Showing posts with label Amiri Baraka. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amiri Baraka. Show all posts

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Black Music Month 2011: "Bessie Smith is saying 'Kiss My Ass. Kiss my Black unruly ass'"



From the cinematic adaptation of Amiri Baraka's (Leroi Jones) Dutchman, which opened in 1964 and won an Obie Award. The film version, released in 1967 was directed by Anthony Harvey and starred Shirley Knight and Al Freeman, Jr. (who portrayed Elijah Muhammad in Spike Lee's Malcolm X).

Friday, May 20, 2011

Malcolm X: Amiri Baraka, Michael Eric Dyson & Herb Boyd Recall



Democracy Now | with Amy Goodman

Manning Marable’s Controversial New Biography Refuels Debate on Life and Legacy of Malcolm X

After two decades of work, Dr. Manning Marable completed a new biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Dr. Marable used material for his book that was recently made available, thus providing a new insight into the famed civil rights leader. His biography, however, has also refueled the debate on many controversial aspects of Malcolm X’s life and interpretation of his politics and legacy. To discuss Dr. Marable’s biography, we host a roundtable discussion with three guests. Amiri Baraka is an acclaimed poet, playwright, music historian and activist based in Newark, New Jersey. Herb Boyd is a Harlem-based activist, teacher and author who edits the online publication, The Black World Today, and writes for several publications, including Amsterdam News. Michael Eric Dyson is a professor of sociology at Georgetown University and is the author of numerous books, including Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X.

Monday, March 14, 2011

'Left of Black': Episode #25 featuring Guy Ramsey, Jr. and Esther Iverem



Left of Black #25
w/Guthrie “Guy” Ramsey, Jr. and Esther Iverem
March 14, 2011

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by musician, author, professor and curator Guthrie Ramsey, Jr.. Later Black indie digital media pioneer and SeeingBlack.com founder Esther Iverem, joins Neal, also via Skype.

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→Guthrie Ramsey, Jr. is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and co-curator of Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment, currently exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York. Ramsey is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop ( University of California Press, 2003) and the forthcoming In Walked Bud: Earl “Bud ” Powell and the Modern Jazz Challenge.

→Esther Iverem is founder and editor of SeeingBlack.com, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. A journalist, poet and author, Iverem’s most recent book is We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press). A former staff writer for several newspapers, including The Washington Post and New York Newsday, she is the recipient of numerous honors, including a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship, a National Arts Journalism Fellowship and an artist’s fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is also a member of the Washington Area Film Critics Association and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Friday, March 4, 2011

Now Playing: Amiri Baraka's 'Dutchman'



from Shadow and Act:

Made in 1966, Dutchman is the filmed version of Amiri Baraka’s controversial one-act stage play. It won the Obie Award for best off-Broadway play, thrusting Baraka into the limelight. It stars Al Freeman Jr. & Shirley Knight.

The story, for those unfamiliar, goes… A sinister, neurotic, lascivious white girl, Lula, lures to his doom, a good-looking young black man, Clay – a stranger she picks up in the subway. She mocks him for wearing the clothes, and employing the voice and manners of what she deems the conventional white intellectual. The man, who, at first, sees no reason to resist the girl’s advances, perceives too late that he is being used by her. He then drops his so-called “white” disguise, and launches into a counterattack, against the girl, and at whites in general, leading to its haunting, shocking conclusion.

*hat-tip to Kalamu ya Salaam