Ramcat Reads #7

RAMCAT READS #7

Bell, Bernard W., ed. Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an African American Postmodernist. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. This examination of an underappreciated writer and visual artist should be read along with Keith Byerman's The Art and Life of Clarence Major . Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.

Chang, Jeff.  Who We Be: The Colorization of America .New York: St. Martin's Press, 2014.  Chang's lively blending of nonfiction narratives and multicultural visuals, a brief history of writing performance, lends some credibility to the belief that "the tragedy of life is that you never know all the things you're supposed to know when you're supposed to know them"( 345).

Franklin, John Hope.  George Washington Williams: A Biography.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.  Franklin's book is a fine example of cultural memory at work.  Williams (1849-1891) was the author of  A History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880; Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens (1882) and A History of Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion (1887).  In a remarkable gesture of putting Williams in conversation with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Mark Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy, Franklin appended Williams's open letter to King Leopold II of Belgium (1890), a most "eloquent indictment," and  "A Report on the Proposed Congo Railway" (1890).  Williams set the bar for later generations of scholar activists.  When Williams died on August 2, 1891, "he had achieved the full stature of a real nineteenth century American" (240), and Franklin concludes he "was one of the small heroes of this world; but it is well that one should not try to make more of him then what he was ---a flawed but brilliant human being" (241).  In this book we find a perfect matching of subject and object, for Franklin himself was  a consummate American historian and a brilliant, responsible human being.

Izzo, David Garrett, ed. Movies in the Age of Obama: The Era of Post-Racial and Neo-Racist Cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.  These essays address how Obama's presidency "spurred a cultural shift, notably in music, television, and film" and their arguments should be compared with those made by essays in Black Hollywood Unchained: Commentary on the State of Black Hollywood. Chicago: Third World Press, 2015.  Both collections are contemporary supplements for  essays collected in Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), edited by Manthia Diawara.  These three collections tempt us to think we might be much enlightened by  a collection of essays on how African and Asian films challenge the adequacy of films produced in Australia, Europe and the Americas.

Smith, Patricia.  Blood Dazzler: Poems.  Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2008.  Smith's accomplished explorations of aesthetic gestures occasioned by Hurricane Katrina should be read in the company of Hurricane Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita (Cape Girardeau, MO: Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2006), edited by Philip C. Kolin and Susan Swartwout and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), edited by Camille T. Dungy.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            December 23, 2015

Ramcat Reads 6.5

RAMCAT READS #6.5: STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

 

2016 will be a hard year.  We can't avoid, in the words of the novelist Keenan Norris, being "compelled to perform complex narrative gymnastics" or being glued to metaphors which govern actions. What or who controls the compelling  machinery?

Is breathing a performance?  What motions are not performances  in the world we are limited to know ? Is chewing a slice of toast or consulting a friend or squeezing the trigger of a gun a performance?  Is a performance itself a performance?

In the time and space and consciousness of being, every motion is not a performance.  If in this century, human beings are incapable of distinguishing a performance from its logical opposite, they confront the damnation of being absurdity personified.

The purpose of reading is to beget narratives that liven up daily conversations and assist us in making choices.  Narratives bike through our minds and recycle thought.  Reading as such does not make us more stupid or wiser.  It does not ensure that we shall be good or bad or liberated from deep confusion about our morality and mortality.  Reading just increases the probability that we can recognize a nude platitude or  cliché when it parades before us and immunize ourselves against the cancer of spinformations.  Remember that many people who are not print literate employ other forms of literacy to make their way through life, and we ought to value them as much as we value those who blind us with verbal brilliance.

One purpose of the "Ramcat Reads" series is to provide a finite spectrum of choices and to minimize the notion that any single esteemed writer or any single necessary discipline in the universe donates THE TRUTH to anyone.

In 2016, we may want to retreat a few hours  from the paralyzing utterances of our presidential candidates and the thought-murdering entertainment our public intellectuals and enslaved mass media gleefully provide.  We may want a recess from obscene but inevitable disinformation. We may want to sample such  books as Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology, edited by Raphaël Baroni and Françoise Revaz and Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu.  We may want to have spirit-shaking arguments with the Qur'an, the Dao de jing, and the Bible (both the Roman Catholic and Protestant versions thereof).  We may want to do battle with scientific treatises, legal documents and economic spreadsheets,  and poetry. We may want to spend a cosmic nanosecond or two in renewing our minds.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            December 21, 2015

Note on Satire

A Note on Satire

 

The so-called Age of Obama may be a time when satire refuses to be distinguished from ordinary communication.  There's a hint of this possibility in a commentary on Mat Johnson's recent novel Loving Day.  In his urbane assessment of the book  "Forward Passes" (The New York Review of Books, December 17, 2015, pages 68-70), Darryl Pinckney invites us to think with some care about how satire may work as a description of fact. Johnson's title refers to the case of  Loving v. Virginia 388 U.S. 1 (1967).  That fact invites us to consult Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014) by Karla FC Holloway.  The subject matter of the novel, however, invites a study of the premises articulated in Emine Lale Demirturk's How Black Writers Deal With Whiteness: Characterization Through Deconstructing Color (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).

Addressed to readers who may know absolutely nothing or very little about African American fiction, "Forward Passes" incorporates a mini- literary history, one necessary for understanding how it is that Mat Johnson "is able to interrogate black history."  In one paragraph Pinckney suggests

You could think of Mat Johnson alongside Wesley Brown, Paul Beatty, Colson Whitehead, John Keene, or Percival Everett.  To call them black satirists or humorists wouldn't quite cover it.  In their ease with genre and their consciousness that the language they're after is literary, they descend through the allegory of Ralph Ellison, not the realism of Richard Wright.  But they have inherited Wright's social vision, not Ellison's . "I know you're beige, but stay black," a friend says to Warren Duffy (70).

 Duffy is the mix-raced protagonist, and by James Joyce's "commodius vicus of recirculation" we may travel into the heart of interpretation.  Pinckney's playing the familiar Wright/Ellison binary is deliciously problematic.  If Ellison owns allegory and Wright possesses realism, can one read allegory without being haunted by its rootedness in realism?  Does disjunctive juxtaposition of allegory as narrative device or metaphor with realism as a mode of representation take us out to lunch on a date with satire?  And does Pinckney insinuate there is treason afoot in Ralph Ellison's social vision and a redeeming clarity in the one Richard Wright willed to us?

Perhaps in the Age of Obama, satire consigns writers and critics to a system of hell so that they may have an epiphany of race.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

PHBW BLOG  December 4, 2015