Ramcat Reads #5
Capshaw, Katharine.
Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing
Liberation in African American Photobooks. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014. Emphasizes the
photographs and writings of children.
Gives special attention to what is seldom examined regarding children in
studies of the Black Arts Movement.
Mentions the importance of Today
(1965), a photobook created largely by Doris Derby for the Child Development
Group of Mississippi. Today is available in the McCain
Library, University of Southern Mississippi.
Cooley, Peter.
The Van Gogh Notebooks. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press,
2004. Cooley's sustained meditations on Van Gogh's creativity and paintings are
sketches of a poet's mind at work, and they remind one of Ralph Ellison's
writing about Romare Bearden's artistry.
Cooley, of course, limits his introspection to the personal, the
immediacy of his aesthetic experience divorced from explicit social
implications.
Ellis, Thomas
Sayers. The Maverick Room. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2005.
________________. Skin,
Inc. : Identity Repair Poems.
Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2010.
Ellis stands out from Sharon Strange and other poets
associated with the Dark Room Collective much as Lorenzo Thomas does from
members of the legendary Society of Umbra:
Ellis and Thomas are fiercely independent, following their divergent interests in the visual and sonic
manifestations of the constantly changing NOW. Both bring a maverick spirit of
exploration to the task of naming the unpredictable.
Frank, Edwin,
ed. Unknown Masterpieces: Writers
Rediscover Literature's Hidden Masterpieces. New York: New York Review
Books, 2003. "Masterpieces are showpieces," according to Frank,
"designed to establish a public reputation; classics...constitute the public
face of knowledge, the books that everyone should know" (xi). Unknown
Masterpieces is an example of ideological formation, and its singular charm
exists in testing whether Elizabeth Hardwick, Toni Morrison, and James Wood can
persuade readers that Tess Slesinger, Camara Laye, and Shchedrin [M. E.
Saltykov] indeed wrote works that everyone should know. Everyone
may refer only to a small community of
readers predisposed to share the tastes and values of the thirteen writers who
are "rediscovering" works that a larger community of readers, the
more authentic everyone, has chosen
not to remember. The special conditions of "rediscovering" ought to
be taken into consideration in discussions of the recovery work that has been
influential in the expansion of African American canons.
Gardner, John.
On Moral Fiction. New York: Barnes
& Noble, 2009. First published in
1978, Gardner's book should be read
by every person who believes she or he must be a writer; it should be required reading for people who
so easily confuse the possession of a degree in creative writing with knowledge
that does not demand earning a degree. Gardner was shockingly honest in
asserting "it is the universality of woundedness in the human condition
which makes the work of art significant as medicine or distraction" (167).
Few people who call themselves writers have the capacity to embrace woundedness
or the will power to reject fashioning what is genuinely universal in their own
images.
Howard, Ravi. Driving the King. New York: HarperCollins, 2015. Howard is the author Like Trees, Walking
(2008) and winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence
(2008). The novel may one day receive a
bit of notice in critical discourses on how Nat King Cole as a musical icon can
be appropriated for discussion of civil rights issues.
Rose, Tricia. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We
Talk About Hip Hop --- and Why It Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2008. Rose describes certain arguments regarding
causes of violence, the reflection of dysfunctional ghetto cultures, symbolic
injury of African Americans, devaluation of women, and the ongoing destruction
of American values. She juxtaposes the
defensive arguments used to justify rather negative forms of representation
----the clichéd notion "keeping it real," denial of responsibility
for sexism, the vexed possibility that bitches and hoes (whores) exist outside
of symbolic representation, the denial that artists have any obligation to be
role models for anyone, and loud complaints that large numbers of people do not
talk about positive aspects of hip hop.
Rose struggles to construct guiding principles for progressive
creativity, consumption, and community in and beyond the phenomenon of hip hop.
Despite her dedicated scholarship, Rose does not get very
far in exposing the amorality of the music industry in the American
economy. The mechanisms of that economy are not controlled by African
American businesspeople, and they batten on the absence of ethics and moral
struggle in the unfolding of the United States of America as a nation. Rose fails to deal with the possibility that
will power does need to be talked about, even if the talk is itself theoretical
and philosophical. She doesn't take into
account that home education (what back in the day was called "home
training") and public schooling (what is now too frequently miseducation
of everyone) ought to be held accountable for encouraging a destructive sense
of freedom and entitlement (e.g. the mirroring of the violence applied in the name of combating
terrorism). Almost echoing James
Baldwin, Rose recommends the use of affirmative love and argues that
"transformational love is necessary and crucial"(272). To add salt to wounds in a hostile American
environment, Rose is content to reify the deadly black/white binary as if
Hispanic drug suppliers, Islamic thugs, and Asian criminals do not participate
in maintaining destructive features of hip hop.
The hip hop wars are overwhelmingly economic in nature, although they
are disguised as innate manifestations of biocultural evolution.
Neither Rose nor any cultural critic who is not prepared
to commit to plunge into boiling water will suggest the draconian remedies
needed to minimize the hip hop wars, because those methods only promise to beget other forms of
corruption and inequality in the manufacturing of wealth. Such is the moral
poverty of our nation.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
October 29, 2015
