because I needed to let go of the crutches that I thought defined me as a person. Now that those crutches are gone, people can get to know and see the real me.

********
Briana Whiteside is a graduate student in English at SIUE and a contributing writer for the Black Studies Program.  

A Notebook on Mark Anthony Neal

2013
• February 27: Mark Anthony Neal and #L4Leroy by Danielle Hall
• February 13: Mark Anthony Neal's Future Histories by Howard Rambsy II

2012
• April 14: Black Intellectual Histories by Howard Rambsy II
• April 8: Mark Anthony Neal Shares His Audience by Howard Rambsy II 
• April 8: Notes on Black Thought 2.0
• March 21: The Writer-Scholar & Twitter: The Case of Mark Anthony Neal  by Howard Rambsy II

2011
• June 6: Mark Anthony Neal's Multiple Approaches To Composition   by Howard Rambsy  II

Related:
• An Extended Notebook on the works of writers & artists
• Black Intellectual Histories

Cool & contemplative; or a note on photographs of Miles Davis

The other day I wrote about that iconic image of Eric Dolphy and mentioned it to Tony Bolden, who, along with William J. Harris, has been engaging me in an extended conversation about poetry, history, jazz, and cultural history that has lasted some years now. When Bolden looked at the images of Dolphy, he made the keen observation that coolness and contemplation were often linked when it came to photographs of jazz musicians. My mind has been running in multiple directions on that point since he made it a couple of days ago.

Miles Davis might be one of the exemplars in this regard. For years, I've listened to older guys talk about being inspired by Miles, and they weren't only referring to his music. At some point , I started looking at photographic images of Miles and came to understand that he was being admired as a musician, a thinker, and a stylist kind of dude.

You see some of those images and realize that more than simply posing, he's also thinking. Or better, you realize that in addition to striking a cool pose, he's caught in a deep thought. Maybe that's part of what Bolden had in mind when he highlighted the link between coolness and contemplation in jazz.

Related:
• That iconic images of Eric Dolphy
• Jazz artists as icons
• Toni Morrison as icon

Reading Harlem: Five Percent Nation & Hip Hop

By Danielle Hall

Here's one other notable discovery I found during my recent NYC visit while walking along Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. en route to the Schomburg Center. We happened to walk past the Allah School in Mecca, a building with a huge 7 atop a crescent moon within a pointed star painted onto the side of the building.

To an average passersby, one would assume that it was just a regular building or outreach center by the Nation of Islam, but it is in fact the Harlem headquarters for the Nation of Gods and Earths (NGE) also known as the Five Percent Nation, founded in 1964 by Clarence 13X a former student of Malcolm X who broke ties with the Nation of Islam. The headquarters in Harlem is known as “Mecca;” Brooklyn is referred to as “Medina;” Queens is “the Desert;” and St. Louis is referred to as “Saudi”—all stemming from locations across Arab diaspora.

For me, this was a n important random discovery. The 1980s into the 1990s or the hip hop’s golden age marked an era of consciousness. Many rappers were members of or affiliated with the Five Percent Nation and incorporated their beliefs and teachings into their lyrics. Some of the notable artists affiliated with NGE included Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Wu Tang Clan, Poor Righteous Teachers, Brand Nubian, Queen Latifah, Digable Planets, Nas, Mos Def, Erykah Badu, and Jay Electronica, who is a member of the organization.

Who can forget Method Man’s classic lines in Belly when he picks up the phone and says “Knowledge Born, what’s the science?” Occasionally, you may hear Nas say “Peace God” like during the 2013 Grammy’s when he and Kelly Rowland presented the Urban Contemporary Award. On Monday, Nas sent out two tweets “Peace 2 the God’s!” and “Peace 2 the Earth’s.”

Still, one of the more well-known examples is probably Erykah Badu’s “On & On” when she sings “I was born underwater with 3 dollars and 6 dimes, yeah you may laugh cause you did not do your math.” The $ 3.60 refers to 360º meaning wholeness and balance, important concepts in 5-percenter discourse. 

The examples I mention above are only a brief example of hip hop’s ghost curricula, meaning unofficial and sometimes informal systems of knowledge and salutations (and I’m not talking about the Illuminati here) that were and are still used as methods of teaching self-empowerment and awareness through music, cultural interaction, and as a tool of reasoning in everyday life.

 Related:
• NYC 2013  

***
Danielle Hall is a program coordinator and contributing writer for Black Studies @ SIUE.