bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
An Uneasy Accord: LA Museums Open Their Walls to Comics as True Works of Art
Authors: Timberg Scott
Published: May 2021

This chapter contains an in-depth exploration of the issues surrounding comics and museums written by cultural journalist Scott Timberg for the Los Angeles Times in 2005 during the opening of the Masters of American Comics exhibition at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This chapter includes interviews with Ann Philbin, Art Spiegelman, John Carlin, and Brian Walker about the organization of the show. This chapter discusses the valuation of comic art versus fine art, the disillusionment some cartoonists feel about art school and contemporary fine art, and opinions on the future of comic art shows from curators at other museums.
Introduction to Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby
Authors: Hatfield Charles
Published: May 2021

This chapter includes a 2016 article by California State University Northridge professor and author of Hand of Fire: The Comic Art of Jack Kirby, Charles Hatfield, explaining the genesis of and his curatorial strategy for the exhibition Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby at CSUN. This chapter discusses the culture of collectors of original Kirby art, narrative in exhibits, displaying the complete Kamandi #14 and Thor #155, and the importance of murals and color in exhibit design. Images: 2 exhibit photos
Skin Deep: Identity and Trauma in God Help the Child
Authors: Stave Shirley A.
Published: May 2021

In “Skin Deep: Identity and Trauma in God Help the Child,” Shirley A. Stave argues that the novel plays surface off depth, unravelling the dichotomy as false through the lens of racism, which is predicated upon the gaze, the surface, but which profoundly disables the depth, leaving its victims traumatized. Morrison’s two main characters, Bride and Booker, both live fractured lives because of their attempt to avoid depth, choosing image and intellect as mechanisms to insulate themselves from further trauma. Bride’s ruptured skin, which exposes what lies beneath, begins her journey toward wholeness, which results in her leaving the Lacanian Mirror Stage and a misguided sense of her completeness to enter the Symbolic Order. Similarly, Booker embraces intellect as a way to isolate himself from human connection. Bride and Booker, through the agency of Booker’s aunt Queen, learn to open themselves to vulnerability and achieve the completeness they have resisted.
“You Not the Woman I Want”: Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child and the Legend of Galatea
Authors: Montgomery Maxine Lavon
Published: May 2021

Montgomery's essay interrogates the close, yet ambivalent relationship between Morrison's most recent work of fiction and Greco-Roman myth with dual accounts of the legendary Galatea as both an animated statue that comes to life as a result of the careful sculpting on the part of Pygmalion and an enchanting sea-nymph who inspires the musician, Polyphemus. Through a reliance upon recent works by post-colonial, diaspora, and trans-national scholars Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, Tuire Valkeakari, and others, along with the deconstructionist theory of Jacques Derrida, she pays close attention to Morrison's narrative and rhetorical method in talking back to Ovid as a means of conflating the twofold identities ascribed to Galatea and recycling classical tropes using a strategy invested in a diaspora imaginary involving slavery, the Middle Passage, and colonization -- key events defining a specifically raced, trans-national history.
Bob Wilber, the Westchester Kid: White Privilege and Perspectives on Jazz Belonging
Authors: Marin Reva
Published: May 2021

In Bob Wilber’s Music Was Not Enough, the multi-instrumentalist and bandleader offers a detailed account of his experience in New York during the mid-1940s as a student and protégé of the renowned New Orleans musician Sidney Bechet and the effect of that experience on his life and career. While Wilber’s description of his jazz education with Bechet and his subsequent professional career reveals his rich immersion in New Orleans and East Coast traditional and swing jazz communities, the colorblind lens through which he filters these experiences serves to deemphasize, or even negate, the significance of race in them. This chapter contrasts Wilber’s privilege and apparent distance from New Orleans’ jazz culture with Bechet’s insistence on the significance of his Creole identity to the shaping of his musical and cultural persona.
Representations of Identity in Jewish Jazz Autobiography
Authors: Marin Reva
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the autobiographies of Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Mezz Mezzrow, and Max Kaminsky, focusing on their multifaceted identities as second-generation Jewish Americans whose lives and careers brought them into close contact with African American music and society. While these autobiographers recount childhoods in which their identities as ethnic Jews leave them at a distance—both geographically and psychologically—from Protestant white America, their identities prove to be far from fixed; over time their focus on themselves as ethnic outsiders is complimented—or even replaced—by a more general self-identification as “white” and a longing to be Black, or at least to experience immersion in African American culture. This process is facilitated by their experiences of city life and their attraction to jazz music and nightlife—all of which exposes them to the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of American life.
“Straight Life”: The Jazz Journey of Art Pepper
Authors: Marin Reva
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the haunting autobiography of Art Pepper, one of the leading jazz saxophonists of the postwar period, reading it against recent work on Los Angeles’ Central Avenue and West Coast jazz, more generally. Pepper’s account of his experiences with Black music and culture reprises some of the central themes of this study, including a white jazzman’s early recognition of the Black roots of jazz, his desire to belong to that world, and the euphoria and limitations of jazz interracialism. As the only autobiography in this book coauthored by a woman, Straight Life opens pathways for considering women’s resistance to the misogyny and rigid gendering that has dominated jazz culture. Laurie Pepper’s account of her central role during her husband’s final decade illuminates the authority and influence of a jazzwoman in a study of texts in which women’s voices are generally on the periphery or absent entirely.
Jason’s Mechanical Eye
Authors: Clayton Wickham
Published: May 2021

This chapter considers discussions and categories for different forms of the eye/camera shot as they appear in the Friday the 13th series. First, there is an analysis of the criticism of the use of first-person camera shots in horror, and areas this criticism ignores. Then the chapter looks at eye/camera shots that use various approaches, from those that take on the qualities of seeing from the eye of a specific character, to examples where the viewer sees what looks like a shot from a specific point-of-view but works as misdirection, and other variations in between.
The Postpastoral City
Authors: Lambert Matthew M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on ways that depression-era authors use urban pastoralism to call attention to the value and effects of “green” spaces and nonhuman nature in urban landscapes—from parks and other recreational spaces to overgrown vacant lots and “commensal” animals. While James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan (1932) and Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning (1942) depict parks as largely unable to counter overly individualistic and masculine forms of “place” valued by their urban characters, Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930) and Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974) envision ways that working-class characters attempt to create alternative social and environmental interactions in vacant lots and neighborhood dumps. In Native Son (1939), Richard Wright uses rats to symbolize the poor economic and environmental conditions of Chicago’s “Black Belt” and to model forms of mobility and defiance for his characters, both of which challenge what constitutes human and nonhuman “pests.”
Steven Moffat and Fandom’s Favorite Troll
Authors: Salter Anastasia , Stanfill Mel
Published: May 2021

Chapter 1, “Steven Moffat and Fandom’s Favorite Troll,” interrogates how Moffat both avows and disavows fandom. On one hand, Moffat-as-fanboy is both the author of the show and his own ideal audience as he performs and expects broad and deep knowledge of the text’s history. On the other, there is tension with actual fans—as opposed to the imagined fans who are just like himself—and he rejects those he thinks are not being fans the right way. Indeed, this chapter contends that the most standout characteristic of Moffat’s brand may well be being abrasive to anyone and everyone. The chapter concludes by considering the substantial concerns his work raises around inclusion—or lack thereof.
J. K. Rowling and the Auteur Who Lived
Authors: Salter Anastasia , Stanfill Mel
Published: May 2021

Chapter 3 begins with a history of Rowling’s interactions with fandom; not only was Harry Potter one of the first truly massive internet-based fandoms, but she has been famously open to engaging with her fans on the internet from JKRowling.com to Pottermore to Twitter. Rowling’s auteur persona demonstrates a drive to be at the center of the fan experience, between providing a never-ending drip-feed of canon, moving fans into her proprietary Pottermore space, and actively seeking fan attention. In fact, by telling her fans how to interpret and continually re-centering herself, this chapter contends, Rowling models “proper” fandom as obedient to the author, one vital sense in which she is a fangirl auteur.
Joss Whedon and the Allegedly Feminist Fanboy Auteur
Authors: Salter Anastasia , Stanfill Mel
Published: May 2021

This chapter interrogates the role of being a feminist in Whedon’s branding, arguing that, while he successfully branded himself as feminist for two decades, closer analysis and subsequent revelations demonstrate this to be far more style than substance. Whedon’s branding as a fanboy, by contrast, is more robust and permeates his public persona, from his casual fashion to his texts to actively participating in his own and other fandoms—though the chapter notes that these practices are in tension with his auteur status. Finally, the chapter argues, Whedon actively leverages the illusion of intimacy enabled by Twitter and fan site Whedonesque to extract the unpaid fan labor that has powered his career.
Groove Theory
Authors: Bolden Tony
Published: May 2021

Tony Bolden presents an innovative history of funk music focused on the performers, regarding them as intellectuals who fashioned a new aesthetic. Utilizing musicology, literary studies, performance studies, and African American intellectual history, Bolden explores what it means for music, or any cultural artifact, to be funky. Multitudes of African American musicians and dancers created aesthetic frameworks with artistic principles and cultural politics that proved transformative. Bolden approaches the study of funk and black musicians by examining aesthetics, poetics, cultural history, and intellectual history. The study traces the concept of funk from early blues culture to a metamorphosis into a full-fledged artistic framework and a named musical genre in the 1970s, and thereby Bolden presents an alternative reading of the blues tradition.
Funk artists, like their blues relatives, tended to contest and contextualize racialized notions of blackness, sexualized notions of gender, and bourgeois notions of artistic value. Funk artists displayed contempt for the status quo and conveyed alternative stylistic concepts and social perspectives through multimedia expression. Bolden argues that on this road to cultural recognition, funk accentuated many of the qualities of black expression that had been stigmatized throughout much of American history.
Blue Funk
Authors: Bolden Tony
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the development of funk as a distinct concept in black vernacular culture, and explains how blues artists, modern jazz musicians, and political attitudes during the civil rights movement combined to establish the foundation for the musical genre of funk as well as the non-conformist aesthetics and attitudes the music expressed. The central argument is therefore two-fold: that blues artists formulated the concept now known as funk, and that funk became the epistemic centerpiece of a broader cultural aesthetics in black working-class environments. As with the previous chapter, “Blue Funk: The Ugly Beauty of Stank ” foregrounds the central role of kinesthesia in blues-oriented approaches to music-making. Using insights and methods from multiple areas of scholarship, including musicology, ethnomusicology, philosophy, literary criticism, dance criticism, and art history, Bolden explains how the concept of funk and/or precepts associated with funk were not only exemplified in several black musical genres but also dancing, literature, and visual art as well. In this way, black artists working in several mediums contributed to the transformation of “funky” from a stigmatizing signification, that is, a negative, stereotypical expression into a metaphor of black cultural affirmation.
The Kinkiness of Turquoise
Authors: Bolden Tony
Published: May 2021

This chapter showcases Betty Davis’s transposition of women’s blues into rock-inflected version of funk. Bolden advances two key arguments. First, Davis reprised the sexual politics and rebellious spirit exemplified by singers Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, for instance, and reinterpreted those principles in modern America. Second, Davis’s eroticism and sui generis style of funk, which she expressed in her recordings and onstage, reflected a sexual politics that served as a counterpart to those of black feminists writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and many others who were publishing coextensively. But whereas black feminist writers often wrote about black women in previous generations, Davis not only addressed contradictions that black women encountered in contemporary street culture; she also represented such X-rated sexual desires as sadomasochism in her songwriting. In addition, the chapter provides biographical information that contextualizes Davis’s route to the music industry, and Bolden uses critical methods from scholarship on African American poetry to illuminate Davis’s vocal technique.
The Land and Its People
Authors: Dajko Nathalie
Published: May 2021

This chapter provides an overview of the geography and settlement history of Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes, beginning with the presence of indigenous peoples at the time of French colonization, continuing through the French, Spanish, and American historic periods, and ending with the modern distribution of ethnic groups on the landscape. It includes a history of the modern indigenous population, who identify as either Houma or one of several other groups: the Pointe au Chien Indian Tribe or one of two branches of the Biloxi Chitimacha Confederation of Muskogees, and provides an account of the arrival of Francophone Europeans, including Acadians, to the Lafourche Basin. It also considers the implications that slavery had for both historic and modern demographics. Finally, it describes the modern settlement patterns, the means by which people make a living, and the distribution of ethnic groups in the area.
The Connection of French to Bayou Identity
Authors: Dajko Nathalie
Published: May 2021

Chapter Five illustrates how a general Bayou identity that is universal across the region underlies other divisions, and shows that this relationship is revealed via discussions of language. The chapter outlines the results of two perceptual tests: the first was a verbal guise test, during which participants were asked to guess the origins and ethnicity of speakers they listened to via short audio clips. The second asked interviewees to simply state whether they believed there were differences in the French spoken between sub-regions or between ethnic groups; the results were analyzed using a method borrowed from cultural anthropology called cultural domain analysis. The results of both tests show that all people, whether Indian or Cajun, when asked to define themselves first make their affiliation with place clear.
Oak Point or Dog Point?
Authors: Dajko Nathalie
Published: May 2021

Chapter Six confirms the findings of chapter Five, via an examination of the dispute over the name of the town that is either Pointe au Chien or Pointe aux Chênes. Place naming is an important part of place-making: those who name a place are the authentic stewards of the place. The chapter traces the history of the confusion and shows that the long-standing dispute seems to pattern along ethnic lines today. However, via an examination of many factors, including the linguistic landscape, storytelling, and a consideration of semantics, it becomes clear that both groups lay claim to the same space, using the same means to do so. Because place is so closely tied to personal identity, the competing goals of the two sub-groups results in the need to characterize the place differently. The dispute over the name is not a dispute over boundaries or stewardship, but rather over characterization.
Omens from the Past, Warnings for the Future
Authors: Dajko Nathalie
Published: May 2021

Chapter Eight considers the stories told in the process of place-making. It focuses on the history of land loss in the Lafourche Basin via personal accounts of recent storms and land loss and of the hurricanes that destroyed vibrant communities such as Last Island or Chenière Caminada. These are the stories people tell when they create place in Terrebonne-Lafourche; it has been so for generations. The stories are presented in the words of the residents themselves. The chapters shows how these stories invoke both land and language, and a subsequent showcasing of the stories told about language demonstrate that people speak of the disappearance of land and of the language in parallel ways; the disappearance of both has thrown this into sharp relief and demonstrates that place is both physical and aural space made meaningful.
Conclusion
Authors: Dajko Nathalie
Published: May 2021

The book concludes by uniting the themes developed throughout the volume. It introduces the concepts of the soundscape and of soundmarks to show how place may be both physical and aural, as argued in earlier chapters. Place creation is the mapping of a community’s boundaries onto its space, via storytelling, using landmarks to define the boundaries of physical space, and via the use of soundmarks to indicate the boundaries of aural space. Places reflect who we are, and they teach us how to be. They are intrinsically personal, and their loss felt profoundly. There are many reasons that we should be concerned about land and language loss, but it is precisely because the connection to land and to language is so very intimate, that they matter so much to the people whose lives shape and are shaped by them, that we should care when they are threatened.
“Hell Is an Improvement So Far As the Negro Is Concerned”
Authors: Johnson Andre E.
Published: May 2021

Chapter 6 examines Turner’s prophetic ire against America and how the country deals with race. The chapter offers analysis of speeches in which he condemns America, calls the flag a “contemptible rag,” and suggests that African Americans have nothing to obtain if they remained in the country.
Harmony and Normalization
Authors: Storhoff Timothy P.
Published: May 2021

Harmony and Normalization explores cultural relations between Cuba and the United States during the Presidency of Barack Obama, who restored diplomatic relations with the island. Musical exchanges during this period act as a lens through which to view not only US-Cuban musical relations but also the larger political, economic, and cultural implications of musical dialogue between these two nations. Policy shifts allowed US and Cuban performers to more easily traverse the Florida Straits than in the recent past and encouraged them to act as musical diplomats, and their performances served as a testing ground for political change that anticipated normalized diplomatic relations. While government actors debated these changes, music created connections between individuals on both sides of the Florida Straits. This book describes how musicians were among the first individuals to take advantage of new opportunities for travel, push the boundaries of new regulations, and expose both the possibilities and limitations of licensing musical exchange. Through the analysis of both official and unofficial musical diplomacy efforts, including the Havana Jazz Festival, the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba’s first US tour, the Minnesota Orchestra’s trip to Havana, and the author’s own experiences in Cuba, this ethnography demonstrates how performances reflect aspirations for stronger transnational ties and the common desire to restore the once thriving US-Cuban musical relationship.
The Politics of Cuban Music in the United States
Authors: Storhoff Timothy P.
Published: May 2021

The third chapter describes the history of Cuban politics in the United States, their recent transformations, and how they have impacted musical production and interaction. The politics and musical prominence of Cuban exiles in Miami has resulted in a range of reactions to Cuban musicians in South Florida ranging from controversy to acceptance. Divisive Florida performances are contrasted with appearances by Cuban artists elsewhere in the country. The National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba’s first tour of the United States in 2012 featured a range of repertoire by Cuban artists, European romantic composers, Gershwin, and more that represented a call for increased US-Cuban musical interaction.
Jazz as Intercultural Dialogue at the Havana Jazz Plaza Festival
Authors: Storhoff Timothy P.
Published: May 2021

Chapter Four consists of an in-depth analysis of jazz in US-Cuban musical exchange along with an ethnographic description of Havana’s International Jazz Plaza Festival. Cuba’s relationship to jazz became complicated after the revolution. Performers on the island had to carefully negotiate their desire to play jazz with the Castro government’s descriptions of jazz as imperialist music. The 2012 Havana Jazz Plaza Festival and the US musicians who played at the event are analyzed in-depth to show how participants navigated US-Cuban relations to perform in a festival that uses jazz as a form of intercultural dialogue. Arturo O’Farrill, a New York musician of Cuban heritage who was regularly featured in the jazz festival, illustrates the significance of Latin jazz in musical diplomacy and how the definition of jazz is redefined through the festival lens.
Dissonance and Diplomacy under Donald Trump
Authors: Storhoff Timothy P.
Published: May 2021

The Epilogue is dived into three categories: “US-Cuban Relations in the Trump Era,” “Play On: Musical Diplomacy Continues,” and the final “Conclusion.” In this last chapter, the author delves into the current state of US-Cuban relations. The future of US-Cuban musical exchanges is uncertain in the age of Trump. Yet, musical interaction continues to create ties between the United States and Cuba even as diplomatic and economic normalization appears to have stalled. Thus, the author states, this story is still incomplete.
The Warm Glow of Cold War Nostalgia
Authors: Silva Vesta , Wiebel Jon
Published: May 2021

The chapter argues that the resurgence in the late 2010s of films set during or focusing on events of the Cold War allow American audiences to buy into a nostalgically purified vision of America as morally and militarily superior to our allies and to our enemies–contributing to a new victory culture untroubled by the actual events of history. It focuses such films as Atomic Blonde and Bridge of Spies and claims that they re-secure and re-create a comforting and comfortable image of Americans in a world simplified into the binary distinctions (right/wrong, good/evil) that have become central to our nostalgic retellings of the Cold War.
The Westernization of Stalin
Authors: Țion Lucian
Published: May 2021

The chapter explores how late Hollywood has mounted a defamatory political campaign against not only the authoritarianism of the former Soviet regime but the entire past of the “socialist bloc.” It argues that examples like The Death of Stalin (2017) and Comrade Detective (2017) condemn communist ideology a
posteriori for the sole purpose of colonizing the postsocialist space with Western notions of “democracy,” which purportedly precludes the postsocialist world from fully embracing the values of liberalism. Moreover, it claims that the new turn in Hollywood cinema not only represents a false progressive view on behalf of a deceptively “leftist” Hollywood, but it also reinstates America’s neocolonial film practices vis-à-vis the postcolonial world to the postsocialist space. This turn represents the beginning of the erasure of the local histories of Russian and Eastern European socialism, subsuming them to a necessarily Western interpretative frame.
The Coldest City
Authors: Scott Ian
Published: May 2021

The chapter examines the way the Cold War has been historicized in the mode of films like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Bridge of Spies but also how in other texts it has increasingly been filtered through the lens of nostalgic pop-culture referents. The locations are not simply backdrops but active signifiers, the characters less archetypes than reassembled studies in cinematic RPGs, the soundtracks no longer sombre diegesis but more a mix-tape of your favorite hit songs. This chapter, therefore, argues that, over the course of the 2010s, from Tinker Tailor to Atomic Blonde, art as the unconscious face of politics has never been more important. Reminiscence has thus shifted from a mode of nimble historical furnishings to one that contains a jumble of ideological contradictions designed to accentuate–and critique–the reassembled Cold War mentality of the Trump-Putin age.
Laughing at the Early Cold War
Authors: Maguire Lori
Published: May 2021

The chapter examines two recent films, Hail Caesar! and The Death of Stalin, both set in the early 1950s, that use black humor to consider two very serious events. Set two years apart (the first in 1951 and the second in 1953), both films use laughter to explore a particularly stressful period in the histories of the respective superpowers. The chapter places the films in the context of the 2010s and shows how their darkly humorous re-envisioning of the past, particularly of Cold War tropes, fits into a period of renewed tensions between Russia and the United States.
Of Mothers and Motherlands
Authors: LaRocca David
Published: May 2021

Into a landscape with many prominent instances of “Russians on screen,” it comes as something of a (pleasant) surprise to discover The Americans, an FX series (2013-18) that depicts “the enemy” as a married couple with children who run a small business and live in the suburbs of 1980s Washington, D.C. These people may be foreigners or enemies, but they are also spouses, friends, neighbors, bosses, and parents. The question for us, then, is how a show that is squarely focused on the “first” Cold War might have something to say to our current reckoning with the “second” Cold War. The chapter suggests that The Americans provides a deeply human and humane portrait of parents and patriots, who happen to be loyal citizens of the Soviet Union, and in this way orients us to the not-always-clear distinctions between the personal and the political.
Conservative Understanding and Nationalist Exclusion
Authors: Jimenez Christian
Published: May 2021

The chapter focuses on the issue of “moral equivalence” (invented by neoconservatives during the Cold War), which attempts to discredit virtually any criticism of U.S. policy, foreign or domestic, in novels, films, and books, to show how it continues to be utilized today. The chapter compares Bridge of Spies and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and argues that, far from equating the West and Russia, these films try, repetitiously, to suggest that there is no equivalence whatsoever between these entities, for Russia is continuously framed as some bestial “Other” without freedom and normality against the essential healthiness, even the life–through the use of bright colors–of Western countries. The chapter showcases how the films attempt to contain criticism to only a few selected areas and disallow any other, perhaps genuinely difficult, criticisms of world politics, as represented in the Cold War cinema.
Red Sparrow
Authors: Gessell Donna A.
Published: May 2021

The chapter examines Red Sparrow as commentary on current U.S. politics. In a time when traditional identity values are at stake, the two current governments of Russia and the U.S both operate at the expense of the individual. As a second Cold War film, Red Sparrow acts a mirror, manipulating American fascination with Russia to direct Americans’ gaze at themselves. In the process, the film evokes a reevaluation of how Americans maintain traditionally held values, including concepts of duty and patriotism, even if that loyalty demands contesting America’s own corruption. Thus, this chapter argues that Red Sparrow compels its viewers to reevaluate their values in light of how the new Cold War is being fought: not conventionally, but on a much more personal level compelling individual choice.
Rediasporization
Authors: Richards-Greaves Gillian
Published: May 2021

This book examines how African-Guyanese in New York City participate in the Come to My Kwe-Kwe ritual to facilitate rediasporization, that is, the creation of a newer diaspora from an existing one. Since the fall of 2005, African-Guyanese in New York City have celebrated Come to My Kwe-Kwe (more recently called Kwe-Kwe Night) on the Friday evening before Labor Day. Come to My Kwe-Kwe is a reenactment of a uniquely African-Guyanese pre-wedding ritual called kweh-kweh, and sometimes referred to as karkalay, mayan, kweh-keh, and pele. A typical traditional (wedding-based) kweh-kweh has approximately ten ritual segments, which include the pouring of libation to welcome or appease the ancestors; a procession from the groom’s residence to the bride’s residence or central kweh-kweh venue; the hiding of the bride; and the negotiation of bride price. Each ritual segment is executed with music and dance, which allow for commentary on conjugal matters, such as sex, domestication, submissiveness, and hard work. Come to My Kwe-Kwe replicates the overarching segments of the traditional kweh-kweh, but a couple (male and female) from the audience acts as the bride and groom, and props simulate the boundaries of the traditional performance space, such as the gate and the bride’s home. This book draws on more than a decade of ethnographic research data and demonstrates how Come to My Kwe-Kwe allows African-Guyanese-Americans to negotiate complex, overlapping identities in their new homeland, by combining elements from the past and present and reinterpreting them to facilitate rediasporization and ensure group survival.
Introduction: “Who Karkalay?”
Authors: Richards-Greaves Gillian
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the traditional (wedding-based) kweh-kweh as an African retention or African continuity that developed among enslaved Africans in Guyana, South America. It also demonstrates the ways that traditional kweh-kweh indexes indigenous African rites of passage, such as Ïgba Nkwü, a wine-carrying ceremony practiced by the Igbos of Nigeria. Moreover, this chapter explores how African-Guyanese migration to the United States necessitated the reenactment of the traditional kweh-kweh, and thus, an invention of tradition in the form of Come to My Kwe-Kwe, also known as Kwe-Kwe Nite. This chapter further demonstrates how the African-Guyanese diaspora in the United States (African-Guyanese-Americans) is comprised of smaller interconnected factions or diasporas, such as the migrated diaspora, procreated diaspora, and affinal diaspora. It also demonstrates how the celebration of Come to My Kwe-Kwe serves to transition the African-Guyanese-American community from an imagined community to a tangible one that is uniquely African, Guyanese, and American.
“Beat de Drum and de Spirit Gon Get Up”
Authors: Richards-Greaves Gillian
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines how the repertoire, form, content, and performance styles of traditional kweh-kweh songs and dances are performed and innovated at Come to My Kwe-Kwe to entertain, instruct, and educate the African-Guyanese diaspora in New York City. Accompanied by “found” instruments, synthesizers, djembes, and an assortment of percussive instruments, attendees sing traditional kweh-kweh songs, Guyanese folk songs, and musical genres from around the world. They sing using coded language, double-entendre, and unmasked (raw) speech to edify the community and facilitate inclusion. As attendees sing and dance in the ganda (performance space), they address diverse matrimonial topics, particularly sex. In fact, the volunteer bride and groom are expected to wine (gyrate) to demonstrate sexual prowess, or risk ridicule from the larger community. Some African-Guyanese-Americans disapprove of the musical innovations at Come to My Kwe-Kwe, but others view the changes as crucial to the survival of the ritual and the African-Guyanese community.
Picking Up the Pieces
Authors: Richards-Greaves Gillian
Published: May 2021

This chapter takes an innovative approach to discussing the process of diasporization and rediasporization as acts of repair and renewal. It provides a life history of the fictional character, Dia, a woman ripped from her native village as a young girl and sold into slavery. By embodying the diasporic experience, this chapter gives voice to the complexities involved in the diasporic process, unmasks the pain that is often shrouded in academic discourse on diaspora, and compels the reader to think about diasporas not only as groups, but also as individuals with unique life experiences. More importantly, this chapter summons the reader to think about diasporization and rediasporization as both instantaneous and continuous processes.
“Ignorance of Your Culture Is Not Considered Cool”: Reconsidering the Avant-Garde Impulse in American Punk
Authors: Rapport Evan
Published: May 2021

This chapter reconsiders the role of American rock experimentalists such as Captain Beefheart, DEVO, and the Residents in the formation of punk’s musical style. Although these musicians are often referenced in punk histories, their contributions are typically misunderstood because of an anachronistic focus on the British punk scene of 1977 as punk’s starting point. These musicians used avant-garde approaches to American popular music and vernacular culture in order to tackle American music’s unacknowledged and whitewashed history, including such controversial practices as blackface minstrelsy, as well as the problems of white suburbia, the war in Vietnam, the failures of hippie idealism, and a frustration with both mainstream American culture and the counterculture.
“Pure Rock and Roll with No Blues or Folk or Any of That Stuff in It”
Authors: Rapport Evan
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on the emergence of the first fully identifiable punk style in New York and Boston in the early to mid-1970s. Bands such as the Ramones, Blondie, New York Dolls, Modern Lovers, and the Real Kids used musical materials from the late 1950s and early 1960s. This source material of doo-wop, early rock and roll, and rhythm and blues connected to the vernacular “common stock” schemes and patterns shared among white and Black blues and country musicians. This music harked back to early punk musicians’ baby boomer childhoods, underscoring the fact that—contrary to the general perception—most of the individuals in this scene around CBGB were not teenagers or kids, but rather adults in their late twenties and thirties performing music about being kids. Also, the diverse scene was heavily female and LGBTQ, in direct opposition to punk’s later associations with young white heterosexual males. The chapter contains the first in-depth analysis of the Ramones’ music, revealing the ways in which their compositions and performance styles set the stage for future punk innovations.
Punk and the White Atlantic
Authors: Rapport Evan
Published: May 2021

Punk emerged as a fully formed and recognizable style in the mid-1970s in the United Kingdom, primarily in London, and in the United States, primarily in New York and Los Angeles. British punk musicians such as the Damned, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols during this period put together elements from American punk and its precedents, including elements that were previously heard in distinction from each other, such as the riff-based blues of the Stooges and back-to-basics rock and roll songs of the Ramones. Although this period is marked by a preoccupation with whether punk was “invented” in the US or UK, in fact, punk is a product of exchanges between musicians across the Atlantic, with much of the music continuing a long history of white people using a vocabulary of Black musical resources, including blues and reggae, to explore identity, class distinctions, and the nature of whiteness itself. These exchanges in punk are comparable to the so-called “British Invasion” of the prior decade. The discourse of making the mid-1970s UK a starting point for punk also appears to be an idea that American musicians were primarily invested in, and an idea that further dissociated punk from its basis in Black American music.
Outro: A New Way to Pay Old Debts
Authors: Rapport Evan
Published: May 2021

The work of contemporary musicians helps explain the significance and legacy of early American punk and the world in which it was created. This conclusion looks first at the continued contradictions and paradoxes of the blues’ central role in punk, through the music of Harry Pussy, This Moment in Black History, and others. The chapter then considers the ways in which groups such as Downtown Boys use a variety of musical approaches to establish female and Latinx punk lineages that intersect or run parallel to taken-for-granted narratives. Then the chapter considers the paradoxes of punk history and the forces of nostalgia through a consideration of the story of Death, an unknown Black rock group from mid-1970s Detroit with newfound success in the 2000s, as well as the diverse styles of contemporary groups such as Soft Pink Truth and Show Me the Body.
Recovering Interpretative Possibilities in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor: An Introduction
Authors: Arant Alison , Cofer Jordan
Published: May 2021

This chapter provides an overview of the responses to Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, highlighting both the strengths and weaknesses of the reception history, and argues for the need to recover the breadth of interpretation her work invites. The writers discuss the concept of authorial intent as it relates to O’Connor and lay out their premise that author, text, and audience all play roles in the process of meaning making. The authors also provide chapter summaries for each of the essays included in the volume.
Feather Method: Rereading O’Connor in the Age of the Object
Authors: Caison Gina
Published: May 2021

Gina Caison coins “feather method,” an object-oriented ontology that considers the feather itself as a lens for reading several of O’Connor’s stories. Rather than seeing the peacock feather as a metaphor for the author’s work or as a religious symbol, as many readers have, Caison takes the feather as a meaning-making object in its own right and uses its characteristics to reconsider O’Connor. Caison argues that O’Connor’s writing both upholds and challenges an object-oriented ontology that rejects status hierarchy. Thus, her essay uses O’Connor’s work to further theorize object-oriented ontology.
“God Made Me Thisaway”: Crip-queer Perspectives on Flannery O’Connor
Authors: Henderson Bruce
Published: May 2021

Drawing on disability studies and queer theory, Bruce Henderson uses a “crip-queer” lens to read “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” and “The River.” Henderson argues that while O’Connor rarely writes non-heteronormative characters, there are, in fact, several “queer” figures in O’Connor’s fiction, who don’t play into normative roles. Furthermore, Henderson notes that despite the number of disabled characters who populate O’Connor’s stories, few scholars write about O’Connor from a disability studies lens. Henderson recognizes the complications that most likely contribute to this critical gap, ranging from O’Connor’s orthodox Catholic beliefs about sexuality on the one hand, to the uneasy relationship between associating queerness and cripness on the other. However, he argues that a crip-queer approach provides a useful way into understanding the function of nonnormative bodies and souls in O’Connor’s work.
The Trouble with “Innerleckchuls”: Flannery O’Connor, Anti-Intellectualism, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop
Authors: Cofer Jordan
Published: May 2021

In dialogue with Eric Bennett and Mark McGurl’s work on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as well as Tara Powell’s work on archetypes, Jordan Cofer uses new information from the Emory Archive and The Prayer Journal to contextualize one of O’Connor’s most famous comedic devices: the antagonistic intellectual. Cofer argues that although this device may have roots in southern fiction, O’Connor’s anti-intellectual trope derives from her time in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This chapter examines some of O’Connor’s juvenilia, the drafts of Wise Blood she was writing in Iowa (while simultaneously writing in her journal), and some of the short stories she wrote while enrolled at the Workshop. Finally, Cofer reconsiders the origins of O’Connor’s anti-intellectual as a potential outgrowth of her own anxieties during this time.
Country People: Depictions of Farm Women in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction
Authors: Miller Monica Carol
Published: May 2021

Monica Miller recuperates O’Connor’s female farmers and mothers, women whose labor keeps their dependents financially stable but whose complaints and unhappiness often invite censure from other characters as well as readers and critics. Miller offers a more sympathetic reading of these women, suggesting that their preoccupations might stem less from pettiness than from practical concerns about managing farms and finances. To support her argument, Miller draws on archival material newly acquired by Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. These materials, excerpted here for the first time, provide context about the realities of managing Andalusia, the O’Connor family farm. Ultimately, Miller argues that through these women farmers and mothers, O’Connor’s stories offer a realistic representation of farm life that corrects the romantic depictions that appear in the fiction of many of O’Connor’s contemporaries.
Flannery O’Connor and the Fascist Business: Plurality and the Possibility of Community
Authors: Staudinger Alison
Published: May 2021

Recognizing O’Connor’s relevance as a political thinker, Political Scientist Alison Staudinger puts O’Connor in dialogue with Hannah Arendt in order to explore O’Connor’s approach to fascism, a pressing subject in the author’s Cold War context, as well as in our contemporary political moment. By engaging Arendt, Staudinger examines O’Connor’s relationship with fascism on three levels—as the practice of the artist, as the worldview of some fictional characters, and as an approach to her personal friendships. Staudinger argues that while O’Connor sees the temptations of fascism, she finally rejects it as a totalizing denial of human plurality. Staudinger suggests that O’Connor falls short of depicting an earthly community that could accept this plurality, especially regarding racial equality; at the same time she points out that O’Connor’s fiction demonstrates how it is the country’s deep-seated racial hierarchy that makes it vulnerable to fascism.
Inscrutable Zoot Suiters and Civil Rights Ambivalence in Flannery O’Connor and Toni Morrison
Authors: Arant Alison
Published: May 2021

Alison Arant uses the zoot suit—an outfit that is simultaneously conspicuous and difficult to interpret—as a way to put the fiction of Flannery O’Connor in conversation with that of Toni Morrison. In their fiction set in the 1940s and 50s, including one unpublished story by O’Connor, both authors create zoot suited figures who are not quite visible to those around them. Arant reads O’Connor’s and Morrison’s works in the context of the zoot suit riots of 1943 and argues that both writers use these inscrutable zoot suiters as a way of exploring the fears, promises, and limits of racial integration. Together these texts demonstrate the persistence of white ideology, which persists both in individual minds and in social systems that purport to be free of it.
Silence, Scalpels, and Loupes: Reconsidering O’Connor as Sylvia Plath’s Contemporary
Authors: Alexander Lindsey
Published: May 2021

In an approach that is closer to a work of creative writing than to conventional criticism, Poet Lindsey Alexander compares O’Connor’s and Plath’s reception as women writers. This essay is something of an anomaly in the collection since it relies on elements of the personal essay, asks more questions than it answers, and uses anecdotal evidence. However, we see it as an essential demonstration of the volume’s commitment to a broad reconsideration of O’Connor, which includes exploring how she affects current writers and their work and practices. Alexander examines O’Connor and Plath as a way to consider how female authors are received by a male readership and identifies several similarities between the two authors—who are rarely regarded in tandem—and one striking difference: the perceived masculinity of O’Connor’s violent subject matter and the assumed femininity of Plath’s subject matter. Alexander uses these two gendered designations to raise the question: why one and not the other?
Saint Flannery, Approximately: O’Connor and the Dogma of Creative Writing
Authors: Bennett Eric
Published: May 2021

Eric Bennett examines O’Connor’s legacy in an influential but often overlooked venue: the creative writing workshop. Bennett argues that creative writing programs have benefitted from O’Connor’s success story, but they have also mischaracterized her method as a writer. Bennett demonstrates how manuals and instruction in creative writing laud the practice of not knowing where one’s fiction is going during the writing process, and often some of O’Connor’s words get marshaled in support of this approach. Bennett claims that such uses of O’Connor both distort who she was and demonstrate how impoverished current theories of fiction often are.