Tough Fronts takes the difficult issues in urban education head on by putting street-savvy students at the forefront of the discussion on how to best make successful changes for inner city schools. Individual chapters discuss scholarly depictions of black America, the social complexity of the teacher-student relationship, individual success stories of 'at-risk' programs, popular images of urban students, and implications for education policy. With close attention to the voices of individual students, this engaging book gives vitality and legitimacy to arguments (...) for school changes that have been lacking in previous discussions. (shrink)

This article explores Fanon's thought on dance, beginning with his explicit treatment of it in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. It then broadens to consider his theorization of Black embodiment in racist and colonized societies, considering how these analyses can be reformulated as a phenomenology of dance. This will suggest possibilities for fruitful encounters between the two domains in which (a) dance can be valorized while (b) opening up sites of resignification and resistance for Black (...) persons and communities-including a revalorization of Black embodiment as a kind of empowering danced experience. (shrink)

This article explores the history of Vodou from outlawed African dance to revolutionary magic to depoliticized national Haitian religion and popular dance, its present reduction to Diaspora interpersonal healing, and a possible future. My first section, on Kate Ramsey’s The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti, reveals Vodou as a sociopolitical construction of racist legal oppression of Africana dances rituals, and artistic-political resistance thereto. My second section, on Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, (...) a “postmodern ethnography” of intersectional oppressions and Black female Haitian resistance in the Diaspora, foregrounds the figure of Gedelia, a feminist variant on Papa Gede, central Vodou spirit (lwa) of resurrection and healing. Finally, my last section, on the “observing participant” analyses of Black dance anthropologist Yvonne Daniel’s Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé, finds a dancing Gedelia in her centering of Oyá, a warrior spirit of storms and death. On this basis, I propose the figure of tornadic black angels as a possible magical tool (in Vodou, a pwen, or “point”) intended to re-spiritualize and thereby re-politicize the secularized and whitewashed social Latin dance called “salsa” for social justice. (shrink)

For Steve Biko, ‘Black Consciousness’ has to do with remedying the ‘lack’ and ‘failure’ which emanate from the colonial encounter. It describes the existential and ontological shift whereby the black moves towards the assumption of her humanity. Beginning on the margins of Continental European philosophy with Jacques Derrida and Frantz Fanon, I examine the pathogenesis of the situation of the black, and point to a road to recovery. In the process, I centre the lived experience of black folk: our yearning (...) to dance with the past; our need for air; our struggle to keep madness at bay. (shrink)

Electronic dance music has much about it to interest philosophers. In this article, I explore facets of dance music cultures, using the issue of authenticity as a framing question. The problem of sorting real or authentic dance music from mainstream or commercial clubbing can be treated as a matter of history and genre-definition; as a matter of defining scenes or subcultures; and as a matter of blackness. In each case, electronic dance music, and critical discourse surrounding it, offers fresh illumination (...) of aesthetic questions. I briefly characterise the main genres of dance music, match conversations about the hardcore continuum with philosophers’ accounts of genre, survey sociologists’ ways of thinking about cultures and their connections to taste and personal identity, and link criticisms that dance music now lacks blackness to conceptions of black aesthetics. This article is Part I of two; Part II focusses on dancers, DJs, and the aesthetics and ontology of dance music itself. Video abstract. (shrink)

Giving the impression that perichoresis solves the “threeness-oneness problem” or the “two natures–one person problem” without an explanation of how perichoresis works is problematic; as such, an explanation of perichoresis ought to be provided. I provide one way to address this problem by drawing upon the work of Eleonore Stump. In contrast to approaches that avoid the metaphysics of perichoresis I provide an account of the metaphysics of perichoresis and suggest that a Stump-inspired account of perichoresis—that is, an account that (...) places an emphasis on the notion of sharing some aspect of the mental life—deserves serious attention by those who feel the weight of the problematic use of perichoresis. (shrink)

What Makes That Black? The African American Aesthetic in American Expressive Culture delineates the African-American aesthetic in both the African-American culture and the artistic cultural formation of the United States. It presents a definition of the African-American aesthetic using a typology of seventy-four tenets-markers that expand the aesthetic's definition to include its artistic structure, cultural function, and consciousness.¿The book is both anecdotal and scholarly, creating an accessible dialogue in a research area sometimes burdened by excessive scholarly nomenclature. The power of (...) story (art) reaches into cognitive spaces and impact understandings unreachable by linear academic argument. ¿Physical features such as images, links to visual media, glossary, bibliography, and index make the project easier for teachers/students to use.¿The book approaches the African-American Aesthetic from wide-ranging sources, cross-referencing literature, dance, oration, music, dress, sub-Saharan African aesthetics, scholarly text, visual arts, athletics, children's games, and anecdotal accounts. (shrink)

This article identifies two different paths where the amnesia described by Hannah- Arendt and the fragmentation identified by Willie James Jennings of our historical past has distorted how people today view dan-cing. I set out how the Christian entanglement with colonial powers has impacted on people’s abilities to relate to their bodies, lands and other creatures of the world. I describe how the colonial wound of Western society forms the basis of the loneliness and alienation that totalitarianism inculcates. After this, (...) I examine how people who seek to find a solid tradition of dance within the Western traditions of Christianity often end up in a conundrum when they seek to legitimize the existence of the tradition in the wrong places. I show how seeking roots for Christian dance practices in Jewish customs is often entangled in supersessionist understandings. These arguments are constructed by means of both J. Kameron- Carter’s writings on race and theology and the black political theology outlined by Vincent W. Lloyd. The second-most-often chosen option for creating a dance tradition for Western forms of Christianity is to romanticize the non-Western ‘other’. Using Lindsey Drury’s work, I argue that dancers have perpetuated the interests that seek to possess the ‘other’ by bringing exotic dancers to the Western marketplace. Finally, I describe the third option – more commonly found amongst those critical of Christian tradition – to seek the roots of transformational dance practices in Hellenistic and more esoteric teachings flourishing in the early twentieth century. We run into the often forgotten or neglected stories of renowned dance teachers like Rudolf Laban and Isadora Duncan on this path. By combining esoteric bodily practices, Mother Earth ‘spirituality’ and superior views about race, they not only promoted but laid the foundation for how people were manipulated in the Third Reich. I end by sharing ethnographic stories of resistance towards how these past historical patterns have affected how dance is viewed today. Those exhibiting such resistance are not always consciously aware of the historical roots I have described. However, engagement in contemplative and healing dance practices seems to be forging new and better ways to create community and to live in a connected way with creation and our creatureliness. The central theme of these practices is to resist the illusion of perfection and control while helping people to listen to and discern the Holy Spirit leading them into a new way of living. (shrink)

Slovenes of African descent find themselves in a calculus of biopower. This points to the precariousness of life (or flesh), which is deemed as less “worthy.” We are at a historical moment in which Afro-pessimism offers a “realistic” glimpse into the past and future of Blackness in the White supremacist contexts of the West, due almost solely to the enormity of systemic violence that Black flesh has endured. In light of this very real political urgency, there is a very real (...) need for security, which in the short term might best be accomplished through concepts such as identity and authenticity. However, Afro-Slovene acts of living reject in passing the priorities that “progress” evokes through the standardization of Euro-normalizing biopolitical orders and slip the categories used to confine them to a limited form of existence. This analysis focuses on the Afro-Slovene insistence on living otherwise as a form of resistance to the tyranny of linear progressive subjectivities, without shedding responsibility for the need to confront race and racism head on. (shrink)

What's aesthetically interesting or significant about electronic dance music? The first answer I consider here is that dancing is significant. Using literature on groove, dance and expression, I sketch an account of club dancing as expressive activity. I next consider the aesthetic achievements of DJs, introducing two conceptions of what they do. These thoughts lead to discussions of dance music's ontology. I suggest that the fundamental work of dance music is the mix and that mixes require their own ontology, distinct (...) from ontologies of recordings or improvisations. Finally, I explore two aspects of dance music's aesthetics: its connection with repetition and repetitiveness and its use of electronic sounds and technologies. I conclude with some speculative thoughts about the unique relation dance music bears to repetition and electronics. This article is Part II of two; in Part I, I consider the problem of defining dance music, via the framing question of authenticity. I explore history, genre, scenes and subcultures, and blackness. (shrink)

This project was provoked by the almost nonexistent pushback from the Democratic liberal establishment to the (2020) exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse, despite his acknowledged killing of two Black Lives Matters protesters against the police murder of George Floyd. It builds on three prior articles arguing for the revival of ancient Dionysian practice, Haitian Vodou, and Indigenous South American shamanism to empower leftist revolution. In essence, I propose an assemblage of spiritual practices that are accessible today for the neo-colonized 99% of (...) the global population, by synthesizing and reconstructing three democratic, lower-SES, Indigenous religions, all of which share a militant defiance of their respective tyrannical plutocracies. To avoid cultural appropriation, I center these reconstructed spiritual practices on the figure of the “mage,” a psychosocial healer loosely analogous to a shaman. And the mage’s signature activity, “magic,” I redefine naturalistically as free interpersonal performative action, practiced using two theoretical disciplines (philosophy and psychology) and two practical disciplines chosen by each mage. More precisely, Spirit/Dance channels the “spirits” of dead ancestors, historical figures, legendary heroes, mythical beings, and fictional characters, into the three ultimate objectives of “mindfulness” for psyches/souls, “liberation” for mindful bodies, and “social justice” for liberated communities, indirectly empowering long-term revolution. (shrink)

Black Art and Aesthetics comprises essays, poems, interviews, and over 50 images from artists and writers: GerShun Avilez, Angela Y. Davis, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Theaster Gates, Aracelis Girmay, Jeremy Matthew Glick, Deborah Goffe, James B. Haile III, Vijay Iyer, Isaac Julien, Benjamin Krusling, Daphne Lamothe, George E. Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Meleko Mokgosi, Wangechi Mutu, Fumi Okiji, Nell Painter, Mickaella Perina, Kevin Quashie, Claudia Rankine, Claudia Schmuckli, Evie Shockley, Paul C. Taylor, Kara Walker, Simone White, and Mabel O. Wilson. The (...) stellar contributors practice Black aesthetics by engaging intersectionally with class, queer sexuality, female embodiment, dance vocabularies, coloniality, Afrodiasporic music, Black post-soul art, Afropessimism, and more. Black aesthetics thus restores aesthetics to its full potential by encompassing all forms of sensation and imagination in art, culture, design, everyday life, and nature and by creating new ways of reckoning with experience, identity, and resistance. Highlighting wide-ranging forms of Black aesthetics across the arts, culture, and theory, Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings provides an unprecedented view of a field enjoying a global resurgence. Black aesthetics materializes in communities of artists, activists, theorists, and others who critique racial inequities, create new forms of interiority and relationality, uncover affective histories, and develop strategies for social justice. (shrink)

This essay considers the recuperation of beauty as a productive critical strategy in discussions of African American dance. I argue that black performance in general, and African American concert dance in particular, seeks to create aesthetic sites that allow black Americans to participate in discourses of recognition and appreciation to include concepts of beauty. In this, I suggest that beauty may indeed produce social change for its attendant audiences. I also propose that interrogating the notion of beauty may allow for (...) social change among audiences that include dance theorists and philosophers. Through a case-study consideration of work by three African American choreographers, Donald Byrd (b. 1949), Ulysses Dove (1947 – 1996), and Abdel Salaam (b. 1949), I ultimately hope to suggest critical possibilities aligning dance performance with particular aesthetic theory relevant to its documentation and interpretation. (shrink)

Purpose: A poetic work of fiction haunts the base of the Statue of Liberty. The act overshadowed the original tribute to the Civil War victory and the Emancipation Proclamation. Abraham Lincoln's praises of the Black American military fell silent. Eurocentrists shrouded centuries of genius and scaled-down Black American mastery. Sagas of barrier-breaking Olympians, military heroes, Wild West pioneers, and inventors ended as forgotten footnotes. Today, countries around the world fetishize Black American history and culture to the point of ethnocide. The (...) real-time case study of Woni Spotts explores the phenomenon. Until ancient traditions evolve with authenticity, global cultures will wither and die. The presented research chronicles over half a millennium of archives. Lists with names, dates, and genealogies seal the Black American legacy in stone. Methodology: The presented research for case studies draws from archival data, dated events, news articles, and an interview with Woni Spotts. The case studies generated three lists. Fifty sports and competitions were dated and cataloged. The athletes were analyzed by a genealogist. Forty music and dance genres were cataloged by publishing or recording dates. The artists were analyzed by a genealogist. Copyright infringements were noted. Inventors were researched for U.S. patents. NASA astronauts and inventors were analyzed by a genealogist. Findings: The presented research showed centuries of untold, reframed, stigmatized, and fetishized Black American history and culture. In the case studies, foreigners of African descent (Africans, Caribbeans, Central Americans, and South Americans) practiced ethnocidal behavior in concert with European descendants. Prolific abolitionists, patriots, politicians, and inventors were written out of history. Superstar athletes were obstructed or outshined by fictional Recommendations: Case studies showed centuries of fragmented narratives created biases and distortions. Black Americans were written out of history, reframed as background characters, stigmatized with skewed statistics, and fetishized globally to the point of ethnocide. The presented research stands as a vital resource for preservationists. Music and dance genre architects were solidified by publishing and recording dates. Athletic events, inventions, and NASA scientists were recorded. (shrink)

Ice Cube "What's a brother gotta do to get a message through to the Red, White, and Blue?" Ice-T Rap music has emerged as one of the most distinctive and controversial music genres of the past decade. A significant part of hip hop culture, [1] rap articulates the experiences and conditions of African-Americans living in a spectrum of marginalized situations ranging from racial stereotyping and stigmatizing to struggle for survival in violent ghetto conditions. In this cultural context, rap provides a (...) voice to the voiceless, a form of protest to the oppressed, and a mode of alternative cultural style and identity to the marginalized. Rap is thus not only music to dance and party to, but a potent form of cultural identity. It has become a powerful vehicle for cultural political expression, serving as the "CNN of black people", or upping the high-tech ante, as their "satellite communication system". It is an informational medium to tune into, one that describes the rage of African-Americans facing growing oppression, declining opportunities for advancement, changing moods on the streets, and everyday life as a matter of sheer survival. In turn, it has become a cultural virus, circulating its images, sounds, and attitude throughout the culture and body politic. (shrink)

A review of Tim Lawrence's Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture.

As “Shut up and Dance” begins, we sympathize with Kenny as he is blackmailed by computer hackers who threaten to release a video of him masturbating to pornography. But as the episode closes, our attitude flips. He wasn't just looking at pornography, but child pornography! Kenny's not a victim, he's a villain, and the hackers are vigilantes. But should we be celebrating? What Kenny did was deplorable of course, but should we wish for such things to happen to deplorable people? (...) Should the hackers have just notified the police? Or must we apply this kind of punishment to truly attain justice? If so, what does it tell us about our notion of justice? Would we want to live in a society that encourages vigilantes? Should we become vigilantes ourselves? (shrink)

This research is based on the reading of Eboni Turman’s work that focuses on body politics, especially through a theological paradigm. The study confirms that the body is a theological problem, and the extent of the problem stretches to the annals of Christian theology to the present, especially in light of racism, sexism and capitalism. The study will engage black womanist eschatology to draw from the rich well of seeing how the experience of black women gives new meaning to understanding (...) the presence and coming of God through wrestling and struggle. The study will use the black church, especially in the United States of America (USA), to dialogue with. The researcher has previously done work on the black church in the USA and South Africa, as well as work on the contribution of African womanist theologians. Thus, the study uses the USA purely because of Eboni Turman’s discussion on the body as a theological problem. Contribution: The study seeks to invite men and the black church to remember the black sacred dance from old, which has remained with black women as they continue to dance, thus critiquing those who are out of rhythm and need it now more than ever. (shrink)

This research is based on the reading of Eboni Turman’s work that focuses on body politics, especially through a theological paradigm. The study confirms that the body is a theological problem, and the extent of the problem stretches to the annals of Christian theology to the present, especially in light of racism, sexism and capitalism. The study will engage black womanist eschatology to draw from the rich well of seeing how the experience of black women gives new meaning to understanding (...) the presence and coming of God through wrestling and struggle. The study will use the black church, especially in the United States of America (USA), to dialogue with. The researcher has previously done work on the black church in the USA and South Africa, as well as work on the contribution of African womanist theologians. Thus, the study uses the USA purely because of Eboni Turman’s discussion on the body as a theological problem.Contribution: The study seeks to invite men and the black church to remember the black sacred dance from old, which has remained with black women as they continue to dance, thus critiquing those who are out of rhythm and need it now more than ever. (shrink)

A recent (2020) special issue in Critical Philosophy of Race dedicated to Maria Lugones illustrates and thematizes the continuing challenge of (re)constructing coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and their allies. As one proposed solution to this challenge, in their guest editors’ introduction to that special issue, Emma Velez and Nancy Tuana suggest an interpretive “dancing with” Lugones. Drawing on my own “dancing-with” interpretive method (which significantly predates that special issue), in the present article I choreograph an interpretive duet between (...) Lugones and Saidiya Hartman. My first section retraces Lugones’ essay on queering tango as a decolonizing practice, and how the latter echoes Marta Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. My second section then utilizes Lugones’ queering of tango as a lens for interpreting her magnum opus, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, emphasizing the dance-resonance of its central concepts, including “playfulness” reinterpreted as a “dance-fulness” that empowers the peregrina’s “world-traveling.” My third section identifies this dancing peregrina’s world-traveling with the wayward young Black female chorus member, or “chorine,” at the center of Saidiya Hartman’s tour de force history, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. And my conclusion names chorines of color in Afro-Latin social dance communities today as exemplary agents for empowering coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and allies. (shrink)

A review of Tim Lawrence's Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture.

In this article, I channel the autobiography of Black Panther cofounder Huey P. Newton, entitled Revolutionary Suicide, against the misogyny of the alt-right movement today. Both Newton and the alt-right have been powerfully influenced by Nietzsche, but one way of grasping the central difference between them is by comparing their conceptions of Dionysus. While the alt-right sticks closer to Nietzsche’s conception, which minimizes the god’s androgyny, Newton’s thought resonates with that androgyny, thereby bringing him closer to the most influential Dionysus (...) scholar since Nietzsche, Walter Otto. I therefore turn to the latter’s Dionysus: Myth and Cult, whose analyses I synthesize into the following image inspired by the god’s closest animal familiar: the dancingly-graceful panther as aqueous-androgynous soul-hunter. Reimagining Newton’s Black Panther in this way, finally, can help us overcome the alt-right. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Sacrificial Ram and the Swan QueenMimetic Theory Fades to BlackBrian Collins (bio)“We speak of a ‘black’ mirror. But where it mirrors, it darkens, of course, but it doesn’t look black, and that which is seen in it does not appear ‘dirty’ but ‘deep.’”—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on ColorThis paper explores the ways in which male and female bodies become the sites of mimetic desire and ritual violence in Darren (...) Aronofsky’s two companion films The Wrestler (109 min, Wild Bunch, 2008, DVD) and Black Swan (108 min, Fox Searchlight, 2010, DVD). Both films (which were originally intended to be one film, explaining their thematic consistency)1 share three elements. First, both explore cultural forms, wrestling and dance, respectively, that punish the body of the performer in a spectacular way. Second, both films end with the ritualistic dying (if not the death) of the main character. Third, in both films, this dying is accompanied by a kind of transformation that can only be called “becoming-animal.”2 Though this last point is much easier to demonstrate [End Page 207] in the case of Black Swan, I will argue that this is also true for The Wrestler. In interpreting these films, I will rely mainly on René Girard’s ideas about mimetic desire and the surrogate victim mechanism, supplemented by Slavoj Žižek’s notion of symbolic death. Symbolic death or “second death” is Žižek’s Hegelian appropriation of the psychoanalytic death drive. The death drive holds a special place for Girard, since he considers Freud’s formulation of the death drive his admission that the Oedipal complex cannot explain the compulsion to repetition, an admission for which he credits Freud’s honesty. In this paper, I demonstrate that pseudo-masochism, Girard’s alternate theory of repetition, and the Žižekian second death are both present in Black Swan and The Wrestler, and that each film plays on the animal/human distinction and ritual transformations of the body to explore these themes.Part One: The Sacrificial Ram“The function of the wrestler is not to win: it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him.”—Roland Barthes, “The World of Wrestling,” MythologiesThe Pseudo-Masochistic Body I: Becoming-RamWilliam Golding’s novel Pincher Martin: The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1956) follows a bitter, selfish, and intransigent sailor who finds himself clinging to a rock in the middle of the ocean, the sole survivor of a shipwreck, only to slowly learn that he is not a survivor at all, but is rather trapped like a character from The Twilight Zone in the utter loneliness of the timeless time between his titular “two deaths.” The first death comes when Martin goes down with his ship and the second comes when he is annihilated (possibly; the ending is ambiguous) by the “black lightning,” which Terry Eagleton identifies in his analysis of the book as “the fire of God’s ruthless love, which burns up those who cannot bear it.” Martin’s misotheism is his last defense against the terrifying power of love, and he continues to defy God as the black lightning engulfs him.3 Why the two deaths? Martin is unable to die properly the first time, Eagleton argues, “because he is incapable of love. Only the good are capable of dying. Martin cannot yield himself up to death because he has never been able to yield himself up to others in life.”4 [End Page 208]Randy “The Ram” Robinson, born Robin Ramzinski, (Mickey Rourke), the protagonist of The Wrestler, is, like Pincher Martin, between two deaths, isolated from the rest of humanity because of his inability to connect with others. But while Pincher Martin is defiant and bound for a self-created Hell because of his deliberate rejection of love, Ram is a much more sympathetic character—though no less doomed—because he tries but fails time after time to accept the love of those who could save him. Pincher Martin’s self-created internal obstacle is his hatred of God, externalized through his encounter with the black lightning. But in Ram’s case... (shrink)

In _Sentient Flesh _R. A. Judy takes up freedman Tom Windham’s 1937 remark “we should have our liberty 'cause... us is human flesh" as a point of departure for an extended meditation on questions of the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in which the black being is understood. Drawing on numerous fields, from literary theory and musicology, to political theory and phenomenology, as well as Greek and Arabic philosophy, Judy engages literary texts and performative practices such as music and (...) dance that express knowledge and conceptions of humanity appositional to those grounding modern racialized capitalism. Operating as critiques of Western humanism, these practices and modes of being-in-the-world—which he theorizes as “thinking in disorder,” or “poiēsis in black”—foreground the irreducible concomitance of flesh, thinking, and personhood. As Judy demonstrates, recognizing this concomitance is central to finding a way past the destructive force of ontology that still holds us in thrall. Erudite and capacious, _Sentient Flesh _offers a major intervention in the black study of life. (shrink)

In this collection of essays, Max Black has brought together discussions on the language of politics, religion, poetry, law, and even magic. The scholars represented include W. B. Gallie, Aldous Huxley, Gilbert Ryle, Friedrich Waismann, Alan S. C. Ross, Bronislaw Malinowski, Owen Barfield, Samuel Butler, and C. S. Lewis. The selected essays deal with the danger, the power, and the extraordinary versatility of language, and show how "all of us can get our thoughts entangled in metaphors.".

It is a noteworthy achievement of Western liberal democracies that they have largely relinquished the use of force against citizens whose lifestyles offend their members’ sensibilities, or alternatively which violate their members’ sense of truth. Toleration has become a central virtue in our public institutions. Powerful majorities are given over to restraint. They do not, by and large, expect the state to crush eccentrics, nonconformists, and other uncongenial minorities in their midst. What precipitated this remarkable evolution in our political culture?The (...) road to toleration originates in the debates provoked by religious dissent in the early modem period. This road was paved in part by a grudging appreciation of the necessity for pragmaticaccommodation. The wars of religion that had devastated the Continent educated the political classes about the costs of persecution. A policy of state-imposed religious intolerance was widely understood to be imprudent.In the early modem period there occurs, however, a shift in the arguments adduced in support of the duty of toleration. (shrink)

In a book that is part memoir and part writing guide, the author discusses how he used a journal to enhance his experiences on the yoga mat and then explains how readers can best start and maintain their own yoga journal. Original.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface Sometimes, even those of us who have organized our entire lives around the transformative possibilities of Black feminist thought can sit back in wonder at the expansiveness of this intergenerational transnational practice.Thisspecialissuetakesamomenttoimbibewhere we have been, where we are, and where we have yet to journey. The contributors to this special issue on, or more precisely, of Black feminist thought find Black feminist thinking in a wide range of (...) times, places, and forms. Each of the contributors invites us to bear witness in a distinct way to the pushes and pulls of critical engagement with Black feminist thought. Biomythic origin point “mitochondrial eve” brainstorms the archive and admonishes those of us looking back to “be a forest of your own / dreams.” Gladys Bentley sends unrequited texts to... Gladys Bentley. Everything is possible here, even what should never have happened. In If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, Farah Jasmine Griffin, one of the most dedicated and prolific stewards of Black feminist thought as a liberatory practice, cites Rita Dove’s poem “Canary” to evoke the protective strategies Black women employ to hold something (ourselves, each other) sacred in an unfree world.1 The lineage we participate in through our Black 1. Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), 155–56. “Be a Mystery”: (The Infinity of) Black Feminist Thought 8Preface feminist intellectual labor is sacred to us. For generations, even before the name “Black Feminist,” it has existed as a form of love, communion, protest, and prophecy, often far from the spotlight. Nurtured by the warmth of imagination, practices became praxis. Griffin and others have ensured a tradition wherein, to invoke Griffin’s paraphrase of Toni Morrison in her tribute to Nellie McKay, “the mothers may soar and the daughters may know their names.”2 We are some of the daughters. But we are living in times that neither we nor our mothers would hardly recognize. Abolitionist queer Black feminists are topping the New York Times bestseller lists. Our scholars and experts speak on the nightly news. Some of what were once our most marginalized proposals have become policies, funding keywords, and even memes. The Movement for Black Lives, one of the largest and most visible social movements of our time, or any time, explicitly connects its vision to the foundational Combahee River Collective statement. We do this work now in the light of recognition. Masses of people think they know what Black feminism is, and yet, this is not the world that we dreamed. We, the current generation of practicing Black feminist thinkers, are faced with the consequences of Black feminist practice feeling like less of a mystery. We celebrate the legacy our foremothers have made possible, and we must also think creatively, lovingly, and sometimes even cryptically about what this moment can and must mother—or bring into being. It has to bring into being something we cannot describe from here, something we have not yet known. It is exhilaratingly beautiful to look upon what’s been made possible, but we know there is so much more than recognition. Undaunted by a world still hellbent on not caring for or loving us, even as it consumes our insights, theories, and modes of organizing, we create worlds filled with an abundance of joy, affirmation, and ingenuity. It is from this robust, ancestral practice of world-making that this special issue emerges. The pieces found here provide insight into one of the most dynamic aspects of Black feminist thought: its generative power. The range of topics included in this special issue encapsulates the breadth of this interdisciplinary, transnational, multimodal, and 2. Farah Jasmine Griffin, “That the Mothers May Soar and the Daughters May Know Their Names: A Retrospective of Black Feminist Literary Criticism,” Signs 32, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 483–507. Preface 9 intergenerational practice. Given the seemingly infinite nodes and entry points of Black feminist thought, it is befitting that this issue coheres because of an unboundedness and porousness among the pieces. The art essays, articles, field reviews, and conversations converse, dance, and harmonize with... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Note From A Narcissist (Amores 1.11) OVID (Translated by Caleb M. X. Dance) Yoohoo! Yes! You! You do her hair. Right? Not like the one who does her legs or nails, right? You know where she goes, right? And you can let her know, like before, to rush those lovely toes— Oh! I mean her hair, to me. Oh, you’ve always been a friend! Right! Take this little note (...) to her tomor— Oh! and hand it to her. Understand? No delay! You’ve got a heart, right? You might be softer than you think and not as “plain Jane” as you think? I think you’ve felt a bit of love, no? You see it in me too, no? So— anyway, if she wants to know what I’m thinking, tell her I can’t wait to hold her close tonight. Right! Enough. My note will say the rest. Oh, it’s late! I’m blabbing. Go! No! Wait! Catch her in a good mood—when she’s free. Oh! but make her read it right away. Watch her eyes! And her face, reading. I mean as she reads. Oh, you learn a lot, even from dumb faces. Don’t be slow! When she’s read it, arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 make her write right back. Lots. Tell her! It’s the worst when every page is filled with loads of empty space. She should pack them in—lines—so eyes linger on words in the margins. My eyes! No! Wait! Tell her not to tire fingers writing long. Let her only write: “Come!” No delay—I’ll praise these letters right away. I’ll dedicate them to... oh... you know, Lady Love herself, and I’ll note, “To Love: Ovid offers up these loyal saviors— you who just were scraps of paper.” 154 note from a narcissist... (shrink)

Author Max Black argues that language should conform to the discovered regularities of experience it is radically mistaken to assume that the conception of language is a mirror of reality.

Author Max Black argues that language should conform to the discovered regularities of experience it is radically mistaken to assume that the conception of language is a mirror of reality.