350:588                                                                                         

Index # - 52876

Distribution Requirement:  A5, C

Monday – 4:30 p.m.   

CCA – 8 Bishop Place

Brent Edwards 

African Diasporic Culture and the Poetics of Circulation

This seminar will take up some of the recent scholarly work on African diasporic culture that has attempted to theorize black material and intellectual cultural production less through readings of artifacts and commodities, and more through their ongoing movement, exchange, and translation in a transnational circuit. We will consider Marxist and post-Marxist economic theories of circulation in relation to African diasporic practices that at times may challenge market-based assumptions of rationality and value, pursuing alternative “informal” or illicit modes. We will also attempt to theorize the poetics of circulation: the ways that certain kinds of cultural transfer, with their attendant rhythms, epistemologies, and dynamics of exchange, can impact or even determine the reception of the “content” transferred, with implications for aesthetic valuation as well as for commodification. Of course, we will have to attend to the question of what difference it makes to consider these issues in patterns of circulation marked by race.

In addition to grappling with contemporary theory on the subject, we will consider case studies in a variety of media and from a variety of locations. Our examples may include: nineteenth century proto-Pan Africanist serial fiction; government surveillance and black radical periodical print culture in the 1920s; 1960s market literature in Onitsha, Nigeria; the Caribbean and African reception of the U.S. Black Power movement in the 1960s; innovative 1960s African American expatriate fiction; jazz and dub poetics; Jean Genet’s ambivalent romance with the Black Panthers and Palestinian militants;  the literature of the Nigerian oil boom of the 1970s; rumor, paranoia, and the figure of the “Mau-Mau” in the Kenyan novelist Ngugi’s Matigari; the echoes of Amos Tutuola’s fiction in the New York no wave/ambient music of the early 1980s; the thematization of recording technology and the memory of slavery in Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber’s Louisiana; piracy in contemporary Nigerian video culture; Afrofuturism in film and poetry; and “sampling” and appropriative innovation in hip hop and spoken word.

The course is designed to be linked with the activities of the 2006-2007 seminar of the Center for Cultural Analysis on “Cultures of Circulation.” Activities directly linked to the seminar will include class visits by writers, panel discussions, a field trip (to see Kurt Thometz’s collection of Nigerian market literature at Jumel Terrace Books in Harlem), and possibly a concert or reading.

Readings will include some of the following:

Essays on circulation and the public sphere by Benjamin Lee, Edward LiPuma, Michael Warner, Dilip Gaonkar, and Elizabeth Povinelli

Essays on circulation and the African diaspora by James Ferguson, Giovanni Arrighi, Elizabeth Hofmeyr, Joseph Roach, Paul Gilroy, Mamadou Diouf, and AbdulMaliq Simone

Martin Delany, Blake; or the Huts of America (1859/1861-62)

Selections from Moorish Science Temple of America (Noble Drew Ali), FBI file [1931-1959]

Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Lost/Found Moorish Time Lines in the Wilderness of North America,” Sacred Drift (1993)

Selections from The Crusader regarding the African Blood Brotherhood (1920s)

Theodore Kornweibel, “The Most Colossal Conspiracy against the United States: Efforts to Thwart the Crusader and the African Blood Brotherhood” (1998)

Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954)

David Byrne and Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981)

Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama (1961)        

James Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture” (1984)

Life Turns Man Up and Down: High Life, Useful Advice, and Mad English: African Market Literature, ed. Kurt Thometz (2001)

Selections from Emmanuel Obiechina, An African Popular Literature: a Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets (1973)

Jan Carew, Ghosts in Our Blood: with Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean (1994)

Selected speeches and letters by Malcolm X from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Ghana (1964-1965)

Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (1969)

Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants (1967-69)

Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “History of the Voice” (1979-80)

William Melvin Kelley, Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1969)

Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love (1986)

George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970)      

Mohamed Choukri, Jean Genet in Tangier (1974)

Ken Saro-Wira, Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1985)

Buchi Emecheta, Naira Power (1982)

Karin Barber, “Popular reactions to the petro-Naira” (1982)

Andrew Apter, “The Politics of Illusion” (2005)

Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook (1986)

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Matigari (1987)

A.S. Cleary, “The myth of Mau Mau in its international context” (1990)

Fred Cooper, “Mau Mau and the discourse of decolonization” (1988)

Erna Brodber, Louisiana (1994)

Selections from recordings of interviews with former slaves from the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, collected in Remembering Slavery, ed. Ira Berlin et. al (1998)

Zakes Mda, The Heart of Redness (2000)

Selections from Jeff Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongquawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-7 (1989)

$1 (One Dollar) dir. Gabriel Moses (2002)  [film]

John McCall, “Nollywood Confidential: The Unlikely Rise of Nigerian Video Film” (2004)

Brian Larkin, “Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy” (2004)

Mike Ladd and Vijay Iyer, In What Language? A Song Cycle of Lives in Transit (2003) [libretto and CD]

Anthony Joseph, The African Origins of UFOs (2007)

Anthony Joseph, Liquid Textology (2005) [CD]