READING 2015, PART ONE
Having abandoned the bad faith of making New Year’s
Resolutions, I am determined in 2015 to pursue three priorities:
CHINA
CULTURAL WORK IN
NEW ORLEANS
RESEARCH, THINKING
AND WRITING
The trio demands specialized kinds of reading. 2014 produced increased awareness of Cosmic
Evil, of the international insanity that Cosmic Evil makes its primary work,
and of the domestic insanity in European genocide, rape, and dispersal of
indigenous peoples that is the origin of what is now called the United States
of America. Using the bodies of Africans as objects of commerce is a nasty
feature of American history; nastier still is the complicity of certain
Africans, educated by an Arab slave trade, in supporting demeaning trafficking
with human lives. The vulgar outcome is that Americans in 2014 are enslaved by
custom, rancid ideologies, criminal passions, Darwinian penchants, and law.
America’s history
is stamped SNAFU. Its contemporary
chapters are written by people of no-color.
They are fully aware that theirs is a dying race in the global scheme of
things. Inspired by Cosmic Evil, they
work feverishly to lay the groundwork of World War III and the near-total end
of human and animal life on this planet and the dawn of post-whatever
everything. People of no-color may
indeed succeed with generous help from a minority of Islamic demons and other
beings who dance the militarized police foxtrot and procreate with Satan. One
must be prepared for anything.
I have not abandoned hope that the story can end
differently, but I have profound reservations about the efficacy of hope as an
abstraction. Some narcotics are not
worth ingesting.
The reading plan for the first months of 2015 includes rereading
W. Keorapetse Kgositsile’s essay “I Know My Name” [The Black Position, No. 3 (1973): 60-69], Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Henry Giroux’s
Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and
the Politics of Education, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Antony Easthope’s Literary Into Cultural Studies, Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain, Lucien Goldmann’s The Human Sciences and Philosophy, Origins of Terrorism,
edited by Walter Reich, Karl R. Popper’s
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Aimé
Césaire’s Return to My Native Land, and
Floyd W. Hayes’s “The Paradox of the Ethical Criminal in Richard Wright’s Novel
The Outsider: A Philosophical
Investigation,” Black Renaissance Noire
13.1 (2013): 162-171.
Such revisiting, as it were, of old friends will
strengthen me to grapple with such works as the Dao De Jing, In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina: New
Paradigms and Social Visions (2010), edited by Clyde Woods, Thomas Brothers’s Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (2006) and Black Gold: An Anthology of Black Poetry (2014), edited by Ja A.
Jahannes. All of this is reading to
inform my writing of READING RACE READING
AMERICA: SOCIAL AND LITERARY ESSAYS, a book I may finish and publish before
my burial. Wish me luck.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. December 18, 2014
