Guides: Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) & the ULS Collection: Close Reading the Emergency!

Close Reading the Emergency! - October 2022

Close Reading the Emergency!
A CAAPP Black Study
October 11th through October 14th, 2022

“Disaster requires acts of imagination…emergency can be, and almost always is, a moment of emergence.” —Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Yale Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration

Tuesday, October 11th
5 PM: Hanif Abdurraquib, Kimberly Drew, & Namwali Serpell in Creative Conversation
VIRTUAL on Crowdcast

Wednesday, October 12th
6 PM: Ashon Crawley & Coco Fusco in Creative Conversation
IRL (and livestreamed) at Frick Fine Arts Auditorium

Thursday, October 13th
6 PM: Dante Micheaux, David (D.S.) Marriott, & Diedrick Brackens in Creative Conversation
VIRTUAL on Crowdcast

Friday, October 14th
6 PM: Mendi + Keith Obadike joining Torkwase Dyson & Ronaldo V. Wilson (paired in collaboration) in Creative Conversation
IRL (and livestreamed) at Miller Institute of Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Floor 2 Gallery

caapp fall 2022 poster of events

Close Reading the Emergency!
A CAAPP Black Study | Oct. 11 — Oct. 14 2022
Selected Supplemental Resources & Links [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VUbVLPpDGCFzof4BkjCugKZedTBWolCitF_2qIUC7WM/edit]

Hanif Abdurraquib | Website

poet, essayist, cultural critic

Button Poetry Reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZxsRiKJje8
“The Art of Disappearance,” New York Times Magazine: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/magazine/connie-converse-disappearance.html
“You’ve Got Mail,” 4 Columns http: hs://www.4columns.org/abdurraqib-hanif/youve-got-mail

Kimberly Drew | Website

art influencer, culture writer

“How Black Contemporary Art's Founder Kimberly Drew Amplifies Black Artists”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FWK-fP9t0s
Interactive feature from Black Futures, New York Times Magazine: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/07/magazine/black-futures.html
“Curating Art in a Digital World” Lecture, Chicago Humanities Festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCu3QbyezZo

Namwali Serpell | Website

fiction writer, cultural critic

[Fiction] “The Work of Art,” Harper’s https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/the-work-of-art-namwali-serpell/
[Essay] “Unbothered: The Grace of Black Nonchalance,” The Yale Review https://yalereview.org/article/namwali-serpell-unbothered-black-nonchalance
[Criticism] “Pixar’s Troubled ‘Soul,’” The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/pixars-troubled-soul

Coco Fusco | Website

interdisciplinary artist

[Performance] “Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist (2013)”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg_yPMapPEM&t=131s
[Essay] “How the Art World and Art Schools are Ripe for Abuse,” Hyperallergic: https://hyperallergic.com/411343/how-the-art-world-and-art-schools-are-ripe-for-sexual-abuse/
[Conversation] Under the Cover: Coco Fusco on “Your Eyes Will Be An Empty Word,” Artforum: https://www.artforum.com/video/the-artist-talks-about-her-2021-video-your-eyes-will-be-an-empty-word-88844

Ashon Crawley | Website

scholar, visual artist

Ashon Crawley on his project “Made Instrument: Polyphonic Intention”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r1rKdSFjJg
“I Grew Up Afraid. Lil Nas X's 'Montero' Is The Lesson I Needed,” NPR: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/14/986466561/i-grew-up-afraid-lil-nas-xs-montero-is-the-lesson-i-needed
“He Was an Architect,” NPR: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/22/948963753/little-richard-black-queer-grief-he-was-an-architect
Art: https://ashoncrawley.com/

Dante Micheaux | Website

poet

Selected poems, Poets.org: https://poets.org/poet/dante-micheaux
Reading, excerpt from “Pelham,” Bowery Poetry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moChlLHI_XM
“Jeweler,” The Baffler: https://thebaffler.com/poems/jeweler

David (D. S). Marriott | Website

philosopher, poet

Reading, The Poetry Center: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS0kBLQfLZo
“Corpsing; or, The Matter of Black Life,” Cultural Critique: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/culturalcritique.94.2016.0032
“The Love Of Neither-Either — Racial Integration in ‘Pressure Point,’” Qui Parle: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20686151
Waiting to Fall, The New Centennial Review: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.13.3.0163.pdf

Diedrick Brackens | Website

visual artist

Made in LA Residency presentation: https://vimeo.com/284439799?embedded=true&source=video_title&owner=23454938
“Ark of Bulrushes” Studio Behind the Scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CrRB0-gW7A
Artist Talk, Blanton Museum of Art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmYfG7n_yhQ&t=1s

Mendi + Keith Obadike | Website

sound artists

“The Sour Thunder: An Internet Opera” album stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/3T2NnzMabrru2pI1vKCmGL?si=-BeweSX-TJCeFY1pv3sJ9A
“The Bell Rang” installation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKvxwcTs_9U
Culture/Context Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJfg5VBwRTg

Torkwase Dyson | Website

visual artist

Exhibitions: https://www.torkwasedyson.com/exhibition-page
Performances: https://www.torkwasedyson.com/fh-d
“I Belong to the Distance”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXYshy0lZtY
Torkwase Dyson, Pace Gallery Showcase: https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/torkwase-dyson/

Ronaldo V. Wilson | Website

poet, visual artist

Reading, excerpt from Virgil Kills, The Poetry Center: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC3Koix-X3Y
Selected Poems, Poets.org: https://poets.org/poet/ronaldo-v-wilson
Artwork: https://www.ronaldovwilson.com/drawings

Close Reading the Emergency!
A Fall CAAPP Black Study
Invited Guest Book List

Hanif Abdurraqib
A Little Devil In America (Random House, 2021)
A Fortune For Your Disaster (Tin House Books, 2019)
Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes on A Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas Press, 2019)
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017)
The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016)

Kimberly Drew
Black Futures (One World, 2020)
This Is What I Know About Art (Penguin Workshop, 2020)

Namwali Serpell
The Furrows (Hogarth, Sept. 2020)
The Old Drift (Hogarth, 2020)
Stranger Faces (Transit Books, 2020)
7 of Modes of Uncertainty (Harvard University Press, 2017)

Ashon Crawley
The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press, 2020)
Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (American Literatures Initiative, 2016)

Coco Fusco
Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (Tate Publishing, 2015)
A Field Guide For Female Interrogators (Seven Stories Press, 2008)
Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (Abrams Books, 2003)
The Bodies That Were Not Ours: And Other Writings (Routledge, 2001)
Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (Routeledge, 2000)
English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusions in the Americas (The New Press, 1995)

Fahima Ife
Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021)

Dante Micheaux
Circus (Indolent Books, 2018)
Amorous Shepherd (Sheep Meadow Press, 2010)

D.S. Marriott
Before Whiteness (City Lights Publishers, 2022)
Duppies (Commune Editions, 2019)
Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford University Press, 2018)
The Bloods (Shearsman Books, 2011)
Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman Books, 2008)
Haunted Life (Rutgers University Press, 2007)
On Black Men (Edinburgh University Press and Columbia University Press, 2000)

Mendi+Keith Obadike
            Books
Big House / Disclosure (1913 Press, 2014)
Four Electric Ghosts (1913 Press, 2011)
Armor and Flesh (Lotus Press, 2004)

            CDs
The Sour Thunder: An Internet Opera (2008)
Crosstalk: American Speech Music (2004)

Torkwase Dyson
Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood (The 3rd Thing Press, 2021)

Ronaldo V. Wilson
Virgil Kills (Nightboat, 2022)
Carmelina: Figures (Wendy’s Subway, 2021)
Farther Traveler (Counterpath Press, 2015)
Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem, 2009)
Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008)

A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib
Call Number: PN1590.B53 A23 2021
ISBN: 9781984801197
Publication Date: 2021
"I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too." Inspired by these few words, spoken by Josephine Baker at the 1963 March on Washington, MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellow and bestselling author Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines--whether it's the twenty-seven seconds in "Gimme Shelter" in which Merry Clayton wails the words "rape, murder," a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt--has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib's own personal history of love, grief, and performance. Item number: 31735071736379
A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib
Call Number: PS3623.I57748 A6 2019b
ISBN: 9781947793439
Publication Date: 2019
Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside--from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs--to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility. Item number: 31735074224738
Go Ahead in the Rain by Hanif Abdurraqib
Call Number: ML421.T762 W55 2019
ISBN: 9781477316481
Publication Date: 2019
How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group's history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself. Item number: 31735071810216
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib; Eve L. Ewing (Foreword by)
Call Number: PS3623.I57748 A6 2017
ISBN: 9781937512651
Publication Date: 2017
In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly. In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls how he sought refuge as a teenager in music, at shows, and wonders whether the next generation of young Muslims will not be afforded that opportunity now. Item number: 31735071785962
The Crown Ain't Worth Much by Hanif Abdurraqib; Michael Mlekoday (Editor)
Call Number: PS3623.I57748 A6 2016
ISBN: 9781943735044
Publication Date: 2016
The Crown Ain't Worth Much, Hanif Abdurraqib's first full-length collection, is a sharp and vulnerable portrayal of city life in the United States. A regular columnist for MTV.com, Abdurraqib brings his interest in pop culture to these poems, analyzing race, gender, family, and the love that finally holds us together even as it threatens to break us. Terrance Hayes writes that Abdurraqib "bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy." The poems in this collection are challenging and accessible at once, as they seek to render real human voices in moments of tragedy and celebration. Item number: 31735071811149
Black Futures by Kimberly Drew; Jenna Wortham (Editors)
Call Number: CB235 .B595 2020
ISBN: 9780399181139
Publication Date: 2020
Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham have brought together this collection of work-images, photos, essays, memes, dialogues, recipes, tweets, poetry, and more-to tell the story of the radical, imaginative, provocative, and gorgeous world that Black creators are bringing forth today. The book presents a succession of startling and beautiful pieces that generate an entrancing rhythm. Item number: 31735071734911
This Is What I Know about Art by Kimberly Drew; Ashley Lukashevsky (Illustrator)
Call Number: N72.S6 D69 2020
ISBN: 9780593095188
Publication Date: 2020
In this powerful and hopeful account, arts writer, curator, and activist Kimberly Drew reminds us that the art world has space not just for the elite, but for everyone. In this installment, arts writer and co-editor of Black Futures Kimberly Drew shows us that art and protest are inextricably linked. Drawing on her personal experience through art toward activism, Drew challenges us to create space for the change that we want to see in the world. Because there really is so much more space than we think. Item number: 31735071812246
The Furrows by Namwali Serpell
Call Number: PR9405.9.S37 F87 2022
ISBN: 9780593448915
Publication Date: 2022
Namwali Serpell's remarkable new novel captures the uncanny experience of grief, the way the past breaks over the present like waves in the sea. The Furrows is a bold exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a story of mistaken identity, double consciousness, and the wishful--and sometimes willful--longing for reunion with those we've lost. Item number: 31735071812717
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
Call Number: PR9405.9.S37 O53 2019
ISBN: 9781101907146
Publication Date: 2019
On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families (black, white, brown) as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. As the generations pass, their lives--their triumphs, errors, losses and hopes--emerge through a panorama of history, fairytale, romance and science fiction. From a woman covered with hair and another plagued with endless tears, to forbidden love affairs and fiery political ones, to homegrown technological marvels like Afronauts, microdrones and viral vaccines, this gripping, unforgettable novel is a testament to our yearning to create and cross borders, and a meditation on the slow, grand passage of time. Item number: 31735074224795
Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell
Call Number: RD763 .S47 2020
ISBN: 9781945492433
Publication Date: 2020
If evolutionary biologists, ethical philosophers, and social media gurus are to be believed, the face is the basis for what we call "humanity." The face is considered the source of identity, truth, beauty, authenticity, and empathy. It underlies our ideas about what constitutes a human, how we relate emotionally, what is pleasing to the eye, and how we ought to treat each other. But all of this rests on a specific image of the face. We might call it the ideal face. What about the strange face, the stranger's face, the face that thwarts recognition? What do we make of the face that rides the line of legibility? In a collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger faces--the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of the dead--Namwali Serpell probes our contemporary mythology of the face.Stranger Faces imagines a new ethics based on the perverse pleasures we take in the very mutability of faces. Item number: 31735073564282
Seven Modes of Uncertainty by C. Namwali Serpell
Call Number: PN3347 .S47 2014
ISBN: 9780674729094
Publication Date: 2014
Literature is rife with uncertainty. Literature is good for us. These two ideas about reading literature are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature's capacity to unsettle, perplex, and bewilder us, and literature's ethical value? To revive this question, C. Namwali Serpell proposes a return to William Empson's groundbreaking work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our own experience. Item number: 31735067639801

The Lonely Letters by Ashon T. Crawley
Call Number: BX8762.5.Z8 C73 2020
ISBN: 9781478007760
Publication Date: 2020
The Lonely Letters is an epistolary blackqueer critique of the normative world in which Ashon T. Crawley meditates on the interrelation of blackqueer life, sounds of the Black church, theology, mysticism, and love. Throughout his letters, A explores blackness and queerness in the musical and embodied experience of Blackpentecostal spaces and the potential for platonic and erotic connection in a world that conspires against blackqueer life. Both a rigorous study and a performance, The Lonely Letters gestures toward understanding the capacity for what we study to work on us, to transform us, and to change how we inhabit the world. Item number: 31735071775823
Blackpentecostal Breath by Ashon T. Crawley
Call Number: BH39 .C734 2017
ISBN: 9780823274543
Publication Date: 2016
In this profoundly innovative book, Ashon T. Crawley engages a wide range of critical paradigms from black studies, queer theory, and sound studies to theology, continental philosophy, and performance studies to theorize the ways in which alternative or "otherwise" modes of existence can serve as disruptions against the marginalization of and violence against minoritarian lifeworlds and possibilities for flourishing. Examining the whooping, shouting, noise-making, and speaking in tongues of Black Pentecostalism--a multi-racial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect with one strand of its modern genesis in 1906 Los Angeles--Blackpentecostal Breath reveals how these aesthetic practices allow for the emergence of alternative modes of social organization. As Crawley deftly reveals, these choreographic, sonic, and visual practices and the sensual experiences they create are not only important for imagining what Crawley identifies as "otherwise worlds of possibility," they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture in an era when such expressions are increasingly under siege. Item number: 31735074224720
Dangerous Moves by Coco Fusco
Call Number: N6603 .F87 2015
ISBN: 1849763267
Publication Date: 2015
Examining performance and politics in post-revolutionary Cuba, Dangerous Moves challenges the understanding of performance art and political engagement through a sustained analysis of the contemporary experience in Cuba. Coco Fusco analyzes the ways that the Cuban state has wielded influence over artists in recent times, arguing that in a context in which overt political speech is subject to censorship, the language of performance emerges as the favored means of social commentary. Focusing on a range of performative practices in visual art, music, poetry, and political activism, Fusco examines the relationship between the abject body in performance and the greater body politic of a state officially defined as revolutionary yet seeking to limit and constrain dissent. Item number: 31735071814242
A Field Guide for Female Interrogators by Coco Fusco
Call Number: HQ1426 .F887 2008
ISBN: 9781583227800
Publication Date: 2008
Combining an art project with critical commentary, Fusco imaginatively addresses the role of women in the war on terror and explores how female sexuality is being used as a weapon against Islamic terrorists. Using details drawn from actual accounts of detainee treatment in US military prisons, Fusco conceives a field guide of instructional drawings that prompts urgent questions regarding the moral dilemma of torture in general and the use of female sexuality specifically. Item number: 31735074224894
Only Skin Deep by Coco Fusco; Brian Wallis
Call Number: TR680 .O55 2003
ISBN: 0810946351
Publication Date: 2003
Artists featured include those who specifically address issues of race in their work as well as those who may not have intended to address racial issues but whose work nonetheless raises them. They include: Jessica Craig-Martin, Chester Higgins, Nikki Lee, Catherine Opie, Lorna Simpson, Vanessa Beecroft, Simon Johan, Carrie Mae Weems, Nancy Burson, Garry Winogrand, Pedro Meyer, Robert Misrach, Lewis Hine, Lee Friedlander, John Baldessari, Ansel Adams, Man Ray, F. Holland Day and Thomas Eakins. Item number: 31735047582816
The Bodies That Were Not Ours by Coco Fusco
Call Number: NX180.P67 F87 2001
ISBN: 0415251737
Publication Date: 2001
Interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco is one of North America's leading interpreters of intercultural theory and practice. This volume gathers together her finest writings since 1995 and includes critical essays by Jean Fisher and Caroline Vercoe that interpret her work. Engaging and provocative, these essays, interviews, performance scripts and fotonovelas take readers on a tour of our current multicultural landscape. Approaching the dynamics of cultural fusion from many angles, Fusco's satires, commentaries, and sociological inquiries collapse boundaries, and form a sustained meditation on how the forces of globalization impact upon the making of art. Item number: 31735042178735
Corpus Delecti : performance of the Americas by Coco Fusco (Editor)
Call Number: NX501 .C67 2000
ISBN: 0415194539
Publication Date: 1999
The most comprehensive volume on performance art from the Americas to have appeared in English, Corpus Delecti is a unique collection of historical and critical studies of contemporary Latin performance. Drawing on live art from the 1960s to the present day, these fascinating essays explore the impact of Latin American politics, popular culture and syncretic religions on Latin performance. The essays demonstrate how specific social and historical contexts have shaped Latin American performance. They also show how those factors have affected the choices artists make, and how their work draw upon and respond to their environment. Item number: 31735042097430
English Is Broken Here by Coco Fusco
Call Number: E169.04 .F867 1995
ISBN: 1565842456
Publication Date: 1995
Essays, performance scripts, and interviews by one of America's emerging art critics. Item number: 31735045537358
Maroon Choreography by fahima ife
Call Number: PS3609.F35 M37 2021
ISBN: 9781478014256
Publication Date: 2021
In Maroon Choreography fahima ife speculates on the long (im)material, ecological, and aesthetic afterlives of black fugitivity. In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, they examine black fugitivity as an ongoing phenomenon we know little about beyond what history tells us. As both poet and scholar, ife unsettles the history and idea of black fugitivity, troubling senses of historic knowing while moving inside the continuing afterlives of those people who disappeared themselves into rural spaces beyond the reach of slavery. At the same time, they interrogate how writing itself can be a fugitive practice and a means to find a way out of ongoing containment, indebtedness, surveillance, and ecological ruin. Item number: 31735074221791

Circus by Dante Micheaux
Call Number: PS3613.I3449 C57 2018
ISBN: 9781945023200
Publication Date: 2018
I still stand by words I wrote almost twenty years ago, when I read Dante Micheaux's poems for the first time: "I am impressed by the serious depth and masterful technique of Micheaux's poems. He is a true man of the world, mature beyond his years, one whose voracious intelligence and richly diverse background uniquely equip him for the literary vocation. Circus promises to be received as a masterpiece reminiscent of the best of Melvin Tolson's work, and some of Micheaux's poems bear an a nity to the delicate music and wisdom of Robert Hayden. But Micheaux's in uences are not limited to the stars of African American poetry; his experience and reading ranges wide. Dante Micheaux is a code-switcher fluent in many languages. Some of his lines bring this reader close to heartbreak." --MARILYN NELSON Item number: 31735074179023
Amorous Shepherd by Dante Micheaux
Call Number: PS3613.I3449 A46 2010
ISBN: 9781931357807
Publication Date: 2010
"Dante Micheaux's poetry is always musical. He plays in a group with Cavafy, Lorca, Komunyakaa. His instrument is a clear exact voice with his heart beating so loud you can hear it. He has highs and lows that reach into something Greek, into jazz, into the blues, into metaphysical English poetry. He pulls all this off remaining wonderfully African-American." Item number: 31735060847724
Before Whiteness by D. S Marriott
Call Number: PR6063.A6575 B44 2022
ISBN: 9780872868847
Publication Date: 2022
A searing indictment of anti-Black social and political violence by British Jamaican poet and leading scholar of Afro-pessimism D.S. Marriott. A book that turns Blackness into a question of reading, of inscribing and decoding Blackness in poetry, Before Whiteness ranges from medieval Beowulf to contemporary UK grime. Born in Britain but now living in the U.S., D.S. Marriott trains his analytical gaze on grim American subjects like the Middle Passage and lynchings, yet also finds inspiration in African American poets and artists. The book ends with "Another Burning," a mournful elegy for the victims of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London and stirring rebuke of the structural racism of contemporary UK society. Item number: 31735071785970
Duppies by D. S Marriott
Call Number: PR6063.A6575 A6 2018
ISBN: 9781934639269
Publication Date: 2019
In Duppies, D.S. Marriott writes a poetry of grime music, one that is 'late shift, zero hour'. Mixing lyric tonality with grime's aggression, grit, and speed, this is a coruscating study of the racial politics of austerity. And it is an erudite lyric, one attentive to the continuing legacies of slavery, how this history shapes and defines everything from the law to the understanding of who or what is human. Item number: 31735074224787
Whither Fanon? by David Marriott
Call Number: B1029.F354 M37 2018
ISBN: 9780804798709
Publication Date: 2018
Frantz Fanon may be most known for his more obviously political writings, but in the first instance, he was a clinician, a black Caribbean psychiatrist who had the improbable task of treating disturbed and traumatized North African patients during the wars of decolonization. Investigating and foregrounding the clinical system that Fanon devised in an attempt to intervene against negrophobia and anti-blackness, this book rereads his clinical and political work together, arguing that the two are mutually imbricated. For the first time, Fanon's therapeutic innovations are considered along with his more overtly political and cultural writings to ask how the crises of war affected his practice, informed his politics, and shaped his subsequent ideas. As David Marriott suggests, this combination of the clinical and political involves a psychopolitics that is, by definition, complex, difficult, and perpetually challenging. Item number: 31735071814564
The Bloods by D. S. Marriott
Call Number: PR6063.A6575 B56 2011
ISBN: 9781848611511
Publication Date: 2011
In The Bloods, his third poetry collection, D.S. Marriott's recurrent theme is that of memory and absence: 'bound to what is remembered/ what is absent'. In poems that both embody and inhabit this double obligation, memory and absence prove to be equally central to the mysteries of ordinary language, the politics and philosophy of enslavement, as well as markers-typographic, archival, ethical-respecting the borders of what cannot, finally, be known. Spare, lyrical, and deeply haunting, and yet not without irony or hope, The Bloods continues Marriott's pursuit of a style and concept of the poem that is strictly his own. Item number: 31735074179031
Hoodoo Voodoo by D. S. Marriott
Call Number: PR6063.A6575 H66 2008
ISBN: 9781905700790
Publication Date: 2008
"D.S. Marriott 'dares to dream' in this book...by refolding beautiful romantic lines...into new relation with the real that haunts him, which he attends through mourning and recasts in an art full of loss. These poems do indeed seem to 'contain the whole of death, even before / life has begun', but they engage no refusal, just the overturning of willful stasis and a lyric luring of the undone into poetic doing, to light. HOODOO VOODOO's last section's dark streaming of figures through landscapes...is presided over by 'Ghede', or Guede, after all--best known as the loa of death in Vodou, 'Papa Bones', but also a figure of fertility, of the crossroads between life and afterlife: a trickster, a door, a manipulable sign (as well as a protector of children). Marriott's deployment of such mythological materials and even 'hoodoo' itself in his theatre of 'real ghosts', fears and emergent desires enacts his forging of new relations with the past and his many interlocutors in this book, as well as his Rilkean 'refusal to refuse', a seeming double negative that opens a new way through the many locked doors and crossroads his speakers encounter in these poems. I'm overwhelmed by the beauty that is this book"--Romana Huk. Item number: 31735071813194
Haunted Life by David Marriott
Call Number: P94.5.B55 M37 2007
ISBN: 9780813540276
Publication Date: 2007
In ""Haunted Life"", David Marriott examines the complex interplay between racial fears and anxieties and the political-visual cultures of suspicion and state terror. He compels readers to consider how media technologies are ""haunted"" by the phantom of racial slavery. Through examples from film and television, modernist literature, and philosophy, he shows how the ideological image of a brutal African past is endlessly recycled and how this perpetuation of historical catastrophe stokes our nation's race-conscious paranoia. Drawing on a range of comparative readings by writers, theorists, and filmmakers, including John Edgar Wideman, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Issac Julien, Alain Locke, and Sidney Poitier, ""Haunted Life"" is a bold and original exploration of the legacies of black visual culture and the political, deeply sexualized violence that lies buried beneath it. Item number: 31735074224704
On Black Men by David Marriott
Call Number: E185.86 .M365 2000
ISBN: 0231122268
Publication Date: 2000
Mutilated, dying, or dead, black men play a role in the psychic life of culture. From national dreams to media fantasies, there is a persistent imagining of what black men must be. This book explores the legacy of that role, particularly its violent effect on how black men have learned to see themselves and one another. David Marriott draws upon popular culture, ranging from lynching photographs to current Hollywood film, as well as the ideas of key thinkers, including Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and John Edgar Wideman, to reveal a vicious pantomime of unvarying reification and compulsive fascination, of whites looking at themselves through images of black desolation, and of blacks dispossessed by that process. Item number: 31735042640940

Big House/Disclosure by Mendi+Keith Obadike
Call Number: PS3615.B33 B54 2014
ISBN: 0977935191
Publication Date: 2014
"Mendi + Keith Obadike are 21st century sonic griots channeling spirits worthy of the great poet Larry Neal's Bebop Ghosts and the interplanetary rhythms of Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders. The richness of their references--from the nsibidi script of ancient Nigeria to oral histories from modern day Chicago--reminds us of the sacredness of the quotidian and animates the relentless admonitions of human ancestors who refuse to be silenced. Replete with nuance and wit, Big House/Disclosure is both elegy and praise song to enslaved Africans whose lives and losses speak to us across continents and across the centuries. Through word, image, performance and sound the Obadikes lead us on a journey that is fluid and fluent, gloriously unpredictable, endlessly inventive and engaging. In so doing, they map a territory of imagination and history that leaves the traveler breathless--and forever grateful."--Kinshasha Holman Conwill Item number: 31735074224902
Four Electric Ghosts by Mendi+Keith Obadike
Call Number: N6494.M78 O233 2011
ISBN: 9780977935130
Publication Date: 2011
"[T]his was one of the freshest and most interesting performances I've caught in years... a vision about new ways of thinking about living and learning and a vivid, veritable (Afro-Diasporic-) futurist parable."—John Keene Item number: 31735074224878
Armor and Flesh by Mendi Lewis Obadike
Call Number: PS3615.B33 A766 2004
ISBN: 0916418936
Publication Date: 2004
In these poems there is the duality of wanting and needing, softness and hardness. The vulnerability of flesh and the necessary protection of armor are in constant conflict. There is a fusion of male and female, of self and other--the self outside itself, looking in a mirror, sometimes in mystery or knowing terror at what it sees. Here are the "stark, dark places where self and selves unfurl, confront, and recombine." These cleanly wrought poems confirm that nothing is simple and that flesh could not long survive without the intricate armor of luck, imagination, and grace. Item number: 31735074224779
Banana [ ] / We Pilot the Blood by Paul Hlava Ceballos; Quenton Baker; Christina Sharpe (Foreword by); Torkwase Dyson (Artist)
Call Number: PS3608.L36 B36 2021
ISBN: 1734407182
Publication Date: 2021
This tête-bêche (head-to-toe) book is more than the sum of its parts: two poetic accounts of Empire by two different writers. Assembled from Senate documents detailing the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole, Quenton Baker's "we pilot the blood" considers the position of blackness and the ongoing afterlife of slavery. Paul Hlava Ceballos's "Banana [ ]" collages declassified CIA documents, corporate reports, horticultural papers and personal accounts into a bloody portrait of multinational exploitation. Between these lyrical interrogations is a contemplative interval conducted by the writer and scholar Christina Sharpe in collaboration with Torkwase Dyson's "Hypershapes." Item number: 31735074224969
Virgil Kills by Ronaldo V. Wilson
Call Number: PS3623.I58572 V57 2022
ISBN: 1643621181
Publication Date: 2022
Linked stories alighting from a U.S., Black and Filipino imaginary through a central character Virgil, and his accounts on race, sex, and desire. Virgil kills forms, manifesting a set of poetic investigations--revealing black and brown life, memory, dreams, the sea, the sex-act, the line. Virgil travels in theaters and lots: Manhattan, Guam, Santa Cruz, Sacramento, Berlin, Iloilo, Provincetown, Millington, San Francisco, Long Island, Western Mass. Virgil moves against class, whiteness, on stages, at lecterns, in studios, and a luxury vehicle. Virgil records in the sensorium of cruising lovers, real love, family, T.V., characters--"Butch," "Stream," "Clean"--his precise unfurling. Item number: 31735071785228
Carmelina: Figures by Ronaldo V. Wilson (Artist)
Call Number: N7433.4.W5557 C37 2021
ISBN: 9781735924236
Publication Date: 2021
Ronaldo V. Wilson's Carmelina: Figures excavates the territory between memory, nation, and embodiment, exploring place as a discipline of the body and an extension of the hand. Through poems, photographs, drawings, records of performance, and home movies recorded in Guam, Tennessee, and the Subic Bay between 1962 and 1979, Wilson reckons with familial heritage, diaspora, and legacies of militarism.The book pays homage to Wilson's mother, Carmelina, who served for most of her working life as a certified nursing assistant at Florin Convalescent, an assisted living facility in South Sacramento, California. Through a visual logic of repetition and reenactment that works to unmoor sensory expectation and narrative logic, Wilson renders her figure as trace, melody against paper, drawing within song, mixed media, dance, and through improvised, masked, and recorded performances in the Berkshires, MA; Long Island, NY; Emeryville, CA; and Boulder, CO. Carmelina: Figures is a book of the Psoas, ice, smudge, and light. Item number: 31735074224845 and 31735074221916 (with cover)