Archives and Artificial Histories: Remix in African American Literature - Black Portraitures III

from http://www.blackportraitures.info

Archives and Artificial Histories: Remix in African American Literature
Black Portraiture{s} III:  Reinventions: Strains of Histories and Cultures. Tribune Hall. Johannesburg, South Africa.   17 - 19 November 2016. 

My experimental novel Willows in the Spring is a bildungsroman story that explores the relationships women share in the delicate gestational period of adolescence. It fictionalizes the oppressions and opportunities that emerged as a result of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United States. The Great Depression, coupled with the eugenic optimism of the 1930s, created many tensions within the Movement. The novel re-appropriates archival documents as narrative artifacts.

The novel’s protagonist is a fourteen-year-old girl who is being rehabilitated for promiscuity at the Girls Industrial School of Kansas during the late 1930s. The protagonist, Katherine Perish, affectionately known as Kat, is the daughter of a Lutheran minister and pious mother. Her mother is a prominent member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

The novel addresses the relationships women share across race barriers and generations. With an emphasis on sexuality and reproductive rights, the story charts the processes of self-discovery within a community of young women at the Girls Industrial School of Kansas.  The story is further complicated by the political, religious, racial, and environmental climates of Kansas. Inspired by the glorious achievements of women in Kansas’ history, Willows in the Spring is a third-wave feminist ensemble that resonates the harmonies of the jazz era. 

from https://www.amazon.com/Re-Bop-Remixes-Various-Artists/dp/B000F4RHA2

Afro-modernist legacy – Afro-Postmodern Tendencies

Explorations of ethnicity and modernism complement one another. As a contemporary work of fiction, my novel Willows of the Spring resembles an Afro-modernist aesthetic.  Mark Sanders refers to Afro-modernism as a “claim of historicity, of change, development…of both social and psychic complexity.”

The novel is in kind an  expression of Re-Bop, an art form that incorporates the artistic practice of DJing and relies heavily on previous notions of Afro-modernism expressed in jazz theory and practice. These reflections on DJing inspired me to consider what aspects of my work are post-modern. 

Much of what I am doing in this presentation is questioning if my work stands in the crossroads of literary (in the form of linguistic text and genre manipulation), visual (archival photos), cultural (abstracting/recontextualizing the historical narratives) and other forms of Afrologic and expression.

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 Alexander G. Weheliye in  Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afo-Modernity  refers to the practice of “thinking sound” as interfacing historically seemingly disparate texts in order to excavate their intensities (which only emerge in the process of juxtaposition and recontextualization), much as DJs treat record in their mixes.   My novel takes the practice of thinking sound and extends it into the visual. 

Adam Banks finds a remix to be ‘a remake undertaken to fit a different context, purpose, and audience… He also finds that a remix may use different samples, slightly or significantly, different melodies or beats, additional or removed voices, and layerings of all the above.The recontextualization of digital archives are one of the ways I demonstrate creative mobility and engages in a type of remix that is a “multidimensional performance” and an “intentional rehearsal of a history.” 

Jesse Stewart  in "DJ Spooky and the Politics of Afro-Postmodernism" (2010)  finds that the multiplicity and fluidity of DJ culture plays out on a global scale, because we are in the age of digital file transfers and a virtually limitless digital archive. The recontextualizing of digitally material is one of the ways stake "claim to history".

He also finds that Afro-postmodernism frequently uses pastiche, intertextuality, and irony as strategies of identity formation the remember and honor the cultural past, while at the same time working to construct visions of a better future. Likewise, the Afro-postmodernist emphasis on creative mobility and the collapsing of artistic, cultural, social, and economic boundaries is frequently connected to ideals of race advancement and social justice more generally.  

from -----Sampling Archival Ph

Similar to the ways DJs invoke the groove, I use of digitized archival photos to articulate the multidimensional process of identity performance. This is my remix.  

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Because I have written this novel to be an intentional ‘rehearsal’ of a historical process, special attention is given to the images I ‘SAMPLE’ to create, articulate and validate my characters. They become layered ways to read the characters.  

Digitized photos appear on prison intake forms, medical reports, and family histories. ‘Sampling’ the photos allows me to recontexualize  popular images from the Depression Era as a means of critiquing the validity of historical narratives and documentary arts associated with the eugenic sciences of the era. 

By manipulating the photos, I play with notions of nationalist propaganda that can be found within public histories and that are perpetuated in the form print capitalism a.k.a public narratives.  By using these portraits to create family ties and alter perceptions of physical bodies, I “VALIDATE” my story in a documentary style and satirize singular truths and linear concepts of ‘history’. 

I have chosen to write my novel like this because I am aware of the power of archival photos also act as a type of visual ethnography/biography, some westernized logic and "proof". The reclaiming of archival photos allows me to undermine photography’s use as proof.  

Deborah Willis says that art that reclaims archival proof is a way to  “wrestle the black body from the grip of visual empiricism – where it has often been used by more powerful others observing it for evidence of deviance and difference”…  Whereby this remix is a means of  “intentionally going against the grain of current historicist discourse.”

This novel works like some of DJ Spooky’s recordings. It combines Afrological and Eurological elements to create a polyculutral, Afro-postmodern flow of LITERATURE [music] that challenges the ontological status of both jazz and hip hop as stable entities unto themselves.  

My interest in portraits and archival photos into literary works demonstrates the influence of Lucille Clifton on my writing.  Her memoir Generations (1976) is composed of family photos and short prose writings. Clifton arranged collections of short prose writings to express diverse perspectives and to create individual portraits that are echoed by the photographs.  This method allowed Clifton to tell her life story in a relational format, within the context of her family and public histories. In doing so, she was able to portray African Americans outside of the constraints of visual empiricism.  

In this novel I am re-bopping and extending the tradition of intertextual works in African American Literature. I am looking to works such as Langston Hughes and Roy Decavara’s The Sweet Fly Paper of Life (1955), Natasha Trethewey’s Belloqc’s Ophelia (2002)  and most specifically Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976) as models.

 

Artist’s Statement

As a writer, I engage in cultural productions; I create distinct archives. Most often my observations are expressed in surrealist forms that are reflect some concepts associated with psychoanalytic theory and memory studies, particularly Toni Morrison’s theories regarding rememory.  

I am inspired by the anxieties of our contemporary existence. These anxieties are further complicated by fears that some linear narratives of history fail to be inclusive. Essentially, I belong to a generation, and speak primarily for black women artists when I say, “we do not fear death, but are afraid that we may be erased"-yet again.  

As an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky, I contribute to the academic mission of five areas of study – creative writing, American literature and cultural studies, African American and Africana Studies, digital humanities/WIRED learning, and women’s and gender studies. My research stands in the intersections of these disciplinary studies.