Black Panther, Cinematic Milestone

BLACK PANTHER

This weekend brought the debut of Ryan Coogler's newest directorial triumph, Black Panther,  a Marvel Studios production distributed by Walt Disney Studios. Based on the eponymous Marvel Comics character, Black Panther, which features a black director and a nearly all-black diasporic cast, raised incalculable expectations for black moviegoers, comics fans, critics and the film industry, and, having seen it yesterday, I can say hesitation that it more than satisfies them. It manages to be a thrilling fantasy movie based on a comics foundation, a visually arresting and movingly acted wok of cinema, and a politically aware, multilayered film that keeps the viewer thinking even after the final credits and post-credit clip have rolled.

The film's plot mirrors similar superhero tales, but is, as has been widely remarked, anchored in and deeply informed by an African(ist) futurist aesthetic. The story's hero must assume the mantle of his father, and shoulder the profound responsibilities for his people, but the script, by Coogler and John Robert Cole includes twists, include two villains, one far more significant than the other, and a tale of familial revenge, linked to differing ideas of cultural socialization (African vs. African-American) and liberation, that I cannot say I have ever seen in any other superhero film. (One sees echoes of this, however, in a TV show like Black Lightning, which I wrote about last week.) Indeed, the deeper conflict in the film, rooted in the idea of family, now underpinned by the DNA testing industries and genealogical research, about the relationship between those in the Diaspora and those, like the Wakandans, who have remained in the African homeland, may pass over some moviegoers' heads, but to me was one of the most stirring aspects of the film. Another was the film's baseline feminist perspective; Wakanda may be presided over by a king, and Black Panther may be a cis-heterosexual male, but this is no patriarchy, and women are equals--as warriors and citizens--to the men, the ruler notwithstanding. As a template for the new century, and for black children and children of all races, this is a powerful model to internalize.

Lupita Nyong'o, Chadwick
Boseman, & Danai Gurira

What underlines this portrait is the fictional Wakanda's almost singular status as an uncolonized and unconquered country; it and its people, the comics' and films' writers tell us, avoided the fate of almost every other non-Western country in the world. (Watching the film, I immediately thought of its closest African model, Ethiopia, a site of ancient knowledge and civilization, a religious center, the home of a proto-Enlightenment preceding that of Europe, and more, which nearly withstood all attempts at subjugation, until Benito Mussolini's firepower briefly won control of its territory (1936-1941).) What if Ethiopia, in addition to all of its advances, had possessed an element so powerful it might transform the world? Another analogue I thought of is the contemporary Republic of Congo, whose lands contain a host of precious and invaluable resources now used in the high tech industries. Centuries of slavery, colonialism and empire, however, have created tremendous challenges for the people of Congo, and other resource-rich African nations, to pursue their destinies to the fullest, though a cursory glimpse at the economic, political and social developments in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa underline that advancements of all kinds are underway.

To give just a glimpse of the plot, Black Panther unfolds with a quick prologue, set several centuries back. In a world parallel to our own, a meteor bearing the fictional metal vibranium, the rarest and most powerful element known to humankind, strikes central Africa. As five tribes wage war over the magical resource, a member of one of the tribes ingests a "heart-shaped bulb" that has been transformed by the vibranium, giving him special powers that lead him to become the first Black Panther. He unites four of the five tribes as the nation of Wakanda, with the fifth, the Jabari, remaining semi-independent in a loose confederation in the snowy mountains above. (A scene later in the film gives us a mini-tour of this aerie-perched nation; what was not clear was where most its women were, as if it were a kind of black Sparta in the clouds.) Rather than exploiting this remarkable resource, Wakanda chooses to guard it, presenting itself to the outside world as an impoverished, sleepy "Third World" member of the international community, while inside its borders, it is a technological powerhouse.

Lupita Nyong'o and
Letitia Williams

The film's real action opens in 1992, in an apartment in a housing project in Oakland, California (where the original Black Panther Party was established in 1966). Outside, a group of black boys are playing basketball. Inside the apartment, two young black men, whom we think are African Americans, appear to be plotting a revolution, stockpiling firearms. We soon learn that one of them, royal Prince N'jobu (Sterling K. Brown), really a Wakandan with aims of arming oppressed black people worldwide, is the brother of Wakanda's King, T'Chaka (Atandwa Kani), has arrived to bring his brother back for violating one of Wakanda's chief tenets: betraying the country by working with an outsider, arms dealer Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis, exuding malevolence), who has stolen a cache of vibranium from Wakanda. N'jobu's co-conspirator Zuri (Denzel Whitaker, related directly to neither of his namesakes!) turns out to be a fellow Wakandan and spy who has ratted him out. When N'jobu attempts to kill Zuri for snitching, the King slays his brother, and departs with Zuri for Wakanda. As their airship zooms away, one of the boys on the playground looks up at the apartment, and notes the fleeing spacecraft.

We flash forward to the current moment, which includes references to our contemporary world, in which the noble Prince T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) is set to assume the Wakandan throne after the assassination of his father, T'Challa (now played by veteran South African actor John Kani). We meet his younger sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), Wakanda's resident tech genius; his mother, the grieving Queen Ramonda (a suitably regal Angela Bassett); and the head of the Dora Milaje, the Wakandan state's all female guard,  General Okoye (Danai Gurira, embodying an electrifying blend of brilliance and ferocity). Before T'Challa's coronation begins, he and Okoye retrieve his ex, Nakia (a radiant Lupita Nyong'o), now a deep operative in Nigeria, the sparks still evident between them. As part of his ritual installment, before a royal audience outdoors, above waterfalls, and presided over by a much older Zuri (Forest Whitaker), T'Challa must face a challenger from any of Wakanda's tribes, all of whom, including his best friend, W'Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya), beg off. The Jabari tribe's head, the strapping (6'5" and stoutly built) M'Baku (Winston Duke), does raise a challenge, only to eventually tap out after being subdued by T'Challa. This is one of several rituals the viewer witnesses, giving a sense of the depth of the culture and the reverence with which power is transferred.

T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) facing off
against Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan, at right)

The plot then moves first to South Korea, where the trio of T'Challa, Nakia and Okoye seek out Klaue (and Black Panther's creator, the legendary Stan Lee, makes a brief cameo), with a brief detour in London, before returning to the familiar confines of Wakanda. In the British capital, in a museum displaying African artifacts, we encounter another of the film's major characters, the oddly named but cinematically galvanizing Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), who devours the screen every time he is on it. In fact, he moves through the script as a literal antithesis to Boseman's T'Challa. Where the new king is restrained, dignified, almost placid, personality traits Boseman portrays effortlessly, Jordan's Killmonger is all confident swagger, a mental and physical paragon (he nearly scorches the screen when he takes off his shirt for battle), pulsating with rage born of vengeance and, the viewer eventually learns, a sense of profound abandonment. Why, he asks, was he--like Black America--left to fend for himself, a question that the film suggests is the question of the entire Diaspora; yet, as we know, Africa itself has had a centuries-long battle on its hands too. When Killmonger reaches Wakanda, he upsets the social and political cassava cart, a civil war included, and the heart of the movie turns on whether his vision of the world, or T'Challa's, will prevail. (No spoilers!) As I noted above, their senses of duty are parallel; each seeks to rule, but in the service of an idea, and communities, beyond themselves. For Killmonger, is is black and other oppressed people of color across the globe; for T'Challa, it is his birthright, Wakanda. In the end, we see how the visions merge.

The acting is uniformly strong, and the viewer gets the sense that everyone in the film is enjoying themselves. Winston Duke and Letitia Wright are among the many breakout stars, if there are rolls for them down the road, and it was invigorating to see Boseman, Jordan, Nyong'o, and Gurira in roles other than biopics, historical narratives or realist tragedies, important and necessary as such films are. In 2006 and again in 2012 I wrote about the increasingly Diasporic cast of black Hollywood, and this film fully represents that shift, drawing its talent from across the globe, while bringing together venerable figures like Kani, Academy Award winners like the senior Whitaker, and beginners like the younger Whitaker. As other commenters have noted, the films is that rare Hollywood product that also seems not beholden to colorism, particularly for its leading actresses. How rare--and needed!--to see dark-skinned women not relegated to the background, but in the forefront of a story, yet this felt organic, not forced, like most of what the film offers its viewers. Cinematographer Rachel Morrison deserves praise for the rich imagery and her skillful blending of realism and CGI, and the score, by Ludwig Göransson, with contributions by Kendrick Lamar, and others, complements and enlivens what the viewer sees.

Michael B. Jordan, as Erik
Killmonger; Daniel Kaluuya,
as W'Kabi at right

I have so far not commented much on any of the film's white characters; in addition to Klaue, who functions mainly as a plot feint and device, there is another, CIA agent Everett K. Ross, played by Martin Freeman, who occupies a pivotal place in the plot. Ross appears in the original comics as a fairly timid, low-key character, I believe, but the filmmakers expanded his role and pumped up his personality, making him not just essential to what unfolds, but memorable as well. (It paints the CIA in a favorable light, despite the agency's less than honorable history in advancing US neocolonial, imperial and capitalist aims in Africa and elsewhere.) As a thought experiment, I asked myself, what if he had been played by a Latinx actor, say, or, given China's growing role in Africa, by a major Chinese-American or Chinese star? Would Hollywood ever have allowed that?

I then wondered about future iterations of Black Panther, which because of its box office success (like $200 million earned over the opening weekend, with receipts set to keep rising, and a fan base that dots the globe); will the original comics' template, and Hollywood's desire for viable white stars, shape the storylines, or will the films' directors and screenwriters delve a little more deeply into other parts of the world, considering South Korea, for example, not just as a scenic backdrop, but Korean and Korean-American actors--and other Asian American and Asian actors, actors from Latin America, and so on--for key roles? What would a big budget but decolonized, Afro-futurist and Diasporic, plural cinema look like? Would Disney, let alone Marvel Comics, allow it? Black Panther certainly provokes the question.

T'Challa (Boseman) again
facing off against Killmonger (Jordan)

I will end this review am not familiar enough with all of the past iterations of Black Panther to know which Coogler and Cole drew from, but I believe in one of the newer versions, Okoye, in addition to being womynist, is a lesbian. In this film, her love interest is W'Kabi, however. (They generate little heat on camera, unlike T'Challa and Nakia.) Will queer Wakandans make an appearance in future iterations of the film, or will wariness on the issue win out? Also, and this is just a minor quibble, but there is a patriarchal, pro-monarchist ideological strain in the film, connected to a quite different but related notion of Afrocentricity--"we are descendants of kings and queens"-- that I found a little unsettling. Of course some of us are descended, however distantly, from royals, and African Americans may find, upon receiving their DNA results, that our royal roots go in multiple directions (Africa, Europe, etc.), but the reality for most of us is that we come from the people who did the work to build most societies and cultures up, that is, from the bottom up, and there is nothing in this to be ashamed about. Patriarchy under any guise is problematic.

Moreover, at a time when democracy feels especially precarious, in the US, in the Americas, in Europe, in Africa, and across the globe, I hope that the writers of Black Panther's sequels can figure out a way to weave a vibrant representative democracy and republican structure into their portrayal of Wakanda's government.  I have nothing against noble black kings and queens, but everyone needs to see decent, dedicated politicians, black and of every hue, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, etc., taking the right and judicious steps, on behalf of the people they represent and the globe, which may include not only keeping each other, but kings--and presidents--on the just path.

"Rivers" in VICE + "The Lions" (& Interview) in The Offing

Brazos (de) Santiago, Texas, where
the final battle of the US Civil War occurred

One of the stories in Counternarratives, "Rivers," is also one of the riskiest. Not because of its form or style, but because it takes up the thread of--and takes on, it's fair to say--one of the greatest writers and books in American literature, Mark Twain's 1885 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Or, more precisely, it revisits one of that novel's central characters, the enslaved man Jim, without whose presence the novel could not exist, but whose perspective throughout it remains mostly on the periphery, except in rare glimpses that are played for comedy.

My goal with the story was not so much to revise Twain's novel, whose main story stays mostly offstage in "Rivers," but rather to imagine Jim's life, particularly after freedom, his freedom, both the convenient legal version given by Twain and whatever subsequent freedom(s) Jim earned himself. Before the novel appears next week, thanks to VICE magazine and its editors, and New Directions, you can read "Rivers" in The VICE Reader and see where the character of Jim, as well as Huckleberry, led me, discover the significance of the story's title, and find out what it was like to participate in the final battle of the U.S. Civil War. Accompanying the story are photographer Alec Magnum's stunning, stirring photos from his series "Sleeping by the Mississippi."

***

In another fascinating coincidence, another story in Counternarratives, "The Lions," appeared this week in The Offing, the new literary publication of the Los Angeles Review of Books. About "The Lions" I'll say only that it is the last story in the collection and deeply disturbing. There are many inspirations for each of the characters, which is one reason neither is named, and you can take your pick about who seems to fit which role. (It is set in contemporary Africa, but could take place, with some adjustments, all over the globe.) Many thanks to the editors at The Offing and at New Directions.

Accompanying the story is a brief online interview, "No Whitewash," on The Offing's Tumblr that Bix Gabriel conducted with me, about the new collection and this collection, so please do check it out. (Thank you, Bix!)

A snippet:

Other stories or aspects of the book you’d like to readers to know about?
Spirituality and religion, in their multiple manifestations, flow throughout many of the stories, and some, like “A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon,” turn in part on the clash between spiritual systems, which are also systems of knowledge. What does it mean to know, and can knowledge lead to freedom? Liberty and fugitivity are throughlines in the text. How might freedom be lived, embodied? Also, queerness in the many senses of that term is another current throughout all of these stories. Lastly, I hope it’s clear that I had a lot of fun creating and then following the stories of many of these characters.

Black History Month/Langston Hughes Day + Poems by Langston Hughes

February 1 always marks the start of US Black History Month, as well as the birthday of one of the greatest poets this country gave the wider world, James Langston Mercer Hughes (1902-1967). I think I've alternated in the past by celebrating one or the other, but today, in tribute to the month and to Hughes, here are a few of his poems, all taken from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad and David E. Roessel, Editors (New York: Vintage, 1995).

The first is a poem drawn from Hughes's time on the sea; Sekondi, part of Sekondi-Takoradi, is a port city in Ghana. Note the ironic play on fog and the swift punchline-like turn at the poem's end.

FOG

Singing black boatmen
An August morning
In the thick white fog at Sekondi
Coming out to take cargo
From anchored alien ships,
You do not know the fog
We strange so-civilized ones
Sail in always.

***

Here are three queer poems drawn from Hughes's collections up to 1936. I reread all the poems in these volumes in preparation for my story "Blues," which involves a (fictional?) meeting between Hughes and the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia, who had already translated some of Hughes' work into Spanish.

In his first three or so collections, Hughes has, among a wide array of poems in which a male voice addresses a female beloved; a female voice addresses or speaks of a male beloved; and gender-ambiguous poems, many invoke nocturnal imagery (because we all know what goes on in the dark).

SONG

Lovely, dark, and lonely one,
Bare your bosom to the sun.
Do not be afraid of light,
You who are a child of night.

Open wide your arms to life,
Whirl in the wind of pain and strife,
Face the wall with the dark, closed gate,
Beat with bare, brown fists--
And wait.

HARLEM NIGHT SONG

Come,
Let us sing the night together,
Singing.

I love you.

Across
The Harlem roof-tops
Moon is shining.
Night sky is blue.
Stars are great drops
Of golden dew.

Down the street
a band is playing
I love you.

Come, let us roam the night together
Singing.

DESIRE

Desire to us
Was like a double death,
Swift dying
Of our mingled breath,
Evaporation
Of an unknown strange perfume
Between us quickly
In a naked
Room.

***

Lastly, Hughes was a poet who did not shy away from political and social commentary, but he had a gift for figuring out how to express it without it (for the most part) sounding like propaganda. Part of his success hinges on his use of humor, part on his careful use of rhyme, rhetoric and rhythm, part on his inclusion of vernacular and the viewpoint of the subaltern, and part on his skillful deployment of irony. The parodic tone and collage quality here point in the direction of post-modernism.

"Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria" appeared in 1931 in New Masses magazine, and later in Hughes's aubiography, The Big Sea, and is considered a masterpiece of Popular Front aesthetics. I checked the Inflation Calculator, and $10,000/year in 1931 would equal $155,747.37/year in 2014 dollars. That would come to about $12,978/month, which, it turns out, was about the price of the lowest end rentals in the Waldorf Towers in 2011 (I can only imagine that it has risen by several thousand dollars as the price of high-end real estate keeps rising.) To put it another way, Hughes was prescient, and not for the first time!

Excerpt from ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE WALDORF ASTORIA

EVICTED FAMILIES

All you families put out in the street

   Apartments in the Towers are only $10,000 a year. (Three

   rooms and two baths.) Move in there until times get good,

   and you can do better. $10,000 are about the same

   to you, aren't they?

Who cares about money with a wife and kids homeless, and no-

   body in the family working? Wouldn't a duplex high above

   the street be grand, with a view of the richest city in the

   world at your nose?

"A lease, if you prefer, or an arrangement terminable at will."

All poems Copyright © Estate of Langston Hughes, 1995, 2015. All rights reserved.

New Books: Poetry & Translation

A number of new books now grace my desk, so here is a little information on several that I have had a hand in. I'll begin with Rodney Gomez's Mouth Filled with Night, the second winner of the Drinking Gourd Poetry Chapbook Prize, a national honor given to an emerging poet of color, resulting in a beautiful chapbook published by Northwestern University Press. During my final year and a half at Northwestern, I served on the planning committee and as a judge for the inaugural prize, when a committee of poets and literary scholars awarded to Kristiana Rae Colón, for her striking, powerful book of poems, Promised Instruments.

Before I left, I again participated on jury that selected Rodney Gomez's vivid, moving poems for this year's prize. As the images below show, these are not just impressive first literary sallies, but beautiful books in themselves, and I highly recommend both, as well as eminent poet and Northwestern professor Ed Roberson's Closest Pronunciation, which was also published, as a volume by a senior poet, in conjunction with the contest. Since I left Northwestern I am no longer involved in the Drinking Gourd Poetry Chapbook contest, but I wish the winners my heartiest congratulations, and the prize itself, which introduces the work of writers who might otherwise see publication by such a distinguished press to a wide audience, the very best.

Rodney Gomez's Mouth Filled with Night (2014)

Kristiana Rae Colón's Promised Instruments (2012)

Ed Roberson's Closest Pronunciation (2012)

***

During the period that I was moving back to New Jersey, I began to become involved in helping to launch another wonderful, invaluable book publishing project, The African Poetry Book Series, one component of the African Poetry Book Fund, which the multitalented, prodigious and visionary poet and critic Kwame Dawes helms, at the University of Nebraska. Its mission, to quote the APBF website is as follows:

The African Poetry Book Fund promotes and advances the development and publication of the poetic arts through its book series, contests, workshops, and seminars and through its collaborations with publishers, festivals, booking agents, colleges, universities, conferences and all other entities that share an interest in the poetic arts of Africa. The Fund is committed to seeking the resources to support this mission and to ensure that all its efforts are carried out with excellence.

The Fund will, through the Series and other projects, promote the writing and publication of African poetry through an international complex of additional collaborations and partnerships. The Fund and its partners will offer support for seminars, workshops and other publishing opportunities for African poets.

The other APBF editorial board members include Chris Abani, Matthew Shenoda, Gabeba Baderoon, and Bernadine Evaristo. Distinguished figures from the worlds of literature, business and publishing fill the Advisory Board.

Among the first books the APBF will publish, two are now in print: the winner of the first Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, which is Kenyan poet Clifton Gachagua's wry, ever-fresh and compelling Madman at Kilifi, and the great, late Ghanaian poet, novelist, teacher and mentor Kofi Awoonor's The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems, 1964-2013, which was in process before his tragic death last fall at the Westgate Towers in Kenya, and which serves as a fine tribute to his extensive poetic gifts and legacy. Both books, published by the University of Nebraska Press, will officially reach bookstores on March 4, 2014, but you can put your orders in now and receive them as soon as they appear. More APBF books are on the horizon, so check the APBF site to see when they will appear.

Clifton Gachagua's Madman at Kilifi and
Kofi Awoonor's The Promise of Hope: New
and Selected Poems, 1964-2013

***

Finally, but not least, a year's work has now achieved fruition with the official release, as of today, of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst's 1991 masterpiece Letters from a Seducer, which I translated into English last year, working closely with Brazilian publisher A Bolha Editora and its editors, Rachel Gontijo Araújo and Stephanie Sauer (now no longer with the house), and US publisher Nightboat Books and its head, Stephen Motika, who have jointly released the volume pictured below. You can purchase a copy directly from University Presses of New England, who distribute Nightboat's books, or from one of the many online bookstores. Or you can check your local bookstore and if they don't have a copy in-store, urge them to order one or some. I will say only that this text of Hilst's isn't for the faint of heart, just as it wasn't in the original Portuguese, but if you looking for a book that truly charts a distinctive path in late 20th century literature, with a heady dose of trangressive sex, literary intertextuality, meta-critique of writing, and textual depth and music, as well as humor, that could give William S. Burroughs or Kathy Acker runs for their money, Hilst's Letters from a Seducer should be in your hands, pronto.

Hilda Hilst's Letters from a Seducer

Tanta Saudade: Cesaria Evora

Reading Fly Brother's blog entry today reminded me that back in the early 1990s, two different friends introduced me to the music of Cesária Évora (b. 1941), whose renditions of morna, a Blues-like musical form, and the more upbeat caldeira, both from her her native Cape Verde, made her and these genres global sensations some thirty years ago. Évora began singing in the 1960s, but gained international acclaim only after recording her first album, La Diva Aux Pieds Nus (The Barefoot Diva), in France, in 1998. She began touring, people couldn't stop listening, and the rest is history.  Évora passed away two days ago, after many months of heart trouble. 

I believe the first album of hers that I heard was Miss Perfumado, from 1992, but the first ones I bought were Cesária, in 1995, and Café Atlantico, in 1999, both issued by Lusafrica. Her voice, like her music, is often brimming with joy and saudade. Évora kept her home open to all, and reportedly was still receiving people and enjoying life just two days before she passed away. Here are a few YouTube clips, beginning with one of her most famous songs, Sodade (i.e., saudade), to remember her by. Enjoy!

Sodade (live, in Paris) Cabo Verde (one of my favorite songs of hers) Angola (live, in New Bedford) Africa Nossa Ligereza (live, in Moscow) Carnaval de São Vicente (live, in Paris) Isolada (live, in Paris)

Quote: Yoruba Folktale

Thus Elenuobere was acquitted and absolved from his labours. The mouth that had put him into trouble had talked him out of it again. Nevertheless my friend, it is wiser not to open your mouth too wide. For it is always easier to talk yourself into trouble than to talk yourself out of it.

--Copyright © Bakare Gbadamosi and Ulli Beier, from "The mouth that commits an offence must talk itself out of punishment" in Not even God is ripe enough: Yoruba Stories told by Bakare Gbadamosi and Ulli Beier, London: Heinemann, 1968.

Abdias do Nascimento RIP

Checking tweets before bed, I saw Tara Betts' note about and link to the New York Times obituary for Abdias do Nascimento (1914-2011, at left, photo by Bia Parreira), one of the extraordinary figures in Brazil's contemporary history. Nascimento advocate for the rights and cultural of Afro-Brazilians, and major contributor to that culture and the society.  A playwright, poet, scholar, teacher, artist, activist, and politician, Nascimento had never softened his voice in calling out Brazil's racism and countering its prevailing ideology, still dominant despite major intellectual and cultural shifts, of itself as a "racial democracy."

Among his many social, political, economic and cultural interventions were his founding of the Black Experimental Theater in Rio de Janeiro, in 1944, which became a site for the production and celebration of Afro-Brazilian dramaturgy and culture; his participation in the first Congress of Brazilian Blacks, in 1950, sponsored in part by the acting troupe, which staged one of Brazil's best known exports of the mid-century, Vinicius de Morães's Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus), which Marcel Camus adapted into the award-winning movie of the same name; and his role in the 1945 founding of the Afro-Brazilian Democratic Committee to free political prisoners held by the right-wing Vargas regime. Later he established the Ipeafro (Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Afro-brasileiros), the Institute for Afro-Brazilian Research and Study.

Nascimento spent nearly 20 years in exile after Brazil's 1964 military coup, living in the United States, where he taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and in Nigeria, returning in the 1980s. Yet while in exile, he helped found the Democratic Labor Party of Brazil, and after the resumption of democracy he served as a federal deputy and senator, and as the Secretary for the Defense and Promotion of the Afro-Brazilian Populations in the State of Rio de Janeiro in during the 1991-94 term of Leonel Brizola.  As the New York Times writes, Nascimento gave one of his final interviews to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as part of Gates's Black in Latin America series on PBS, which I wrote about a few weeks back. You can watch the Brazil episode here.

A native of Franca, São Paulo, and a graduate of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies, and the Oceanography Institute, Nascimento authored many works, including Africans in Brazil: a Pan-African perspective (1997); Orixás: os deuses vivos da Africa (Orishas: the living gods of Africa in Brazil) (1995); Race and ethnicity in Latin America - African culture in Brazilian art (1994); Brazil, mixture or massacre? Essays in the genocide of a Black people (1989); Sortilege (1978); and Racial Democracy in Brazil, Myth or Reality?: A Dossier of Brazilian Racism (1977). He also founded the important journal Quilombo. If you read Portuguese, O Dia has posted an obituary here. Scholar Molefi Kete Asante wrote a tribute posted on Dialogues.

One of my great hopes was to meet Nascimento before he passed. I nevertheless have a small link to him; a few years back, I came into possession of several copies of K. Anthony Appiah's and Gates's magisterial Encyclopedia Africana, and it so turned out that a Brazilian correspondent mentioned that Nascimento might be interested in one, so I sent it to him and he brought it down to Nascimento. It was a small (but heavy) gift of tribute to an amazing figure, and I have always hoped that he had the opportunity even to flip through it once or twice, to see Aaron Myers's fine entry on him.

Henry Louis Gates's Black in Latin America

Gates talks with
Brazilian rapper,
MV Bill

Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s 4-part PBS series Black in Latin America, which ran for each of the last four Tuesdays, has concluded, and all of the episodes are available free online. I have deep respect for Gates as a scholar, intellectual leader and institution-builder, but I must admit that I was a bit wary about this series after I saw some of the pre-broadcast clips on The Root's website. Based on these trailers, my two main fears were that Gates might oversimplify things and that he would allow some of his presuppositions to overwhelm the discussion. For example, in the Brazil trailer, Gates, who has written extensively about race and racism, fails to disarticulate the differences between between Brazilian names for skin colors and racial categories and identities in Brazil, while also failing to historicize these categories or broach contemporary discussions of them. He even denies that the lighter-skinned man can be negro (black). Here we go...I thought. But this thankfully was only a snippet.

Musicians perform at the Toro de Patate

In fact, Gates's discussion of race, and in particular, of blackness and black people in 6 Latin American countries--Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru--turned out to be one of the best, concise introductions to the topic I've come across in a while. He not only did not oversimplify, but he repeatedly challenged some of his own assumptions. In the background for me always as these episodes unfolded were magisterial overviews like the late Leslie B. Rout Jr.'s The African Experience in Latin America (Cambridge, 1976; Wiener, 2003), John Thornton's Africa and Africans and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge, 1998), and George Reid Andrews' Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 (Oxford, 2004), as well as numerous excellent historical, sociological, and other kinds of studies on the specific countries.  Given how little many Americans know about our own national history (histories)--given how much I myself am always learning about moments that I have previously studied, like the US Civil War, from the New York Times's Disunion Series--I did not expect even a handful of Gates' viewers to know much of what could be found in these or similar books, and it was clear that he didn't either. This lack of knowledge included, it was refreshingly clear at times, himself.

Gates in Cuba with the son music group, Septeto Típico de Sones

Each of the episodes ran for an hour, so Gates had to shoehorn quite a bit into a small slot, and given the long histories of each of these countries (Hispaniola's going back to 1492, let us not forget). In the cases of the DR and Haiti, and later Mexico and Peru, he split the episodes in half.  I still believe Haiti alone deserved an hour, and that this particular episode did not take into account more recent and popular racial self-representations among younger Dominicans. That said, Gates' overall presentation of the processes and dynamics of historical development, the role of economics and politics in racial and cultural formation (incluing discursively), and the effects of US hegemony, particularly in the Caribbean, illuminated a great deal about each of these countries and their societies.  He thoughtfully consulted scholars, archivists, and activists from each of the countries, sometimes bringing to light, through minor details, what 1000 words might not fully convey. To give one example, in visiting a museum that housed the late Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo's effects, he and the curator examined a large pot of white (rice?) powder that Trujillo used to whiten his skin. The pot was still nearly full, and its contents blindingly white--as I glimpsed it I thought of the well of racial self-loathing this man possessed, of his ghostly, murderous face looming before me, and a shiver ran up my spine as I considered what terror it must have struck in the eyes and backbones of the Dominicans, Haitians and others (like Venezuela's Rómulo Bettencourt, whom Trujillo attempted to assassinate).

Chebo Ballumbrosio and his family with Gates

The Cuban and Brazilian episodes were the best, in that Gates had the time to delve more deeply than most commentators do about each of these countries, debunking something I have seen up close, Cuba's myth of having abolished racism (officially, perhaps, yes, in reality, no) and Brazil's "racial democracy." In the case of Brazil, Gates started in Salvador da Bahia, the heart of black Brazil, but traveled to other cities--Rio de Janeiro and, quite surprisingly, Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, the huge, populous interior state built, from the 17th century onwards, on mining--to explore questions of blackness, race and racism.  Anyone watching would have grasped the complexities of Brazil's history, but also parallels with the US in terms of how economic activities, geography, and so on, affected the system and practice of slavery.  Most revelatory for me, perhaps because I was reminded of information I had forgotten, was his episode on Mexico, and its intrinsic but obscured black history. From the slave ports to its maroon societies to the role of black Mexicans in the country's liberation, I think it's fair to say that almost none of this history is known or even mentioned in the United States, and, as Gates suggested, remains obscure even to many (most?) Mexicans, save those direct or semi-direct descendants of the Africans in places like Veracruz and the Costa Chica. One of the many great flashes of insight during this episode occurred when an Afro-Mexican interlocutor suggested to Gates that it would be better for Jesse Jackson to forgo protesting about the racist Memín Penguín cartoon figure and to spend more time taking interesting and advocating for black Mexicans living in the United States! I think most Americans, including Mexican Americans, would be surprised to know that black Mexicans are living in the US, and thus facing the same issues as other Latino immigrants and other black Americans, let alone that there are (not just were) blacks in Mexico.  To moreover hear this uttered on television, to hear someone break the silence about a group over whom a veil of ignorance still lies, was startling in the best way.

Gates talk with Bernard Diederich at Haiti's Fort Dimanche

Seeing the parallels between all these countries is in itself quite illustrative; so too is to consider how far blacks in the United States have come, for a variety of reasons, long before the election of President Barack H. Obama, whose election is the result not only of the long black struggle for freedom but also of its effects on white Americans and, more broadly, everyone in this country.  What Gates' show suggested more than once, however, is that in some cases other countries, like Mexico, were ahead of us in terms of racial attitudes, far ahead of us, in some ways, and yet the struggles that black people are battling in these countries are perhaps now multiple generations behind where black Americans were a while ago. What his series suggested too was the ways in which the slave trade also impacted Africa, especially the western and southwestern regions of that continent, an aspect of our global and hemispheric histories that still does not merit enough attention or discussion.  Unfortunately, I doubt enough people will see these episodes to deepen knowledge either about the presence or experiences of black people in Latin America or change a great deal of public and private discussions about race, racism, blackness, immigration, or anything else. (I can hope, though.) Indeed, I don't think that a sizable enough number of black Americans, or Latinos who are not black, will watch these shows, let alone white people, though we all would benefit from knowing more about the histories of all of these societies, especially given how deeply implicated the US and its political, economic, social and cultural politics and policies have been in many of them (cf. DR, Haiti, Cuba, Mexico).  But I know that's unlikely to happen, and that particularly those in power will continue to speak and act from positions of gross, sometimes willful ignorance about such things, since they benefit from the ignorance and the divisions and diversions it sows. PBS, however, is doing us all a huge favor by making the videos freely available, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. has done us a tremendous favor by producing these informative gems at all.

On David Kato

David Kato (Photo: Frontline, CAHR)

Gukira has one of the best (as always), most thoughtful and considerate memorial posts I've read on David Kato (Kisule), the Ugandan teacher and LGBT rights activist, who had served as advocacy officer for Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG).

Kato was brutally beaten to death in his home on Wednesday, January 26, 2011. As the New York Times reports, Kato was one of a number of people Rolling Stone, a notorious Ugandan newspaper, identified as "homosexual" and targeted under the banner "Hang Them." He had been repeatedly threatened and attacked over the years, and had just won a legal decision against Rolling Stone. Uganda’s High Court ordered the magazine financially compensate those it had attacked and to stop publishing the names of people it claimed were gay.

His murder also occurred within the context of Uganda's parliamentary debates about making homosexuality a capital crime, a move directly fostered by US evangelicals, as the Times reported early in January of this year.  In fact it was shortly after a 2009 visit by US evangelicals that Uganda's Parliament began pushing a law to capitalize being gay, though pressure from the US led Ugandan president Yoweri Musaveni to disavow the law. It nevertheless could still be enacted. (Here's the Times's presentation of the views of four Ugandans, including a transman, on the issue.)

I won't even try to reprise Gukira's post, but I'll just quote a small section:

A quick look at his Facebook page tells one story. Early this morning, messages from January 3 and 4 congratulated David on the win against the Ugandan Rolling Stone. Just above them, expressions of loss and solidarity, of love and courage, of mourning. This juxtaposition enacts a certain kind of work to which I hope to return in this edit.

From what I know, which is to say, from the available evidence, it is not clear that a direct line can be traced from David’s activism to his murder. I write this not to be contrary, but because I think it’s important to be judicious, to be contextual. Simultaneously, and just as importantly, there is no evidence that his murder was not a result of his activism. For now, his death remains something that can be used in any number of ways.

Please do read the rest.

RIP, David Kato (1964-2011)

(E-)Revolution in Tunisia

Holly Pickett/NY Times

So the Tunisian people have driven out their corrupt, authoritarian president, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, in office since 1987. Mohamed Ghannouchi, the prime minister, has stepped into the breach on his ouster, to form a coalition government and work with the former Speaker of the Parliament, Fouad Mebazaa (below, at left), who has now temporarily assumed the presidency according to the Tunisian Constitution. Mebazaa has promised elections within 60 days, but it remains unclear what sort of government will be formed, and by whom, especially given how harshly Ben Ali and his allies, many of whom presumably are still in the country, had restricted the opposition parties, especially those on the left and of a religious cast. In fact, Al Nahda, the Islamist Party, had been completely outlawed. Ben Ali's Constitutional Democratic Rally Party (Rassemblement Constitutionnel Democratique) or RCD, so long in control and so dominant, is now, it appears, thoroughly discredited.

What provoked this "Jasmine" revolution, which is reverberating throughout the Middle East, has been the frustration, building over a series of years but erupting a month ago, of millions of people, especially the young, the middle and working-classes and the poor, who faced a lack of jobs, rising costs for staples, constant repression in a police state, and no representation in and by a government that was robbing the country blind. Ben Ali's stage-managed elections were a sign of the problems; his family's steady enrichment a symptom of all that had been going wrong in Tunisia.  The specific spark seems to have been the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi, an unemployed university graduate, who made his mortal protest after police stopped him from earning a subsistence living selling fruits and vegetables, because he lacked a permit.  News of his death spread via Facebook, engendering protests by unemployed university graduates like Bouazizi, and then, according to The New York Times, by workers and young professionals, which the Ben Ali government met with brutal, repressive responses.

Thus far, gun battles between the military and militias loyal to Ben Ali are continuing in and around key sites in the capital, Tunis and its suburb, the historical city of Carthage, with the military apparently backing the nascent government. Though he also may have aided Ben Ali's flight from Tunisia, the country's military's chief, General Rachid Ammar, had earlier made the dramatic and crucial decision to cease firing live ammunition against the protesters (initially labeled by the Western media as "rioters" and "looters"--sound famliar), which enabled Ben Ali's overthrow.  Military authorities have arrested Ben Ali's former Security Chief, Ali Seriati, who is alleged to have been promoting chaos, "murder and pillage," along with other leading figures in Ben Ali's government, including the former Interior Minister, Rafik Belhaj Kacem. (Is he any relation to the French philosopher, critic and novelist Mehdi Belhaj Kacem? Do any J's Theater readers know?)

Africa's Major Universities in Decline? + Writers' Rooms + Littlemilk on Late 90s NYC + Bellow's Neocon

One of the most depressing things I've read in recent days is this Lydia Polgreen article in the New York Times on the dreadful state of some of Africa's major universities. Now I don't know how accurate it is, because I do know that at least in a few cases outside of South Africa that some of the major African universities are doing okay, but if it comes anywhere near to a reasonable assessment of some other institutions, it bodes ill for the future of many countries there, and Africa's future generations as a whole. Polgreen describes a situation of horribly underfunded, overcrowded institutions whose infrastructures are crumbling and which cannot accommodate the students to crave to attend them. She focuses on Cheikh Anta Diop University, once the University of Dakar, in Senegal, which was build originally to handle 5,000 students but now has a student body of around 60,000, but she also cites similar problems at flagship institutions in Nigeria, such as the University of Ibadan, and Tanzania, like Makerere University. The universities were the among the institutions to suffer the worst from the waves of corruption and neglect that struck many of these countries in the late 1960s and afterwards, and the article suggests that they have not recovered. The result is that students who can gain a university education overseas strive to do so, but for those who cannot, these universities are they best and worst hope. Another issue she notes is that the student unions at some institutions have proved incubation tanks for radicals who seek to challenge the governmental and societal status quo, and while this obviously can have positive effects in certain cases, it also represents possible sources of political and social instability.

One institution I used to be closely affiliated with was seeking to partner with Cheikh Anta Diop University, but I took another job before that potential project came to fruition, so I'm not sure how it turned out. (I believe this institution did develop a program with another university in another sub-Saharan country.) It strikes me that in addition to attaining better and more consistent governmental support where possible (as well as potential corporate support in those cases where foreign corporations are extracting resources from these countries), two small steps to address the situation might be by strengthening (or, in cases where no links already exist, establishing) non-colonialist links with state and private institutions overseas, such as major research universities, small private liberal arts colleges, and historically Black colleges and universities, to foster exchange of scholarship and resources wherever possible, and also generating foreign support both from alumni and from those interested in the necessity of human and intellectual development in these countries. The future not only of these countries, but of the planet, depends upon a drastic change in these institutions' fortunes.

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Where writers write is often important. Many articles and books have focused on this topic. As an itinerant writer, I can say that my writing spaces tend to be more internal than one set physical place, which means that I'm always having to find ways to protect and preserve them. The Guardian Online has links to the writing rooms of some important contemporary British writers. Most are neat and well-appointed, which makes me think they're all either very well organized or had a week's notice before the photographer popped around. Hanif Kureishi's room is below; he explains the lovely wallpaper. I'd love to see what books are lining those shelves and tables!



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A friend of mine who doesn't read blogs--or my blog, though he's fond of one written in Santo Domingo!--was telling me this afternoon about how somnolent, dreary and warzonish so much of Manhattan's 8th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues was looking these days. Once upon a time, it was still a hive of human excitement, and, because of its position as the novelty shoe mecca of the East Coast, was a magnet for people both within and outside the city. (I once heard tell of a Southern scholar who came to spend a few weeks at a university in New York, and, instead of whiling away her free moments in the libraries or taking in the city's hundreds of sights and sites, managed to visit the stores on 8th Street every day and burnt through most of her summer stipend and then some more because of all the gravity-defying, never-seen-before pedal accoutrements she kept coming across and could not deny herself.) He said that he'd heard that the landlords were hoping to evacuate every shop that had made that street unique--which is to say, the shoe capital of the Eastern seaboard, as well as all the head shops, funky clothing stores, and so on--so that the high-end stores which have now colonized most of SoHo, Chelsea, parts of the East Village, and Bleecker Street between Christopher and W 12th could move in, I guess to take advantage of the disposable dollars of all those wealthy nearby undergraduates (though this article suggests that some of them might not have a dime to eat or pay for lodging), or even wealthier people snapping up every piece of surrounding real estate, turning the West Village into a high end arrondissement. Perhaps the only thing that would remain would be the former Whitney Museum, now the New York Studio School, which I doubt is going anywhere. I told my friend that I'd actually taken pictures of the transformed 8th St. and posted them, and that in my non-enabling nostalgic mode I'd bemoaned the changes that were happening, fully aware that New York is always in transition and that things could change rather quickly if the economy hit a serious glitch. It's strange to think of mid-to-late 1990s Manhattan, when some of the trends that have now come to fruition were just beginning, as a minor golden age, but my friend suggested that it was still a special moment in New York time. Of course those were also sometimes very difficult days, especially under the supremacist regime of Rudolph Giuliani, who is again masquerading as a moderate something or other, but there were many things to recommend that era. In particular, I think of how several friends found themselves integral participants in the frenzy around the burgeoning new media culture, which culminated in a few unforgettable, truly remarkable years when those many phantasms we called Silicon Alley companies created jobs and visions of the future that would evaporate as quickly as our national sanity in 2000. One friend did not find another fulltime job for five years, and others rue the disappearance of what proved to be the some of the most exhilarating working experiences they ever had. I've tried to write about it more than once, but with no success. At any rate, I forgot to tell him to read Unbeached Whale's recent entry on this topic, so I'm forwarding the link to him, but sending J's Theater's readers there directly. O youth and halcyon days, oh memories and vanities!

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Sometimes it pays to read a book twice, or at least not so quickly (though when on earth does anyone have the time anymore? I surely don't). Several years ago I did read Saul Bellow's late hatchet job novel Ravelstein--or rather I skimmed it from cover to cover--mainly because of the controversy surrounding his fictional depiction of his deceased, conservative friend, the ideologue and pedagogue Allan Bloom. I was curious to see what all the brouhaha was about, and I concluded, as more than one reviewer already had, that the text contained as much acid as honey. I should add that I read the book despite strongly disliking Bellow's racial politics, particularly as expressed in his books from the 1960s on, but nevertheless, I learned more than a few things from that novel, even though it is nowhere near his best work. But I missed one characterization in it, of a figure who has loomed quite large in our recent history, one of the arch-neocons, then only an underling but enough of a presence to imprint himself on Bellow's imaginative canvas. Who am I talking about? From Sarah Baxter's TimesOnline article "Decline and fall of the neocons":

Wolfowitz taught himself Arabic in the 1980s and had a walk-on part in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein as an official in the first Bush White House who was disappointed that Saddam Hussein was left in place at the end of the Gulf war.

His recent downfall is deliciously Bellowesque (or is it Bellovian?), if you think about it.