Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 438

The Decline of Labor Unions

'Harper’s Magazine contributing editor Garret Keizer discusses his latest piece in the September issue “Labor’s Last Stand.” Keizer writes about how the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a bill that would make it easier for workers to organize unions, has been weakened by recent Supreme Court decisions. Keizer assesses the prospects of the working class as income inequality widens and union membership declines.' -- Midday on WNYC
         
        

Black Genius and the ‘Precarity’ of The Archive by Mark Anthony Neal

Black Genius and the ‘Precarity’ of The Archive by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
There are many who will claim to have been at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue on August 11, 1973, the night that Clive Campbell, aka Kool Herc, who was said to have “birthed” Hip-Hop at a house party in the community center. There is no audio recording of that night; not even a set list, for what happened that night in a place mythically referred to as the “birthplace” of Hip-hop.  There similarly is no such claim to be made about a signature moment in the creation of Jazz, yet when five-year old Louis Armstrong snuck around Funky Butt Hall and first heard Charles “Buddy” Bolden, he could only reflect that “Old Buddy Bolden blew so hard that I used to wonder if I would ever have enough lung power to fill one of those cornets.” (Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, 53)
With Precarity, John Akomfrah’s visual meditation on the life and art of Buddy Bolden, the filmmaker seeks not to recreate the moment that could be mythically referred to as a birth, nor does he seek to tell the facts of the story, but dares to provide glimpses into the literal precarity of Black Genius; who is to care and nurture the genius of those for which citizenship, and worse still, humanity, was thought to be at best a liminal existence.
Yet to document the genius of Bolden – the one who blew so hard – is  rife with that which was not documented, and thus can never be documented.  As Michael Ondaatje writes in Coming Through Slaughter, the experimental novel that helps inform Akomfrah’s vision, “There is only one photograph that exists today of Bolden and the band...as a photograph is is not good or precise, partly because the print was found after the fire.” Existing just at the dawn of the phonograph – Bolden’s peak years of 1899 to 1907 begin only two years after Thomas Edison’s invention was trademarked the Gramophone – but who would waste a cutting edge technology for one for which genius could not possibly exist.
Throughout Precarityaudiences bear witness to images of Blackness, photographs rendered most pristine under the cover of the water’s flow, all too familiar “deep river(s)”  like the ones the Jubilee singers turned into a Negro standard in the late 1800s. We hear Bolden, voiced by Christopher Udoh,  “I am the only thing alive; I am one with the water” and the totality of water is made apparent, yet water – flow – is  also a metaphor for a non- extant archive.
As Allyson Nadia Field’s writes in her book Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity,  “Language surrounding non extant film largely falls into three categories of terms, often invoked in combination: the historical artifact, the perishable organic, and the spiritual...The last category answers the perceived lack evoked by the first two, and thereby establishes film restoration and preservation as a near-messianic solution, invoked with terms such as saving and resurrection.” (24)  Fields notes the responsibilities of scholars of Black film, to “treat non-extant films as having the same concerns and import as their extant counterparts. If we do not look adjacently at these elements of film history...we risk missing the rich, albeit ephemeral, archive of the majority of films produced in this period.” (24)
While Fields is specifically referring to early Black cinema, her observations are apropos to the non-extant archives of musical figures such as Buddy Bolden. The crisis of the non-extant archive is in part the crisis of Black Genius; a genius that was obscured, ignored, disregarded in its formative moments, as the documented silence and invisibility of Black Genius – the lack of evidence of things unseen and unheard to offer a Baldwinian mix – is used as indices of a genius that was lacking in the archive.
Hence Bolden’s “biographer”  could argue that “Bolden was not a genius: he attempted to follow through on the music and couldn’t, which caused him great frustration and led to the public displays of rebellion against society that were his downfall and acted as a catalyst in his monumental battle with alcohol” – as if Bolden simply lived in his head with the music and didn’t live in a world; David Marquis writes as if society was some innocuous force in Bolden’s life and not defined by the violence, trauma associated with policing of the color line. (In Search of Buddy Bolden: The First Man of Jazz, xvii). Indeed DuBois is echoed through Udoh’s Bolden: “being a problem is a strange experience”.
Akronfrah framesPrecarity around the six properties of double consciousness – fluidity, plasticity, fugitivity, Enjambment, waywardness, and immanence – the film’s triptych further complicating Du Bois’s now flattened existentialist observations about Black life, perhaps in ways that could only be legible to the cohort of late 19th Century Black Americans that Bolden belonged. As Marquis asserts of the music that would claim Bolden as its innovator,  “Although their sound was alien to some, it had an appeal, especially to a liberated, post-Civil War generation of young blacks.” (43) Yet Akomfrah’s framing might very well also describe the non-extant archive.
Bolden’s story presumably ends in the Louisiana State Insane Asylum, where he is committed in 1907, and remained until his death twenty-three years later.  Marquis suggests that Bolden did, on occasion, pick up his instrument while institutionalized and “seemingly retained traces of his old touch and mannerisms.” (128)  Ondaatje offers some impression of how Bolden might have processed his new surroundings: “Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room...I first began to play, back when I was unaware that reputation made the room narrower and narrower.” (82) Marquis notes that few “were aware of his former reputation. He was just another black patient who talked to himself, babbled incoherently and walked around ritualistically touching objects.” (128)
Buddy Bolden’s world is a contrast to our contemporary moment where the overexposure of Blackness finds its most logical resonance in millennial uses of social media. In this case it was not simply about the inability for there to be a full documentation of Bolden’s impact on the culture of Jazz, but the underexposure and diminishing of Black genius itself.  Bolden would be simply one of the first of many 20th century figures for which their genius would be reduced to incoherent babble.
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Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Professor of African & African American Studies and Professor of English at Duke University, where he is Chair of the Department of African & African-American Studies and Director of the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship (CADCE). Neal is the author of several  books including Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aestheticand Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, and co-editor, with Murray Forman, of That’s The Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (now in its 2nd edition).  Neal is host of the weekly video podcast Left of Black, produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies. Follow Neal on Twitter at @NewBlackMan and Instagram at @BookerBBBrown.

Visuals & Sonics: "Charcoal Baby" by Blood Orange

Blood Orange -- "Charcoal Baby" from Negro Swan with intro by Janet Mock
Director: Crack Stevens; Producer/Exec: Nick Hayes

BK Stories: Homeschooling Co-Ops in NYC

'As more and more parents in New York home-school their children, co-op run micro-schools are growing in number. CottageClass is a Brooklyn-based start-up that makes it easy for parents to browse micro-schools in the area. Hear from a teacher at Brooklyn Apple Academy and the founder of CottageClass about why it's giving kids agency in their own education and providing alternatives to traditional schooling.' -- BRIC TV

GQ: Spike Lee Breaks Down His Film Inspirations

'Spike Lee, the director of BlacKkKlansman, talks about movie greats, from David Lean to Charles Laughton, and films like On the Waterfront and Mean Streets.' -- GQ

Dancer Preserves The Work Of Black Choreographers, In One Video At A Time

'When she was in her 20s, dancer Gesel Mason started emailing black choreographers she admired, asking them to create a solo for her. To her surprise, many of them said yes.  For 15 years, she's performed these solos, calling the combined effort No Boundaries: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers. Mason has now turned her focus to creating a digital archive, highlighting 10 black artists relatively unknown to the general public.' -- All Things Considered

A Controversial Street Co-Naming -- When Dessalines Came to Brooklyn

'Rodneyse Bichotte, New York State Assembly member (D-42), includes East Flatbush, Flatbush, Ditmas Park and Midwood in Brooklyn, talks about the recent co-naming of a street in Flatbush Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard, why it was controversial and why it's important to Haitian-Americans in the area.' -- The Brian Lehrer Show
         
        

Anger Stews Over Plan to Close Nearly All Voting Places In a Rural Black Georgia County

'Ahead of an historic election featuring the nation’s first major black-female nominee for Governor, election officials in Randolph County, Georgia are scheduled to vote on a plan to shutter the majority of voting places in a mostly black district. Voting Rights advocates have threatened to sue the county if the plan prevails, and likened it to the state's long history of minority voter suppression.  Rose Scott is a journalist and host of the midday WABE program Closer Look on 90.1 FM.' --  The Takeaway

Who Gets To Use Black English?

'John McWhorter, teaches linguistics at Columbia University and author of many books including Talking Back, Talking Black  (Bellevue Literary Press, 2017), digs into why a white poet using African American Vernacular English outraged so many readers in his most recent essay in The Atlantic, and asks if there is away to imitate Black English without offending people of color.'
         
        

Examining Black Art and Representation: A Conversation with Deborah Willis

'Deborah Willis, the newly appointed director of the Institute of African-American Affairs at NYU discusses the program's fall 2018 programming, The Black Portraiture conference, and the growth of black representation in the media.  Deborah Willis' exhibition, 'In Pursuit of Beauty: Imaging Closets in Newark and Beyond' at Rutgers University runs through December 21, 2018.' -- Midday on WNYC