The development of the personal computer and the word processor were a revolutionary step in democratizing access to technologies of inscription, but also mark the beginning of the encounter between literature and electronic mediation, a fact which itself became a generative fact of artistic work. Following a succession of personal tragedies — the death of his wife to cancer in 1986, the destruction of his archival research material on Caribbean culture by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, and the attack on his Kingston home by gunmen in 1990 — poet Kamau Brathwaite developed an approach to visual poetry on his Macintosh computer’s word processor, coining it the “Sycorax video style”. In this fashion, Brathwaite produced new material but also re-worked old pieces, incorporating the total body of his output into a digital archive that could now live exclusively on his Mac SE/30.

The use of the word processor let Brathwaite take a step beyond the avenues of inscriptive power that white channels of culture-making had previously been able to police, breaking the monopoly of the pencil, pen, typewriter or printing press, all instruments of colonial English power. On a purely aesthetic note, Brathwaite’s stylized typographic choices evoke the Russian and Italian Futurist traditions of concrete poetry, which all used dynamic font and layout choices to mirror the onomatopoeic character of the poetry itself. However, I hope momentarily wearing a Eurocentric art discourse hat (and making reference to theorists like Clement Greenberg, as occurs later) doesn’t suggest that there the white and black avant-garde traditions are mutually exclusive, though critics like Fred Moten make note that there is often the dangerous appearance that the “avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American” and ” the deeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avante-garde as necessarily not black” (Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, xxxi).

Though not all radical black experimentalism is Afrofuturistic, it feels reasonable to suggest that Brathwaite’s work extends the Afrofuturist tradition — that is, not in the sense that it lies within some kind of aesthetic tradition defined narrowly by any single 20th century decade’s style moments, but that its place within the Afrofuturist canon was defined is qualified by how it looks to technological developments as tools in realizing new futures within African diaspora. Though Brathwaite produced a considerable amount of work prior to his turn to his the Macinstosh SE/30 in the 1980’s, the way that he looks to the computer as a way of preserving his work and poetic voice after the literal and figurative destructions of his “archives” demonstrate how its possible to claim emotional refuge and poetic/imaginative territory even in the digital realm, and how a new technological epoch meant a new set of unclaimed affective spaces free to be cultivated for the growth of communities. The first task of in this process, what Brathwaite accomplished in the earlier portion of his career, was the crafting of the West Indian voice: “a complex of imposed “establishment” tongues (Standard English, French, Dutch, etc.) and the mainly submerged patterns of the “folk”” dialect (Brathwaite, Roots, 115).

The work of Brathwaite the poet thus became the praxical work of Brathwaite the theoretician. In his text “The African Presence in Carribean Literature,” Brathwaite suggested that a “nation language” could be reflective of not only “sound-symbols,” but also “certain tunes, tones, and rhythms which are characteristic of the folk tradition and are often essential features of its expression.” (Brathwaite, Roots, 243) That is to say, linguistic meaning does not only come in the words that we exchange between one another but also in the spectrum of all the other sounds that humans make, our extraverbal or musical communication, and also the rhythmic aspects of the ways that we vocalize. He takes this further in “History of the Voice,” developing the sense that a nation language is a form of counter-hegemonic discourse, that of “slaves and laborers” (Brathwaite, Roots, 206), and constitutes an authentic linguistic entity. Making reference to the Rastafarian rite of groundation, communal self-reflection accompanying cannabis smoking, he implicitly demonstrates the way that common discourse is a prerequisite for the formation of community, and particularly those that arise in resistance to histories of violence and disenfranchisement.

In achieving this, Brathwaite pulls a bit of a Charles Chestnutt by working as an archivist of vernacular expression in expanding a canon that had sought to exclude Black voices. His voice, however, is not in the parodic way that Chestnutt subverts plantation fiction to depict the adjacent streams of Black and white lives, and the failed or successful instances of communication between them. Instead, Brathwaite’s work seeks to outrun the reference to the histories of slavery and colonialism as necessary foundational scenes and to springboard off of inscription/transcription of speech itself as a kind of cogito. He synthesizes a voice for island life by yanking the sonic quality of island life into print. When he later reclaims it within the digital sphere, in the form Ignacio Infante calls a “digital vernacular”, he takes a step out of a context marked by nation-states and literature as a power-inflected object of printed matter, and  into the cultural fabric of the digital – where endless voices of diaspora are free to proliferate. For him, it is even more poignant that his works exist free-swimming in his computer’s random access memory, free of topology or heirarchy but all intertextually linked and at the ready.

In a sense, he demonstrates the art theorist Clement Greenberg definition of what it is like to be a modernist – “… the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence” (Greenberg, Avant Garde and Kitsch)  — to explain how one can take a formal aspect of one’s work, like the fact that a painting happens on canvas or that a digital text exists as multiple entangled codes (electrical currents, binary logic, and writing as we know it), and use that particular formal aspect as a point of reflection. So when Bratwaithe writes

he is still initializing the reader’s sense of the context, drawing attention to the medium he is working in and the one it has succeeded to situate himself as a subject in the larger flow of technological history (as the mention of “mercentalists” helps situate). Once he has done that, he is free to mobilize his poetic voice to performatively create the images and soundscapes of his Caribbean world. Because his work is not written on paper, we can more readily read it out loud and experience it sonorously, something of which Brathwaite seemed acutely aware of:

“Likewise, the African presence in Caribbean literature can not be fully or easily perceived until we redefine the term “literature” to include the nonscribal material of the folk-oral tradition, which on examination, turns out to have a much longer history than our scribal tradition, to have been relevant to the majority of our people, and to have unquestionably wider provenance.”

Infante calls Brathwaite’s poetry “a vernacular performance that aims at grounding a particular accumulative history of the Caribbean (172). He contends that Brathwaite’s writing sets up up a poetic world defined simply by its own existence and constituting a representation of Caribbean history that doesn’t need to be tethered to anything to explain it. Infante suggests that his corpuses collapses the distinction between a “pedagogical temporality of history” (Infante, 174),  the way that explaining things in a historical sense necessary means referring back to a passage in logically-organized periods of time throughout which something was developed, and the the opposite “performative temporality of poetics” (Infante, 174), the way that poetic discourse creates a world which doesn’t need to be explained in reference to anything that preceded. It merely exists self-sufficiently in being uttered.

That all being said, theorist Brathwaite recognizes that, in some degree, the onus is on him to provide explanations when he makes references in the quest of his nation-making poetics. This confession uncomfortably pins him between the pursuit of his work as a community-building prerogative and his own concern with being more widely understood by audiences. We see him grappling with this sense of responsibility when he mentions that he provides footnotes to his works “with great reluctance, since the irony is that they may suggest the poetry is so obscure in itself that it has to be lighted up; is so lame, that is to have a crutch; and (most hurtful of all) that it is bookish, academic, “history.” (Brathwaite, X/Self, 113) Here, the notion of being “academic” suggests being contrived, obscurantist, or out-of-touch with an authentic reality and is marked by the presence of footnotes, rather recognition of the fact that because “Caribbean culture has been so cruelly neglected both by the Caribbean itself, and by the rest of the world” (173) that these clarifications are needed to make sense of the potent allusions in his work. Even further still, Brathwaite’s axiety about the reception of SycoraxVS seems pulled taut between its two different forms of materiality: as its self-assured digital form, or as a printed, outward facing piece of media that is expected to hold up when negotiated for its intelligibility. Brathwaite’s poems do not seem to be quite like Amiri Baraka’s, whose poems “set fire and death to Whities ass” (Baraka, Black Art) rather than allude to Descartes or Shakespeare. 

Here, I think it becomes very easy to critique Brathwaite on his potential entanglement with Ezra Poundian-type invocations of the Western canon (though the habit of namedropping many of his colleagues alleviates this charge) and, as Leah notes in her post, the way he seems to pander the white Apollonian through such invocations rather than to un-apologetically represent the Black Dionysian. But in the way that his work offers a nascent form of Black posthumanism/modernism, the SycoraxVS corpus feels like an authentically revolutionary gesture.

In “Faulkner’s “Greek Amphora Priestess”: Verbena and Violence in The Unvanquished,” Patricia Yaeger writes that “Scitex and its photogenic lesions become an unexpected metaphor for gender trauma at the heart of The Unvanquished,” (203) referring to the computer retouching program used to edit images of the female body in fashion photography. Yaeger calls into question Faulkner’s ancillary treatment of women (be they Black and enslaved and so rendered largely subaltern, or white and thus beholden to the order of Southern society and its respectability politics), comparing their roles as stand-ins for real women to the way that Scitexization robs them of the those visible marks of social inscription under the regimes of patriarchy and brings on the erasure of “the body’s experience [and] its connection to institutional power” (193). Yaeger also gives treatment to the resurfacing metaphor of verbena flowers, their many inflections throughout the book as a function of Drusilla’s femininity, and their intense overdetermination to the point of full dehiscence — much like the young Trickster-spirited Drusilla is eventually torn asunder by the tides of the Old and New Southern Woman leaving behind only an olfactory trace of the “jettisoned” subject.

Yaeger seems to be working in the line of post-Freudian feminist criticism — she makes frequent reference to Faulkner’s search for the site of  a “melancholy” about demise of an emergent Southern trans-racial solidarity at the hands of ballot-guarding Jim Crow. Here, Yaeger is employing a definition of melancholy (as elaborated by Julia Kristeva) as the grief one feels about the death of a love object one cannot identify — Drusilla is never allowed to be, restlessly crossing categories throughout the novel’s plot, throwing off polite white womanhood for military service, first pressured into marrying the Father, Colonel Sartoris because her relative’s implication that they have become intimate, before bearing witness to his death and succession (political and sexual) by the son, Bayard. Her “melancholy” binding to the counterposed identities, all summing up to a nascent form of Southern life that never come to fruition, push upon Drusilla’s character, as Yaeger writes, — “the increasingly grotesque site of a white woman’s body”– this she has no choice to “discharge this imponderable tension”.

 We can draw a vague connection to Slavoj Zizek’s riff on Lacan’s understanding of desire in his essay “Courtly Love, or, Woman As Thing”: the site of the woman is the center pole of a forcefield in which all the whims of the male writer are expressed in relief to an love interest (but applicable here at large), structuring all chauvinistic desires around it but restricting the woman to simply as a reflective surface devoid of its own organic content. In this case, Faulkner wants to solve the racist South’s problems at the expense of the emotional labor of women, the capacity of which he takes for granted as an endless fount. This presumption suffuses Faulkner’s masculinist worldview, so much so that he writes — in a moment that rings with an muddled sense of self-awareness — “Only like I said, maybe times are never strange to women: that it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks” (83). Here, Faulkner denies the subjectivity of women by offering the view in which their lives are precedent on the perpetual unfolding of the actions of men, whereby the truth is (in a dialectical kind of way) that without the syntagmatic presence of the emotional-laboring women, male characters would not have narrative steam if not for plots where they kill one another (alone, in groups, or any combination therein). 

Still, Faulkner is white and while Drusilla bears the symbolic albatross of the latter section of the book, there is very little granted in that regard to the Black women. On the whole, Yaeger rightly notes that “in the midst of this romantic soup Faulkner forges an uneven story about Black emancipation” (204). However, within that confused mass there are flashpoints moments in which Faulkner sketches (by accident) the outline of something that he does not  understand but, in so doing, documents and preserves an historical affective grain that can be now read out of his text — as Yaeger suggests in invoking Toni Morrison’s “analysis of the complexity of any act of literary “failure”, hinting that even “a failed text […] may be encountering material it cannot control, trying simultaneously to address and to avoid topics buried, distorted, or sociologically askew within a region’s political unconscious” (205).  See the way in which the violently anti-suffragist (to put it lightly) Drusilla comes to cry at the chest of Louvinia, who assumes the role of the matriarchal character in a moment of what Yaeger calls racial schizophrenia. “Louvinia is asked to mirror the depth and breadth of humanity itself,” she writes, after being subjected to the length of a book whose true melancholic charge comes from the depiction of “ the constant loss of speech, rights, recognition, and selfhood that African Americans endured without benefit of public mourning” (218), and within this, the systematic erasure of Black women. 

Despite its shortcomings, which are equal parts Faulkner’s race-confused white dude-ness and ease at using women characters as “a mere prop in a world where men can freely appropriate feminine symbols while women who confiscate the attributes of the masculine world are sent to the margins, becoming abnormal, freakish, crazed,” (209) Faulkner assembles some particularly writerly gestures and symbols in The Unvanquished. It feels apt to tie together “the presence of the war’s uncivil crypts” (205), a stand in for burial and death, the humid feeling of mysticism that dwells in the Deep South (like the over-ground cemeteries of New Orleans and the practices of conjuring), and the violent overdetermination of Scixetized women till they vanish into an olfactory phenomenon, “an excision so aestheticized that it is almost invisible… a loss unnamed and almost impossible to mourn” (208). Drusilla is banished from the plot and leaves behind a pile of verbena flowers on her bed, the description of the smell of which begins the resolving note of the whole novel. The smell of which previously marked Bayard first sexual encounter with Drusilla. While it is stylistically intoxicating and a really quite beautiful piece of a language, it’s a romantically bizarre-o kind of conclusion for some of the brutal content within it. 

The aim of my paper is to examine the legacy of the South Side non-profit Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Founded in 1965, the AACM operated as a node in a robust network of South Side grassroots groups concerned with community service to the traditionally underserved part of the city — a result of a long-standing precedent in Chicago government to segregate and disenfranchise Black neighborhoods following the Great Migration. The AACM initially began as a way of making it possible for a larger group of performers to communally see their “creative music” performed, and functioned essentially like a musician’s worker cooperative. Its conception as a non-profit reflected a core ethic of horizontal organization and pedagogical proactivity. Soon thereafter, the AACM began to offer larger programs of community education, serving as an ad-hoc music resource center for younger members in the neighborhood, promoting the cultural value of radical improvisational music.

Democratizing access to fellow musicians, rehearsal spaces, and performance venues was a revolutionary gesture in the face of historically closed circuits of musical inscription controlled by white music industry personnel. My goal is to examine the way the AACM was able to shift the control of these tools of inscription through community organizing and non-profit-oriented resource aggregation, and understand the musical practice of improvisation as a break with the music power structures of genius-composer as value holder. Thus, free improvisation is a praxical and pedagogical position as well as an approach to music-making, and one that reflects the civic and moral concerns of the AACM at large.

My research will refer heavily to the history of the AACM as was recently reported by one of its core members, trombonist George E. Lewis, in his book A Power Greater Than Itself, in order to understand the tensions and sites of contestation that existed within the organization, but also to ascertain what has been left out the the organization’s self-reported narrative. Additionally, it will use trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s theoretical work Notes (8 Pieces) as a reference for some of the improvisatory practices espoused by the group (by way of Smith’s teaching) and how they map back onto organizational practices employeed by the AACM. Other texts, like Amy Absher’s Dissonance and the Desegregation of the Chicago Musician’s Union will offer a historical backdrop for the AACM as it relates to the plights of musicians in Chicago at this time, while sources Michael J. Budd’s The Art Ensemble of Chicago in Context examine how one particularly infamous AACM-based ensemble related to the Chicago musical econsystem. Iain Anderson’s work Jazz Outside the Marketplace will give a case study of the AACM with regards to non-profit sponsorship in the avant garde arts field.

Finally, my paper will conclude by detailing the continuing influence of the AACM, touching briefly on the distribution and reception history of the group’s members’ work, but focusing particularly on the way that its members have continued their careers: going on to work as academics and faculty in the United States’ leading conservatory programs and associated non-profits — re-codifying the cultural value of the organization/aesthetic movement’s contributions in an arena where that value is no longer challenged but wholly institutionalized instead.

Lewis, George E. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 22, 2002, pp. 215–246. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1519950.

Lewis, George. A Power Stronger than Itself : the AACM and American Experimental Music. University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Radano, Ronald M. “Jazzin’ the Classics: The AACM’s Challenge to Mainstream Aesthetics.” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, 1992, pp. 79–95. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/779283.

Smith, Wadada Leo, and John Corbett. Notes (8 Pieces): Source: a New World: Music: Creative Music. Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2015.

Budds, Michael J. “The Art Ensemble of Chicago in Context.” Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry, vol. 3, 1997, pp. 59–72., www.jstor.org/stable/4177063.

Absher, Amy. “Dissonance and the Desegregation of Chicago’s Musicians’ Union, 1963–1967.” The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900-1967, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2014, pp. 119–146. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.3974910.9.

Anderson, Iain. “Jazz Outside the Marketplace: Free Improvisation and Nonprofit Sponsorship of the Arts, 1965-1980.” American Music, vol. 20, no. 2, 2002, pp. 131–167. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1350138.

Hanson, Michael. “Suppose James Brown Read Fanon: The Black Arts Movement, Cultural Nationalism and the Failure of Popular Musical Praxis.” Popular Music, vol. 27, no. 3, 2008, pp. 341–365. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40212397.

Not many people can claim to be Ivanhoe alumna, but in this case, like Arianna, it’s my unique privilege. Playing the text is often a good opportunity to try and glean the central diorama of its plot out of some hidden and unique vantage point. Even if that window is far from the center of things, its constraint tends to play a generative role as you branch out further and further from the events into story and wade into the vaster universe that is the narrative’s historical backdrop.

This time around, I elected to play as Walter Hines Page, who was Charles Chestnutt’s old editor at the Atlantic Monthly and, later on, at publishing firm Doubleday, Page, and Co (of which he was a partner). When I played the first time, I wrote as the paratextually-relevant opera composer Benjamin Britten, whose complicated relation to the narrative of the source text and role in its various stagings allowed him not only to serve as a conduit for a discussion of reception history but also made it sensible for him to respond directly to the actions of characters in the story.

In this case, writing as Page didn’t allow me quite the same leeway. Though I would have liked to interact and respond to the characters from The Conjure Tales, it would not have made much sense for me to do so. This initially frustrated me, because it felt like the most I would be able to do is hunt down moments from the life and times of Chestnutt and Page, and bring them to the fore as little anecdotes. However, looking a little bit into the backdrop of Chestnutt’s work and using Page as an entry point to thinking about reception history offered a fruitful vantage for thinking about the way Chestnutt navigated the racialized arena of the publishing world. For one, Page’s position of power create many spaces where his intentions might be doubted, despite his posture as an enlightened Southerner who deplored slavery and wished for some kind of unification. As I continued looking into things, it became hard to tell whether he ever truly acted with Chestnutt’s best intentions in mind — and that their kinship was legitimate — or if he was merely another paternalistic white actor co-opting the cultural value Chestnutt was creating by acting as a self-righteous go-between.I found myself constantly wondering whether his sympathies were earnest or rooted in self-interest. There are many accounts that point towards the former, but reading about Braithwaite’s reference to Chestnutt as “Page’s darkie” (at the point that his writing career has slumped) calls all of that into question and arouses strong suspicion of false allyship.

Despite my initial fears about being unable to provide a compelling narrative, what I found most fruitful about playing Page was the opportunity to research and acquaint more fully with his and Chestnutt’s embeddedness within the literary social circles of the time. Finding out that the two of them went together to Mark Twain’s 70th birthday party is a particularly colorful example of that. All party description aside, what it offers is the peculiar and perhaps poignant knowledge that Page secured Chestnutt’s invitation to this exclusive event long after his moment of commercial success. The episode seems understandably bittersweet for Chestnutt, and further complicates our understanding of him relative to the overwhelmingly white literary apparatus. Though it says nothing about the content of his work, and of the hypocritical way white audiences wanted his local color stories but not his color line longform works, his attendance is significant and indexical of his own prestige as a writer. . Much in the way that institutional case studies show us the interaction between discrete actors and the larger structures surrounding them, playing Ivanhoe was helpful in thinking about Chestnutt’s role in a discrete passage of time in American social and cultural history.

Only suggestion, like others have pointed out, is a less constricted publishing interface. Some of the functionality, like the Insert Media function in the standard WordPress format, appeared to be missing. The ability to edit after the fact was also sorely missed, but perhaps serves as a useful reminder to edit carefully and slow down. Perhaps there is something about the way the post displays that make it slightly clunky for characters within the text to interact — perhaps a map displaying posts as interrelated nodes — but both my position as a firmly paratextual character and personal preference to digging up historical details meant that I just opted to stay in my lane.

In the introduction to The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois explains that he has endeavored “to sketch, in vague uncertain outline” the content of the spiritual life of Black Americans, and has ended his chronicle with a “tale told twice but seldom written, and a chapter of song” (1) In all these opening remarks, Du Bois makes reference to the content of the Black struggle but seems to acknowledge that his transmission of it is a daunting task, and particularly in regards to the selection of a medium which conveys in full fidelity. 

The contrast between his phenotypically marked Blackness and the whiteness of his New England education make Du Bois a racially liminal subject, especially given his acute understanding of the Veil that hangs between these two worlds in America. Furthermore, Du Bois’s initial caveats suggest that there is a challenge to transmitting the experiential content of one side to the other, and vice versa. Frustrated by this lack of common tongue, he confronts “the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood.” His absorption into white culture informs him of those tales so obvious that they are commonly repeated to white individuals but never shared with Black folks; strangely, when he speaks of the teachings that root from in his Blackness which white communities could benefit from, he frames this knowledge as “Greek” to his soul. The shadow of Classical European culture seems to tinge even Du Bois’ perception of his Black identity. 

To the white audience, the reality of Black suffering and religious life can be, at best, only “sketched” – gestured to in an affectively charged but potentially “unintelligible” fashion. The disparity in suffering makes broaching the gap between White oppression and Black experience seemingly impossible, though Du Bois tries. In attempting to pen the tale “seldom written”, he acknowledges the ontological gap between textual and oral accounts which he is up against. Turning the inscriptive apparatus on its head, he harnesses it to the end of Black liberation by the creation of this text.

However, the fact that Du Bois begins each section and finally concludes the entire work with music is not insignificant. “The passion of its human sorrow” is beyond what the colonizing means of language offer. Instead, the Black experience is sooner understood in its sonorous dimension – for instance, through its oral history, its spirituals and Sorrow Songs. With this emphasis on the voice and direct communication – unlike writing, which preserves ideas in an amber and takes them out of human circulation -oral history guarantees transmission from generation to generation, subverting the logocentrism of the Western tradition through the recourse to totalizing power of music.