Tyechia Thompson discusses the making of the short film James A. Emanuel: A Poet in Exile to shine a light on the life and work of James A. Emanuel. The paper discusses the film as a digital humanities project that integrates archival materials, digital media, storytelling, and interpretation. A Poet in Exile uses archival materials from the Library of Congress, interviews, and historical footage to celebrate the trailblazing path of James A. Emanuel, a veteran, literary scholar, professor, and poet. The 23-minute documentary chronicles his beginnings in Nebraska; his participation in WWII to receive his undergraduate education at Howard University; his mentorship by Langston Hughes; his run for the Board of Education in Mount Vernon, New York; his professorship at CUNY City College; his books of poetry and scholarship; his decision to expatriate to Paris; and his creative resilience. This film is part of a larger effort to expose Emanuel’s work to a new generation of readers and to increase scholarship on the author. The documentary is a part of the James A. Emanuel Project, which also includes a digital archive, oral history project, poetry readings, and literary analyses.
Aldon Nielsen argues that Amiri Baraka's work in poetry has been represented largely by a surpassingly small selection of his writings. Even in his most recent collected poems, the work of his Black Arts era is given extremely short shrift.
But even less known, and seldom commented upon, is the poetry of the years just preceding his name change and move to a cultural nationalist ideology. That work remains as some of the most vital of his career. The book Black Magic Poetry, one of the largest of his collections, includes nearly a decade’s worth of poetry, extending from the end of what is generally termed his “Beat Era,” to the peak years of his Nationalist phase. Within that body of work, the last of the poetry composed under the name LeRoi Jones is perhaps the least known and discussed of his entire career. I propose to offer a corrective by reasserting the centrality of the first section of Black Magic, titled “Sabotage,” which gathers the poems written in the mode of the “New American Poetics” and Baraka’s evolving jazz-inflected aesthetics. Close attention to these poems reveals not only the intrinsic value of these poems on their own, but also underscores the poetic and political continuities between his earliest writings, the writings of the Black Arts period, and the Third World Marxism of his final decades, poetry.
In "Morant Bay Shadows," Kierra Duncan highlights The Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” which epitomized recent concerns with African & African diasporic artists (re)making of this 20th C aesthetic movement. Return to modernisms has become intertwined with enthusiasm for Claude McKay. “Morant Bay Shadows,” builds on recent work by Mimi Sheller and Winston James. I return to McKay’s understudied poem “Gordon to the Oppressed Natives” (Jamaica Times 1912) to ask: Who is Claude McKay’s George William Gordon, the man referred to in the title? Duncan identifies the strategies used in the poem to explore the mobilization’s meanings to unnamed participants overlooked by dominant narratives who favored Gordon. Together, these materials enable timely reflections on who is allowed to be a victim in the global sphere and who is denied that recognition, as well as art’s ability to intervene.
Matthew Johnson discusses renewed interest in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper since Black feminists retrieved her from the archive in the 20th century. While scholars typically center Harper's prose, particularly Iola Leroy, he argues her poetry deserves more critical attention to the Black feminine and maternal. He offers a new lens through which we might interpret Harper’s poetry: whether the enslaved Black mother immobilized in “The Slave Auction” or the immanently mobile, maternal “Ethiopia,” Harper employs an aesthetic meditation on the implications of white supremacist spatial logics under which the Black body is made object. Taking cue from recent scholarship in Black Geographies, Johnson posits the poetics of mobility as both a critical lens and an aesthetic practice, reading Black encounters with space, and a Black response to those encounters.
Each speaker will take 12-15 minutes to share perspectives across Black poetics with 15 minutes for discussion.