From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances Registration >> |
| 11:30 | Registration |
| 12:00 | Opening Reception |
| 1:00 | Panel One |
| Greg Tate "dada, punk rock and the african presence" |
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| Lisa Thompson "Soul Food: Reconsidering Black Middle Class Sexuality in Contemporary Film" | |
| In Black Bourgeoisie E. Franklin Frazier suggests that, “the frustration of many Negro women has a sexual origin.” In light of his perception, my talk will examine the conventional rendering of middle class black female sexuality in contemporary romantic comedies and consider the interventions made by black woman filmmakers. | |
| Mary Pattillo "The Black Bourgeoisie Meets the Truly Disadvantaged" | |
| This presentation will explore the concept of black middle class "aggression" against other African Americans as posited by Frazier. Class and race are explored as they relate to space and location, as blacks of different classes work to construct a literal and figurative "community" out of widely disparate lifestyles and rituals related to public space. |
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| 2:35 | Amiri Baraka "Negrossity" |
| Darwin T. Turner Featured Speaker (This special talk is sponsored by the African American Studies Program) |
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| A performative talk that uses poetry, short fiction and a section of a novel in progress--NEGROSSITY-- to explore and explain the time, place, and condition of relevance of black racial descriptors as Black-Afro-American-Negro, the N-Word, and Nigra. This special talk will illuminate how these terms identify a specific era and specific mindsets of the callers and the called. In addition, important black writers and movements--Douglass, DuBois, Hughes , Zora Neale, Dumas, Larry Neale & relationship to Negritude, Negrissmo, Indigisme Movements in African and the Caribbean, Spanish speaking, English speaking, French speaking--will be discussed and placed in a context of contemporary significance and application to race, class, spiritual condition and racial destiny/progress. | |
| 3:35 | Coffee Break |
| 3:50 | Vershawn Ashanti Young Solo Performance: "Your Average Nigga" |
| Special Performance which dramatizes presenter’s identity conflicts as he journeys from the Chicago housing projects to the professorship at the University of Iowa. Performance is a stage adaptation of Young’s monograph Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity (Wayne State University Press 2007). |
| 9:30 | Continental Breakfast at Old Brick |
| 10:00 | Panel Two |
| E. Patrick Johnson “In the Merry Old Land of Oz: Rac(e)ing and Quee(r)ying the Academy” | |
| This talk will focus on being black, gay, and southern in the academy. Tracing the journey from public housing to the ivory tower, this presentation examines the nebulous tightrope one has to walk when negotiating class, race, sexuality, and region in higher education. Drawing on the speakers first job as an assistant professor at Amherst College, he recalls how he survived the "land of Oz" in spite of the various road blocks to his success. | |
| Angela Kupenda “Examining the Black Female Struggling Class through the Lens of Life and Literature” | |
| This presentation will examine the position of a group of black woman, whom the speaker calls, “the struggling class,” women who, but for race and gender complications, could be a part of the middle class. This group will be examined in this paper through the lens of literature and life stories. | |
| 11:05 | Roundtable Discussion: "Performing Writing, Performative Research, Performance Studies" |
| Facilitated by Professor Kim Marra, Theatre Arts and American Studies, Sydne Mahone, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Theatre Arts; Tisch Jones, African American Studies and Theatre Arts; E. Patrick Johnson; and Bryant Keith Alexander | |
| 11:45 | Lunch and Continued Discussion (Preregistration for Lunch required by September 19, 2007) |
| 1:00 | Panel Three |
| Signithia Fordham “My Love Affair With My Arrogant Hair: A Black Female's Celebratory Hair Poem” | |
| A poetic performance that chronicles the presenters tortuous relationship with her outside-the-norms hair, including how her unsuccessful efforts to make her hair fit the hegemonic hair norms--long, blond and uncurled--compelled her not only to an appropriate cultural space but unconditional acceptance and celebration. | |
| Bridget Harris Tsemo “Our Unwashed America: The Black Middle-Class Confronting Politics at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries” | |
| This presentation will investigate the early moments of a black bourgeois identity as it is constructed in various performances found in novels, political speeches, poetry, and photographs produced by middle-class authors at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century | |
| Bryant Keith Alexander “’Boojee!‘ A Question of Authenticity; An Accusation of Passing, and Both the Not (Me) and the Not (Not Me)”: A Critical Performative Essay | |
| This critical performative essay will be structured around a series of autopoetic movements that establish a commentary on the use of “boojee” as (1) a question of black authenticity; (2) an accusation of passing—as in acting White, and (3) a narrative that ultimately admits that the accusation of being boojee rings as true to both the not (me) and the not (not me), which the speaker makes literal to the performance of racial identity and class as an influencing variable in everyday life. |
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| 2:30 | Michele Wallace "Soul Pictures: Black Feminist Generations" |
| Darwin T. Turner Featured Speaker (This special talk is sponsored by the African American Studies Program) |
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| This paper will examine the work and lives of three generations of a black family primarily through the accomplishments of its women, beginning with Mme. Willi Posey, a Harlem designer, her daughter Faith Ringgold, who has become an internationally known artist and her daughter Michele Wallace, black feminist author and academic. | |
| 3:30 | Coffee Break |
| 3:45 | Nancy Cheryll Davis-Bellamy Performance: "Passing SOLO" |
| Passing SOLO is based on Towne Street Theatre's highly successful play PASSING, adapted from Nella Larsen's 1927 novella. A memory play, it explores the conflicting demands of race and friendship... the slippery line between trust and deception. In this solo performance, Nancy Cheryll Davis portrays both Irene and Clare, as their renewed friendship exposes the price we pay in a society where freedom is bought with deceit. |
Co-sponsors: African American Studies, American Studies, Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts, Communications Studies, English, Rhetoric, Sociology, Theatre
If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact the department of Rhetoric, in advance, at 319-335-0178.
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Page update:
October 25, 2007
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Contact: Obermann-Center@uiowa.edu • Phone: 319-335-4034
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