Sue's Blog

Performance, vernacular culture, & feminist poetries: This week in A Social History of Spoken Word Poetry

3/4/2018

As an inveterate reviser (writing is never done, it's just due), I'm not surprised as I go through a semester and start seeing all sorts of other choices I could have made in designing a course, in selecting topics and readings and emphases and activities and assignments. It happens whether I create a new syllabus in one stressful week or ruminate for months, jotting notes in excited bursts of inspiration and pulling it all together in measured sessions full of careful thought.

I don't always remember to document these alternative ideas when they occur, which means I'm not always refining and revising course plans as fruitfully as I might. As an aid to my own distracted memory, then, please enjoy the first installment of a new sometimes-series I'm thinking of as "other courses, other texts."

This post features 2 books we're reading for the Spring 2018 graduate seminar "A Social History of Spoken Word Poetry," and an increasing number of books that come to mind as I prepare for our conversation tomorrow. Note: Diana Taylor, author of 2 of the "other texts" below, is a scholar I've mentioned several times in class as we discuss the challenges of generating thick-enough (to paraphrase Geertz) description/representation of performance events to be able to describe and analyze them usefully in our research.

Current Course Readings

Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture.
Fahamisha Brown, Rutgers UP, 1999.

CONTENTS

Mother Tongue: African American Vernacular Speech as Poetic Language
Orality: Language and Voice
The Poetry of Preachment: Didacticism in African American Poetry
Song/Talk: African American Music and Song as Poetic References
Tell My Story: Boast and Toast Traditions
"Black Is ... and Black Ain't": Of Gender and Generations in African American Poetry.

The Feminist Poetry Movement.
Kim Whitehead, UP of Mississippi, 1996.

CONTENTS

The Life of the Movement.
Judy Grahn's Poetics of Commonality
Feminist and Black Arts Strategies in the Poetry of June Jordan
Survival as Form in the Work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Irena Klepfisz
History, Myth, and Empowerment in Joy Harjo's Poetry
Motherhood, Eroticism, and Community in the Poetry of Minnie Bruce Pratt

Resources: Black Vernacular Verbal Performance
The Dozens, toasts, girls' games

The Dirty Dozens
Collected skits from In Living Color

"Daddy Dozens" by Jamila Woods

"Daddy Dozens" written text
"Daddy Dozens" audio performance

The Signifying Monkey
Performed by Rudy Ray Moore

"The Name Game" by Shirley Ellis

Relevant Studies

Performance
Diana Taylor, 2016, Duke UP

CONTENTS

Framing [Performance]
Performance Histories
Spect-Actors
The New Uses of Performance
Performative and Performativity
Knowing through Performance: Scenarios and Simulation
Artivists (Artist-Activists), or What's to Be Done?
The Future(s) of Performance
Performance Studies

Diana Taylor is University Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author and editor of several books, including The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas and Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War", both also published by Duke University Press.

Prophets of the Hood:
Politics & Poetics in Hip-Hop
Imani Perry, 2004, Duke UP

CONTENTS

Hip Hop's Mama: Originalism and Identity in the Music
My Mic Sound Nice: Art, Community, and Consciousness
Stinging Like Tabasco: Structure and Format in Hip Hop Compositions
The Glorious Outlaw: Hip Hop Narratives, American Law, and the Court of Public Opinion
B-Boys, Players, and Preachers: Reading Masculinity
The Venus Hip Hop and the Pink Ghetto: Negotiating Spaces for Women
Bling Bling…and Going Pop: Consumerism and Co-optation in Hip Hop

Imani Perry is a Professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University.

The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas
Diana Taylor, Duke UP, 2003

After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement
Cheryl Clarke, Rutgers UP, 2004

CONTENTS

Acts of Transfer
Scenarios of Discovery: Reflections on Performance and Ethnography
Memory as Cultural Practice: Mestizaje, Hybridity, Transculturation
La Raza Cosmetica: Walter Mercado Performs Latino Psychic Space
False Identifications: Minority Populations Mourn Diana
"You Are Here": H.I.J.O.S. and the DNA of Performance
Staging Traumatic Memory: Yuyachkani
Denise Stoklos: The Politics of Decipherability
Lost in the Field of Vision: Witnessing September 11
Hemispheric Performances

Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America
Geneva Smitherman, Wayne State UP, 1977

CONTENTS

From Africa to the New World and Into the Space Age
"It's Bees Dat Way Sometime"
Black Semantics
"How I Got Ovuh"
"The Forms of things Unknown"
Where It's at
Where Do We go From Here? T.C.B.!

Appendix A
Some Well-Known Black Proverbs and Sayings
Appendix B
Get Down Exercise On Black English Sounds
Appendix C
Black Semantics: A Selected Glossary

CONTENTS

'Missed Love': Black Power and Black Poetry
The Loss of Lyric Space in Gwendolyn Brooks' "In the Mecca"
Queen Sistuh: Black Women Poets and the Circle(s) of Blackness
Black Feminist Communalism in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf
Transferences and Confluences: Black Arts and Black Lesbian-Feminism in Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn

Love & Theft
Eric Lott, Oxford UP, 1983

CONTENTS

Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American Culture
Love and Theft: "Racial" Production and the Social Unconscious of Blackface
White Kids and No Kids At All: Working Class Culture and Languages of Race
The Blackening of America: Popular Culture and National Cultures
The Seeming Counterfeit": Early Blackface Acts, the Body, and Social Contradiction
"Genuine Negro Fun": Racial Pleasure and Class Formation in the 1840's
California Gold and European Revolution: Stephen Foster and the American 1848
Uncle Tomitudes: Racial Melodrama and Modes of Production

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Gloria Anzaldua, Aunt Lute Press, 1987

Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
James Scott, Yale UP, 1992

CONTENTS

The homeland, Aztlan
Movimientos de rebeldia y las culturas que traicionan
Entering into the serpent
The Coatlicue state
How to tame a wild tongue
The path of the red and blank ink
Towards a new consciousness

More on Spanglish...
A Hidden History of Spanglish in California
An episode of the podcast The World in Words from PRI (Public Radio International).

The Games Black Girls Play.
Kyra Gaunt, NYU Press, 2006

CONTENTS

Slide: Games as Lessons in Black Musical Style
Education, Liberation: Learning the Ropes of a Musical Blackness
Mary Mack Dressed in Black: The Earliest Formation of a Popular Music
Saw You With Your Boyfriend: Music between the Sexes
Who’s Got Next Game? Women, Hip-Hop, and the Power of Language
Double Forces Has Got the Beat: Reclaiming Girls’ Music in the Sport of Double-Dutch
Let a Woman Jump: Dancing with the Double Dutch Divas

CONTENTS

Behind the Official Story
Domination, Acting, and Fantasy
The Public Transcript as a Respectable Performance
False Consciousness or Laying It on Thick?
Making Social Space for a Dissident Subculture
Voice under Domination: The Arts of Political Disguise
The lnfrapolitics of Subordinate Groups
A Saturnalia of Power: The First Public Declaration of the Hidden Transcript

3 Comments

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (notes toward teaching)

2/16/2018

3 Comments

Select a concept or quotation from the whiteboard and write about its significance in and to the novel.

LINKS
Why Comics Belong in the Classroom (TEDx talk by Gene Yang)
The Monkey King in Chinese folklore
Transformers

3 Comments

Space, place, & identity-Notes for a lesson on The Hate U Give

2/1/2018

4 Comments

Yi-Fu Tuan (1977 ) first explored and articulated how ideas of space and place depend upon one other for definition, arguing that if ‘‘we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is a pause’’ (p. 6). Tim Cresswell elaborates on this claim, noting that ‘‘When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and then become attached to it in some way… , it becomes place’’ (2004 , p. 10). This place, then, can take the form of home, for Tuan, a fundamental concept to people around the globe.

Source: Glenn, Wendy. 2017. "Space and Place and the 'American’ Legacy: Female Protagonists and the Discovery of Self in Two Novels for Young Adults. Children's Literature in Education 48:378–395.

Freewrite
Write about a place that's central to your identity. What makes that place important to who you are?

"This not an anti-cop book" - Angie Thomas

Influences and references in
The Hate U Give

Tupac Amaru Shakur

Trayvon Martin & Rachel Jeantel

Angie Thomas says of Jeantel, "I remember being so angry at how people characterized her just because they didn't think she presented herself the way they would have presented themselves."

With Starr, "I wanted to say, Here's a black girl who is saying things the way you think that she should say them, but are you listening?"

Oscar Grant
"I first got the idea for the book after the shooting death of Oscar Grant, a young man in Oakland, California. I was in college at the time, and a lot like Starr, I went to a mostly white, upper-class conservative school and I lived in what we can call the hood. Every day, I would make a 10-minute drive to school from where I lived, and I would hear two different conversations about Oscar. In my neighborhood, Oscar was 'one of us,' but in my school, he 'shouldn’t have done this or that,' or 'he got what he deserved'.”
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/books/a9083515/the-hate-u-give-angie-thomas/

4 Comments

Winter breaking

1/19/2018

3 Comments

It's been a long break here at PoetryPedagogy.com with lots to be attended to IRL. This spring, I'll be teaching two newish classes: Young Adult Literature for undergraduates, and Social History of Spoken Word Poetry as a graduate seminar. I'll post readings and course plans for each soon.

The semester got underway a week ago Wednesday, but then we had 2.5 snow/frozen roads days this week, so I've taught a total of one class meeting so far. It's a little strange, but the good news is that I'm getting my desk copies ordered for the first time in awhile!

3 Comments

Book-a-Day Whiteboards #2: All American Boys by Jason Reynolds & Brendan Kiely

12/8/2017

2 Comments

Read: Dec. 3, 2017
Thumbs: Middling to downward
But why, Sue? It's a challenge to work events so recent into a piece of writing, and I'm afraid Reynolds and Kiely don't fully pull it off for me. The Quinn character doesn't work, ultimately; his connection to the central events of the narrative are weak, and while his internal struggle is occasionally compelling, it feels strained toward the end. Quinn's reaching for Rashad in the final scene is... strange. It feels like Rashad has become something of a hollow symbol for Quinn, something he can touch to become fully part of something he wants to understand.
Thoughts?

2 Comments

Book-a-Day Whiteboards #3: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017)

12/8/2017

4 Comments

Read: Dec. 4, 2017
Thumbs: Middle Up
But why, Sue? I enjoyed this book and found myself making lots of connections to other texts and genres, including Sister Soulja's The Coldest Winter Ever (a book I don't love, but whose popularity is significant) and blaxploitation cinema of the '70s. The Hate U Give draws from such sources, but creates something contemporary, rich, and intense.
My main issue is the book's length, which doesn't seem necessary enough to make up for the readers it might put off - readers who, possibly, would love this book most.

4 Comments

Book-a-Day Whiteboards #1: Ghost by Jason Reynolds

12/3/2017

3 Comments

Book: Ghost by Jason Reynolds (2016)
Thumbs: Up
But why, Sue? This is a satisfying story about a boy's process toward figuring out who he is and who he wants to be through mentoring, friendship, and track. There are a lot of opportunities for teaching here, and compelling minor questions around measurement and categorization that add depth to the narrative. I want to read its sequel/partner Patina now.
A note on Reynolds' style: Here and in the Reynolds co-authored All American Boys, there's what I assume is a purposeful choice to almost never use race labels as a way to identify characters. Tell me if I'm wrong, because I haven't gone back and done a careful study of it. But I like it.

3 Comments

Poetry and musicality

11/26/2017

3 Comments

Thinking about this topic as I collect poems etc to share with a student who wants to learn how to think in more rhythmic, kinesthetic ways about their own writing.

"Music in Poetry: Ballad and Blues Stanzas" at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Lesson plans for "Music in Poetry"

A collection of essays etc on poetry and music at Academy of American Poets.

"How the Irreverent Poetry of the '60s Helped Spawn Punk Music" at PBS News Hour

Walt Whitman on Beethoven and Music as the Profoundest Expression of Nature at Brainpickings