1 Feb 2016

Today is Langston Hughes's birthday.

Read two of his poems before midnight.

February 2016

 February 2016

 

Let us take a lesson from the Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans.  They spend an entire year creating new suits for Carnival Time.  We should spend twelve months in research, debating, action and writing in order to have something important to say when we engage the themes announced by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History for Black History Month.  "Hallowed Grounds: Sites of African American Memories" is the theme for 2016.  The best site for memory is the mind.

Elder minds might remember The Institute of the Black World was once located at 87 Chestnut Street, S. W., Atlanta, Georgia 30314.  In January 1983, Vincent Harding sent out "IBW Thirteenth Anniversary Update and Fund Appeal" along with an unforgettable quotation from Lerone Bennett's The Challenge of Blackness:

"….we believe in the community of the black dead and the black living and the black unborn.  We believe that that community has a prior claim on our time and our talents and our resources, and that we must respond when it calls."

Elder minds continue to share Bennett's beliefs  in greater and lesser degrees.  Times have changed. Let us ask minds that are twenty and younger if Bennett's words still have mad juice, even if we don't know what mad juice is. Let us be still and wait for silence or a hip hop word of four letters or an answer in Twitter syllables.  Times have changed, but the need to cultivate minds has remained constant.

In 2016, elderly farmers can plant old seeds from Vincent Harding's The Other American Revolution (1981) in the soil of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow (2010):

"At the edge of history, how shall we move? Do we continue to trail behind the most revolutionary insights that our struggle has already achieved; do we turn away from the radical directions that Malcolm, Martin, and Fannie Lou had already approached in the 1960s?  Or do we stand with them, move with them, move beyond them, move on for them and for ourselves and our children to remake this nation?" (231)

The seeds might produce talking plants that will care to say:

Teach the unborn what law is and law is not as citizens, with or without benefit of uniform, kill young minds contained in young bodies.  Teach the unborn that they are expected to excel in mathematics and STEM.  Teach the unborn to be conversant with how global economies function inside and outside the United States of America.  Teach the unborn that the arts and the humanities are not useless; they are limited.  Teach the unborn that ACTUALITY dominates REALITY.  Teach the unborn that natural law does not baptize, ordain, and canonize STUPIDITY and that WISDOM is a terrible thing to waste.

It is not beneath the dignity of elder minds to do a bit of sharecropping.

In another part of the upper forty, the talking plants will repeat words from Harding that will upset the minds of the black living.  He asserted "that just as many of the energies of the middle-class black freedom movement leadership have now been absorbed into the middle level structure of the American nation, so, too, the phenomenon that we called Black Studies  ---and many of its similarly middle-class proponents ---has been absorbed into the structures , ethos, and aspirations of the American university system" and  " that Black Studies was absorbed (with a few important partial exceptions) for many of the same reasons that we experienced in the larger area of national struggle.  Essentially, it happened because the Black Studies movement failed to carry to their logical, radical ends many of the challenges to the assumptions, ideology, and structures of American higher education, failed to continue to press the critical issue of the relationship between black people inside the universities and those who will never make it" (227).

In February 2016, the elder minds will be silent and listen for sounds from the young and middle-aged minds inside and outside of the Trilateral Commission, the  Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the  United Negro College Fund, the BK Nation, the various #Whatever Matters phenomena, the IMF and the World Bank,   the National Council of Black Studies, the CDC and the NSF, the College Language Association, the Urban League , the United Nations and the NAACP.  Should the elder minds hear nothing more than white noise, they will continue serene conversations in the community of the black dead.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

January 26, 2016

bones, ashes, minds

OUR BONES/OUR ASHES/OUR MINDS

 

In his nicely crafted review essay "The Anger of Ta-Nahesi Coates" (New York Review of Books, February 11, 2016 issue), Darryl Pinckney raises the penultimate question of our day:

"Which is better:  to believe that blacks will achieve full equality in American society or to realize that white racism is so deep that meaningful integration can never happen, so make other plans?"

In the first choice of response, the word "equality" really ought to be "power," so that the second choice would appear with better advantage. Moreover, the word "power" might provoke certain neoliberal, colorblinded readers to have epiphanies.  We recognize, of course, that Pinckney is writing for the NYRB audience, and some liberties of vision are simply forbidden.  One must not trample on the tender sensibilities of an august readership.  For the 1% of the readership that has achieved post-humanity, even the common sense phrase "white racism" will be deemed micro-transgressive.

For that portion of the readership that is still capable of being enlightened, however, Pinckney's offense is weaving a male-centered discussion of anger.  In order of reference he names: Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, DuBois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Malcolm X, Paul Coates, George Jackson, Eric B & Rakim, Robert Hayden, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Brown, Prince Jones, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney, and Harold Cruse.  The deliberate absence in what purports to be a liberal overview of the growth and development of post-Reconstruction anger are the invisible threads named: Ida B. Wells, Sandra Bland,  Barbara Jordan, Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Lou Hamer, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Michelle Alexander, Alice Walker, Joyce Ladner, Ann Petry, Mary McLeod Bethune, Margaret Walker, Angela Davis, Tarika Wilson, Sonia Sanchez, Wanda Coleman, and Elaine Brown.  Had Pinckney dared to weave a dense fabric, we might have nominated him for an award for prescience.

In fairness to Pinckney, we recognize that his voice is hedged by the rules of the game.  He was employed to write in a tradition of counter-anger that one associates with William Stanley Braithwaite and Alain Locke and Nathan A. Scott, Jr.  If one has a sliver of understanding about the neoliberal and protofascist designs of contemporary publishing, one is aware that Pinckney is embroiled in autarky --"forcible separation from the rest of the world" in the footloose interpretation used by Jeffry A. Frieden in Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (2006). One must turn to the Oxford English Dictionary to recover a better definition of autarchy.  The game demands that Pinckney situate Ta-Nahesi Coates and Between the World and Me inside the discursive WEB (Wright/Ellison/Baldwin mechanism  of emotional assurance).  The game has an old, rather ignoble history. Therein, Pinckney has implied authority to play riffs on sagas of black fathers and sons.  He can use lightweight historical and cultural analyses and comparisons to defang the modest revolutionary potential of Coates's prose, to transform the promise of a flame into a flicker. He will not cause the NYRB readership to suffer a single moment of cognitive indigestion.  He speaks in the pages of the NYRB as effectively  for his kind of people as Donald Trump speaks on the airwaves for his race and Hillary Clinton speaks for her gender.  Pinckney is an experienced player in the five rings of our national intellectual circus.  And the sales of Coates's book shall not be significantly diminished.

However much Pinckney's review essays is a heartfelt reading of the roots of Coates's alleged anger, what one reads may be other than what one gets.  Although we lack grounds for accusing  Pinckney of insincerity or want of moral integrity ----after all he is playing a literary game without spilling blood, we  should not ignore how Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty  (or Indeterminacy) Principle functions within the game.  A few black and non-black readers among us may experience acid reflux as they grasp the implacable rightness of Coates's success where tamed anger is unexceptional and welcomed.  In territories where belief that the social destiny of black people is fixed in a dualist tradition has no funk-appeal, we recognize the severe limits of literary persuasion and why Between the World and Me is a highly accomplished but incomplete representation of authentic anger. Indeed, I dare to imagine that were our nation more literate, Coates and his publisher could have entitled his book A Father's Law rather than Between the World and Me in order to expose just how much  the obscenity of domestic genocide in the United States of America is complicit with irreversible changes in world order.

 

I have reasons, which I care not to interrogate, for repeating the following paragraphs from August 7, 2015:

Dread is the real deal in the United States of America and elsewhere. The Dream is an evil fiction that attempts to enslave people, and  too often it succeeds beyond the expectations of its authors.

 Ta-nehisi Coates has produced a first-rate secular jeremiad, an honest meditation on Dread.  There is a thin but critical line between a sermon and a jeremiad.  Coates is neither a priest nor a preacher.

 You sit in the desert, secure in your idiosyncrasy.  You and the ghost of Claude McKay sit in the sand and take bets on who shall be the first to see Time's unerring terrorism, with much help from Nature,  dispatch the millions of people who worship in the temples  and cathedrals and mosques  of white supremacy.

Thus, I announce as a response to Pinckney's penultimate question of our day that I have chosen to make other plans.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

January 24, 2016

Reading Mahmoud Darwish

Reading Mahmoud Darwish: A Polemical Note

 

Some years ago, I read Darwish's famous poem "Identity Card," thinking of how we seem to need plastic and passes, ink, paper and photographs ----legitimate or forged documents ---to move through and across geopolitical territories.  Is it not strange that we require inscriptions to authenticate our flesh, our blood and bones, our cognitive activities?

"Identity Card" is a finely executed act of self-fashioning, proof of what and how symbols signify.  In Darwish's case, the signifying and significance are apparently anti-Zionist.  It is the trace of an Arab, a Palestinian who sends words as weapons of self-defense into real and imagined space.  As luck would have it, I had written "I Didn't Ask to be a Palestinian" before I read "Identity Card."  I was not under his influence in the poetic appropriation of identity, despite the empathy that links his poem and mine.  Links matter.  The joy of linking informs what I think of his epic lyric " The 'Red Indian's ' Penultimate Speech to the White Man" from If I Were Another. Trans Fady Joudah. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.  I say with due caution that this poem is superior to "Identity Card" as an aesthetic  critique of "the ideology/ of madness."   One of my paternal great-grandmothers was no more named "Red Indian" than her husband was named "Negro."  It is a truth, acknowledged by the cosmos, that in their pathetic love/hate affair with symbol and substance, human beings are damned to rarely see what is  uncertainly actual. I suppose the very best poets on Earth do blacken our eyes and our minds to help us see better.

The illegal, alien entity that calls itself "the white man" is at one with the bogus entity that calls itself "the black man" and other  diversely mixed and thoroughly raced and gendered  entities in America in forgetting what/who  decimated indigenous peoples and continues to rape and violate  the Earth that belongs to them and to us.  Darwish, thousands of miles away from the Father of Waters, knew "the stars/are illuminated speech…if you stared into them you would read our story entire:"  I salute Mahmoud Darwish for helping me to remember a few things which #ultimately matter.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

January 23, 2016

Mario Vargas Llosa and Culture

Mario Vargas Llosa and Culture

 

Vargas Llosa, Mario. Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society. Ed. and trans.  John King,  New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015.

 

We have had overmuch talk about the crisis of the humanities , and Mario Vargas Llosa has cleverly offered us an alternative  ----  the crisis of culture.  He has dusted off and polished the subject matter of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy  (1869, 1875) to relieve us of boredom.  In so doing, he doesn't invite us to jog through the Victorian realm of Arnold's sweetness and light; instead, he invites us to surf the contemporary ocean of chaos. His jeu d'esprit is not cheap.  But thanks to John King's lucid translation of La civilización del espectáculo (2012), we can afford the price of the ticket to gawk at the cage wherein Vargas Llosa has sought habitation as if he is truly a Kafkaesque hunger artist.

Shortly after Vargas Llosa won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Spanish monarch bestowed him with the entitlement to be addressed as "Ilustrisimo Señor Marqués de Vargas Llosa," a gift that has no doubt improved the quality of Spanish nobility.  Being an integral part of Spanish spectacle, Vargas Llosa employs his new aristocracy to lecture us on the death of culture.  Like earlier efforts to announce the Death of God, the Death of the Author, the Death of the Novel, and the Death of Death, this recent broadcast is momentarily enthralling.  Yet, the attempt to persuade us that Walter Benjamin and Karl Popper can serve "as evidence that however rarified the air might become, and life turn against them, dinosaurs can manage to survive and be useful in difficult times" (226) ultimately fails. We are amused but not persuaded when we notice the limits of Vargas Llosa's neoliberalism.

He begins the collage of essays with a swift review of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), a modernist work that anticipates the postmodernism displayed in Notes on the Death of Culture.  To be fair, we admit that reminders of what Eliot said regarding culture, the individual, the group or class, and the whole society are necessary for specifying the character of Western civilization.  It is from Eliot that Vargas Llosa derives the notion that the democratizing force of education is fracturing and destroying "higher culture."  In this regard, he is in synch with Allan Bloom's lamentations in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), implying that membership in the elite is requisite for  acquiring  true knowledge.  Yet, the idea of knowledge promoted by Eliot, Bloom, and Vargas Llosa is suspect and much in need of deconstructive unpacking.  Certain kinds of indigenous knowledge (which  might be more respected in advanced physics than in the sprawling humanities) seems to be beyond their comprehension.

Vargas Llosa hints at this possibility in his remarks about George Steiner's In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture (1971).  Steiner attributed Eliot's failure to acknowledge that the carnage of World Wars I and II was an integral element of culture to anti-Semitism, and Vargas Llosa is uncomfortable with Steiner's alleged belief that postmodern society is dominated by science and technology. He seeks a little comfort in Guy Debord's La Société du spectacle (1967) but actually seems to find a more authentic comfort in La cultura-mundo: Respuesta a una sociedad desorientada (2010) by Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy and the best comfort of all in Frederic Martel's Mainstream (2010).  After dancing in English, French and Spanish, Vargas Llosa must conclude that pre-twenty-first-century culture was designed to transcend time but that post-whatever cultures evaporate with noteworthy swiftness in their own times.

However much we applaud the performance, we are left with the enduring  problem of how theories of culture are merely incomplete speculations, particularly coming from the imagination of a writer who apparently is uninformed about what W. E. B. DuBois,  Lu Xun,  Frantz Fanon , and  Edward Said have written about the life of culture.  Vargas Llosa is right in claiming that entertainment is a universal passion.  He is rather naïve in thinking that Benjamin and Popper, whom we admit are very  important in a long parade of committed writers, show us "by writing, one can resist adversity, act and influence history"(226).  He aristocratically glosses over the implacable dread of material suffering and dying in global civilization as he makes a trenchant critique of our deadly passivity.  We may like the spectacle of Mario Vargas Llosa as Don Quixote, but we are not obligated to believe and dream the impossible dream, to confuse the image with the actuality.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            January 17, 2016

 

the keyword museum

The Keyword  Museum

The Modern Language Association's project on Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments is a space-bending and mind/behavior-altering enterprise.  It will change the future of what is loosely known as the Profession,  the diverse arenas of higher and lower education, and the traditional work of social scientists and , most  importantly, of people in the hard sciences who think in combinations of mathematical symbols and natural languages.  The MLA enterprise, which is open for comment until January 31, 2016, is a 21st century companion to a still important 20th century print-centric tool, namely Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) by Raymond Williams.

Forty years ago, Williams had traced how 155 words function in the English language  domain of cultural transmission.  He did not select "race" for inclusion in his book.  That is odd.  Given the blitzkrieg of "race" in American and European discourses from 1900 to 1976, one might have expected it would not have been ignored by a Cambridge University professor.  But the Western academic world is a strange place where omissions can be rationalized and theorized into non-existence, erased until they return home to roost. As a sidebar, one should note, using "evidence" from Google's Ngram, that after ebb and flow from 1930 to now, the frequency of using "race" has currently returned to its 1940s, 1950s, and 1970s levels.

Adeline Koh (Stockton University) has brought that prodigal child named "race" back to the animal farm.  Under her curatorial guidance, we are beginning to see more clearly just what kind of personification Race has been historically.  We are invited to interrogate the stealthy delinquent as an agent of psychological destruction, a victim of its own "affluenza."  Koh links race and technology.  She admits she has made a "deliberate political choice" in deciding that "any responsible representation of race and technology should offer challenges to and an expansion of how digital pedagogy and digital humanities are defined."  Whether her choice is absurd or correct is open for debate.

One might also be skeptical of Koh's claim that much vital digital work on race is unlikely to receive "the sorts of governmental, federal, and institutional support other less politicized work has,"  primarily because the work is done outside the academic factory.  But it  is probable that a network of surveillance agencies do support digital work on race by using code words that seem remote from the bogus concept of race.  After all, our nation is the greatest nation on Earth, and we the people  are  capable of doing anything.

Among the curated artifacts Koh offers for our review are African Diaspora Ph.D, Ferguson Syllabus, Mapping Police Violence, SAADA (South Asian American Digital Archive), #This Tweet Called My Back, Soweto 76, and Invisible Australians: The Real  Face of White Australia.  She provides her own NITLE Race and the Digital Humanities Zetro Bibliography, other related materials, and WORKS CITED for our inspection.  One must ask, of course, where are the curated artifacts pertaining to Whiteness, Hispanic Diaspora, Pacific Island Cultures, and the Hamitic/Semitic Middle East?  If Digital Pedagogy is the future, we need a better keyword mapping of why  so-called White Folk speak freely all races except the one to which they belong.         Jerry W. Ward, Jr.     January 14, 2016

MLA Source:  http://digitalpedagogy/commons.mla.org/keywords

January 13

Topics for Cultural Memory 2016

 

I am remembering January 14, 2016 marks the 100th anniversary for John Oliver Killens (1916-1987).  Frank Garvin Yerby (1916-1991) will also be 100 on September 5, one day before Richard Wright celebrates being 108.  The dead and the living can celebrate a birthday together.

Killens and Yerby chose to follow different paths or ideologies.  That is to be remembered.  Killens chose to confront and question the Establishment, the system.  Yerby chose to take advantage of the Establishment's nostalgia for the past to enlarge his bank account.  Their choices are starting points for cultural remembering.  We can use the common topics of rhetoric (definition, comparison, relationship, circumstances, and testimony) as well as the special topics (deliberative, judicial, ceremonial) as we read or re-read works of the past and make connections.  Those who are younger than we are must always be equal partners in the conversation.  Like the dead and the living, the young and the old must speak to and listen to one another.  Otherwise, we emit hot air and waste time.

We can remember Eugene B. Redmond's Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry was published 40 years ago as we recall the Eugene B. Redmond Club has been in existence for 30 years. This remembering is an apt prelude for giving attention to the East St. Louis Riot of 1917 in the context of what happened in Ferguson and other combat zones.  The urban discord of then has something to teach the urban unrest of now.

Margaret Walker's Jubilee was published 50 years ago.  The idea of Kwanzaa is 51, having been created by Dr. Maulana Karenga in 1965.  Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)  dramatically  uttered the phrase "Black Power" during  James Meredith's "March Against Fear" from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi in 1966.  These three facts bid us to negotiate (1) history and fiction, (2) African American celebration of seven principles [Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba, Imani], and (3) political actions.  We have options for choosing how and what to remember. And we should ask as well why Goodread's list of the top 200 books published in 1966 includes Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? but omits Jubilee.

The selection of options can be an investment in re-examination, analysis, and perhaps rededication. We can hope that the young will speak about  the future to the present and the past.  To be sure, the old can contribute insights about  mistakes and suggest (but only suggest) guides for avoiding them. The young should tell us WHAT, WHERE, and HOW.  And we should say to them  WHY and WHO all of us ought never forget.  How we converse about topics of cultural memory in 2016 has the possibility of enlightening and empowering us as we try to build a future that will be slightly different from the one President Barack Obama had the audacity to dream in his January 12 "State of the Union" address.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

January 13, 2016