 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Marcellus Blount Columbia University Moderator |
Marcellus Blount is Associate Professor English at Columbia University. He specializes in American and African American literature with particular attention to matters of gender and sexuality. He has co-edited a collection of essays on black men, and he is currently writing a critical study entitled "Listening for My Name: African American Men and the Politics of Intimacy." |
|
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
 |
Margo Natalie Crawford Indiana University Friday October 20, 2006 | 2:00 - 3:45 pm “The Rhythm and Swing of Larry Neal’s Post-Double Consciousness Dream” |
| Margo Natalie Crawford is an assistant professor of African American literature and culture in the department of English at Indiana University-Bloomington. She is co-editor, with Lisa Gail Collins, of New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers, 2006) and author of Rewriting Blackness: Beyond Authenticity and Hybridity (forthcoming 2007). Her work has appeared in a range of journals including Études Faulknériennes, MAWA Review, American Literature, and Studies in American Fiction. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth century African American literature, African American cultural movements, race and American modernism, theories of the black diaspora, and images of "Africa" in the African American imagination. | |
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
George P. Cunningham Brooklyn College (CUNY) Thursday October 19, 2006 | 12:00 pm - 1:45 pm |
|
George P. Cunningham is Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Africana Studies at Brooklyn College (CUNY) He teaches courses on African American and American literature and culture in the Africana Studies and English Departments and in the American Studies Program. His research focuses on African American Literature and Culture with an emphasis on gender. His publications include: Representing Black Men co-edited with Marcellus Blount, New York: Routledge, 1996 and "Body Politics: Race, Gender and the Captive Body," in that volume. He is currently completing "Porgy and Bess: An American Cultural Reader" with Ray Allen from the Conservatory of Music. Their article "Cultural Uplift and Double-Consciousness: African American Responses to the 1935 Opera Porgy and Bess" appears in the most recent issue of Musical Quarterly." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
|
 |
William J. Harris University of Kansas Friday October 20, 2006 | 11:00 am - 12:30 pm “Larry Neal’s Folkloric Frame of Mind” |
| William J. Harris teaches American literature, African American literature, creative writing and jazz studies at the University of Kansas. He has published a critical study, The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka:The Jazz Aesthetic and two books of poems, Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment and In My Own Dark. He is the editor of The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader and co-editor of Call and Response: the Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition and of a special double issue of the African American Review on Amiri Baraka. Recent pieces have appeared in Uptown Conversation: the New Jazz Studies and Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: an Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans. Currently he is writing poetry and working on a book called, a history of African American Poetry: From Spirituals to Spoken Word. | |
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
Mae G. Henderson University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Thursday October 19, 2006 | 12:00 - 1:45 pm "Larry Neal: A Personal Retrospective" |
|
| Mae G. Henderson is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of numerous articles on African American and feminist criticism and theory, pedagogy, and cultural studies and is co-editor (with E. Patrick Johnson) of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (2005), editor of Borders, Boundaries, And Frames (1995), and co-editor (with John Blassingame) of the five-volume Antislavery Newspapers And Periodicals: An Annotated Index Of Letters, 1817-1871 (1980). She is also author of the widely anthologized essay, "Speaking In Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition" as well as the more recently published "Josephine Baker and La Revue Negre: From Ethnography to Performance." | |
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
Régine Latortue Brooklyn College (CUNY) Moderator |
|
Régine Latortue is Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Africana Studies at Brooklyn College, and served as Chair of the department for fifteen years. Her field of specialty is Black Diasporic Literature, with an emphasis on Haitian literature and a special focus on women. She is the Principal Investigator of the Haitian Language Bilingual Educational Technical Assistance Center (HABETAC) at Brooklyn College, funded by the New York State Department of Bilingual Education. She recently served as President of the College Language Association (2004-2006). Her publications include a co-authored bilingual edition of Les Cenelles: A Collection of Poems by Creole Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century, and numerous articles on Haitian studies, francophone literature, and women writers of the African Diaspora. Recent publications include “Le Corps du roi: Christophe, le tragique architecte,” "Francophone Caribbean Women Writers and the Diasporic Quest for Identity," "Une Nouvelle vision de l'Indigénisme: Fond-des-Nègres de Marie Chauvet," "Haitian Women Underground: Revising Literary Traditions and Societies,” and “Ré-imaginer trois siècles: L’héritage de Toussaint Louverture et d’Aimé Césaire, et le bicentenaire de la révolution haïtienne.” |
|
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
 |
Carter A. Mathes Rutgers University Friday October 20, 2006 | 2:00 - 3:45 pm “Sounds of Liberation: The Aesthetic Contours of Neal’s Black Radical Critique” Friday October 20, 2006 | 6:00 - 7:45 pm “Prospectives” |
| Carter Mathes is an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, and a specialist in African American Literature and African Diaspora Studies. His research interests include aesthetic theory, literary sound, and the Black Arts Movement. He is currently working on a book manuscript, "Imagine the Sound: Modalities of Radical Struggle in Post-Civil Rights Black Literature." In this work, he examines the creative use of sound in black literature as a form of both aesthetic innovation and political resistance during the shifting racial climate of the 1960s-1980s. | |
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
 |
Aldon L. Neilson Pennsylania State University Thursday October 19, 2006 | 2:00 - 3:45 pm "Bee Bop Ghost in the Machine" |
Aldon Lynn Nielsen was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for Poetry in Washington, D.C. He is currently the Kelly Professor of American Literature at The Pennsylvania State University. His volumes of criticism include Reading Race, Writing Between the Lines, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction, Black Chant, And Integral Music: Languages Of African American INNOVATION. His collections of poetry include Heat Strings, Evacuation Routes, Stepping Razor, Vext, and Mixage. With Lauri Ramey, he edited Every GoodbyeAin’t Gone: an Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans. Nielsen's regular commentaries on poetry and politics can be found at the blog: |
|
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
 |
Amy Abugo Ongiri University of Florida Thursday October 19, 2006 | 4:00 - 5:45 pm “Hoodo[o] Hollerin’ Bebop Ghosts: Jazz Culture in the Work of Larry Neal” |
| Amy Abugo Ongiri is assistant professor in the English Department and the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Florida. She is currently completing her manuscript Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic. Her research interests include African American Literature and Culture, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her work has been published in College Literature, Camera Obscura, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Black Filmmaker, Nka: The Journal of Contemporary African Art, and Screening Noir: The Journal of Black Film, Television and New Media Culture. She was Teacher of the Year at the University of Florida in 2005. | |
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
Esiaba Irobi Ohio University Friday October 20, 2006 | 4:00 - 5:45 pm “Who is Afraid of Larry Neal?” |
|
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
 |
Howard Rambsy II Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville Friday October 20, 2006 | 11:00 am - 12:30 pm “Checking Out Style: Larry Neal’s Recovery of Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison” |
| Howard Rambsy II is a professor of African American and American literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He has curated extra-literary exhibits on cultural arts and published articles on the Black Arts Movement as well as on emergent writers Tyehimba Jess and Colson Whitehead. | |
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
Craig A. Schiffert Howard University Friday October 20, 2006 | 4:00 - 5:45 pm “New Research and a Reappraisal: Larry Neal’s Co-founding of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (Harlem, 1965)" |
|
Craig A. Schiffert holds a master's degree in Afro-American Studies (concentration in literature and history) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; he is completing a doctoral degree in U.S. history (Concentration in black cultural history) at Howard University in Washington, DC. He has a special interest in, and has done extensive research on, the Black Arts movement. |
|
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
Mike Sell Indiana University of Pennsylvania Thursday October 19, 2006 | 2:00 - 3:45 pm “Speaking to Poppa Stoppa: Ghosts and Performances in Larry Neal's Theory of Blackness” |
|
| Mike Sell is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches avant-garde studies, modern world drama, critical theory, radical African-American literature (esp. the Black Arts Movement), and writing. He is author of Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement (University of Michigan, 2005), editor of Ed Bullins: Twelve Plays and Selected Writings (University of Michigan, 2006), and consulting editor for The Life and Times of the New Lafayette Theatre, by Robert Macbeth (University of Michigan, forthcoming). He is author of many articles on the Black Arts Movement that emphasize its critical, theoretical, and performative dimensions, including the first website dedicated to the movement (www.umich.edu/~eng 499), and one of the first essays to argue the centrality of Larry Neal and the Muntu Group not only to the movement itself, but to contemporary reconsideration of the Black Aesthetic ("The Black Arts Movement: Performance, Neo-Orality, & the Destruction of the 'White Thing'" in Elam and Krasner's African American Performance & Theatre History: A Critical Reader [Oxford U Press, 2001]). He is currently working on two essays—one on the disciplinary history of the Black Aesthetic, the other on the "agit-prop closet drama" of Bullins—and a multi-disciplinary, globally oriented history of the avant-garde informed by Black Aesthetic methodology, The Avant-Garde: Race Religion Food War. | |
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
 |
James Smethurst University of Massachusetts Friday October 20, 2006 | 4:00 - 5:45 pm “Larry Neal, the Muntu Circle, and Black Arts Ideology” |
| James Smethurst is an Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is the author of The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946 (Oxford University Press, 1999) and The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). He is also the co-editor of Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) and Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan 2006). | |
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
 |
David Lionel Smith Williams College Thursday October 19, 2006 | 2:00 - 3:45 pm “Larry Neal’s Aesthetic Phantoms” |
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
W.S. Tkweme University of Louisville Thursday October 19, 2006 | 4:00 - 5:45 pm “Black Boogaloo and Bebop Ghosts” |
|
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
 |
Eleanor Traylor Howard University Friday October 20, 2006 | 6:00 - 7:45 pm “Reflections” |
Eleanor W. Traylor, Graduate Professor of English and Chairman of the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University, is an acclaimed scholar and critic in African-American literature and criticism. Dr. Traylor obtained a B.A. from Spelman College; an M.A. from Atlanta University; and a Ph.D. from Catholic University, where she pursued her interests in African-American literature and mythology concentrating this focus in a dissertation on Richard Wright. She later received a Merrill Scholarship to the Stuttgarter Hochschule in West Germany and a research fellowship to study at the Institute of African Studies in Ghana and Nigeria. More recently, Dr. Traylor has traveled to South Africa, Paris, Brazil, Jamaica, Martinique, Jerusalem, Switzerland, Germany, Hawaii, and the Virgin Islands to address scholarly forums. Her work has appeared in the form of chapter essays, biographies, articles, and papers on such challenging African-American writers as Larry Neal, Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Margaret Walker, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Richard Wright. |
|
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
Jeffrey Taylor Brooklyn College (CUNY) Moderator |
|
Jeffrey Taylor is Associate Professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center (CUNY), and? specializes in music of the United States and jazz history, He has taught courses on early jazz, jazz historiography, music in the Harlem Renaissance, the history of jazz arranging, and the music of Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus. He is also on the staff of the Institute for Studies in American Music (ISAM) at Brooklyn College, and has contributed frequently to the ISAM Newsletter, both as editor and author. His scholarly work has focused primarily on early jazz pianists, though his interests include many aspects of current trends in jazz and popular music scholarship and performance, particularly those related to race, gender, class, sexuality and spirituality. He is a member of interdisciplinary jazz study groups at Columbia University, the University of Kansas, and the Leeds College of Music, and is on the editorial boards of Black Music Research Journal and American Music. As a performer Prof. Taylor has focused primarily on the work of Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, and Earl Hines, and in 1998 appeared with fellow pianist Artis Wodehouse at several events related to ISAM’s The Gershwins at 100 festivals. |
|
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
 |
Frederick Vincent University of California, Berkeley Thursday October 19, 2006 | 4:00 - 5:45 pm "Suppose James Brown read Fanon’: Revolutionary Nationalism and the Funk of the Black Panthers" |
Frederick Vincent is the author of Funk: The Music, the People and the Rhythm of the One (St. Martin’s Press 1996) which is the definitive account of the Black Power inspired generation of funk bands, musicians and artistic innovators. Vincent is currently completing his PhD in Ethnic Studies and African American Studies at UC Berkeley. He broadcasts “The History of Funk” from KPFA radio in Berkeley on Friday nights. www.rickeyvincent.com |
|
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | |
 |
Salim Washington Brooklyn College (CUNY) Friday October 20, 2006 | 2:00 - 3:45 pm "The Glorious Monster in the Bell of a Horn: Musical Visions of Struggle and Freedom in Larry Neal's Black Aesthetic" |
| Salim Washington is a Harlem-based tenor saxophonist, who also plays the flute and the oboe, and is an avid composer/arranger. He has performed in festivals throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Latin America. His passionate writing and fiery playing is featured in his Harlem Arts Ensemble and in performances and recordings with many of New York's finest musicians. Salim is currently a member in the Donald Smith Quintet, Kuumba Frank Lacy's "Vibe Tribe," James "Jabbo" Ware's "Me We and Them Orchestra ,"Antonio Dangerfield's "Ensemble Uniqua," and Ahmed Abdullah's "Diaspora." He can also be heard as a leader on Love in Exile (Accurate Records) and his forthcoming Harlem Homecoming (Ujam Records). He is a senior fellow at the Institute for Studies in American Music, and also an associate professor of music at Brooklyn College, where he teaches in music, American Studies, and Africana Studies. He is co-author along with Farah Jasmine Griffin of Clawing at the Limits of Cool: the collaboration of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, 1955-1961 (forthcoming, New York: St. Martin's Press) | |
Brooklyn