The 1st Biennial U.S. Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference
Haciendo Caminos: Mapping the Futures of U.S. Latina/o Literatures
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
City University of New York
March 7-9, 2013
Abstracts Due: November 12, 2012
This conference aims to draw a critical mass of U.S. Latina/o literary critics and theorists, both foundational thinkers and emerging voices, for the first time in the history of the field. In response to a literature extant in the United States for roughly 150 years, U.S. Latina/o literary scholarship has grown with exponential force over the last two decades. Thinking through an array of subjects from borders to exile, poetics to politics, bilingualism, race, and sexuality, U.S. Latina/o literary scholarship offers new dimensions to the study of “American” literature. As the inaugural conference, this gathering marks a historic intervention calling attention to the robust contributions of U.S. Latina/o writers. For too long, academic conferences have relegated Latina/o literary scholars to isolated panels, in large part fueled by the erroneous perception that U.S. Latina/o literature lacks the depth and breadth of other established literatures. Yet this flies in the face not only of a rich body of literature, but scholarly community laboring to shape the field and find greater institutional inclusion. Thus, this three-day conference offers an exclusive space for intellectual exploration and exchange on a literature that sits within literary studies like the proverbial elephant in the room, just too substantial to ignore. Consolidating the field, inciting generative conversations, creating innovative modes of reading and understanding, are some of the scholarly objectives of this conference.
Located in New York City, home to one of the largest and most diverse Latina/o populations in the country and birthplace to some of the important literary movements in Latina/o literature, this conference boldly calls for a fundamental reawakening of the field. One that provides the space for critics of multiple U.S. Latina/o literatures to congregate and become (re)acquainted in order to expand our scholarship and build critical networks of support. In an era when Ethnic Studies is being attacked, we must brazenly champion, across our departments and institutions, a brilliant literature and scholarship that shine a path to a more complex and just humanity.
In addition to two days of panels by scholars from around the country, this conference will include the following special events:
Thursday, March 7th: Opening address by Ramon Saldivar, Stanford University
Friday, March 8th: Roundtable discussion with Mary Pat Brady, Cornell University, José Esteban Muñoz, New York University, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Columbia University
Saturday, March 9th: Silvio Torres-Saillant, Syracuse University, in conversation with Helena Maria Viramontes, Cornell University, Ernesto Quiñonez, Cornell University
Proposals for panels or individual papers are welcomed. Undergraduate and graduate student submissions are encouraged.
Papers might include, but are not limited to the following:
Illegal Borders and Imaginative Boundaries
Citizenship, Strangers, Politics of Exile
Affective States
Latina/o Phenomenologies
Diaspora, Displacement, and Relocation
Spic-ing English: Aesthetics and Bilingualism
Afro-Latinidad and Reimagining Race
Class and the Violence of Everyday Life
Gender and Literature
Queer Futures
Dis-Abilities
Coloniality and Modernity
Transnationalism and Hemispheric Studies
Literature and Nation in the Age of Global Capital
Human Rights and Activism
Latina Feminism
New and Old Genres: Poetry, Drama, and the Graphic Novel
Latinidades
Abstracts Due 11/12/12
Conference Registration $65
Please send abstracts of 250 words and queries to Professors Richard Perez and Belinda Linn Rincon at latlitconfnyc@gmail.com
As African communities, diversity is something we cannot deny. On so many different levels we differ. Yet still, we share a strong common identity. This month, our discussions will be centered on the theme “Shades of Black”; a three-worded-phrase so pregnant with thoughts and ideas. Let this month be no different, as always, join us with your opinions on all our social channels.
We’ll touch on issues that have been under-discussed like Colorism in African communities on the continent and in the diaspora. Face it, there are glaring differences in our skin tones and someway somehow this affects how we feel. The Rise Africa team is passionate about rescinding all prejudices on African societies. We’ll be sharing stories and experiences with color and how the different shades of colors, races and identities pleasantly co-exist. This is prevalent in the diaspora and especially in countries where colonization left its footprints strong; where Black, “Albino”, Arab, Indian and white Africans live together.
November’s theme captures the entire essence of Rise Africa: changing perceptions about the African identity. We all hold different ideas and have our own ways of doing things, stretching from politics to religion and prejudice often shows its face strongly. We may be treated unfairly or forced to feel out of place because of these differences and that’s what “Shades of Black” is about; emphasizing the presence of a salad of voices, thoughts & lifestyles and the need to remain comfortable, regardless of where you find yourself on the spectrum. This won’t be possible without your involvement.
Our goal is to build a community of Africans who have the confidence to speak and the awareness to engage in productive conversation with one another about the shared and unique lives we live as Africans and members of the African diaspora.
As always, we value your participation. Share your experiences on colorism and the spectrum of viewpoints with the entire Rise Africa community. If you or someone you know would be interested in participating in this series, we encourage you to contribute. Just e-mail us at info@africaisdonesuffering.com for more information. Click to access all articles under our November 2012 theme “Shades of Black”. Thanks to all who participated in October’s theme and we hope that you all enjoy our work this month.
We’ll be looking forward to providing personal, educational, and stimulating posts for you all this month. Stay tuned!
Last month we said you were Legendary and we meant it; we still do. Have a superb month!
Four enterprising young African girls put together a generator that runs on a plentiful natural resource. Whether or not it could work efficiently is a different story.
Future science stars? Three of the girls who invented the pee-powered generator.
(Credit: Maker Faire Africa)
In a stroke of ingenuity that could have proven handy during Hurricane Sandy, four teenage African girls have come up with a urine-powered generator.
Duro-Aina Adebola, Akindele Abiola, and Faleke Oluwatoyin, all 14, and Bello Eniola, 15, collaborated on the invention, which they claim generates one hour of electricity from one liter (about a quart) of urine.
The pee-powered product made its debut at Maker Faire Africa in Lagos, Nigeria, this week. A post on the Maker Faire Africa blog describes the generator's workings in the following words:
Urine is put into an electrolytic cell, which separates out the hydrogen.
The gas cylinder pushes hydrogen into a cylinder of liquid borax, which is used to remove the moisture from the hydrogen gas.
This purified hydrogen gas is pushed into the generator.
Hydrogen, of course, carries explosive risks, so the girls used one-way valves as a security measure (whether that is safety precaution enough is unclear). But don't start saving your bladder output just yet. The blog doesn't mention where the energy needed to power the electrolytic cell comes from, or whether the electrolytic cell uses more power than the machine generates.
While many commenters on the Maker Faire Africa blog are applauding the girls' work, others have expressed skepticism of their contraption. On one science-minded blog, believers and not-so-believers are currently engaged in a lively and thorough deconstruction of its various components.
The girls will probably be famous chemists one day, in any case, but they aren't the first to propose urine (or more solid human and animal waste) as a possible alternative fuel.
Last year, in one example, researchers from Ohio University came up with their own technology for extracting hydrogen from urine. Doing so, they say, requires less power than plucking it from water, as hydrogen can be separated more easily from the ammonia and urea chemical compounds present in pee.
The four African teens likely are the youngest researchers yet to dabble in pee as power. Skepticism aside, can we all just agree that the foursome should be lauded for their efforts to find alternative power sources on a continent that could really use them? Sheesh. When I was 14, I'm pretty sure I was too busy watching TV to concern myself with hydrogen extraction.
It all starts with the pee, a substance that's readily available no matter where in the world you are.
What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.
The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell "neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.
Rather than give out laptops (they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, "hey kids, here's this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!"
Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren't unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you're going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?
But that's not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here's how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference last week:
"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."
This experiment began earlier this year, and what OLPC really want to see is whether these kids can learn to read and write in English. Around the world, there are something like 100,000,000 kids who don't even make it to first grade, simply because there are not only no schools, but very few literate adults, and if it turns out that for the cost of a tablet all of these kids can simply teach themselves, it has huge implications for education. And it goes beyond the kids, too, since previous OLPC studies have shown that kids will use their computers to teach their parents to read and write as well, which is incredibly amazing and awesome.
If this all reminds you of a certain science fiction book by a certain well-known author, it's not a coincidence: Nell's Primer in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age was a direct inspiration for much of the OLPC teaching software, which itself is named Nell. Here's an example of how Nell uses an evolving, personalized narrative to help kids learn to learn without beating them over the head with standardized lessons and traditional teaching methods:
Miles from the nearest school, a young Ethiopian girl named Rahel turns on her new tablet computer. The solar powered machine speaks to her: "Hello! Would you like to hear a story?"
She nods and listens to a story about a princess. Later, when the girl has learned a little more, she will tell the machine that the princess is named "Rahel" like she is and that she likes to wear blue--but for now the green book draws pictures of the unnamed Princess for her and asks her to trace shapes on the screen. "R is for Run. Can you trace the R?" As she traces the R, it comes to life and gallops across the screen. "Run starts with R. Roger the R runs across the Red Rug. Roger has a dog named Rover." Rover barks: "Ruff! Ruff!" The Princess asks, "Can you find something Red?" and Rahel uses the camera to photograph a berry on a nearby bush. "Good work! I see a little red here. Can you find something big and red?"
As Rahel grows, the book asks her to trace not just letters, but whole words. The book's responses are written on the screen as it speaks them, and eventually she doesn't need to leave the sound on all the time. Soon Rahel can write complete sentences in her special book, and sometimes the Princess will respond to them. New stories teach her about music (she unlocks a dungeon door by playing certain tunes) and programming with blocks (Princess Rahel helps a not very-bright turtle to draw different shapes).
Rahel writes her own stories about the Princess, which she shares with her friends. The book tells her that she is very good at music, and her lessons begin to encourage her to invent silly songs about what she's learning. An older Rahel learns that the block language she used to talk with the turtle is also used to write all the software running inside her special book. Rahel uses the blocks to write a new sort of rhythm game. Her younger brother has just received his own green book, and Rahel writes him a story which uses her rhythm game to help him learn to count.
Read more about Nell in this paper, and if you haven't read The Diamond Age, do so at once.
After spending a year as a student teacher in a New York City elementary school, documentary filmmaker Lerone Wilson explores the effects of George W. Bush's momentous No Child Left Behind Act on schools across the country.
I’m sure this is a moment you want to savor, a time to take a deep breath, get some rest, hydrate, regain your balance, and take a long walk in the sunshine. It might be as well a good time to reflect, rethink, recharge, and perhaps reignite. I sincerely hope that it is, and I urge you to put education on your reflective agenda.
The landscape of “educational reform” is currently littered with rubble and ruin and wreckage on all sides. Sadly, your administration has contributed significantly to the mounting catastrophe. You’re not alone: The toxic materials have been assembled as a bipartisan endeavor over many years, and the efforts of the last several administrations are now organized into a coherent push mobilized and led by a merry band of billionaires including Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Walton, and Eli Broad.
Whether inept or clueless or malevolent—who’s to say?—these titans have worked relentlessly to take up all the available space, preaching, persuading, promoting, and, when all else fails, spreading around massive amounts of cash to promote their particular brand of school change as common sense. You and Secretary Arne Duncan—endorsed in your efforts by Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and a host of reactionary politicians and pundits—now bear a major responsibility for that agenda.
The three most trumpeted and simultaneously most destructive aspects of the united “school reform” agenda are these: turning over public assets and spaces to private management; dismantling and opposing any independent, collective voice of teachers; and reducing education to a single narrow metric that claims to recognize an educated person through a test score. While there’s absolutely no substantive proof that this approach improves schooling for children, it chugs along unfazed—fact-free, faith-based reform at its core, resting firmly on rank ideology rather than any evidence whatsoever.
The three pillars of this agenda are nested in a seductive but wholly inaccurate metaphor: Education is a commodity like any other—a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or a screwdriver—that is bought and sold in the marketplace. Within this controlling metaphor the schoolhouse is assumed to be a business run by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping along the assembly line while information is incrementally stuffed into their little up-turned heads.
It’s rather easy to begin to think that “downsizing” the least productive units, “outsourcing” and “privatizing” a space that was once public, is a natural event. Teaching toward a simple standardized measure and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the “outcomes” (winners and losers) becomes a rational proxy for learning; “zero tolerance” for student misbehavior turns out to be a stand-in for child development or justice; and a range of sanctions on students, teachers, and schools—but never on lawmakers, foundations, corporations, or high officials (they call it “accountability")—is logical and level-headed.
I urge you to resist these policies and reject the dominant metaphor as wrong in the sense of inaccurate as well as wrong in the sense of immoral.
Education is a fundamental human right, not a product. In a free society education is based on a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being; it’s constructed on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and, conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all. Further, while schooling in every totalitarian society on earth foregrounds obedience and conformity, education in a democracy emphasizes initiative, courage, imagination, and entrepreneurship in order to encourage students to develop minds of their own.
When the aim of education and the sole measure of success is competitive, learning becomes exclusively selfish, and there is no obvious social motive to pursue it. People are turned against one another as every difference becomes a potential deficit. Getting ahead is the primary goal in such places, and mutual assistance, which can be so natural in other human affairs, is severely restricted or banned. It’s no wonder that cheating scandals are rampant in our country and fraudulent claims are commonplace.
Race to the Top is but one example of incentivizing bad behavior and backward ideas about education as the Secretary of Education begins to look and act like a program officer for some charity rather than the leading educator for all children: It’s one state against another, this school against that one, and my second grade in fierce competition with the second grade across the hall.
You have opposed privatizing social security, pointing out the terrible risks the market would impose on seniors if the voucher plan were ever adopted. And yet you’ve supported—in effect—putting the most endangered young people at risk through a similar scheme. We need to expand, deepen, and fortify the public space, especially for the most vulnerable, not turn it over to private managers. The current gold rush of for-profit colleges gobbling up student loans is but one cautionary tale.
You’ve said that you defend working people and their right to organize and yet you have publicly and noisily maligned teachers and their unions on several occasions. You need to consider that good working conditions are good teaching conditions, and that good teaching conditions are good learning conditions. We can’t have the best learning conditions if teachers are forced away from the table, or if the teaching corps is reduced to a team of short-termers and school tourists.
You have declared your support for a deep and rich curriculum for all students regardless of circumstance or background, and yet your policies rely on a relentless regimen of standardized testing, and test scores as the sole measure of progress.
You should certainly pause and reconsider. What’s done is done, but you can demonstrate wisdom and true leadership if you pull back now and correct these dreadful mistakes.
In a vibrant democracy, whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children. Arne Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (as did our three sons); you sent your kids to Lab, and so did your friend Rahm Emanuel. There students found small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the far limits, and a minimum of time-out for standardized testing. They found, as well, a respected and unionized teacher corps, people who were committed to a life-long career in teaching and who were encouraged to work cooperatively for their mutual benefit (and who never would settle for being judged, assessed, rewarded, or punished based on student test scores).
Good enough for you, good enough for the privileged, then it must be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere—a standard to be aspired to and worked toward. Any other ideal for our schools, in the words of John Dewey who founded the school you chose for your daughters, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”
The years between Reconstruction and World War 1 witnessed an amplified and varied African American presence in the public sphere. During the last years of the 19th century a dramatic rise of “public amusements” occurred that was marked by an explosion of commercialized leisure that indexed America’s turn from Victorian sensibilities. Advances in technology, the emergence of cultures of consumerism, and an unprecedented black mobility together with increasing educational opportunities created a social milieu in which black musicians became a strong presence in the culture industry. As the specter of minstrelsy still prevailed in the land, many black musicians would have to engage its structures and practices in order to gain opportunities in the newly emerging mass-market enterprise. Black musicians would continue to build a cultural nationalism through both Afrological and Eurological expressions.
For the African American performer after the Civil War participation in theater could involve three related forms: musical theater, minstrel shows, and vaudeville. The black musical theater tradition began when the Hyers Sisters, two women who had already built careers on the concert stage, created together with the white writer Joseph Bradford, the musical comedy Out of Bondage in 1876. The first of many such productions, their plots included plantation scenes and topics of racial progress within a format that featured plantation songs, ballads, operatic numbers and folk dances.
The minstrel show became a reliable route to financial security for many black musicians, even those trained in classical music. What was often billed as Ethiopian minstrelsy created the most ample opportunities for African Americans to break into show business with over 100 black minstrel troupes formed between 1865-1890. Their entertainment comprised a traveling hour and forty-five minute variety show consisting of three general categories of songs: ballads, comic songs, and specialty numbers. Representative shows featured singers and a small ensemble of instrumentalists and performed the works of such black songwriters as James Bland, Gussie Davis, Samuel Lucas as well as Stephen Foster, a white writer. The repertory of the typical black minstrel show included religious songs and operatic arias as well.
Advertisement for an Ethiopian Minstrel Performance
Broadly speaking, the social categories of “folk” (a group’s continuity with a constructed ancient past), “mass” (accessibility and value through sales), and “art” (edification and understanding through specialized training) began to calcify in the public sphere. An important development as well concerned the partnership of various elements of the music industry at this time. The three primary revenue streams—publishing, live music, and recording—became consolidated and over the years each would take and lose the lead in earnings for a musicians. One thing would become crystal clear, however: promotions would always be central to the success of each. The paradigm was set earlier in the middle of the 19th century when the great impresario P.T. Barnum—mostly known today for his circuses—promoted the Swedish operatic soprano Jenny Lind’s solo tour to the United States in 1850. Through clever advertising, Barnum instilled the desire for not only Lind’s stellar musicianship but also her “chaste” personal lifestyle. One could experience, consume and be edified by each in her performances, or so the advertising claimed. What we see here is the beginnings of a remarkable turn in which artifice was collapsed with the supposed inner subjectivity of performer. It is a paradigm present even in today’s performers. “Lindmania” swept the country.
The new technology of recording, pioneered by Thomas Edison in 1877, began as an experiment to reproduce the spoken word and soon became a way to disseminate music. When George W. Johnson, a former slave, recorded “The Whistling Coon”in 1890 for the New Jersey Phonograph Company, it made him the first African American recording artist. As a child he was assigned to be the “bodyservant” to his master’s young son to whom he was close in age. Johnson sat in on his young master’s flute lessons, imitated the notes, and could eventually whistle any tune he heard. He was “discovered” as an adult by the New Jersey Phonograph Company that was looking for something “cheap and loud.” Johnson recorded a “coon song” written by the white vaudevillian Sam Devere and filled with lyrics poking fun at physical stereotypes of African Americans. Despite the utterly distasteful lyrics of “The Whistling Coon,” which made him famous and, perhaps, even infamous, one can explain Johnson’s art as the humanizing of technology. Jazz vocalists in the next century would create scat singing using the same principles. The accompaniment of the song is performed in the “rag” style, a syncopated piano form that was sweeping the nation.
In the 1890s, the term ragtime embraced a wide range of music, including syncopated coons songs from minstrelsy, arrangements of these songs for large ensembles, any syncopated music for dancing, and solo piano music. As early as 1876 one finds reference to a stylistic precursor named “jig time” in the musical theater production Out of Bondage. Describing an energetic music played on the piano, it was also known as “jig piano,” which simulated the rhythms and melodic phrasings of banjo and fiddle dance music. It was the coon song, however, that was more ubiquitous in American society due to minstrelsy’s popularity and its association with the cakewalk dance. The publication of William Krell’s Mississippi Rag (actually a cakewalk) and African American composer Thomas Turpin’s Harlem Rag, both in 1897, promoted a definition of ragtime as a solo piano composition that codified in score form the elements of the improvised versions. However, the idea of “ragging” an improvisation of a popular song still remained a living tradition along side the new “classic ragtime.” Scott Joplin became particularly well known as a composer of piano ragtime, writing syncopated pieces with multiple strains or themes similar to the march. Sheet music and piano rolls allowed ragtime composers to reach a broad swath of the American public.
Sheet Music Cover for Tom Turpin’s “Harlem Rag”
This period also saw the emergence of the blues, perhaps, the most important musical form to develop in the twentieth century. Its influence can be felt in virtual every aspect of the American musical landscape today. In her poem “Fast Skirt Blues” from 2003 and excerpted below, Honorée Fannone Jeffers meditates on the publicly expressed freedoms in typical blues lyrics through sentiments that irreverently collapsed sacred and secular meanings. Blues lyrics, according to cultural critics Angela Davis and Hazel Carby represented a radical space of identity, particularly for black women who expressed the full range of their humanity and subjectivity in this musical practice. Although Jeffers’ poem is not “a” blues per se, it certainly captures the playful and exacting emotional impact of the form.
I want to teach you the pigmeat
story this evening. I’m an angel
stabbed by the point I dance on.
I need the sanctified blues.
I need the hallelujah nasty.
Take me there.
I don’t care where we go.
Out past County Line Road
and a dark field shout.
On a cracked backseat.
The melodic sources of the blues grew from the same moans, field hollers, and timbral qualities upon which the spirituals were built. Popular ballads from the Eurological tradition provided the song form models, and they were performed in a variety of non-religious venues and public spaces such as cafes, saloons, streets, theaters, railroad stations, among other places where money could be earned for performances.
The lyrics of the blues, usually performed in first person narrative form, address a large variety of specific everyday experiences often with irony and humor. Guitars, pianos, small ensembles with a variety of instruments provided the accompaniment for singers in a tightly interactive manner. The genre’s codified poetic structure (aab) and the repeating 12-bar harmonic form that became convention has become one of the most important practices of twentieth century American music. Like “ragtime,” the term “the blues” once denoted a variety of expressions although it was first developed in the interior South. Women performers like Mamie Smith, who became the first black singer to record the blues with “Crazy Blues” (1920), pioneered the new “race records” phenomenon, which targeted African American consumers. Although it is commonly believed that these records were primarily responsible for introducing the blues to the wider world, it should be noted as well that sheet music, individuals like W.C. Handy, and the touring vaudeville stage shows also played a large role in circulating the blues widely.
Mamie Smith
Although the record industry was worth $335 million by the end of World War I, according to historian David Suisman, it remained a severely segregated business with the major companies paying very little attention to black audiences and performers. Enter Black Swan Records begun in 1921 and owned by Harry H. Pace, “the first major black-owned record company. Conceived as a venture to produce a broad range of music by and for African Americans.” Suisman describes it as more than a capital venture. It was “an audacious didactic project designed to utilize the combined power of music and business as vehicles of uplift and racial justice. “ The musical output was, of course, uniquely ambitious, as the company “sought to issue all kinds of records-not just blues, ragtime, and comic records, but also opera, spirituals, and classical music-in order to challenge stereotypes about African Americans, promote African Americans’ cultural development, and impugn racist arguments about African American barbarism.” Black Swan’s relative success in the marketplace, unfortunately, led to its demise. White owned record labels tapped the market they had previously ignored by releasing gutbucket blues recording that had little to do with “uplift” but with capturing other sensibilities, namely the salacious appetites of Americans wanting to “slum” in titillating myths about blackness.
Black Swan Records Logo
In the end, Black Swan just couldn’t keep up. It declared bankruptcy at the end of 1923.
In early 1964 Charles Mingus put together one of the great combos in jazz history. The sextet was composed of Mingus on bass, Dannie Richmond on drums, Jaki Byard on piano, Johnny Coles on trumpet, Clifford Jordan on tenor saxophone and the extraordinary multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy on alto saxophone, flute and bass clarinet. Mingus called his experimental group The Jazz Workshop.
In April of that year Mingus and his band embarked on a three-week tour of Europe, much of which is recorded on film and audiotape. The tour is remembered as one of the high-water marks in Mingus’s career. As Rob Bowman writes in the liner notes to the Jazz Icons DVD Charles Mingus Live in ’64:
The tour effectively introduced two new compositions, “Meditations On Integration” and “So Long Eric”, while the band walked a fine line between Mingus’s usual amalgam of bop, swing and New Orleans jazz and the free-jazz leanings of the cataclysmic Dolphy. The result, of course, was something that could only be called Mingus Music–a galvanizing, high-energy sonic stew that, while the product of the kinetic interplay of six musicians, could only have been conjured up with Mingus as the master of ceremonies.
The performance above is from Charles Mingus Live in ’64. It was recorded by Belgian television on Sunday, April 19, 1964 at the Palais des Congrés in Liège, Belgium. The band had unexpectedly been reduced to a quintet two nights earlier, when Coles collapsed onstage in Paris and was rushed to the hospital with what was later diagnosed as an ulcer. In the Belgian TV broadcast, pianist Byard makes up for the missing trumpet parts as the band plays three Mingus compositions:
So Long Eric
Peggy’s Blue Skylight
Meditations on Integration
“So Long Eric” was originally called “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” but Mingus renamed the tune in honor of Dolphy, who had announced before the band left America that he would remain in Europe when the tour was over. Sadly, Dolphy fell into a diabetic coma in Germany and died just two months after finishing the tour. Mingus would later call the song “Praying With Eric.”
One of contemporary jazz's most renowned pianists dazzles during his recent visit to KPLU's studios in Seattle. Watch Chestnut work magic throughout this three-song solo set.
Pianist Cyrus Chestnut took his time making a name for himself on the jazz scene: For a decade starting in the mid-1980s, he apprenticed as pianist for Jon Hendricks, Betty Carter, Donald Harrison and Wynton Marsalis. But since then, he's toured the world and recorded 15 albums as a bandleader.
In this performance and interview, Cyrus describes his gospel roots and his discovery of jazz, and discusses how he approaches interpreting other composers' music.
We are sponsoring our sixth annual fiction chapbook competition. Winner will receive ten copies and a two hundred dollar cash prize. Competition runs September 15th to December 31st. Winner will be announced approximately March 1st, with publication date set for summer. Chapbooks are made in a limited edition, with letter-pressed covers.
Guidelines
Contest runs September 15th-December 31st.
—Up to 10,000 words of fiction. This can be one longer story or multiple shorter pieces. The writer’s name should appear nowhere on the manuscript.
—2 cover sheets, one with the title of the manuscript, your name, telephone number, and address. The second cover sheet should list only the title of the manuscript.
—A page acknowledging previously published work.
IF BY POST: Include a self addressed stamped envelope and a check or money order for $15- made out to Burnside Review. Entry must be postmarked by December 31st to: Burnside Review Fiction Contest, P.O. Box 1782, Portland OR 97207.
IF BY ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION: E-mail all of above a single Word file to contests@burnsidereview.org. Send $16- by Paypal to sid@burnsidereview.org. Fee and entry must be submitted within 24 hours of each other. Receipt of entry will be send after both arrive. (This method will save money and trees.)
The initial readers of the manuscripts will be Burnside Review staff members. They will choose between five and ten manuscripts as finalists to be passed on to the judge for selection of the winning collection.
We ask that former students or colleagues of the Burnside Review Chapbook Contest’s judge—as well as any writer whose relationship with the judge constitutes an unfair conflict of interest—refrain from entering the contest. The Burnside Review staff reserves the right to disqualify entries deemed conflicts of interest and will return those entry fees.
At no time will the judge have the names of the finalists.
Winner will receive 10 copies of the chapbook printed by Burnside Review Press and a cash prize of $200-.
