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

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.

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Current Course Readings

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

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. 

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

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

The Dirty Dozens
Collected skits from In Living Color 

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"Daddy Dozens" by Jamila Woods

"Daddy Dozens" written text
​"Daddy Dozens" audio performance
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The Signifying Monkey
Performed by Rudy Ray Moore

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"The Name Game" by Shirley Ellis

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Relevant Studies

Performance
​Diana Taylor, 2016, Duke UP

​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.

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

​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.

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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

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 

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

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

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Love & Theft
​Eric Lott, Oxford UP, 1983

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

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Borderlands/La Frontera: The New ​Mestiza
Gloria Anzaldua, Aunt Lute Press, 1987
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Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
James Scott, Yale UP, 1992

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).

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

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 

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