photo by Lynda Koolish

 

 

 

The Black Arts Movement

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Kalamu ya Salaam

Both inherently and overtly political in content, the Black Arts movement was the only American literary movement to advance "social engagement" as a sine qua non of its aesthetic. The movement broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (civil rights) literature and dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black Power.

In a 1968 essay, "The Black Arts Movement," Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept." As a political phrase, Black Power had earlier been used by Richard Wright to describe the mid-1950s emergence of independent African nations. The 1960s' use of the term originated in 1966 with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee civil rights workers Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks. Quickly adopted in the North, Black Power was associated with a militant advocacy of armed self-defense, separation from "racist American domination," and pride in and assertion of the goodness and beauty of Blackness.

Although often criticized as sexist, homophobic, and racially exclusive (i.e., reverse racist), Black Arts was much broader than any of its limitations. Ishmael Reed, who is considered neither a movement apologist nor advocate ("I wasn't invited to participate because I was considered an integrationist"), notes in a 1995 interview,

I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don't have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.

 

History and Context. The Black Arts movement, usually referred to as a "sixties" movement, coalesced in 1965 and broke apart around 1975/1976. In March 1965 following the 21 February assassination of Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) moved from Manhattan's Lower East Side (he had already moved away from Greenwich Village) uptown to Harlem, an exodus considered the symbolic birth of the Black Arts movement. Jones was a highly visible publisher (Yugen and Floating Bear magazines, Totem Press), a celebrated poet (Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, 1961, and The Dead Lecturer, 1964), a major music critic (Blues People, 1963), and an Obie Award-winning playwright (Dutchman, 1964) who, up until that fateful split, had functioned in an integrated world. Other than James Baldwin, who at that time had been closely associated with the civil rights movement, Jones was the most respected and most widely published Black writer of his generation.

While Jones's 1965 move uptown to found the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) is the formal beginning (it was Jones who came up with the name "Black Arts"), Black Arts, as a literary movement, had its roots in groups such as the Umbra Workshop. Umbra (1962) was a collective of young Black writers based in Manhattan's Lower East Side; major members were writers Steve Cannon, Tom Dent, Al Haynes, David Henderson, Calvin C. Hernton, Joe Johnson, Norman Pritchard, Lenox Raphael, Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, James Thompson, Askia M. Touré (Roland Snellings; also a visual artist), Brenda Walcott, and musician-writer Archie Shepp. Touré, a major shaper of "cultural nationalism," directly influenced Jones. Along with Umbra writer Charles Patterson and Charles's brother, William Patterson, Touré joined Jones, Steve Young, and others at BARTS.

Umbra, which produced Umbra Magazine, was the first post-civil rights Black literary group to make an impact as radical in the sense of establishing their own voice distinct from, and sometimes at odds with, the prevailing white literary establishment. The attempt to merge a Black-oriented activist thrust with a primarily artistic orientation produced a classic split in Umbra between those who wanted to be activists and those who thought of themselves as primarily writers, though to some extent all members shared both views. Black writers have always had to face the issue of whether their work was primarily political or aesthetic. Moreover, Umbra itself had evolved out of similar circumstances: In 1960 a Black nationalist literary organization, On Guard for Freedom, had been founded on the Lower East Side by Calvin Hicks. Its members included Nannie and Walter Bowe, Harold Cruse (who was then working on Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 1967), Tom Dent, Rosa Guy, Joe Johnson, LeRoi Jones, and Sarah Wright, among others. On Guard was active in a famous protest at the United Nations of the American-sponsored Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion and was active in support of the Congolese liberation leader Patrice Lumumba. From On Guard, Dent, Johnson, and Walcott along with Hernton, Henderson, and Touré established Umbra.

Another formation of Black writers at that time was the Harlem Writers Guild, led by John O. Killens, which included Maya Angelou, Jean Carey Bond, Rosa Guy, and Sarah Wright among others. But the Harlem Writers Guild focused on prose, primarily fiction, which did not have the mass appeal of poetry performed in the dynamic vernacular of the time. Poems could be built around anthems, chants, and political slogans, and thereby used in organizing work, which was not generally the case with novels and short stories. Moreover, the poets could and did publish themselves, whereas greater resources were needed to publish fiction. That Umbra was primarily poetry- and performance-oriented established a significant and classic characteristic of the movement's aesthetics.

When Umbra split up, some members, led by Askia Touré and Al Haynes, moved to Harlem in late 1964 and formed the nationalist-oriented "Uptown Writers Movement," which included poets Yusef Rahman, Keorapetse "Willie" Kgositsile from South Africa, and Larry Neal. Accompanied by young "New Music" musicians, they performed poetry all over Harlem. Members of this group joined LeRoi Jones in founding BARTS.

Jones's move to Harlem was short-lived. In December 1965 he returned to his home, Newark (N.J.), and left BARTS in serious disarray. BARTS failed but the Black Arts center concept was irrepressible mainly because the Black Arts movement was so closely aligned with the then-burgeoning Black Power movement.

The mid- to late 1960s was a period of intense revolutionary ferment. Beginning in 1964, rebellions in Harlem and Rochester, New York, initiated four years of long hot summers. Watts, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, and many other cities went up in flames, culminating in nationwide explosions of resentment and anger following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s April 1968 assassination.

In his seminal 1965 poem "Black Art," which quickly became the major poetic manifesto of the Black Arts literary movement, Jones declaimed "we want poems that kill." He was not simply speaking metaphorically. During that period armed self-defense and slogans such as "Arm yourself or harm yourself' established a social climate that promoted confrontation with the white power structure, especially the police (e.g., "Off the pigs"). Indeed, Amiri Baraka (Jones changed his name in 1967) had been arrested and convicted (later overturned on appeal) on a gun possession charge during the 1967 Newark rebellion. Additionally, armed struggle was widely viewed as not only a legitimate, but often as the only effective means of liberation. Black Arts' dynamism, impact, and effectiveness are a direct result of its partisan nature and advocacy of artistic and political freedom "by any means necessary." America had never experienced such a militant artistic movement.

Nathan Hare, the author of The Black Anglo-Saxons (1965), was the founder of 1960s Black Studies. Expelled from Howard University, Hare moved to San Francisco State University where the battle to establish a Black Studies department was waged during a five-month strike during the 1968-1969 school year. As with the establishment of Black Arts, which included a range of forces, there was broad activity in the Bay Area around Black Studies, including efforts led by poet and professor Sarah Webster Fabio at Merrit College.

The initial thrust of Black Arts ideological development came from the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a national organization with a strong presence in New York City. Both Touré and Neal were members of RAM. After RAM, the major ideological force shaping the Black Arts movement was the US (as opposed to "them') organization led by Maulana Karenga. Also ideologically important was Elijah Muhammad's Chicago-based Nation of Islam.

These three formations provided both style and ideological direction for Black Arts artists, including those who were not members of these or any other political organization. Although the Black Arts movement is often considered a New York-based movement, two of its three major forces were located outside New York City.

As the movement matured, the two major locations of Black Arts' ideological leadership, particularly for literary work, were California's Bay Area because of the Journal of Black Poetry and the Black Scholar, and the Chicago-Detroit axis because of Negro Digest/Black World and Third World Press in Chicago, and Broadside Press and Naomi Long Madgett's Lotus Press in Detroit. The only major Black Arts literary publications to come out of New York were the short-lived (six issues between 1969 and 1972) Black Theatre magazine published by the New Lafayette Theatre and Black Dialogue, which had actually started in San Francisco (1964-1968) and relocated to New York (1969-1972).

In 1967 LeRoi Jones visited Karenga in Los Angeles and became an advocate of Karenga's philosophy of Kawaida. Kawaida, which produced the "Nguzo Saba" (seven principles), Kwanzaa, and an emphasis on African names, was a multifaceted, categorized activist philosophy. Jones also met Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver and worked with a number of the founding members of the Black Panthers. Additionally, Askia Touré was a visiting professor at San Francisco State and was to become a leading (and longlasting) poet as well as, arguably, the most influential poet-professor in the Black Arts movement. Playwright Ed Bullins and poet Marvin X had established Black Arts West, and Dingane Joe Goncalves had founded the Journal of Black Poetry (1966). This grouping of Ed Bullins, Dingane Joe Goncalves, LeRoi Jones, Sonia Sanchez, Askia M. Touré, and Marvin X became a major nucleus of Black Arts leadership.

 

Theory and Practice. The two hallmarks of Black Arts activity were the development of Black theater groups and Black poetry performances and journals, and both had close ties to community organizations and issues. Black theaters served as the focus of poetry, dance, and music performances in addition to formal and ritual drama. Black theaters were also venues for community meetings, lectures, study groups, and film screenings. The summer of 1968 issue of Drama Review, a special on Black theater edited by Ed Bullins, literally became a Black Arts textbook that featured essays and plays by most of the major movers: Larry Neal, Ben Caldwell, LeRoi Jones, Jimmy Garrett, John O'Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Marvin X, Ron Milner, Woodie King, Jr., Bill Gunn, Ed Bullins, and Adam David Miller. Black Arts theater proudly emphasized its activist roots and orientations in distinct, and often antagonistic, contradiction to traditional theaters, both Black and white, which were either commercial or strictly artistic in focus.

By 1970 Black Arts theaters and cultural centers were active throughout America. The New Lafayette Theatre (Bob Macbeth, executive director, and Ed Bullins, writer in residence) and Barbara Ann Teer's National Black Theatre led the way in New York, Baraka's Spirit House Movers held forth in Newark and traveled up and down the East Coast. The Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) and Val Grey Ward's Kuumba Theatre Company were leading forces in Chicago, from where emerged a host of writers, artists, and musicians including the OBAC visual artist collective whose "Wall of Respect" inspired the national community-based public murals movement and led to the formation of Afri-Cobra (the African Commune of Bad, Revolutionary Artists). There was David Rambeau's Concept East and Ron Milner and Woodie King’s Black Arts Midwest, both based in Detroit. Ron Milner became the Black Arts movement's most enduring playwright and Woodie King became its leading theater impresario when he moved to New York City. In Los Angeles there was the Ebony Showcase, Inner City Repertory Company, and the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles (PALSA) led by Vantile Whitfield. In San Francisco was the aforementioned Black Arts West. BLKARTSOUTH (led by Tom Dent and Kalamu ya Salaam) was an outgrowth of the Free Southern Theatre in New Orleans and was instrumental in encouraging Black theater development across the south from the Theatre of Afro Arts in Miami, Florida, to Sudan Arts Southwest in Houston, Texas, through an organization called the Southern Black Cultural Alliance. In addition to formal Black theater repertory companies in numerous other cities, there were literally hundreds of Black Arts community and campus theater groups.

A major reason for the widespread dissemination and adoption of Black Arts was the development of nationally distributed magazines that printed manifestos and critiques in addition to offering publishing opportunities for a proliferation of young writers. Whether establishment or independent, Black or white, most literary publications rejected Black Arts writers. The movement's first literary expressions in the early 1960s came through two New York-based, nationally distributed magazines, Freedomways and Liberator. Freedomways, "a journal of the Freedom Movement," backed by leftists, was receptive to young Black writers. The more important magazine was Dan Watts's Liberator, which openly aligned itself with both domestic and international revolutionary movements. Many of the early writings of critical Black Arts voices are found in Liberator. Neither of these were primarily literary journals.

The first major Black Arts literary publication was the California-based Black Dialogue (1964), edited by Arthur A. Sheridan, Abdul Karim, Edward Spriggs, Aubrey Labrie, and Marvin Jackmon (Marvin X). Black Dialogue was paralleled by Soulbook (1964), edited by Mamadou Lumumba (Kenn Freeman) and Bobb Hamilton. Oakland-based Soulbook was mainly political but included poetry in a section ironically titled "Reject Notes."

Dingane Joe Goncalves became Black Dialogue's poetry editor and, as more and more poetry poured in, he conceived of starting the Journal of Black Poetry. Founded in San Francisco, the first issue was a small magazine with mimeographed pages and a lithographed cover. Up through the summer of 1975, the Journal published nineteen issues and grew to over one hundred pages. Publishing a broad range of more than five hundred poets, its editorial policy was eclectic. Special issues were given to guest editors who included Ahmed Alhamisi, Don L. Lee (Haki R. Madhubuti), Clarence Major, Larry Neal, Dudley Randall, Ed Spriggs, and Askia Touré. In addition to African Americans, African, Caribbean, Asian, and other international revolutionary poets were presented.

Founded in 1969 by Nathan Hare and Robert Chrisman, the Black Scholar, "the first journal of black studies and research in this country," was theoretically critical. Major African-disasporan and African theorists were represented in its pages. In a 1995 interview Chrisman attributed much of what exists today to the groundwork laid by the Black Arts movement:

If we had not had a Black Arts movement in the sixties we certainly wouldn't have had national Black literary figures like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alice Walker, or Toni Morrison because much more so than the Harlem Renaissance, in which Black artists were always on the leash of white patrons and publishing houses, the Black Arts movement did it for itself. What you had was Black people going out nationally, in mass, saving that we are an independent Black people and this is what we produce.

For the publication of Black Arts creative literature, no magazine was more important than the Chicago-based Johnson publication Negro Digest / Black World. Johnson published America's most popular Black magazines, Jet and Ebony. Hoyt Fuller, who became the editor in 1961, was a Black intellectual with near-encyclopedic knowledge of Black literature and seemingly inexhaustible contacts. Because Negro Digest, a monthly, ninety-eight-page journal, was a Johnson publication, it was sold on newsstands nationwide. Originally patterned on Reader’s Digest, Negro Digest changed its name toBlack World in 1970, indicative of Fuller’s view that the magazine ought to be a voice for Black people everywhere. The name change also reflected the widespread rejection of "Negro" and the adoption of "Black" as the designation of choice for people of African descent and to indicate identification with both the diaspora and Africa. The legitimation of "Black" and "African" is another enduring legacy of the Black Arts movement.

 

Negro Digest / Black World published both a high volume and an impressive range of poetry, fiction, criticism, drama, reviews, reportage, and theoretical articles. A consistent highlight was Fuller's perceptive column Perspectives ("Notes on books, writers, artists and the arts") which informed readers of new publications, upcoming cultural events and conferences, and also provided succinct coverage of major literary developments. Fuller produced annual poetry, drama, and fiction issues, sponsored literary contests, and gave out literary awards. Fuller published a variety of viewpoints but always insisted on editorial excellence and thus made Negro Digest / Black World a first-rate literary publication. Johnson decided to cease publication of Black World in April 1976: allegedly in response to a threatened withdrawal of advertisement from all of Johnson's publications because of pro-Palestinian/anti-Zionist articles in Black World.

The two major Black Arts presses were poet Dudley Randall's Broadside Press in Detroit and Haki Madhubuti's Third World Press in Chicago. From a literary standpoint, Broadside Press, which concentrated almost exclusively on poetry, was by far the more important. Founded in 1965, Broadside published more than four hundred poets in more than one hundred books or recordings and was singularly responsible for presenting older Black poets (Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling A. Brown, and Margaret Walker) to a new audience and introducing emerging poets (Nikki Giovanni, Etheridge Knight, Don L. Lee/Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez) who would go on to become major voices for the movement. In 1976, strapped by economic restrictions and with a severely overworked and overwhelmed three-person staff, Broadside Press went into serious decline. Although it functions mainly on its back catalog, Broadside Press is still alive.

While a number of poets (e.g., Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez), playwrights (e.g., Ed Bullins and Ron Milner), and spoken-word artists (e.g., the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron, both of whom were extremely popular and influential although often overlooked by literary critics) are indelibly associated with the Black Arts movement, rather than focusing on their individual work, one gets a much stronger and much more accurate impression of the movement by reading seven anthologies focusing on the 1960s and the 1970s.

 

Black Fire (1968), edited by Baraka and Neal, is a massive collection of essays, poetry, fiction, and drama featuring the first wave of Black Arts writers and thinkers. Because of its impressive breadth, Black Fire stands as a definitive movement anthology.

 

For Malcolm X, Poems on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X (1969), edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, demonstrates the political thrust of the movement and the specific influence of Malcolm X. There is no comparable anthology in American poetry that focuses on a political figure as poetic inspiration.

 

The Black Woman (1970), edited by Toni Cade Bambara, is the first major Black feminist anthology and features work by Jean Bond, Nikki Giovanni, Abbey Lincoln, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Gwen Patton, Pat Robinson, Alice Walker, Shirley Williams, and others.

Edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., The Black Aesthetic (1971) is significant because it both articulates and contextualizes Black Arts theory. The work of writers such as Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and J. A. Rogers showcases the movement's roots in an earlier era into sections on theory, music, fiction, poetry, and drama, Gayle's seminal anthology features a broad array of writers who are regarded as the chief Black Arts theorists-practitioners.

Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry (1972) is important not only because of the poets included but also because of Henderson's insightful and unparalleled sixty-seven page overview. This is the movement's most thorough exposition of a Black poetic aesthetic. Insights and lines of thought now taken for granted were first articulated in a critical and formal context by Stephen Henderson, who proposed a totally innovative reading of Black poetics.

 

New Black Voices (1972), edited by Abraham Chapman, is significant because its focus is specifically on the emerging voices in addition to new work by established voices who were active in the Black Arts movement. Unlike most anthologies, which overlook the South, New Black Voices is geographically representative and includes lively pro and con articles side by side debating aesthetic and political theory.

The seventh book, Eugene Redmond's Drumvoices, The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History (1976), is a surprisingly thorough survey that has been unjustly neglected. Although some of his opinions are controversial (note that in the movement controversy was normal), Redmond's era by era and city by city cataloging of literary collectives as well as individual writers offers an invaluable service in detailing the movement's national scope.

 

The Movement's Breakup. The decline of the Black Arts movement began in 1974 when the Black Power movement was disrupted and co-opted. Black political organizations were hounded, disrupted, and defeated by repressive government measures, such as Cointelpro and IRS probes. Black Studies activist leadership was gutted and replaced by academicians and trained administrators who were unreceptive, if not outright opposed, to the movements political orientation.

Key internal events in the disruption were the split between nationalists and Marxists in the African Liberation Support Committee (May 1974), the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania where race-based struggle was repudiated/denounced by most of the strongest forces in Africa (Aug. 1974), and Baraka’s national organization, the Congress of Afrikan People (CAP), officially changing from a "Pan Afrikan Nationalist" to a "Marxist Leninist" organization (Oct. 1974).

As the movement reeled from the combination of external and internal disruption, commercialization and capitalist co-option delivered the coup de grace. President Richard Nixon's strategy of pushing Black capitalism as a response to Black Power epitomized mainstream co-option. As major film, record, book, and magazine publishers identified the most salable artists, the Black Arts movement's already fragile independent economic base was totally undermined.

In an overwhelmingly successful effort to capitalize on the upsurge of interest in the feminist movement, establishment presses focused particular attention on the work of Black women writers. Although issues of sexism had been widely and hotly debated within movement publications and organizations, the initiative passed from Black Arts back to the establishment. Emblematic of the establishment overtaking (some would argue "co-opting") Black Arts activity is Ntozake Shange's for colored girls, which in 1976 ended up on Broadway produced by Joseph Papp even though it had been workshopped at Woodie King's New Federal Theatre of the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side. Black Arts was not able to match the economic and publicity offers tendered by establishment concerns.

Corporate America (both the commercial sector and the academic sector) once again selected and propagated one or two handpicked Black writers. During the height of Black Arts activity, each community had a coterie of writers and there were publishing outlets for hundreds, but once the mainstream regained control, Black artists were tokenized. Although Black Arts activity continued into the early 1980s, by 1976, the year of what Gil Scott-Heron called the "Buy-Centennial," the movement was without any sustainable and effective political or economic bases in an economically strapped Black community. An additional complicating factor was the economic recession, resulting from the oil crisis, which the Black community experienced as a depression. Simultaneously, philanthropic foundations only funded non-threatening, "arts oriented" groups. Neither the Black Arts nor the Black Power movements ever recovered.

 

The Legacy. In addition to advocating political engagement and independent publishing, the Black Arts movement was innovative in its use of language. Speech (particularly, but not exclusively, Black English), music, and performance were major elements of Black Arts literature. Black Arts aesthetics emphasized orality, which includes the ritual use of call and response both within the body of the work itself as well as between artist and audience. This same orientation is apparent in rap music and 1990s "performance poetry" (e.g., Nuyorican Poets and poetry slams).

While right-wing trends attempt to push America's cultural clock back to the 1950s, Black Arts continues to evidence resiliency in the Black community and among other marginalized sectors. When people encounter the Black Arts movement, they are delighted and inspired by the most audacious, prolific, and socially engaged literary movement in America's history.

From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Oxford UP.

Paris DJs presents

The 10 Best Albums of 2012

Posted on Thursday 03 January 2013

This entry concludes our 'best of 2012' series with a selection of our 10 favorite albums of the year. Hands down, The Souljazz Orchestra ruled with their totally ridiculous album - and yep, 'ridiculous' means it's really great!. Not far behind, the Paris DJs Soundsystem compilation follows, and from Australia Papa Chango complete the podium. Those 3 albums have all in common their modern afro/latin/funk grooves with nods to the past. All 3 are filled with so much hits, you're left wondering how they could decide on which tracks to send to the radios. KILLER material all along. Other artists who messed with our heads the most this year include Quantic & Alice Russell, Franck Biyong & Grant Phabao, Calibro 35, Doctor L, Brownout, Wrongtom & Deemas J., and Monophonics. What a great musical year it's been... and that concludes our 2012 retrospective as Paris DJs marches on 2013 mutating into a label that's an international community of artists. But more about that later... Stay connected!

Paris DJs - Best Of 2012 - The Albums

01. The Soujazz Orchestra - Solidarity (Strut) info | buy
Absolutely no weak moments on this album, loaded with hits, incredible protest or psychedelic anthems. Like every great platter, Solidarity does sound like an instant classic - as if this music was here a long time ago. As if it's always been here.

02. Paris DJs Soundsystem - Dis Is Good For You - Tropical Grooves & Afrofunk International (Paris DJs) info | buy
An epic take on 21st century Afrofunk, Afrobeat, Ethio-Jazz, Reggae and Soul. Cult bloggers/producers Djouls & Grant Phabao gather their friends for an afro/reggae/tropical/funk festival of hits - one of the albums of the year, hands down!

03. Papa Chango - The Matador (General Film Music) info | buy
Someone should press this 70’s ethio-jazz and afro-funk "Morricone meets Mulatu" afro-blaxploitation soundtrack on vinyl ASAP!

04. Quantic & Alice Russell - Look Around The Corner (Tru-Thoughts) info | buy
Pure sweet soul and blues, with overtones of gospel and folk music and the added Latin swing of the Combo Bárbaro- Absolute class!

05. Franck Biyong & The Diamane Bantu Messengers - Ki I Ye Yi (Afrolectric Music/Paris DJs) info | buy
When the lost big band Central Africa tradition meets the urban 70s afrofunk sound of the Paris Djs studios, Cameroonese music is reaching new heights…

06. Calibro 35 - Ogni Riferimento A Persone... (self-released) http://www.parisdjs.com/index.php/post/Calibro-35-Ogni-Riferimento-A-Persone-...
impressive funk/jazz and vintage 70s pop jam band with Italian soundtracks obsession.

07. Doctor L - We Got Lost (Comet Records) info | buy
This afro/folk/blues masterpiece has been playing on repeat in our headphones for months. And it's just one of the many incredible releases of the Doctor in the recent years!

08. Brownout - Oozy (Nat Geo Music) info | buy
another killer album of Latin-Funk grooves

09. Wrongtom meets Deemas J. - In East London (Tru Thoughts) info | buy
Remixer/producer Wrongtom and dancehall MC Deemas J offering classic British rub-a-dub over early 80s UK dancehall dubs. Addictive retro grooves.

 

10. Monophonics - In Your Brain (Ubiquity) info | buy
The band is deeply rooted in 70s Funk & Soul, but with a lot of fuzzy psychedelics and bits of 60s garage rock, nods to afrofunk and blaxploitation, rather close to the best productions from Orgone or Daptone's studios.

 

 Author: Djouls

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Saturday, February 2, 2013

Editor's Pick:

The Top 10

Lusophone Albums of 2011

 

This isn't a typo. I really do mean 2011.

I used to make fun of the guys at Wakuti Musica and Luaty at Musica Uhuru for going months without updating their blogs. Now I can finally relate. This post was due a little over 1 year ago. As other projects, events, and dreams have gotten in the way, my Lusophone music consumption greatly suffered, and with it the pace of writing at the Lounge. I didn't even finish listening to most albums below until well into 2012.

But what great albums they are. From Komba (Buraka Som Sistema) to Proíbido Ouvir Isso (MCK) to Cherry on My Cake (Luísa Sobral), 2011 was (another) stellar year for Lusophone music. There were more collaborations among luso-artists and there were many high-profile concerts and musical events in the main Lusophone capitals in the world and several cities beyond those. Music in Portuguese is becoming ever more popular. I was lucky to see several Brazilian musicians here in New York and even got to see Buraka in action, and in a testament to all great albums, many of the ones profiled below are still in heavy rotation on my iPod, over a year after they came out.

Below were my favorite Lusophone albums of 2011.

Não, não é um erro. Quis mesmo dizer 2011.

Antes ria-me dos manos do Wakuti Música e o Luaty do blog Música Uhuru por ficarem meses sem um novo post nos seus respectivos blogs. Finalmente posso perceber o que causa este “silêncio”. Blogar todos os dias é obra, e este post que escrevo neste momento era pra sair a mais de um ano atrás. Um ano! Mas o tempo foi passando e a vida foi acontecendo. Projectos, eventos e sonhos foram surgindo e o meu consumo de música lusófona sofreu com isso, bem como o a frequência dos posts neste espaço. Só acabei de ouvir os álbuns aqui perfilados já bem no meio de 2012.

E que grandes álbuns temos aqui. Desde o Komba (Buraka Som Sistema) ao Proíbido Ouvir Isso (MCK) ao Cherry on My Cake (Luísa Sobral), 2011 tem sido (mais) um ano excelente para a música lusófona. Houve mais colaborações entre artistas lusófonos, grandes eventos culturais nas principais capitais da lusofonia e não só, e nota-se o crescimento da popularidade da música lusófona à volta do mundo. Tive a oportunidade de ver vários músicos brasileiros aqui em New York, incluindo os Buraka. E como todos grandes álbuns, os álbuns aqui perfilados continuam em constante rotação no meu iPod, mais de um ano depois de terem saído.

A seguir, os meus álbuns preferidos de 2011.

 

10. Komba, by Buraka Som Sistema (Portugal/Angola)

Buraka’s rise has been meteoric. They’ve basically carried the kuduro sound all over the world and made it cool outside of Luanda’s streets. It’s the first, if not the only, Luso-Angolan group that has truly become a globally-known band, selling out concerts from Rome to Tokyo to Paris to Mexico City (which is, incidentally, one of Conductor’s favorite cities for a Buraka concert). This year marked the first time they performed in India, where they gave their local New Delhi fans a taste of their infections electro-kuduro sound. And I finally had the opportunity to see them right here in New York City, in an unforgettable concert. Their music is still pure energy: festive and frenetic with a highly contagious rhythm that denotes a certain evolution in their sound, evidenced by some of the artists that they invited for this album. Sara Tavares on a kuduro? Yeah. Why not?

 Voodoo Love

 

Buraka, by brooklynvegan.com

A ascenção meteórica dos Buraka tem sido vertiginosa. É o primeiro, se não o único, grupo luso-angolano que conseguiu realmente se impôr no mundo como uma banda global, esgotando concertos de Roma à Tóquio a Paris a Cidade do México (que por acaso é um dos lugares preferidos do Conductor). Este ano levaram pela primeira vez a sua mistura contagiosa de kuduro e electro à India, num concerto inédito em Nova Delhi. E eu finalmente tive a oportunidade de os ver actuar aqui em Nova Iorque, num concerto inesquecível. A música, esta continua energética, festiva, frenética, num ritmo alucinante em que se nota alguma evolução sonora da banda, mesmo vendo pelos artistas que eles decidiram convidar desta vez. Sara Taveres num kuduro? Ya. Porque não?

 

9. Chapa '97, by Cacique '97 (Portugal/Mozambique)

Afro-beat in Portuguese. I still can’t get over that. For people who love this genre, Luso-Mozambican collective Cacique ‘97’s new EP is tasty. It has all the ingredients with which these musicians have made us love them and also features another artist that we’ve grown to love, Nástio Mosquito. Cacique’s live performances, which make up 4 of the 6 songs in this EP, are full of life. Chapa ’97 is the standout here – it’s such a great tune. It was inspired by the unrest in Maputo towards the end of 2010, triggered by yet another price increase of basic goods. True, this only an EP and not a true album, but the energy in Cacique’s live performances and the quality of the work here merited its inclusion. Chapa ’97 live is something else.

 American Cop

 

Cacique '97, by flun

Afro-beat em português. Para amantes do género, o novo EP da malta luso-moçambicana dos Cacique ’97 está saboroso. Tem todos os ingredientes com os quais estes músicos já nos habituaram e conta também com a participação de artistas que muito apreciamos, entre eles o Nástio Mosquito. São dois temas inéditos e 4 sons gravados ao vivo. Chapa ’97 é muito som, e o meu preferido. Foi inspirado nos confrontos que surgiram em Maputo em 2010 depois de mais uma súbida dos preços de produtos básicos. Sim, isto é só um EP e não um álbum própriamente dito, mas a qualidade do trabalho motivou a sua inclusão nesta lista. Chapa ’97 ao vivo é outra coisa.

 

8. Pitanga, by Mallu Magalhães (Brazil)

 

I was very impressed by the musical quality of Mallu's third studio album and how, at just 20 years old, she has truly found her voice. Pitanga contains confidence and assurance not usually seen in artists this young. The sound of her album is a unique mix of MPB, bossa nova, and folk rock, combining genres seldom seen in a Brazilian production. She binds it all together with that sweet, delicious voice of hers that she uses to great effect. It's almost like a caress, the way she whispers. Pitanga is the album I'd play on quiet nights while sipping a drink or lazy Sunday afternoons; it has a soothing effect. Sambinha Bom was one of my favorite tracks that year and one I still listen to regularly.

 Highly Sensitive

Mallu, by Eneias Barros

Fiquei positivamente impressionado pelo terceiro álbum da Mallu e como ela, aos 20 anos, já foi capaz de encontrar a sua voz e o seu estilo próprio de interpretar a música. O álbum chama-se Pitanga e nele a Mallu liberta-se, mostrando confiança e certeza em si própria, no seu talento, e na sua música, confiança esta que nem sempre é comum em artistas tão jovens. O som dela é uma mistura incomum de MPB, bossa nova, e folk rock, géneros que normalmente não coabitam numa produção brasileira. A voz deliciosa, sussurrante dela actua como um instrumento sobre as diversas melodia. É quase como uma carícia, a voz doce dela. Pitanga é o álbum que toco em noites calmas enquanto aprecio um vinho ou então em tardes preguiçosas de domingo; tem um efeito acalmante. Sambinha Bom é uma das melhores músicas que ouvi em 2011 e uma que ainda toco regularmente.

 

7. World Massala, by Terrakota (Portugal)

 

 

I have a lot of love for Terrakota. Their musical versatility is simply incredible. World Massala, their most recent album, is a previously unheard of mix of Lusophone music and Indian music, and they actually traveled to the Indian subcontinent to drink the music from the source. I’m also a fan of Terrakota for reasons beyond their music. They’re environmentally-friendly stance, their simple and altruistic lifestyle, their complete disregard for imaginary land borders, and even their political choices are qualities I greatly appreciate. When Angolan youth were getting beat up in the streets of Luanda for legally protesting against the regime, Terrakota showed their indignation is social media platforms and even in concert, when they, alongside the regime’s favorite protestor Ikonoklasta, showed their solidarity with the Angolan youth that had been farcically incarcerated. Despite its Indian flavor, World Massala also has some more afro-centric and Brazilian-sounding jams. Ilegal below is one of them.

 Ilegal

 

Tenho muito amor pelos Terrakota. A sua versatilidade musical é simplesmente incrível. O World Massala é uma mistura préviamente inexistente de música lusófona com ritmos indianos, e eles viajaram até ao subcontinente asiático para sentirem de perto a música. Mas também aprecio muito a postura deles enquanto artistas e seres humanos. Gosto da atitude ambientalista deles,a forma simples e altruísta como encaram a vida e até mesmo das suas opções mais políticas: quando os jovens angolanos estavam a apanhar porrada nas ruas de Luanda por se manifestarem, os manos da Terrakota mostraram a sua indignação nas redes sociais e na mesma altura realizaram um concerto com o “arruaceiro-em-chefe” em que o mesmo, e a banda, se mostraram solidários com os jovens injustamente incarcerados. Apesar do seu sabor indiano, o World Massala também contém ritmos do continente berço e outros com sabor mais brasileiro. Ilegal acima é um deles.

 

6. Dor de Mar, by Tcheka (Cape Verde)

 

It’s one of my favorite albums to listen to in the morning as I’m getting ready to work and also during my commute. It has the power to clear my mind, to relax me, to prepare me for the day ahead. It is definitely the best album to come out of Cape Verde in 2011. Dor de Mar is another strong effort from Tcheka, full of beautiful melodies and haunting tunes that only a Cape Verdean can create and only those islands can inspire. And once again, the songs are enhanced by Tcheka’s voice – the man can sing. This album is Tcheka’s fourth and I hope for the sake of Lusophone music that he continues to give us these sonic treasures.

 Pexera Porto

 

Tcheka, by Jono Terry

É dos meus álbuns preferidos para ouvir logo de manhã enquanto me preparo para o trabalho, e também adoro ouvi-lo no subway. O álbum relaxa-me, clarifica-me a mente e prepara-me para enfrentar o dia. É definitivamente o meu álbum preferido a sair de Cabo Verde em 2011. Mais uma vez o Tcheka conseguiu compôr um álbum musicalmente forte, repleto de lindas melodias e canções que só um caboverdeano pode sonhar e só aquelas ilhas podem inspirar. E mais uma vez cada melodia, cada canção é reforçada pela voz do Tcheka...realmente o homem sabe cantar. Este já é o quarto álbum do Tcheka e pelo bem da música lusófona, espero que continue a nos oferecer estes tesouros sonoros.

 

5. The Cherry on My Cake, by Luísa Sobral (Portugal)

Several publications considered Luísa Sobral's debut album The Cherry on My Cake as the best Portuguese album of 2011 and I'd have to agree. What an assured and accomplished debut by the young woman. She has a wealth of talent at her disposal and if her breakthrough success on both sides of the Atlantic (US and Portugal) is anything to go by, she'll be singing for awhile. I love that Luísa made the choice to sing in both Portuguese and English; it gives her jazzy, lighthearted album a distinct sound and feel. Hearing her croon in Portuguese is particularly satisfying, and her English still retains a bit of a Portuguese accent. I'm a huge fan of accents, especially when sung to music like this. Not There Yet was amongst my favorite songs of 2011, while O Engraxador below is another standout track.

 O Engraxador

 

Luisa Sobral, by EU Neighbourhood Info Centre

Várias publicações consideraram o álbum de estreia de Luísa Sobral,  The Cherry on My Cake, como o melhor álbum português de 2011. Terei de concordar. Que grande estreia por parte de uma cantora tão nova e talentosa. O facto que a Luísa encontrou sucesso não só em Portugal como também aqui nos States logo na primeira tentativa é prova que ela veio para ficar. Adoro o facto dela ter escolhido cantar tanto em inglês como em português; a presença dos dois idiomas, a maneira como as duas línguas funcionam igualmente bem nas músicas jazzy e alegres, torna o álbum distinto. Sou um apreciador de jazz em português e não é todos os dias que o oiço. E também sou um apreciador de sotaques - gosto de ouvir o sotaque aportuguesado do inglês da Luísa. Not There Yet, single do álbum, foi dos meus sons preferidos de 2011, enquanto que O Engraxador é outro tema que aprecio.

 

4. Clave Bantu, Aline Frazão (Angola)

After I found out about Aline and her music, I dreamt of seeing her play at the Luanda Jazz Festival. I also hoped that one day she would edit an album, even though she said she had no plans to do so at the time. In 2011 she released her studio debut Clave Bantu and in 2012 she played in the Luanda Jazz Festival. Some dreams do come true, apparently...

 

There are not many albums like this one in the Angolan market. There aren't many albums with this sublime simplicity, this beauty, this lightness. Guitar, voice, percussion. It's an album that's easy to listen to and contains influences from other Lusophone areas, including Brazil, Cape Verde, Portugal, and...Galicia. It was independently produced and released by Aline herself. Of the 11 tracks, two were written by very well known Angolan authors: Ondjaki wrote Amanheceu while José Eduardo Agualusa wrote O Céu da Tua Boca. The other nine songs are Aline's. I'll leave you with Na Boca do Mundo, one of the standouts.

 Na Boca do Mundo

 

Aline, by Obra Social Caja Madrid

Pouco após conhecer a Aline sonhava em ver-lhe cantar no Luanda Jazz Festival. Sonhava também em escutar um disco dela, porque na altura em que comecei a ouvir as suas músicas ela nem sequer tencionava lançar um álbum. Em 2011 ela lançou Clave Bantu e em 2012 cantou no Luanda Jazz Festival. Alguns sonhos tornam-se realidade...

Não existem muitos álbuns como este no mercado angolano. Não existem muitos álbuns com esta liberdade, esta beleza, esta simplicidade. Guitarra, voz e percurssão. É um álbum de audição fácil, suave, com influências de vários pontos da lusofonia, incluindo Brasil, Cabo Verde, Portugal e...a Galicia. Foi produzido de forma independente. Das onze faixas, duas foram escritas por conhecidos cantores angolanos: o Ondjaki escreveu Amanheceu e o José Eduardo Agualusa é o autor de O Céu da Tua Boca. As outras nove músicas foram lindamente escritas pela Aline. Fique com Na Boca do Mundo.

 

3. Proibido Ouvir Isso, by MCK (Angola)

 

His songs usually don't play on the radio - only his tamer songs get airtime. His videos aren’t shown on TV. He’s anti-regime. Still, his album release event in Luanda's Praça da Independência attracted more crowds than any other release event in the capital that year. Thousands of people turned up to try to get a copy of one of the most anticipated album of the year. Once again, with his characteristic humility, MC Katrogipolongopongo calmly sold out his album and continued to spread his unique brand of social critique. He then went to the provinces and did the same thing. The effect was immediate. The phrase 'país do Pai Banana' (father banana's country) entered into the national lexicon. Even Rafael Marques took a break from his usual articles and wrote an extensive piece on this album, becoming a music blogger for a day. Proibido Ouvir Isso features some heavy-hitters of the Lusophone music scene, including Angola's Paulo Flores and kuduro artist Bruno M, and Portuguese producing maestro Sam the Kid. This was simply the best Angolan rap album of 2011 and the one that was able to create serious discussion about the social ills that plague us as Angolans.

 Eu Sou Angola

 

Lançamento do Proibido Ouvir Isso Foto do blog Kano Kortado

Não tocava na rádio. Não passa na televisão. É anti-regime. Mas mesmo assim, os acto do lançamento do mais novo disco do MC do Bairro de Lata foi talvez o lançamento mais concorrido do ano em Luanda. Eram milhares de pessoas ávidas em conseguir uma cópia do CD. Mais uma vez, com a humildade que lhe é característica, o MC Katrogipolongopongo encheu a Praça da Independência em Luanda e vendeu milhares de exemplares. Depois viajou pelas províncias e fez o mesmo. O efeito foi imediato. A frase “país do Pai Banana” entrou no léxico nacional. O álbum foi motivo de um artigo extenso no site do Rafael Marques e fez com que o homem se tornasse music blogger por instantes. Contou também com a participação de grandes talentos do panorama musical angolano e não só, entre eles o Bruno M, Paulo Flores e Sam the Kid. É simplesmente o melhor álbum de rap angolano de 2011, e mais do que isso, foi álbum que mais despertou a nossa consciência crítica como cidadãos angolanos. Ponto final.

 

2. Lovers Rock Inna Week, by Grasspoppers (Portugal)

 

It's an ambitious, heavy-hitting album, filled with musicians at the top of their game. Selma Uamusse. Milton Gulli. Helder Faradai. Just to name a few. Cape-Verdeans, Mozambicans, Angolans. English, Creole, and Portuguese. This album has it all. Grasspoppers released the album for free on their website, which means that you (still) have the possibility of listening to quality Lusophone reggae without spending a single cent. When the album first came out I was unable to listen to much of anything else for days. On the subway on the way to work, at home as I made dinner, in the city streets as I walked to friend's houses, it was Lovers Rock that was playing. I still listen to it regularly over a year after its release. Carta a Uma Cidade Anoitecida was among my absolute favorite songs of 2011. At night, in the quiet dark, alone or with company, or on that night drive when it seems the road is all yours, there are few better songs to play than that one. This was, without a doubt, one of the albums that most influenced me in 2011.

 Black Brothers Riddim

 

É um álbum estonteante, com personagens em grande forma. Selma Uamusse. Milton Gulli. Helder Faradai. Só para citar estes. Cabo-verdianos, moçambicanos, portugueses, angolanos. Português, crioulo, inglês. O álbum tem de tudo. Os manos dos Grasspoppers ofereceram o Lovers Rock de graça no seu website. Ou seja, tem a possibilidade de escutar reggae lusófono de qualidade sem gastar um único centavo. Quando o álbum saiu, ouvia-o durante dias seguidos. No subway a caminho do trabalho, em casa enquanto preparava o jantar. Ainda o oiço com frequência, mais de 1 ano depois de ter saído. Carta a Uma Cidade Anoitecida foi talvez a música que mais gostei de ouvir em 2011. À noite, no escuro, na solidão ou com uma companhia, no carro de madrugada com a estrada vazia, não conheço melhores músicas para se escutar. Este foi, definitivamente, um dos álbuns que mais me marcou em 2011.

 

1. Nó na Orelha, by Criolo (Brazil)

Quite simply the best Lusophone album of 2011, and definitely the best Lusophone rap album to come out in some time. It was considered by national and international publications as the best Brazilian album of 2011. Nó na Orellha broke down several barriers and introduced Criolo to a worldwide audience. On the success of this album, Kléber Gomes, his real name, finally left São Paulo and held live concerts in Paris, London, and right here in New York City, introducing rapt audiences to the distinctive rhythm of his Paulista rap. There's a lot to love about this album. It is the complete package: lyrically profound, excellently produced, and so much more than just rapping. Criolo infused his brand of hip hop with soul, intelligence, and a distinctly Brazilian identity - he sings in some tracks, croons in others and then lays down rhymes with the same skill as the best. From the afro-beat opener to the samba closer, Criolo's second album contains several sonic landscapes, among them funk, MPB, blues, and brega. It is a trascendental album and further establishes São Paulo as the source of all that's brilliant about modern Brazilian, and Lusophone, music.

 Lion Man

 

Criolo, por Tinho Sousa

Simplesmente o melhor álbum lusófono de 2011, e definitivamente o melhor álbum de rap lusófono que eu ouvi nos últimos tempos. Foi considerado como o melhor álbum brasileiro de 2011 por várias publicações brasileiras e internacionais. Nó na Orelha quebrou vários preconceitos e apresentou o Criolo à uma audiência mundial. Por causa do sucesso deste álbum o Kléber Gomes, como também é conhecido, teve a oportunidade de actuar ao vivo em várias capitais mundiais, incluindo Paris, Londres, e Nova Iorque. Introduziu o seu rap paulista ao mundo. Há muito que respeitar e apreciar neste álbum - é um trabalho completo. Liricamente profundo, excelentemente produzido, e muito mais que rap. Este MC conseguiu criar o seu próprio estilo de rimar e encarar o hip-hop. O hip-hop do Criolo tem soul, inteligência e uma identidade brasileira distinta. E como se não bastasse, este homem também sabe cantar. Não existe amor em SP é uma obra de arte por si só. Desde o afro-beat da primeira música ao samba da última, Nó na Orelha é uma viagem por várias paisagens sonoras, incluindo funk, MPB, blues e brega. É um disco trascendente que mais uma vez estabelece São Paulo como a fonte de tudo que é brilhante na música brasileira e lusófona moderna.

The Short Fiction Contest

The submissions period for the 2013 Short Fiction Contest is now open!

2013 Guidelines

The contest is open to all writers who have not yet published a book of fiction. Submissions must be 1200 words or fewer. There is no entry fee. Katharine Weber, the Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College and author of five critically-acclaimed novels, including Triangle and True Confections, will be the final judge. The Kenyon Review will publish the winning short story in the Winter 2014 issue, and the author will be awarded a scholarship to attend the 2013 Writers Workshop, June 15th-22nd, in Gambier, Ohio. Additional info on the Writers Workshop is available here.

Submission Guidelines

• Writers must not have published a book of fiction at the time of submission. (We define a “published book of fiction” as a novel, novella or short story collection written by you and published by someone other than you in print, on the web, or in ebook format.)

• Stories must be no more than 1200 words in length.

• One submission per entrant.

• Please do not simultaneously submit your contest entry to another magazine or contest.

• Please do not submit work that has been previously published.

• The submissions link will be active February 1st to February 28th. All work must be submitted through our electronic system. We cannot accept paper submissions.

• Winners will be announced in the late spring. You will receive an e-mail notifying you of any decisions regarding your work.

Submit Now

Click here to view the past winners of the KR Short Fiction Contest

THE FOURTH ANNUAL NORMAL PRIZE

IN FICTION, NONFICTION, & POETRY

It's that time of the year: The Normal School is accepting entries for the 2013 Normal Prize from 12/15/12 until 3/15/13. We can't wait to spend our winters, holed up in our caves, reading submissions. Are you Normal enough to enter? We think so. Every entrant gets a free two year subscription to The Normal School so, why not? Read on for our full contest guidelines, and send us your best.

 

Fiction Prize: $1000 & Publication
Nonfiction Prize: $1000 & Publication
Poetry Prize: $1000 & Publication

 

Final Judges

Fiction: PABLO MEDINA

Nonfiction: DINTY W. MOORE

Poetry: AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

 

GUIDELINES

• All fiction and nonfiction submissions must be 10,087 words or less, double-spaced, 12 pt. font. Poetry submissions should not exceed five pages or five poems total. No identifying information on the manuscript.

• All submissions must be previously unpublished (print or electronic media).

• Simultaneous submissions are allowed as long as you notify editors should your piece be accepted elsewhere. Multiple submissions ARE allowed.

HOW TO SUBMIT

• All submissions must be uploaded through our online submissions manager found here.

• $20 per submission, paid through PayPal only. One story or essay, or up to five poems per entry fee.

• You will receive a confirmation email once your submission has been uploaded.

• Submissions will be read between 12/15/2012 and 3/15/2013.

• Winners will be announced Spring/Summer, 2013.

 

CFP: Constructions of Identity –

Contemporary Challenges

(Cluj-Napoca, 24-26 October 2013)

 

By Katie Reid on 2 February , 2013 • ( 0 )

[For those post-millennialists among us?] The Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters, “Babes-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca (Romania) announces the 7th edition of its biennial conference:

Constructions of Identity – Contemporary Challenges (Cluj-Napoca, 24-26 October 2013).

Abstracts should be submitted by September 1, 2013 (details below).

This conference’s main goal is to examine the challenges and the future of English and American Studies along three major directions: Literary Studies, Language Studies, and Cultural Studies, at the beginning of the 21century, in the era of digitalization and globalization.More specifically, we invite presentations in the fields listed below:

• Literary studies

• British and Commonwealth literature

• American literature

• Literary theory

• Language studies

• Theoretical linguistics

• Applied linguistics: ELT

• Applied linguistics: Translation studies

• Cultural studies

• Literature and culture

• Gender and ethnicity

• Film and media

The conference will host keynote speeches and workshops. The participants in the workshops are allotted a 30-minute slot for presentation and discussion. The general conference fee is 250 lei (about 60 €), to be paid upon arrival. This includes: participation costs, coffee breaks, lunches on Thursday and Friday, the conference dinner on Thursday and the publication in the conference volume.

For details and registration, please visit the conference website: http://constructionsofidentity7.wordpress.com/cfp/

Abstracts of about 100 words should be submitted by September 1, 2013.

For additional information, please contact:  Dr. Adrian Radu  adrian.radu@ubbcluj.ro  or  Dr. Petronia Petrar  petronia.petrar@gmail.com

DIY Natural Room Scents

Add fragrance to your home using simmering waters infused with spices, herbs, & fruit

Here's the thing. I'm married to a man who hates artificial scents of any kind. That goes for air fresheners, candles, perfume, soaps and anything else that is scented. We buy unscented everything. I could probably buy a car with the money I've saved on perfume throughout the years of our marriage. 

Turns out that King-Man may just be ahead of his time. I've recently been reading about air fresheners and their harmful ingredients. Many of them are especially hard on people with allergies and asthma. One more thing to stay away from. 

But, the air in my house gets stale sometimes. Or, the day after I've cooked with garlic, that aroma that was so appealing when I was cooking becomes very unpleasant. I want to walk into my house and have it smell pleasant. Nothing overpowering or even that noticeable. Just pleasant. 

There is a simple, all natural, truly lovely solution. That is to fill the air in my home with subtle scents of spices, herbs, and fruit. All I have to do is simmer some sweet smelling ingredients in water. The steam fills the air with a pleasant scent. Truth is, I did this many years ago on the advice of our realtor when we were selling our house. Realtors often advise sellers to bake cookies or boil cinnamon water right before a potential buyer drops by. That inviting aroma goes a long way to leave a good first impression. Why I didn't continue scenting the air in a similar way for our own enjoyment, I don't know.  I've now got a simple routine going that keeps our house smelling pleasant without staleness or day-after garlic odor.

Keeping the supply list simple. I only used items available at the grocery store or in my yard for these scent recipes. I want this to be easy and inexpensive so that I can set up a sustainable routine of pleasantly scenting our home. These recipes are simply guidelines and don't have to be followed exactly. In fact, I change them up all the time based on what I have on hand in my kitchen or yard. 

 

How to Make Natural Room Scents

 

Skip the photos - Go straight to the recipe

 

Fragrant items for naturally scenting your home:

• citrus -- I've tried other fruits. Some of them smell good initially, but they don't hold up for more than one use. Citrus is sturdier, longer-lasting, and gives these scent recipes freshness. Lemons and oranges are particularly fragrant and have the best staying power in these scented waters.

• herbs -- Any herb can be used for making a room scent, but the ones that are sturdier and on woody twigs hold up the best. My favorites for room scents are rosemary and thyme.

• pine or cedar twigs/needles -- There may be other fragrant trees that will work, too; pine and cedar are the two I've tried for their appealing, fresh fragrance.

• extracts -- A touch of vanilla or almond extract improves most room fragrance mixtures. Mint extract has a nice fresh scent. You can also use whole vanilla beans instead of vanilla extract; pricey but amazingly fragrant. Amazon has a good bulk price (80% less than grocery store prices).

• spices -- You can use ground or whole sweet spices. The whole spices look prettier, if your scented water will be in a location where it will be seen. I have found that cinnamon sticks and whole cloves have the most scent staying power. Cinnamon sticks can be rinsed off and reused several times. They keep on giving.

view whole spices on Amazon:
cinnamon sticks,  anise stars,  allspice,  cloves, vanilla beans

Five Natural Room Scent Recipes
These are all scents that my nose likes. But, scents that are pleasing to one person may not be to someone else. Consider how many different scents of perfumes, soap, and candles there are in stores in an effort to appeal to the masses. So, use my recipe combos as guidelines that you can tweak and customize to suit what your nose likes.

General procedure: Combine the ingredients in a 2 cup (pint) jar or container, or in a pan on the stove top. Cover them with water and heat. I'll explain different heating options further down. Keep reading. 

view on Amazon:  ♦pint jars    ♦plastic lids for jars

Scent #1: Oranges, cinnamon & cloves (allspice and anise are optional). This is my favorite, both for it's wonderful aroma and for it's staying power. This scent carries into multiple rooms better, and it can be reheated to scent your rooms for several days.

Scent #2: Lemon, rosemary, & vanilla. A similar scented water is often simmering in Williams-Sonoma stores. It has a lovely freshness to it.  

Scent #3: Lime, thyme, mint & vanilla extract. This combination has such a fresh, pleasant scent. I initially made it without the mint extract, but have found that it really kicks up the aroma.

Scent #4: Orange, ginger (fresh or powdered), and almond extract. This is a sweet, delicious scent. 

Scent # 5: Pine or cedar twigs (or other fragrant twigs), bay leaves, and nutmeg. These scents combine for a complex aroma. If you have whole nutmeg, use a microplane to grate off the outer surface--this will release the scent. Add the whole nutmeg piece along with the gratings.

view on Amazon:  Microplane

Here's the gang of five. Aren't they beautiful? I like to make these up in pint jars and keep them on hand in the fridge so I'm ready to start a pot of simmering scents as needed.

Make ahead and...

• ...store in the fridge. Uncooked jars of scented waters will keep in the fridge for 1 to 2 weeks, so you can make these ahead to have on hand. I recommend adding all of the ingredients, including the water, to the jars before refrigerating them. I've tried refrigerating the fruit/spice/herb combos in jars without the water, but they don't last as long that way.

• ...freeze them.  I've tried freezing them both with and without the water added, and both ways work fine. I haven't tested them in the freezer longer than 2 weeks, but I'm confident that they can be frozen for a month or longer. Make sure you use freezer-safe jars like these pint wide-mouth mason jars. (Not all mason jars are freezer-safe.)

How to heat the scented mixtures

I've tried a variety of methods, and all of these work to varying degrees. Some of them provide a more powerful scent than others. Just like the air fresheners you buy, none of these will scent a whole house; but I'll show you some ways to set up individual scent sources in multiple rooms. Hopefully you already have what you need to try out one or more of these options.

Stove top method. This is by far the best way I've found to get the most powerful scent that will spread to more rooms the fastest. It's easy as can be. Simply combine the ingredients in a pot on the stove, bring them to a boil, and then lower the heat to a simmer. They will immediately begin to scent your kitchen and spread to other rooms. How far the scent spreads depends on the size and layout of your house. A simmering pot like this makes all four rooms on our first floor smell good. The only drawback of this method is that you have to keep a close eye on the water level. If the pan dries out, you'll be smelling burned citrus instead of sweet, fragrant citrus.  NOTE: For a stronger scent, simply double or triple the recipe in a larger pot on the stove.

Uncovered Slow Cooker Method. This is my personal favorite. I use a mini slow cooker--the kind made for keeping dips and sauces warm. Mine only has one low heat setting. The mixture never actually bubbles and visibly steams. I leave it uncovered on my kitchen counter to slowly release scent throughout the day. It's subtle, but creates a pleasant smell in my kitchen and a hint of scent in surrounding rooms. When I'm home, I keep my mini slow cooker going. It's easy and uses very little electricity. When I fill mine in the morning, it won't dry out for an entire day. If you're concerned about accidentally letting it run dry, you can put a lamp timer on it so that it automatically shuts off at the desired time. I put a scented jar mixture in the microwave for 2 minutes to get it really hot before I add it to the slow cooker. That gives it a jump start on releasing the scent.  NOTE: For a stronger scent, simply double or triple the recipe in a larger, full-size slow cooker and set it on high.

view on Amazon:
♦1-1/2 qt. small slow cooker  (holds double or triple batch--removable insert)
♦16 oz. mini slow cooker (holds single batch--no removable insert)
♦on-off lamp timer (for auto shut-off)

Fondue Pot Method. If you have a fondue pot, then you have a portable scent station. Set it up in any room you'd like to scent. Below is a small ceramic fondue pot I have that uses a tea light for heat. So, this will only remain warm as long as the candle lasts--3-1/2 to 4 hours. Like the slow cooker, this is a low level of heat and releases a very subtle scent--enough for a small room. Get the scent mixture boiling hot before adding it to the fondue pot. I like to set this up in our entry way when we have guests. It makes it smell wonderful when you walk through our front door. And, it looks pretty.

view on Amazon:  small ceramic fondue pot

Mug Warmer Method. I normally keep this little mug warmer next to my computer to keep my coffee and tea warm. I've discovered it also can be used to keep a jar or small bowl of scent mixture warm. It only keeps it warm, it doesn't actually heat it up. So again, be sure to heat the mixture before adding it the bowl. Or microwave a jar and set it right on top of the mug warmer. This low heat puts off a soft, subtle scent that is suitable for a small area like a bathroom. 

• Here's a hint to keep it pretty. As the mixtures cook and lose their color, they're not as attractive. You can spruce it up by floating a fresh slice of citrus on top. Or add a few cranberries (I keep a bag of them in my freezer); they float and add a touch of color.

view on Amazon:  electric mug warmer

Candle Warmer Method. These work just like the mug warmers. Candle warmers come with a little bowl on top for melting scented candle pellets. Instead, you can add some heated scented water. Or, remove the bowl and set a jar or other bowl on top. 

• Note: I tested the temperatures of these with a thermometer. The mug warmer and candle warmer both kept the mixture at about 120°F. That's enough to let off a very subtle scent in a small area or room, but don't expect these to strongly scent a big room. You need more heat and steam for a stronger scent.

view on Amazon:  ceramic electric candle warmer

Tea Pot Warmer Method. My tea pot warmer also uses tea lights. I can put two or three tea lights in mine to achieve the temperature I want. These only last as long as the tea lights burn, but they can get hotter than the mug and candle warmers, thus releasing more scent. I can put a bowl or jar on top of my tea pot warmer, as long as I put it somewhere that I can keep an eye on it. I don't like to leave candles unattended.

view on Amazon:  cast iron teapot warmer

Add more hot water as needed. As the water evaporates from any of these warming bowls or jars, top it off with additional HOT water. It needs to be hot when it's added so that it doesn't cool down the temperature of the scented water.  Higher heat = more fragrance.

Gift them! These make a fun, unique hostess gift. Take one along to a party as a gift for your host that can be simmered and enjoyed the next day.

Reuse each mixture 2-3 times. After these have been heated and simmered for awhile, the water becomes cloudy (as you can see in the jars below), and some of the ingredients lose their vibrant color. Although they don't look as pretty, they still smell good. Usually, you can reheat and simmer these again 2-3 times. Jar them up and refrigerate them between uses. Open the jar and give it the sniff test--if it still smells good, reheat and reuse it. Add more water as needed.

Cost saving tips

You can save, use and reuse a number of fragrant ingredients. These scents don't need to be expensive.

• Leftover ginger --  If you ever cook with fresh ginger and end up with leftover pieces , this is a way to use them up before they spoil. Slice the leftover ginger and freeze it in a bag or container to have on hand for whipping up a quick batch of scented water. 

• Save your orange peels -- When you eat an orange, save the peel for use in scented waters. Store them in the refrigerator or freezer until you need them.

• Save your juiced lemons and limes -- After you've juiced these for use in a recipe, refrigerate or freeze the leftover pieces.

• Save your leftover herbs -- If you have herbs in a garden or have leftover herbs that you've purchased for cooking, they can be frozen and saved for use in these scented waters.

• Use expired juices. If you have fruit juices that are past their prime, use them as a base in place of the water in these mixtures. They're both fragrant and colorful.

• Use expired spices. Spices are supposed to be replaced after a year, because they lose much of their flavor. But, they still smell good! Instead of throwing out old spices, use them for scenting water.

There are endless combinations for these scented waters. If you have some additional ideas, please share. I'm always looking for a new, pleasant scent for my home.

Oh, and good news . . . King-Man likes these natural scents. Happy husband, happy home.

Make it Yummy day!
Monica 

 

When the Lights Shut Off:

Kendrick Lamar and

the Decline of

the Black Blues Narrative

by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

January 31st, 2013 

 Images below by Karim Davis

The sound of the blues is pre–Civil Rights. It’s oppression. In high school I had a friend who asked me why I played the blues, that black people don’t play blues. And for the most part, he was right. But I said, how can you abandon what we come from? All the stuff that you’re jamming to [now] came from this foundation. Jimmy Reed sang “Big Boss Man,” and, as a black man, he sang that because he couldn’t say it in the workplace. He sang that and had people dancing to it. If guys like that were ballsy enough to put that out, how can you deny it? That was the foundation to be able to say whatever the fuck you want.

— Gary Clarke Jr.

When the lights shut off
And it’s my turn to settle down
My main concern
Promise that you will sing about me
Promise that you will sing about me

— Kendrick Lamar

 

¤

IN A MOMENT I will tell you why Kendrick Lamar, a young rapper from Compton, deserves much of the acclaim, and, even more so, the analysis he has received, but first let us deal with the vanguard of black memoirists who came before him and in whose well-forged path he follows.

In the summer of 1945, Ralph Ellison wrote a review of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Wright’s semiautobiographical novel about his tough boyhood in Mississippi. In Ellison’s piece he suggested that Black Boy is shaped more by the blues tradition born from the same hard countryside as Wright than it is by any literary genre or narrative model. Ellison would explain that, “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

Twenty years later — still long before he converted to Mormonism, or ran as a Republican candidate, or invented Christlam, his own religion with its branch of military forces called The Guardians of the Sperm — came Eldridge Cleaver’s first book, Soul on Ice. But first, Cleaver, on the lam from a shoot-out with the Oakland police, moved to Paris and became a fashion designer. He made pants with a codpiece, calling the cloth prosthesis that fell from their fly the “Cleaver Sleeve.” “Walking tall … walking proud … walking softly but carrying it big. You’ll be cock of the walk with the new collection from Eldridge de Paris,” he advertised.

Although it is difficult to understand Cleaver's intentions in designing the pants, it is easier to configure them into the strange blues that was Cleaver’s life. They were merely another leitmotif in his homophobic, sometimes rambling obsession with his own masculinity. Cleaver was a man full of the almost embarrassing desire to express all of the makings of himself despite the costs, open to all mediums and seemingly unconcerned about how much ridicule or scorn that self-expression might bring him.

Eldridge Cleaver was also a rapist. There can be no rationalizing of that, and we can’t go further without acknowledging that fact. And if Soul on Ice wasn't so extraordinarily powerful and so honest about his violent misogyny, it would be easy to dismiss the praise he received from established literary forces like Norman Mailer as the result of the strange, congratulatory bond men can share over the violated bodies of women.

A classmate introduced me to Soul on Ice in my last year of middle school. I was hesitant to read it because, for starters, I was deep into my 20th read of Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series, but also because I simply could not reconcile Cleaver’s past with his reform, his literacy with his criminality. But my classmate insisted, “No, you don’t understand, it is much more complicated than that, he is more complicated than that, just read it.”

In some ways, she was right: even though I cannot dismiss his past so easily, even to this day, Soul on Ice is a persuading and profound book; it is the bildungsroman of a young criminal who reinvents himself as a Black Panther and revolutionary. It works for a number of reasons. But what stands out to me now is Cleaver’s earnestness in the book, his bluesy-wounded tenderness, that neither he nor the world around him had any idea what to do with it.

For the record I recognize that I’m easily prey
I got ate alive yesterday
I got animosity building
It’s probably big as a building
Me jumping off of the roof
Is me just playing it safe…
Step on my neck and get blood on your Nike checks
I don’t mind because one day you’ll respect
The good kid, m.A.A.d. city

— Kendrick Lamar

“There’s a certain kind of American story that is characterized by a laconic surface and a tight-lipped speaking voice. The narrator in this story has been made inarticulate by modern life. Vulnerable to his own loneliness, he is forced into an attitude of hard-boiled self-protection,” writes Vivian Gornick in her essay “Tenderhearted Men,” in which she takes to task the terse, unchanging masculinity of Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus. Gornick, however, could just as easily be writing about the emotional impasse found in hip-hop.

A few months ago, when Kendrick Lamar released his album good kid m.A.A.d city, it excited all of the critics who get paid good money to not get too excited. They were mesmerized by the album’s narrative arc and the power of Lamar’s storytelling. The cosigns and cameos Lamar had received from his Compton godfathers Dr. Dre and MC Eiht impressed them. Lamar’s first major label release wasn’t just good — it also had the strange fatalism of a plaintive, grave, 25-year-old man-child unafraid to sound all Septimus Smith with his anxieties, to break open the status quo’s “laconic surface” with his youthful vulnerability. He is young, but also old enough to know that nothing in life is promised for men like him except death. So, on the album’s strongest song, he asks for only one thing and it recalls the blues elegies of Son House and Robert Johnson: “When the lights shut off, and it is my turn to settle down, promise that you will sing about me.”

I could easily tell you that Kendrick Lamar’s “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” is one of the best songs to come from hip-hop in the last few years, and since I like grand statements, I might even give him the decade. Lamar’s style is uncanny: at times when he raps it sounds like a Congo Square bamboula, fueled by inflated tears. His lyrics deal with his mortality, his fears, and the futility of street life, and his phrasing is such that he seems to both pause and dervish over his well-selected beats, but that is not what makes Kendrick Lamar’s work important. What makes him important is the way in which the autobiographical good kid m.A.A.d city is so novelistic and so eloquently anchored in the literary blues tradition of which Ellison wrote. Lamar is equal parts oral historian and authorial presence, and more than many authors writing today, he has captured all of the pathos and grief of gun violence, poverty, and the families who carve their lives out amidst all of that chaos. Lamar has offered up his hymnal for a lost generation, a defense for the black family, and in his jumpy prosody, his shell-shocked sensitivities, his clipped memories, and recorded conversations, he has produced “a novel from life” that single-handedly revives the long lost, suppressed literary tradition of young, working-class black boys on fire, with pens smote in hell, telling us how they become gifted, tenderhearted, black men — something we have been missing even though no one seems to notice it.

 

A few months ago I stood in my windowless, dimly lit classroom in Jamaica, Queens, a working-class neighborhood in New York City, and asked my new students, who were black and West Indian 20-something-year-olds from all over the borough, to tell me something about themselves. How often did they read novels? Who were their favorite authors? Hands flew up. A slim, unsmiling girl with wild hair pulled into a ponytail, spoke first.

“I love to read. Right now, I read at least four books a week.”

She then told us that she had so many books she had to keep them in her closet and they still didn’t fit.

The image of her overflowing closet was captivating. I had another question: “Out of all of the books that you’ve read, can you tell me some of your favorites?”

She paused to think, and then had to compete with the rest of class who began speaking at once, calling out titles I hadn’t heard of.

“True to the Game II, the first True to the Game, Dutch, all the Dutch books, basically … anything by Teri Woods. Gangsta, Coldest Winter Ever. A Street Girl Named Desire. Baby Momma Drama. I read that in one night. I loved that, too. Do you read Flexin and Sexin?”

“Miss,” one of them asked, “are we going to read those books or the kind they teach in school?”

I was there as part of a program that brings college classes to underserved communities. Having once taught English in a Brooklyn public high school for a year, I rattled off the curriculum I remembered with little to no response from them. Were these the books they read in school? And then I got to Toni Morrison.

“Toni Morrison?” asked a neatly dressed girl in the corner.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Toni Morrison, didn’t she win that award for being like the only black author alive?” 

“No. That award doesn’t exist. Toni Morrison …” I began, but was cut off by a boy in a newsboy cap who mumbled, not looking up from the notebook he was doodling in. 

“Toni Morrison. I know her. I read her in English. Some dude started flying to freedom at the end? And the other one was about the girl who wanted to be white? Am I right?" 

“Yes,” I said.

“Yeah, Toni Morrison,” he said, “I know her. She is deep. And she still writes about us.”

If I mentioned all of my skeletons, would you jump in the seat?
Would you say my intelligence now is great relief?
And it’s safe to say that our next generation maybe can sleep
With dreams of being a lawyer or doctor
Instead of boy with a chopper that hold the cul de sac hostage 

— Kendrick Lamar

As excellent a lyricist as Kendrick Lamar is, as a young writer who is quietly committed — like Morrison — to telling stories about the community most familiar to him, he also enters his story at a time when black American literature has become splintered between battling narratives: the haves and the have-nots. It was because of my students’ struggle to find contemporary stories they could relate to that I realized we no longer hear many narratives from black Americans who did not go to college, who are not middle-class, who aren’t privileged with access. The problem is not that these authors are privileged — that is not at all the issue. The problem is that during a time when moralizing about the lower-income, black body is once again at an all time high, many of these authors continue to tell us about all the ways they are “feeling rich,” while for everybody else, as Joan Didion would write in The New York Review of Books, it is glaringly apparent “that we [are] living in a different America, one that [has] moved from feeling rich to feeling poor.”

Even more curiously, many of these authors are wide-open to discussing what it means to be a person of color now in America, but in their many talking points, very few are willing to look beyond their own social realities. Nor are they agitating against, or even addressing, the very real issues facing their communities at large, like stop-and-frisk, a policing policy that disproportionately targets black and Latino men — a practice that is slowly being dismantled because it seems to indeed be unconstitutional. In his book The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and Rise and Decline of Black Politics, Fredrick C. Harris captures the vastness of the divide:

The black poor are told they should demonstrate greater personal responsibility in their lives and that they lack the moral standing necessary to deserve public benefits. From city ordinances banning sagging pants, to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s request to deny food-stamp recipients the right to purchase sodas, to DC delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton’s one-woman crusade to restore the sanctity of marriage to black families, these policy initiatives have the blessings of middle-class blacks who believe black poor people need to be policed by black elites and by the state.

Of course, the grip of respectability is not at all new, and perhaps that is why to some extent the black authors who loom as literary lions today seem to do so not only because they are gifted writers but also because they performed dual functions, even when they were made uneasy by the confines of biological allegiances. The examples of such commitment run long: James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry with the Civil Rights Movement; Zora Neale Hurston’s relationship to ruralism and afro-agrarianism despite it being out of vogue; bell hooks, Jayne Cortez, and Ntozake Shange with womanism; Octavia Butler’s and Ishmael Reed’s radical world-building.

The battle between marginality versus acceptance has long attempted to put a chokehold on many voices that would have told stories about those outside the talented tenth. Hilton Als, a critic at The New Yorker, wrote about this in his book The Women, as it concerned Alain Locke’s New Negro arts movement in the 1920s, for which “the New Negroes were roundly applauded by white publishers and patrons, who rewarded them with stipends, book deals, and no criticism whatsoever. What the New Negro was: a model of repressed and repressive colored middle class aspirations.”

But after the 2008 presidential election, there was a change in the game that made things markedly different from before: black Americans, like much of America, wondered out loud and naïvely if those communal problems hadn’t disappeared — and even if they hadn’t, did they still need to be articulated out loud? Maybe because America is driven by the theme of migration and reinvention, we had an inbred predisposition to believe that in 2008, as an entire country, America could start anew and wipe the slate containing its story clean. The notion was compelling: that with conviction alone a new world could be constructed where race mattered little and the election of a mixed-race president could signify more than any one man can. Suddenly after Obama’s election, race, particularly blackness, in America was discussed as though it had became optional, as if one could be black but did not have to be defined by their blackness. Blackness, pundits said, was now an identity that many people seemed keen to shed, especially since sometime towards the end of the 20th century, it had become a set of prescriptive, problematic behaviors born out of prison and hip-hop culture, with both of those things acting as a wall to a prouder history.

It was out of this moment that a new generation of black writers arose, like Thomas Chatterton Williams, who in his book Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture wrote that “black life had changed in dramatic ways. Human and civil rights were in, hip-hop was in, nihilism was in, self-pity was in, the street was in, and pride and shame were out — two more cultural anachronisms consigned to the African-American dustbins of history, like jazz music and zoot suits.” Williams, who takes care to describe himself as being black “despite my mother’s being white,” as if having mixed heritage is something he needs to explain or apologize for, was raised by her and his black father in an upper-middle-class, two-parent home in suburban New Jersey. He grew up comfortably with used German cars and many books but somehow became enamored with all of the things he considered “street.” He smoked weed, he slapped his girlfriend, he wore gold chains. After failing his first year at Georgetown because he preferred to party at nearby all-black colleges rather than stay on campus with the more studious, mostly white students, he came to the realization that hip-hop had literally hoodwinked black youth culture into settling for less. In a chapter unironically entitled “Beginning to See the Light,” Williams recounts his decision to begin dressing up for class, writing that, “If it is true that it feels good to look good, then it is equally true that it can feel gangsta to look gangsta and it can feel thugged-out to look thugged-out, or on the other hand, it can feel smart to look smart. I wanted to feel smart.” Dressed now in slacks, he found that his professors became more agreeable; they now looked him in the eye, and it was as if he had “stepped from beneath a shapeless burka or a pasteless mask” and finally become the kind of young man his culturally conservative black father, Pappy, wanted him to be. He never stops to question the politics of his newfound identity, because he has seen the light.

This desire, however, for a more fluid racial self was not just relegated to young, emerging authors like Williams. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. would tell Touré for his book, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: “If there are 40 million Black Americans then there are 40 million ways to be Black. There are 10 billion cultural artifacts of Blackness and if you add them up and put ’em in a pot and stew it, that’s what Black Culture is. Not one of those things is more authentic than the other.”

In the year after Obama’s election, before Thomas Chatterton Williams’s book was published, Colson Whitehead made a move. He abandoned the historical backdrop he used in John Henry Days and the pointed allegoric commentary in his first book, The Intuitionist, to tell, in his novel Sag Harbor, a story more personal to him: that of a young black New Yorker who summers and comes of age in a wealthy black enclave in the Hamptons. Obama, it seemed, and his ascent to the presidency as a Harvard-educated, bicultural lawyer from Hawaii, had given the black middle-class the confidence to resurface and stake their claim to the culture. The shift in tone and subject in black literary writing seemed to be less incidental and more so the birth of an unorganized subgenre. Having been held hostage by the masochist capitalism and the wild of hip-hop, the black middle-class was finally pushing back.

This was the return of all those who had had their blackness questioned, or because of class, parentage or schooling, had somehow felt alienated from a culture to which they felt they belonged. In this post-racial, post-black, post-hip-hop world there was no longer any one correct way of being black but there were still many ways that one could be proto-black, aggressively black, or overly wedded to the old narratives of blackness. Wyatt Mason, reviewing Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, saw Obama’s election as evidence that “our national house was revealed to be more stable than we knew, more richly peopled, more capable of supporting higher floors,” and said he could not “help but feel, during this most unusual American year, that Morrison’s fable about America’s beginnings and its legacy strikes a peculiarly shortsighted note.” It was astounding how many people had taken to heart the myth surrounding the new president. The notion was just too captivating: that an event that had seemed implausible only a decade ago had actually overnight jettisoned centuries of a conversation. A few months before Obama’s first win, Zadie Smith, in an essay about Franz Kafka and his own conflicted feelings about his Jewishness, would suggest that Kafka’s dilemma (“What have I in common with Jews?”) was one that spoke to us all in these postmodern times: “We are all insects, all Ungeziefer now.”

But quickly it would become obvious that we are not all insects now nor are all insects the same. In their rush to reinvent and refute blackness as it was — yes, yes, we could become the president, we could learn to ski and speak German — somehow, the gestalt of class had been conveniently ignored. Instead, a conversation that began back in the days of Reconstruction about the new wonders of blackness and possibilities of freedom was allowed to coyly continue. Blackness was so new, but no one was using any new language or ideas to explain how. Sometimes the most inescapable ghetto is the one that you build for yourself. Amid all of the talk that things were changing for the better, for most of poor, black America things were actually getting worse. In 2010, the median household net worth for whites was $110,729 versus $4,995 for blacks. In 2011, black unemployment shot up to 15.8 percent. In 2012, 13.6 percent of black Americans were jobless — the national average was 8.1 percent. Gun violence was once again surging in predominately black cities like Camden, Oakland, Chicago, and Philadelphia. What happened after the election was a shift, but in the rush to become a post-racial, post-black society, had anyone actually stopped to see if the relationship between race and poverty in America had really changed? Had the possibilities and realities for the poorest Americans truly become any different?

I’m fortunate you believe in a dream
This orphanage we call a ghetto is quite a routine

— Kendrick Lamar

While some black writers busied themselves grifting in the post-racial world, other black writers were filling the vacuum by writing gritty, salacious urban fiction about fast cars, drug dealers, and women full of aspiration who were not afraid to use sex or guns to achieve their ends. These books — often busy with crime, light on plot, and initially messy with copy errors — are written by authors all too happy to be what Jonathan Franzen has called a “contract writer.” Utterly disinterested in mining any “discourse of genius and art-historical importance,” they instead “provide words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience.” It is a business that has become so lucrative, so popular, that urban fiction authors such as Sister Souljah and Teri Woods have each sold close to a million copies of their books. Woods’s self-owned publishing company has grossed $10 million dollars since 2001, and eyeing her success, Borders Bookstore signed a deal to spotlight her imprint nationwide in their stores. These authors are no longer marginal influences. They are so mainstream that companies like Atria, Simon & Schuster, and St. Martins Press have signed some of them to six-figure, three-book deals. When asked to explain the success of her book Dutch, Teri Woods would tell Salon, “You want me to tell you why that book sells so well? Because Dutch is what every black man feels right now. Go to traffic court, dude. Go to criminal court — it’s fucking disgusting! It seems like white life is excusable, and black life is intolerable. […] I’m like this far away from injustice. I’m not going to let it go. […] It needs to be aired out.” In a time when no one was supposed to be angry, no one was supposed to look back, there were still millions of readers who seemed to think differently.

As some literary black authors struggled to find a culture of readers who looked like them, their would-be readers seemed to be thinking the inverse of the question: where are the literary writers who are writing stories that sound like mine? The post-racial generation had created their own disconnect, and the authors of urban fiction were vampiristic. They saw a void and filled it — cheaply, but they filled it. They became the writers who were still speaking to black and Latino Americans who were slipping through the cracks, a group of people the new literary generation seemed reluctant to acknowledge as an audience or as subjects. And their failure to do so is what makes work that deeply and realistically deals with class (like the fiction of Z.Z. Packer, Junot Díaz, Edward P. Jones, the reporting of Jelani Cobb, the early music journalism of writers like Bonz Malone and Touré, the theoretical work of Tricia Rose and Greg Tate, and the poetry of Thomas Sayers Ellis and Nikky Finney) so necessary — and it is also why Lamar’s project is more relevant than ever.

What am I to do when every neighborhood is an obstacle
When 2 niggas making it out had never sounded logical
3 niggas making it out, that’s mission impossible

— Kendrick Lamar  

In 1992, David Foster Wallace coauthored with Mark Costello one of the finest essays ever written about rap music, Signifying Rappers. I’d like to cite it all but I will make do with this paragraph:

Our opinion, then, from a distance: not only is a serious rap serious poetry, but, in terms of the size of its audience, its potency in the great 80s Market, its power to spur and to authorize the artistic endeavors of a discouraged and malschooled young urban youth culture we’ve been encouraged sadly to write off, it’s quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today. “Real” (viz. academic) U.S. poetry, a world no less insular than rap, no less strange or stringent about vocab, manner, and the contexts it works off, has today become so inbred and (against its professed wishes) inaccessible that it just doesn’t get to share its creative products with more than a couple thousand fanatical, sandal-shod readers, doesn’t get to move or inform more than a fraction of that readership […] Because of rap’s meteoric rise, though, you’ve got poor kids, tough kids, “underachievers,” a “lost generation” … more young people — ostensibly forever turned off “language” by TV, video games and low U.S.D.E. budgets — more of these kids hunched over notebooks on their own time, trying to put words together in striking and creative ways, than the U.S.A has probably ever had at one time.

Although more than 20 years have passed since they published that essay, I imagine that Kendrick Lamar’s magpie, bibliographic mind and his anxiety-ridden prodigiousness would excite David Foster Wallace. Kendrick Lamar was born in 1987 in Compton, California, by parents who had migrated west from Chicago. The year after his birth was considered to be the golden year of hip-hop: Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, and Big Daddy Kane all released albums that are now considered classics. In Los Angeles, N.W.A released Straight Outta Compton. It begins: “When something happens in South Central, Los Angeles, nothin’ happens, it’s just another nigga dead.”

In the spring of that year, 1988, The New York Times sent Robert Reinhold into Los Angeles County, the gang capital of the nation. He reported back, “In L.A. County there are about 70,000 gang members, including the ‘wannabes’ and ‘gonnabes,’ the prepubescent boys awaiting initiation, which sometimes requires a drive-by murder. During the first four months of this year, there were 109 gang-related killings in the country, many of the victims innocent bystanders.” South Los Angeles, nestled under the Hollywood sign and fawning palms, just miles from Sunset Boulevard, with its pastel, stucco bungalows and Spanish tiles, was once middle-class, but the clenches of post–World War II unemployment, white flight, heavy-handed police profiling and harassment and the rise and execution of black power movements in the 1970s, had seen a cluster of neighborhoods produce young men who were not only destitute but also disillusioned. They were young men who saw no reason not to vivisect their cities into elaborate codes of customs and colors, or a cycle of gang violence that turned their city into a warzone.

To listen to Kendrick Lamar is to hear a hope chest of these voices unleashed; they are his arsenal, and because he has lived near them and collected and stored them all, he has become their imperator. At times Lamar laments that he is not a better solider. But what Lamar does differently is to tell us of what it means to grow up as an observer and witness to an under-discussed inner-city war, while remaining for the most part uninterested in joining the battle. He instead sings a tender blues for the permanently underclass.

Good kid m.A.A.d city is a memento mori haunted by dead and living ghosts. It is constructed out of them: there are old messages left by his mother and his father on his phone warning Lamar to focus, to come home, to stay out of trouble. There are the vivid images clipped from his childhood in Los Angeles: that the one in front of the gun lives forever, bodies on top of bodies, Pirus, Crips, Rosecrans, Warriors, Techs, AKs, Leadshowers, Dunk!, Homies, Drank, Church’s Chicken, Steppin’, Bible Study, Red and Blue, Racial Profile, Bullets, The Hood, a smart boy as a human sacrifice. When they are pieced together as a sequence they act like Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope: they give us the impression that from these clips we are watching a black boy learn to fly above it all.

 

Because Kendrick Lamar has exploded into the stratosphere of hip-hop and there are no fans as adoring and passionate as real hip-hop fans, there are dozens of video clips of him small-talking all over the Internet. Kendrick Lamar is sitting on a couch, he is wearing a white shirt, and there is a faint part cut into his hair; he looks younger than he is. He is bashful, like he is uncomfortable or unfamiliar with doing interviews, or maybe it is just difficult to talk to strangers about your dreams and the astrological signs your mother taught you to interpret. Kendrick Lamar is doing one of his favorite things: alluding to Tupac, connecting himself to him in emotional ways, in statements that seem to be part business savvy — torch-carrying but, more so, hip-hop emo.

It’s a crazy true story, actually. You know one of them things when you really delirious in your sleep? It’s a real situation where I was sleeping one night and a silhouette [came] and he said, “Keep doing what you doing, don’t let my music die.” The shit scared the shit out of me! Just off the fact that prior to that, a day before, my mom [said], “You know, you and Tupac, y’all like days apart, y’all birthdays.” I never knew that shit, that’s some wild shit. Once she said that shit — and I’m really big on shit like that — somebody comes in your dreams and relays a message, you gotta listen to it because I’ve got past family relatives that’s been coming to my dreams forever and been talking to me.

When Tupac died, many people mourned his physical body, his music, his energy, his muscles, and his doe-eyes rimmed with long lashes, and he did indeed look like a poet. Nowadays, people like to call Biggie and Tupac hip-hop’s Keats, our Lord Byron or whatever, as if we must be tied to the West to be of relatable, understandable value, but Keats didn’t get shot at a stoplight, so the connection doesn’t quite capture it, does it? Now that Tupac is gone, we always hear about his expansive book collection, how he was named after an indigenous Peruvian leader who fought against Spain’s colonial grip; we connect this to his complicated but powerful mother and his stepfather Mutulu Shakur who was a revolutionary fighter, now imprisoned for life. We take these things to mean that Tupac was born with difference and greatness in him. We don’t have any royal families, so we respect this lineage. We still wonder who he would have become. What we are mourning most of all though was the abbreviation of his possible greatness. We see the way that kids in developing countries and despots in Russia look to him for strength because his voice had so much velocity that it seems to still boom from the afterlife. It is not that Tupac was the most lyrical; instead, he had dimension in his stories — they weren’t all arty-farty, nor were they all leathered in toughness and street life. He too was shell-shocked, a writer, a man divided up among many loyalties, a livewire. Only our parents thought the Thug Life tattooed on his abdomen had much to do with bullets and the flimsy glory found in a gun. Tupac was the original good kid in the mad city, the most compelling one we might ever see. And the Thug Life tattoo on Tupac’s stomach just seemed like a reminder to stay liberated, unchecked, free. Tupac had wisely disavowed himself of the cruel optimism that seems to blind much of black literature of today. Lauren Berlant described cruel optimism as when “a desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” Acceptance. Respectability. Post-ness. It is not that those desires are misguided or wrong, but I challenge you to name another black man who presents a more respectable image than Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He is a bespectacled, distinguished professor at Harvard, hosts a TV show on PBS, and is nicknamed Skip. And yet, for all of that, for all of the 40 million different ways of being black, now in his emeritus, Skip Gates, Jr. on his own porch, was stopped by a cop, and the professor almost went the way of so many overpoliced men of color. Kendrick Lamar might intend to keep the music alive but what Lamar channels most of all from Tupac is the understanding that there is no making sense of this nonsense. It is a blues: near-tragic, near-comic, and it can make one anxious, oppositional, or emotional. So here is another clip: Tupac Amaru Shakur, with his red T-shirt raised to show his bare-chest, turns towards the cameras following him and spits mouthfuls of water on them and their cameramen. He saunters off. He slides into the passenger side of a SUV. He is surrounded by a frantic entourage. He smiles. Teeth all megawatt. As the trunk pulls off, he leans out of the window to shout, “Have a good summer.” He is laughing. He seems to live forever. Thug Life.

Shortly after the Watts riots, Guy Debord wrote about them:

Los Angeles blacks are better paid than any others in the United States, but they are also the most separated from the California superopulence that is flaunted all around them. Hollywood, the pole of the global spectacle, is right next door. They are promised that, with patience, they will join in America’s prosperity, but they come to see that this prosperity is not a fixed state but an endless ladder. The higher they climb, the farther they get from the top, because they start off disadvantaged, because they are less qualified and thus more numerous among the unemployed, and finally because the hierarchy that crushes them is not based on economic buying power alone: they are also treated as inherently inferior in every area of daily life by the customs and prejudices of a society in which all human power is based on buying power. Just as the human riches of the American blacks are despised and treated as criminal, monetary riches will never make them completely acceptable in America’s alienated society: individual wealth will only make a rich nigger because blacks as a whole must represent poverty in a society of hierarchized wealth. Every witness noted the cry proclaiming the global significance of the uprising: “This is a black revolution and we want the world to know it!” Freedom Now is the password of all the revolutions of history, but now for the first time the problem is not to overcome scarcity, but to master material abundance according to new principles. Mastering abundance is not just changing the way it is shared out, but totally reorienting it. This is the first step of a vast, all-embracing struggle.

I’m trying to keep it alive and not compromise the feeling we love
You trying to keep it deprived and only cosign what radio does
And I’m looking right past ya
We live in a world, we live in a world on two different axles
You live in a world, you living behind the mirror
I know what you scared of, the feeling of feeling emotions inferior
This shit is vital, I know you had to
This shit is vital, I know you had to
Die in a pitiful vain, tell me a watch and a chain
Is way more believable, give me a feasible gain

— Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar is close enough to Watts in proximity to understand its despair, close enough to the civil disobedience of the 1992 riots to understand their rage, to understand that there is no exit. He is young enough to idolize the golden age of hip-hop, innocent enough to engage in shameless hero worship, a fan enough to put Mary J. Blige and MC Eiht on his album. But he is also old enough to know that nobody followed Tupac’s body to the morgue. That a bullet fractured one of Tupac’s fingers, fingers often used to so brazenly flip off the world. Lamar is wise enough to know that, in hip-hop, the jig is up on a lot of things (overstated capitalism, the battering of women), and he isn’t flashy — he calls himself the black hippie. His abundance is his talent. And yet, because of his murdered uncle, his fretful grandmother, and the gang-raped girl whose voice he occupies in the same way De La Soul did Millie’s, Lamar is not just a wandering preacher in town to be angry at the locals and their chaos. Nor is he salaciously telling their stories, hoping to give people an angry crime fantasy so that he can bait and hook anyone who is susceptible. It is not that Lamar’s album is perfect, either. At times it is uneven: the song with Drake is annoyingly schmaltzy. But Kendrick Lamar has made a third way, and by the end of his album, one cannot help but feel excited for him.

His tone at the end of the album is remarkably similar to that of a young Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice, recalling a day in 1965 when Cleaver, locked up in Folsom Prison, watched:

[A] group of low riders from Watts assembled on the basketball court. They were wearing jubilant, triumphant smiles, animated by a vicarious spirit by which they, too, were in the thick of the uprising taking place hundreds of miles away to the south in the Watts ghetto.

“Man,” said one, “what they doing out there? Break it down for me, Baby.”

“Baby,” he said, “They walking in fours and kicking in doors, dropping Reds and busting heads; drinking wine and committing crime, shooting and looting; high-siding and low-riding, setting fires and slashing tires; turning over cars and burning down bars; making Parker mad and making me glad; putting an end to that ‘go slow’ crap and putting sweet Watts on the map — my black ass is in Folsom this morning but my black heart is in Watts!”

Tears of joy were rolling from his eyes. It was a cleansing, revolutionary laugh we all shared, something we have not often had occasion for.

¤

The songs and speeches below were inspiration for this piece. Across forms, decades, they all evidence the certain qualities that make Lamar and his generation so exciting to me: tenderness, pride, dissatisfaction, brilliance, and such serious innovation.

 

 

African Americans and

the US Penal System

Posted on June 25, 2012 by blackatlanticresource 

Trayvon Martin’s fatal shooting in late February 2012 has sparked off a whole host of debates around the problematic relationship of African-Americans to the US penal system in the popular media. Yet this has long been a contentious issue leading many to draw parallels between the contemporary treatment and incarceration rates, particularly of African-American men in the US, and former explicit regimes of discrimination in that country such as Jim Crow and Slavery. Such comparisons led one online blogger to claim that more black men are in prison today than enslaved in 1850, while there have also been a host of good academic studies in this area such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness – summarized via Worldcat.org as:

“…the book Lani Guinier calls “brave and bold,” and Pulitzer Prize-winner David Levering Lewis calls “stunning,” … In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet, as legal star Michelle Alexander reveals, today it is perfectly legal to discriminate.”

In relation to this Angelina Matson and the design team at Criminolgy.com created the graphic below illustrating case-by-case examinations of police brutality, for more information about this graphic click here:

Created by: Criminology.com