autobiography & angles of remembering

 Autobiography and Angles of Remembering

 

                During the October 28, 2015 PHBW webinar, it was refreshing to hear the poet Sharon Strange mention that art bears witness.  She gave voice to one angle of remembering.  Contemporary memory has a very brief half-life.  We need to hear what is obvious again and again.

 

                 It is fashionable of late to applaud writers who made careers of always bearing witness to something in their  writings. We may downplay the fact that giving testimony in a society that seems to despise morality, especially any ethics associated with politics and art,  requires more than ordinary strength.  It is easier to pander to the mob and to act out  the role of the court jester in the face of grave, compelling issues.  Either for votes, instant fame,  shock value,  or money, witnesses entertain the crowd.

 

                Thus, Strange's comments brought us down to earth without the explicit  preaching we find in John Gardner's  On Moral Fiction (1977) or William F. Lynch's Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination (1960) and by accident prepared us for a reading of

Pierce, Wendell. The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, A Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken. New York: Riverhead Books, 2015.

Acclaimed for  his roles in the television series The Wire and Treme and for his work  in such films as Selma and Waiting to Exhale, Pierce is a gifted actor.  He is a proud New Orleanian, grateful to "that northernmost Caribbean city, the last bohemia, which instilled in [him] a truthful culture that identifies [his] membership in that most beloved tribe that thrives in the Crescent City" (343).  Pierce is an actor not a writer, but that fact does not compromise his ability to tell a free story.   He is  a consummate reader and interpreter of words who has great respect for art and religion as "ways of knowing, pathways to and channels of the transcendent truths of our existence"(337).  What does compromise The Wind in the Reeds, and reminds us of its kinship with the genre of slave narrative,  is his collaboration with Ron Dreher in the writing of the story.

 

                How  do we assign credit for the crafting of words?  Or should we value the affirmative content and character of the autobiography much more than its form?  As is the case with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, we have to speculate about the agency of the amanuensis.  Pierce admits that Dreher cleared the path for a "journey filled with fear, uncertainty, joy, and fond memories"(343).  Dreher projects himself as a reluctant collaborator ("a white boy from the Feliciana hills") who  gained "a much deeper appreciation of the African American experience"(344).  Dreher's wording alerts us that Pierce is scrupulous in revealing that his life, his journey, is an atypical example of  ethnic American experiences.  He is a socially conscious actor who transforms orality into writing or an actor who assumes orality is writing.

                However curious we remain about Dreher's role, we can suspend disbelief  and accept Pierce's dominant voice and historical consciousness in the narration in just the way we honor the authenticity or "truth-telling" of Malcolm X's autobiography.  Language is social property, and in collaborative autobiography it is not impossible for the subject to devise clever, coded messages that minimize the authority of the subject's helper. Even if the codes of enslaved ancestors now wear designer clothing, they have not abandoned the awe-inspiring  power of the racialized code.

                 Pierce offers us an autobiography that distinguishes itself from those which accommodate inane expectations of what an African American male's life history ought to be, i.e. a confessional saga of fractured will power, sprawling identity crises, cartoon masculinity, and minimal or diminishing respect for the power of family history from slavery to freedom.  In one of the most important paragraphs in the book, Pierce does not bite his tongue and extends a special angle of remembering  ----

The family values debate in our culture is more politicized than it ought to be.  Everybody on both sides of the argument understands the value of the nuclear family.  The fact is, when we had intact families, we had fewer problems.  As the history of my own family demonstrates, when we African Americans held our families together, we drew from them the strength and solidarity we needed to combat the evils of racism, prejudice, and attack from the enemies of our community. (49)

 

This angle of remembering is not very popular in an American culture that champions the deconstruction of character and responsibility.  Nevertheless, it is a signal of the superior qualities that obtain among African Americans from New Orleans who retain pride in their uniqueness, in their un-American difference and their African- and  French-inflected différence avec l'aide de Dieu.  Superior character as it is exemplified by Wendell Pierce is not the exclusive property of Creoles and Roman Catholics, nor does it have much to do with the production of culture for the pleasure of tourists and the strange American invaders of all colors who are gradually reshaping post-Katrina  New Orleans and maximizing the vulgarity of corruption.

                The play referenced in the subtitle of Pierce's autobiography is Beckett's Waiting for Godot.  It is refreshing to read Pierce's explanations of why that particular play holds great significance for him as a Eurocentric work of art that motivated him to make an Afrocentric contribution to post-Katrina resurrection culture in his childhood neighborhood of Pontchartain Park and why he chose in 2007 to produce that play in the devastated Lower Ninth Ward. 

                Page after page of The Wind in the Reeds is informed Pierce's unfaltering belief in the value of art to motivate civic responsibility and to negotiate with the unguaranteed future of New Orleans without excuses and lamentations.   Like the novels of Ernest Gaines,  Pierce's autobiography  is noteworthy for affirming the Crescent City  wisdom of holding fast to black angles of remembering.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

November 10, 2015

 

Black Drama Note

BLACK DRAMA STUDY NOTE

 

Tom Dent's one-act Ritual Murder (1967), first performed in 1976, is a classic of Black South drama . Dent minimized plot  and depended on the Narrator's investigation  and the individual testimonials of type-cast  characters (the wife, the public school teacher, the boss, the anti-poverty program administrator, the mother and father,  the chief of police, a black psychiatrist, the victim  and the murderer) to sketch a communal story.  His verbal economy is effective. The only action is focused speech.  Spectators can experience the play as an investigative tool, a device  for analyzing a familiar event  in modern life:  African American men killing African American men.  Ritual Murder figuratively incorporates its audience.  It provokes them to speak at the end of the performance.  Even spectators who refuse to speak become characters in a theatrical ritual. Ultimately, Ritual Murder is metadrama, i.e., a play that explains how a play may have a socially engaged purpose. It is an example of how a play can create a temporary, democratic  community.

It is judiciousness that Dent  remixed  of some elements of tragedy as described in Aristotle's Poetics with some of  the dark, biting humor  Bertolt Brecht used in writing the libretto for  The Threepenny Opera (1928), for which Kurt Weill wrote the atonal music. The aesthetic effect of Ritual Murder  is cool and unsettling.  It does not provoke fear and pity; its performance does not lead spectators to have any feeling of  catharsis, of being purged and cleansed .  On the contrary, because one witnesses the collection of opinions about the crime rather than any visual details about Joe Brown's knifing his friend James Roberts on a Saturday night, one feels moved to have compassionate disinterest.  One does experience, however,  the  frustration  involved with clarifying  a recurring social problem that defies resolution.

That Ritual Murder exposes its own architecture and pricks what might be called "consciousness of social paralysis" with maximum economy makes it one of the more unusual examples of black drama written for communal consumption during the Black Arts Movement.  One-act plays by Ben Caldwell,  Marvin X,  Kalamu ya Salaam, and Ted Shine; longer plays by Alice Childress, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins; the acclaimed works of  August Wilson and Ntozake Shange and Suzann Lori-Parks might seem more typical of the diversity which characterizes black drama from the Black Arts Movement to the present.

 Since the 1960s, when LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and others formulated ideas regarding a revolutionary theatre,  black drama has successfully defied easy classification.  It has not succeeded in revolutionizing contemporary  audiences.  It has exploited the futurism of mixed dramatic  genres, structures that are neither purely tragic nor comic nor overtly realistic .  Spectators are often uncertain whether a given play is designed to entertain, to propagandize or politicize, to induce outrage or  to inform, or to achieve all these aesthetic ends simultaneously.  And few of them would give a damn about contemplating what black drama means. Spectators are most often happy with the thrills provided by exaggerated spectacle, thrills which undermine revolutionary potentials.

 Scholarly  study of black drama, on the other hand,   can require that we  account both for the formal or textual treatment of subject matter in scripts as well as potential or actual performance, that we conjoin analyses which bespeak ideological disharmony, and that we put drama in historical perspectives.  The highly visualized, recent instances of black drama as film or television programs, when we would be active rather than passive spectators, obligate us to use combinations of visual, literary or verbal, and aural literacies. We have daunting work to do when the drama is a translation from fiction into film, as is the case with Their Eyes Were Watching God, Beloved, The Color Purple, Long Black Song, and PUSH transformed into Precious .  The difficulty of the task may explain, in part, why scholarly discussions of black drama seem to be remarkably few in number  when they are counted against  either standardized or innovative criticisms of black poetry and black fiction.  It is easier to witness instances of black drama than to articulate what one has witnessed.  And it must be noted that witnessing black drama by way of television or cinema is more common than attending a live performance.  Electronic or digital  commercialization of black drama encourages a certain passivity, a loss of desire to explore nuanced differences between the dramas of everyday living and crafted, oppositional  drama which defamiliarizes what we take for granted and provokes discomforting thought. The integrity of the drama as script counts for little under the current  pressures of satisfying audiences and earning profits.  And the path most often taken is a reductive discussion of black drama as narrative rather than as exceptionally  complex mimesis.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

November 2, 2015

 

Ramcat Reads 5

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

 

writers and politicians

Writers and Politicians

Among the Presidents who have occupied the White House since my birth, President Barack Obama is one of the most literate. Historians who write about the American presidency after 2017 will be obligated to note that Obama tried to "write an honest account of a particular province" of his life in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995; New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), and that he called for a new kind of politics in The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming The American Dream (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006).  As they condemn or commend his policies and speeches, the wisest historians will not ignore that fact that he invited Elizabeth Alexander to bless his 2009 inauguration with a woman's vision.  Nor will they simply mention in passing that Richard Blanco gave some credibility to Obama's virtue of tolerance in the 2013 inaugural poem.  The most scholarly historians will dwell for more than a nanosecond on Tara T. Green's conclusion in A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009)that "Obama, then, shows the possibilities of escaping the pressures of social pitfalls as much as he proves the importance of black communities in the late twentieth century providing homes for those wandering black sons in need of understanding, healing and love" (132).  All of the historians will direct attention to Obama's September 14, 2015 conversation with Marilynne Robinson.

It may be the case that writers and politicians rarely have meaningful conversations, because such talks might draw undue attention to national insecurities. Robinson's exchange of ideas with the President pivots on the topic of fear, the subject of her startling essay "Fear" in the September 24, 2015 issue of the New York Review of Books.  Robinson apologizes to no one for her Calvinist-flavored Christianity, for her conviction that "[w]hen Christians abandon Christian standards of behavior in the defense of Christianity in the defense of Christianity, when Americans abandon American standards of conduct in the name of America, they inflict harm that would not be in the power of any enemy"(30).  Yet, Robinson warns us in disarmingly plain English that " the making of Christianity in effect the official religion, is the first thing its [Christian "establishment"] supernumeraries would try for, and the last thing its faithful should condone"(30).  Robinson's essay provides an extended footnote for Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), and her breezy recycling of Katznelson's neoliberal analyses seems to have swept Obama into  a remarkable instance of the indivisible unity of the literary and the political.  Obama knows what kind of supernumeraries Donald Trump and Ben Carson are as they riff on the epistles of St. Paul and inundate us with exegeses of the Book of Revelation.  He knows also why he needs to deflect attention from the impeccable satire of Paul Martinez Pompa's "I Have a Drone"  (see The BreakBeat Poets, pages 165-167) and to direct our gaze, with patriotic help from Robinson, to the sublime beauty of the Russian-manufactured Kalashnikov.  As the elected Defender of American faith, he must wash us in the blood of the Second Amendment and satisfy our yearnings for violence and fear as the seven angels "pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth."  Marilynne Robinson and President Obama have given us a conversation to remember.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.    October 27, 2015

Tacit Knowing/Explicit Knowledge

Tacit Knowing/Explicit Knowledge

 

Tom Dent's one-act Ritual Murder (1967), first performed in 1976, is a classic of Black South drama . Dent minimized plot  and depended on the Narrator's investigation  and the individual testimonials of type-cast  characters (the wife, the public school teacher, the boss, the anti-poverty program administrator, the mother and father,  the chief of police, a black psychiatrist, the victim  and the murderer) to sketch a communal story.  His verbal economy is effective. The only action is focused speech.  Spectators can experience the play as an investigative tool, a device  for analyzing a familiar event  in modern life:  African American men killing African American men.  As we move from the particular to the general,  especially in 2015, we recognize that what demands investigation is why in the United States officers of the law take pathological pleasure in killing unarmed civilians inside and outside of prisons (literal and figurative)  and why our nation's primary story (myth)  is one of death, dying and despairing  rather than one of life, living and loving.

Thanks to the unrelenting  immediacy of visual and verbal evidence, we have no escape route from a most disturbing question: in which place of human habitation will the next accidental or intended "ritual murder" occur and necessitate our speaking the words "lives matter"?  In 2015, we are condemned to knowing that our beloved democracy is a cuckoo's nest.  Just as Ken Kesey could not predict that his 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest would become emblematic of American history, Tom Dent could not be certain that his play would universal applicability in the United States and beyond.

 What Dent did know, however, was that  Ritual Murder figuratively incorporates its audience.  Written in the early years of what we now call the Black Arts Movement, the play  provokes those who  witness it  to speak at the end of the performance.  Even spectators who refuse to speak become characters in a theatrical ritual. Ultimately, Ritual Murder is metadrama, i.e., a play that explains how a play may have a socially engaged purpose. Thus,  it is at once a local (New Orleans) and a transcendent example of art for life, or in the more familiar wording of the Black Arts Movement, the indivisibility of art and politics.

It is noteworthy that Dent  remixed elements of tragedy as described in Aristotle's Poetics with some of  the dark, biting humor  Bertolt Brecht used in writing the libretto for  The Threepenny Opera (1928). The aesthetic effect of Ritual Murder  is cool and unsettling.  It does not provoke fear and pity; its performance does not lead spectators to have any feeling of  catharsis, of being purged and cleansed. On the contrary, because one witnesses the collection and broadcasting  of opinions about the crime rather than specific  visual details about Joe Brown's knifing his friend James Roberts on a Saturday night, one feels moved to have compassionate disinterest.  One experiences the  frustration of the need to clarify a recurring social problem that defies resolution.

 

 

 

For some of its readers,

Bracey, John H., Jr., Sonia Sanchez, and James Smethurst, eds. SOS --Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader.  Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.

will produce renewed interest in problems that we can't resolve.  The book is an invitation to think about how a moment in American cultural history still compels us to deal with the implications of human knowledge.  Such thinking can benefit from a possibility set forth by Michael Polanyi in The Study of Man (1959).  Polanyi proposed that written knowledge is "only one kind of knowledge; while unformulated knowledge, such as we have of something we are in the act of doing, is another form of knowledge.  If we call the first kind explicit knowledge, and the second, tacit knowledge, we may say that we always know tacitly that we are holding our explicit knowledge to be true. If, therefore, we are satisfied to hold a part of our knowledge tacitly, the vain pursuit of reflecting ever again on our own reflections no  longer arises" (12).  Such anthologies as SO--Calling All Black People  suggest our ability to forget is stronger than our capability to remember.  They serve as forms of explicit knowledge to help us with the job of tacit knowing, because reflecting on what we have failed to remember is not a vain pursuit.  Common sense instructs us that we need to remember and use works created by the artists and thinkers of the Black Arts Movement.

Weighing in at 666+ pages, SOS---Calling  All Black People might be one of the primary texts in community or academic seminar, an investment in remembering that might include Black Fire (1968), edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal,  Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (1976) by Eugene B. Redmond, The Black Aesthetic (1971), edited by Addison Gayle, Jr.,  The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry (2011) by Howard Rambsy II, and The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005) by James Edward Smethurst.  Arnold Rampersad's recommending that the anthology can "add immeasurably to our ability to understand and teach a crucial  aspect of modern African American and American literary history" is wonderful as far as colleges and university might be concerned, but out-of-school  people deserve to share its wealth. They are the troubled citizens who can benefit most from  the renewal of tacit knowing, from considering how an anthology assassinates time and freezes particular "documents" for everyday use.

The book has five major sections ----1) theory/criticism, 2) statements of purpose, 3) poetry, 4) drama, and 5) fiction/narrative---and concludes with commentary by James G. Spady , John H. Bracey, and Audre Lorde.  In the introduction, the editors inform us the anthology is intended to provide access to "the ideological, aesthetic, and geographical scope of the movement"(10). The editors went a step beyond on September 17, 2015 in modeling how to contextualize this access in a panel "First Fires & the Black Arts Movement in the South"  at the Sonja Haynes Center, University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill.

The book provides a great amount of material for study, but it falls short in matters of identification and internal contextualizing.  This failure may be a result of haste in making editorial decisions.  For example, the book does not have an index, the apparatus needed for quick comparison with other indexed compilations or for highlighting areas of emphasis.  The book does not provide notes on contributors.  Younger readers may be familiar with the names Amiri Baraka, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks, but they may need to visit the Internet to discover who were Carolyn Gerald [Carolyn Fowler], Ebon Dooley, Ahmos Zu-Bolton, Joe Goncalves, A. B. Spellman,  and Henry Dumas.  People of a certain age who belong to special communities of reading need no special assistance in knowing why Ronald Milner, Louise Meriwether, Tom Dent, James G. Spady, and Sam Cornish are important, but it is wrongheaded to assume general readers will possess such knowledge.

Those readers do need the apparatus or metadata commonly used in the best contemporary anthologies.  Moreover, serious scholarship is obligated, for example, to provide more than a single descriptive paragraph to cast light on such documents as "NKOMBO, Food for Thought," "Southern Black Cultural Alliance, By-Laws," and "Umbra, Foreword to Issue 1.1."  Indeed, scholarship demands some annotation regarding Tom Dent's formative role in the intellectual process of bringing Umbra, Southern Black Cultural Alliance , and NKOMBO into being.  Yes, we can turn to books by James Smethurst and  Howard Rambsy; to The Cambridge History of African American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011);  to New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), edited by Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford; to Tony Bolden's Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), and to many journal articles for supplemental information.  But the habits taken for granted within academic settings may not obtain when SOS--Calling All Black People circulates in more public communities of reading and discussing and agonizing over the recurrent issues and problems  of African American life (and indeed all lives) in the United States of America. The editors might have used their tacit knowing to anticipate such a possibility.

This editorial shortcoming does not undermine the invaluable contribution of the anthology as a resource for dealing with seismic and paradigm shifts in American culture. And it is probable that like Tom Dent's Ritual Murder, SOS---Calling All Black People will be welcomed as an investigative tool for examining contemporary American pathologies which unite politics and art.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

October 20, 2015

learning from undergraduates

Learning from Undergraduates

                Occasionally, teaching undergraduates involves  moments which provoke you to curse.  On the other hand, learning from undergraduates can be a blessing which demands your gratitude.  The young women and men who sat in my classrooms from 1970 to 2012 were powerful instructors.  They were unpredictable.  Some of them were brilliant, challenging me to challenge them.  The so-called average students inspired me to invent puzzling questions for which we struggled together to find responses, for the questions defied our best efforts to find answers.  The slower students used their lack of preparation to teach me why compassion and patience must be used with caution, why sympathy must not be confused with empathy.  In one way or another, all of my students contributed to my worldly salvation.  None of them are to be blamed for my spiritual flaws, for the faults that require me to negotiate and renegotiate endlessly with the cosmic powers.  For a period of forty-two years, undergraduates taught me the limits of being human.

                They also taught me why the quest for clarity can be dreadful.  Clarity in speech and writing that is (or can be)  free in day to day life  is costly inside the boundaries of institutionalized learning.  As teachers  try to build knowledge and  share insights about what they are constructing, profound investments in a discipline can encourage blindness. Some of us who deal with literary theory, critical possibilities, and interpretation, for example,  often mistake our errors for "truth."  We can easily forget  what now appears to us to be simple was at some point in our life histories daunting and complex.  Our acquired expertise in language and literature and writing can be diabolic. Our praxis or pedagogy can be identical with the Devil's work, particularly in instances when we believe we have to be a god in the eyes of our students and our peers.  Abandoning common sense, many of us clothe ignorance in awkward prose and parade it as evidence of superior achievement.  Is it ironic that obstreperous  representation of thought earns great praise?

                Retired, liberated from the immediate need to learn from undergraduates or to teach them, I have not forgot what they taught me. The quest for clarity is still a dreadful journey toward eternity, and I thank undergraduates for implanting such knowledge in my mind.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

October 17, 2015

letter to a young philosopher

 LETTER TO A YOUNG PHILOSOPHER 

 

Dear James,

After reading your proposal for a book on black aesthetics, I raise four common sense questions:

WHAT IS NECESSARY?

WHAT IS GOOD?

WHAT IS TRUE?

WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL?

If you paste these questions on your wall as you investigate "black aesthetics," you might write a mind-opening book.  That is the only worthwhile kind of book any of us ought to try to write.  Good thinkers use the gravity of simple questions to ground themselves.

Standard American English invites us to be careless as we pretend to be rigorous.  Take a clue from the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who merits applause for publishing The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century ( New York: Viking, 2014). No sentence in his book refers to Black American English.  That is a damned fine thing.  By ignoring an ethnic use of English that flavors styles of contemporary American thought, Pinker alerts us to exclusion as an option.  In academic commerce, we opt to exclude or ignore as we shape reality in an image that we deem pleasing and proper.  For example, he tells us "the graybeard sensibilities of the style mavens come not just from an underappreciation of the fact of language change but from a lack of reflection on their own psychology"(4).  Should you opt to ignore the ethnic history of the word "aesthetic," and what that history reveals about use and abuse in doing things with words, you will make common cause with Pinker in mavenship. Be at once more cautious and more radical than he, and reflect on your own psychology.

The English language can be treacherous.  To write about aesthetics in a meaningful and necessary way, you have to weed the garden of Western thought.  As far as I know, aesthetics was not a worshipful category prior to the 18th century.  And since you up the ante by using  the slippery adjective black to modify aesthetics, remember that African peoples did not think of themselves as "black" prior to their sundry contacts with color-deficient peoples.  They thought of themselves as people who used their minds and bodies as instruments to sense what was external.  In this regard, they were no different than people unlike themselves in expressing how body and mind could deal with material objects and environments and flashings of the spirit.  Western thought is predisposed to fix what is not broken and to let weeds choke roots.

As a philosopher, you may have studied how etymology  is related to epistemology and use of words. From the Oxford English Dictionary, a source of some authority, we learn that aesthetic comes from Greek.  It originally meant "of or pertaining to...things perceptible by the senses, things material (as opposed to...things thinkable or immaterial."  In 1735, the German thinker Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, being pro-Aristotle and anti-Plato in sensibility, used episteme aistetike to mean a science of what is sensed and imagined, a nice violation of the original meaning. According to some reports, Immanuel Kant was not pleased with such philosophical violation.  He was a purist. But when the word " aesthetic"  gained currency in English usage after 1830, thinkers  maximized the sense of taste (minimizing other senses) and designated it to mean "philosophical inquiry, the object of which is philosophical theory of the beautiful."  The word's  journey from the Greek to the German to the English is ethnic and also coloured by the paint of race. The word is now used most exclusively in  discussions of art.

It pleases me that you are taking up an unfinished project of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), namely exploration of diverse changes in how  African American make aesthetic choices as they respond to life and to art.  It became fashionable in the 1980s to demonize the "political" features of  BAM, to dismiss the phenomenon as a cultural temper tantrum or a suspect reification of African and African American mythologies.

 BAM did have flaws and contradictions, of course, but they were not so irrational that discussions of the Black Aesthetic and aesthetics in the anthology The Black Aesthetic  (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., had to be murdered  in a rush toward a reconstruction of instruction and the salvation of theory. Many  anti-BAM critics, energized by the vernacular signifying of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,  deemed it a virtue to be "theoretical"  in the way Jacques Lacan,  Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were always already postmodern and deconstructionist in the theatre of philosophy. Their opposition was a sign of how rational they were.  A smaller number of them embraced the blues-informed ideology of Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s history-bound  brand of theorizing.  Few of them, I suspect, read Derrida's characterization of metaphysics  in The Margins of Philosophy (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982) as "the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason" (231). Had they engaged Reason from this angle, they might have been more sympathetic to BAM's efforts to say that perceptions have a racialized historicity. They might have been less anxious to foreclose the unfinished  metaphysical project BAM initiated regarding aesthetics.

On the other hand,  it might  have mattered very little  if they had read Derrida, for they were determined to give  credibility to an assertion John Dewey made in Art as Experience (1934; New York: Paragon, 1979): "Usually there is a hostile reaction to a conception of art that connects it with the activities of a live creature in its environment. The hostility to association of fine art with normal processes of living is a pathetic, even a tragic commentary on life as it is ordinarily lived" (27). Dewey understood that aesthetic experiences were first of all about living (sensing of materiality) and only secondarily about "correct" contemplation of objects in the visual and plastic arts and motion in ballet;  eargasms and rapture  in the presence of "classical music" or opera; or in the case of literature, formal and deceptive  ahistorical inspection of  verbal icons.  James, I urge you to read Dewey as well as Cornel West's enlightened commentary on Dewey in The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).  Dewey knew how to weed a garden.  You may also want to read Barnor Hesse, "Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies." Ethnic and Racial Studies 30.4 (2007): 643-663.  Hesse pulls up weeds nicely as he discusses the racial metaphysics of presence.

Above all, I strongly recommend that you read Carolyn Fowler's brilliant introduction to Black Arts and Black Aesthetics. 2nd Edition (Atlanta: First World Foundation, 1981).  Better than any other thinker associated with the Black Arts Movement, Fowler understood that the term "black aesthetics" is historical and non-exclusive.  Like the terms "Chinese aesthetics" or "Persian aesthetics," it belongs to a history of philosophical discourses.  The idea of aesthetics is fluid not fixed. And our talk about aesthetics should not lead to the belief that we can have a total accounting of how people perceive and think about things material.  We are limited to approximate accounting for the human sensorium in time and space.  Emphasize in your book that you are making an inquiry about history (narratives regarding the endless process of change and continuity) and that philosophical propositions are not omniscient.  It is necessary and good to make  acknowledgements with grace.  I believe you are trying to articulate "a truth" rather than "the Truth."  Ultimately, I am suggesting that you use common sense to write in uncommon ways about the flowing ontology of black aesthetics, the river where consciousness connects with the beautiful.

With very best wishes,

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

October 8, 2015