Anthologies featuring African American Poetry, 1968 - 2013

• 1967 -- For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret Burroughs
• 1968 -- I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by Negro Americans edited Arnold Adoff
• 1968 -- Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature edited Abraham Chapman
• 1968 -- Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal
• 1968 -- Nine Black Poets edited by Robert Baird Shuman
• 1968 -- Dark Symphony edited by James A. Emanuel and Theodore Gross
• 1968 --Watts Poets: A Book of New Poetry and Essays edited by Quincy Troupe
• 1969 -- City in All Directions; an Anthology of Modern Poems edited by Arnold Adoff
• 1969 -- Black Arts: An Anthology of Black Creations edited by Ahmed Alhamisi and Harun Kofi Wangara
• 1969 -- The New Black Poetry edited by Clarence Major
• 1969 -- Black Poetry: A Supplement to Anthologies Which Exclude Black Poets edited by Dudley Randall
• 1969 -- Black American Literature: Poetry edited by Darwin Turner
• 1970 -- Afro-American Literature: Poetry edited by William Adams 
• 1970 -- Black Out Loud: An Anthology of Modern Poems by Americans edited by Arnold Adoff
• 1970 -- The Black Woman: An Anthology edited by Toni Cade Bambara
• 1970 -- We Speak as Liberators: Young Black Poets edited by Orde Coombs
• 1970 -- Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry edited by June Jordan
• 1971 -- Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology edited by Gwendolyn Brooks
• 1971 -- To Gwen With Love: An Anthology Dedicated to Gwendolyn Brooks edited by Patricia Brown
• 1971 -- The Black Poets: A New Anthology edited by Dudley Randall

A Notebook on Anthologies

2023 

• January 6: A Checklist of Anthologies featuring Black Writings, 1967 - 1976

2020

• November 25: From 250 Years to 250 Years of African American Poetry

2019

• February  2: Poetry, Anthologies, and Book History

2018
• October 10: Anthologizing Amiri Baraka
• September 17: Amiri Baraka's five most anthologized poems
• July 25: Amiri Baraka's three most anthologized poems

2016
• February 26: Poetry magazine published two of the most anthologized poems
• February 25: Two of the most popular non-anthologized poems
• February 24: Adding poems by Frances E. W. Harper & George Moses Horton
• February 23: 52 of the most anthologized African American poems
• January 6: Awards, anthologies, and the shift from poems to volumes of poetry

2014
• November 6: SOS, Poetry, and Black Arts Anthologies
• October 16: Sonnet Sequences vs. Poetry Anthology Patterns
• April 3: Lucille Clifton's Shifting Places in editions of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature

2013
• December 30: Repeatedly anthologized poems by black poets
• May 29: Anthologies featuring African American Poetry, 1968 - 2013
• May 24: 25 poems widely anthologized poems
• May 13: From "Black" to "African American" Poetry Anthologies
• February 17: Anthologies featuring African American Poetry, 2000 - 2012

2012
• September 30: Early Black American Poets (anthology) 
• September 29: I am the Darker Brother (anthology) 
• September 29: The back cover of Black Fire
• September 29: Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing 
• September 22: New Black Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Afro-American Literature   
• September 22: Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature 
• September 8: Black Spirits poetry anthology 
• September 6: Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry
• August 9: 20 Anthologies featuring African American Poetry, 2003 - 2011
• August 8: 20 Anthologies featuring African American Poetry, 1992 - 2002 
• March 6:  The Trouble with Anthologies & the Series Trend in Poetry 
• February 20: The Golden Age of Anthologies featuring Black Poetry

2011
• December 30: The Coverage of Rita Dove's Anthology
• November 4: A Prelude to Rita Dove's Anthology? 
• September  11: 30 Anthologies featuring Black Poetry, 1968-1975
• September 5: 6 Ways Black Arts Era Anthologies Shaped Black Literary History  
• August 2: 10 Notable African American Anthologies Feat. Poetry from the 1990s 

Related:
Assorted Notebooks

Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Kevin Young, and their playful poetry

Of the poets that we cover in my courses, students have consistently enjoyed the humor in poems by Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967), Amiri Baraka (b. 1934), and Kevin Young (b. 1970). Despite many differences of time, place, circumstance, and writing styles among the three writers, we recognize overlaps when it comes to tones of playfulness that appear in several of their works.

Taken together, Hughes, Baraka, and Young display a deep regard for the blues, producing poems that celebrate the people and sensibilities of the art-form. Transmuting the conventions and convictions of the blues into their poems perhaps means adapting and absorbing the humor and playing that characterizes the music. Like blues musicians, but unlike most contemporary poets, Hughes frequently uses rhyme, which students regularly find entertaining.

Baraka uses rhyme from time to time in his pieces to give his poems a sense of musicality. In his poem "RhythmBlues," he pays homage to the art-form and closes with the serious yet humorous lines "Slave boy, leroy, from Newark Hill / If capitalism dont kill me, racism will!" Young doesn't rhyme much, but a poem like "Black Cat Blues" does bring chuckles with its opening lines:

I showed up for jury duty—
turns out the one on trial was me.

Paid me for my time & still
I couldn't make bail.


Judge that showed up
was my ex-wife.

Now that was some
hard time.

The blues ethos provides Hughes and Young with the materials to produce memorable and funny hard-luck guys as well as tough, bad women. For Hughes, it's a figure like Madam Alberta K. Johnson, and for Young, is a figure like Delilah Redbone, from his book Black Maria, who informs listeners that "I make men / get religion when / I strut by— / Lordy, they say, /My my." For Baraka, a blue ethos means offering biting and humorous questions, like: "If Elvis Presley is the King, who is James Brown---God?!?" 

The playfulness that we find  in poems by Hughes, Baraka, and Young is rooted, among other things, to  the sensibilities of the blues or a blues ethos.

A Notebook on the work of Langston Hughes

2013 
• May 28: Links to Langston Hughes's Madam Alberta K. Johnson poems 
• July 26: Presidential Politics & African American Poetry 
• April 14: The hues of Hughes, the dynamism of D.A.S.H.
• April 3: Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes & RapGenius 

2012 
• September 27: Accumulative Advantage, Poetry, and Langston Hughes
• January 21: 10 Poems by Langston Hughes on the Poetry Foundation site 

2011 
• August 22: Encountering Poems by Langston Hughes in Comic Strips 
• July 14: Langston Hughes in Poetry magazine
• July 12: 4 Langston Hughes poems from 1926 Poetry Magazine 
• June 20: Teleportation & Hughes's "Negro Speaks of Rivers": An Afrofuturist Reading   
• May 20: Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, & Black Poetry Placement Power  
• May 7: Kevin Young & the Langston Hughes Connection

Related:
An Extended Notebook on the works of writers & artists

Links to Langston Hughes's Madam Alberta K. Johnson poems

Langston Hughes wrote a series of poems in the voice of a fictive character Madam Alberta K. Johnson. She was, as Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad has noted  "an assertive, brassy Harlem heroine." 
What follows are links to some of those poems.

• Madam’s Past History
• Madam and the Phone Bill 
• Madam and Her Madam
• Madam and the Census Man 
• Madam And The Rent Man
• Madam's Calling Cards

Madam and the Phone Bill

Madam and the Phone Bill

Black men in the arts, humanities & politics born between 1948 - 1969

A while back, I produced a list "Accomplished black men in the arts born between 1965 - 1975 as part of a project that I was working on and also as part of my ongoing observations about birth years and age matters. Reading Mark Anthony Neal's book Looking for Leroy has inclined me to turn the clock back a little. I decided to start the following list with 1948, the year Avery Brooks, one focal point in Neal's book and 1969, the birth year of Jay-Z, who is also a key figure in the study.    

Avery Brooks b. 1948 -- actor
Clarence Thomas b. 1948 -- Supreme Court Justice
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. b. 1950 -- scholar
Luther Ronzoni Vandross (1951 – 2005) -- singer
Manning Marable (1950 - 2011) -- scholar
Cornel West b. 1953 -- scholar
Denzel Washington b. 1954 --  actor
Stephen L. Carter b. 1954 -- legal scholar, novelist
Randall Kennedy b. 1954 -- legal scholar
Deval Patrick b. 1956 -- politician, governor of Massachusetts 
Steve Harvey b. 1957 -- actor, television host
Russell Simmons b. 1957 -- producer, co-founder of record label Def Jam
Michael Eric Dyson b. 1958 -- scholar 
Prince b. 1958 -- singer, musician 
Ice T b. 1958 -- rapper, actor
Chuck D b. 1960 -- rapper
Barack Obama b. 1961 -- politician, President of the United States
Eddie Murphy b. 1961 -- comedian, actor
Gene Anthony Ray (1962 – 2003) -- actor
Chris Rock b. 1965 -- comedian, actor 
KRS-ONE b. 1965 -- rapper
Dr. Dre b. 1965 -- rapper, record producer, entrepreneur
Kyle Baker b. 1965 -- cartoonist, illustrator
Stuart Scott b. 1965 -- sports commentator 
Kenny Smith b. 1965 -- former basketball player, basketball commentator
Keith Knight b. 1966 -- comic book artist, writer 
Stephen A. Smith b. 1967 -- sports commentator 
Jamie Foxx b. 1967 -- actor, comedian 
R. Kelly b. 1967 -- singer, musician 
Rakim b. 1968 -- rapper
Will Smith b. 1968-- rapper, actor
Ice Cube b. 1969-- rapper, actor, producer
Diddy b. 1969 -- rapper, producer
Tyler Perry b. 1969 -- actor, producer
Cory Booker b. 1969 -- politician, mayor of Newark, New Jersey
Colson Whitehead b. 1969 -- novelist
Jay-Z b. 1969 -- rapper, producer

Related:
• A Notebook on Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy  

Uncanny Black Women, Illegible Black Men

During the course of the past academic year, I've discussed the idea of uncanny black women characters with Briana Whiteside, a first-year student in our M.A. grad program in English. I've followed along as she wrote several blog entries on the subject. Now, I'm following along as I read Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy, and he discusses "legible" and "illegible" black masculinities.

For Briana, the touchstone is Octavia Butler, especially Butler's mysterious women. For Neal, one of the touchstones is Leroy (played by Gene Anthony Ray) in the movie and then television series Fame. Neal discusses how a range of black men and black men personas, including Hawk, Denzel Washington, S. Carter, R. Kelly, and others are both legible and illegible in the public imagination based on how they are read and misread.    

Lately, Briana has been thinking through the differences between "strong" and "uncanny" black women. Interestingly, talking with her about the subject made Neal's work even more legible to me as I began reading his book. At the same time, the extended and scholarly treatments that Neal is providing are giving me ideas on how I might advise Briana to move forward with her own work.

Briana is a year out of undergrad, and Neal is well into a distinguished career. I'm enjoying thinking about the places where their works meet and diverge. 
  
Related
• A Notebook on Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy 

A notebook on dance -- past and present By Danielle Hall

Katherine Dunham

For a few years now, Danielle Hall has been studying the life and career of dancer, anthropologist, and writer Katherine Dunham. In the process, Danielle has studied the histories of dance and culture. What follows is a notebook that she produced making connections between dance--past and present.

Entries
• Katherine Dunham’s Intellectual Plight
• The Underground Origins of Twerking
• Katherine Dunham Dance Glossary
• 8 Vintage Sensual Performances by Black Women
• Key Twerk or Dance Moments in Music and Film
• The Form and Function of Twerking

***
Danielle Hall is a program coordinator and contributing writer for Black Studies @ SIUE.    

8 Vintage Sensual Performances by Black Women

By Danielle Hall

In her book Babylon Girls, author and scholar Jayna Brown describes the complex world of early black women performers. She describes the chorus girls and burlesquers of the period as well as other notable women whom she argues became “figures of self-gratification, not self-abjection and denial.” In the following quote, Brown discusses the advantages that underground environments provided for black women of the working class:

Black popular music and social dance were part of the world of alternative economies…They offered a conditional release from the official forms of exploitative labor in the post-slavery era, paying much more than jobs available under the racist caste system in the United States. For women stage performance was an alternative to the bedroom work of sexual labor…and poorly paid scullery and laundry work in middle-class households. It offered black working-class women mobility and independence. They could earn a good living expressing themselves creatively, working alongside friends and lovers.

Below I’ve provided links to 8 classic examples of the more erotic dances and techniques by African American women performers that have since evolved into more tantalizing variations.

Josephine Baker - Danse Sauvage (1926)

Nina Mae McKinney – Hallelujah (1929) around the 3:00 mark

Ethel Waters and Lena Horne – Cabin in the Sky (1943); at 2:40, Petunia tells Georgia Brown “ain’t it about time you got into that cootch dance.”

Katherine Dunham & Dance Company in film Cashbah (1948)

From following women are in the 1949 film Burlesque in Harlem:

Tarza “The Exotic” Young – quite elegant but she turns it up at about the 1:30 and 2:17 marks

Princess D’orsay – a Josephine Baker-style striptease/flapper dancer

Gertrude “Baby” Banks

Gloria “The Atomic Bomb” Howard – provides a Dunham-style Afro-Caribbean dance number with lots of shakes, shimmies, and thrusts.

Related:
• A notebook on dance -- past and present

***
Danielle Hall is a program coordinator and contributing writer for Black Studies @ SIUE.

Katherine Dunham’s Intellectual Plight

Katherine Dunham in Cabin in the Sky

By Danielle Hall

I was once asked what I thought the difference was between Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham. Undeniably, both Baker and Dunham were dance icons of the 20th century. Josephine Baker, who witnessed the East St. Louis race riots of 1917, dropped out of school when she was 12 and began dancing in the streets of St. Louis’s Chestnut Valley neighborhood and vaudeville acts prior to her acclaim in Paris.

While Dunham had a difficult childhood, she was raised in a black middle class home. The notable difference between the two women is seemingly social class and formal education. There is no doubt about it, at the height of Dunham’s dance career she was the hottest thing on Broadway and in theaters and cabaret venues around the world—even Josephine Baker attended Dunham’s Paris debut and congratulated her on her success.

Aside from Baker, Dunham’s education was the one key element that made her notably different in the entertainment world among many exceptionally talented black performers. In many ways, this could be seen as Dunham’s intellectual impasse. Behind the scenes of the 1940 Broadway production, Cabin in the Sky, Dunham was perhaps misunderstood mostly by her headlining cast mate Ethel Waters, who had proclaimed to an associate producer “Ah don’ know nothin’ bout no anthropology, but Ah sho’ know a lot of naked asses wigglin’ when Ah see ‘em!”

In a 1946 article titled “Schoolmarm Turned Siren or Vice Versa,” New York Times theater critic John Martin said of Dunham “One group recognizes in her a woman of fine intellect, a sincere student of anthropology…The other group sees her as a beautiful, highly sexed theatrical entertainer, with surprisingly few inhibitions in the material she puts on the stage.”

For Dunham, dance as an extension of her intellectual self was perhaps the primary site for articulating the interwoven political, disembodied, and artistic consciousness that is often divorced from each other. The stage was not only a prime platform for artistic expression but became a prime location to establish her personal freedom agenda by challenging racist conventions of sexuality and in more ways than one, made the invisible black, visible and dignified.

Related:
• A notebook on dance -- past and present

***
Danielle Hall is a program coordinator and contributing writer for Black Studies @ SIUE.

Katherine Dunham Dance Glossary

By Danielle Hall

As I stated in my previous blog, I wanted to provide a brief synopsis of terms of or relating to dance movements and techniques that Dunham, in her studies of Haitian and Caribbean society and ritual life, outlined in her master’s thesis. In American culture, we can see the retentions of such movements in popular dances, but without the naming and documentation of dances it becomes harder to locate its history. This is perhaps one reason some historians shy away from studying dance histories.

Banda – the name of a dance and also of an African tribe.

Collé – a dance movement consisting of face-to-face contact, close together body contact.

Congo Pailette – Dance of the Congo sect, line of women and men approaching each other with sexual intent.

danse collé - mass dance in close body contact for example Carnival season.

danse des hanches – dances which emphasize hip, pelvic, and buttock movements, serving as sexual stimulation, release, and symbolism i.e. mascaron, maison, Congo Pailette.

danse du ventre – classification given to dances emphasizing the rolling of the stomach muscles; peculiar to Carnival and rara.

dos-bas – a dance movement, with the back low or down, parallel to the floor.

gouillé – a hip movement in dancing. A gouillade is an elaborate, grinding hip movement

gros bouzin – dance popular during Carnival time. Literal translation is “big prostitute.”

maison (mazon) – a specialized cult dance to shift from religious to sexual ecstasy, grotesquely sexual in movement and form.

pou’ plaisi’ – done for fun, pleasure.

rara – street dances and dance groups with characteristics of both sacred and secular dance, associated with the Lenten season and Carnival.

Yanvalou – a religious dance honoring Damballa; low, undulating movements, usually in ¾ or 6/8 time.

‘zépaules – Vodun dance of Legba, or other *loas, emphasizing rapid shoulder movement. *loa(s) (lwa) – God(s).
----------

Notes

Dunham, Katherine. Dances of Haiti. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 1983.

Originally submitted as her master’s thesis, “Dances of Haiti: Their Social Organization, Classification, Form, and Function,” to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1938.

Originally published as “Las Danzas de Haití.”Acta Anthropologica II:4 (1947, Mexico; in Spanish and English) and Les Danses de Haiti (Paris: Fasquel Press, 1957) in French.

Related:
• A notebook on dance -- past and present

***
Danielle Hall is a program coordinator and contributing writer for Black Studies @ SIUE.

Key Twerk or Dance Moments in Music and Film

By Danielle Hall

These are just a few key dance moments I’ve selected to highlight key components in twerk dancing or shakin’ it. It’s not intended to be a comprehensive listing and I’ve refrained from using the most explicit videos.

• Salt-N-Pepa – Shake Your Thing (1988) “so what are we gonna do about this dirty dancing?”
• E.U. – Da Butt from the School Daze soundtrack (1988)
• Oaktown 3.5.7 – Yeah Yeah Yeah (1989)
• Sydney and Sharane in the film House Party (1990)
• Patra – Queen of the Pack (1993)
• MC Hammer – Pumps and a Bump (1994) – some of the best “twerk” choreography 2:27
• Juvenile – Back That Thang Up (1999)
• Aaliyah – Rock the Boat (2002)
• Kelis – Milkshake (2003)
• Rihanna – Pon de Replay (2005)
• Sean Paul – Get Busy (2009)
• Ludacris – How Low (2010)
• Beyonce – Dance For You (2011)
• Waka Flocka Flame – Round of Applause (2012)
• Ciara – Body Party (2013)

Related:
• A notebook on dance -- past and present

***
Danielle Hall is a program coordinator and contributing writer for Black Studies @ SIUE.

Twerk Key Terms

By Danielle Hall

Twerk or the act of twerking is the physical manipulation in dance characterized by the twisting or jiggling of isolated parts of the body (i.e. buttocks, abdomen, or pelvic region) or total body articulation in a sexually suggestive, most often explicit, manner.

Related Terms: the bump, booty bump, freaking, the butt, wobble, backin’ it up, “poppin’,” droppin’, working’ it, droppin’ it like it’s hot, the percolator, eagle’s dance, or in more derogatory terms p¬¬¬____ poppin' or tip drillin’

“Da Butt” (a popular song by E.U.),

“Shake Your Thing” (a popular song by Salt-N-Pepa)

Tip Drill – a popular, but controversial song by Nelly that alludes to a woman with a nice body or singular physical attributes (i.e. breasts, thighs, hips, etc.) performing dances for pay (i.e. a tip).

hootchy-cootchy or hoochie-coochie – originating in the Middle East this sensual dance, or belly dance, is performed by a woman and characterized through torso isolations and articulation of the hips usually the shaking, shimmying, and gyrating of the torso. It was popularized by a belly dance trio known as Little Egypt (Farida Mazar Spyropoulos, Ashea Wabe and Fatima Djemille)

Hoochie Mama – a likely derivative of the dance is an urban idiom that generally means an African American woman who dresses provocatively or who is promiscuous.

Related Industry: striptease, burlesque, vaudeville, erotic or exotic dancing, pole dancing, pole dance fitness, belly dance, cabaret, chorus girls, chorus line, chorus girls, gypsies, acrobatics.

Related:
• A notebook on dance -- past and present

***
Danielle Hall is a program coordinator and contributing writer for Black Studies @ SIUE.

The Underground Origins of Twerking

The Twerk Team, a popular dance duo that appears on YouTube

 By Danielle Hall


Dance has been around since the beginning of time. However, it is the polyrhythmic nature of twerk dances that indicates its African retention, which range from the social/secular dances to aspects of religious/ritual ceremonies evidenced in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States and other regions.

Similarities can be seen in dances like the Mapouka dance in the Dabou region of Ivory Coast, West Africa or the Bel Congo dance, Afro-Caribbean in style. Taken together, these dances and movements embody everyday village life from harvest to hunting as well as life stages like coming of age, courtship, marriage, sexuality, fertility, and funeral; to invoke spirit(s); or carnival celebrations.

Twerking is said to have originated in New Orleans during the hip hop bounce music era in the early 1990s, but African dance in New Orleans also points to its historic Congo Square, a public locale where 18th century slaves would gather on Sundays to sing, dance and play music.

Twerking, then, is indeed a modern social/secular dance rooted in Southern rap/hip hop culture. It likely received mainstream media attention by Miami artist, Luke and the 2 Live Crew’s 1990 album debut, Banned in the U.S.A. further emphasized receiving attention in lyrics and video footage of the Atlanta Freaknik, a large spring break gathering held in Atlanta, GA. Even Kim and Freddie from the TV sitcom A Different World made plans to attend Freaknik in a 1989 episode (although the location was changed to D.C.).

Twerking was further popularized during the hip hop crunk era with Atlanta based artist Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz’s Get Crunk, Who Ya Wit? album debut in 1996. Twerk has been used by artists like Master P and Houston’s Underground Kingz’s (UGK) “Take It Off” in 1999. In 2003, the word twerk was used in Lil Jon’s “Get Low” featuring the Ying Yang Twins. It has promoted and made alternative economies like strip clubs more widely acceptable. There is an official Twerk Team, two sisters based in Atlanta, who have been referenced in songs like Waka Flocka’s “Round of Applause,” which was filmed on location at the Diamonds of Atlanta Premiere Gentleman’s Club.

While many may argue that twerking is misogynistic, and I don’t deny that it is problematic, for many African American women and women of color, the dance is viewed as a form of self-expression and empowerment, and for some, a form of economic security. Twerking has come a long way and is in the process of acculturation. It’s no longer just a thing that’s done in the underground. It has even surpassed the infamous rap video. It’s on reality TV and YouTube. There has been an emergence of pole dancing and pole fitness classes across the country. Women and men even have poles installed in their homes.

In California, some 33 high school seniors were suspended for their “Awesome Twerk” video and just last week Stevie Ryan of VH1’s Stevie TV declared in comedic form that she’s “addicted to twerking…I’m really just a social twerker.” It appears that twerking is not going anywhere anytime soon.
 
Related:
• A notebook on dance -- past and present

***
Danielle Hall is a program coordinator and contributing writer for Black Studies @ SIUE.

The Form and Function of Twerking

By Danielle Hall

It all started when I was tagged to a facebook post which read “Her studies led her to develop a new technique called “dance isolation,” which involves moving one part of the body while all other parts remain motionless, "Katherine Dunham, inventor of twerking and tip drilling.” While I asked the person to take the post down, I also realized that it was really intended for me to see it in the first place. Hmm, what would Dunham say about twerking?

I immediately directed myself to Miss Dunham’s master’s thesis, “Dances of Haiti” first published in Spanish in 1947; in French in 1957; and finally in English in 1983. What I explored was her glossary, specifically those terms relating to dances or physical movements that could in some way be seen in modern twerk techniques. This is not a shoddy attempt to devalue Miss Dunham’s name and work by any means.

In fact, from what I’ve studied about Katherine Dunham and from stories I’ve been told by people who have studied under her, Miss Dunham could pull greatness out of anyone. This was one of the very reasons why she chose East St. Louis as her home in the 1960s. She wanted to help at-risk youth and young adults by teaching them about their history and culture and through the arts she wanted them to find value not only in themselves, but also in their community.

Miss Dunham had a lifetime of experience navigating various socio-economic and ethnic boundaries. However, much of her repertoire stems from those dances of the underprivileged and marginalized people of color. Twerking, as a modern dance, has evolved from earlier dances, many that Dunham and her predecessors were familiar with, but because of Dunham’s anthropology and dance background she was in a better position to document, define, interpret and choreograph such techniques, thereby establishing her own dance pedagogy.

For the informally trained dancer, there is no model. There are no notations or examples (with the exception of music videos and the now the internet). Still, what is clear about twerking is it is a dance form derived from urban/street dancing, nightclub venues and a working class environment.

Related:
• A notebook on dance -- past and present

***
Danielle Hall is a program coordinator and contributing writer for Black Studies @ SIUE.

Jay-Z's Cosmopolitanism: Notes from Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy

After reading the introduction of Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy, I decided to jump ahead and read the chapter on Jay-Z entitled "'My Passport Says Shawn': Toward a Hip-Hop Cosmopolitanism." Of the figures -- Gene Anthony Ray, Avery Brooks, R. Kelly, Denzel Washington, Barack Obama, Luther Vandross, and characters from The Wire -- that Neal covers in his book, I've probably followed and paid attention to Jay-Z the closest and for the longest amount of time.

I've read several profiles on Jay-Z over the years, and now I'm inclined to add Neal's piece somewhere at the top of the list. Of course, it's more than a profile, engaging academic discourse more than the journalist  pieces would, but the scope of Neal's coverage and his attention to rap lyrics, back-stories, music videos, news items, and contemporary matters related to his subject align his work with something beyond the conventional scholarly essay.

Neal makes the case that Jay-Z is increasingly cosmopolitan, a concept signaling the extent to which figures participate in global experience, or, in the words of a much noted book on the subject by Timothy Brennan, cosmopolitanism refers to being "at home in the world." Given Jay-Z's beginnings in an impoverished corner of the world, his rise as a global icon and world traveler is even more notable. Neal goes farther and notes that in addition to Jay-Z having access to the world, the world also now has access to Brooklyn, to hip hop, to aspects of black culture through Jay-Z.

By explaining how Jay-Z and his productions disrupt multiple, conventional readings, Neal extends the overall project of his work of "rending 'legible' black male bodies...illegible, while simultaneously rendering so-called illegible male bodies...legible."    

Related
• A Notebook on Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy 

Reading Mark Anthony Neal (a quick look back)

As a graduate student at Penn State over 10 years ago, I was primarily working on topics related to the Black Arts Movement, that is, when I wasn't fulfilling the general English requirements. In the spare time that I had from studying writings related to the 1960s and 1970s, I recall beginning to read 4 writers whom I've now consistently followed since that time.

There was Colson Whitehead and Aaron McGruder on the artistic side and Alondra Nelson and Mark Anthony Neal in scholarly realms. Nelson was moderating the Afrofuturism list; she co-edited and edited books on technology; and her essay "Afrofuturism: Past Future Visions" became one of my favorites. Around that same time period, Neal had written three books -- Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998) -- that signaled and solidified his

I viewed Neal as producing a contemporary history of Rhythm and Blues, and he was also providing important cultural commentary on a range of artistic works being produced from the 1980s onward,  or what some refer to as the Post-Civil Rights era. He was also one of the first scholars I encountered who wrote about The Boondocks. Over the years, he has been a consistently engaged commentator, writer (in multiple formats), and moderator concerning black popular culture and African American studies, broadly conceived.         

I ordered Neal's latest work Looking for Leroy last week, and when it finally arrived a few days ago, I was excited about the opportunity of extending my journey reading his work.

Related
• A Notebook on Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy 

A Notebook on Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy

This notebook comprises a series of short writings on Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013). I'm not providing a full-fledged review. Instead, I'm mostly taking notes on topics from his book that really catch my attention and assist with the work that I'm doing concerning black men writers on the one hand and collegiate black men on the other.

Here's a write-up about the book:

Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. Neal argues that black men and boys are bound, in profound ways, to and by their legibility. The most “legible” black male bodies are often rendered as criminal, bodies in need of policing and containment. Ironically, Neal argues, this sort of legibility brings welcome relief to white America, providing easily identifiable images of black men in an era defined by shifts in racial, sexual, and gendered identities.

Neal highlights the radical potential of rendering legible black male bodies—those bodies that are all too real for us—as illegible, while simultaneously rendering illegible black male bodies—those versions of black masculinity that we can’t believe are real—as legible.

I'm looking forward to reading and collecting notes on what he's written.

Entries:
• Jay-Z & Big Data: Mark Anthony Neal Decodes S. Carter 
• Reading Mark Anthony Neal (a quick look back)
• Jay-Z's Cosmopolitanism: Notes from Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy 
• Uncanny Black Women, Illegible Black Men
• Other Kinds of Recovery Work
• Black men in the arts, humanities & politics born between 1948 - 1969
• The Return of a Soul Man Scholar 

Related:
• Mark Anthony Neal 

Black Studies Readings for AALCI in June 2013

Next month, at the University of Texas San Antonio, I'll work with fellows in the African American Literatures and Cultures Institute, a program founded and directed by literary scholar and all-around-extraordinaire Joycelyn Moody. I handle the day-to-day seminar duties and reading assignments for the program.

Here are, for the most part, the works we'll read.

• Alexander, Michelle. from The New Jim Crow
• Anderson, Elijah. "Emmett and Trayvon: How racial prejudice in America has changed in the last sixty years"
• Bambara, Toni Cade. From The Black Woman: An Anthology
• Black Panther Party Platforms 1966 & 1972
• Black poetry packet
• Black poetry: A timeline, 1854 - 2013
• Combahee River Collective Statement
• Diagram of the Slave ship Brooks 
• DuBois, W. E. B. “On Being Crazy.”
• -----, Tom Pomplun, and Kyle Baker. “On Being Crazy.”
• Fryer, Roland. “Acting White”
• Gladwell, Malcolm. "Creation Myth"
• -----. "Small Change"
• -----. "The Tweaker"
• Harris, Trudier. “Black Nerds”
• Johnson, Charles. "The Transmission"
• Keywords List
• Knight, Keith. from Are We Feeling Safer Yet?
• Longman, Phillip. “To Live Longer, Move to a New Zip Code”
• Malcolm X “Message to the Grassroots”
• McGruder, Aaron. Aaron. from A Right to Be Hostile
• Middleton, Harris. The Black Book
• Morrison, Toni. “Behind the Making of the Black Book"
• Nelson, Alondra. "Afrofuturism: Past Future Vision"
• Patton, Stacey. "Black Studies: 'Swaggering Into the Future"
• Randall, Alice. "Black Women and Fat"
• Rediker, Marcus From The Slave Ship: A Human History
• Reed, Ishmael. "Flight to Canada"
• Rooks, Noliwe. "Do Black Women Really Want to Be Fat?"
• Rose, Tricia. From The Hip Hop Wars
• Sawyer, Keith. From Explaining Creativity
• Schuessler, Jennifer. “Drug Policy as Race Policy: Best Seller Galvanizes the Debate”
• Shenk, David. “The 32 Million Word Gap”
• Trethewey, Natasha. “Native Guard.”
• Whitehead, Colson. "A Psychotronic Childhood: Learning from B-movies"
• Wilson, William J. "The Economic Plight of Inner-City Black Males"

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• Black Studies Readings for AALCI in June 2012

Black Poetry: A Timeline, 1854 - 2013

What follows is a partial, developing timeline on the histories of black poetry:

1854: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's volume of poetry Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects is published. 
1864: Frances E. W. Harper's poem "Bury Me in a Free Land" is published in Liberator, January 14.
1893: Paul Laurence Dunbar's first collection of poems Oak and Ivy is published.
1895: Alice Moore's Violets and other tales is published.
1896: Dunbar's Lyrics of Lowly Life are published.
1900: "Lift Every Voice and Sing," written by James Weldon Johnson, is performed for Booker T. Washington.
1905: John Johnson, brother of James Weldon Johnson, sets "Lift Every Voice and Sing" to music.
1913: Fenton Johnson's first volume A Little Dreaming is published.
1918: Georgia Douglas Johnson's The Heart of a Woman is published. "The Heart of a Woman."
1919: The NAACP adopts "Lift Every Voice and Sing" as "The Negro National Anthem."
1919: Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" is published in the July issue of Liberator. 
1921: Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is published in the June issue of The Crisis magazine.
1922: The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson, is published.
1923: Jean Toomer's Cane is published.
1925: The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke, is published.
1925: Countee Cullen's first volume Color is published.
1926: Langston Hughes's first volume The Weary Blues is published by Knopf.
1926: Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" appears in the June issue of The Nation. 
1932: Sterling A. Brown's Southern Road is published.
1937: Margaret Walker's "For My People" is published in the November 1937 issue of Poetry magazine.
1942: Margaret Walker's For My People,  recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, is published.
1945: Gwendolyn Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville is published by Harper & Row. 

25 poems widely anthologized poems

• Amiri Baraka -- “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” “A Poem for Black Hearts,” “Black Art”
• Gwendolyn Brooks -- “We Real Cool,” “a song in the front yard,” “kitchenette building”
• Cullen, Countee -- “Incident,” “Yet do I Marvel”
• Paul Laurence Dunbar -- “We Wear the Mask,” “Sympathy”
• Nikki Giovanni -- “Ego-Tripping,” “Nikki-Rosa”
• Frances Harper -- “Bury Me in a Free Land,” “The Slave mother”
• Robert Hayden -- “Frederick Douglass,” “Runagate Runagate,” “Those Winter Sundays”
• Langston Hughes -- “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Mother to Son,” “I, Too”
• Helen Johnson -- “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem”
• Claude McKay -- “If We Must Die,” “The Lynching”
• Margaret Walker -- “For My People”
• Phillis Wheatley -- “On Being Brought from Africa to America”

Related: 
• Poetry Lists

Poems about slavery or "liberation" poems: Framing Black Poetry

Nat Turner plots revolt

This coming fall semester, what if I teach some of the same poems I have in the past that focus on slavery, but instead of referring to the pieces as poems about slavery, I tell the students that we'll be reading "liberation poems"? What difference will it make in how the students experience the poems and view the poets?

Defining the pieces as liberation poems will not be too tough of a sell since we have so many instances of modern and contemporary poets looking back on moments when black people were enslaved and writing pieces about how those people took steps to either free themselves or at least talk back in rebellious or liberating ways to their captives.  In addition, poets tend to write most often about insubordinate or unruly formerly enslaved people such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Nat Turner. Saying that poets produced "liberation poems" will of course give a sense of agency to those enslaved as well as the writers.

Referring to the poetry as "liberation poems" or even referring to slave narratives as "liberation narratives" assists in raising the issue of framing and how such practices influence interpretations. Of course, the implications of framing go even further or are already with us when we decide to refer to the works we're reading as "poetry," "black poetry," or "African American poetry." As I was noting early last week, over the decades, editors have gone from framing collections of poems as "black" to "African American," a shift that likely has subtle yet far-ranging implications for how audiences view groups of poems and individual poets.

In a literature course that highlights concepts such as "Black Power," "the Black Freedom Struggle," "the Black Arts Movement," "black rage," "black resistance," black aesthetics, and other terms associated with the word "black" and concepts related to agency, the move to frame or label certain kinds of poetry as "liberation poems" might serve as an important connecting point for students.

Related: 
• African American Poetry and Kanye West's "New Slaves"  
• 50 Poems about Slavery, Struggles for Freedom
• Poetry, Slavery & Creativity
• 150+ Years of Antislavery Poems by Black Poets 
• Ishmael Reed's Funny Ex-slave Poem
• Evie Shockley and This Douglass Poetry Discourse 

The Big Chop

Immediately after the "big chop"

 By Briana Whiteside 

On May 17, 2013, at 12:15pm, I big chopped. I transitioned for nine long months which were planned and thought out, but spontaneously on that cloudy Saturday afternoon, out of frustration, I sat in the mirror and cut the relaxed hair off. For me, the process of cutting my hair was a symbolic ceremony of letting go of the old me and coming into a new woman. I think of it as a birthing ceremony.

[Related: On Natural Hair]

The transitioning months surprisingly taught me a lot about myself. It was through that stage that I became aware of how much I used my hair—let’s not forget the false lashes, which I’m letting go of too—as a crutch to enhance my physical appearance. While I loved the illusion of healthy, thick, beautiful hair, the truth is that my hair was unhealthy, filled with split ends and unmanageable breakage. It was time for a change because I wanted thick beautiful hair and the option of going to the gym and not worrying about sweating out my relaxer.

A few days after the big chop

The decision to big chop was easy; my hair actually made the decision for me. After long months of transitioning, using lots of moisturizers, and shea butter based products, the relaxed hair began to shed uncontrollably. I tried a protective style, the Senegalese twists for three weeks to try to manipulate my hair, but it had a mind of its own. When I took my hair out of the twists on May 16th, I noticed that the relaxed hair was missing in large sections, and it just looked horrible. The next day when I got off work I cut the stringy pieces of hair off.

If I said that I was completely confident with my big chop, I’d be lying. Though I am not completely confident and I am still learning my hair because it is new to me, I can’t help but embrace it. This was an important decision for me because I needed to let go of the crutches that I thought defined me as a person. Now that those crutches are gone, people can get to know and see the real me.

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Briana Whiteside is a graduate student in English at SIUE and a contributing writer for the Black Studies Program.  

A Notebook on Mark Anthony Neal

2018
• April 7: Mark Anthony Neal and black arts, culture writing

2017
• February 13: Histories of highly intelligent black males in fictional representations


2016
• May 29: Black men writers and creativity, 1995 - 2016

2015
• July 18: Notes on an Illegible book proposal       
• July 18: Returning to Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy

2013
• June 17: Jay-Z & Big Data: Mark Anthony Neal Decodes S. Carter   
• June 2: The Return of a Soul Man Scholar
• June 1: Other Kinds of Recovery Work  
• May 25: Uncanny Black Women, Illegible Black Men  
• May 25: Black men in the arts, humanities & politics born between 1948 - 1969 
• May 24: Reading Mark Anthony Neal (a quick look back) 
• May 24: Jay-Z's Cosmopolitanism: Notes from Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy  
• May 24: A Notebook Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy 
• February 27: Mark Anthony Neal and #L4Leroy by Danielle Hall
• February 13: Mark Anthony Neal's Future Histories

2012
• April 14: Black Intellectual Histories 
• April 8: Mark Anthony Neal Shares His Audience
• April 8: Notes on Black Thought 2.0
• March 21: The Writer-Scholar & Twitter: The Case of Mark Anthony Neal  

2011
• June 6: Mark Anthony Neal's Multiple Approaches To Composition  

Related:
• An Extended Notebook on the works of writers & artists
• Black Intellectual Histories

Cool & contemplative; or a note on photographs of Miles Davis

The other day I wrote about that iconic image of Eric Dolphy and mentioned it to Tony Bolden, who, along with William J. Harris, has been engaging me in an extended conversation about poetry, history, jazz, and cultural history that has lasted some years now. When Bolden looked at the images of Dolphy, he made the keen observation that coolness and contemplation were often linked when it came to photographs of jazz musicians. My mind has been running in multiple directions on that point since he made it a couple of days ago.

Miles Davis might be one of the exemplars in this regard. For years, I've listened to older guys talk about being inspired by Miles, and they weren't only referring to his music. At some point , I started looking at photographic images of Miles and came to understand that he was being admired as a musician, a thinker, and a stylist kind of dude.

You see some of those images and realize that more than simply posing, he's also thinking. Or better, you realize that in addition to striking a cool pose, he's caught in a deep thought. Maybe that's part of what Bolden had in mind when he highlighted the link between coolness and contemplation in jazz.

Related:
• That iconic images of Eric Dolphy
• Jazz artists as icons
• Toni Morrison as icon

Reading Harlem: Five Percent Nation & Hip Hop

By Danielle Hall

Here's one other notable discovery I found during my recent NYC visit while walking along Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. en route to the Schomburg Center. We happened to walk past the Allah School in Mecca, a building with a huge 7 atop a crescent moon within a pointed star painted onto the side of the building.

To an average passersby, one would assume that it was just a regular building or outreach center by the Nation of Islam, but it is in fact the Harlem headquarters for the Nation of Gods and Earths (NGE) also known as the Five Percent Nation, founded in 1964 by Clarence 13X a former student of Malcolm X who broke ties with the Nation of Islam. The headquarters in Harlem is known as “Mecca;” Brooklyn is referred to as “Medina;” Queens is “the Desert;” and St. Louis is referred to as “Saudi”—all stemming from locations across Arab diaspora.

For me, this was a n important random discovery. The 1980s into the 1990s or the hip hop’s golden age marked an era of consciousness. Many rappers were members of or affiliated with the Five Percent Nation and incorporated their beliefs and teachings into their lyrics. Some of the notable artists affiliated with NGE included Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Wu Tang Clan, Poor Righteous Teachers, Brand Nubian, Queen Latifah, Digable Planets, Nas, Mos Def, Erykah Badu, and Jay Electronica, who is a member of the organization.

Who can forget Method Man’s classic lines in Belly when he picks up the phone and says “Knowledge Born, what’s the science?” Occasionally, you may hear Nas say “Peace God” like during the 2013 Grammy’s when he and Kelly Rowland presented the Urban Contemporary Award. On Monday, Nas sent out two tweets “Peace 2 the God’s!” and “Peace 2 the Earth’s.”

Still, one of the more well-known examples is probably Erykah Badu’s “On & On” when she sings “I was born underwater with 3 dollars and 6 dimes, yeah you may laugh cause you did not do your math.” The $ 3.60 refers to 360º meaning wholeness and balance, important concepts in 5-percenter discourse. 

The examples I mention above are only a brief example of hip hop’s ghost curricula, meaning unofficial and sometimes informal systems of knowledge and salutations (and I’m not talking about the Illuminati here) that were and are still used as methods of teaching self-empowerment and awareness through music, cultural interaction, and as a tool of reasoning in everyday life.

 Related:
• NYC 2013  

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Danielle Hall is a program coordinator and contributing writer for Black Studies @ SIUE.   

How to read poetry like a RapGenius

Poet Amiri Baraka and DJ Spooky

I’ve been quickly discovering that RapGenius provides me with useful lessons to enhance and improve my efforts engaging black poetry -- as a reader, a writer, a blogger, and teacher. For me, the annotations on RapGenius have confirmed that reading and interpretation can be:

Collaborative. On RapGenius, many of my favorite rap songs are collectively annotated by dozens of different people. 33 “scholars” annotated “They Reminisce Over You;” 48 annotated “Dead Presidents II;” and 53annotated "A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre.” The many contributors on popular pieces demonstrate the value of having multiple perspectives and interpretations of common lyrics.     

Multimodal. Skilled and experienced annotators provide short notes, links to images, audio clips, and videos. The processes of illuminating lyrics is a mixed media or multi-modal affair. Reading, the annotators suggest, involves decoding words, photographs, sounds, and moving images.  

Accessible. As one of the items in their instructional guide, the editors write "Don't put stuff into Nerdspeak." I'm imagining how student essays would turn out if I placed that rule on course assignments or if editors of scholarly journals requested that contributors adhere to that rule. Clearly, there are reasons for participants in fields to converse in the "nerdspeak" of their discourse at times, but challenging students and scholars to also be accessible might assist in expanding opportunities for more readers and writers.

Fun & lighthearted. The annotators for the site are doing more than providing a service by interpreting rap lyrics. Not all, but large numbers of contributors are clearly having fun in the process, providing witty remarks on lines, adding humorous images and videos, and having a general good time engaging each other in the comments beneath annotations. The playful tones that persist throughout the site and many of the annotations would be a useful addition in some academic writing on poetry.   

Purposeful. I asked one of my students why he's provided annotations to various lyrics on the site, and he said that he wanted to "help" people understand the meaning of certain lyrics. I sensed too that he was driven by the chance to display his own decoding expertise in a venue that is populated with, he says "all kinds of deep folks." Decoding words as a method of helping others and gaining props as a thinker give him and others on the site a sense of purpose.  

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Participation on the net can always turn troubling since there are so many trolls out there. Nonetheless, so far, I've found RapGenius reading experiences to be collaborative, multimodal, accessible, fun & lighthearted, and purposeful. Those are all ideas and lessons that could be useful in the practice of reading poetry.

Related:  
• A Notebook on RapGenius 
 • A notebook on other ways of reading African American poetry  

A notebook on other ways of reading African American poetry

On a list-serv I subscribe to related to African American literature, someone recently posed a question to the group "what articles/books would you recommend that teach students how to read poetry?" She went on to note "I'd like some new/old tried/true borrowed/black ideas so I can perform feats of intellectual & pedagogical deviance."

People started helpfully providing book chapters and scholarly essay suggestions. I was familiar with several of the print-based materials that were suggested, but maybe it's telling that few links to online materials were listed. I've decided to do here is provide a few writings concerning other ways of assisting students on reading poetry.

Entries
• How to read poetry like a RapGenius
• A list of popular writings concerning African American poetry and poets 
• Notes on popular writings concerning African American poetry

A list of popular writings concerning African American poetry and poets

Obituaries by Margalit Fox for The New York Times
• Jayne Cortez (May 10, 1934 - December 28, 2012) 
• Ai (October 21, 1947 - March 20, 2010)
• Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936 - February 13, 2010)

High-profile reviews:
• Are These Poems to Remember? -- The New York Review of Books -- Helen Vendler
• Defending an Anthology -- The New York Review of Books -- Rita Dove
• "A Post-Racial Anthology" -- Poetry -- Amiri Baraka 
• "End of the Line: New poems from Carl Phillips" (rev. of Silverchest) -- The New Yorker -- Dan Chiasson  

Rap as poetry writings:
• "How Ya Like Me Now" -- Poetry Foundation -- Adam Kirsch
• "Word: Jay-Z's Decoded and the language of hip-hop" -- The New Yorker -- Kelefa Sanneh
• "Unwrapping the Message" -- Bookforum -- Kevin Young 

Coverage
• Tracy K. Smith's Pulitzer-Prize Win  
• Kevin Young in The New Times in 2012
• Nikky Finney's National Book Award for Poetry Win
• The Coverage of Kevin Young’s Ardency

Related:
• Notes on popular writings concerning African American poetry  
• A notebook on other ways of reading African American poetry