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: Junot Díaz in conversation with Silvio Torres-Saillant, Syracuse 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
Our FREE international creative writing contests encourage youth to exercise their imagination, expression, and sense of purpose and beauty. Check regularly for periodic contests focused on various personal development and social change issues. Please pass on the word to youth, students, parents, educators, mentors, and youth advocates you know!
This Adinkra symbol is called ANANSE NTONTAN, "the spider's web." It represents wisdom, creativity, and the complexities of life. Ananse is a popular figure in African folktales.
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South African musician Johnny Dyani begins our week with world class jazz, followed by Atlanta-based Dominica, West Indies born neo-soul vocalist/composer Heston. And close out with six versions of Jackie McLean’s “Appointment In Ghana” featuring The Jazz Crusaders, Howard Johnson & Gravity, Laika Fatien, Jackie McLean and McCoy Tyner, and Marc Carey in addition to Jackie Mac’s original recording.
These musicians played as though jazz was in their blood, as though jazz was their musical mother tongue. South African musicians are the international separated-at-birth twins of Black jazz musicians from the United States. And yet, at the same time, they have their own distinctive heritage that manifests itself in a distinctive sound and distinctive approaches to the universal music known as jazz.
Whereas you can find individuals worldwide who are extremely proficient jazz musicians, only in South Africa do we get communities of significant jazz players who easily match their overseas kin. Moreover, even in this regard, Johnny Dyani is extraordinary. In the history of jazz there have been very few bass players who lead the way as innovators, composers, band leaders and/or performers.
Of course Charles Mingus comes immediately to mind, and some might point to Ray Brown but after that acoustic bass players as leading lights becomes a dim picture. Although I wish he had recorded more music, I am extremely grateful for the double handful of recordings on featuring Johnny Dyani’s beautiful music.
I have always marveled at how well Dyani could excel in a wide variety of musical styles: from straight ahead swing to free jazz, from classics to traditional South African melodies, no one else had such command and breadth of music. . Whether in duet or larger ensemble, playing originals or traditional music, Johnny Dyani was a major musical force.
Natasha Bowens interviews a young woman at East New York Farms. Photo by Hugues Anhes.
Because green and Black is a much needed combination, today the story of Natasha Bowens. She is a farmer and food activist in New York, who is making a difference in her community.
This story originally appeared on Dominion of New York, the international magazine of black intellectual swagger. Written by: Kelly Virella
Natasha Bowens was living in Washington, D.C. and working for the Center for American Progress as a healthcare advocate, earning a livable $35,000 per year, when she began longing to live and work on a farm, to put her hands into the dirt and cultivate fruits and vegetables.
In December 2009, the University of Florida graduate packed her bags and headed to Argentina for three weeks to do just that. The then-25-year-old was already an environmental activist and was starting to believe that one of the best ways to protect the environment and improve health was to grow food responsibly.
When she returned from Argentina, she began Google searching urban farms and community gardens where she could work in exchange for housing and food. She found a farm she liked in Brooklyn and in July 2010, with $1,300 in savings, quit her job and headed there.
Her journey — which she documented for the online magazine Grist — has been eye-opening, not only for her, but for dozens more black farmers and black-farmer-wannabes, who seldom see themselves represented in agriculture.
A century-and-a-half after plantation slavery, the last thing many black people want to be associated with is working on a farm and that’s exactly what Bowens and her fellow farmers want to change.
“A lot of my black friends are like, ‘What are you doing? You’re going back to picking cotton?’” Bowens says. “I kept hearing this kind of stigma especially from youth, from a lot of first generation immigrant youth whose parents would, over their dead bodies, let their youth go into farming.”
Yet farming is one way that black communities can increase their control over their food supply, reducing food deserts, hunger and the health problems that stem from them. It’s called food justice.
“It’s a beautiful, powerful thing to be able to feed your own community and we should be the ones to lead the way,” Bowens adds.
Bowens spent her first three months as a full-time farmer at East New York Farms in Brooklyn and her first full-season as a farmer in Wassaic, New York, on a 4-person, multiracial, Duchess County organic farm, about 90-miles north of New York City. After working 70 to 80 hours per week cultivating herbs and vegetables, she and her fellow farmers sold their harvests at two Bronx farmers markets and at two in Duchess County, filling the demand of a lot of West Indian families for medicinal roots and herbs.
To dispel the myth that black people don’t farm, Bowens began creating an online map of the food justice movement, documenting the locations of people of color who are farmers, food activists, grocery co-op founders, and more.
In the UK there are three black farmers. One of them is the famous Wilfred Emmanuel Jones who created the brand The Black Farmer.
Much like Twitter, Tumblr is a social networking tool that you can't fully appreciate until you're completely immersed in it. It's used primarily for sharing pictures, links, and videos, but increasingly the microblogging site has become a platform for sharing news and building community.
The best thing about Tumblr? The dozens of images of powerful, beautiful Black women you'll come across daily. The site proves just how we take it upon ourselves to promote self-affrming images when they are nowhere to be found.
Warning: Be sure you've got some time to kill before you tackle this list. Tumblr is the prime destination for colored girls who are bored at work when Twitter isn't enough.
Africa
http://fyeahafrica.tumblr.com - Dedicated to, and celebrating, the people, numerous cultures, tribes and traditions of Africa
By now, it seems, the whole world has seen the picture. The Swedish Minister of Culture, Lena Adelsohn-Liljeroth, has just cut a piece from the crotch of a cake baked in the image of a distorted African body, complete with golliwog red lips and white eyes. Now, laughing heartily, she’s bent forward as if jokingly feeding a piece of the cake to itself. The whole room eggs her along, laughing, snapping photographs, caught up in the moment. It’s a horrific picture, and it has spread like fire on the web. Two days ago it started popping up in the facebook feeds of acquaintances of the artist who made the cake, Makode Linde. Yesterday it was everywhere in Sweden, in the morning peppering the social media with condemnation and trending on twitter; by noon the National Association of Afro-Swedes had demanded the culture minister’s resignation, and media hell broke loose. By evening, it was already spreading past international borders, and overnight it’s gone on to become a huge worldwide talking point, ending up on the BBC, on HuffPo, on Jezebel, Al Jazeera and condemned in no uncertain terms by activists from South Africa to Berlin, outraged at the picture, the artist, the crowd, the minister and their apologists. It has become a powerful photograph indeed. As such, I think it’s worth talking a little on how it came about.
It’s Sunday, April 15th, and at Moderna Museet the swedish Artists Organisation is organising a celebration of World Art Day, as well as celebrating its own 75th birthday. Invited to speak is Lena Adelsohn-Liljeroth, the culture minister, who – it’s worth noting – is reviled by large parts of the art world for her culture-sceptic stance and for previously condemning provocative art in what many see as a kind of censorship. Here’s her chance at patching things up.
A number of artists have been asked to create birthday cakes for the celebration. At some point, Lena Adelsohn-Liljeroth gets asked if she would go ahead and cut the first piece of cake, standard politician fare she thinks, and she agrees. Then she’s told that the cake will be about the limits of provocative art, which is a subject she now carefully treads around, and about female genital mutilation.
The cake is wheeled out and uncovered. The crowd stares, tittering nervously. The culture minister is placed at the crotch end, and starts cutting into the cake – when suddenly the head starts screaming in pain. It’s the artist, Makode Linde, whose own painted head is placed as the head of the cake. The crowd’s tittering erupts in nervous laughter; the uncomfortable humour of the situation, the classic Swedish fear of conflict, triggered by the surprise sound and movement. Lena Adelsohn-Liljeroth tries to play along as best she can in what she sees as a “bizarre” situation, reciprocating the laughter.
And on the other side of the cake, placed in the narrow space in front of a glass wall, stands one of the minister’s fiercest critics, visual artist and provocateur Marianne Lindberg De Geer, camera at the ready. And she snaps pictures of the whole series of events, as the minister is egged into doing more outrageous things, performing for the crowd.
It’s of course no coincidence. The whole thing was carefully planned, a “mousetrap” as one Swedish artist puts it. And based on how much traction the picture of the event has garnered, it was a very efficient mousetrap indeed.
Who’s Makode Linde, who staged the whole event? He is a visual artist, and as such has continuously asked uncomfortable questions about race, racial stereotyping and his own position as a black man in a condescending elite art world. The golliwog figure is a consistent image in his artwork, being placed on everyday objects, on paintings grinning nervously at the king, gawking in horror from children’s faces, at times undergoing almost formalist destruction. But just as importantly: he’s a club promoter and a DJ, one of Sweden’s most successful, who knows exactly how to manipulate crowds and their emotions.
And I’m left wondering – whatever the artist himself says – if the intended artwork here is not the cake, nor the performance, but the picture. Because what Makode Linde and Marianne Lindberg De Geer have produced is a picture which is incredibly powerfully laden with symbolism of colonial exploitation.
The all-white crowd, laughing bayingly and taking pictures while the African Other screams in anguish.
The cemented association between racist stereotyping and the haute bourgeoisie, as Johan Wirfält writes.
The visual connection not just to blackface but to parodied, racist depictions of African art, the kind that is looted by colonialists and that provide ongoing shame for western Ethnographical museums. At, of course, an event in a museum.
The cutting of the genitals, the literal removal of the sexual subjectivity of the screaming woman.
The feeding, not as an act of infinite compassion, but as an objectifying joke, the “recipient” made entirely passive and unintelligible.
And the fact that the source of the food is the symbolic African herself, the resources stolen from her belly.
It’s a brilliant staging of structural racism and post-colonial existence.
Disclaimer: All the intentions behind this cake, combined with the execution of the piece and the defenses of them are despicable. Taken as the artist intended ( as far as the public is aware), everything about this was poorly thought-out, ignorant, and racist as fuck.
Sometimes the most poignant art is accidental. The artist’s choices and intentions are used by the artwork itself to convey a different message than the artist intended. While I’m not sure if the artist necessarily deserves the credit for the message conveyed in these cases, this cake (for which I cannot find an actual title anywhere) is definitely an example of such an artwork. It says something concrete. It means something important.
It proves exactly how racist everyone who participated in it and everyone who sees it is.
That that woman could metaphorically cut up a screaming Black woman, others could eat the cake, people could laugh about it; that is the art. That is the meaning.
Makode Aj Linde may have made the piece with the intention of saying something else, but what it ended up being was a bunch of white people proving that they could happily participate in the murder and consumption of a shrieking Black body. It proved that the museum director and the curator saw no issue in allowing it to take place.
The appropriate reaction to being asked to cut that cake should have been one of horror. It should have struck a nerve. It should have been a devastating prospect. That representation of a body should have meant something, and it didn’t. Because, to the people laughing, eating, drinking, and defending; cutting up screaming Black bodies, especially stereotypically “African” bodies, doesn’t mean anything.
Makode Aj Linde accidentally made a perfect, poignant, inarguable display of the danger of internalized and “but I’m not a racist” racism. And it’s horrifying and crushing and awful but, most importantly, it’s reality.
I’m secretly still hoping this was his intention all along so it can be less of a display of internalized racism. Really really hoping. But then there’s still a level of using the image of a Black woman’s body and blackface to prove a point that is dehumanizing and exploitative. I doubt the intentions of everyone who helped this happen are in any way respectable.
As it stands, art > artist. Anyone who thinks the Swedish Minister of Culture wasn’t displaying racism is a danger to those around them.
No. No. This…it’s the same thing. You’re saying the same thing. You’re doing the same thing Linde is doing. That everyone does to our bodies. You’re saying we’re open to violence and that this violence has a point. That it deserves to be. That we have no right to our own image. That it’s ok for anyone to use a Black woman’s body— even if it’s for horrific purposes!— if someone gets something “poignant” out of it.
But who is this poignant for? Who? Sartje Baartman? I’m pretty sure she already got the point long ago.
There is no good that comes from other people carving up Black women’s bodies. None. Not ever. And I don’t understand how you could think you have a right to say this, to make this call. It’s not your body and personhood on the line here.
Nobody gets to use our bodies to prove a point we already knew.
Exclusive interview with artist behind controversy that has some calling for Minister of Culture's resignation.
Images above showing Sweden's Minister of Culture, Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, cutting into a cake in the shape of a naked black woman have led to an outcry across the country and online, as The Localfirst reported.
The art installation marking World Art Day was meant to highlight female genital mutilation, as the Minister can be seen cutting into the reproductive region of the exhibit. The National Afro-Swedish Association has called for the minister’s resignation, describing the event as a “racist spectacle.” The Stream spoke with Makode Linde, the artist behind the installation.
How did this idea come about as an art installation?
Was the Minister of Culture aware of your art installation or was it a surprise?
How have people responded to you and the art installation?
Why did you choose female circumcision as the subject?
Do you expect to do something like this in the future, after the reactions?
How did social media impact the way the art installation was perceived?
The recent uncovering of centuries-old documents has revealed that Swedish ships were used in the Mediterranean slave trade. Up to three quarters of the cargo was women who researchers have suggested were sold as sex slaves.
“Swedish history must be rewritten,” researcher Joachim Östlund told The Local.
Östlund, from the Department of History at Lund University, found that Sweden had an active role in the 18th century slave-trades through the discovery of forgotten ship registration documents stored in Stockholm’s consulate archives.
While ‘not surprised’ about uncovering Sweden’s participation in the Ottoman Empire, he stresses the importance of shedding light on Sweden’s role in the affair.
“Sweden actively participated in the Ottoman Empire slave trade with the Sub-Sahara – and this is completely new,” he said.
According to Östlund’s findings, the shipping registries state that the Swedish ships’ cargo was “negroes”.
While the slaves sent to America were predominantly men used for plantation work, the Ottoman Empire had a different agenda entirely.
“Up to 75 percent of the passengers on board were women,” said Östlund.
“These women were used as servants and concubines, often both at the same time. They lived a relatively short time, research suggests an average of seven years after reaching the Empire, and this kept the slave trade between Africa and Tripoli going strong.”
The only other alternative for freedom was marriage, and this, too, reduced slave numbers – prompting an increase in demand.
Sweden had consuls in Tripoli in 1741, creating a peace agreement between the countries[.]
According to Östlund, Sweden also had peace agreements with other states in the region meaning Swedish ships had extra leeway in international waters and used this to sail the Mediterranean uninterrupted.
Östlund’s findings have created a heated discussion, and not everyone is taking the news well. While people have accused him of trying to drag Sweden’s history through the mud, Östlund explains that it was simply curiosity that motivated his research.
“We can’t always have this idea that Sweden is just a happy land in the North, isolated from the rest the world,” he told The Local.
Östlund’s book on the findings, Sweden and North Africa: Slavery and Diplomacy in the Mediterranean World, circa 1650-1760, will be released in 2013.
One of our favorite writers and producer of far and away the best Twitter feed we’ve seen, novelist Teju Cole (@TejuCole) has been curating and tweeting incredible ‘top-ten’ playlists of African music this past week. We’re honored to share one of these in the A/V section here. All text comes from Cole’s tweets.
To improve your Friday immeasurably, here’s an Afrolicious top ten.
10. Just A Band- “Usinibore” An amazing music/video collective from Kenya. Are they funk? House? Disco? Who cares. They’re simply fearless Kenyan lads.
This is not your anthropologist’s African music.
Next track is Kezia Jones, funkiest brother of them all. I’ve met him in Lagos and in New York. he’s always on point.
9. Keziah Jones – “Lagos vs New York”
Now here’s a cat I’d love to meet, because he’s simply on another level. The decidedly futuristic and darkass Spoek Mathombo.
8. Spoek Mathombo – “Mshini Wam”
Next track is from Nneka. She’s German-Nigeria, she’ll give you all kinds of arrhythmia.
7. Nneka- “Heartbeat”
Next: BLK JKS. Fueled by South African Township Jive, but clearly aware of Radiohead. Saw them play at Poisson Rouge, and was like “What!”
6. BLK JKS – Lakeside
My main man Siji combies video and song perfectly in this next selection. Last time I was with my siblings, we had this on endless repeat.
5. Siji – “Ijo”
Bajoli is a Congolese brother I saw perform in Brooklyn last summer. He’s an Adebayor lookalike! Next cut is a laid back number from him.
4. Baloji- “September”
The last three tracks are Nigerian, beginning with “Gongo Aso” by 9ice. A modern classic: years after its release, it still rocks the party.
3. 9ice – “Gongo Aso”
Next track’s from DaGrin, who died in 2010 at the age of 23. A wordsmith without equal, he transformed Yoruba-English rap and we miss him.
2. DaGrin, feat. Omawumi- “Thank God”
The party is over, people don’t want to go home. I send them on their way with another Omawumi track, a retro-funky one.
“If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry.'” - John Lennon
There are hundreds of moments you can point to as the watershed moment where rock was born. There are dozens of early singles by blues and hillbilly bands that point to where rock was headed. But before him, there was no-one who embodied the now iconic image of “guitar god” like Chuck Berry.
1. Guitar showboating (well, he got it from Marty McFly, obviously) 2. Reinventing one's childhood for the sake of “legitimacy” 3. Catering to a teen audience despite being a long way from teenagery 4. Doing horrible horrible things and somehow still being a beloved cultural icon 5. Being a guitar god.
Born to a middle class family in St. Louis in a (comparably) affluent black neighborhood, Charles Edward Anderson Berry was exposed to music at a young age through the church. The son of a deacon and school principal, he played guitar and violin, and sang with the church choir. Although he would sometimes later exaggerate about his upbringing, claiming he was raised in absolute poverty to appear more “legitimate” as a blues guitarist (I hear he didn't even have an Xbox), for a St. Louis family in the 40's, Berry's early life was comfortable.
In the years following World War 2, a new phenomenon developed in America. In previous years, American teenagers were sent off to work or start families as soon as they were able, with only the wealthiest getting an education beyond middle school. In the post-war economic boom, high school went from a luxury to a necessity for most Americans. Almost overnight the notion of idle, bored, and angsty teens was born.
Like Berry would later sing in his classic “No Particular Place To Go,” he spent much of his teen years “ridin' along in [his] automobile...cruisin' and playin' the radio with no particular place to go.” Unfortunately for him, his car fetish combined with suburban boredom would begin his long and storied relationship with the police. In 1944 while driving around with friends, his car broke down. With no money on hand, Berry flagged down a passing car and stole it at gunpoint. He was sent to the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men at Algoa, Missouri.
Berry was released on his 21st birthday on October 18th, 1947, and joined several local bands. He would work hillbilly songs (early rockabilly, before the invention of rock, but after the invention of hills) into his set for shock value initially. Berry delighted at a black audience's reaction to him playing hillbilly music with a blues band. Eventually the songs shifted from being gimmicks in his sets to highlights, and as the local audience grew, Berry got serious about pushing his music beyond St. Louis.
In a chance meeting with his hero Muddy Waters, Berry was introduced to Leonard Chess of Chess Records and invited to audition. Berry ran through a number of blues standards, but Chess was most impressed by a hillbilly song called “Ida Red.” With longtime pianist Johnnie Johnson, Jerome Green (from Bo Diddly's band), Jasper Thomas, and Willie Dixon, Berry adapted “Ida Red” as “Maybellene” and the record hit #1 on the rhythm and blues charts. In exchange for airplay, Chess would give legendary DJ and douchebag Alan Freed writing credits on the song, a fact that Berry wouldn't find out until after the record had been released.
Berry launched a successful US tour, becoming one of the top touring acts in 56. He would test his stage antics on audiences throughout the country, fine tuning his stage persona and vocal delivery to appeal as much as possible to both black and white audiences. He deliberately sang with clear diction for the white audiences and played with flamboyant guitar showmanship for the black audiences. His goal throughout the 50's was to be an artist with true cross-over appeal.
With the goal of creating a place where black and white teens could dance without fear of police harassment, Berry started the nightclub Club Bandstand in St. Louis. He put the venue in the primarily white theatre district in St. Louis, and as a result him and his secretary Francine Prager became the subject of frequent police harassment. The two were the only consistent employees of the venue, which was probably a good idea considering what happened when he tried to hire a hat check girl in 1959.
In December 1959, Berry was arrested for violating the Mann Act (transporting underage girls over state lines for immoral purposes. Immoral here means sex, not other immoral acts like tax evasion or videotaping people in the bathroom, Berry would do that stuff later.) when he brought an Apache waitress from Arizona to St. Louis to work at Club Bandstand. After a falling out between them, he was arrested. The two week trial in 1960 was eventually overturned because of the judge's rampant racism (he would only refer to Berry as “The Negro” throughout the proceedings), nevertheless a second jury convicted him in 1961 to 3 years in prison.
Accounts of the incident vary, as they always do in these situations. Thus among his rock and roll pioneering, Berry also spawned the Michael Jackson / R Kelley / Roman Polansky defense: “well sure he might be a pedo, but have you checked out Thriller / 12 Play / Rosemary's Baby? The dude's a genius.” As a Boston ex-pat, I'm also intimately familiar with “I know he may have killed that woman in the 60's, but Ted Kennedy's an amazing senator.”
Berry was released on his birthday in 1963, and his career seemed to recover for a time. Releasing classic singles like “No Particular Place To Go,” “You Never Can Tell,” and “Nadine,” it appeared Berry was back. However, the success he had known in the 50's were quickly dominated by the white British invasion bands who had lifted their sound almost entirely from Berry's classic records. Although both the Beatles and the Stones (and of course the Beach Boys, whose classic “Surfin' USA” is a note for note copy of Berry's “Sweet Little Sixteen”) made no bones about Berry's influence on them, and name-checked him whenever possible, Berry became increasingly embittered that his efforts to unite black and white music had instead been wholly co-opted by white musicians for white audiences.
“Sweet Little Sixteen”
“Surfin' USA”
And this was no coincidence of the “Born This Way” sounds like “Express Yourself” or “Post-Break Up Sex” totally rips off “The KKK Took My Baby Away” sort; Berry was awarded a writing credit for “Surfin' USA” shortly after its' release.
He would express his bitterness in the Keith Richards produced film Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll about fans like Richards copying his trademark guitar style and stage antics to great success, while Berry was stuck playing the oldies circuit to diminishing audiences. Berry would have one final hit with the novelty song “My Ding-a-ling” in 1971, ironically his only #1 single, but that would be his last successful new release.
Throughout the 70's, Berry continued to tour regularly backed by young up-and-coming local bands, who included Bruce Springsteen and the Steve Miller Band. His performances at the time were notably erratic, and he demanded that he be paid in cash. In 1979, shortly after playing a gig at the White House for Jimmy Carter, Berry was arrested yet again, this time for the considerably less rock and roll crime of tax evasion (if only he'd timed it better...).
Berry would have legal trouble one more time in 1990, when female employees from his Southern Air nightclub alleged that he had been taping them in the bathroom. He ultimately settled out of court with the 59 women, with the incident costing him an estimated 1.2 million dollars.
Rather than ruin his career, or tarnish his legend, Berry's legal drama has only bolstered his reputation as the prototypical rock and roll badass. As Salmon Rushdie puts in his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, rock stars are our modern day Greek gods. And in the rock and roll pantheon, Berry is a Titan. We need our guitar gods to be brilliant, deviant, and flawed. The contradiction of fanship of musicians like Chuck Berry is ultimately what makes them endlessly fascinating. He's a man who in his 30's became the original rock and roll teen idol, despite having lost his teenage years in a correctional facility. He's a man whose music is often used in films to display a more “innocent time” despite his...let's just call it a noted appreciation for young girls. He's a man who's autobiographical song “Johnny B. Goode” was included on a gold disc sent in to space literally as a document of humanity's greatest achievements for aliens to hear. Ultimately we don't need Chuck Berry to be good(e), we need him to be a genius, we need him to break boundaries, and we need him to be interesting.
To foster the study and appreciation of Jane Austen, JASNA conducts an annual student Essay Contest, with support generously provided by the Sonia Raiziss Giop Charitable Foundation.
Students interested in the life and works of Jane Austen are encouraged to enter. The Essay Contest is open to students world-wide at the high school, college/university, and post-graduate levels of study. Entrants do not need to be members of JASNA. Students must be enrolled full-time or part-time in coursework during one or more semesters/quarters of the contest year. Home-schooled students at the high school level are also eligible. Part-time is defined for the college/university level as a minimum of six credit hours and for the post-graduate level as a minimum of three credit hours.
2012 Essay Contest
The 2012 Essay Contest topic aligns with the JASNA Annual General Meeting theme, “Sex, Money and Power in Jane Austen’s Fiction”:
How do sex, money, and power enable characters in Austen's novels to manipulate each other, and what forms of resistance are there to that manipulation? Consider no more than two of Austen’s novels or other major works and analyze the modes of manipulation, whether successful or unsuccessful.
The Submissions page includes important rules about format and submission of essays and a link to the official Essay Contest entry form. Entries must be e-mailed by May 15, 2012.
Essay Contest Awards
JASNA awards scholarships to the winners in each of three categories: High School, College/University, and Post-Graduate.
First Place
One year’s membership in JASNA for both the winner and his or her mentor
$1000 scholarship
Free registration and two nights’ lodging for JASNA’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in New York [Note: Transportation to New York is not provided.]
Recognition at the AGM and on the JASNA web site
Publication of the essay on JASNA’s web site
One of Jane Austen’s novels
Second Place
One year’s membership in JASNA for both the winner and his or her mentor
$500 scholarship
Free registration and two nights’ lodging for JASNA’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in New York [Note: Transportation to New York is not provided.]
Recognition at the AGM and on the JASNA web site
Publication of the essay on JASNA’s web site
One of Jane Austen’s novels
Third Place
One year’s membership in JASNA for both the winner and his or her mentor
$250 scholarship
Free registration and two nights’ lodging for JASNA’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in New York [Note: Transportation to New York is not provided.]
Recognition at the AGM and on the JASNA web site
Publication of the essay on JASNA’s web site
One of Jane Austen’s novels
Please review the Essay Contest FAQs. If you still have questions, contact Eric Nye at eric.nye@jasna.org. You must use “JASNA Essay Contest” in your subject line.
