EVENT: Brooklyn, New York—"Celebration of the Word" - You're Invited!!!

Celebration of the Word

Eleven storytellers, novelists, poets & spoken word artists  

from seven countries in 

an evening of letters, lyrics and ol' talk

Poets & Passion - A Caribbean Literary Lime

5 Years - Tellin We Own Story

Honorary Benefit Chairperson

Hon. Una Clarke

 

Patrons

State Senator Keven Parker     Assembly Member N. Nick Perry     Council Member Mathieu Eugene 

  

Honorees  

Donna Primus Fleming - former Director, Caribbean Literary & Cultural Center - Brooklyn Public Library

Christopher Gibbons - former Director, Office of Special Events, St Francis College

Clover Hall, Ed.D. - Vice President, Institutional Research & Academic Planning, St. John's University

Robert Antoni  

(Bahamas)

Cheryl Boyce Taylor  

(Trinidad & Tobago)

Merle Collins  

(Grenada)

Jacinth Henry-Martin  

(St. Kitts-Nevis)

Marlon James  

(Jamaica)

Anton Nimblett  

(Trinidad & Tobago)

Elizabeth Nunez  

(Trinidad & Tobago)

Ras Oosagefo  

(Jamaica)

Yolaine St. Fort  

(Haiti)

Everton Sylvester  

(Jamaica)

Tiphanie Yanique  

(Virgin Islands)

Poets & Passion - A Caribbean Literary Lime

5 Years - Tellin We Own Story

Honorary Benefit Chairperson

Hon. Una Clarke

 

Patrons

State Senator Keven Parker     Assembly Member N. Nick Perry     Council Member Mathieu Eugene 

  

Honorees  

Donna Primus Fleming - former Director, Caribbean Literary & Cultural Center - Brooklyn Public Library

Christopher Gibbons - former Director, Office of Special Events, St Francis College

Clover Hall, Ed.D. - Vice President, Institutional Research & Academic Planning, St. John's University

 Sunday, June 12, 2011.  5:00PM

  

St. Francis College

182 Remsen Street (between Clinton & Court Sts), Brooklyn, New York 11217   

map 

 

  $35.00, $55.00; $150.00  

Information/Reservation
Caribbean Cultural Theatre: 718-783-8345 / 917-202-0696 / 646-626-9412
/ 718-462-6508
Theatermania.com: 212-352-3101
Join Our Mailing List
Forward to a Friend

Poets & Passions was designed for lovers of the magic of the written word. The program is a mix of literary salon with critically acclaimed, award-winning featured writers, emerging talents, open mic performances, electrifying spoken word artists and stimulating discussion that positions the writer's work as part of a larger conversation on identity, aspiration, heritage and the immigrant experience. 

Caribbean Cultural Theatre is a theatrical immersion experience presenting the work of Caribbean based and/or influenced writers, performers and other practitioners that both entertains and enlightens, and honours a balanced rendering of Caribbean culture and the Caribbean-American experience.

 

 

The Caribbean Cultural Theatre is a registered 501-c-3 tax exempt organization.  All contributions are tax deductible to the extent permitted by applicable laws.    

 

INTERVIEW: Ralph Ellison - The Art of Fiction No. 8 > Paris Review

Ralph Ellison,

The Art of Fiction No. 8

Interviewed by Alfred Chester & Vilma Howard

 

When Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s first novel, received the National Book Award for 1953, the author in his acceptance speech noted with dismay and gratification the conferring of the award to what he called an “attempt at a major novel.” His gratification was understandable, so too his dismay when one considers the amount of objectivity Mr. Ellison can display toward his own work. He felt the state of United States fiction to be so unhappy that it was an “attempt” rather than an achievement which received the important award.

Many of us will disagree with Mr. Ellison’s evaluation of his own work. Its crackling, brilliant, sometimes wild, but always controlled prose warrants this; so does the care and logic with which its form is revealed, and not least its theme: that of a young negro who emerges from the South and—in the tradition of James’s Hyacinth Robinson and Stendhal’s Julien Sorel—moves into the adventure of life at large.

In the summer of 1954, Mr. Ellison came abroad to travel and lecture. His visit ended in Paris where for a very few weeks he mingled with the American expatriate group to whom his work was known and of much interest. The day before he left he talked to us in the Café de la Mairie du VIe about art and the novel.

Ralph Ellison takes both art and the novel seriously. And the Café de la Mairie has a tradition of seriousness behind it, for here was written Djuna Barnes’s spectacular novel, Nightwood. There is a tradition, too, of speech and eloquence, for Miss Barnes’s hero, Dr. O’Connor, often drew a crowd of listeners to his mighty rhetoric. So here gravity is in the air, and rhetoric too. While Mr. Ellison speaks, he rarely pauses, and although the strain of organizing his thought is sometimes evident, his phraseology and the quiet, steady flow and development of ideas are overwhelming. To listen to him is rather like sitting in the back of a huge hall and feeling the lecturer’s faraway eyes staring directly into your own. The highly emphatic, almost professorial intonations, startle with their distance, self-confidence, and warm undertones of humor.

 

RALPH ELLISON

Let me say right now that my book is not an autobiographical work.

INTERVIEWER

You weren’t thrown out of school like the boy in your novel?

ELLISON

No. Though, like him, I went from one job to another.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you give up music and begin writing?

ELLISON

I didn’t give up music, but I became interested in writing through incessant reading. In 1935 I discovered Eliot’s The Waste Land, which moved and intrigued me but defied my powers of analysis—such as they were—and I wondered why I had never read anything of equal intensity and sensibility by an American Negro writer. Later on, in New York, I read a poem by Richard Wright, who, as luck would have it, came to town the next week. He was editing a magazine called New Challenge and asked me to try a book review of Waters E. Turpin’s These Low Grounds. On the basis of this review, Wright suggested that I try a short story, which I did. I tried to use my knowledge of riding freight trains. He liked the story well enough to accept it, and it got as far as the galley proofs when it was bumped from the issue because there was too much material. Just after that the magazine failed.

INTERVIEWER

But you went on writing—

ELLISON

With difficulty, because this was the recession of 1937. I went to Dayton, Ohio, where my brother and I hunted and sold game to earn a living. At night I practiced writing and studied Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Stein, and Hemingway. Especially Hemingway; I read him to learn his sentence structure and how to organize a story. I guess many young writers were doing this, but I also used his description of hunting when I went into the fields the next day. I had been hunting since I was eleven, but no one had broken down the process of wing-shooting for me, and it was from reading Hemingway that I learned to lead a bird. When he describes something in print, believe him; believe him even when he describes the process of art in terms of baseball or boxing; he’s been there.

INTERVIEWER

Were you affected by the social realism of the period?

ELLISON

I was seeking to learn and social realism was a highly regarded theory, though I didn’t think too much of the so-called proletarian fiction even when I was most impressed by Marxism. I was intrigued by Malraux, who at that time was being claimed by the Communists. I noticed, however, that whenever the heroes of Man’s Fate regarded their condition during moments of heightened self-consciousness, their thinking was something other than Marxist. Actually they were more profoundly intellectual than their real-life counterparts. Of course, Malraux was more of a humanist than most of the Marxist writers of that period—and also much more of an artist. He was the artist-revolutionary rather than a politician when he wrote Man’s Fate, and the book lives not because of a political position embraced at the time but because of its larger concern with the tragic struggle of humanity. Most of the social realists of the period were concerned less with tragedy than with injustice. I wasn’t, and am not, primarily concerned with injustice, but with art.

INTERVIEWER

Then you consider your novel a purely literary work as opposed to one in the tradition of social protest.

ELLISON

Now, mind, I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial—all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain? One hears a lot of complaints about the so-called protest novel, especially when written by Negroes, but it seems to me that the critics could more accurately complain about the lack of craftsmanship and the provincialism which is typical of such works.

INTERVIEWER

But isn’t it going to be difficult for the Negro writer to escape provincialism when his literature is concerned with a minority?

ELLISON

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel—and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?—is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.

INTERVIEWER

But still, how is the Negro writer, in terms of what is expected of him by critics and readers, going to escape his particular need for social protest and reach the “universal” you speak of?

ELLISON

If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what is expected of him, he’s lost the battle before he takes the field. I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance—but it must be acceptance on his own terms. Perhaps, though, this thing cuts both ways: the Negro novelist draws his blackness too tightly around him when he sits down to write—that’s what the antiprotest critics believe—but perhaps the white reader draws his whiteness around himself when he sits down to read. He doesn’t want to identify himself with Negro characters in terms of our immediate racial and social situation, though on the deeper human level identification can become compelling when the situation is revealed artistically. The white reader doesn’t want to get too close, not even in an imaginary recreation of society. Negro writers have felt this, and it has led to much of our failure.

Too many books by Negro writers are addressed to a white audience. By doing this the authors run the risk of limiting themselves to the audience’s presumptions of what a Negro is or should be; the tendency is to become involved in polemics, to plead the Negro’s humanity. You know, many white people question that humanity, but I don’t think that Negroes can afford to indulge in such a false issue. For us, the question should be, what are the specific forms of that humanity, and what in our background is worth preserving or abandoning. The clue to this can be found in folklore, which offers the first drawings of any group’s character. It preserves mainly those situations which have repeated themselves again and again in the history of any given group. It describes those rites, manners, customs, and so forth, which insure the good life, or destroy it; and it describes those boundaries of feeling, thought, and action which that particular group has found to be the limitation of the human condition. It projects this wisdom in symbols which express the group’s will to survive; it embodies those values by which the group lives and dies. These drawings may be crude, but they are nonetheless profound in that they represent the group’s attempt to humanize the world. It’s no accident that great literature, the product of individual artists, is erected upon this humble base. The hero of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and the hero of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” appear in their rudimentary forms far back in Russian folklore. French literature has never ceased exploring the nature of the Frenchman. Or take Picasso—

INTERVIEWER

How does Picasso fit into all this?

ELLISON

Why, he’s the greatest wrestler with forms and techniques of them all. Just the same, he’s never abandoned the old symbolic forms of Spanish art: the guitar, the bull, daggers, women, shawls, veils, mirrors. Such symbols serve a dual function: they allow the artist to speak of complex experiences and to annihilate time with simple lines and curves; and they allow the viewer an orientation, both emotional and associative, which goes so deep that a total culture may resound in a simple rhythm, an image. It has been said that Escudero could recapitulate the history and spirit of the Spanish dance with a simple arabesque of his fingers.

INTERVIEWER

But these are examples from homogeneous cultures. How representative of the American nation would you say Negro folklore is?

ELLISON

The history of the American Negro is a most intimate part of American history. Through the very process of slavery came the building of the United States. Negro folklore, evolving within a larger culture which regarded it as inferior, was an especially courageous expression. It announced the Negro’s willingness to trust his own experience, his own sensibilities as to the definition of reality, rather than allow his masters to define these crucial matters for him. His experience is that of America and the West, and is as rich a body of experience as one would find anywhere. We can view it narrowly as something exotic, folksy, or “low-down,” or we may identify ourselves with it and recognize it as an important segment of the larger American experience—not lying at the bottom of it, but intertwined, diffused in its very texture. I can’t take this lightly or be impressed by those who cannot see its importance; it is important to me. One ironic witness to the beauty and the universality of this art is the fact that the descendants of the very men who enslaved us can now sing the spirituals and find in the singing an exaltation of their own humanity. Just take a look at some of the slave songs, blues, folk ballads; their possibilities for the writer are infinitely suggestive. Some of them have named human situations so well that a whole corps of writers could not exhaust their universality. For instance, here’s an old slave verse:

     Ole Aunt Dinah, she’s just like me

     She work so hard she want to be free

     But ole Aunt Dinah’s gittin’ kinda ole

     She’s afraid to go to Canada on account of the cold.

 

     Ole Uncle Jack, now he’s a mighty “good nigger”

     You tell him that you want to be free for a fac’

     Next thing you know they done stripped the skin off your back.

 

     Now ole Uncle Ned, he want to be free

     He found his way north by the moss on the tree

     He cross that river floating in a tub

     The patateroller* give him a mighty close rub.

It’s crude, but in it you have three universal attitudes toward the problem of freedom. You can refine it and sketch in the psychological subtleties and historical and philosophical allusions, action and whatnot, but I don’t think its basic definition can be exhausted. Perhaps some genius could do as much with it as Mann has done with the Joseph story.

INTERVIEWER

Can you give us an example of the use of folklore in your own novel?

ELLISON

Well, there are certain themes, symbols, and images which are based on folk material. For example, there is the old saying among Negroes: If you’re black, stay back; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re white, you’re right. And there is the joke Negroes tell on themselves about their being so black they can’t be seen in the dark. In my book this sort of thing was merged with the meanings which blackness and light have long had in Western mythology: evil and goodness, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. In my novel the narrator’s development is one through blackness to light; that is, from ignorance to enlightenment, invisibility to visibility. He leaves the South and goes North; this, as you will notice in reading Negro folk tales, is always the road to freedom—the movement upward. You have the same thing again when he leaves his underground cave for the open.

It took me a long time to learn how to adapt such examples of myth into my work—also ritual. The use of ritual is equally a vital part of the creative process. I learned a few things from Eliot, Joyce and Hemingway, but not how to adapt them. When I started writing, I knew that in both “The Waste Land” and Ulysses, ancient myth and ritual were used to give form and significance to the material; but it took me a few years to realize that the myths and rites which we find functioning in our everyday lives could be used in the same way. In my first attempt at a novel, which I was unable to complete, I began by trying to manipulate the simple structural unities of beginning, middle, and end, but when I attempted to deal with the psychological strata—the images, symbols, and emotional configurations—of the experience at hand, I discovered that the unities were simply cool points of stability on which one could suspend the narrative line, and that beneath the surface of apparently rational human relationships there seethed a chaos before which I was helpless. People rationalize what they shun or are incapable of dealing with; these superstitions and their rationalizations become ritual as they govern behavior. The rituals become social forms, and it is one of the functions of the artist to recognize them and raise them to the level of art.

I don’t know whether I’m getting this over or not. Let’s put it this way: Take the “Battle Royal” passage in my novel, where the boys are blindfolded and forced to fight each other for the amusement of the white observers. This is a vital part of behavior pattern in the South, which both Negroes and whites thoughtlessly accept. It is a ritual in preservation of caste lines, a keeping of taboo to appease the gods and ward off bad luck. It is also the initiation ritual to which all greenhorns are subjected. This passage states what Negroes will see I did not have to invent; the patterns were already there in society so that all I had to do was present them in a broader context of meaning. In any society there are many rituals of situation which, for the most part, go unquestioned. They can be simple or elaborate, but they are the connective tissue between the work of art and the audience.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think a reader unacquainted with this folklore can properly understand your work?

ELLISON

Yes, I think so. It’s like jazz; there’s no inherent problem which prohibits understanding but the assumptions brought to it. We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even “Little Red Riding Hood.” The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life. I noticed, incidentally, that the Germans, having no special caste assumptions concerning American Negroes, dealt with my work simply as a novel. I think the Americans will come to view it that way in twenty years—if it’s around that long.

INTERVIEWER

Don’t you think it will be?

ELLISON

I doubt it. It’s not an important novel. I failed of eloquence and many of the immediate issues are rapidly fading away. If it does last, it will be simply because there are things going on in its depth that are of more permanent interest than on its surface. I hope so, anyway.

INTERVIEWER

Have the critics given you any constructive help in your writing, or changed in any way your aims in fiction?

ELLISON

No, except that I have a better idea of how the critics react, of what they see and fail to see, of how their sense of life differs with mine and mine with theirs. In some instances they were nice for the wrong reasons. In the U.S.—and I don’t want this to sound like an apology for my own failures—some reviewers did not see what was before them because of this nonsense about protest.

INTERVIEWER

Did the critics change your view of yourself as a writer?

ELLISON

I can’t say that they did. I’ve been seeing by my own candle too long for that. The critics did give me a sharper sense of a larger audience, yes; and some convinced me that they were willing to judge me in terms of my writing rather than in terms of my racial identity. But there is one widely syndicated critical bankrupt who made liberal noises during the thirties and has been frightened ever since. He attacked my book as a “literary race riot.” By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.

INTERVIEWER

When did you begin Invisible Man?

ELLISON

In the summer of 1945. I had returned from the sea, ill, with advice to get some rest. Part of my illness was due, no doubt, to the fact that I had not been able to write a novel for which I’d received a Rosenwald Fellowship the previous winter. So on a farm in Vermont, where I was reading The Hero by Lord Raglan and speculating on the nature of Negro leadership in the U.S., I wrote the first paragraph of Invisible Man, and was soon involved in the struggle of creating the novel.

INTERVIEWER

How long did it take you to write it?

ELLISON

Five years with one year out for a short novel which was unsatisfactory, ill-conceived, and never submitted for publication.

INTERVIEWER

Did you have everything thought out before you began to write Invisible Man?

ELLISON

The symbols and their connections were known to me. I began it with a chart of the three-part division. It was a conceptual frame with most of the ideas and some incidents indicated. The three parts represent the narrator’s movement from, using Kenneth Burke’s terms, purpose to passion to perception. These three major sections are built up of smaller units of three which mark the course of the action and which depend for their development upon what I hoped was a consistent and developing motivation. However, you’ll note that the maximum insight on the hero’s part isn’t reached until the final section. After all, it’s a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality. Each section begins with a sheet of paper; each piece of paper is exchanged for another and contains a definition of his identity, or the social role he is to play as defined for him by others. But all say essentially the same thing: “Keep this nigger boy running.” Before he could have some voice in his own destiny, he had to discard these old identities and illusions; his enlightenment couldn’t come until then. Once he recognizes the hole of darkness into which these papers put him, he has to burn them. That’s the plan and the intention; whether I achieved this is something else.

INTERVIEWER

Would you say that the search for identity is primarily an American theme?

ELLISON

It is the American theme. The nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are. It is still a young society, and this is an integral part of its development.

INTERVIEWER

A common criticism of first novels is that the central incident is either omitted or weak. Invisible Man seems to suffer here; shouldn’t we have been present at the scenes which are the dividing lines in the book—namely, when the Brotherhood organization moves the narrator downtown, then back uptown?

ELLISON

I think you missed the point. The major flaw in the hero’s character is his unquestioning willingness to do what is required of him by others as a way to success, and this was the specific form of his “innocence.” He goes where he is told to go; he does what he is told to do; he does not even choose his Brotherhood name. It is chosen for him and he accepts it. He has accepted party discipline and thus cannot be present at the scene since it is not the will of the Brotherhood leaders. What is important is not the scene but his failure to question their decision. There is also the fact that no single person can be everywhere at once, nor can a single consciousness be aware of all the nuances of a large social action. What happens uptown while he is downtown is part of his darkness, both symbolic and actual. No, I don’t feel that any vital scenes have been left out.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you find it necessary to shift styles throughout the book; particularly in the prologue and epilogue?

ELLISON

The prologue was written afterwards, really—in terms of a shift in the hero’s point of view. I wanted to throw the reader off balance—make him accept certain non-naturalistic effects. It was really a memoir written underground, and I wanted a foreshadowing through which I hoped the reader would view the actions which took place in the main body of the book. For another thing, the styles of life presented are different. In the South, where he was trying to fit into a traditional pattern and where his sense of certainty had not yet been challenged, I felt a more naturalistic treatment was adequate. The college trustee’s speech to the students is really an echo of a certain kind of Southern rhetoric and I enjoyed trying to recreate it. As the hero passes from the South to the North, from the relatively stable to the swiftly changing, his sense of certainty is lost and the style becomes expressionistic. Later on during his fall from grace in the Brotherhood it becomes somewhat surrealistic. The styles try to express both his state of consciousness and the state of society. The epilogue was necessary to complete the action begun when he set out to write his memoirs.

INTERVIEWER

After four hundred pages you still felt the epilogue was necessary?

ELLISON

Yes. Look at it this way. The book is a series of reversals. It is the portrait of the artist as a rabble-rouser, thus the various mediums of expression. In the epilogue the hero discovers what he had not discovered throughout the book: you have to make your own decisions; you have to think for yourself. The hero comes up from underground because the act of writing and thinking necessitated it. He could not stay down there.

INTERVIEWER

You say that the book is “a series of reversals.” It seemed to us that this was a weakness, that it was built on a series of provocative situations which were canceled by the calling up of conventional emotions.

ELLISON

I don’t quite see what you mean.

INTERVIEWER

Well, for one thing, you begin with a provocative situation of the American Negro’s status in society. The responsibility for this is that of the white American citizen; that’s where the guilt lies. Then you cancel it by introducing the Communist Party, or the Brotherhood, so that the reader tends to say to himself, Ah, they’re the guilty ones. They’re the ones who mistreat him, not us.

ELLISON

I think that’s a case of misreading. And I didn’t identify the Brotherhood as the C.P., but since you do, I’ll remind you that they too are white. The hero’s invisibility is not a matter of being seen, but a refusal to run the risk of his own humanity, which involves guilt. This is not an attack upon white society! It is what the hero refuses to do in each section which leads to further action. He must assert and achieve his own humanity; he cannot run with the pack and do this—this is the reason for all the reversals. The epilogue is the most final reversal of all; therefore it is a necessary statement.

INTERVIEWER

And the love affairs—or almost love affairs—

ELLISON

I’m glad you put it that way. The point is that when thrown into a situation which he thinks he wants, the hero is sometimes thrown at a loss; he doesn’t know how to act. After he had made this speech about the Place of the Woman in Our Society, for example, and was approached by one of the women in the audience, he thought she wanted to talk about the Brotherhood and found that she wanted to talk about brother-and-sisterhood. Look, didn’t you find the book at all funny? I felt that such a man as this character would have been incapable of a love affair; it would have been inconsistent with his personality.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any difficulty controlling your characters? E. M. Forster says that he sometimes finds a character running away with him.

ELLISON

No, because I find that a sense of the ritual understructure of the fiction helps to guide the creation of characters. Action is the thing. We are what we do and do not do. The problem for me is to get from A to B to C. My anxiety about transitions greatly prolonged the writing of my book. The naturalists stick to case histories and sociology and are willing to compete with the camera and the tape recorder. I despise concreteness in writing, but when reality is deranged in fiction, one must worry about the seams.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have difficulty turning real characters into fiction?

ELLISON

Real characters are just a limitation. It’s like turning your own life into fiction: you have to be hindered by chronology and fact. A number of the characters just jumped out, like Rinehart and Ras.

INTERVIEWER

Isn’t Ras based on Marcus Garvey?

ELLISON

No. In 1950 my wife and I were staying at a vacation spot where we met some white liberals who thought the best way to be friendly was to tell us what it was like to be Negro. I got mad at hearing this from people who otherwise seemed very intelligent. I had already sketched Ras, but the passion of his statement came out after I went upstairs that night feeling that we needed to have this thing out once and for all and get it done with; then we could go on living like people and individuals. No conscious reference to Garvey is intended.

INTERVIEWER

What about Rinehart? Is he related to Rinehart in the blues tradition, or Django Reinhardt, the jazz musician?

ELLISON

There is a peculiar set of circumstances connected with my choice of that name. My old Oklahoma friend, Jimmy Rushing, the blues singer, used to sing one with a refrain that went:

Rinehart, Rinehart,

it’s so lonesome up here

on Beacon Hill,

which haunted me, and as I was thinking of a character who was a master of disguise, of coincidence, this name with its suggestion of inner and outer came to my mind. Later I learned that it was a call used by Harvard students when they prepared to riot, a call to chaos. Which is very interesting, because it is not long after Rinehart appears in my novel that the riot breaks out in Harlem. Rinehart is my name for the personification of chaos. He is also intended to represent America and change. He has lived so long with chaos that he knows how to manipulate it. It is the old theme of The Confidence Man. He is a figure in a country with no solid past or stable class lines; therefore he is able to move about easily from one to the other. . . .

You know, I’m still thinking of your question about the use of Negro experience as material for fiction. One function of serious literature is to deal with the moral core of a given society. Well, in the United States the Negro and his status have always stood for that moral concern. He symbolizes among other things the human and social possibility of equality. This is the moral question raised in our two great nineteenth-century novels, Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn. The very center of Twain’s book revolves finally around the boy’s relations with Nigger Jim and the question of what Huck should do about getting Jim free after the two scoundrels had sold him. There is a magic here worth conjuring, and that reaches to the very nerve of the American consciousness—so why should I abandon it? Our so-called race problem has now lined up with the world problems of colonialism and the struggle of the West to gain the allegiance of the remaining non-white people who have thus far remained outside the communist sphere; thus its possibilities for art have increased rather than lessened. Looking at the novelist as manipulator and depicter of moral problems, I ask myself how much of the achievement of democratic ideals in the U.S. has been affected by the steady pressure of Negroes and those whites who were sensitive to the implications of our condition, and I know that without that pressure the position of our country before the world would be much more serious than it is even now. Here is part of the social dynamics of a great society. Perhaps the discomfort about protest in books by Negro authors comes because since the nineteenth century, American literature has avoided profound moral searching. It was too painful and besides there were specific problems of language and form to which the writers could address themselves. They did wonderful things, but perhaps they left the real problems untouched. There are exceptions, of course, like Faulkner who has been working the great moral theme all along, taking it up where Mark Twain put it down.

I feel that with my decision to devote myself to the novel I took on one of the responsibilities inherited by those who practice the craft in the U.S.: that of describing for all that fragment of the huge diverse American experience which I know best, and which offers me the possibility of contributing not only to the growth of the literature but to the shaping of the culture as I should like it to be. The American novel is in this sense a conquest of the frontier; as it describes our experience, it creates it.

 

* patroller

 

 

VIDEO: Africa Unchained: "How I Came to Study Nuclear Physics at AIM's"-Buthaina Abdall Sulemian

"How I Came to Study

Nuclear Physics at AIM's"

—Buthaina Abdall Sulemian

 

From Next Einstein:
Born in Darfur and raised in Khartoum, Butheina's father wanted his only daughter to be an educated person. She went on to graduate from university with a degree in chemistry. At AIMS, she overcame several obstacles, and completed the year with a project in nuclear physics and now is getting her Masters in the same field.

 

 

 

 

VIDEO: Women Beyond War: A World March in Africa on Vimeo

WOMEN BEYOND WAR:

A WORLD MARCH IN AFRICA

WOMEN BEYOND WAR: A WORLD MARCH IN AFRICA

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo women are leading the campaign against violence and against the use of rape as a weapon of war.

From October 13-17, 2010, hundreds women gathered in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for the World March of Women. Two hundred and fifty representatives from 48 countries joined over a thousand delegates from the DRC to protest violence against women. Besides leading a massive march, participants formed panels to discuss economic empowerment, public service, and demilitarization. The event could not have been held in a more appropriate place. An estimated 1,000 rapes are committed every month in the DRC, and nearly 40 percent of the victims are under the age of 18. The use of rape as a weapon of war has tormented the women of DRC during the past decade and a half of civil conflict. However, women today are winning more through their mobilizing than ever before. In February 2011, thanks to the brave testimony of 49 women, a military court in eastern DRC for the first time convicted a commanding officer for mass rape and crimes against humanity. Eight other soldiers were also convicted and sentenced to more than 115 years in prison. Congolese women working with international solidarity groups are meeting with government officials to discuss ways to hold more military combatants accountable for their crimes. This short film captures the mood of the World March of Women and conveys the demands coming from women who have for too long borne the brunt of violent conflict.

 

OP-ED:Global capitalism and 21st century fascism > Al Jazeera English

Global capitalism and
21st century fascism
The global economic crisis and the attack on immigrant rights are bound together in a web of 21st century fascism.

 

Last Modified: 08 May 2011

The TCC has unloaded billions of dollars into food, energy and other global commodities in bond markets worldwide [GALLO/GETTY]

The crisis of global capitalism is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration, and the scale of the means of violence. We truly face a crisis of humanity. The stakes have never been higher; our very survival is at risk. We have entered into a period of great upheavals and uncertainties, of momentous changes, fraught with dangers - if also opportunities. 

I want to discuss here the crisis of global capitalism and the notion of distinct political responses to the crisis, with a focus on the far-right response and the danger of what I refer to as 21st century fascism, particularly in the United States.

Facing the crisis calls for an analysis of the capitalist system, which has undergone restructuring and transformation in recent decades. The current moment involves a qualitatively new transnational or global phase of world capitalism that can be traced back to the 1970s, and is characterised by the rise of truly transnational capital and a transnational capitalist class, or TCC. Transnational capital has been able to break free of nation-state constraints to accumulation beyond the previous epoch, and with it, to shift the correlation of class and social forces worldwide sharply in its favour - and to undercut the strength of popular and working class movements around the world, in the wake of the global rebellions of the 1960s and the 1970s.

Emergent transnational capital underwent a major expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, involving hyper-accumulation through new technologies such as computers and informatics, through neo-liberal policies, and through new modalities of mobilising and exploiting the global labour force - including a massive new round of primitive accumulation, uprooting, and displacing hundreds of millions of people - especially in the third world countryside, who have become internal and transnational migrants.

We face a system that is now much more integrated, and dominant groups that have accumulated an extraordinary amount of transnational power and control over global resources and institutions.

Militarised accumulation, financial speculation - and the sacking of public budgets

By the late 1990s, the system entered into chronic crisis. Sharp social polarisation and escalating inequality helped generate a deep crisis of over-accumulation. The extreme concentration of the planet's wealth in the hands of the few and the accelerated impoverishment, and dispossession of the majority, even forced participants in the 2011 World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos to acknowledge that the gap between the rich and the poor worldwide is "the most serious challenge in the world" and is "raising the spectre of worldwide instability and civil wars."

Global inequalities and the impoverishment of broad majorities mean that transnational capitals cannot find productive outlets to unload the enormous amounts of surplus it has accumulated. By the 21st century, the TCC turned to several mechanisms to sustain global accumulation, or profit making, in the face of this crisis.

One is militarised accumulation; waging wars and interventions that unleash cycles of destruction and reconstruction and generate enormous profits for an ever-expanding military-prison-industrial-security-financial complex. We are now living in a global war economy that goes well beyond such "hot wars" in Iraq or Afghanistan.

For instance, the war on immigrants in the United States and elsewhere, and more generally, repression of social movements and vulnerable populations, is an accumulation strategy independent of any political objectives. This war on immigrants is extremely profitable for transnational corporations. In the United States, the private immigrant prison-industrial complex is a boom industry. Undocumented immigrants constitute the fastest growing sector of the US prison population and are detained in private detention centres and deported by private companies contracted out by the US state.

It is no surprise that William Andrews, the CEO of the Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA - the largest private US contractor for immigrant detention centres - declared in 2008 that: "The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts … or through decriminalisation [of immigrants]." Nor is it any surprise that CCA and other corporations have financed the spate of neo-fascist anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona and other US states.

The passing of the anti-illegal immigrants law in Arizona sparked national protests and outrage [GALLO/GETTY]

A second mechanism is the raiding and sacking of public budgets. Transnational capital uses its financial power to take control of state finances and to impose further austerity on the working majority, resulting in ever greater social inequality and hardship. The TCC has used its structural power to accelerate the dismantling of what remains of the social wage and welfare states.

And a third is frenzied worldwide financial speculation - turning the global economy into a giant casino. The TCC has unloaded billions of dollars into speculation in the housing market, the food, energy and other global commodities markets, in bond markets worldwide (that is, public budgets and state finances), and into every imaginable "derivative", ranging from hedge funds to swaps, futures markets, collateralised debt obligations, asset pyramiding, and ponzi schemes. The 2008 collapse of the global financial system was merely the straw that broke the camel's back.

This is not a cyclical but a structural crisis - a restructuring crisis, such as we had in the 1970s, and before that, in the 1930s - that has the potential to become a systemic crisis, depending on how social agents respond to the crisis and on a host of unknown contingencies. A restructuring crisis means that the only way out of crisis is to restructure the system, whereas a systemic crisis is one in which only a change in the system itself will resolve the crisis. Times of crisis are times of rapid social change, when collective agency and contingency come into play more than in times of equilibrium in a system.

Responses to the crisis and Obama's Weimar republic in the United States

In the face of crisis there appear to be distinct responses from states and social and political forces. Three stand out: global reformism; resurgent of popular and leftist struggles from below; far-right and 21st century fascism. There appears to be, above all, a political polarisation worldwide between the left and the right, both of which are insurgent forces.

A neo-fascist insurgency is quite apparent in the United States. This insurgency can be traced back several decades, to the far-right mobilisation that began in the wake of the crisis of hegemony brought about by the mass struggles of the 1960s and the 1970s, especially the Black and Chicano liberation struggles and other militant movements by third world people, counter-cultural currents, and militant working class struggles. 

Neo-fascist forces re-organised during the years of the George W Bush government. But my story here starts with Obama's election.

The Obama project from the start was an effort by dominant groups to re-establish hegemony in the wake of its deterioration during the Bush years (which also involved the rise of a mass immigrant rights movement). Obama's election was a challenge to the system at the cultural and ideological level, and has shaken up the racial/ethnic foundations upon which the US republic has always rested. However, the Obama project was never intended to challenge the socio-economic order; to the contrary; it sought to preserve and strengthen that order by reconstituting hegemony, conducting a passive revolution against mass discontent and spreading popular resistance that began to percolate in the final years of the Bush presidency.

The Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of passive revolution to refer to efforts by dominant groups to bring about mild change from above in order to undercut mobilisation from below for more far-reaching transformation. Integral to passive revolution is the co-option of leadership from below; its integration into the dominant project. Dominant forces in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle East and North America are attempting to carry out such a passive revolution. With regard to the immigrant rights movement in the United States - one of the most vibrant social movements in that country -moderate/mainstream Latino establishment leaders were brought into the Obama and Democratic Party fold – a classic case of passive revolution - while the mass immigrant base suffers intensified state repression.

Obama's campaign tapped into and helped expand mass mobilisation and popular aspirations for change not seen in many years in the United States. The Obama project co-opted that brewing storm from below, channelled it into the electoral campaign, and then betrayed those aspirations, as the Democratic Party effectively demobilised the insurgency from below with more passive revolution.
 
In this sense, the Obama project weakened the popular and left response from below to the crisis, which opened space for the right-wing response to the crisis - for a project of 21st century fascism - to become insurgent. Obama's administration appears in this way as a Weimar republic. Although the social democrats were in power during the Weimar republic of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, they did not pursue a leftist response to the crisis, but rather side-lined the militant trade unions, communists and socialists, and progressively pandered to capital and the right before turning over power to the Nazis in 1933.
 

21st century fascism in the United States
 
I don't use the term fascism lightly. There are some key features of a 21st century fascism I identify here:

  1. The fusion of transnational capital with reactionary political power 
    This fusion had been developing  during the Bush years and would likely have deepened under a McCain-Palin White House. In the meantime, such neo-fascist movements as the Tea Party as well as neo-fascist legislation such as Arizona's anti-immigrant law, SB1070, have been broadly financed by corporate capital. Three sectors of transnational capital in particular stand out as prone to seek fascist political arrangements to facilitate accumulation: speculative financial capital, the military-industrial-security complex, and the extractive and energy (particularly petroleum) sector.
  2. Militarisation and extreme masculinisation
    As militarised accumulation has intensified the Pentagon budget, increasing 91 per cent in real terms in the past 12 years, the top military brass has become increasingly politicised and involved in policy making.
  3. A scapegoat which serves to displace and redirect social tensions and contradictions 
    In this case, immigrants and Muslims in particular. The Southern Poverty Law Centre recently reported that "three strands of the radical right - hate groups, nativist extremist groups, and patriot organisations - increased from 1,753 groups in 2009 to 2,145 in 2010, a 22 per cent rise, that followed a 2008-9 increase of 40 per cent."

     A 2010 Department of Homeland Security report observed that "right wing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on the fears about several emergency issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for right wing radicalisation and recruitment." The report concluded: "Over the past five years, various right wing extremists, including militia and white supremacists, have adopted the immigration issue as a call to action, rallying point, and recruitment tool."

  4. A mass social base
    In this case, such a social base is being organised among sectors of the white working class that historically enjoyed racial caste privilege and that have been experiencing displacement and experiencing rapid downward mobility as neo-liberalism comes to the US - while they are losing the security and stability they enjoyed in the previous Fordist-Keynesian epoch of national capitalism.
  5. A fanatical millennial ideology involving race/culture supremacy embracing an idealised and mythical past, and a racist mobilisation against scapegoats 
    The ideology of 21st century fascism often rests on irrationality - a promise to deliver security and restore stability is emotive, not rational.  21st century fascism is a project that does not - and need not - distinguish between the truth and the lie.
  6. A charismatic leadership 
    Such a leadership has so far been largely missing in the United States, although figures such as Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck appear as archetypes.

The mortal circuit of accumulation-exploitation-exclusion

One new structural dimension of 21st century global capitalism is the dramatic expansion of the global superfluous population - that portion marginalised and locked out of productive participation in the capitalist economy and constituting some 1/3rd of humanity. The need to assure the social control of this mass of humanity living in a planet of slums gives a powerful impetus to neo-fascist projects and facilitates the transition from social welfare to social control - otherwise known as "police states". This system becomes ever more violent.

Theoretically stated - under the conditions of capitalist globalisation - the state's contradictory functions of accumulation and legitimation cannot both be met. The economic crisis intensifies the problem of legitimation for dominant groups so that accumulation crises, such as the present one, generate social conflicts and appear as spiralling political crises. In essence, the state's ability to function as a "factor of cohesion" within the social order breaks down to the extent that capitalist globalisation and the logic of accumulation or commodification penetrates every aspect of life, so that "cohesion" requires more and more social control.
 
Displacement and exclusion has accelerated since 2008. The system has abandoned broad sectors of humanity, who are caught in a deadly circuit of accumulation-exploitation-exclusion. The system does not even attempt to incorporate this surplus population, but rather tries to isolate and neutralise its real or potential rebellion, criminalising the poor and the dispossessed, with tendencies towards genocide in some cases.
 
As the state abandons efforts to secure legitimacy among broad swathes of the population that have been relegated to surplus - or super-exploited - labour, it resorts to a host of mechanisms of coercive exclusion: mass incarceration and prison-industrial complexes, pervasive policing, manipulation of space in new ways, highly repressive anti-immigrant legislation, and ideological campaigns aimed at seduction and passivity through petty consumption and fantasy.

Militarised ideology has intensified the Pentagon's budget, and military officials are increasingly involved in policy-making [GALLO/GETTY]

A 21st fascism would not look like 20th century fascism. Among other things, the ability of dominant groups to control and manipulate space and to exercise an unprecedented control over the mass media, the means of communication and the production of symbolic images and messages, means that repression can be more selective (as we see in Mexico or Colombia, for example), and also organised juridically so that mass "legal" incarceration takes the place of concentration camps. Moreover, the ability of economic power to determine electoral outcomes allows for 21st century fascism to emerge without a necessary rupture in electoral cycles and a constitutional order.
 
The United States cannot be characterised at this time as fascist. Nonetheless, all of the conditions and the processes are present and percolating, and the social and political forces behind such a project are mobilising rapidly. More generally, images in recent years of what such a political project would involve spanned the Israeli invasion of Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, to the scapegoating and criminalisation of immigrant workers and the Tea Party movement in the United States, genocide in the Congo, the US/United Nations occupation of Haiti, the spread of neo-Nazis and skinheads in Europe, and the intensified Indian repression in occupied Kashmir.

The counterweight to 21st century fascism must be a coordinated fight-back by the global working class. The only real solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power - downward towards the poor majority of humanity. And the only way such redistribution can come about is through mass transnational struggle from below.

William I. Robinson a professor of sociology and global studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

 

VIDEO: Nomfusi and the Lucky Charms | Charmed > Mahala

In a groundbreaking cinematic production featuring dazzling special effects, Nomfusi & The Lucky Charms rise above the rest bringing you "Nontsokolo", a story of a girl rising spectacularly above her bleak circumstances.

Directors: Garth von Glehn & Jonas Stärk

Brought to you by Green Haus Films & Universal Music...
Producer: Adrian Hogan
D.O.P. Garth von Glehn
Editor: Jonas Stärk
Animation: Garth von Glehn
Production Design: Janine Loubser
Costume & Makeup: Quaanitah Allie & Rushda Cozyn
Gaffer: Wynand Herholdt
Camera Assistant: Meredith Aylward
A.D. Carl Houston Mc Millan
On Set producer: Rob Voortman
D.I.T. Karl Schmidt
Assistant Editor: Max Nadolny

Featuring:
Tlhonepho Thobejane
Siyabulela Mgabadeli
Thiru Naidoo
Nabby Ofori

Charmed

Monday, May 3rd, 2010 by Zoe Henry

Nomfusi is the next big thing. She’s sitting on the precipice of stardom, and with the support of her marketers, it won’t be long before her name is as household as your toaster. Every now and then an artist arrives on the scene, seemingly out of nowhere, and produces the sort of hype that the general public revel in, but that evokes scepticism from hacks like us. Nomfusi is one of these artists. She’s talented, and her music blends traditional African sounds with just the right amount of pop to appeal to a wider audience. But that’s true of many artists these days, so why has Nomfusi been anointed above all as the latest poster child for Afropop?

The Alliance Francais is unsurprisingly akin to a Parisian café. There are tables and chairs set out for the evening, most of which are already occupied. The crowd mills about chatting to one another, in a mixture of English and French, and sipping on glasses of red wine while the smell of Gauloises drifts in from the foyer. The crowd is mixed in every sense of the word; race, age and affluence, but they all seem to know each other. There’s a sense of community. Platters of mini hamburgers are passed around and people aren’t shy about indulging in the free food. About thirty minutes after the show is set to start, the Pesto Princess Soul Bus from Khayelitsha, Nyanga and Gugulethu pulls up outside and people begin to flood through the doors. Their excitement is palpable as they get absorbed into the already full venue. Once everyone is settled Nomfusi saunters onto stage with her band the Lucky Charms.

“Thank you so much for coming”, she says in a Tinkerbell sized voice. “I had a speech prepared, but now I can’t think of what I wanted to say.” With her little voice and timid body language, it’s difficult to imagine her taking command of a stage, but when she opens her mouth to sing, her energy changes completely. She has a strong singing voice that holds notes beautifully, and her body moves in a way that makes it clear that she feels the music.


Image by James Twarrow

She introduces every song, explaining what it’s about and what inspired it. The stage banter is awkward, unpolished and clichéd. “A lot of things don’t make sense to lots of people, but one thing I know is that music makes sense to me”, she says to rapturous applause. Her songs vary from old school South African jazz to pop and gospel. The audience embraced the gospel influence by standing and singing with their hands waving back and forth. If she had shouted, “Can I get an Amen?” she would have.

The Lucky Charms play a little too loudly for Nomfusi’s delicate voice, and most of the time it feels as though the sounds they’re creating are battling rather than complimenting each other. Halfway through the set they are joined by a brass section that lifts the vibe, and they harmonise effortlessly with her voice in a way that the rest of the band doesn’t manage. Together they build the crowd up, song by song, climaxing in a Miriam Makeba medley.

By the end of the night it’s obvious that Nomfusi is a cute, sellable package performing safe tunes for a welcoming audience. Despite her incredibly difficult life story, that’s shockingly reminiscent of an Athol Fugard play (we’ll delve into this in another article), she maintains a sweet and almost naïve energy that’s approachable and easy to watch. She’s not breaking any boundaries, but she’s having fun, and that counts for a lot.

__________________________

Nomfusi wrote this song for her late mother, Kwazibani, who died of Aids when Nomfusi was only 12 years old. Kwazibani is the Xhosa-word for "Who knows?" Herewith a rough translation of the lyrics. Read/view/listen more athttp://www.nomfusi.com.

Kwazibani English translation

Who knows? 

You were a beautiful lady with beautiful features
big eyes and a beautiful smile
You were a loving lady with a warm heart,
broad shoulders and a motherly touch

CHORUS

Who knew that you would not be alive today?
Who knew that I would be singing about you?
Who knew you would raise so many sons and daughters?
Who knew that your work would be fruitful?

(In Tswana:)

You were a beautiful lady with beautiful features
big eyes and a beautiful smile
You were a loving lady with a warm heart,
broad shoulders and a motherly touch

BRIDGE:

Who knows of her beautiful smile?
Who knows of her loving eyes?
Who knows everything she gave?
Who knows of her special powers?

Who knows of her golden voice?
Who knows of her awesome pride?
Who knows that she was a mother?
Who knows that she was a father?

CHORUS

Who knew that you would not be alive today?
Who knew that I would be singing about you?
Who knew you would raise so many sons and daughters?
Who knew that your work would be fruitful?


 

VIDEO: Slum Stories: Lost Chance by Ephantus Kariuki > NFB

THE LOST CHANCE
This short documentary introduces us to Isaac, an 8-year-old boy who spends his day cleaning house and looking after his younger sister. Mathare slum in Nairobi has a population of 500,000 where despite access to free primary education, many children do not go to school. 

Produced by Slum TV, in association with UN Habitat and the National Film Board of Canada.

Director: Ephantus Kariuki
Camera: Nicholas Mathenge
Sound: Vilnick Kemuma
Producer: Benson Kamau
With Support from Sam Hopkins

Lost Chance is part of the Slum Stories, Kenya project.

via nfb.ca

 

PUB: Sources for Individual Artists

Funding for Individual Artists

This is a list of foundations that provide funding to individual artists. Please contact them directly for more specific information about their programs.

The Roy W. Dean Writing Grants

The Roy W. Dean writing grants have been created just for filmmakers, writers and artists like you.  The grants take you to New Zealand for 30 days to write in the quiet of the South island. The grants provide housing at Wye Cottage, food and gas money, a round trip ticket for the time that best suits you and you will be in the beautiful rolling hills of Marlborough County. You may be in the country but you are connected to the world via your Mitsubishi RUV, fast computer, internet, Phone, fax and SKY TV!  They are looking for writers who need uninterrupted time to create. 

The Roy W. Dead Writing Grants
1455 Mandalay Beach Rd.
Oxnard, CA 93035-2845
Phone: (805) 984-0098 (Carole Dean)
Email: general@fromtheheartproductions.com
Website: www.fromtheheartproductions.com

Artist Trust

Offers grants and fellowships to Washington State artists in all disciplines.

Artist Trust
1835 12th Avenue
Seattle, WA  98122-2437
Phone: (206) 467-8734

Toll Free: 1 (866) 21-TRUST
Fax: (206) 467-9633
Email: info@artisttrust.org
Website: www.artisttrust.org

Creative Capital

Offers grants to individuals in the performing & visual arts, media, new fields. Grants: Up to $20,000  

Creative Capital
65 Bleecker Street; Seventh Floor
New York, NY 10012
Phone: (212) 598.9900
Fax: (212) 598-4934
Email: grants@creative-capital.org">grants@creative-capital.org
Website: www.creative-capital.org/

Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Inc.

Grants of up to $1,500 to poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, visual artists, and for a mixed-genre category (illustration and text) to feminist women in the arts. Application fee is $20. Two application deadlines each year: December 31 (art and fiction) and June 30 (nonfiction and poetry). Fund does not maintain email, phone, or website. To request application materials, write to the postal address and be sure to include a SASE.

Susan Pliner, Executive Director
Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Inc.
P.O. Box 309
Wilton, NH 03086

The Puffin Foundation

Grants to individuals in Literature, photography, performing arts.
Grants: Up to $2,500

The Puffin Foundation
20 Puffin Way
Teaneck, NJ  07666
Phone: (201) 836-8923 
Fax:(201) 836-1734
Email: puffingrant@mindspring.com" class="bodytext">puffingrant@mindspring.com
Website: www.puffinfoundation.org

The Kentucky Foundation for Women

Grants to feminist artists in Kentucky.
Grants: Up to $5,000; most $3,000

The Kentucky Foundation for Women
1215-A Heyburn Building
332 West Broadway
Louisville, KY 40202
Phone: (502) 562-0045
Fax: (502) 561-0420
Email: kfw@kfw.org
Website: www.kfw.org

Independent Television Service (ITVS)

Grants for independent film and video for television.
Grants: $20,000 - $250,000

ITVS
651 Brannan St., Ste. 410
San Francisco, CA  94107
Phone: (415) 356-8383
Fax: (415) 365-8391
Email:
itvs@itvs.pbs.org

Website: www.itvs.org

Xeric Foundation

Publishing support for comic book creators
Grants: Up to $5,000

Xeric Foundation
351 Pleasant Street, Suite 214
Northampton, MA  01060
Phone: (413) 585-0671
Email:
xericgrant@aol.com

Website: www.xericfoundation.org

Lambda Literary Foundation

Awards for published work only.

Lambda Literary Foundation
5482 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Phone: (213) 568-3570
Email: info@lambdaliterary.org
Website: www.lambdaliterary.org/

Film Arts Foundation

Grants to Bay Area filmmakers only.

145 9 th Street, #101
San Francisco, CA 94103
Phone: (415) 552-8760
Fax:(415) 552-0882
Email: info@filmarts.org" class="bodytext">info@filmarts.org
Website: www.filmarts.org

The Leeway Foundation

For Philadelphia area women artists.  Disciplines rotate each year.
Grants: $5,000 to $50,000

The Leeway Foundation
The Philadelphia Building
1315 Walnut St., Ste. 832
Philadelphia, PA  19107
Phone: (215) 545-4078
Fax: (215) 545-4021
Email: info@leeway.org
Website: www.leeway.org/

Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation

Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation (LVF) provides one-time grants to individuals working in the fine arts (excluding photography, film, and video) and in the literary arts, including playwriting. Also supports certain unaffiliated scholarly and/or research projects. Grants ranging from $1,000 to $3,000 are awarded on the criteria of merit and need; the foundation is especially concerned with those who have no other source of funding. Send email or SASE to request current guidelines (email is preferable and quicker).

Diana Braunschweig, Executive Director
Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation
4001 Inglewood Ave., Suite 101-309
Redondo Beach, CA 90278
Email: lvf@earthlink.net
No phone calls

NOTE:  Many state arts agencies also fund individual artists.

 

PUB: Crab Orchard Review Series in Poetry First Book Award

2011 First Book Award
$2500 and publication
final judge: Lee Ann Roripaugh

Crab Orchard Review and Southern Illinois University Press are pleased to announce the selection of the 2010 First Book Award competition. Our final judge, Jake Adam York, selected Claire McQuerry's LACEMAKERS as the winner of the 2010 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. LACEMAKERS will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in December 2011.

 

Below are the guidelines for the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, which will be open for entries on MAY 15, 2011:

A first book of poems will be selected for publication from an open competition of manuscripts POSTMARKED MAY 15, 2011 through JULY 1, 2011. (Since this is a postmark deadline, there is no need to send Express Mail, Fedex, or UPS. First Class or Priority Mail are preferred.) Manuscripts should be 50-75 pages of original poetry, in English, by a U.S. citizen or permanent resident who has neither published, nor committed to publish, a volume of poetry 48 pages or more in length in an edition of over 500 copies* (individual poems may have been previously published). (**Current or former students, colleagues, and close friends of the final judge, and current students and employees of Southern Illinois University and authors published by Southern Illinois University Press are not eligible.) For questions about judging, please visit http://www.siuc.edu/~crborchd/conpo3.html.)


The winner will receive a publication contract with Southern Illinois University Press, and will be awarded a $1000 prize. The winner will also receive $1500 as an honorarium for a reading at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.


Manuscripts should be typewritten, single-spaced. No more than one poem should appear on a page. Dot-matrix printing that is not letter-quality is not acceptable. A clean photocopy is recommended. Please do not send your only copy of the manuscript since manuscripts will not be returned, and please do not include illustrations. CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW and Southern Illinois University Press assume no responsibility for damaged or lost manuscripts. All submissions must be accompanied by a $25 entry fee. Please make your check out to "Crab Orchard Series in Poetry." All entrants will receive a year's subscription to CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW, beginning with the 2011 Winter/Spring CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW.


Submit two title pages for the collection. The author's name, address, and daytime phone number should appear on the first title page only. The author's name should appear nowhere else in the manuscript. An acknowledgments page listing poems previously published in magazines, journals, or anthologies should be placed after the second title page.

 

CRAB ORCHARD SERIES IN POETRY FIRST BOOK AWARD WINNERS:

 

Year
Author
Title
Final Judge
       
2011 postmark dates May 15 to July 1, 2011 Lee Ann Roripaugh
2010 Claire McQuerry Lacemakers selected by Jake Adam York
2009 Traci Brimhall Rookery selected by Michelle Boisseau
2008 winner
William Notter Holding Everything Down selected by Ricardo Pau-Llosa
2007 winner
Sean Nevin Oblivio Gate selected by Lynne McMahon
2006 winner
Mary Jo Firth Gillett Soluble Fish selected by James Harms
2005 winner Jennifer Maier Dark Alphabet selected by Jason Sommer
2004 winner A. Loudermilk Strange Valentine selected by Julia Kasdorf
2003 winner Amy Fleury Beautiful Trouble selected by Judy Jordan
2002 winner Chad Davidson Consolation Miracle selected by Rodney Jones
2001 winner Joelle Biele White Summer selected by Allison Joseph
2000 winner Vandana Khanna Train to Agra selected by Allison Joseph

 

 

FOR A FULL LIST OF THE CRAB ORCHARD SERIES IN POETRY TITLES, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

 

FOR A LIST OF BASIC QUESTION ABOUT THE CRAB ORCHARD SERIES IN POETRY FIRST BOOK AND OPEN COMPETITIONS, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

 

 

Please address entries to:

Jon Tribble, Series Editor
Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
(First Book Award)
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
1000 Faner Drive
Carbondale, IL 62901

Include a self-addressed, stamped envelope for notification of contest results. If you would like confirmation that the manuscript has been received, please include a self-addressed, stamped postcard as well. Manuscripts may be under consideration elsewhere, but the series editor must be informed immediately if a collection is accepted for publication.

 

PHONE: 618-453-6833
FAX: 618-453-8224

 

PUB: For Writers Writing in French: The $150,000 FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages 2011|Writers Afrika

For Writers Writing in French:

The $150,000 FIL Literary Award

in Romance Languages 2011

 

Deadline: 22 July 2011

The FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages 2011, bestowed by the Civil Association of the Juan Rulfo Latin American and Caribbean Literature Prize opens the call for entries for candidacies to receive the FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages 2011, recognizing the life’s work of a living writer with a valuable creative work in any literary genre (poetry, novel, theatre, short story or essay) and whose artistic expression comes through Spanish, Catalan, Galician, French, Italian, Romanian or Portuguese.


Any cultural or educational institution, association or group of people interested in literature may submit nominations. Required documentation includes the candidate’s resume and any documents deemed necessary to sustain the candidacy, and should be sent to: Premio FIL de Literatura en Lenguas Romances 2011. Comisión de Premiación. Lerdo de Tejada 2121, CP 44150, Guadalajara, Jalisco, México. Telephones: +52 (33) 3630–9787 and 3630–9788.

Proposals must be received in office no later than July 22nd, 2011. Nominations will be considered by a group of seven jurors with recognized literary and critique achievement, selected by the Judging Committee. The jury’s decision is indisputable and will be announced at a press conference no later than August 29th, 2011. To the date, over 70 writers, academics and critics of unquestionable reputation from 19 countries have served as jury.

Under the name “Juan Rulfo”, the award was bestowed to Nicanor Parra (1991), Juan José Arreola (1992), Eliseo Diego (1993), Julio Ramón Ribeyro (1994), Nélida Piñón (1995), Augusto Monterroso (1996), Juan Marsé (1997), Olga Orozco (1998), Sergio Pitol (1999), Juan Gelman (2000), Juan García Ponce (2001), Cintio Vitier (2002), Rubem Fonseca (2003), Juan Goytisolo (2004), and Tomás Segovia (2005). As FIL Literary Award, it was granted to Carlos Monsiváis (2006) and Fernando del Paso (2007). Under its current title, it has been granted to António Lobo Antunes (2008), Rafael Cadenas (2009) and Margo Glantz (2010).

With a purse of $150,000 USD, the FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages will be given during the 25th Guadalajara International Book Fair.

Guidelines

• FIRST. Eligible to the FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages 2011 are writers with a valuable creative work in any literary genre (poetry, novel, theatre, short story or literary essay) whose literary expression is through any of the romance languages: Spanish, Catalan, Galician, French, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese.

• SECOND. Nominations must be presented by any cultural or educational institution, association or group of people interested in literature. However, the award may also be presented to a writer who in the opinion of the Jury deserves it, even if he/she has not been nominated by any institution.

• THIRD. Nominating institutions, groups or associations must send their nominees along with a resume and due documentation to sustain said candidacy to: Premio FIL de Literatura en Lenguas Romances 2011. Comisión de Premiación. Lerdo de Tejada 2121, cp 44150, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.

• FOURTH. All documentation regarding submitted candidacies to the Award Commission, as well as the identity of the nominees, will remain confidential. Documents will be destroyed after a decision is reached.

• FIFTH. Reception of nominations is open as of the publication of these guidelines and will close on Friday July 22nd, 2011.

• SIXTH. Seven outstanding literary critics will form the Jury of the FIL Award in Romance Languages 2011.

• SEVENTH. The Jury’s decision is indisputable and will be announced at a press conference no later than August 29th, 2011.

• EIGHTH. The Award has a purse of US $150,000.00 (one hundred and fifty thousand US dollars).

• NINTH. The FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages 2011 will be given in the city of Guadalajara during the last week of the month of November, during the 25th Guadalajara International Book Fair.

• TENTH. Any unforeseen situation in these guidelines will be resolved by the Award Commission.

Contact Information:

For inquiries: fil@fil.com.mx

For submissions: Premio FIL de Literatura en Lenguas Romances 2011. Comisión de Premiación. Lerdo de Tejada 2121, cp 44150, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico

Website: http://www.fil.com.mx