POTENTIAL SUSPECTS WANTED! BY “THE MAN”

POTENTIAL SUSPECTS WANTED! BY “THE MAN”

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Alleged Crime: Taping a University Professor W/O Explicit Permission….

Does Ryan care?: Not really. I only care if your fellow students care. Your fellow students may grant you amnesty, you may be innocent, or this could all be a doubly-conscious hoax. Nevertheless, will these eight suspects come to front of the room immediately.

But it’s a rule.

So, if you taped (which four here pictured did do and I have a picture of you doing it), please send me a copy of that tape and I will put it on the blog along with today’s lecture (which I am filming and putting on the blog so that you can review it),

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Dutchman (1964)by

Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)

A Modern Myth of AssimilationDream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry upLike a raisin in the sun?Or fester like a sore--And then run?Does it stink like rotten meat?Or crust and sugar over--like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sagslike a heavy load.Or does it explode? YADIGSHONUFF!

Full Speed After DaytonaThe History of Black Drama: What We’ve Seen and Done so Far……..

1) Why does Houston Baker turn to the concepts of the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery

I want to suggest that a compete expressive modernity was achieved only when the “Harlem Renaissance” gave way to what might be called—

following the practices of Anglo-American and British Moderns—’renaisancism.’ By this term I mean to suggest a spirit of nationalistic engagement that begins with intellectuals, artists, and spokespersons at the turn of the century and receives extensive definition and expression during the 1920’s. This sprirt is one that prompts black artist’s awareness that his or her only possible foundation for authentic and modern expressivity resides in the discursive field marked by formal master and sounding deformation. Further I want to suggest that “Renaissancism”connotes something quite removed from a single, exotic set of failed high jinks confined to less than a decade. It signals in fact a resonantly and continuously productive set of tactics, strategies, and syllables that takes its form at the turn of the century and extends to our own day.” Houston Baker

1) Then do European principles and aesthetics apply to theatre written by African-Americans of modernity? Why or Why not?

ANSWER-DEPENDS ON WHO’S the F#CK iIS APPLYING THEM!

Does the treatise composed at Golden Pond hold water? Why and Why not? (Can African American Theatre in your estimation, so far, be defined by a concrete set of definable aesthetics different from those of Anglo-American theater?

ANSWER: YES AND NO BECAUSE IT’S TAXANOMIC-----BUT! It will always be retrospective and, for many, restrictive. Do revolutionaries like give a flying-mutha-f*ck about rules?

QUESTION: What makes these revolutionaries uniquely different from “American,” French, Soviet, and/or Chinese Revolutionaries?

Rut roh…. Tut-a-tut-tutt-EVERYMUTHAF*CKNTHANG!

The History of Black Drama consists of innovative (infinite?) deformative (nation based discursive strategies of masking and sounding) discursive strategies that are always mixtures of the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery

The “History so Far” of Black Drama in the 20th century (geographically, movement-wise, and with respect to author)

Slave-ship Performance Plantation Performance and Ritual, Minstrelsy, The Pulpit Space (Escape…. By William Wells Brown), Proscenium Performance (The Black minstrel Show, In Dahomey, by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Black-Realism to Black Modernism? (Depends)- Mulatto to A Raisin in the Sun by Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry.

Any verlapping themes?: black nationalism, black internationalism, double consciousness with respect to the actor’s paradox, a hyper-Burden of representativity and… what else? MARXISM, MASKING, CODING, COMMUNING

Negritude and the Black Arts Movement

“Sellout” Damas

I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their dinner jackets/ their starched shirts/ and detachable collars/ their monocles and/ their bowler hats

……………….

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an accomplice/ among them/ like a pimp/ like a murdere ramong them/ my hands hideously red/ with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-za-tion

The Dissemination of the Polemics of Negritude in English

Key DatesAimé Cesairé’s Discourse on Colonialism (English translation 1953)

Franz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth transl. Constance Farrington (1963 translation of the 1961 book: New York, Grove)

Damas

Black Art

Leroi Jones and The poem of B.A.M.

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project1) To align the projects of

the black artist and political activist

2) To fashion a collective goal: the destruction of double consciousness

Points

1) Does this poem conform to formal norms? Which ones?

2) Where do you turn when you can’t get out of the Bubbule?

DutchmanA Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

Major Themes

Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred

Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.

Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka, makes a community stagnant, incapable of producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a passivity whose transgression results in self-destruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more than likely not)

Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal devouring female

Allegory

a subway “heaped in modern myth”

Symbolic Associations and Locales

The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman, Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly of the city”

Amiri Baraka (1934- )born Leroi Jones

Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, CommunistPreface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965Home: Social Essays, 1965A Black Mass (1966Tales, 1967Black Magic, poems, 1969Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969Slave Ship, 1970It's Nation Time, poems, 1970Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971Hard Facts, poems, 1975The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978Poetry for the Advanced, 1979reggae or not!, 1981Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.Somebody Blew Up America, 2001The Book of Monk, 2005Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008Ancient Music

The B.A.M and Fanon

Neal on Fanon• .

Henderson on Fanon (The Harlem Renaissance comes home to

Roost)

Understanding the New Black Poetry – p. 19-20

Whether the masses of Black people accept this position, the first one, or some other, the cultural dimension of the event lies in the fact that Black writing-not only the works of Malcolm X and Fanon, but the poetry of Etheridge Knight and Don L. Lee and Claude McKay-had helped to shape the prisoners’ new values, had increased their self-esteem and sharpened their political awareness, just as it has affected a whole generation of black college students on all levels. Ironically, for it shows with graphic precision the arrogant ignorance which established institutions have of the Black arts Movement, and, deeper, of Black history and aspirations—ironically, a Time magazine story which purported to be an in-depth study of the rebellion noted that Black prisoners were inspired by original writings by the prisoners themselves, among which was “ a poem written by an unknown prisoner, crude but touching in its would-be heroic style” (Time, Sept. 7, 1971, p. 20). And in demonstration of what he meant, the Time writer included the opening lines of Claude McKay’s famous sonnet, “If We Must Die.”

"If We Must Die”

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursed lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death blow

!What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’lll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!



Assimilationism and Exceptionalism

CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?

LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate, taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrow-shoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.

CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.

LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they were Averell Harriman.

CLAY All except me.

LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?

CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation] Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.

LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious, then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black Baudelaire.

Talking Points:1)Costume (on and off stage)2)Prescribed modes of revolt.3)Black Baudelaire: The Relationship Between the Black Artists of the 60s and Extant Poetic Forms4)Symbolism: Black Baudelaires and Black Niggers

“Cultural Strangulation”by

Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:To Defend the Positing of a Black

Aesthetic

The Argument:1)The failure to recognize a separate black aesthetic is not only out of step with current leftist moves forward in the field of race relations, but is also the outgrowth of a failure to come to terms with what might constitute a White Aesthetic.

2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the “race problem,” but its privileging of light over dark was mapped onto race relations.

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm, the entire realm of aesthetics is poisoned by a racism that comes to the fore every time it evaluates an object of Black Art.

4) And, the Black artist is forced into a corner. To answer to the demands of traditional aesthetics is to allow white critics to dictate the expression of Black experience (which can result in a re-instantiation of racism)

5) Hence, the only option other than assimilation, calls for an iconoclastic set of principles embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”

Exploding the RaisinA Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle

LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.

CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.

LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least. [She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right! [The others respond]

CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it. [As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across

her knees, his mouth working stupidly]

LULA Sorry is right. [Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.

Get this man off me! Hurry, now! [ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off] And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She

takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.

Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]

CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!

YOUNG NEGRO Hey [The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and

follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the car]

Curtain

the mastery of form

The deformation of mastery

A Theoretical Approach to Black Drama

The History of Black Drama consists of innovative (infinite?) deformative (nation based discursive strategies of masking and sounding) discursive strategies that are always mixtures of the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery

Houston Bakeresque





Acting Black and Double ConsciousnessYou don’t know anything except what’s there for you

to see.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do. [Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way

I want. [Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know

anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant. That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you. Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying, and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker. Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors. No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.

[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers. Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those ex-coons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences3)Artistic and Rational Revolution4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

A Henry Louis Gastesish approach to African American Theater

Mitchell-Kernan’s summary of the defining characteristics of “Signifying as a Form of Verbal Art” helps to clarify the most difficult, and elusive, mode of rhetoric. We can outline these characteristics for convenience. The most important defining features of Signifyin(g) are “indirect intent” and “metaphorical reference.” This aspect of indirection is a formal device, and “appears to be purely stylistic”; moreover, “itss art characteristics remain in the forefront.� Signifyin(g), in other words, turns upon the foregrounding of the Signifier. By 妬 ndirection� Mitchell-Kernan means “That the correct semantic (referential interpretation) or significance of the utterance cannot be arrive at by a consideration of the dictionary meaning of the lexical items involved and the syntactic rules for their combination alone. The apparent significance of the message differs from its real significance. The apparent meaning of the sentence signifies its actual meaning.”The relationship between latent and manifest is a curious one, as determined by the formal properties of the Signifin(g) utterance, In one of several ways, manifested meaning directs attention away from itself to another, latent level of meaning. We might compare this relationship to that which obtains between the two parts of metaphor, tenor (the inner meaning) and vehicle (the outer meaning).

Signifin(g), according to Mitchell-Kernan, operates so delightfully because “apparent meaning serves as a key which directs hearers to some shared knowledge, attitudes, and values or signals that reference must produced “metaphorically,” The decoding of the figurative, she continues, depends “upon shared knowledge” and “this shared knowledge operates on two levels.” One of these two levels is that the speaker and the audience realize that “The signifying is occurring and that the dictionary-syntactical meaning of the utterance is to be ignored.” In addition, a silent second text, as it were, which corresponds rightly to what Michell-Kernanis calling “shared knowledge,” must be brought to bear upon the manifest content of the speech act and “employed in the reinterpretation of the utterance.” Indeed, this is of the utmost importance in the esthetics of Signifyin(g), for “It is the cleverness used in directing the attention of the hearer and the audience to the shared knowledge upon which a speaker’s artistic talent is judged.” Signifyin(g), in other words, depends upon the success of the signifier at invoking an absent meaning ambiguously “present” in a carefully wrought statement.

ToastingBlack Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the Signifying

Monkey

Way down in the jungle deep,The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.Why, everyday before the sun go down,The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"So he ran up on the lion the very next day.Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!Said your sister did the damndest trick.She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,Screwin a muthafuckin flea!He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fenceGivin a goddamn zebra a french.Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.



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POTENTIAL SUSPECTS WANTED! BY “THE MAN”