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

3/4/2018

3 Comments

 
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.
Picture
CONTENTS​​
  1. Mother Tongue: African American Vernacular Speech as Poetic Language
  2. Orality: Language and Voice
  3. The Poetry of Preachment: Didacticism in African American Poetry
  4. Song/​Talk: African American Music and Song as Poetic References
  5. Tell My Story: Boast and Toast Traditions
  6. "Black Is ... and Black Ain't": Of Gender and Generations in African American Poetry.
The Feminist Poetry Movement.
Kim Whitehead, UP of Mississippi, 1996. 
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CONTENTS
  1. The Life of the Movement.
  2. Judy Grahn's Poetics of Commonality 
  3. Feminist and Black Arts Strategies in the Poetry of June Jordan 
  4. Survival as Form in the Work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Irena Klepfisz
  5. History, Myth, and Empowerment in Joy Harjo's Poetry
  6. 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
Picture
​CONTENTS
  1. Framing [Performance]
  2. Performance Histories
  3. Spect-Actors
  4. The New Uses of Performance
  5. Performative and Performativity
  6. Knowing through Performance: Scenarios and Simulation
  7. Artivists (Artist-Activists), or What's to Be Done?
  8. The Future(s) of Performance
  9. 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
Picture
​CONTENTS
  1. Hip Hop's Mama: Originalism and Identity in the Music 
  2. My Mic Sound Nice: Art, Community, and Consciousness
  3. Stinging Like Tabasco: Structure and Format in Hip Hop Compositions
  4. The Glorious Outlaw: Hip Hop Narratives, American Law, and the Court of Public Opinion
  5. B-Boys, Players, and Preachers: Reading Masculinity
  6. The Venus Hip Hop and the Pink Ghetto: Negotiating Spaces for Women
  7. 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
Picture
After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement
​Cheryl Clarke, Rutgers UP, 2004
Picture
CONTENTS
  1. Acts of Transfer
  2. Scenarios of Discovery: Reflections on Performance and Ethnography
  3. Memory as Cultural Practice: Mestizaje, Hybridity, Transculturation
  4. La Raza Cosmetica: Walter Mercado Performs Latino Psychic Space 
  5. False Identifications: Minority Populations Mourn Diana 
  6. "You Are Here": H.I.J.O.S. and the DNA of Performance 
  7. Staging Traumatic Memory: Yuyachkani 
  8. Denise Stoklos: The Politics of Decipherability 
  9. Lost in the Field of Vision: Witnessing September 11 
  10. Hemispheric Performances 

Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America
Geneva Smitherman, Wayne State UP, 1977
Picture
CONTENTS
  1. From Africa to the New World and Into the Space Age
  2. "It's Bees Dat Way Sometime"
  3. Black Semantics
  4. "How I Got Ovuh"
  5. "The Forms of things Unknown"
  6. Where It's at
  7. 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
  1. 'Missed Love': Black Power and Black Poetry 
  2. The Loss of Lyric Space in Gwendolyn Brooks' "In the Mecca"
  3. Queen Sistuh: Black Women Poets and the Circle(s) of Blackness
  4. Black Feminist Communalism in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf
  5. Transferences and Confluences: Black Arts and Black Lesbian-Feminism in Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn

Love & Theft
​Eric Lott, Oxford UP, 1983
Picture
CONTENTS
  1. Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American Culture
  2. Love and Theft: "Racial" Production and the Social Unconscious of Blackface
  3. White Kids and No Kids At All: Working Class Culture and Languages of Race
  4. The Blackening of America: Popular Culture and National Cultures
  5. The Seeming Counterfeit": Early Blackface Acts, the Body, and Social Contradiction
  6. "Genuine Negro Fun": Racial Pleasure and Class Formation in the 1840's
  7. California Gold and European Revolution: Stephen Foster and the American 1848
  8. Uncle Tomitudes: Racial Melodrama and Modes of Production

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

Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
James Scott, Yale UP, 1992
Picture
CONTENTS
  1. The homeland, Aztlan
  2. Movimientos de rebeldia y las culturas que traicionan
  3. Entering into the serpent
  4. The Coatlicue state
  5. How to tame a wild tongue
  6. The path of the red and blank ink
  7. 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
Picture
CONTENTS
  1. Slide: Games as Lessons in Black Musical Style 
  2. Education, Liberation: Learning the Ropes of a Musical Blackness 
  3. Mary Mack Dressed in Black: The Earliest Formation of a Popular Music 
  4. Saw You With Your Boyfriend: Music between the Sexes 
  5. Who’s Got Next Game? Women, Hip-Hop, and the Power of Language 
  6. Double Forces Has Got the Beat: Reclaiming Girls’ Music in the Sport of Double-Dutch 
  7. Let a Woman Jump: Dancing with the Double Dutch Divas 
CONTENTS
  1. ​Behind the Official Story
  2. Domination, Acting, and Fantasy
  3. The Public Transcript as a Respectable Performance
  4. False Consciousness or Laying It on Thick?
  5. Making Social Space for a Dissident Subculture
  6. Voice under Domination: The Arts of Political Disguise
  7. The lnfrapolitics of Subordinate Groups
  8. A Saturnalia of Power: The First Public Declaration of the Hidden Transcript 

3 Comments
uk essay service link
5/7/2020 03:26:33 am

Spoken word poetry is my favorite thing to do. I love being able to voice out the feelings that I have in my heart. In my opinion, it is because I can do that, that I enjoy life. I want to keep on doing it for as long as I am able. I believe that I can touch a lot of people's hearts as long as I am allowed to pursue my passion for both writing and performing my writing

Reply
Ketos link
4/21/2022 04:20:52 am

I am a poet and like to write the poem for the children. A lot of poems are in my collection. There are many poems written by me . I like it.

Reply
Justin Ball link
10/19/2022 09:20:21 pm

Boy test leader church his some. City effect positive represent paper mind.
Push since realize they big in.

Reply



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    Thanks for visiting Poetry/Pedagogy. This site blog is where I'll post notes and thoughts about the critical pedagogies and literacies work happening in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and around the world. - Sue

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  • Home
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  • Poems. Just poems.
  • English education
  • Class Plans and Resources
    • ENGL4302: Spoken Word Poetry & Pedagogy
  • Contact
  • The Public Teacher Interview Project