Joseph McLaren

James Matthews: From Cry Rage to the New South African Nation

ABSTRACT Legendary South African poet, fiction writer, and activist, James Matthews exemplifies the path from “dissident” writing to contemporary engagement with community issues in Cape Town. Author of numerous works of poetry, including Cry Rage (1972), Black Voices Shout (1974), Flames and Flowers (2000), Poems from a Prison Cell (2002), and Age Is a Beautiful Phase (2008), Matthews engaged political concerns in South Africa, much of which can be understood through historical and cultural lenses. Especially focusing on the collected works found in the republished version of Cry Rage, this paper examines poetic language and themes as they move from a vigorously articulated anti-apartheid sentiment to a community interest based on political issues of the twenty-first century in the “New South Africa.” A primary goal of this paper is to assess the transition from apartheid to liberation through Matthewss creative works and also through his retrospective thoughts on the early years and the development of his career in relation to twenty-first century realities in Cape Town and the nation more broadly. To what extent have the ideas of the Black Consciousness period been maintained in the collective memory of twenty-first century Cape Town residents? In this regard, the social history of District Six can be unearthed through the literary works of Matthews and through his memory of events, personalities, and struggles.

Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (review)

but Hughes realized that he had his own vernacular tradition in the blues, which he experienced in various black communities, including Chicago and Washington, DC. Certainly his reading of Paul Laurence Dunbar revealed black vernacular elements. The problem with citing infl uence is that it might suggest imitation or lack of originality. Hughes’s “Proem” is seen as similar to Sandburg’s “Old Timers,” and probably Hughes’s most recognized blues poem, “The Weary Blues,” also the title of his fi rst collection, is linked stylistically in part to Lindsay’s “The Congo.” Hughes, however, employed blues elements more extensively than any of his predecessors or contemporaries. Tracy offers a somewhat technical analysis of the blues and Hughes’s poetry by using such concepts as the “twelve-bar stanza” and AAB format. Jazz is another infl uence and can be distinguished from the blues by its greater reliance on instrumental improvisation. Although there is sharper present-day distinction between jazz and blues, in the 1920s many of the so-called jazz artists were playing blues structured compositions, and this has been the case throughout the evolution of jazz. In chapter 3, “Creating the Blues,” Tracy notes that Hughes called the fi rst poem he “‘sold’” a “‘ jazz poem,’” (155). Because of the breadth of his career, Hughes became familiar with later developments beyond blues such as 1940s bebop and “modern” jazz of the fi fties. Although Tracy is not primarily concerned with improvisational-instrumental jazz, it is certainly an area that needs closer exploration in relation to Hughes’s poetry. Tracy rightly asserts that Hughes employed “aspects of the blues tradition more regularly than any other poet of his time” (248), but it is also important to emphasize the latter stages of Hughes’s career and the infl uence of jazz legends Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Charles Mingus as well as the importance of Hughes’s Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961). With a very thorough bibliography and discography organized with subheadings, Langston Hughes and the Blues is a commendable scholarly work. —Joseph McLaren Hofstra University

Langston Hughes and the Blues (review)

The Paul Robeson chapter is terrifi c. Here Baldwin dives right into the essential: Robeson’s unmatchable and self-understood physical presence; his voice, so riveting even when present only in recordings; his commitment to global folk traditions (though some song-lists would have helped), and their relations to both Negro and Russian self-articulations; and his extremely favorable reception in all sectors of Soviet society. At times, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain will frustrate readers, partly for its lengthy discussions of unknown texts not yet or only fragmentarily presented (more text-presentation would enhance the reader’s understanding), and partly also for its frequent heavy-going prose; some rewriting based on Richard Lanham’s Revising Prose (New York: Scribners, 1979, 1987) would do some good. Yet the book’s historical depth, bordercrossing scope, analytic reach, and exposure of little-known but globally important texts make this a front-shelf selection. In its closing pages, the book’s epilogue is terrifi cally smart and dazzlingly readable: should that style carry into Baldwin’s future work she will be a force indeed. —David Chioni Moore Macalester College

Language, Rhythm, and Sound: Black Popular Cultures into the Twenty-First Century (review)

ing of the PBS broadcast of Peter Brooks’s Mahabharata convincingly argues that “global commodity logic makes it impossible to separate the category of aesthetic from other economies of value” or to “distinguish economic from cultural estrangement” (169, 145). Ganguly’s title invokes Walter Benjamin’s thesis, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that ‘the state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (25). The notion of exception, or “anomalous historical positioning,” provides one element of the book’s subtle coherence, as such things as ethnographic narrative, the native informant, the author, and her book are in turn considered as “exceptions” (10). Benjamin and Theodor Adorno provide frequent reference points for her consideration of the “experience” of the “everyday” as “exception,” but among the most instructive aspects of the book are the wide-ranging genealogies she traces for these terms and others such as adequation, antinomy, and authenticity. Ganguly’s ethnographic interest can be described as the “peculiar hold of past distortions on material in the present” (9), but this phrase captures too her commitment to theoretical precision and her conviction that thinking a concept backwards can offer a way forward, as if concepts, no less than experience, are susceptible to “petrification [. . .] in late capitalism” (13). Ganguly moves among thinkers and concepts with remarkable suppleness, the density of her argument lightened by moments of well-earned wit, when a deft turn of phrase suddenly knots together multiple strands of thought. She crafts an elegant structure for each of the chapters that enacts the dialectical “tensions between conceptuality and the world” (22); the chapter on media spectatorship, for example, is artfully structured around Ernest Bloch’s distinction between alienation and estrangement (“bad” vs. “helpful contrasts,” 142). States of Exception is challenging and rewarding reading not least because of the overlapping intricacies of Ganguly’s ideas and her demonstration of the possibility of writing through complexities with cogency, urgency, and grace. —Jennifer Wenzel