protean arts

Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“Whenever we envision a world without war, prisons, or capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. 

Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown have brought 20 of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. These visionary tales span genres—sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism—but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be. 

Also features essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renée Thomas.

Edited by Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown

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Bitter Root #4 (2018)  //  Imagine Comics

The Sangerye family has fought evil for decades, but they’ve never faced anything like this. And while two family members have returned home, one may be lost forever as Hell comes to Harlem.

Story: Chuck M. Brown, David Walker, art: Sanford Greene

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Wizard of the Crow (2007)

TA landmark of postcolonial African literature, Wizard of the Crow is an ambitious, magisterial, comic novel from the acclaimed Kenyan novelist, playwright, poet, and critic.Set in the fictional Free Republic of Aburiria, Wizard of the Crow dramatizes with corrosive humor and keenness of observation a battle for the souls of the Aburirian people, between a megalomaniac dictator and an unemployed young man who embraces the mantle of a magician. Fashioning the stories of the powerful and the ordinary into a dazzling mosaic, in this magnificent work of magical realism, Ngugi wa'Thiong'o—one of the most widely read African writers—reveals humanity in all its endlessly surprising complexity.

by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

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Ngũgĩ wa’Thiong’o has taught at Nairobi University, Northwestern University, Amherst College, Yale University, and New York University. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. His many books include Wizard of the Crow, Dreams in a Time of War, Devil on the Cross, Decolonising the Mind, and Petals of Blood, for which he was imprisoned by the Kenyan government in 1977.

…In the end, Billie Holiday’s insistence on performing “Strange Fruit” may have been responsible for her demise.

One of the primary attempts to silence her came from a man named Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and an extreme racist, even for the 1930s. As Johann Hari details in Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Anslinger claimed that narcotics made black people forget their place in the fabric of American society, and that jazz musicians were dangerous in particular, creating “Satanic” music under the influence of marijuana.

Holiday, who throughout her career called public attention to the devastating impact of white supremacy, was also a drug user.  She drew Anslinger’s notice, and he ordered Holiday to cease performing the song. Holiday refused, and Anslinger ramped up his efforts to silence her.

After one of Anslinger’s men was paid to track Holiday and frame her with buying and using heroin, she spent eighteen months in prison. Upon her release in 1948, the federal government refused to renew her cabaret performer’s license, mandatory for any performer playing or singing at any club or bar serving alcohol.

This utterly undermined her career. Although Holiday was able to perform multiple sold-out Carnegie Hall performances over the next several years, she could no longer travel the nightclub circuit.

Unable to perform regularly at the venues she loved, and to stop remembering a childhood that included being raped at age ten, and working in a brothel with her mother, Holiday eventually began using heroin again.  When she checked into a New York hospital in 1959, her liver was failing and cancerous. She was emaciated, and her heart and lungs were compromised. Despite her condition, she didn’t want to stay there. “They’re going to kill me. They’re going to kill me in there. Don’t let them,” she presciently told friends and family.

Indeed, Anslinger’s men, sensing a macabre opportunity, showed up at her hospital bedside, handcuffed her to the bed, took mugshots, removed giftsthat people had brought to the room—flowers, radio, record player, chocolates, magazines—and stationed two cops at the door.

Even so, as doctors began methadone treatment, Holiday began to improve, gaining some weight and improving slowly. But then Anslinger’s men prevented hospital staff from administering any further methadone. She succumbed to death within days.

The only surviving filmed version of Holiday performing the song is from the British cabaret television show, “Chelsea At Nine,” recorded February 25, 1959 and released in March of the same year, just a few months before she died. Her voice is strong and impressive; the raw emotion simply devastating.

4-year-old Daliyah Arana is the inspiration for this new gig at the Library of Congress.

I salute her parents

The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed (2015)

“Here’s what The Rap Year Book does: It takes readers from 1979, widely regarded as the moment rap became recognized as part of the cultural and musical landscape, and comes right up to the present, with Shea Serrano hilariously discussing, debating, and deconstructing the most important rap song year by year. Serrano also examines the most important moments that surround the history and culture of rap music–from artists’ backgrounds to issues of race, the rise of hip-hop, and the struggles among its major players–both personal and professional. Covering East Coast and West Coast, famous rapper feuds, chart toppers, and show stoppers,The Rap Year Book is an in-depth look at the most influential genre of music to come out of the last generation. 

Complete with infographics, lyric maps, uproarious and informative footnotes, portraits of the artists, and short essays by other prominent music writers, The Rap Year Book is both a narrative and illustrated guide to the most iconic and influential rap songs ever created. It’s like the gold tank from Master P’s “Make ‘Em Say Uhh!” video, except it’s a book. It’s like Kanye’s verse on “Put On,” except it’s a book. It’s like the face Biggie made when he was on the boat with Puffy in “Hypnotize,” except it’s a book.”

by Shea Serrano, art: Arturo Torres

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Wouldst thou like the taste of butter? A pretty dress? Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?

Tiny Space Fan by Resalan