The Global Avant Garde in Literature and Film

"Testifiers have expressed anger that their testimonies appear (often unacknowledged) in...Country of my Skull. Some feel they revealed more than they wanted to at the public hearings from which Krog draws their testimonies (103)" 

(Source: Ross, Fiona. 205. "Codes and Dignity: Thinking about Ethics in Relation to Research on Violence." Journal of the Anthropology of Southern Africa 28(3-4): 99-107.) 

Also, considering Krog as poet: 

"No poetry should come forth from this. May my hand fall off if I write this” (Krog 6).

there’s a line in Texaco about how the slaves actively resisting on plantations are the real sites of strength/action/change, more so than the marrons. i wish i could find the quote! anyway, the dwellers of Texaco are similarly (though ofc totally differently) fighting to stay a PART of City, rather than fleeing into the hills. (why does chamoiseau not seem to really like marrons? or are the people getting called marrons not the true marrons?)

Jean Genet, opening to Prisoner of Love, page 5. 

“Anxious, irritable, frowning eyebrows, a ferocious face to tame misfortune, I was a sight to see: I walked as if hacking my way through thickets. My clothes were different: head caught in curlpapers, a madras dress, bare feet, a scarf around the waist to hold my stomach. My pace was decisive, because you had to be decisive, walk decisively, move forward decisively to leave the hesitation in the dust. . . My voice could cut like a machete blow. It was hard for anyone to look me in the eyes because war would stare back -- and their eyelids would drop.” (Chamoiseau, Texaco, 273) 

John Yau, “Please Wait By the Coatroom”

Made me think of how Desani chose to write in the style of British dictionaries.

And the artist Yau was writing about is Wifredo Lam, who was friends with Aime Cesaire.

Returned to this Sara Ahmed essay on “Feminist Aunties” while I was trying to process what didn’t make sense to me about Jeff Nunokawa’s self-describedly banal subject of the middle/mixed. For Nunokawa it seems important that the middle is mixed and that the mixed is middle: as in, middle class middle America is mixed race, and mixed in its cultural interests (nothing “fancy,” but a range of political and aesthetic possibilities); mixed race Americans are “middle,” perhaps typical, and so central to America.

Ahmed: “The contours of mixed-race spaces are not so smooth in the face of how things arrive. Already there are arrivals that are unexpected, creating rough edges in the contours of this world. Its like you can see the creases, which then means that the cover fails to cover, fails in the act of providing a covering. So objects and bodies disturb this picture, creating disorientation in how things are arranged.”

Then she says, of discussions of complexion and “mixed” varietals, “Color wasn’t just something added, like a tan adorning a white skin, as it redirected my attention to the skin, to how the surfaces of bodies as well as objects are shaped by histories of contact.”

Maybe this is what is ugly to me about Nunokawa’s version of the middle/mixed: though it is supposedly about the encounter of “mixed” orientations into a kind of middle, "middle/mixed” smooths over all of those edges into a nostalgia for a melting pot. He wants edges to exist there; he wants this middle to be mixed and so full of diverse characters and orientations-- wants them to be hashing it out, probably. But he simultaneously desires “middle,” as pleasant, nostalgic, universal. 

Bo-Jangles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U4ww-MmAY4

“It is the lack of symmetry which makes Negro dancing so difficult for white dancers to learn. The abrupt and unexpected changes. The frequent change of key and time are evidences of this quality in music. (Note the St. Louis Blues.) The dancing of the justly famous Bo-Jangles and Snake Hips are excellent examples.”  -- Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression”