Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 489

Chronicling Marcus Garvey and the UNIA: Dr. Robert Hill and Dr. Michaeline Crichlow

'Professors Robert A. Hill and Michaeline A. Crichlow discuss Hill’s career as a chronicler and historian of the African Diaspora through the writing of his now 13-volume Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers project. Hill‘s research has taken him through the expanse of the African Diaspora as he combed through personal, public, and private archives to document the life and pan-African influence of Marcus Garvey, one of the leading intellectual voices of the early 20th century. Hill‘s papers are now housed in the John Hope Franklin Research Center at the David M Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Professor Hill is at Duke University for a one week fellowship to celebrate the archive and share with the Duke community.' -- John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University

The Breach: How the FBI Is Targeting Peaceful Black Activists

'Senior Staff Attorney Nusrat Choudhury of the ACLU’s Racial Equality Program joins Lindsay Beyerstein to explain the FBI’s newest crackpot theory about Black activism and the threat it poses to the people they are targeting.' -- Rewire 

Stuart Hall's Deconstruction of Fate

credit: John AkomfrahStuart Hall's Deconstruction of Fateby Amanda Bennett | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The island of Barbuda is currently devoid of human life, a bleak reality that is both unfathomable in its scope and seemingly inevitable under the conditions of racialized capitalism. The severity of Hurricane Irma’s impact was undoubtedly worsened by the gross consumption of natural resources, particularly by nations that historically benefitted from colonialism and the construction of empire. Of Hurricane Irma and other precedent-setting storms, Bolivian president Evo Morales wrote on Twitter that the “devastation of hurricanes is caused by pollution of capitalism,” specifically targeting the damage done to the environment by nations such as the United States and Great Britain through their industrial pursuits.
In his lecture, “The Formation of Cultural Studies,” Hall states that Fate is “the language of a class to which things happen, not of a class without any command on history. It’s the language of a class to which things happen, not of a class which makes things happen” (Hall 10).  Thus, was it really “Fate” that determined Barbudans to be undeserving of their native home and suitable prey for the IMF, or was it unabashed greed and callousness, cloaked in the neocolonial idea of “modernity”? It appears that one’s position in the dialectic of modernity (in which one is either “backwards” or “advanced”) determines not only whether one deserves to be represented as a legitimate force in “high culture,” but also whether or not one has the right to retain control over the stability of one’s own body on this earth.
It is here—in the conflation of the concepts of modernity, capitalism, high culture, and the right to exist and have rights—that Hall launches his conceptualization of cultural studies. Specifically, it is his aim to metaphorically pull back the curtains on the ambiguous illusion of fate to reveal a complex web of material and ideological threads that determine who is rich and who is poor, who is colonizer and who is colonized, and ultimately, who may live and who must die. Hall’s envisioning of cultural studies implodes the godlike status of the colonizer and releases his stranglehold on the valve through which the formerly colonized and oppressed may have access to power, representation, joy, and life.
“What is the function of ideology?” Hall asks. “It is to reproduce the social relations of production. The social relations of production are necessary to the material existence of any social formation or any mode of production. But the elements or the agents of a mode of production, especially with respect to the critical factor of their labour, have themselves to be continually produced and reproduced” (Hall 129). In his laborious tracing of the genealogy of European Marxist thinkers such as Althusser and Gramsci, Hall deconstructs the ambiguous and omnipotent construct of “fate” in order to expose both the very real mechanics of global exploitation of formerly colonized subjects, as well as the veil of “false consciousness” that prevents the exploited from “recognizing the real” (Hall 128).
Thus, Hall’s lectures can be used contemporaneously more than thirty years later in order to critique discourses around issues such as racialized police brutality, the right to protest, and the continued stigmatization of “low culture” (such as hip hop and Rastafarianism) that are primarily created by those most harmed in the colonizer/colonized dialectic. Through Hall, it becomes possible to analyze these discourses not as even handed debates about patriotism, individual intentions, and personal taste. Rather, within Hall’s cultural studies framework, these issues become sites of resistance to hegemonic control.
In exercising the right to protest systemic racism and the racialized violence endemic to America’s existence as a carceral state, black people seek to dispel the opacity of “fate” and stridently refuse to remain objects trapped within a system that quite literally profits from their lifeblood. Through Hall, readers are able to identify the cultural, physical, and economic mechanics of hegemony that the State and the capitalist class consistently employ to project the illusion that a black life is necessarily fated to be miserable, sick, poor, and subservient. Furthermore, like cultural studies, early hip hop and Rastafarianism often acted as a counter-hegemonic force, speaking directly to those on the “lower frequencies” (as Ralph Ellison said) to dispel ideas of a racialized “fate” and begin the arduous work of picking apart the threads of this world.
Hall particularly emphasizes the potential of cultural forms (such as music, dance, and spirituality) as vehicles for the creation of new subjectivities. In the lecture “Culture, Resistance, and Struggle,” Hall notes the importance of learning to “maintain the difference between yourself and the other in the moments between the points where you can resist openly” (Hall 198). In this space of difference, the development of hip hop and Rastafarianism become methods of resistance, allowing the oppressed to convey messages to each other that are often cloaked in the stereotypes that the dominant class used to justify their exploitation. For Hall, the use of cultural forms as political projects directed toward liberation allows marginalized groups to transform spaces of liminality into crucial hubs of hope, catharsis, and organization. Hall’s work seems to only increase in relevance and urgency with the passing of time, particularly as more insidious and seemingly “natural” methods of suppressing new black subjectivities emerge within the current political and environmental moment.
How much of a claim do formerly colonized peoples have over the earth, and how do old colonial relationships strive to delegitimize that claim in the pursuit of capital and hegemonic control? Britain is certainly no longer the expansive empire that it once was during the nineteenth century, nor is it the budding Thatcherian neoliberal experiment of Hall’s time. Great Britain—as well as all other colonial powers, including the United States—are morphing into something else entirely, positioning themselves as vultures that pick apart the geographic and physical carcasses of the destruction that their insatiable greed leaves behind.
The destruction and economic exploitation of the former British colony of Barbuda is no more a consequence of fate than the State-sanctioned murders of black Americans such as Philando Castile and Eric Garner. it is, as Michel Foucault declared, “the order of things,” and it is the aim of Hall’s work and the field of cultural studies to facilitate a complete disruption of that order before we are all washed away.
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Amanda Bennett is a doctoral student studying literature at Duke University. Her research interests include critical race theory, Black Marxism, and cultural studies.

Works CitedHall, Stuart, et al. Cultural Studies 1983: a Theoretical History. Duke University Press, 2016.
Morales, Evo (evoespueblo). “Saludamos reconciliación con la #MadreTierra que pide Papa     Francisco. Devastación de huracanes es causada por contaminación del capitalismo.” 9     September 2017, 9:17 AM. Tweet.

When Crates Are Archives -- The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap

As a musical, cultural and social force of the last 40 years, hip-hop is taking its place in the Smithsonian — an institution devoted to preserving and documenting our nation’s heritage.
That’s why the National Museum of African American History and Culture is partnering with our GRAMMY Award-winning record label, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, to create the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap — a cultural statement told through music, text and powerful visuals. 
This will be the third major anthology produced by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings that tells the story of a defining era of music “of, by and for the people,” following the Anthology of American Folk Music and Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology. It will also serve as an extension of the objects and stories of hip-hop already displayed in the galleries of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, offering perspective on the African American experience and its impact on American culture. The Anthology will be a tool for education as it explores hip-hop’s evolution and global influence.


To support these efforts, click HERE

Seeing Our Way Free -- En | Gender at Cassilhaus

Seeing Our Way Freeby Wesley Hogan | @hogan1_wesley | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
New ways of looking at the world never fail to create within me feelings of both excitement and awkwardness, like learning a new dance step. When I became director of Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) in 2013, my training was an oral historian, so I asked my colleagues for advice on how to look at photography and film. Many generous and brilliant people expanded my understanding but none more than Courtney Reid-Eaton, CDS’s exhibitions director.
Recently, the richness of her knowledge enveloped me again as I listened to her curator’s talk and panel for the extraordinary exhibit, En | Gender, now on view at Cassilhaus. The show is part of the Triangle’s annual CLICK photography festival, which continues to develop as one of the most exciting gatherings around photographic work in the country.
“I had the good fortune to be invited to Curator Camp at Cassilhaus last summer,” Reid-Eaton began. “A lovely gathering of museum and gallery professionals from around the South. We began with conversations about upcoming projects, interests, and concerns, and when my turn came I asked, ‘Why am I the only person of color here?’ That’s a problem.”
Indeed, who is at the storytelling table is at the heart of documentary, journalism, and the arts nationwide. Most of the people who have trained as photographers, filmmakers, oral historians, and other nonfiction storytellers over the last five or six generations have been overwhelmingly white. For Reid-Eaton, this was true as she began her career: “I think of my photographic influences, especially in documentary, and they’re mostly white; my mentors and teachers were white. That had an impact on my aesthetic and the ways I learned to see. I realize on reflection, that there are things that I make that white people respond to and there are other things that I’ve felt really strongly about that they seem unable to read or connect with or that they exoticize.”
What impact does this have on developing artists who are people of color, or women, or LGBTQI?, she asked. She described how exploring that question became ever more important to her as she recognized that “most gatekeepers in the arts, people with jobs like mine, who select which artists and work to promote and support, are white.”
Reid-Eaton’s remarks got me curious: How do we learn to see, to read, the work by some artists, even as we find others incomprehensible, illegible? She explained that during her first decade at CDS, she “focused on the institution; showed the kind of work our mostly white audience responded positively and comfortably to.” Then her curatorial practice took a distinctly new turn.
“I decided I wanted to spend my second decade centering the work of people of color and women—my communities—by holding and supporting access to places/spaces like CDS and Cassilhaus; encouraging folks from my communities to take on gatekeeper jobs/roles, to create access for others.” She invited in new audiences, gathered local artists from the African diaspora at CDS, and expanded the range of her curatorial practice through innovative shows like “The Self Care Exhibit: A Word and Image Act of Self Preservation and Political Warfare” and “The Jemima Code.”
En | Gender emerges as another example of the nourishing fruit of Reid-Eaton’s intellectual labor. Here she brings together the work of three gender-nonconforming artists of color: Gabriel García Román, Saba Taj, and Lola Flash. “To bring the work of these artists together to be in conversation, to call in our communities, is a joy and a privilege,” Reid-Eaton notes in the gallery guide.
Invoking Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois’s focus on representation, she recognizes that “people of color, Muslims, women—people who have been identified by dominant American culture as minority, marginalized, other—don’t wear those labels in the wider world. We are, in fact, the majority of the world’s population. Our intellectual and cultural contributions, Spiritual practices, and the unpaid, invisible labor of home and family making/sustaining—the stuff that keeps the human race alive and growing—are undervalued, except when drawn on to entertain, enrich, and inspire the ‘powerful.’ But we know who we are. Artists and scholars like the three whose work is included in this exhibition, are working in a tradition that has existed much longer than the camera. Portrait, image, art; vehicles for collaboration and self-determination; opportunities for immortality.”
Cassilhaus has an enviable reputation for bringing thought-provoking artists forward, and Reid-Eaton’s virtuosity opened a space for those present at Cassilhaus to broaden understandings and legitimize the ways people choose to see and present themselves and their communities in documentary. She asked García Román and Taj to share some of their early influences. Who impacted how they saw the world?
Taj noted that her mother could make anything: drapes, delicious cuisine, clothing. She even “sculpted the hell out of the hedges.” Taj grew up in a majority white school where both family and school culture advocated assimilation. She identifies as a queer Muslim femme, and part of her early motivation was to express the beauty and diversity of Muslim and South Asian culture in a North Carolina where people held static stereotypes of both, particularly in the wake of 9/11.
García Román’s early influences included Jan van Eyck, and as he developed his work, he grew fascinated by texture; he wanted his subjects to be able to talk back to their portraits by allowing them to add their own words. “From the queer Latina fighting for immigration rights to the non-binary disabled Trans Filipino,” García Román writes, his sitters are “heroes in their own right.” Both Taj and García Roman explored how their early influences shaped their art, and how they began to create new expressions to better represent their own experiences and communities. Taj’s work presents a broad range of Muslim women’s experiences and emotions; García Román has focused on self-determination. Lola Flash makes disarming, complex portraits of gender non-conforming trailblazers such as Cheryl Dunye and DJ Formika. Reid-Eaton moves with these “outsiders” from margin to center, as figures that García Román notes are “inherently worthy of attention, emulation, and storytelling.”
One hundred and fifty-six years have passed since Frederick Douglass’s first “Lecture on Pictures” in 1861. Yet artist Coco Fusco recently observed that today, elite art schools avoid revising curricula and modes of critique that incorporate critical race theory or the history of anti-racist cultural production. Without that formative training, curators and artists lack a common ground for informed discussion about power and representation. I’m grateful, enormously so, that I work alongside a curator who fosters that informed discussion day in and day out and helps me to learn to see and engage in more authentic dialogues with people who’ve lived lives that may be different than mine.
“We know none of us are not free until we are all Free,” writes Reid-Eaton. Go see En | Gender—it’s on view until December 3—and imagine what your freedom will look like.
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Wesley Hogan is the director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, where she teaches the history of youth social movements, African American history, women’s history, and oral history. She is a research professor at the university’s Franklin Humanities Institute and Department of History. Hogan’s  book on SNCC, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (2007), won the Lillian Smith Book Award, among other honors, and she is currently working on a post-1960s history of young people organizing in the spirit of Ella Baker.

New Orleans and Haiti are Linked by Culture, Food and History

'When you walk around New Orleans, you can see the Haitian influence everywhere, from the creole cottages to the jambalaya. And thousands of New Orleanians trace their ancestry back to the island. This connection had journalist Laine Kaplan-Levenson asking, is the feeling mutual?' -- PRI's The World
         
            

'They Can't Just Be Average': Lifting Students Up Without Lowering The Bar

'In a radical new high school in Washington, D.C., the push for academic success sometimes clashes with providing young men the love and support they need to thrive.' -- Code Switch

Blue Note All-Stars' Debut Album Paints A Portrait Of Contemporary Jazz

'For its 75th anniversary, the venerable Blue Note Records wanted to celebrate jazz's present as much as its past. The label's current roster includes some of today's most dynamic composers and players: Keyboardist Robert Glasper, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, saxophonist Marcus Strickland, guitarist Lionel Loueke, bassist Derrick Hodge and drummer Kendrick Scott. Coming together as the Blue Note All-Stars, their debut album, Our Point of View, which is available now, is a collective manifesto and a portrait of contemporary jazz.' -- All Things Considered

Sonics + Visuals: Rapsody -- "Power" feat. Kendrick Lamar & Lance Skiiiwalker

Sonics and visuals from Rapsody's "Power" featuring  Kendrick Lamar & Lance Skiiiwalker from Laila's Wisdom.  Directed by Cam Be .

Left of Black S8:E6: Daniel José Older -- from EMS Worker to Writing Afro-Latino Identity into the Fantasy Genre

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal sits down with fantasy novelist Daniel José Older talk his interests in Fantasy Fiction, how bureaucracies influenced his writing, and the challenge of diversity in the publishing industry. Older is the author of Battle Hill Bolero (an epic war novel set in Brooklyn), from the Urban Fantasy series the Bone Street Rumba and the Young Adult fantasy series Shadowshaper. 


Left of Black is hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced by Catherine Angst of the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University and in collaboration with the Center for Arts + Digital Culture + Entrepreneurship (CADCE) and the Duke Council on Race + Ethnicity (DCORE). 
***  Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlack