Negotiating the “Negro Problem”: Stew’s Passing (Made) Strange (original) (raw)
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2021
and this written component or complementary writing which functions as a commentary to the performance by elucidating the politics of identity that informed its creation. The performance was a confluence of performance-poetry, jazz and autobiography. It detailed (as does the written component) the relationship between the candidate and his deceased father, and the precariousness of his position as a Coloured man in South Africa, where he is neither 'black enough nor white enough'. Both performance and written commentary expound the subversive improvisatory challenge to hegemony by jazz as an improvisatory phenomenon, and a release from subjugation in non-verbal self-expression where the 'self' is always in post-modern deferral. The written component examines the manner in which historical narrative conventions implicate in popular cultural practices. To this end, a closer reading of King Kong (1959)-the first internationally acclaimed musical, then billed as an Africa jazz opera-reveals the first omission of the Coloured (Mixed Race) subject. Such omission was arguably not arbitrary when considering the liminal positionality of the Coloured subjects in the South African political collective unconscious. Central to the reading of cultural praxis alongside political thought, is how the two imbricate in the construction, consumption, and maintenance of identity phenomena. In other words, how the imperial dominant political ideologies colluded with a popular musical in the meanings of Coloured identities on a mass scale. Consequently, this study links this phenomenon to the public construction and consumption of Coloured identities in popular South African musical performance practices. Advancing from the empirical premise of the marginal socio-political status of the South African coloured subjects, the writing brings to the fore the connectedness of cultural praxis with the political realities. To this end, the project employs contemporary black performance strategies-jazz, spoken-word-poetry, and autobiography to argue for a radical shift in our understanding of Colouredness.-Volume Please! p ! ! Volume Please! is a contemporary autobiographica l musical developed with a threefold aim. First to adopt cotemporary performance practice strategies in a response to a • historica l musical King Kong (1959); second, to engage the subjective autobiographical voice in challenging King Kong's performance of collective memory; and third, to create a musical score which locates outside of the traditional musical theatr e genre. As part of my doctoral research,
The In-Between of Jazz and the Blues : Beyond Marginality in Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues
Babel
In this paper I show how in the Ghanaian-born Canadian writer Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues, the marginality of a"hitherto little-regarded corner of the black Diaspora"-the history of the so-called Rhineland Mischlingers-is put in the center of a story that concerns itself with specific memories of the Second World War of a Black American jazz musician. In order to do so, I focus on the different forms of liminality-or in-betweenness-that these memories present: temporal, spacial, ethnic and musical, as well as generic and finally linguistic. I show that these liminalities-at the very margin of marginality, or beyond-will reveal the horrors of war but will also create a Deleuzian ligne de fuite that allows the protagonist to come to terms with this painful period in his life as a musician and as a man. Key terms Black diaspora; World War 2; Rhineland Mischlingers; Blues; Jazz; liminality; marginality; ligne de fuite The In-Between of Jazz and the Blues: Beyond Marginality in Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues Seldom have I read such poetic words of praise as there are on the introductory pages of the novel Half-Blood Blues by the Ghanaian-born Canadian writer Esi Edugyan. As The Seattle Times puts it, "the story hurls us from Baltimore, to Berlin, to Paris, to an obscure Polish town-as breathlessly as that trumpet player finishing a long heartfelt riff. From bleak, violent cityscapes, it shifts to the troubled souls of the musicians as they tend the pure flame of art and the impure fire of jealousy." Indeed, the book, which won many prizes in Canada as well as in America and Europe, features an old bass player, Sid, who basically tells the story of the group of Jazz musicians he played with at the time of the Second World War, presenting, to quote Newsday from the introductory pages to the novel: "A bold imagining of a hitherto littleregarded corner of the black Diaspora." As this paper will show, this marginalized little corner of the black Diaspora is centralized in memory, here, through a palimpsests of liminalities: temporal, spatial, racial and, most gloriously, musical, as well as generic and linguistic, which in the end turns out to be a veritable ligne de fuite, to use the term of Gilles Deleuze. Indeed, while the Blues, as a musical genre, represents an endeavour to overcome-or at least live with-racial injustice and grief, Jazz, in its turn, is an overcoming of the Blues towards a brighter future. The symbolics of this transformation is important and can be seen, for instance, in Toni Morrison's well-known novel Jazz. But in the context of a war-ridden Europe, the celebration that Jazz represents is returned towards the suffering of the Blues, the plot of the novel centering
Explores Sears' play as an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello, interrogating ideas of racial inequality and black identity in a contemporary political context. In Harlem Duet, Sear's positions Billie as a symbol for Malcolm X and his separatist views of black nationalism, and Othello as a symbol for Martin Luther King and his idealistic dream of absolute racial equality. This dissertation argues that Sears' investigation of these two great Black Freedom Movement leaders' opposing values ultimately questions the definition of King's dream, which comes to be equated with black assimilation into white society. Ultimately, Sear's asserts, Malcolm X was correct - the nightmare of race is still not over in America.
Black arts and white devils: the theatre of black power
2020
This essay explores how theater of the Black Arts Movement served as an important public forum in the American Civil Rights Movement. The dramatic representations of black and white identities proffered by Black Power dramatists challenged the validity of dominant ideology surrounding national identity primarily by subverting the tenets of American civil religion, and thereby demonstrating how myths surrounding national identity bind some together while causing violent ruptures between other kinds of Americans. However, dissenting stories of American national life and identity that characterized drama of the Black Arts movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s offered more than mere responses to the mainstream. Rather, plays that emerged out of the context of Black Power activism and philosophy provided audiences with new, alternative conceptions of American identity, with which black Americans, historically excluded from narratives of the national self, could identify and emulate.