Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 582

Marc Lamont Hill: The 13th Amendment Abolishes Slavery -- Except for Prisons

'Activist, author, and television personality Marc Lamont Hill sat down with an exclusive interview with VladTV where he spoke about his new book, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond.'  

Playing it Safe on the Radio Dial: Mark Anthony Neal talks Pop Music After 9/11 Attacks

'Duke University asked several scholars how their fields have changed in the fifteen years since 9/11. Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of African + African American Studies & English, discusses the impact of the 9/11 attacks on Pop Music.' 

Ava Duvernay & 'Queen Sugar': Celebrating Black Storytelling

'Ava Duvernay, director of the acclaimed film Selma, brings her talents to TV in Queen Sugar, an original drama series for Oprah's OWN network premiering Sept. 6.  Of her decision to d television, Duvernay tells NPR's Michel Martin "his is the golden era of television! If you're a storyteller and you're trying to tell the best stories, I really and truly believe that TV is the king medium right now." -- +NPR 

[Album Trailer] -- 'Sunkissed' by Ashleigh Smith

'Sunkissed, the title of Ashleigh Smith’s  debut on Concord Records, describes her singing perfectly. The 27-year-old Dallas-based winner of the 2014 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocals Competition possesses an iridescent alto that radiates a spectrum of poised emotions. While clearly she’s capable of tackling material underscored by darker themes such as heartache and sobering social commentary, optimistic rays of light always shine through her voice.' -- +Concord Music Group 

“…Till The Wings Fly Off”: A Man and His Letters by Sasha Panaram

“…Till The Wings Fly Off”: A Man and His Letters Sasha Panaram | @SashaPanaram | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t make them. More aptly, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t make one resolution – the same resolution – year after year after year. Ever since I graduated from high school, I vowed to write more letters at the start of each new year. Both nostalgic of pen-pal days and eager to remain in touch with loved ones not by phone or text or email but by words – carefully selected, artfully arranged, handwritten words – each year, I make a promise to carve out time to be in contact with others in this way.
Given my fondness for missives, it is hardly surprising that part of what drew me to study black literature and culture, at least initially, concerned epistolary exchanges namely those penned by Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. August is a historic month insofar as it concerns black history and black letter writing because some of the most poignant exchanges were first conceived of and communicated during this very month.
Take, for instance, Benjamin Banneker, a freeman of Baltimore County, Maryland, who wrote to then Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, on August 19, 1791, in part, to share with him a copy of his first almanac and, in part, to challenge Jefferson’s view that all Africans were socially and intellectually inferior to whites.
Langston Hughes found himself in the bouts of letter writing, too, when he contacted James Weldon Johnson shortly after returning from a trip to Haiti on August 14, 1931 eager to share his thoughts on the Black Republic and invite Johnson to consider collaborating with him on a southern book tour.   
Several years later in August 1936, Ralph Ellison responded to a letter he received from Langston Hughes marveling, “I had no idea that you possessed such an old fashioned virtue – you even answer letters. Quite surprising in this age of read’em and leave’em” (Newkirk 287). Ellison’s surprise hints at this forms long history and anticipates its rapid decline.
Arguably, one of the most circulated letters that emerges from an August month was penned by George Jackson of the Soledad Brothers. In a letter to Joan, a member of the Soledad Defense Committee, on August 9, 1970 – two days after Jackson’s brother, Jonathan, or his man-child as he more affectionately referred to him was shot – he both mourns his brother’s death and honors his life in the only way he knows how: with words.   
This final letter that concludes Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson is tellingly complex in its commentary on restraint. Jackson, who served most of his sentence in isolation, warns Joan in his final letter to remove anything in his previous letters that would tarnish his mother’s representation. He fears her and her motives being misunderstood. Additionally, he stops himself from gushing over his brother writing, “it would just be a love story about the baddest brother this world had the privilege to meet, and it’s just not popular or safe – to say I love him” (329).
These restrictions that Jackson placed both on himself and in his writing were secondary to that of what the prison imposed. From the letters we do have access to we know that every letter Jackson sent out from the prison was first read by the prison staff who policed its language and content. We know that California prisons regulated how much prisoners could write meaning that Jackson, prolific as he was, could never exceed the two-sided 8 ½  x 11 ruled sheet allotted to him (50). We know that some of Jackson’s letters were never even sent and the consecutive letters he publishes offer a sense of when that became evident to Jackson, himself.
Much of what constitutes Soledad Brother revolves around Jackson’s plans for the future, what he perceives to be the “miseducation of negroes” and his proposed solutions, and his concern for his family. Inasmuch as he cautiously wrtites these letters so as to suppress his emotions oftentimes the words cannot hide them. Oftentimes, it is the emotions that sustain him.
Nowhere is this more vividly communicated than the writing he exchanged with Angela Davis. In his letters to Davis, Jackson could do nothing but pronounce his deep love and admiration for a woman who inspired and excited him. With her he could share his revolutionary plans, he could plot how to escape prison’s intellectual grasp. With her he could talk about a woman’s place in the movement revising what he initially perceived as women’s subservient nature. With her he could just be.
While he could not and would not say the words “I love you” to his brother even after Jonathan died to Davis he writes, “I love you like a man, like a brother, and like a father. Every time I’ve opened my mouth, assumed by battle stance, I was trying in effect to say I love you, African – African woman” (302).
Soledad Brother shows this one-sided love affair but some digging into the archives shows that Davis cared as much for Jackson as he did for her.  In fact, some of Davis’ love letters were read to jurors when Jackson was on trial. “I have come to love you,” she wrote, “I have used those words very infrequently in my 26 years… My love, your love, reinforces my fighting instincts. It tells me to go to war.”
To encounter these letters – to even have access to them as freely as we do – is to trespass; to relish in material that was never written for our eyes.
It is also to learn and to learn from the best.
So much of what we know and are taught about liberation movements today suggest, as Jackson’s earlier letters in Soledad Brother do, that politics and love exist independently. That there can be no place for pleasure in movement-work. That what animates and sustains collective organizing is rooted in outrage, disgust, and profound sadness.
It’s this same logic that wants to suggest that slaves never experienced happiness in forced servitude. That their lives were eternally grief-stricken. That black people, even today, cannot exist outside the realm of pain.  
To participate in this line of thinking – to even fathom its possibility – is to perpetuate a harmful myth that denies black people access to love and desire, happiness and joy.  
What Jackson and Davis teach us, independently and together, in as early as 1970 is that there can be no movement without desire: a desire for intellectual and personal freedom. That there can be no liberation without pleasure: the pleasure to go after that freedom and to maintain it.
In a letter, Jackson writes to Z. in 1970, he says, “I’ll love you till the wings fly off at least, perhaps beyond. My love could burn you, however, it runs hot and I have nearly half a millennium stored up. Mine is a perfect love, soft to the touch but so hot, hard, and dense at its center that its weight will soon offset this planet” (272). As exemplified here, it is at the very end of his life that Jackson lets his words run free showing us that love is not just a feeling but an action: a life-altering, world-shattering, liberatory, and yes, joyful choice. It is this love that marks the difference between bondage and freedom, rebellion and revolution.
As we can see from the movement and just a few of the letters they have inspired – here and here and here – increasingly activists and political protestors are affirming what Jackson and Davis always knew to be true: to let love run loose is to set this world afire and watch it change for the better day after day after day.
Texts Consulted:
Jackson, George. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. New York: Coward-    McCann, 1970.
Newkirk, Pamela. Letters from Black America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009.
“Three Angela Davis Letter Read to Jurors.” Herald Journal. 25 Apr. 1972.
***
Sasha Panaram is Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. A Georgetown University alumna, her scholarly interests are in black diasporic literature, black feminisms, and visual cultures.
Other essays from Sasha Panaram:
Beyond Real(ism)--Review of Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form & Social Critique in African American Culture
The Watcher, The Watched, and The Witness – On (T)ERROR

Nichelle Nichols aka Lt. Uhura on Star Trek at 50

'It's been 50 years since television viewers first entered the Star Trek universe. The science fiction drama brought a progressive vision of the future to 1960s TV sets, as the crew of the starship Enterprise travelled the galaxy seeking peaceful contact with other worlds. Among them: Lieutenant Uhura, representative of The United States of Africa and the ship's Communications Officer. Today Nichelle Nichols, the actress behind the groundbreaking role, joins guest host Piya Chattopadhyay to discuss her role on a show ahead of its time.'  

The Hidden History of African-American Bartenders

'David Wondrich , writer and cocktail columnist for Esquire, details the different ways in which African-Americans of the 19th century gained esteem behind the bar in the North and South, and the ways that some bartending communities actively resisted African-American bartenders. His article for The Bitter Southerner, “The Cunningest Compounders of Beverages: The Hidden History of African-Americans Behind the Bar,”  sheds light on an often overlooked history that helps define modern mixology today.' 

[Official Trailer] -- 'Moonlight' -- on the Intimacies + Interiorities of Black Masculinity

Moonlight -- From writer/director Barry Jenkins and starring Trevante Rhodes, Naomie Harris, Andre Holland, and Mahershala Ali -- Opens October 21

Michaela Angela Davis Celebrating Her Race & Age with Fiery Truth (& a Tight Slip Game)

'"There’s never been a time where I haven’t been, not just proud, but grateful to be black," states Michaela Angela Davis. An irrepressible force of truth, Michaela sounds off on everything from America's white-supremacist structure to sex post-50.' -- +StyleLikeU 

Woe is Me: Friendship in the Time of Genocide by I. Augustus Durham

Simone DrakeWoe is Me: Friendship in the Time of Genocideby I. Augustus Durham | @imeanswhatisays | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
August has always been black. One of the blackest people I have ever known, my mother, was born on the 12th. Though this piece is not about her, I think often about how she, and my father, understood friendship. My mother and her best friend, Aunt Dianne, only became so after a chance encounter in the second grade; my father always said he did not want a lot of “friends”. In fact, I can only ever remember him calling two people such; they have since passed away. Dianne Cook, Thurman Jefferies, Ivory Fisher—these people amounted to being my parents’ woes.
This #BlackAugust, reminiscing on my parents and their friends, I recall George Jackson as son, that brother in Soledad, writing his father, Robert Lester Jackson, in August 1965. This moment as the golden anniversary +1 of these epistolary moments signals that his life should be celebrated now, and that this piece is a sign of good luck akin to an extra candle on a cake. Nevertheless, what puzzles and endears George to me in that first letter is that he, no different than in others, refers to his father as “friend”. In the midst of psychological trauma, ever gesturing to freedom, George renders himself vulnerable to a sociobiological hybrid:
So, my friend, I started conducting these experiments with myself. Why can’t I rid myselfof the sorrow and emotion that awareness has brought me? I get rid of the self-destructive force of error and ignorance only to be torn and miserable by what Idiscover. It happened that I knew all along that some imbalance did exist, or I’ll say afew imbalances existed, that disallowed me from progressing further in my development.I put my head in my hands and wondered why do I make myself sick, why can’t Iovercome this, maybe I’m just human after all? I believe that is what got it! I am what Iam, and that’s all I am. I knew this morbid depression must have some humanexplainable cause, an imbalance somewhere. The mind and body cannot be separated, aphysical imbalance can precipitate effects that could eventually lead to some mentalimbalance. Too much sleep, too little, the wrong kind of food, too much, too little, toomuch reading in the wrong position, too much study, or too long an application to onesubject, results in imbalances, conflicts, struggles. I was looking for a solution from onedirection only, when no event, no effect in nature, has a single cause. It’s a collection ofcauses! So I look at myself and I discover new ways of knowing myself, seeing andplacing myself in the vast scheme. The struggle is almost over, my friend, complete andharmonious development can be mine, everyone’s. Only one-fourth of the sorrow in eachman’s life is caused by outside uncontrollable elements, the rest is self-imposed by failingto analyze and act with calmness.
I quote at length here because . . . just because. I understand George’s words to Robert because I too conducted an experiment with myself, and became torn and miserable by what I discovered:
I do not drive. If I am with friends late into the night, they often drive me home, that is if I do not catch an Uber. What I noticed is consciously, especially if the friends are persons of color, I get out of the car after arriving home, and say, like clockwork, “Text me that you got home all right.” This self-experimentation is because we are all living in a time of genocide. I do not use that hashtag because it is asinine.
I say “all” because in the very state in which I currently reside, the police killed an unarmed deaf man for “speeding”, him likely not hearing their vehicular alarms to pull over—Daniel was someone’s woe. His death elicits woe. Although he was not “black”, his death marks him as someone who died en soledad with countless other black lives who benchmark the ongoing genocide that happens on this soil, whether Sandra Bland or Philando Castile. In other words, Daniel’s “black life” mattered. These names are drops in an ocean. One would think that lessons have been learned from previous genocides. Alas, here we are.
My woes are me; I, them. And it engenders woe to think about a father-as-friend contending with the gravity of his son’s letters being the only physicality he can grasp instead of his warm body, or that after a night of woeful mirth, the next time I see a friend may be in a casket. Friendship in a time of genocide is real. This is likely why I, and I would encourage you, can and should remove “friends” from the “circle” who ain’t never loved (me). When you realize that someone who calls you friend, and vice versa, treats animals better than you, you comprehend that three-fourths of sorrow George theorizes. Hence, this analysis is an act of calmness.
Concurrently, if my life can unexpectedly be snuffed out, I want to know that I loved, and spent time with people who loved in return. This is why, during a recent visit home, when my father told me and my siblings we meant the world to him, I imagine that my father—as transparent as it is to say, even typed—may have become my friend.
I want to conclude with something that may seem counterintuitive, albeit crude, that I think can, somehow, do some work: Shawn Elliott has a ditty called “Shame and Scandal in the Family”. It is a comically sordid tale of lies and deceit, potential incest and cuckoldry in Trinidad; the chorus—“Woe is me/Shame and scandal in the family.” While the shame and scandal in this family deals with the aforementioned vices, what the song equally provokes is everyone’s relationality to others. This is to say, inasmuch as a stranger, with or without authority, who could hypothetically be my “parent”, can “end” me, s/he could also “end” a friend who might be my “brother” or “sister”. One then reads the song’s protagonist doing precisely what George accomplishes in the self-experiment: looking at himself and discovering new ways of knowing himself, seeing and placing himself in the vast scheme, even if said scheme is a hamlet in Trinidad. Therefore, in order to counteract the troubles of the world, its woes, I have to know myself and then work ever harder to encounter me in my woe.
This indeed is working on excellence.
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I. Augustus Durham is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in English at Duke University. His work focuses on blackness, melancholy and genius.
Other essays from I. Augustus Durham:
KING Me: Soul for a Black Future
Mr. White! *said in echo*: Charting the Black(ness)