Ramcat Reads #17

 Ramcat Reads #17

George C. Cochran Innocence Project.   Levon and Kennedy: Mississippi Innocence Project.    Brooklyn, NY: PowerHouse Books, 2018. [Photographs by Isabelle Armand; text by Tucker Carrington]

A photographic documentary, reminiscent of WPA books,  based on Tucker Carrington's article "Mississippi Innocence: The Convictions and Exonerations of Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer and the Failure of the American Promise," Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 28.12( 2015 )and pictures Armand created of the Brooks and Brewer families because "within rural communities vulnerable  to silence and oblivion, they stand witness to wrongful conviction and mass incarceration" (back matter, n.p.).  The book is a tidbit of visual/textual evidence that much we need to know does not occur in the urban public sphere.

Morrison, Toni.  The Origin of Others.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Morrison's publishing her 1990 William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of Civilization as  Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) was an event, a moment of gravity in discussions of how a considerable amount of "white" literature masked as  American literature dealt with or sought to avoid dealing with Africanist presence in the United States of America.  Her analyses were razor-sharp, surgical.  They modeled qualities of literary critical thinking one wished to absorb and pass on to one's undergraduate and graduate students.  If one could succeed, to some degree, in transmitting Morrison's insights, one helped students ( as well as oneself) to be more securely grounded in what mattered about history and the need to have  more thorough understandings of literature as expressions of ideology and politics.  The book was a positive disruption of American literary arrogance.

By contrast, The Origin of Others (2017), the Spring 2016 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures is an occasion, a mellowed recycling of some main ideas from Playing in the Dark in order to focus on the universal actuality and too often debilitating consequences of cultural, social, and political expressions and uses of difference, the multiple constructions of the vexed Other of which one's Self is inevitably a part. Coming twenty-six years after the Massey lectures, the Norton lectures are less surgical and hefty, less effective in dealing with the vexed actuality of now.  To be fair, we must admit that The Origin of Others provides crucial insights about Morrison's evolution as a writer and the current status of her ability to critique forms of denial in twenty-first century global rule of madness.  The book positions us to assess and re-assess the enormous contribution Morrison has made to world literature, but it leaves us with the frustrating recognition that historical meditations on race and difference may produce limited enlightenment without  any benefit of redress and resolution.  Stress "enormous"  by way of remembering that Morrison was instrumental , before she was acknowledged as a maker of world-class fiction, in assisting a few black writers to be published in the mainstream   The book is informed with self-commentary on Morrison's achievements, and that commentary might be used with profit in courses on literature and culture.

Morrison does succeed, however,  in speaking with the  wry charm  of  the lower frequencies  about  "the destabilizing  pressures and forces of the transglobal  tread of peoples"(109).  In his foreword for The Origin of Others,  Ta-nehisi  Coates commends Morrison for understanding "the hold that history has on us all" and for providing "a welcome aid in grappling with how that grip came to be"( xvii).  I stand in polar opposition to Coates about welcoming such aid, because there is better aid to be had from ice cold discourses on the Others, discourses more akin to the work of Frantz Fanon.

 Playing in the Dark gave us radical dreams of agency; The Origin of Others leaves us with despair, with visions of how amoral gods kill us and all the Others for sport.  It is doubtful that we can muster any alacrity to pass on this negative wisdom to future generations.

Perry, Imani.  May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Perry's is a  smart and timely book about how James Weldon Johnson's poem/song has occupied expressive cultural locations for 115 years. "The ways we tell history," Perry asserts, "often make transitions from one period to the next seem permanent and strict.  But in truth every moment and  movement bleeds with the ink of previous eras.  This truth emerged dramatically as I researched the history of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing.' It was the epic anthem embraced by black institutions as well as black and multiracial social movements" (xiv).

Roberts, Blain.  Pageants, Parlors and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. A good WORKS CITED item for a future study of the making of "whiteness" and the making of "white women" in the South.  The commentary on black women can be used in new assessments of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.