Negro Spirituals Research Articles

“I'm Workin’ on My Buildin”: Freedom and Foundation-Building in Florence Price's Two Violin Fantasies

AbstractFlorence Price (1887–1953) was instrumental in establishing a “black musical idiom” in the twentieth century (Samantha Ege, 2020) by embedding vernacular songs into her works, including Violin Fantasy No. 2 in F-sharp minor, built on “I'm workin’ on my Buildin.’” In 1940 she arranged the melody as the second of the Two Traditional Negro Spirituals, finished on March 26, 1940. On March 29 and 30, 1940, she quickly dispatched Fantasy No. 2. Price often performed the piano part of her works herself. The performative act of playing Fantasy No. 2 with its embedded spiritual “I'm workin’ on my Buildin’ […] All for my Lord” would have solidified her faith, which rested in part in her own interpretation of its lyrics: Her “work” on her “buildin” and foundations, in composition and in life. Furthermore, each performance of Fantasy No. 2 would have created an embodied performed commemoration, from her perspective, of historical events of injustice and oppression in the Jim Crow South, which she abandoned in 1927 for Chicago. By engaging with Price's fantasies through the lens of performance studies and genre theory, and by drawing on Ege (2020), Rae Linda Brown (2020), Cooper (2019, 2020), and Douglas Shadle (2021), this article examines Price's vernacular foundation and sonic foundation-building symbolically. Meanings of freedom emerge on several levels, which we relate to creative freedom and to “freedoms in the most oppressive of social environments,” such as Price's environment, to which she responded with “a powerful musical language” (Ege, 2020).

Speaking of Rivers: Spirituals, Poetry, and Relationality

Abstract Rivers and other bodies of water evoke freedom. In Black music the theme of the river continuously returns: from Nile by Beyoncé and Kendrick, which connects the river to liberation, to Sam Cooke's proclamation “I was born by the river.” Gospel tunes such as “Jordan River” and “Down by the Riverside,” together with Negro spirituals such as “Deep River,” “Roll Jordan Roll,” “Wade in the Water,” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” all make clear that the journey of freedom is through the river. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes riffs on Negro spirituals in terms of subject matter and mood, enabling a sensuous way of knowing freedom and liberation. Repetition and variations on key phrases are used to transform the mood throughout the poem, bringing the past, present, and future into conversation. Drawing on the spirituals, Hughes constructs mood, scene, and feeling that recognize the historical importance of the river while transcending the catastrophe of that history of enslavement, redefining the river and rendering a foretelling of liberation. Arguing for the relational and futuristic character of this poem, this article analyses how music allows Hughes to transgress and reexist beyond coloniality and to express a continuous reach for liberation.

Rethinking the Concept of Double Consciousness in Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folks (1903)

Summary In an essay titled “Of our spiritual strivings”, W.E.B. Du Bois coined and elaborated the concept of “double consciousness” to refer to the ambiguity of being black and American. The ambivalence and unstable identities suggested by the term imply living a life characterised by seemingly irreconcilable dualities. On the one hand, blacks are entitled to become Americans because the slave labour they were forced to provide created the material and economic basis of modern America. On the other hand, the black people who created the wealth of the American nation find themselves marginalised or occupying low-paying jobs, leading to the condition of double consciousness being seen as a hindrance to the progress of the black race. In the American South, before the emancipation of slaves, black people were raped, racially segregated, lynched, and denied equal opportunities. Du Bois explains the ruthless experiences that the Negroes endured because of double consciousness as he asserts that the feeling of both belonging and not belonging to America often sent black people to court; thus, false gods invoking false means of salvation. At times blacks felt ashamed of themselves. Du Bois perceives the evil experiences endured by black people as concretised in the musical form of the Negro Spirituals. An analysis of selected songs suggests that these songs are the most beautiful expression of human experience because the songs manifest an awareness of the self that is more than the two-ness implied in the concept of double consciousness. The paradox indicated above confirms double consciousness as on one level a source of evil experiences of the Negroes, and on another, positive level, the condition that enabled them to fashion new discourses of resistances in order to express their desire to escape slavery. This article uses Gilroy’s notion of the ambiguity of modernity in fashioning identities of the Black Atlantic in order to rethink the idea of double consciousness, and at the same time amplify the multiple ways in which black people experienced slavery in America.

Note from the Editor

CLA JOURNAL 1 Note from the Editor March 2020 will be remembered for many reasons, but what will surely set it apart in the history books was the gradual realization during the final weeks of a relatively mild winter that America--indeed the world--was witnessing in slow motion the fast-moving onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout March 2020 and the months that followed, we sheltered in place, venturing out in masks, gloves, or sometimes improvised gear to gather essentials only. During these stressful months--and even earlier, we were soon to learn--infections from this virus led to a staggering worldwide loss of life as the relentless, equal-opportunity killer took down seniors and children alike. Within a matter of days, collateral damage from the virus upended carefully laid plans for conferences, graduations, vacations, weddings, concerts, and sporting events. The80thAnnualConventionof theCollegeLanguageAssociation(Afrofuturism: Diasporic Visions) was not spared from the succession of postponed or cancelled events. Decision-makers moved reluctantly but quickly to devise contingency plans. In an historic announcement to the CLA membership, then-President Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper wrote, “Your CLA Executive Committee has decided to take the extraordinary action of postponing our April 2020 convention–-a decision that CLA fortunately has not had to make since WWII, when three national meetings were cancelled. Following quickly on the heels of Dr. Harper’s announcement was welcomed news that the April 2020 CLA Convention had been rescheduled for March 3-6, 2021 at its original Memphis, TN location. Although birthed amid the onset of an historic upheaval, CLAJ 63.1 does not take up the subject. Instead, the six essays that appear here had their origins during earlier, virus-free moments. Topics range from films by Abdul Ben-Abdallah and Haile Gerima to the science fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell. Agnieszka Tuszynska’s essay,“Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley’s Papers,” offers a reevaluation of Willard Motley’s engagement with the subject of antiblack racism with the hope of a subsequent reassessment of his place in the canon of African American literature. The author argues that the reason for the lack of critical attention to Motley’s work lies in his status as an African American author who became defined early on as a “raceless” writer and challenges calls for scrutiny of his papers--a scrutiny grounded in what he calls archival intimacy. Such archival intimacy requires a holistic study of a broad range of the author’s personal and literary pursuits, leading to a deeply contextual reading of any works produced by the author. Trent Masiki’s essay,“Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell,” examines how U.S. writers use African 2 CLA JOURNAL Note from the Editor American music in speculative emigration narratives that contextualize and critique the state of U.S. race relations. It explores the relationship between Afro-Zionism, contributionism and messianism in the short stories “Way in the Middle of the Air” (1950) by Ray Bradbury and the “The Space Traders” (1991) by Derrick A. Bell, one of the founders of critical race theory. Using cultural poetics and close textual analysis, I examine how the writers of these short stories use Negro spirituals, the blues, and hip hop to express their ambivalence, if not pessimism, about emigration as a solution to the permanence of racial discrimination and terror in the U.S. William Cunningham’s essay, “Quiet Places in Jesmyn Ward and Natasha Trethewey” builds upon Kevin Quashie’s description and analysis of the inner landscape of black expression in The Sovereignty of Quiet. The essay argues for a spatial analog of quiet as revealed in the works of Natasha Trethewey and Jesmyn Ward. It asserts further that Trethewey’s use of telescoping imagery on a still photo demonstrates an intentional and intersectional discourse of quiet that shapes individual identity while also being contained within the landscape. Connecting TretheweyandWardthroughtheiruseof undergroundspaces,theessaydemonstrates how characters in Salvage the Bones access quiet spaces in order to better understand their environment, articulate their own desires, and survive natural and social forces bent on their destruction. Kwangsoon Kim...

Note from the Editor

CLA JOURNAL 1 Note from the Editor March 2020 will be remembered for many reasons, but what will surely set it apart in the history books was the gradual realization during the final weeks of a relatively mild winter that America--indeed the world--was witnessing in slow motion the fast-moving onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout March 2020 and the months that followed, we sheltered in place, venturing out in masks, gloves, or sometimes improvised gear to gather essentials only. During these stressful months--and even earlier, we were soon to learn--infections from this virus led to a staggering worldwide loss of life as the relentless, equal-opportunity killer took down seniors and children alike. Within a matter of days, collateral damage from the virus upended carefully laid plans for conferences, graduations, vacations, weddings, concerts, and sporting events. The80thAnnualConventionof theCollegeLanguageAssociation(Afrofuturism: Diasporic Visions) was not spared from the succession of postponed or cancelled events. Decision-makers moved reluctantly but quickly to devise contingency plans. In an historic announcement to the CLA membership, then-President Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper wrote, “Your CLA Executive Committee has decided to take the extraordinary action of postponing our April 2020 convention–-a decision that CLA fortunately has not had to make since WWII, when three national meetings were cancelled. Following quickly on the heels of Dr. Harper’s announcement was welcomed news that the April 2020 CLA Convention had been rescheduled for March 3-6, 2021 at its original Memphis, TN location. Although birthed amid the onset of an historic upheaval, CLAJ 63.1 does not take up the subject. Instead, the six essays that appear here had their origins during earlier, virus-free moments. Topics range from films by Abdul Ben-Abdallah and Haile Gerima to the science fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell. Agnieszka Tuszynska’s essay,“Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley’s Papers,” offers a reevaluation of Willard Motley’s engagement with the subject of antiblack racism with the hope of a subsequent reassessment of his place in the canon of African American literature. The author argues that the reason for the lack of critical attention to Motley’s work lies in his status as an African American author who became defined early on as a “raceless” writer and challenges calls for scrutiny of his papers--a scrutiny grounded in what he calls archival intimacy. Such archival intimacy requires a holistic study of a broad range of the author’s personal and literary pursuits, leading to a deeply contextual reading of any works produced by the author. Trent Masiki’s essay,“Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell,” examines how U.S. writers use African 2 CLA JOURNAL Note from the Editor American music in speculative emigration narratives that contextualize and critique the state of U.S. race relations. It explores the relationship between Afro-Zionism, contributionism and messianism in the short stories “Way in the Middle of the Air” (1950) by Ray Bradbury and the “The Space Traders” (1991) by Derrick A. Bell, one of the founders of critical race theory. Using cultural poetics and close textual analysis, I examine how the writers of these short stories use Negro spirituals, the blues, and hip hop to express their ambivalence, if not pessimism, about emigration as a solution to the permanence of racial discrimination and terror in the U.S. William Cunningham’s essay, “Quiet Places in Jesmyn Ward and Natasha Trethewey” builds upon Kevin Quashie’s description and analysis of the inner landscape of black expression in The Sovereignty of Quiet. The essay argues for a spatial analog of quiet as revealed in the works of Natasha Trethewey and Jesmyn Ward. It asserts further that Trethewey’s use of telescoping imagery on a still photo demonstrates an intentional and intersectional discourse of quiet that shapes individual identity while also being contained within the landscape. Connecting TretheweyandWardthroughtheiruseof undergroundspaces,theessaydemonstrates how characters in Salvage the Bones access quiet spaces in order to better understand their environment, articulate their own desires, and survive natural and social forces bent on their destruction. Kwangsoon Kim...

Book Review: Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry by Sandra Jean Graham

Graham, Sandra Jean. Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. 330 pages. Even though Negro spirituals are one of the most popular black sacred music genres, they have not been extensively considered as a commoditized cultural product

Forever Disappearing

M. Lamar and Tucker Culbertson elaborate on M. Lamar’s aesthetics of Negrogothic cinema, music, and performance. The Negrogothic, explain the authors, is an approach to representation in which the black body verges on disappearance and the interior of the black psyche is revealed. M. Lamar’s multimedia artworks combine elements of horror, homoeroticism, s/m, Negro spirituals, opera, religious iconography, and ritual to subvert oppressive representations of the black male body. His work evades representations of “capture, containment, and capitalization” by conjuring a “holy theater” in which black consciousness becomes simultaneous with the whole history of black experience. In an attempt to disrupt the pornographic and objectifying imagination of white supremacy as its gazes on the black body, M. Lamar imagines the black body being transformed into more elusive materials: light, shadow, and voice.

Art Songs and Race: The Unique Collaboration of Marian Anderson and Kosti Vehanen

In November 1930, Finnish pianist Kosti Vehanen accompanied the African American contralto Marian Anderson on a series of recitals in Stockholm and Helsinki. Anderson was at the time a relatively unknown singer from Philadelphia; Vehanen was already established as a concert soloist with major European symphony orchestras.1 They appeared together in more than a dozen recitals in Scandinavia over the course of three weeks, delighting audiences with programs that included arias by Handel, Scarlatti, and Cesti; lieder of Liszt and Grieg; Finnish folk songs; and Negro spirituals. These first recitals marked the beginning of a fruitful artistic collaboration that spanned a decade, with hundreds of performances between 1930 and 1939.2 By just about any standards, the artistic collaboration between Vehanen and Anderson was unique. There were relatively few black performers of art songs in the 1930s, and virtually all who chose that career path performed with pianists of their own race.3 Anderson’s good friend of many years and her accompanist immediately before Vehanen was William King, an African American pianist who was popular in Philadelphia, Anderson’s hometown. King had accompanied Anderson in the early years of her career, including recitals in well-known venues such as Carnegie Hall and as part of performance series such as the National Negro Music Festival.4 That Anderson would decide to make Vehanen her accompanist was a source of predictable discord, for reasons at once intensely personal and based on the racial realities of the early 1900s.5 In 1935 King wrote angry letters that expressed his ire and disappointment about Anderson’s decision to have Vehanen accompany her on a major American tour. His single-spaced, four-page harangue to Anderson dated 23 August was by turns a desperate plea to his friend to consider his financial woes and a stern warning about the impropriety of her partnership with Vehanen.6 Frustration and anger were palpable from the first few sentences (“I cannot conceive of you not standing up for me until the last drop of blood was left in you”) to the final statement (“Should you bring Kosti to America or allow Hurok to book him for your American tour, I don’t ever want to see you again”). His words contained hints of intimidation and threat, and he made race the focus of his tirade: Are you aware that Hampton7 will not have you with a white accompanist, are you aware that only the information need to be given to them and your American tour will be cut in half, are you aware that of the eight concerts booked, only two are white? Do you know that you want to return to America for another tour or possibly live here later? Are you aware that if you do this terrible thing, that both the colored people and the white people in America might boycott your concerts? After all, could you have the heart to bring another accompanist to Philadelphia to play for you and especially a white man.8

Intimate Intercessions in the Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar

... Then Br'er Adams, a white-haired patriarch, knelt and up the cross. --Anner 'Lizer's Stumblin' Block (Dunbar, Best Stories) Much of the poetry of Paul Laurence reveals the intimate intercessions of a tormented poet, figuratively taking up the cross. Dunbar's meteoric rise as the most famous black writer in the world at the end of the nineteenth century, his prolific offerings over a short 14-year career (1892-1906), his ambivalence about the branding of his own poetic genius, his precarious stardom in a society that insisted on separate-but-equal race relations, and his tragic, unfulfilled personal life represent the subject matter of many intimate intercessions with which the poet wrestled emotionally and spiritually. Named for the Apostle Paul, the Biblical figure who helped to establish the Christian church, took seriously his parents' charge to be a great man who would carry the word to his people. Like Paul, suffered as the chosen expounder of his own gospel, the African American literary tradition. Though he experimented with many literary traditions and read extensively the works of Tennyson, Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, and Poe, among others, he was painfully aware that his own work inspired a debate on the merits of his standard English works as opposed to his more popular dialect pieces that appeared to some too close to the minstrel and plantation traditions. Sterling Brown, in his book Negro Poetry and Drama (1937), considered a highly gifted man who up the Negro peasant as a clown, and made him a likeable person. Brown recognized that benefited from a heritage of folk sense that poured out in flashes of unforced gay humor, well-turned folk phrases, and virtuoso rhythms. However, Brown believed that was too strongly influenced by the local color poetry of Irwin Russell and the plantation formula of Thomas Nelson Page, and consequently compromised his interpretation of folk life by omitting mention of the hardships that were undoubtedly a part of it. On the other side of the debate, according to Herbert Woodward Martin and Ronald Primeau in the introduction to their book, In His Own Voice (2002), Dunbar wrote about the difficult questions of progress after emancipation, the adjustments of reconstruction, the perils and the promise of migration to Northern cities, the paradoxes of portraying 'Negro' life authentically while a residue of stereotypes remained strong in the society on the whole (xix). In truth, Dunbar's poetic sensibility led him to subtle uses of irony and veiled allusions to racial dilemmas as he steadily made incursions against the dominant stereotypes of his day. However, there were other, more personal challenges in Dunbar's life. He wrestled with the thorns of the flesh: chronic health problems that dogged him until his early death, medically-induced alcoholism, self-hatred, latent misogyny, and depression. Though I do not insist that his poems are personal chronicles of his own life, I do, however, advance that Dunbar's poems echo the complex emotional and spiritual sensibility that penned them. In The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, A Prayer illustrates his poetic genius coming to terms with a deep sense of something more than this world (11). The poem also reveals a poet honing an authentic voice, shaped by both romantic and realistic views of life, and mastering a variety of tones, rhythms, and nuances that are at the heart of his genius. Significantly, Dunbar's poetry gives witness to an intensely religious sensibility that has been shaped in part by the cultural forms, rituals, and beliefs of the black church. Maturing during a period that saw the revival of the so-called Negro spirituals with the work of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, heard the eloquent prayers and sermons of near-illiterate church folk barely one generation removed from slavery. As they had firmly accepted the Bible as their spiritual road map, created characters in his fiction as well as his poetry who were exhorters of the Word. …

Interpretation of Black Culture by Maya Angelou Through Music Poetry

African American music covers wide ranges of music and musical genres largely developed by African Americans. Negro spirituals, ragtime, jazz, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, rock and roll, soul, funk, and disco constitute the principal modern genres of it. Maya Angelou successfully applies to different styles of music in her poetry. With work songs, spirituals, souls, funk, jazz and blues, her poetry reveals African Americans’ withstanding hardships and expressing frustration as well as personal love and concerns. Through the analysis of the themes and the effect of the application of music merged with of her poems, the paper attempts to reveal the interpretation of black culture in Angelou’s poetry.

Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer by Michelle Ann Stephens

Reviewed by: Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer by Michelle Ann Stephens Brandon J. Manning (bio) Stephens, Michelle Ann. Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014. In Skin Acts, Michelle Stephens explores the labor and function of the corporeal, specifically the epidermis, and how it is imbricated in the black masculine performances of Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, and Bob Marley. Stephens centers Paul Gilroy’s and Franz Fanon’s earlier exploration of the “epidermalization” of blackness in order to theorize the intersections at which black skin informs the reception, performance, and meaning of black masculine performance throughout the twentieth century. In a theoretically heavy introduction, titled “Fleshing Out the Act,” Stephens cogently articulates a theoretical terrain that better understands the relationship of black subjects’ minds and bodies and their proximity to a world that mediates its understanding through skin, complexion, and facial expressions by highlighting historical theories of the skin and body with the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. In the first chapter, “Seeing Face, Hearing Sings,” Stephens analyzes the importance of facialization in black face minstrelsy by critically engaging the performance, portraiture, and fictionalized biography of Bert Williams. Stephens highlights the falsity of blacks donning blackface to portray a perception of blackness put forth by white minstrel actors and rounds out her conversation by pulling from other historical and literary engagements of Bert Williams—specifically Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark (2005). Here, Stephens troubles Ralph Ellison’s repudiation of the black minstrel performer to demonstrate an “ironic performing consciousness in the songs and lyrics created by the musicians and composers who produced black minstrel acts” (53). In addition to convincing readings of In Dahomey (1903) and Dancing in the Dark, Stephens includes portraiture and song sheets to demonstrate moments of resistance in Williams’s minstrel performances. Stephens asserts that within the parodic work on the minstrel stage Williams attempts to reclaim the black male body at the expense of his voice and body. “Bodylines, Borderlines, Color Lines,” Stephens’s second chapter, “mark[s] an important shift in the visual culture of modernism” by deconstructing the centrality of skin in Paul Robeson’s artistic works (72). Stephens cogently argues that this shift from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries’ emphasis on the face within a black minstrel tradition, as typified by Bert Williams, was broadened to the entire body by early modernism. Thus, it is Robeson’s body—his physique—and not simply his face that American popular culture was interested in during this early modernist moment. To underscore this point, Stephens analyzes Antonio Salemme’s full-length nude statue of Robeson, Negro Spiritual, and then interrogates the modernist gaze of Salemme’s statue of Robeson with H. D.’s Red Roses for Bronze (1931) to elucidate how a modernist gaze of Robeson was invested in “a more intimate form of recognition” (77). After discussing the white gaze of Robeson’s body, Stephens analyzes Robeson’s films Borderline (1930) and Song of Freedom (1936) to engage the title of the chapter and work through the formal aspects of framing in film, and theorize the boundaries of bodies and complexions on the screen. Stephens ends the chapter discussing the importance and intention behind Robeson’s blurry body in Song of Freedom and the distance it creates between him and his audience. The author’s third chapter, “The Problem of Color,” explores the shift in technologies in film production—specifically Technicolor—and how the 1950s and film technologies [End Page 715] ushered in a new white gaze “reifying and phallicizing blackness as ‘color’ in a new social and political ideal” (120). Stephens begins the chapter by retelling a story of Baldwin and the racial dynamic of what he refers to as a schizophrenic gaze at a civil rights march in Montgomery, Alabama, and how the audience’s—specifically white women’s—contempt shifted to adulation at the sight of Harry Belafonte. Indeed, Stephens’s reliance on the writings of James Baldwin function as a sort of through line for the chapter, making her contributions to the iconicity of Harry Belafonte a project that extends...

Negro Spiritual

You must know, Lord, who was Gabriel Valdés, called Plácido, that solicitous and elegant mulatto, my brother, who since then turned our old home there in Matanzas into his abode. You will remember as well he was clever, agile, skillful, a chosen one, a prestidigitator endowed with an arrow’s vertiginous speed, eyes that were neither large nor small and stirred the air around him. Gabriel Valdés, Lord, stirred the air around him; I witnessed when he did it while dancing in the arms of Mercedes Ayala, a woman from Havana who delighted merely in looking at him, before kissing his purple lips and his dionisyac bronze brow. Plácido talked in solitude with a soul meant solely to keep him company each afternoon when he’d come from El León de Oro, bordering the river, to my house, but never before stopping to see the fighting cocks at Jesús Álvarez’s. He had a daughter named Cariño. I don’t know, Lord, why I recall Plácido so vividly. If you see him, if you embrace him, be attuned to his breathing, his thinking, and may you welcome his lavish word and guide his hesitant, careful steps, Lord, as if they were your own because we need him to keep conspiring against hatred. When they led him to the gallows, Gabriel Valdés never imagined we would be there. They covered his eyes even though they weren’t big. He was Plácido no longer, just a faded piece of paper, yet his paling lips moved; I think he was saying something about the daughter of Jesús, the one with the fine fighting cocks. They forced him forward, he’d stumble, he’d falter. I myself became a faded sheet of paper, that flew propelled by a chilling boom. I am still swimming in the bay, after all that time, perhaps no one will turn me in. Translation from the Spanish By Jorge Febles Luis Lorente (b. 1948, Cárdenas) ranks among the foremost Cuban poets of his generation. He has received countless literary awards, the most prominent of which was the Casa de las Américas prize for Esta tarde llegando la noche (2004). He has earned as well two Premios de la Crítica: one for Esta tarde llegando la noche (2006) and another one for Más horrible que yo (2007). Jorge Febles teaches Spanish American literature and culture at the University of North Florida. His publications center on Cuban and Cuban American literature. He translated Luis Lorente’s poems with the assistance of Lebanese American writer Hedy Habra, author of Under Brushstrokes and Flying Carpets. above Kathy Vargas (b. 1950, San Antonio), Oración: Valentine’s Day / Day of the Dead [Hand], ca. 1989–90, gelatin silver print with handcoloring , 24x20 in. Negro Spiritual by Luis Lorente WORLDLIT.ORG 57 ...

William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography and Documentary History by Gastón Espinosa (review)

Reviewed by: William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography and Documentary History by Gastón Espinosa Angela M. Nelson WILLIAM J. SEYMOUR AND THE ORIGINS OF GLOBAL PENTECOSTALISM: A Biography and Documentary History. By Gastón Espinosa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2014. Gastón Espinosa’s William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism rigorously and thoroughly demonstrates the importance and significance of African American William Seymour’s and that of the Azusa Street Revival’s roles in the origins and development of global Pentecostalism. Espinosa challenges the notion that Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival were “just one among many important leaders and centers of global Pentecostalism. Rather, they were the single most important leader, center, and catalyst (among many) in American (1906–9) and global Pentecostal origins until 1912” (151). Further, he asserts that while “Azusa wasn’t the only center, it was the most important—both literally and symbolically prior to 1909 in the U.S. and prior to 1912 around the world” (151). Participating in a group of scholars writing a new “Pentecostal historiography” (18), a key methodology that Espinosa employs to show the preeminence of Seymour and the Azusa Revival is through ephemeral documentary evidence by Seymour and others between 1906 and 1915. Espinosa relies on this documentation to stage his argument. However, to the advantage of readers, more than half of the book reprints this evidence. Espinosa uses letters, sermons, and teachings written by Seymour or preached as sermons and then stenographically recorded by Clara Lum and others between 1906 and 1909. This evidence includes Seymour’s Doctrines and Discipline Minister’s Manual (1915); first-hand accounts of the Azusa Street Revival and Seymour’s leadership in Seymour’s The Apostolic Faith newspaper (1906–1908). Other sources provide historical overviews and testimonies about Seymour and the Azusa Revival and their influence around the world from histories, autobiographies, testimonies, diaries, reports, newspapers, books, and journals to document Seymour’s theological, social, and racial beliefs and his justification for black-white racial equality and reconciliation. William J. Seymour, the Azusa Revival, and global Pentecostalism are significant to American studies for three reasons. First, the Pentecostal movement is one of the most powerful and fastest growing grassroots religious movements in the world today. The movement is typically broken down into three main groupings: Denominational Pentecostals, Charismatics, and Neo-Charismatics. Pentecostalism continues to expand in the Americas and throughout the world, which might influence American Studies scholars to consider the influence of Pentecostal beliefs on the people and practices they are studying. [End Page 177] Second, as Espinosa shows us through Seymour’s sermons and accounts from the revival, the Azusa revival was a “transgressive social space wherein racial-ethnic minorities, women, the working class, and others could cross some of the deeply inscribed unbiblical racial-ethnic, class, gender, and national borders and boundaries of the day” (101). In a time of legalized segregation and separate but equal practices in America, at Azusa, blacks, whites, and Latinos “laid hands” on each other to be healed and to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. These same people sat together, and prayed at the altar together. It is also a moment in American history that shows the active participation and involvement of Latino Americans with African Americans and Anglo Americans in the origins and rise of Pentecostalism in the U.S. Third, African-American religious traditions and practices were central to the Azusa Revival and to the missions and denominations that followed it. At Azusa for at least three consecutive years, services were grounded in African-American orality and musicality. These traditions included enthusiastic worship and the singing of Negro spirituals which were influenced by African American theology, social practices, and church hymnody. Being conscious of these practices provides an understanding of the role of African-American religious traditions in influencing American Pentecostalism. Angela M. Nelson Bowling Green State University Copyright © 2016 Mid-America American Studies Association

흑인영가에 기초한 존 카터의『칸타타』에 관한 연구 - 노랫말에 투영된 하나님의 정의에 대한 고찰 -

흑인영가에 기초한 존 카터의『칸타타』에 관한 연구 - 노랫말에 투영된 하나님의 정의에 대한 고찰 -

An Unlikely Alliance: Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Seeds of Transformation

An Unlikely Alliance: Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Seeds of Transformation Louis Porter II New York City, Harlem, to be exact, and the year was 1930. Two strong forces were about to meet, one influencing the other in a transforming and ultimately historical way. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., then the prominent pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, was one of the most powerful African Americans in the nation at that time, but probably did not expect to come into contact with one Deitrich Bonhoeffer, then a Lutheran German visiting on a post‐graduate fellowship at nearby Union Theological Seminary. Surely, the fact that the church he led would have a profound effect on someone from the other side of the globe—at least in part creating level of understanding and sensitivity that would lead Bonhoeffer to become a martyr in World War II—could not have been foreseen. In reflecting upon his book, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, () Eric Metaxas said: “For the first time Bonhoeffer saw the gospel preached and lived out in obedience to God's commands. He was entirely captivated, and for the rest of his time in New York he was there every Sunday to worship and teach a Sunday School class of boys; he was active in a number of groups in the church…” Bonhoeffer later shared the power the old Negro spirituals had on him and would even teach them to students in his native country. In his online column, “The Report from Washington,” () Ellis Washington wrote: “Bonhoeffer returned to Germany by late June 1931, where he was one of the first citizens to begin actively plotting against Hitler and Nazism with other courageous Germans.” In 1945, Bonhoeffer was assassinated just before the end of the war. Much has been written about Bonhoeffer's time in Harlem; yet, the results of that visit deserve further reflection, particularly, the effects of Abyssinian and its then, pastor, the elder Powell (and father of the more famous Adam Clayton Powell Jr. who succeeded his father as pastor before being elected to Congress.) Beyond Bonhoeffer's symbolic act of defiance in attending an African American church in 1930, Bonhoeffer and Powell exemplified what would now be given various labels, including cross‐cultural communication and learning, a diversity case study, the difference an ally can make and the power of inclusion. Observers have noted that Bonhoeffer's ability to see and sympathize with “the other” at Powell's Abyssinian Baptist Church undoubtedly played a role in his later resistance to Hitler. “The black Baptist experience not only introduced him to an entirely new form of Christianity, but also provided the possibility for balancing the probable tensions in his own life and his central European Christianity between emotion and reason, between thought and action, between individual and group needs,” wrote Ruth Zerner in Union Seminary Quarterly Review. (Summer, ) Zerner also noted: The life‐affirming leitmotifs of black Christianity resounded with an emphasis upon the centrality of Jesus Christ and the supportive experience of community solidarity. The themes of Christ and community were familiar to Bonhoeffer, but novel was the unique, passionate exuberance with which they were expressed. Unforgettable for Bonhoeffer was the joyful, emotional liberation of Black Baptist worship, particularly in its music and audience participation. The action‐oriented program of Abyssinian Baptist Church also could not have escaped Bonhoeffer's attention. Abyssinian's pastor when Bonhoeffer attended, The Rev. Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., was born in May of 1865, the son of an African‐Cherokee slave woman and a slave owner who was of German descent. Although a delinquent in his youth, Powell accepted Christ as a young man and eventually studied rigorously for the ministry. With Powell's light skin and straight, bushy hair, he could have passed for white, as many others of his era chose to do. Instead, he became an outspoken advocate for black people, with Abyssinian serving as his base. More than a place of rousing sermons and electrifying music, Powell's church during the time of Bonhoeffer's extended visit was an epicenter of community life, including not only Christian study, but educational, recreational, charitable, social and youth...

Germans, Jubilee Singers, and Axe Men: James A. Garfield and the Original Front-Porch Campaign for the Presidency

Germans, Jubilee Singers, and Axe Men:James A. Garfield and the Original Front-Porch Campaign for the Presidency Jeffrey Normand Bourdon (bio) James A. Garfield sometimes had a flair for the dramatic as a presidential candidate in the campaign of 1880. No presidential contestant had ever openly invited groups of people to visit him at his residence, but that is exactly what Garfield did in the summer of 1880. As the first “front-porch” campaign in American history unfolded, personal friends, unknown well-wishers, and different groups all traveled to Mentor, Ohio, to visit him at his Lawnfield home. The visits ranged from the mundane to the dramatic. On October 1, 1880, the Jubilee Club from Fisk College came to Lawnfield. The group was about to fulfill an obligation in Painesville, Ohio, and decided to stop at the home of Garfield. They gathered in Garfield’s living room in what his personal secretary, Joseph Stanley-Brown, later described as a “big living room” that was “well-filled.” As Garfield walked by Brown on his way into the room, he said, “My boy! I am going to say a word to them if it kills me.” Realizing that there were no reporters to record the potentially dramatic event, Stanley-Brown noted all the events he witnessed into a notebook. Before the group started singing, their leader gave an “effecting speech.” Once the group started singing old Negro spirituals, people watching became “increasingly emotional.” Stanley-Brown wrote that “Tears were trickling down the cheeks of many of the women, and one staid old man blubbered audibly behind a door.” Once they were done, Garfield rose and, “standing at ease besides the fireplace with his hand resting lightly on the mantle,” he began talking to the crowd in “low conversational tones” and employed “rhetorical periods,” which Southerners in his audience would be able to identify with. According to Stanley-Brown, Garfield said that he understood [End Page 112] the needs and desires of a “race out of place” and finished his talk with “clear, ringing tones,” stating, “And I tell you now, in the closing days of this campaign, that I would rather be with you defeated than against you and victorious.” Stanley-Brown wrote that immediately following Garfield’s remarks, there was a moment of complete silence followed by the sound of “human expirations in unison.” The story of the event appeared in newspapers in Cleveland, but Garfield’s closing statements were omitted from the paper.1 No matter how the event was reported, Garfield’s front-porch campaign undoubtedly produced some unique and dramatic moments such as this interlude with the Jubilee Club. Maybe most importantly, it does not appear that Garfield offended anybody during the contest. He actually proved to be one of the more active presidential candidates in the nineteenth century as he conducted a front-porch campaign, spoke at three military gatherings, kept up correspondence with his political backers, and managed to go on a stump speaking tour by train to New York State in early August. In what became the closest popular vote in American presidential history, the front-porch campaign certainly played a role in his victory. Republican candidates for the presidency emulated the trend during the Gilded Age. In 1888, Benjamin Harrison became the second Republican nominee to do it. Four years later, William McKinley successfully employed the tactic and became one of the most important presidents in American history. By 1904, presidential candidates abandoned the technique almost as quickly as it was taken up as front-porch campaigning came to be seen as disingenuous. In 1920, Warren Harding successfully ran the last front-porch campaign for the presidency.2 [End Page 113] Garfield started the first front-porch campaign because he simply did not want to upset his friends and prospective voters. Once he had said yes to a visit from one group of friends or small club of people, it became very difficult to say no to another. The process started snowballing until it became an integral part of the candidate’s strategy. Garfield allowed voters to come to his home to show them that he was willing to communicate with them personally...

Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine’s key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book’s pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book’s appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published. Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine’s study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twentyfive years about cultural hierarchy in America? What Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

TIPPETT AND ELIOT

AbstractMichael Tippett called T.S. Eliot his ‘spiritual and artistic mentor’, but the relationship between the two men has never been studied in detail. Eliot's numerous discussions with Tippett in the 1930s proved a lasting influence on the composer's beliefs about the coming-together of words and music. This article has three aims: first, to use Tippett's correspondence and writings to bring together the most accurate and complete biographical description of the relationship to date; second, to show that Tippett quoted from and alluded to the work of T.S. Eliot not only in his early pieces (as has hitherto been thought) but in much later compositions such as The Ice Break, The Mask of Time, and Byzantium; and third, to examine the libretto of Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time in the light of the composer's talks with Eliot. This article suggests that the inclusion in the oratorio of Negro spirituals was influenced by Eliot, and provides an analysis of the composer's own libretto through the lens of T.S. Eliot's essay ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’. Eliot's essay examines the number of voices in which the ‘I’ of a poem can speak, freed from the specificities of prose, and this article argues that Tippett, influenced by Eliot, harnessed the form of oratorio, freed from the specificities of opera, to allow it to speak in many voices.

Haunting Echoes for Homiletics: Why the Spirituals Matter for Preaching

Despite the historical connection between intoned black preaching and the creation and performance of the Negro spirituals, there is silence in homiletical literature about how the spirituals may serve as a resource for the theory and practice of preaching today. This article argues that the spirituals as musical sermons can be a helpful homiletical resource for thinking about preaching, death, and hope, particularly in highlighting the critical relationship between death and the proclamation of the gospel. In light of prosperity gospel preaching and other forms of proclamation that deny the critical role of death in preaching Christian hope, the spirituals offer a healthy and constructive way forward. Thus, remembering them can help re-member preaching.

Whatever Happened to William Dawson'sNegro Folk Symphony?

AbstractWilliam Levi Dawson (1899–1990) is remembered chiefly for his masterful choral arrangements of Negro spirituals and for his multi-decade leadership of the Tuskegee Institute Choir. In 1934, however, his career seemed to be headed in a very different direction: Leopold Stokowski programmed Dawson'sNegro Folk Symphonyon four Philadelphia Orchestra concerts that met with acclaim from critics and audiences alike. The broadcast of one of these concerts on the Columbia Broadcasting System had a particularly powerful impact on the many African Americans in the radio audience. Materials in the William Levi Dawson Collection at Emory University illuminate both the momentousness of the symphony's debut and its provocatively minor impact on the trajectory of its composer's career. This article examines the premiere of theNegro Folk Symphonyas a groundbreaking event both public and personal, offers an explanation for the symphony's startlingly rapid descent into obscurity, and argues that this effective and fascinating work merits renewed attention from conductors and scholars today.