(Sp/R)ace Woman: Dr. Mae Jemison, Afrofuturism, and the Utopian Program

The power point below is part of a presentation in which I explore the intersections between Dr. Mae Jemison, Afrofuturism, and the Utopian Program.

Mae Jemison, Afrofuturism & the Utopian Program

 

It also provides a kind of blueprint for a highly scalable (both in terms of academic level and time) potential multimedia workshop or unit within a larger course; this course would be a way to introduce people to:

o  the historical relationship between NASA and Civil Rights & desegregation

o  Some central ideas about Utopia, written by a few major theorists

o  Afrofuturism (exciting!) as a concept and practice

o  The ways in which Afrofuturists claim Mae Jemison – someone with a Utopian program, the 100 Year Starship – while situating, either overtly or by more subtle implication, that claim within a longer history of black musical production utilizing the trope of (space) travel as a mode of emancipation, be it mental or material/physical.

I would very much welcome thoughts, comments, and responses!

sexual utopia?

I came across this article recently in which the author discusses her experience in the ZEGG community located near Berlin, Germany.  One of the founding ideals of this intentional community was/is free love and the idea that it can help individuals overcome the fear and possessiveness  that too often accompany monogamous relationships.  I`m not going to say more now because I may write about it for my own project, but it is certainly an interesting read, especially when considered in the context of some of the things we`ve been talking about in this course.

The Harlem Shake

Earlier this week, a friend sent me this video and asked if I understood it.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJiSSAMNWw[/youtube]

(can also be viewed here, since the videos don’t seem to be embedding properly right now)

Admittedly, I did not. I didn’t find it funny or creative, I didn’t see what it had to do with the dance the Harlem Shake (except that the words are in the song playing in the background), and I certainly had no idea why the internet had suddenly exploded into copycat videos of people gyrating in their office cubicles.

Like most popular things on the internet, it frustrated me. Here we have this wonderful–dare I say utopian?–resource to spread ideas and cultural resources around the wired world in the blink of an eye, but a lot of this gets lost among the cat videos. “Memes” develop and evolve so rapidly that they quickly lose all provenance, all coherence, and all awareness of any cultural roots. The Root does a much better job than I could of discussing both the origins of the Original Harlem Shake and the Meme Harlem Shake. I also came across THIS video (a much better use of our time, I should say) asking Harlem residents what they think of this new fleeting YouTube trend:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IGH2HEgWppc[/youtube]

(can also be viewed here)

The consensus? These videos are insulting. Not only would Harlem residents not be caught dead dancing so poorly in their pajamas in public, BUT ALSO these videos belie Harlem’s role in Americans’ consciousness as a primary hub of rich African American culture and history dating back to at least the turn of the last century.

Utopia and Dystopia in HBO’s the Wire

The popular HBO series, The Wire, is a glimpse into the dregs of society in Baltimore, MD. The series focuses on drug culture, public school failures, labor racketeering and the methods Baltimore city employed to deal with these situations through politics and law enforcement.  In season 3, Major Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin implements a radical concept to contain the drug culture of the Western District, one of the poorest and most dangerous areas in Baltimore.  One area of the Western District becomes a a safe drug zone where people are free to sell and buy illegal narcotics.  The only rule Colvin mandates for Hamsterdam, the safe drug zone, is no violence.  This enclave acts as a haven for drug dealers and users to indulge in their illicit behaviors without reproach and there are even resources like clean needles and condoms for prostitutes and drug users to carry out their deeds ‘safely’.  Furthering the utopian feeling, the other residents of the Western District are able to live without fear of gun violence, theft and gang activity.  Seemingly, Major Colvin creates an urban Utopia in the Western District where drug use is legal and residents are free to live without fear.  But, Major Colvin’s experiment creates a chaotic space where children of drug abusers are neglected, drug users are not getting help to end their habits and the dregs of inner-city poverty-stricken society are at play, creating a sense of dystopia.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoiJRKwiC1Y[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9tuxxkgFME[/youtube]

Venus

Venus 
By Suzan-Lori Parks
Directed by Judyie Al-Bilali
March 28, 29, 30 April 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
The Curtain Theater (Fine Arts Center, UMass)

In Venus, Suzan-Lori Parks remembers and re-imagines the historical figure of Sarah Baartman, known to the world as “the Hottentot Venus.” In the early 19th century, Baartman, a Khoisan woman from South Africa, was taken from her country and displayed across Europe as a freak and a medical anomaly for her large buttocks. Venus examines how mainstream culture views Black bodies, specifically Black female bodies. Parks uses Baartman’s story and the medium of theater as a powerful platform to ask audience members to consider what it means to watch, to be seen, and to engage in a performance. Because Venus’ sexuality is taboo, is it not indecent for the audience to watch her? Is Venus, in re-imagining Baartman, objectifying her all over again? Expect to leave Parks’ Obie Award-winning play engaged in passionate discussions with your fellow audience members.

http://www.umass.edu/theater/mainstage.php

The Blutopic Appetite

Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem, Preface:

Could “The dead are dying of thirst” apply to the living dead wanting to awake, wanting more life, wanting more from life? An appetite for acknowledgement and the change it can bring drives andoumboulouous we.

This thirst or demand or desire sounds a sometimes dark note, a note whose not yet fulfilled promise bends it, turns it blue. A desperate accent or inflection runs through seriality’s recourse to repetition, an apprehension of limits we find ourselves up against again and again, limits we’d get beyond if we could. This qualifies the promise of advance and possibility the form otherwise proffers, the feeling for search it’s conducive to complicated by senses of constraint. Circularity, a figure for wholeness, also connotes boundedness. Recursiveness can mark a sense of deprivation, fostered by failed advance, a sense of alarm and insufficiency pacing a dark, even desperate measure, but this dark accent or inflection issues from a large appetite or even utopic appetite or, better – invoking Duke Ellington’s neologism — a blutopic appetite. Seriality’s mix of utopic ongoingness and recursive constraint is blutopic, an idealism shaped or shaded by blue, in-between foerboding, blue, dystopic apprehension of the way the world is. (xiv)

A Black Utopia in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

their_eyes_were_watching_god

In the fifth chapter of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937, New Negro Renaissance work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character, Janie and her new husband Joe Starks seek out Eatonville, Florida the first all Black town in America.

“On the train the next day, Joe didn’t make any speeches with rhymes to her, but he bought her the best things the butcher had, like apples and a glass lantern full of candies.  Mostly he talked about plans for the town when he got there.  They were bound to need somebody like him.  Janie took a lot of looks at him and she was proud of what she saw.  Kind of portly like rich white folks.  Strange trains, and people and places didn’t scare him neither.  Where they got off the train at Maitland he found a buggy to carry them over to the colored town right away.

It was early in the afternoon when they got there, so Joe said they must walk over the place and look around.  They locked arms and strolled from end to end of the town.  Joe noted the scant dozen of shame-faced houses scattered in the sand and palmetto roots and said, ‘God, they call this a town? Why, ‘taint’ nothing but a raw place in de woods.’

‘It is a whole heap littler than Ah thought.’ Janie admitted her disappointment.

‘Just like Ah thought,’ Joe said.  ‘A whole heap uh talk and nobody doin’ nothin’. I god, where’s de Mayor?’ he asked somebody. ‘Ah want tuh speak wid de Mayor.’

Two men who were sitting on their shoulderblades under a huge live oak tree almost sat upright at the tone of his voice.  They stared at Joe’s face, his clothes and his wife.

‘Where y’all come from in sich uh big haste?” Lee Coker asked.

‘Middle Georgy,’ Starks answered briskly. ‘Joe Starks is mah name, from in and through Georgy.’

‘You and yo’ daughter goin’ tuh join wid us in fellowship?’ the other reclining figure asked. ‘Mighty glad tuh have yuh. Hicks is the name.  Guv’nor Amos Hicks from Buford, South Carolina.  Free, single, disengaged.’

‘I god, Ah ain’t nowhere near old enough to have no grown daughter. This here is mah wife.”

Hicks sank back and lost interest at once.

‘Where is de Mayor?’ Starks persisted. ‘Ah wants tuh talk wid him.’

‘Youse uh mite too previous for dat,’ Coker told him. ‘Us ain’t got none yit.’

‘Ain’t got no Mayor! Well, who tells y’all what to do?’

‘Nobody. Everybody’s grown. And then agin, Ah reckon us just ain’t thought about it. Ah know Ah ain’t…”

Joe Starks goes on to purchase two hundred acres of land, build a town store, incorporat the town and make a small fortune by selling parcels of land to Black people when they move to Eatonville. He became the first Mayor of Eatonville.

Hurston makes no mention of crime in Eatonville.  The poorest of the poor are feed.  The entire town lives in harmony through agriculture and leisure activities.  Even a mistreated mule in Eatonville is set free to live out his last days free, happy and unencumbered with hardship.  But even in Hurston’s construction of this Utopian space, there are traces of dystopia through the harsh gossip that emanates from the mouths of its civilians, its acceptance of domestic violence and the pure envy that manifests in many women towards Janie for being Mrs. Mayor Starks.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door (full length movie)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BynXfREPG8[/youtube]Here is the full length movie from the class presentation on February 5th. The movie is an adaptation of Sam Greenlee’s Black Arts novel by the same title.  In the story the main character, Dan Freeman, enacts an elaborate scheme to reclaim the south side of Chicago and eventually all ghettos in cities across the United States.  These urban enclaves Greenlee imagines are arguably a Black man’s Utopia in America.

Born in Flames

Here is a short excerpt from the film:  [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn2rgP24pEc[/youtube]

And here you should be able to watch the film in its entirety (it is also on Netflix, but the quality of the Youtube version seems to be reasonably good):  [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgUU41D4T7g[/youtube]