Artists in Residence

Mixing criticism and memoir, “Artists in Residence” offers a rumination on improvisation and collaboration in visual art-making and contemporary jazz performance. The author meditates on the 2017 Unite the Right rally and Ryan Kelly's award-winning photographs of the event and considers how artists offer models for resisting anti-Black racism and white supremacy through collaborative practices. The author analyzes the documentary films Looks of a Lot and RFK in the Land of Apartheid and reviews exhibitions by Roy DeCarava and Jason Moran, highlighting the points of intersection between jazz musicianship and visual artistry. Finally, the essay argues that artists like Kara Walker, William Kentridge, and Yusef Komunyakaa create works that express the pleasure and pain of Black Diasporic experience through practices such as blues idiom improvisation and collage. The author presents criticism as a mode of personal writing.

“Let’s Play Two”: The Affective Resonances of Black Baseball in African American Poetry

As with August Wilson and Gloria Naylor (chapter 3), chapter 4’s poets—Yusef Komunyakaa, Michael S. Harper, Quincy Troupe, and Harmony Holiday—view black baseball as a vehicle for exposing racial degradation on the one hand and maintaining collective pride on the other. While they hold distinct vantage points and Holiday is of a younger, post-Civil Rights generation, these poets are all invested in shedding light on the paradoxical emotions educed by the memory of black baseball, illuminating what it felt like to be systematically excluded from the national pastime and, ultimately, mainstream civic life. In the process, Komunyakaa, Harper, Troupe, and Holiday continue to mine and enrich an “archive of feelings,” which includes the resonances and ephemera that are not housed within museums or captured in statistical records but are nonetheless vital resources for reconstructing the interior lives of marginalized people.

Why We Flee

“Why We Flee” chronicles multiple reasons why we leave our bodies in academic settings. It traces how racism and a backlash against feminist gains to stop sexual harassment have policed our attempts to stay embodied when we teach, compromising our abilities to thrive as orators, as compassionate listeners, as people excited about our research. The chapter offers examples of cues Thompson missed when students could not fully engage with the course material. And how recognizing trauma can help us become more alert to students’ courage as they grapple with difficult material. Thompson has often relied upon the creative writing by Yusef Komunyakaa, Rafael Campo, Sapphire, Edwidge Danticat, and other writers to teach about resilience in the face of war, homophobia, colonialism, and other violations. Thompson also examines what students have taught her about the risks involved in being present in the process. The chapter ends with discussion of the synergistic relationship between the qualities of the mind and the sheaths of the body, in particular how yoga might catapult us to a place of deep connection and joy.

Countercultural Structures of Contemporary Global South Poetry

This essay heeds the fractal reckonings of countermemory—disparate strains of collective memory that resist totalizing models of official historiography—in an array of contemporary poets of the hemispheric South, who are highly attuned to the southern bohemian ethos: Yusef Komunyakaa, Derek Walcott, Brenda Marie Osbey, Kwame Dawes, as well as reggae icon Bob Marley. These poets share a sense of the Gulf and Atlantic cultures as open to transnational, cross-ethnic flows through black diasporic histories streamed along permeable coastlines. The analysis points up the progressive creativity fostered by a hippikat (Wolof “open-eyed”) poetics, one that resets our connection to place from an ecological vantage even as it expands preexisting academic accounts of the field. Drawing from Ras Michael Brown’s recent history of the African Atlantic, the essay shows how contemporary southern poetry shifts us past previous conceptions of “southernness” and into the explicitly transregional, transcultural ethos of current global southern studies.

Australian-American Literary Connections

Within the literary connections between Australia and the United States, the more traditional notion of “influence” gained a different kind of intellectual traction after the “transnational turn.” While the question of American influence on Australian literature is a relatively familiar topic, the corresponding question of Australian influence on American literature has been much less widely discussed. This bi-continental interaction can be traced through a variety of canonical writers, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Brockden Brown, through to Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams, and Mark Twain. These transnational formations developed in the changed cultural conditions of the 20th and 21st centuries, with reference to poets such as Lola Ridge, Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, and Yusef Komunyakaa, along with novelists such as Christina Stead, Peter Carey, and J. M. Coetzee. To adduce alternative genealogies for both American and Australian literature, Australian literature might be seen to function as American literature’s shadow self, the kind of cultural formation it might have become if the American Revolution had never taken place. Similarly, to track Australian literature’s American affiliations is to suggest ways in which transnational connections have always been integral to its constitution. By re-reading both Australian and American literature as immersed within a variety of historical and geographical matrices, from British colonial politics to transpacific space, it becomes easier to understand how both national literatures emerged in dialogue with a variety of wider influences.