NYU/Washington Square ParkI have a confession to make: at my core, I'm really a hardcore nerd. I always find it flattering that nowadays as a young bachelor in my prime some folks find me attractive or alluring (or some crazy combination of both). Growing up I was just your (stereo)typical, super-brainy, flightly teenager. Think Steve Urkel, but President of the Drama Club.
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It really wasnt until my undergraduate days at NYU that I became connected with a whole new clan of sexy black boys (from Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers, City College, Fordham, and The New School, to name a few) that effortlessly referenced terms and concepts like "deterritorialization", "postmodernism", "subjectivity", "interpellation" and "performativity."
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Suddenly being young, black, and gifted was "in." Especially if you had the nerve to be gay on top of all that. Me and my bois would have fights over whether Toni Morrison or James Baldwin was the greatest black writer of the twentieth century. We'd rush to the bookstore to browse the latest collection of essays by Slavoj Zizek or Giorgio Agamben. We'd have shouting matches over the "progressive political efficacy of African American vernacular English (aka Ebonics)" even while none of us spoke it. We talked about graduating college then going on to graduate school in idiosyncratic fields like "Modern Thought and Literature", "The History of Consciousness" and "Performance Studies."
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These of course were the same guys that would party with me at The Warehouse on Saturday night and vogue down at Escuelita on Sunday. NYU was paradise for me because I could get out of a lecture course on campus on Foucault at 3:30 and be down at the Christopher Street Pier at 3:45 to carry on with the children.
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I miss those moments now more than ever. As a doctoral student, its just not the same. The pleasure and danger of being a naive undergraduate in the big city is gone. I'm all washed up. New York City doesnt excite me anymore. My undergrad black queer clan has long since moved and relocated (to some of the crazy and idiosyncratic departments listed above). I've read more books than I can count or remember, and nowadays all courses seem the same to me.
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Nonetheless, I'm excited at what this semester has to offer. This semester I'm enrolled in two graduate seminars in critical theory---one in Marxist cultural theory with Tavia Nyong'o, a young and talented historian who is mad cool, and one in Postcolonial Theory with my advisor and hero, theorist and cultural critic Jose Esteban Munoz. Additionally, I have a required bibliography and research course that all Ph.D. students have to take (at 9:30 in the morning!!!!). Luckily this year I dont have any nagging teaching (T.A.) or (G.A.) graduate research assistant requirements---so i get to focus exclusively on research, writing, and reading. Here are the courses I will be taking this semester:
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Marxist Cultural Theory
Professor Tavia Nyong'o, Ph.D.
Mondays 6:30 – 9:15pm
An introduction to Marxist cultural theory, grounded in the writings of Marx. Effort will be made to historicize Marx's thought by showing its relationship to the intellectual, political, and cultural currents of the nineteenth century. Substantial time will be given to three twentieth century schools of cultural Marxism: the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Buck-Morss), the Birmingham School (Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy), and Black Marxism (W.E.B. DuBois, Cedric Robinson, C.L.R. James, Angela Davis).
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Postcolonial Theory
Professor José Esteban Muñoz, Ph.D.
Chair, Department of Performance Studies
Wednesdays 3:30 – 6:15pm
A graduate survey of theoretical and conceptual tools in social and aesthetic theory that speak from, through and about the experience of colonization and its afterlife. The topics addressed will include globalization, exile, modalities of flexible and nomadic citizenship, translocalisms, diaspora and the post-colony. Questions of gender, class, sexuality and racial formations as they relate to postcolonial studies will also be addressed. Class readings will include Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Eduaord Glissant, Gayatri Spivak, MBembe, Nestor Garcia Canclini. May Joseph, Gayatri Gopinath , David Eng and Paul Gilroy.
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Bibliography & Research: Advanced Readings in Performance Studies
Tuesdays 9:30 - 12:15pm
This course proposes a broad range of readings that bear on the definition, analysis, and social impact of performance in culture. Working from keywords and concepts – aesthetics, agency, embodiment, ethnography, everyday life, festival, folklore, gender, genre, heritage, identity, liveness, material culture, memory and history, myth, narrative, performance art, performativity, play, poetics, postcolonial studies, presence, race, representation/mimesis, ritual, social theory, spectatorship, time, tourism –we will critically engage with texts that have shaped the field of Performance Studies. These works will be put into historical context in the lectures and the student will gain an understanding of the different constellations that elucidate the intellectual history of the discipline, as well as its future directions.
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On the left hand side bar of this site, you'll see that I've added my "Fall 2005 readings list". These are the books i'll be reading from courses listed below. Additionally, I have eight or nine titles that I also will cover this semester just for pleasure. Check them out! Tell me what you think. Send me an email about how much you love or hate them or what key concepts catch your attention.
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After all, I started this blog six months ago to open up a dialogue with other black people across the country (and throughout the world!) about public intellectualism, activist discourse, and queer politics.
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What are you reading right now? Today I picked up a few brand new academic non-fiction titles (with one exception, they're all published in the last past 12 months) in black literary and cultural studies.
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Hot-off-the Press/Frank's September picks:
Phonographies : Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke University Press, 2005). '
Alexander Weheliye, an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University surveys literature, film, and music to focus on black literary engagements with recorded sound. He offers substantial new readings of canonical texts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, establishing dialogues between these writers and popular music and film ranging from Louis Armstrong's voice to DJ mixing techniques to Darnell Martin's 1994 movie I Like It Like That. He also analyzes three contemporary Afro-diasporic musical acts: the Haitian and African American rap group the Fugees, the Afro- and Italian-German rap collective Advanced Chemistry, and black British artist Tricky and his partner Martina. 
Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Duke University Press, 2004).
Through a rich interpretation of the remarkable photographs W. E. B. Du Bois compiled for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, Shawn Michelle Smith--an Assistant Professor of English at St. Louis University-- reveals the visual dimension of the color line that Du Bois famously called "the problem of the twentieth century." Smith provides an extensive analysis of the images, the antiracist message Du Bois conveyed by collecting and displaying them, and their connection to his critical thought. She contends that Du Bois was an early visual theorist of race and racism and demonstrates how such an understanding makes the important concepts he developed—including double consciousness, the color line, the Veil, and second sight—available to visual culture and African American studies scholars in powerful new ways.
The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology Of Critical African-American Studies (Paradigm Press, 2005).
Edited by Manning Marable, Professor of History and Political Science at Columbia University, The New Black Renaissance vividly explores the new and changing realities of the African American experience today. Including articles from noted contributors, the book explores "blackness" today and points us toward new and complex relationships among race, gender, sexuality, class, and youth.
Signs and Cities : Black Literary Postmodernism (University Of Chicago Press, 2003).
Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Madhu Dubey, Professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago, argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy.
Small Nation of People : W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress (Amistad Press, 2005).
In this fantastic new book, two time Pultizer Prize winner David Levering Lewis (Professor of History, NYU) and MacArthur "Genius" Grant recipient Deborah Willis(Professor of Africana Studies, NYU) both tell the history of the exhibition and interpret the photographs. If they occasionally lapse into awkward academic prose, their essays provide welcome context for the pictures, which are more informative about period conventions than moving, possibly because Du Bois saw them as sociological markers and neglected to take the subjects' or the photographers' names.
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what are you reading right now?
NYU/Washington Square Park
Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Duke University Press, 2004). 
The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology Of Critical African-American Studies (Paradigm Press, 2005). 
Hey Frank!
I just finished Frederick Smith's "Down For Whatever" & the Norman Kelley edited "R & B (Rhythm & Business): The Political Economy of Black Music, which is coming out on paperback this month (I got details on the release party, email me if you wanna go).
I am now re-reading a mentor's book, Dr. Sharon Caulder, PhD, "Mark Of Voodoo: Awakening To My African Spiritual Heritage"
Posted by
Kenyon Farrow |
8/29/2005
im reading Down For Whatever but once school starts i will be reading tons of black radical literature for an independent study i will be doing.
Posted by
Clay |
8/29/2005
Good luck with the upcoming semester. I know I've said it a ga-zillion times... but I admire your work and your discipline in doing it so early in life. It will definitely pay off... and "the scene" will always be there once you're done. I mean, gosh, you'll be 17 when you're done with your Ph.D??? A prodigy :-)
fs
Oh, I'm reading Terry McMillan's "The Interruption of Everything." Finished Rashid Darden's "Lazarus" before that. And will re-visit Gloria Naylor's "The Women of Brewster Place" when done with Terry Mac.
Posted by
Frederick Smith |
8/29/2005
Yo, good deal...for real. Congrats and good luck on your upcoming semester. I'm doing a little "off the beaten" path reading myself. Some, primarily to enhance certain parts of my career - others because, well it's interesting.
I'm working my way through "Is Bill Cosby Right: Or has the Black middle class lost its mind?" by Rev. Dr. Eric Michael Dyson...I'm going to post on my opinion soon!
Coming Into Reality,
-Jamal
Posted by
Darius T. Williams |
8/29/2005
After the heavy lifting of the latest Harry Potter, uh, book, I'm digging back into Foucault's MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION, and CAN'T STOP WON'T STOP by Jeff Chang (who may be tickled to be mentioned in the same run-on sentence as Foucault, and somewhat less tickled to be lumped in with JK Rowling.)
Nerds unite.
Posted by
The Lonely Optimist |
8/30/2005
I have been fighting my nerdishness for too long. It even feel wierd to write it but I guess I'm a heady seriou person who just wants to be a flighty girl. I think the modern poet S. Carter once said, ""No matter where you go, you are who you are, playa." And I'm coming to terms with that. I am currently reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (Deathbed Edition and The Zahir by Paolo Coelho. I just finished Lucille Clifton's Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir and I have been working on Lost Prophet, Bayard Rustin's biography.
Posted by
jb |
8/30/2005
great list frank! those titles are so familiar to me during my days as an undergrad at oberlin..you'll enjoy them. :)
what am i reading now? other than the most up to date materials on teaching English Language Arts and LIteracy in the NYC public school system..
I'm going to read:
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (out 9/13) and re-read her other two novels
more samuel delany
actually, just anything I can get my hands on really...:)
I think you should have asked folk, what will you be editing:
my teaching portfolio planning to apply for a PHD in english ed program at Steinhardt School for Ed (or am i going to do public policy?)
Posted by
Ryan Canty |
8/30/2005
Frank right now I am reading, Mis-Education of a Negro, Carter G. Woodson.
Also, I am reading, Stolen Legacy, Greek Philosophy Stolen from Egypt.
Posted by
The Divo |
8/31/2005
That photo made me miss my days at NYU. I linked to it hope that's ok.
Posted by
Anonymous |
9/02/2005