VIDEO: Good Bye & Thank You Donald Byrd Vibes4YourSoul

Donald Byrd with Herbie Hancock

 

Good Bye & Thank You

Donald Byrd


One of the greatest trumpet player and jazz musician of these last 50 years, Donald Byrd passed away this week.

From his phenomenal Jazz starts in the late 50's/ early 60's on Blue Note, to his classic funkier productions alongside The Blackbyrds, his legacy is just immense and I'm sure he will still be played and sampled many years from now.

He was one of my favorite artists and I rarely make a DJ set without playing at least one of his many fantastic tunes. So I just wanted to say : Thank you Donald, you've definitely made this world a better place !


Below three tracks that I believe give a nice snapshot of his tremendous talent.
From his classic jazz period (Hush) to his inimitable hot mellow groove ((Fallin' Like) Dominoes) and his irresistible disco/funk side (Rock Creek Park) :
 

Ce petit billet pour saluer la mémoire de Donald Byrd, trompettiste génial qui aura marqué de son empreinte l'histoire de la Musique, au long d'une riche carrière entamée dans les années 50.

Depuis sa première période Jazz chez Blue Note jusqu'à ses innombrables compositions fusion/groove des 60's/70's, le son de sa trompette magique est reconnaissable entre tous. 
Il est l'un de mes artistes préférés, et je termine rarement un DJ set sans avoir joué au moins un titre inspiré de son immense répertoire. Je voulais donc simplement lui adresser un grand merci en guise d'au revoir. Nul doute qu'il continuera d'être écouté, interprété ou samplé par d'innombrables générations de mélomanes !

Ci-dessus trois titres qui résument à mon sens bien les multiples façettes de son talent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

VIDEO: Herbie Hancock – Hang Up Your Hangups (Live) (1976) > Roy Ayers Project

Herbie Hancock

– Hang Up Your Hangups

(Live - 1976)

 

Off of Herbie Hancock‘s 1976 lp entitled Manchild, Herbie and crew perform Hang Up Your Hangups with a live, improvisational groove that will make any audience get up an move.

On the flip side, here is a fan made youtube video, using clips of NYC in the 70′s, along with vintage transitions and editing.

(a message from youtube user conqa)
When i look back when i was making this video (inspired by the seventies cop show The Streets Of San Francisco opening intro which had a huge impact musically on me when i was little and Jimi Hendrix’s Crosstown Traffic brilliant video ).. it was a bit of a job actually cos the equipment i had was very simple, only had a computer a videorecorder and a lot of determination so i had to record all those 70′s films footage i used for making this video containing New York scenes (Taxi Driver, French Connection, Midnight Cowboy, Kojak and there is one shot from Sicilly Clan and one from Forrest Gump) when they were showing them on telly, so it took a while.. and then transfer them to a digital form, which wasn’t easy really, that program i used was crashing all the time so it took a LOT of patience and then obviously process it, edit and sync it with the music.. It took few weeks to finish it. Therefore im very happy that people are enjoying this video..

 

PUB: Writing Contest Call for Submissions > Selected Shorts

Writing Contest Call for Submissions

Submissions are now open for the 2013 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize!

The winning submission, selected by Jim Shepard, will be read as part of the Selected Shorts performance at Symphony Space on June 12, 2013. The story will be recorded for possible later broadcast as part of the public radio series. The winner will also receive $1000 and a 10-week class from Gotham Writers’ Workshop.

Story requirements

  • Submit a single short story that fits the theme “Complicated Families.”

  • Your story must have a title.

  • Your story must be no more than 750 words (Times New Roman, 12pt font).

  • Your story must be unpublished.

The Prize
The winner will receive: $1000; two tickets to the June 12, 2013 Selected Shorts at Symphony Space, when the prize winning story will be read and recorded for possible broadcast; 10-week creative writing class with Gotham Writers’ Workshop offered in NYC or online. (Prize does not include transportation to or from NYC or the event.)

Entry Fee
Every submission must include a $25 entry fee (payable by credit card, check or money order). To enter, click on “Enter the Contest” below. Instructions for submitting your entry via postal service are provided in the Official Rules.

 

Deadline
All submissions must be received by 5pm, March 15, 2013, Eastern Standard Time. To be specific, online submissions must be submitted by 5pm Eastern Standard Time. Mailed submissions must arrive with the day’s mail. (Entries postmarked on March 15 will NOT be accepted.)

About this year’s guest judge
Jim Shepard
is the author of six novels and four story collections. His stories are published regularly in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, Playboy, and Vice. His most recent story collection is the multiple award-winning You Think That’s Bad.

Note
Contestants who submit online or provide their email address will be added to Gotham Writers’ Workshop’s and Selected Shorts’ email lists – please let us know if you do not wish to receive email about upcoming programs.

ENTER THE CONTEST

Frequently Asked QuestionsOfficial Rules

 

PUB: Sozopol Fiction-writing Seminar

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS:

OPEN CALL 2013

When: from 23 to 26 May 2013. Application deadline: 15 March 2013.

The Elizabeth Kostova Foundation offers its sixth annual summer fiction writing seminar in the ancient town of Sozopol, Bulgaria. The seminar program consists of intensive daily fiction workshops, roundtable discussions, guest lectures and literary readings by faculty and participants. Fiction writers from Bulgaria and fiction writers from English-speaking countries, including but not limited to the U.K. and the U.S., are invited to apply. A total number of ten applicants will be selected for participation and funding.

SCHOLARSHIPS

Five participants writing in English and five writing in Bulgarian language will receive scholarships. A scholarship covers tuition, room and board, in-country transportation, and 50% of international travel expenses.

PROGRAM AND FACULTY

Morning workshops will be led in English by Elizabeth Kostova (US), author of the best-selling novels The Historian (2005) and The Swan Thieves (2010), and in Bulgarian by Vladimir Levchev (BG), author of nineteen poetry collections (four published in the U.S.) and the novels Krali Marko: The Balkan Prince (2006), 2084 (2009) and The Man and the Shadow (2012).

Guest lectures will be provided by Richard Russo (US), a writer and a screenwriter, a Pulitzer Prize winner for the novel Empire Falls (2002), author of the filmed novel Nobody's Fool (1994), and Vladislav Todorov (BG/US), a writer and a screenwriter, author of the filmed novels Zift (2010) and Zincograph (2010).

The program in Sozopol, Bulgaria, includes also roundtable discussions, meetings with distinguished international and Bulgarian editors, publishers, translators, as well as literary readings.

Follow-up events, organized as part of the long-term program of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation CapitaLiterature, will take place on 28 and 29 May 2013 in Sofia, Bulgaria.

APPLICATION PROCESS

In order to apply, the applicants must complete an online submission form and attach all materials as required: a biography (maximum 300 words), a statement of purpose (maximum 1 page) and a fiction writing sample (an excerpt from a novel or a short story/stories; at least 10 and not more than 20 pages; Times New Roman, 1800 characters per page, including gaps). Please note that each file and page of the attached excerpt must contain the applicant's name and the text title.
A letter of reference, sent directly to the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation via e-mail by the reference, is required in addition to the online application. The reference letter should be sent to silieva@ekf.bg.
Only online applications, available here http://www.ekf.bg/ekfa/en/apply.php will be accepted!

Technical requirements: Please name the files you are submitting online using ONLY Latin letters, numbers, dashes and underscores! Please do NOT use commas, spaces, quotation marks, apostrophes, inverted commas and any other symbols. The allowed file formats are: .DOC, .DOCX, .RTF, .PDF.
Please note that all application materials and all pages should contain the author's name. Applications, which do not meet all technical requirements will be disqualified.

APPLICATION DEADLINE

15 March 2013, 24:00, UTC - 04:00 (EDT)

CONFIRMATION

All candidates will receive a confirmation message from sozopolfictionseminars@gmail.com shortly after 15 March 2013. Please be certain that your e-mail account is set to receive e-mails from this address. If you do not receive a confirmation within one week of the deadline for submissions, please contact: sozopolfictionseminars@gmail.com.

NOTIFICATION

All approved applicants will be notified via e-mail by 15 April 2013. The results will be published on the website of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation not later than 30 April 2013.

via ekf.bg

 

PUB: Digital media challenge offers $100,000 for critical work on democracy > Art Threat

Digital media challenge offers $100,000

for critical work on democracy

 

by Rob Maguire on February 7, 2013

A new digital media challenge is looking for creative work that addresses the need to improve democracy in the United States.

And as it is with American democracy in practice, large sums of money are at stake — $100,000 in cash prizes will go to “the most fresh and creative submissions.”

 

Looking@Democracy is a national competition offering a total of $100,000 in prize money for short, provocative media submissions designed to spark a national conversation about why government is important to our lives, or how individuals and communities can come together to strengthen American democracy. Launching today, February 4, 2013, the challenge will award $25,000 for First Place along with significant prizes for 2nd and 3rd place as well as categories and awards for People’s Choice and Emerging Artists.

Examples of welcome submissions would be addressing a critical topic that is absent from the national debate, looking at data and exploring the stories behind them, or highlighting an aspect about democracy taking place on a local level. By making submissions in any digital format welcome, the challenge hopes to engage with independent media makers, investigative reporters, students, graphic designers and artists – anyone with creative ideas to help engage Americans and shift the political discussion in a fresh and engaging way.

Via the MacArthur Foundation.

 

INTERVIEW: Walter Mosley on adapting his novels for the screen > Camera in the Sun

Camera Q&A:

Walter Mosley on

adapting his novels

for the screen


Posted by Christian Niedan

Who: Walter Mosley is a New York City-based author, whose 37+ book literary career goes back to 1990′s Devil in a Blue Dress. That novel kicked off a series revolving around detective Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins — a Black resident of the Watts section of Los Angeles, whose continuing story begins in 1948, and (with the May 2013 release of his 12th story, Little Green) has progressed to 1967. Mosley also created the character of ex-convict Socrates Fortlow, the modern-day protagonist of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, and two other novels. Both Rawlins and Fortlow were adapted for the screen in the 1990s. Denzel Washington portrayed Rawlins in 1995′s Devil in a Blue Dress, directed by Carl Franklin. Laurence Fishburne portrayed Fortlow in 1998′s Always Outnumbered, directed by Michael Apted for HBO. During production Mosley met producer Diane Houslin, and in 2012 they partnered to launch a new production company: Best of Brooklyn Filmhouse. Other Mosley creations include Fearless Jones, portrayed by Bill Nunn in the final episode of Showtime’s anthology series, Fallen Angels. He has also authored several science-fiction stories — the latest being The Gift of Fire and On the Head of a Pin, which were released together by Tor Hardcover in May, 2012. Camera In The Sun interviewed Mosley in the summer of 2012, as he was editing Little Green, and discussed how his books have been adapted for the screen — including past and future versions of Easy Rawlins.

Why write another Rawlins mystery after what appeared to be his death in Blonde Faith?

Well, anybody who read that last book knows two things. Number one: You never saw his body. He went off a cliff. Number two: It’s a first-person narrative. And he says, “I blended into darkness,” or whatever. So the idea is maybe he didn’t die. But I didn’t want to be defined by Easy Rawlins. So I needed to do some other books. And since then, I’ve published between 15 and 20 books that are not Easy Rawlins, and I’m happy about that. I’m happy about doing the work. And also, it was getting stale. I’m editing the new book now, and really liking it, because it’s very different. He’s grown, and going through this near-death experience has really changed him. And so I’m able to talk about a new era in America, and also in his life. It wasn’t that I was always planning to get back to it, or not. It’s just that I had stopped for however long. The latest case is the Sunset strip. Young Black man, who Mouse has some relationship to, goes up to the strip. He goes to the Strip, does some LSD — to be specific, Orange Speckled Barrel — with a young woman, and gets into trouble. And Easy first has to find him, then get him out of trouble. It takes place in 1967. And it was nice because I was a teenager then, so I kind of start remembering.

How did you come to work with Diane Houslin on B.O.B., and John Wells on an Rollins TV series?

I’ve known Diane for a long time. She’s one of the doc worker employees of HBO. And you know how they did those little films about the making of the movie? She was doing that for Always Outnumbered years ago, and I’ve known her since then. We’ve been friends, and she has all the talents that I don’t have about producing — who to talk to, how to talk to them, what things people like, what they don’t like. All the stuff that I just don’t know, and don’t pay any attention to. I’ve always wanted to work with her. And finally, three or four years ago, we got together and started working. Then we made the company, B.O.B. — Best Of Brooklyn. That’s been really good. Diane keeps me going. Because what happens with me is, I keep running off-track. Because I’m a novelist. I like writing novels. I write a lot of them. I’m also doing some plays, and working on a musical. I’m kind of all over the place. Right now, I think there are six different projects that we’re inching forward for television in Los Angeles. Plus, we’ve optioned my book The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey to Sam Jackson. Also, along with a writing partner, Cheo Hodari Coker, we’re writing a script for The Man in My Basement, which Anthony Mackie is very interested in. And the reason I’m able to do all those things is because Diane calls me and says, “Remember, you’re doing this.” And I go, “Oh, OK.”

John Wells, his group is a fun group to work with. So I tried to do a Fearless Jones series with him, which didn’t work. We wrote an Easy Rawlins series for NBC. They passed, but now we have it. So we’re gonna go to where we really should be with it — in cable. We’re thinking of going to A&E, Showtime, and that sounds good to me. What happened was, we wrote the script, and everybody at NBC loved it. They really did. I mean, I know because after they said “No”, they called me up to apologize. All of them. But we didn’t compromise, and they didn’t want to ask us to compromise. And so therefore, they didn’t do it, which is fine. I’m not unhappy with that. Working in television, people ask me “Are you excited?” I say, “No, I’m never excited until after the first season is over.” The Leonid McGill series, The Long Fall, we’ve been talking to some people I like — the producers of Justified, which I think is a great show — and a couple of other people. And then I’m working on developing another series with John Wells. You need a producer, and he’s really good, and his company’s really good. And a guy who’s optioned a graphic novel about the Blues came to Don Cheadle’s company, and I’ve come up with an idea for that series.

Why did you decide to get more involved in adapting your books with B.O.B. Filmhouse?

I would like to have something to do with it, because a lot of times — especially in feature film, but also in television — people get lost. Partially because they’re so frightened of getting fired, and not working, not getting their budget. And once you’ve been formed that way, it doesn’t matter how successful you get, you’re always frightened. You have two ways you can be: you can either be frightened, or be a bully. Those are the two ways. And so it’s good for me to be involved, and to be saying, “This is the character I wrote. This is what I want to do.” I can go talk to Laurence Fishburne, and I can go talk to other people like Anthony Mackie and say, “Look, I’d like to do this. I’d like to do it the way it is.” And have them respond, and say, “OK, yeah that’s what I want too.” I mean, it’s still gonna change. The people with the money are still gonna tell you what they’re willing to do, and what they’re not willing to do. But if I work with Diane, and with Mackie or Fishburne, or whoever else I’m working with — in the end, at least I feel that I’ve articulated what this series, or what this movie, or what this play or whatever can be. And so then I’m a part of the dialogue.

What was the process for adapting Always Outnumbered for HBO?

I was very involved in making that movie. I approached HBO, I approached Fishburne, and they both said “Yes” separately. HBO was doing movies then, and I’m actually doing another film with them, maybe — The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey with Sam Jackson. But then, they made a lot of movies, and that was really good. So you could go there, they gave you a good budget, they were very serious about the film. So you weren’t stuck on how many people were gonna buy tickets, and that kind of stuff. It was really nice. HBO said “Yes” before Laurence. And then I ran into him in New Orleans, and I asked him if he’d like to do it, and he said “Of course, let’s do it.”

HBO said, “Let’s just make the movie the way the book is. Because we like the book.” When you’re working on a Hollywood feature film, what happens is they see a book, and they just see a hook somewhere in it. And they say, “Well, how can we make your book fit around that hook?” That didn’t happen with HBO. They said, “We like this book. We wanna do it.” Same thing with Ptolemy Grey. They read it and said, “We wanna do this story.” And when HBO says that, I’m convinced they really wanna do the story.

I don’t think I wanted to write the script for Always Outnumbered. But Colin Callender, who was running the film part of HBO at that time, said, “No, if you’re gonna do it with us, you’re gonna have to write it.” So I said, “All right.” It was fun. There’s the book where Socrates is in South Central, and he’s living among poor people.

I remember bringing the script to the director, Michael Apted — who’s a wonderful director — him reading it, and giving me notes. So I was probably halfway or three-quarters through the script when he came and signed on. He said, “Let’s go all the way. Let’s do it the way it really looks. If you told me about this place, and I went there, that’s what it should look like.” And so he did, and it was great. Laurence was wonderful to work with, and it was really fun.

I think Socrates is a real character, and an important character. You know, the problem that so-called minorities have in American culture of film, music and books is that they’re not, as a rule, portrayed as the people they are. Socrates is much more of a real character than pop culture can usually put its arms around. Right now, we’re developing a series for Laurence based on Socrates. He’s done some terrible things, and he’s trying to get better, but he doesn’t believe that he can really.

Did the period-L.A. setting of Devil in a Blue Dress significantly add to its budget?

Devil would be much easier to make now, because of CGI and stuff like that. I think it would have cost less money to make. It was like $20-million to get it in the can. Whereas we had $7-million for Always Outnumbered. And I think you could probably make a movie that looks like Devil right now for maybe $10-million. And Always Outnumbered would cost you the same amount. You know, a budget matters, but it’s an ever-changing issue. What are the unions doing? What are actors costing? You could take any script, and take out explosions and car chases, and make it for a low budget. People don’t for a variety of reasons. But that’s an ever-changing question.

Devil was a great movie, and it really showed Los Angeles at that time of transition in 1948. And Always Outnumbered I think was just beautiful. I love Always Outnumbered. Especially because it’s so much itself, that you really can’t compare it to another American movie. And I keep trying, but I can’t think of another movie that looks like it. Or even dramatically, a movie that arcs like it. On one hand, it’s really gritty and urban. And on the other hand, it’s very romantic.

One of the interesting things about L.A. for me is maybe 70% of the city looks just like it did back in the ’50s. Places have changed. I mean, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Santa Monica — there are places that got very fancy. The urban parts. Not the residential parts. I went to an elementary school in Los Angeles in the ’50s and ’60s. And I went back not long ago, and the school is still there. I mean, I never think about that with films. I was talking to Walter Bernstein, who wrote The Front, Fail-Safe and many other wonderful films. He’s 93 now, and he was talking to me about how in his 80s he had a meeting about a period film, and these 20 year-old producers came in and said, “Mr. Bernstein, let us explain to you how a screenplay works.” You know, they felt somebody was paying them money to act like they knew something, rather than learning something. So they said to him, “Oh, it’s a period piece, it’s gonna be very expensive.” Well, not if you’re smart it isn’t. It’s not gonna be that much more expensive. And so I don’t think about it. I know other people do. But I don’t think about it.

What was it like adapting Fearless Jones for Fallen Angels on Showtime?

The first Fearless story I wrote they made into an episode. It was just a short story introducing the character. That was fun. I wrote the short story, and gave it to them before it was published. It was one show. Bill Nunn was Fearless. Giancarlo Esposito was Paris Minton. It was wonderful. And that was period, and it worked fine. And Showtime doesn’t have gigantic budgets for these things. The story is really about the friendship between Paris and Fearless. And this woman gets involved, and they try to help her out — and they do, after a fashion. But the story is also about L.A. It’s about Black people in L.A. One of the things that’s so interesting to me is that you have this incredible city of Los Angeles that has a deep, deep, deep Chicano history. Some of the first inhabitants of old Los Angeles were Black people. And then you have Japanese, Korean, Chinese — all these people who have a deep and very important part of the history of Los Angeles, but don’t appear anywhere in the literature. And because they don’t appear in the literature, they don’t appear in movies, or they appear like caricatures.

Devil in a Blue Dress was a very good movie, and it was a very serious movie. It was entertaining, and it was fun, but the characters in it had lives of their own. And they weren’t lives where they were aping or mimicking some other culture. And I think it’s hard for people. They look at it and go, “Wow.” I remember going around on the tour for the book of Always Outnumbered. White male journalists would talk to me, and they would say, “I don’t know if I can forgive Socrates.” And I said, “Well, that’s OK, because he doesn’t care what you think.” And it was really funny. It was a pat answer. I usually don’t have pat answers, but I had that one. And they would go, “Wow.” And I think that’s it. The fact that when you run across a guy who isn’t beholden to you, that’s definitely in there.

What’s the role of race in Leonid McGill’s period-New York, compared to Fearless & Easy’s L.A.?

Leonid McGill in 1950 would be treated very similar to Easy in 1950. New York, L.A., it makes no difference. You have the same treatment. There was a little less segregation in L.A. at that time. But the more integration you have, the more conflict you have. One thing that’s kind of strange is that the more the races blend together, the more conflict, worries, fears and paranoias you have. More or less, it would be the same. But what changes them differently is time. You know, there are places that you go that would be different. New Orleans would be a little different at any time. Hawaii would be a little different at any time. Alaska would be a little different at any time. But most of the major places, like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles — they’re really gauged by the era. So even if I was to write a contemporary L.A. detective, which I’ve never even thought of doing until this moment, he wouldn’t be much like Easy either. I know this, because I go to L.A. a lot to work on these shows, and I’m usually staying in Beverly Hills. And when I’m in Beverly Hills, I see Black people jogging, and on skateboards and bicycles, and interracial couples going up and down the street. When I was a kid, no, the police would stop every one of those people and say, “What are you doing here?” telling them, “You shouldn’t be here.”

In the four Leonid books, he’s been stopped by the police once for being Black and walking down the street. And Easy, it might happen 3 or 4 times in one book. He’d walk in the building, and they stop him. He walks out of the building, and they stop him. He gets in the car, and they stop him. And thenhe kills somebody, and they don’t stop him. But you know, it’s like that. In Leonid’s New York, no, they’re not on him. And maybe in the ’50s and ’60s, maybe even less than in L.A., they would stop him. I mean, they would, but it would be less. Of course, Leonid is not the Black youth in the ‘hood in New York that are getting stopped and searched every day. I mean, it’s still happening, but Leonid is living in a different place. He’s also a different age. Racism in New York now also is tinged with agism. They’re worried that young people have guns. Well, Bloomberg is good about that. But instead of worrying about why they have the guns, they’re worried that they do have the guns. What? It’s like, you’re the ones who let guns loose on the streets of the city, and then you’re gonna get on people for having them? What’s wrong with you? But again, Leonid’s story is not a racial one. He’s a Black hero, and a Black male hero in America. But it’s not a racial concept. It’s a lot about class, which is why he has a Russian name — named by his anarchist father, who thought he was a communist.

There was always a little leeway with [Black people] owning property in Los Angeles. Much more so than in New York. I remember Harry Belafonte once told me that he wanted to rent an apartment in New York in the ’50′s. But he was married to a white woman, so he couldn’t rent the apartment. But he could buy the building, and he did. Most people can’t do that. But he was the first million-album seller, so I guess he could. There was some leeway. And yes, there was a Black neighborhood in Devil. But Easy’s happy because he came from a place where Black people could own things, but those things could be taken away from you. You could own things, but you better not be doing too well at that thing. You could get a job, but most jobs were held for White people. And so the jobs you got, you didn’t get paid very well, and it wasn’t a very good job, and there was no upward mobility. And so to be able to have two or three jobs, to own your own property, to send your kids to a school where they really learn how to read — he was very happy about that.

A lot of people want to talk about “post-racial” for ridiculous reasons. We’re in no way in a post-racial country or a post-racial world. But there are other issues that are so powerful, so demanding, that you really can’t call race the number one thing. So Leonid McGill is this detective who has the Swedish wife, but they don’t really love each other. They have three children, but two of them he didn’t father, but she says he did. I mean, it’s a whole complex world. And he’ll say, “Listen, I don’t have time to worry about race. I’ve got too many serious things on my mind. People are trying to kill me. And they’re not trying to kill me because I’m Black, you know.” But he’s a part of that world in a way that the world has changed. When I do my political talks, one of the things I often say to people is, “The older you are, the more you live in the past.” And I was listening to a woman talk the other day. She said, “You know, people under the age of 30, 50% of them have dated outside their race.” But the people who make the final decisions about what goes on television, they’re all over 30. And the people who are trying to satisfy those people have to think like them, even if they’re younger. And so you look at television, and if 3% of the people are interracial in any kind of way, it’s pretty amazing. So you have a world that’s represented that’s actually culturally a depiction of the past. No matter how much it’s in the present, and it seems like in the present, culturally the minds that are making these decisions are thinking of another time. And it’s hard for people to get over that. You know, young people are all good and well, but they are always selling themselves to older people. Are they gonna hire me? Are they gonna give me the job? So people who are trying to say things that are new, that’ll never work, because it wouldn’t work 20 years ago.

Which authors do you feel depict Los Angeles especially well in their work?

Los Angeles is really well-done in Chandler’s books, and also in the films of his books. They covered L.A. very well. The Long Goodbye is Chandler’s best book, I think. And I think later on, Ellroy does a really good job, and the movies are really well done. I’m not unhappy about how L.A. is depicted as a rule, except for when it’s “White L.A.”, and so it’s a made-up L..A. It’s like these films where they say well, “L.A. was a White place.” Well, no, it wasn’t a White place. It never was a White place ever. And as it grew, it grew evenly among the cultures. So you see these wonderful films, and you get a great feeling for L.A. Like Chinatown, which is just gorgeous. You get a feeling for the place that’s wonderful, but it’s not accurate. You just kind of feel bad about that. Like, “Come on now. This was never true.”

So if you start to define Watts by just a certain aspect of it — like gang culture or youth culture — you completely misunderstand the notion. Like the gangs in South Central, it isn’t the Tongs. It changes from block to block to block. And even with that, you have a lot of people who live there, work there, libraries. There’s a whole range of life going on. I don’t mind it when you hone in on one person’s life, and there’s something specific there. But the world around should represent the entire world — people going to church, people being in restaurants, people going into business. You know, people having those crazy conversations they have in barber shops and stuff. Without a sense of reality, it becomes a caricature or a cartoon.

The first thing I always think of when someone says New York is the television series Kojak with Telly Savalas. Because I just thought they got New York, and they got it right. He went to every part of New York, and he had a New York attitude. It’s a little dated when you watch it now. But when you watched it then, my God it really did well. Then movies like The Panic in Needle Park with Al Pacino, that was a really good movie. And I think there’s adesire in New York where New Yorkers want to tell the real story. People looking at films about New York want to see the real story. And when you have L.A., they want the Hollywood story. They want another story. I mean, every once in a while people like Ellroy actually do a thing which works. It’s tough and gritty Los Angeles. Listen, Ellroy’s a wonderful writer. And I like Ellroy, because I see us as counterparts. You know, like we’re at the opposite ends of the bookshelf. But we’re supporting all these things in between us. And the movie, L.A. Confidential is really very good. You know, it’s wild like Ellroy is wild. And that’s not me. I don’t think that way. It’s not that I’m domestic. It’s just that the wildness gets located in specific places, like Mouse. Mouse comes from the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas, which is really tough. You know, Mouse could be the whole landscape of Ellroy’s books. And I like to leave in just one or two of those characters.

What’s the plot of The Gift of Fire, and what appeals to you about writing science-fiction?

It’s a novella, because it’s 30,000 words. I wrote a series of six novellas, which Tor is publishing in three different volumes. And the only thing they have in common is that they’re either science-fictionor fantasy. In each one, a Black man destroys the world. And it’s not necessarily a violent destruction, but the world as we know it. The structure of the world will no longer be the same. And in this one I just take a Mediterranean god, Prometheus, who finally escapes from his imprisonment and comes to Earth. He passes his power onto a quadriplegic Black kid, who takes on the mantle of Prometheus, giving the gift of “fire” — the gift of awareness. Prometheus gave the first fire, which is awareness. And now his protege is gonna give the next fire, which is self-awareness. That’s understanding yourself in relation to your society, which is a very political thing. But it doesn’t seem political when you’re reading it, because all these wild magical things are happening. It was lots of fun to write.

Science-fiction allows you to question reality. Because when you’re writing so-called non-fiction, you don’t question reality. So you can actually make stories in which New York only has White people in it, Brooklyn only has White people in it, Americans are all rich, democracy and capitalism are the same thing. You can make it, because it seems like that’s the world we’re asked to believe. Even though, if you looked at it from another way, you’d go, “Why? Thisdoesn’t make any sense.” When it comes to saying “Anyone can be rich,” well in science-fiction you can actually make a world in which everybody’s rich. So you have somebody like Ray Bradbury doing beautiful work. Let’s say you’re a radical lesbian feminist separatist. You can start your novel, “By the year 2023, there were no more men on the face of the earth.” And then you can begin to say, “Well, what’s that world like?”, and then look at it. So science-fiction allows you to look at just a specific kind of band, and then your understanding of the world that exists becomes much broader. Because you have questions.

In another one, there’s a guy who figures out how to blend the minds of people. So you and I can actually share thoughts. So if I have a mental talent, but not the physical talent to do that thing, and you have the physical ability, but you don’t have the mental talent, then we can actually share our beliefs. In a couple of stories, Black men in this world make pacts with alien cultures, and invite them to come to Earth, even though that’s gonna make the Earth change completely. And in one of them, there’s a guy who seems kind of slow-witted, works in a mail room, he’s in his 40s. And it turns out that in a very specific way he is God. But he’s forgotten, because he’s wanted to live among his creations. And this is the character he came up with to live among them as.

What sorts of political writings do you plan to pursue?

I’m very interested in the idea of the convergence of capitalism and communism. I wrote about it in Futureland, another science-fiction book. It’s almost a joke, but I think it’s true that when you look at all the problems of the world, and you say “What does capitalism want?” — capitalism wants profit. That’s all they want is profit. Nothing else really matters, except making money and competing to make money. What does communism want? Well, communism wants to end private property. So you could say, “Well, it seems like those two things could never get together.” But if you had a world in which everything was leased, you would have that. If you leased your car, your house, your shoes, your furniture, your television — everything, except for that stuff like food, stuff that wears out immediately — then you would have corporations that would own these things. They would be the only entities that could own these things, lease these things, and replace these things. And you would save the ecology, because you wouldn’t have planned obsolescence and destruction. And at the same time, you would have a world which would want to support people being able to live in a world where they could lease and continue on. It’s a very complex thing, with a lot of different levels to it. But I would like to start thinking about that. Because the idea of democracy, capitalism and communism all acting as if they’re different, and that they could live separately, or that one could defeat the other… When a man falls dead on the street, somebody has to come move that body, and there can be no profit in that. So obviously there has to be some socialism. You have to have water. You have to have subway trains. You have to have police. There’s no profit there. That’s social. It’s even socialistic. I don’t think I have the answer, but I think it’s important to think about how to have one.

 

PHOTO ESSAY: Philosophy and Dancing Outside the European Tradition >Africa is a Country

Philosophy and Dancing

Outside the European Tradition


A Sudanese sufi dances during Mawlid celebrations. Phil Moore, 2012.

A couple of weeks ago Hamid Dabashi’s article “Can Non-Europeans Think?” was making the usual hype motions on the web. The New York-based Iranian professor took righteous offense at Santiago Zambala’s list of the “important and active philosophers today,” which failed to name any thinker thinking outside Europe (except for Judith Butler [does New York count as Europe?]), and used the opportunity to reflect on the geography of Philosophy’s exclusions:

They are the inheritors of multiple (now defunct) empires and they still carry within them the phantom hubris of those empires and they think their particular philosophy is “philosophy” and their particular thinking is “thinking”, and everything else is – as the great European philosopher Immanuel Levinas was wont of saying – “dancing”.

The ‘Eurocentrism’ which Dabashi finds in Zambala’s list of good philosophers merits the analogy with Levinas (more on him here), whose dancing remark is intended to emphasise the history of this exclusion of non-European thinkers. Thought conversely, the task and activity of philosophy is not so different from that of dancing. But I’m thinking of different philosophers.

In an early work, Karl Marx defined the task of his criticism in terms of dancing: ‘these petrified social conditions must be made to dance by singing their own melody to them. The people must be taught to be terrified of itself, in order to give it courage.’ This philosophy would not, according to Dabashi’s marriage of Zambala and Levinas, be considered “important and active”; perhaps then it is only these unimportant philosophers – Marx and the non-Europeans – who are able to see how the best forms of thinking, speaking and writing are always already a kind of dancing.

*

Sufis beat drums during the Dhikr at Mawlid celebrations.

Sufis beat drums during the Dhikr at Mawlid celebrations. Phil Moore, 2012.

Phil Moore is a photojournalist currently working in Islamabad but mostly based in East Africa. These images are from his 2012 series Sufism in Sudan. The following text is his own.

“If there is a family in Sudan that does not have at least one Sufi member, it is not Sudanese.”

Sufism is the mystical element of Islam, with sufis first coming to Sudan in the sixteenth century.

Every Friday at the Hamid el-Nil mosque in Omdurman, groups of sufis come together to engage in the dhikr. Come Mawlid, the birthday of the Prophet Mohamed (and a celebration which is seen as haram in certain groups of Muslims), thousands of sufis come together across the capital to hear stories about the prophet, pray and dance together.

Sufis sit during a recital of stories of the life of the Prophet Mohamed during Mawlid celebrations.

Sufis sit during a recital of stories of the life of the Prophet Mohamed during Mawlid celebrations.

Mawlid celebrations, Omdurman.

Mawlid celebrations, Omdurman.

Mawlid celebrations in Khartoum's twin city of Omdurman.

Mawlid celebrations in Khartoum’s twin city of Omdurman.

A Sudanese lady fries doughnuts during celebrations for Mawlid.

A Sudanese lady fries doughnuts during celebrations for Mawlid.

Sufis celebrate the birth of the Prophet Mohamed for Mawlid in Omdurman.

Sufis celebrate the birth of the Prophet Mohamed for Mawlid in Omdurman.

A Sudanese man threads Islamic prayer beads to sell during Mawlid celebrations.

A Sudanese man threads Islamic prayer beads to sell during Mawlid celebrations.

Sweets sold during Mawlid celebrations.

Sweets sold during Mawlid celebrations.

 

VIDEO: 'The Larry Davis Project' (The Life & Death Of A Bronx Rebel) > Shadow and Act

Preview:

'The Larry Davis Project'

(The Life & Death

Of A Bronx Rebel)

by Tambay A. Obenson

 
January 3, 2013

 

 

The short story, courtesy of the film's website, goes... Larry Davis was a New Yorker who shot six New York City police officers on November 19, 1986, when they raided his sister's Bronx apartment. The police said that the raid was executed in order to question Davis about the killing of four suspected drug dealers. At trial, Davis's defense attorneys claimed that the raid was staged to murder him because of his knowledge of the involvement of corrupt police in the drug business. With the help of family contacts and street friends, he eluded capture for the next 17 days despite a massive manhunt. Davis eventually surrendered to police, and was acquitted of attempted murder charges in the police shootout case, and was acquitted of murder charges in the case involving the slain drug dealers. He was found guilty of weapons possession in the shootout case, acquitted in another murder case and was found guilty in a later murder case and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

In 2008, Davis was stabbed to death in a fight with another inmate.

The Larry Davis case generated controversy. Many were outraged by his actions and acquittal, but others regarded him as a folk hero for his ability to elude capture in the massive manhunt, for so many years, or as the embodiment of a community's frustration with the police, or as "a symbol of resistance" because "he fought back at a time when African-Americans were being killed by white police officers."

Based on that true story, The Larry Davis Project gives insight into the motivations of a Bronx youth in the 1980s. At a time of police corruption, drug proliferation and rampant poverty, a young Larry Davis struggled with who he would become - thug or artist?

The feature film, which comes from Epoch Motion Pictures, is scheduled to debut sometime this year.

Check out a sneak:

 

POV: Exorcizing Afropolitanism: Binyavanga Wainaina explains why “I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan” at ASAUK 2012 « Africa in Words

Exorcizing Afropolitanism:

Binyavanga Wainaina

explains why

“I am a Pan-Africanist,

not an Afropolitan”

at ASAUK 2012

AiW Guest Stephanie Bosch Santana.


Binyavanga Wainana, writer and founding editor of the Kenyan literary magazine, Kwani

Traces of Binyavanga Wainaina’s address, “I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan”, delivered at September’s African Studies Association UK 2012 conference, have lingered with me over the past few months: the image of invisible digital networks of texts reaching ghost-like across continents, genre-bending “digital pulp,” and a pan-African literature that moves via twitter and sms rather than by printing press and shipping container. If many earlier African print publications—such as popular magazines and newspapers—have been described as “ephemeral,” the new literary world that Wainaina depicts is distinctly spectral.

When I told Katie Reid that Wainaina’s lecture was haunting me, she suggested that “Africa in Words” might be an ideal space to “exorcise” these spirits. It turns out that Katie’s idea was more fitting than I first realized. Wainaina’s address was a kind of exorcism in its own right, an attempt to rid African literary and cultural studies of the ghost of Afropolitanism, a term that perhaps once held promise as a new theoretical lens and important counterweight to Afro-pessimism, but that has increasingly come to stand for empty style and culture commodification.

The origin of this portmanteau (created out of the words ‘African’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’) is usually traced to an article titled “Bye-Bye Barbar” by Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu, published in the LIP Magazine in 2005. Tuakli-Wosornu uses the term primarily to describe Africans living, and often born outside of, the continent. She writes, “Like so many African young people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many. They (read: we) are Afropolitans—the newest generation of African emigrants, coming soon or collected already at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you.”[1] Achille Mbembe later popularized this term in academic discourse with his 2006 essay “Afropolitanism,” in which he attempts to reterritorialize Afropolitanism, in part by drawing attention to the long history of migration to, from, and within the African continent. His interest is not only in Tuakli-Wosornu’s “global Africans” but also in the world in Africa.[2] According to Mbembe, “cultural mixing” or “the interweaving of worlds” has long been an African “way of belonging to the world”—whether one resides on the continent or not (28).

And yet, for Wainaina, Afropolitanism has become the marker of crude cultural commodification—a phenomenon increasingly “product driven,” design focused, and “potentially funded by the West.” Through an Afropolitan lens, “travel is easy” and “people are fluid.” Certainly, magazines, designers, and business execs have seized the term for their own purposes.

 images

On the homepage of Afropolitan magazine, based out of South Africa, we find an essay on the legacy of the ANC alongside an article titled, “Fashion Conscious Carpeting…so much more than just good looks!” as well as an ad for “Samsonite B-Lite Fresh” suitcases.[3] There is also an Afropolitan Shop, which features kente-accented laptop bags amongst a host of other products from African designers. Touting the principle of “Trade Not Aid,” the Afropolitan Shop defines Afropolitanism as “a sensibility, a culture and a worldview.”[4] We see how easily style and “worldview” become conflated, how not only products, but people and identities are commoditized. Indeed, it’s hard not to miss this in Tuakli-Wosornu’s description of stylish Africans “coming soon or collected already” in a Euro-American metropolitan center “near you.”

 

 

 

Style, in and of itself, is not really the issue. Rather, it’s the attempt to begin with style, and then infuse it with substantive political consciousness that is problematic. For example, Tuakli-Wosornu maintains that “Most Afropolitans could serve Africa better in Africa than at Medicine Bar on Thursdays,” but continues, “To be fair, a number of African professionals are returning; and there is consciousness among the ones who remain, an acute awareness among this brood of too-cool-for-schools that there’s work to be done.” Similarly, in a relatively recent article on Cnn.com titled “Young, urban and culturally savvy, meet the Afropolitans,” Afropolitan magazine’s editor, Brendah Nyakudya asserts that “to be a true Afropolitan takes more than a multi-cultural background and the right record collection—it means having a commitment to making the continent a better place.”[5] Although Mbembe’s position is perhaps more nuanced, it is strikingly similar. Distinguishing Afropolitanism from pan-Africanism and négritude, Mbembe describes Afropolitanism as “an aesthetic and a particular poetic of the world. It is a way of being in the world, refusing on principle any form of victim identity—which does not mean that it is not aware of the injustice and violence inflicted on the continent and its people by the law of the world” (29). While Mbembe warns that pan-Africanism, by contrast, has become “institutionalized and ossified” and can slip easily and dangerously into nativism, we can perhaps also see that its longer history of Africa-centered engagement creates a more stable foundation—which, unlike Afropolitanism, is less likely to be used for aesthetic purposes alone. Afropolitanism, it seems, is a portmanteau in more ways than one: it is a general brand of cosmopolitanism cloaked in African style, as well as a literal “coat hanger” for changing fashions. Hence Wainaina’s intervention, his exorcism of this ghost that several years ago could have perhaps been seen as a lively spirit.

Where does literature fit into this debate? Afropolitanism extends ideas of fluid, easy travel to texts as “singular products.” Based on the same capitalist fantasy that economic markets are equal, it is assumed that the literary marketplace, too, is unfettered by issues of uneven development or protectionism. Wainaina points to a particular kind of Afropolitan African novel that is frequently produced—one that touches upon social and economic issues, but ultimately is written for an audience of “fellow Afropolitans.” Overall, a spirit of Afropolitanism has led to texts that are product, rather than process focused, a trend that can perhaps be changed as more and more literature goes digital. Wainaina points to the revolutionary effect that the Internet is having on African literary production, particularly via the creation of what he calls “digital pulp.” Although similar to the original print pulp in that it is often written in genre—such as sci-fi or romance—digital pulp, according to Wainaina, is even more prone to the bending and/or melding of generic conventions. This is due in part to the speed with which it is produced and published as well as to its collaborative dimension. The online medium often allows for audiences to comment on a work in real time—a much-accelerated version of the way readers were able to participate in serialized fiction in popular magazines in the mid-20th century. Finally, Wainaina argues that we must do away with conventions that see pulp fiction as “trashy” or “escapist,” and focus instead on its ability to reach and excite readers on the continent. We don’t pay enough attention, Wainaina suggests, to literature that truly “transports” us.

Some critics have attributed the new rise of genre fiction to the continuing global recession. In times of uncertainty, such as the Great Depression, these critics argue, audiences seek out genre fiction’s vigilante spirit as a way to regain control over uncontrollable forces. Can such analyses be extended beyond the US? Or, in other words, does genre fiction serve the same function everywhere? Beyond its formal and material qualities, or even its more existential ability to “transport” the reader, there seems to be a certain nostalgia for the form, particularly in Africa. Genre fiction burgeoned on the continent in the 1950s and 60s, the period leading up to and immediately following decolonization for much of Africa. This fiction, at least in southern Africa, was often pan-African, or at least regional, in its themes and concerns.

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As J.K.S. Makokha notes in his introduction to Negotiating Afropolitanism, 21st-century Africa is once again characterized by a renewed sense of pan-Africanism that is visible in economic, philosophical, and cultural frameworks: “like in the 50s and 60s, the continent and its regions, rather than singular nations, are the theatres of problem-identification, reaction and aspirations” (14). Genre fiction was used in the past to address pan-African issues, so it is perhaps unsurprising that it is being called upon again to serve a similar function.

But do these new and repurposed literary forms and networks really have a pan-African reach? Online literatures have emerged from Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, but other countries with less digital infrastructure seem to be approaching the era of Internet literature more warily. For example, the theme of the most recent Zimbabwean International Book Fair Indaba was “The Book in the Digital Era,” but while it was acknowledged that traditional means of book distribution are changing and many bookshops closing, the overall emphasis was on the print book as a product that is still necessary to sustain professional writers and reach the majority of Zimbabwean readers. The Indaba’s keynote speaker Ngwabi Bhebe noted that although individual writers are beginning to publish online in the form of e-books and blogs, only about 1 million Zimbabweans have access to the Internet. Of those who are connected, most use it primarily for email and Facebook, which is perhaps why Facebook was frequently mentioned as a useful marketing tool for new print books. 5346441_orig

For those of us who are privileged to have greater access to the digital world, this new spectral fiction still presents many challenges. Identifying and finding new literary networks is not as simple as a trip to the local bookstore or the university archives. Online archives of fiction are ostensibly accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, but simple google searches won’t get you very far (as I’ve recently found from personal experience). Instead, it requires following invisible threads and connections—one site leads to the next—only full immersion will get you anywhere in this new, ghostly world of fiction.


2. ^ Achille Mbembe, “Afropolitanism.” Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent. Eds. Njami Simon and Lucy Durán. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2007. 26 – 30.

5. ^ http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/17/world/africa/who-are-afropolitans/index.html

Stephanie Bosch Santana is a graduate student in African and African American Studies at Harvard. Her work focuses on southern African literary networks and the migration/transformation of genres in the region. From 2005 – 2008, she worked in South Africa and Malawi where she assisted with literacy campaigns, short story competitions, and story-writing workshops. You can read more about the ongoing Malawian Girls’ Short Story Competition at www.malawigirlshortstory.blogspot.com.

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Stephanie’s ASAUK12 paper, ‘Performing minor transnationalism: African Parade’s imitations and innovations of Drum magazine’, argued that although Drum appeared to cross borders seamlessly, requiring little ‘translation’ as it spread across Anglophone Africa, the appearance of African Parade in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (present-day Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi) in 1953 and its continued success throughout the 1950s and 1960s suggests that Drum’s English-only, unrooted cosmopolitanism was not uncontested: African Parade simultaneously sought to vernacularize and reterritorialize the magazine by regularly including material in four regional languages (Shona, Ndebele, Bemba, and Nyanja) and locating its cosmopolitan centre in Harare rather than Johannesburg. Specifically, the paper considered African Parade’s reterritorialization of three genres: the sketch, the serial story, and the short story, suggesting that by writing into and sometimes against Drum, African Parade performs a transnationalism that exposes the unevenness between supposedly lateral networks while also reimagining minority affiliations in a way that allows for cultural pluralism within diaspora.

Other papers in Stephanie’s panel included Tunde Awosanmi’s ‘Global Cultural and Performance Flows: The African “Ethnosell” and Mask Glocalisation’, and Yasuki Kawajima’s ‘The development of secondary education in Ashanti, Ghana: chiefly elites and Prempeh College in the 1940s’.

African Studies Centre Ox_Logo

Binyavanga Wainaina, writer and founding editor of the Kenyan literary magazine, Kwani?, delivered a plenary lecture, ‘I am a Pan Africanist, not an Afropolitan’, at ASAUK12. Organised and chaired by our own Kate Haines, Wainaina’s talk explored the complex relationship between writing, society and economics as well as pointing to future directions for African writing.

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For more AiW content from Stephanie Bosch Santana see Genre and the New Geographies of World Literature: A look at Jungle Jim’s “South African Sci-Fi” issue.

 

HISTORY + VIDEO: A Look at Who Gets Left Out of Black History Month > Alternet

A Look at Who Gets Left Out of

Black History Month


We have come a long way in addressing the whitewashing of history, but perhaps we should address some of the almost artificial borders and boundaries we have set on that history.

Vicente Guerrero, Afro-Indio 2nd president of Mexico, who abolished slavery in 1829.
Photo Credit: Eduardo Baez

Once again, the month of February is here, marked as Black History Month on calendars in the United States and Canada (October in Great Britan).  

Schools, community groups and bloggers will focus attention on the historical contributions of blacks to our culture. When I was growing up it was called "Negro History Week."

Back History Month had its beginnings in 1926 in the United States, when historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History announced the second week of February to be "Negro History Week". This week was chosen because it marked the birthday of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Woodson created the holiday with the hope that it eventually be eliminated when black history became fundamental to American history. Negro History Week was met with enthusiastic response; it prompted the creation of black history clubs, an increase in interest among teachers, and interest from progressive whites. Negro History Week grew in popularity throughout the following decades, with mayors across the United States endorsing it as a holiday.

In 1976, the federal government acknowledged the expansion of Black History Week to Black History Month by the leaders of the Black United Students at Kent State University in February of 1969. The first celebration of Black History Month occurred at Kent State in February of 1970. Six years later during the bicentennial, the expansion of Negro History Week to Black History Month was recognized by the U.S. government.  

We have come a long way since 1926, in addressing the whitewashing of history, but perhaps we should address some of the almost artificial borders and boundaries we have set on that history, and examine peoples and histories who are not usually part of the package.

We have just celebrated the reelection of our first black president, Barack Hussein Obama. Yet my students have been unable to answer the question, "Who was the first black President in North America?" 

None thought to mention Jean-Jacques Dessalines, as first head of state of a liberated Haiti. But if we are defining North America as Canada, the U.S. and Mexico (excluding the Caribbean), there is little excuse to be ignorant of the historic figure of Vicente Guerrero, who became Mexico's second president on April 1, 1829. His father, Pedro Guerrero, was an Afro-Mexican and his mother Guadalupe Saldaña, was indigenous.

Disparagingly nicknamed "el Negro Guerrero"by his political enemies, Guerrero would in the United States have been classified as a mulatto. According to one of his biographers, Theodore G. Vincent, Guerrero was of mixed African, Spanish and Native American ancestry, and his African ancestry most probably derived from his father, Juan Pedro, whose profession "was in the almost entirely Afro-Mexican profession of mule driver." Some scholars speculate that his paternal grandfather was either a slave, or a descendant of African slaves.

Guerrero was born in 1783 in a town near Acapulco called Tixtla, which is now located in the state that bears his name. It is the only state named after a former Mexican head of state, and it is the location of the Costa Chica, the traditional home of the Afro-Mexican community in Mexico.

If we are to obfuscate his heritage under the term "mulatto or mestizo," how is this not true for Barack Obama? What we also know about Guerrero was that he was kept from attending school because of his mixed caste.  

Portraits of Guerrero were "whitened" over time

In 2011, a research investigation about Vicente Guerrero’s African ethnicity won an award from the Scientific Committee on the Slave Route Project of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).  Researcher, Maria Dolores Ballesteros from the Mora Institute, was recognized for her analysis of the representations of Vicente Guerrero in Mexico pictorial iconography...Guerrero, was represented more and more white in the paintings of the time, as prejudices developed about Africans and African descendants.

De castas y esclavos a ciudadanos. Las representaciones visuales de la población capitalina de origen africano. Del periodo virreinal a las primeras décadas del México Independiente

Then there is the story of Jose Nieto Gil, the first black president of Colombia (1861), who was left out of history books, until sociologist Orlando Fals Borda spent years documenting his history and the whitewashing of his legacy. See: The black president Colombia forgot

Part of the problem is the acceptance of "the West Indies" (those parts of the Caribbean which were formerly British colonies) and Haiti as "black." Yet on the same island with Haiti, the next door neighbor the Dominican Republic is "Hispanic or Latino." We include historic political figures like Marcus Garvey or cultural icons like Bob Marley (both Jamaican) but do not do the same for latino revolutionary leaders like Don Pedro Albizu Campos (whose mother was black) and who served in the all-Black 375th Regiment.  

So rarely does our Black History Month cross borders, and artificial boundaries (and yes "race" is itself one of those) but the huge segment of African diasporic history in the New World fails to embrace Afro-Latinos, or Afro-Brazilians.  

Anthropologist Sidney Mintz has designated the entire Caribbean basin region as the Afro-Caribbean, a culture area linked by roots in the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery, whose cultures are rooted in blackness, no matter the current phenotype of the citizenry.  

Thankfully, some ol this is changing. a major breakthrough in the media was Henry Louis Gates' series Black in Latin America was first aired on PBS in 2011.

Latin America is often associated with music, monuments and sun, but each of the six countries featured in Black in Latin America including the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru, has a secret history. On his journey, Professor Gates discovers, behind a shared legacy of colonialism and slavery, vivid stories and people marked by African roots. Latin America and the Caribbean have the largest concentration of people with African ancestry outside Africa — up to 70 percent of the population in some countries. The region imported over ten times as many slaves as the United States, and kept them in bondage far longer. On this series of journeys, Professor Gates celebrates the massive influence of millions of people of African descent on the history and culture of Latin America and the Caribbean, and considers why and how their contribution is often forgotten or ignored.
Gates speaks about how his eyes were opened to this history of the "other Americans":
It wasn't until my sophomore year at Yale, as a student auditing Robert Farris Thompson's art-history class, the Trans-Atlantic Tradition: From Africa to the Black Americas, that I began to understand how "black" the New World really was. Professor Thompson used a methodology that he called the "tri-continental approach" -- complete with three slide projectors -- to trace visual leitmotifs that recurred among African, African-American and Afro-descended artistic traditions and artifacts in the Caribbean and Latin America, to show, à la Melville Herskovits, the retention of what he called "Africanisms" in the New World. So in a very real sense, I would have to say that my fascination with Afro-descendants in this hemisphere, south of the United States, began in 1969, in Professor Thompson's very popular -- and extremely entertaining and rich -- art-history lecture course.

In addition, Sidney Mintz's anthropology courses and his brilliant scholarly work on the history of the role of sugar in plantation slavery in the Caribbean and Latin America also served to awaken my curiosity about another Black World, a world both similar to and different from ours, south of our borders. And Roy Bryce-Laporte, the courageous chair of the program in Afro-American studies, introduced me to black culture from his native Panama. I owe so much of what I know about African-American culture in the New World to these three wise and generous professors.

But the full weight of the African presence in the Caribbean and Latin America didn't hit me until I became familiar with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, conceived by the great historians David Eltis and David Richardson and based now at Emory University. Between 1502 and 1866, 11.2 million Africans survived the dreadful Middle Passage and landed as slaves in the New World.

I am using segments of his series in my classes, along with other resources available online, many of which are discussed in this clip:

 

 

Afro-Latinos: The untaught story, a documentary that is still in the works, has a wealth of resources on their website.

 

High school and college age students have appreciated these contemporary actors sharing their stories about dealing with being Black and Latino.

 

I admire the work and activism of my friend Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, an Afro-Boricua, one of the founders of El Museo del Barrio, and the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York, who has worked tirelessly over the years to bring these histories to the forefront.

 

There are also blogs like Afro-MexicoAfroCubaWeb and projects like LatiNegr@s

This award-winning project started as the formal US focus on Black History Month (February 1-28/9) was upon us. Please know that our goal to celebrate all of the peoples who have influence and history via the African Diasporas. Expanding the inclusively of Blackness is not just during Black History Month but all year round for several of us, self-identified LatiNeg@s, Afro-Latin@s and Afro-Caribeños.

This site is 365 days a year 24 hours a day 7 days a week! As people who recognize and claim the African heritage and history, we have often been excluded from US History, whether it be Black history, Womyn's Herstory (March) or Latino history (September 15-October 15) (to name a few).

As we move forward, forging new and stronger progressive political coalitions for the future, we need to have a clearer understanding of how to build stronger bridges between people in the artificial demographic divides used for our voting analyses.

Though much has been written about immigration reform, and how that will affect the voting choices of "Latino/Hispanic" communities, let us not forget that the virulent racism of the Republican Party does not play well in Afro-Latino households.

Does that mean that there is no prejudice between ethnic groups? No. But one of the ways to combat racism and bigotry is to broaden our understanding of the depth and importance of the black historical and contemporary experience for all of us.