At his reading last night, Jamel Brinkley spoke about his experience as a person of color in a creative-writing workshop, in which his white peers spent twenty minutes puzzling over the term “Booboo the fool.” He writes, “for those unfamiliar with that reference, Google would have been a quick solution. But the refusal on the part of some folks to do even that, and to expect the story to spell it out for them, to spend time faulting the story and its writer for not spelling it out, was total nonsense.” Brinkley explained that the term was a familiar phrase within his family, and so he hadn’t considered it wasn’t universal. At the same time, he was annoyed by his peers’ expectation that he “translate” every unfamiliar, non-caucasian phrase for them.
The Significance of Signifying
After reading the excerpt from the Oxford Companion to African American Literature in class, it inspired me to research the etymology of the term “signify.” What I came to find was that the term originates from “signum” which means “token” in Latin. The verb “significare” in Latin then translates to “indicate” in Old French, then evolves to “signifier” and then later to “signify” in Middle English.
The Power of Prefaces
After reading Lucy Terry’s Poem, “Bar Fight”, we were asked to evaluate which qualities make it both a “good” and a “bad” poem. We were not allowed to look anything up, giving us no context of the poem. Continue reading “The Power of Prefaces”
What’s Black and White, But Gray All Over?
During PSYC 307: Sensation and Perception lectures, Dr. Mounts regularly stresses that “the more you learn, the less you understand”. While Dr. Mounts refers specifically to the complexity of the human mind and brain, this idea can also be applied to human behavior and the social environment. As it turns out, this idea is also applicable to the nature of Steve Prince’s art.
I am often visually overwhelmed when studying Steve Prince’s work. Steve’s art often depicts numerous objects and figures that are clustered together to make up one chaotic composition. In an interview, Steve was asked to elaborate on why he constructs his art to be about multiple things rather than one singular thing. He explained:
“I am utilizing a design mechanism called “dense-pack” whereas I force the viewer to encounter several things all at once and they have to sift through the image like an archeologist to extract meaning and make sense of the controlled chaos. The art is meant to be viewed multiple times and meditated upon. When encountered at different cognitive points in one’s life the work has different meanings and understanding… The artwork is fixed but we are ever evolving and in a state of becoming, therefore the art is being reborn daily, and so too should we be reborn and in pursuit of a deeper understanding of self and everything around us” (.https://everybodyscoffee.com/interview-with-artist-steve-prince/ )
Continue reading “What’s Black and White, But Gray All Over?”
Judge Less, Think More
As we delve further into the semester, I find myself continually thinking about the concept of the mask and the veil. When thinking about the concept of the mask of the veil within African American literature, I am forced to think about the idea of seeing someone clearly when they cannot fully see you. I can relate this back to the day in class when we straddled the lines in the hallway and tried to walk without stepping off the lines on the floor. This was possible, but with immense difficulty. I recognize that this action was used as a symbol to show the ways that many people, specifically African American’s, have to straddle their lives. It may come down to who they are trying to become and what they are learning in life along with their roots and family life. I couldn’t help, but think about how the concept of the mask or the veil relates to this. In one life you are covered from your other life, one that the people around you may not see, but it is always there and vice versa. This being said, one may put on a facade of a person to the outside world, yet people can not see inside the veil to know exactly what a person’s life is like. Continue reading “Judge Less, Think More”
Dissonance of Song and Society
Still unfamiliar with every aspect of the buildings on our campus, I did not know that we had an art gallery in Brodie Hall until my class attended a lecture by the art gallery director, Cynthia Hawkins-Owen. Walking into the room, I instantly saw Steve Prince’s name in bold letters and large pieces of his artwork on the walls. Sitting in the room, I was mesmerized. Here are more compositions to unpack that I did not know existed. Hawkins-Owen described the process of an art director and the troubles she faces. One that stood out to me while she was talking was how sometimes with art we do not get all sides of the story. Every piece tells its own narrative and it’s the artist’s job to depict a certain message to the viewers.
Intersectionality 2.1
After reading Analiese’s post, it made me feel very content and proud to see a friend, as well as a classmate, feel so understood and represented. The pathos appeal present in her post easily translated her enlightenment as she sat in on the Annual Hip-Hop Symposium. It’s reassuring to know and understand that someone else thinks about intersectionality just as much as I do.
“Call and Response”
Call and Response, our massive anthology, sets up texts of African American traditions in such a way that pieces begin to function as questions and answers to each other. This clever formation allows for conversations between and within said traditions. The metaphor is thus rich and literary, but it also carries with it a helpful reminder: that many of the included texts are to be read aloud. To call and, to a lesser extent, to respond are verbal, audible actions that are conducted in human and animal communication. No more has the sonority of Call and Response been obvious than in the work, badman, and prison songs we read for class (3/4). One thing about the spoken word, though. It’s tricky to anthologize. When I got to “Po’ Laz’us,” I logged on to Spotify and began listening to the version from the Coen Brothers’ “O Brother Where Art Thou?” (2000). Here’s where it got tricky: it was one of many versions, all riffing and remixing the words on the page before me. Without saying one version is the right one, I would argue that something is lost when editors take songs of a particularly oral quality and pin their content down to one reading as is done in our own anthology. Accompanying my reading with sung renditions on Spotify and supplementing it with Lawrence Lessig’s thoughts on “remix culture” (another useful source from Dr. Schacht), I began to develop questions of ownership and feelings of uncertainty about interpretive possibilities. Continue reading ““Call and Response””
Where Is The Progress?
You’re all probably getting sick of my posts about repetition, but I haven’t repeated these ideas enough to be sick of them myself. So far, in The America Play, I have been intrigued by Parks’ ideas about repetition and the writing process. In class today, we talked about Parks’ obsession with repetition and her idea of “Rep & Rev” which reflects what I have been thinking about in my posts. I have been struggling to find something to blog about that interests me and I was hesitant to bring repetition up again. That was until I read Molly’s post “Healing is not linear.” Continue reading “Where Is The Progress?”
Thinking about the Bible
In this post I’m going to attempt to thread some of my thoughts together from class on Friday, March 1 during our discussion about Big Machine. For reference at later dates, we have read up to the end of Part 2, or 24 chapters, at this point. What am I going to thread together? I’m going to explore how similar the story of Abram / Abraham is to what we know of Ricky Rice. This post doesn’t follow much of a chronology, so my apologies for that, I just have a lot of thoughts about the Bible at this point for reasons I also don’t understand, as I haven’t been consistently to church since high school. Again, for reference, the Abrahamic stories are contained in Genesis 12-25. Continue reading “Thinking about the Bible”