Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. and Custodial Clowns

[By Jerry W. Ward]

Several times during his September 20, 2012 lecture on “The Crisis of Black Leadership” at the University of Kansas, Eddie Glaude, author of In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (2007), used the phrases “custodial politics” and “democratic perfectionism.” “Democratic perfection” is so critical a concept in political theory that it is virtually invisible in the everyday practices of American politics.  The high visibility of “custodial politics,” on the other hand, is an agonizing pain in the butt.

Eddie Glaude: Prophetic Witness and Black Leadership

[By Goyland Williams]

I was fortunate to witness two powerful and thought-provoking lectures given by Eddie Glaude Jr., the William S. Todd Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Princeton University. The first lecture “The Crises of Black Leadership” was given on Thursday, September 20, 2012 and the second lecture “The Role of the Black Church in the age of Obama” was held in the community at Ninth Street Baptist Church.

In Glaude’s first lecture, “The Crisis of Black Leadership”, he makes his case for what he calls “prophetic pragmatism”- a pragmatism rooted in the Deweyian (John) tradition of American pragmatism and dipped in the waters of what Amiri Baraka calls “Blues People”. It is this blues sensibility that Professor Glaude believes can give voice to the suffering of “the least of these,” and one that challenges the ways in which blacks think about themselves, imagine their history, and how they conceive of their own actions.

On Being Cool: A Cold Announcement

[By Jerry W. Ward]

In the later years of the last century, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) broadcast clear signals about the misdeeds of humanistic disciplines in the United States, the British Commonwealth, and the theoretical centers of Europe.  Said’s aim was not to erase the Western intellectual tradition that informed his thinking.  He only wanted to expose its hidden agendas, its disinformative ideologies.  Said’s pugnacious critiques have yet to be digested by people who study literature and culture.  Perhaps the wounds we shall suffer from Arab Spring and Taliban Summer will promote greater attention to Said’s work, to his brave integrity.  Said was cool.

Toi Derricotte’s Open Confession

[By Jerry W. Ward]

Open confession --- public broadcasting of once private spiritual desire and/or agony   --- may be good for the soul.  As far as contemporary American poetry goes, whether open confession is a many splendid thing or a depressing invitation to tour another person’s dread and suffering is debatable.

The poetic mode identified as confessional is as ancient as the Epic of Gilgamesh and as modern as Toi Derricotte’s The Undertaker’s Daughter (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).  In African American poetic tradition, poets as diverse and different as Gwendolyn Brooks, Lenard D. Moore, Wanda Coleman, Pinkie Gordon Lane, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Robert Hayden have confessed.  What does it profit you to add the burden of another’s psychological/metaphysical dread to your own?  Is the dread imaginary or real?  Is the confession a hook to catch the reader, to bait her or him?  What is the profit in peeping through the keyhole of language at the intimate violence behind the door, the eternal agon resurrected by memory?

Witherspoon: A Novel by Lance Jeffers (1983)*

[By Jerry W. Ward]

INTRODUCTION

Such Agonies Suffer Our Men of War

Reading Witherspoon, one is moved by its aesthetic and its morality.  Lance Jeffers does not depend on mutilation of language, allusion to the arcane, or puzzles in logic to achieve effects.  He is too good and too honest an artist to engage in easy tricks.  He knows, as wordsmiths have known since the pre-history of Africa,  that a good story told in language the community can understand is not to be surpassed.  The grace and strength of fiction are located in its ability to show us our lives with more order, insight, and clarity than we can normally obtain.  Good fiction pushes us toward recognition, toward a profound, relentless honesty about ourselves and others.  It forces us to make moral decisions while satisfying our penchant for narratives about man’s endless contest with the fate of being human.  Because it fulfills these criteria superbly, Witherspoon is a fine, important novel.

Gil Scott-Heron and a Hint-filled Detail

[By Jerry W. Ward]

“Gil Scott-Heron was one of [the] most insightful thinkers of the late twentieth century,”  Tony Bolden writes in Chapter 22 of The Cambridge History of African American Literature, “yet few critics have considered him a serious artist” (552).  Few have commented on Scott-Heron’s serious artistry in the novel The Nigger Factory (New York: Dial, 1972; Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2010).  This work of vernacular realism fell through the cracks.

Recuperative criticism can reconnect The Nigger Factory with the sabotaging of history and “the redemptive power of storytelling and satirical truth-telling for the liberation of the minds of black people” (Bernard Bell, The Contemporary African American Novel 248).

The Ethnic Ethical Turn

[By Jerry W. Ward]

Nature extracts a high cost for beauty.  From an amoral aesthetic perspective, Hurricane Isaac’s performance of a logarithmic spiral is beautiful.  The sublime beauty of a hurricane kills people.  Does the beauty of our cultural studies and theories participate in such murder?

The amorality of nature is a foil for the presence or absence of ethics in the works of human nature.  No doubt, Western philosophy is capable of arguing that deadly forms of behavior are ethical entities.  A few thinkers might say that capability is reprehensible.  We have no survey of Western philosophy that offers necessary and sufficient proof that perverse ethical entities are not operative in global societies, in the Diaspora, in the United States.  It is prudent to think cautiously when we talk about the nihilist dimensions of African American cultural expressions and when we participate in the production of discursive beauty.

Stitching Rifts: Finney Mends American Environmentalism

[By DaMaris Hill]

On September 6, 2012, the Hall Center for the Humanities hosted Dr. Nikky Finney. Her talk was entitled "Making Poetry in Our Anthropocene Age". Anthropocene is a scientific term coined to suggest that humans are the geophysical force changing the climate of the planet, and ushering in a new geological period.  The central question of Dr. Finney’s talk concerned the connections between the damage done to the earth's ecosystems and her role as a contemporary poet.  

Nikky Finney: The Role of the Writer and Critic

[By Kenton Rambsy]

On Thursday, September 6, U.S. National Book Award-winning poet, Nikky Finney visited the University of Kansas to deliver a lecture on “Making Poetry in Our Anthropocene Age.” I was eager to attend the lecture to find out what angle Finney would take in bridging the literary world to issues of environmentalism.

Perhaps my view of ecology was limited solely to the physical interactions of the natural environment. Finney’s talk expanded my conception of “nature” to emphasize the role of one’s memory in how we conceive of and relate to our surroundings.

Black Literature and the Democratic Spirit

[By Jerry Ward]

The democratic spirit demands that all voices be heard and that all interests be represented.  In the literary sector of everyday life, the spirit can manifest itself as a risk-free membership plan offered by an African American book club.  If I join the club, I can get three books for “$3, plus shipping & processing and applicable taxes.  I agree to buy 4 more books in the next year.”  If I want to be thrifty, my option is to buy 1 book now and “reduce my commitment to 3 books in 1 year.”  I will then be billed “an added $5.98, plus shipping & processing and applicable taxes.”  Just do the math.

Witherspoon: A Novel by Lance Jeffers (1983)*

[By Jerry Ward]

INTRODUCTION

Such Agonies Suffer Our Men of War

Reading Witherspoon, one is moved by its aesthetic and its morality.  Lance Jeffers does not depend on mutilation of language, allusion to the arcane, or puzzles in logic to achieve effects.  He is too good and too honest an artist to engage in easy tricks.  He knows, as wordsmiths have known since the pre-history of Africa,  that a good story told in language the community can understand is not to be surpassed.  The grace and strength of fiction are located in its ability to show us our lives with more order, insight, and clarity than we can normally obtain.  Good fiction pushes us toward recognition, toward a profound, relentless honesty about ourselves and others.  It forces us to make moral decisions while satisfying our penchant for narratives about man’s endless contest with the fate of being human.  Because it fulfills these criteria superbly, Witherspoon is a fine, important novel.