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"Often when I thus suddenly think of you I am dumbstricken and overpowered with emotion so that not..."

whatijustread — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 22:36:00 -0400

“Often when I thus suddenly think of you I am dumbstricken and overpowered with emotion so that not for anything in the world could I utter a word. Oh, I don’t know how it happens, but I get such a queer feeling when I think of you, and I don’t think of you on isolated and special occasions; no, my whole life and being are but one thought of you. Often things occur to me that you have said to me or asked me about, and then I am carried away by indescribably marvellous sensations. […] Oh, my darling, how you looked at me the first time like that and then quickly looked away, and then looked at me again, and I did the same, until at last we looked at each other for quite a long time and very deeply, and could no longer look away.”

- Jenny von Westphalen to Karl Marx [before they were married]

the politics of avoidance is the sustained look of and as love.

‎”Traditionally, black musicians, especially in the...

whatijustread — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 19:58:43 -0400

‎”Traditionally, black musicians, especially in the church, do not ‘play by notes.’ That is, they tend to learn to play by ear rather than by reading music. This has certain consequences for performance that can be observed, or rather heard, in musicians trained within the traditional black church (and their secular musical heirs, soul singers and rhythm and blues musicians), which include the propensity for improvisation, highly idiosyncratic rhythmic inflection, and the ability to transpose or modulate from one key to another with relative ease. In traditional black churches it is the singer, not the accompanist, who sets the key. Because musicians who learn to play by ear not only have to reproduce sounds in order to learn new material, but have to be able to hear (understand) relationships between various sounds in order to render an accompaniment that is syntactically sound, the performer develops abilities that in traditional western music are usually only required of composers, or perhaps conductors.”

— Salim Washington
”Of Black Bards, Known and Unknown: Music as Racial Metaphor in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man”

"The [six] hymns about ‘mother,’ in short, exemplify the manner in which the House of God..."

whatijustread — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 19:59:32 -0400

““The [six] hymns about ‘mother,’ in short, exemplify the manner in which the House of God Church affirmed womanhood and the religious freedom of women. No other hymnal of any Protestant denomination, nor of any patriarchal Holiness or Pentecostal denomination, has ever affirmed womanhood in this way.””

- Jon Michael Spencer
Black hymnody : a hymnological history of the African-American church

it’s like they offered a critique of Moynihan’s “report” before he ever wrote it, and sung that critique from the position of the religiously marginalized. that’s hot.

"The reason such sects as the House of God Church became permanent entities in Christianity, rather..."

whatijustread — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 18:45:10 -0400

““The reason such sects as the House of God Church became permanent entities in Christianity, rather than remaining passing inspirations, is due…to the interacting roles which suffering and music played in the lives of church members. Less than half a century removed from slavery, those who gravitated to Holiness churches were indeed ‘the least of them,’ people who suffered most severely from social and economic repression, even at the hands of some of the move privileged blacks of the Methodist and Baptist churches.””

- Jon Michael Spencer
Black hymnody : a hymnological history of the African-American church

"In the early days of the Africans’ transformation into African Americans, the spiritual was..."

whatijustread — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 18:10:40 -0400

““In the early days of the Africans’ transformation into African Americans, the spiritual was the most widespread, or at least the most widely known, of all African-American musical genres. It was created by American slaves as they participated in the process that Christianized them and as they performed their rituals, striving to retain their African cultural memory.””

- Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.
The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States

the communist manifesto [and me! lol]

whatijustread — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 01:54:18 -0400

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

If this is true, and the purpose of the project is to document the historicity of performance practices, the historicity of pentecostal aesthetics, then foundational to any analysis is the claim that the embodied behaviors — dance, song, whooping, tongues — make evident an ongoing class struggle.

a snapshop of a quote from douglass kellner's critical theory, marxism, and modernity.

amandamichellejones — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 02:34:26 -0400

a snapshop of a quote from douglass kellner's critical theory, marxism, and modernity.

"The nervous system is not contained within the body’s limits. The circuit from..."

whatijustread — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 23:17:19 -0400

““The nervous system is not contained within the body’s limits. The circuit from sense-perception to motor response begins and ends in the world. The brain is thus not an isolable anatomical body, but part of a system that passes through the person and her or his (culturally specific, historically transient) environment. As the source of stimuli and the arena for motor response, the external world must be included to complete the sensory circuit. (Sensory deprivation causes the system’s internal components to degenerate.) The field of the sensory circuit thus corresponds to that of ‘experience,’ in the classical philosophical sense of a mediation of subject and object, and yet its very composition makes the so-called split between subject and object (which was the constant plague of classical philosophy) simply irrelevant. In order to differentiate our description from the more limited, traditional conception of the human nervous system which artificially isolates human biology from its environment, we will call this aesthetic system of sense-consciousness, decentered from the classical subject, wherein external sense-perceptions come together with the internal images of memory and anticipation, the ‘synaesthetic system.’ This synaesthetic system is ‘open’ in the extreme sense. Not only is it open to the world through the sensory organs, but the nerve cells within the body form a network that is in itself discontinuous. They reach out toward other nerve cells at points called synapses, where electrical charges pass through the space between them. Whereas in blood vessels a leak is lamentable, in the networks between nerve bundles everything ‘leaks.’ Any cross section of the brain levels show this architectonic discontinuity, and the dendrite-like morphology of their extensions.””

- Susan Buck-Morss

"This misplaced sense of black loyalty to the black president, who doesn’t return it, as far as..."

whatijustread — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 02:37:07 -0400

““This misplaced sense of black loyalty to the black president, who doesn’t return it, as far as I can see, is responsible for a host of absurdities, from Al Sharpton’s twisted logic that Obama cannot advocate for black workers’ rights because people will then say ‘See, he’s playing favorites,’ or something like that. In other words, the African American community—and I use this locution as a demographic placeholder—appears to have reassembled around Barack Obama and to have done so as an ontologically efficacious idea of this man in the White House. So the community seems to think that it must have the president’s back, to cast this in allegorical terms, which might be a useful concept, if the president in turn had theirs, as the logic goes here, but it seems that the president is under no obligation to honor an unwritten, and indeed unspoken, as well as, perhaps, even unspeakable, agreement between him and his supporters. Shockingly, his presumptuous attitude toward his black supporters is rationalized as understandable choice. But as alarming to me, and as disappointing to me, as these deliberate misreadings are, they do not reach at their most intense frequency the interracial counterpart of the intraracial discussion.””

- Hortense Spillers
“Destiny’s Child: Obama and Election ’08”

“The inaugural gesture of phonology was thus the total reduction of the voice as the substance...

whatijustread — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 01:35:12 -0400

“The inaugural gesture of phonology was thus the total reduction of the voice as the substance of language. Phonology, true to its apocryphal etymology, was after killing the voice—its name is, of course, derived from the Greek phone, voice, but in it one cas also quite appropriately hear phonos, murder. Phonology stabs the voice with the signifying dagger; it does away with its living presence, with its flesh and blood.” - Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More

from my dissertation chapter 2 [in progress]

whatijustread — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 23:32:42 -0400

“Blacksong of the enslaved and one of its twentieth century articulations heard in Pentecostalsong are luddisms, they are the breaking of mechanistic stasis, machinic dominance. These sounds, these songs, are the critique of capitalism given through melismatic rupture and yodeling, through elongation and eclipse of voice.”

Snippet from "Introduction: Race, Environment, and Representation " in Discourse Vol. 29, Numbers 2 & 3, Spring & Fall 2007.

joshuabrandonbennett — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 18:48:11 -0400

In his preface to The Future of Environmental Criticism, Lawrence Buell writes,

W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that the great public issue of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. In the century just begun, that problem shows no sign of abating. But ultimately a still more pressing question may prove to be whether planetary life will remain viable for most of the earth’s inhabitants without major changes in the way we live now.¹

Climate change, deforestation, food and water shortages, and the steady increase in nuclear and chemical pollutants are just some of the risk factors that might affect the viability of “planetary life.” Still, as Buell points out, the increasing prominence of ecological catastrophe does not signal a shift away from the problem of the color line. Race continues to play an active role in distinguishing between those who are relatively protected from (or compensated for) environmental harm and “most of the earth’s inhabitants,” who are left with the disproportionate burdens and not the material benefits of resource depletion, toxic dumping, and climate change. The distribution of environmental burdens and risks reflects the legacies of racialization and colonialism, and cannot be analyzed or remedied without attending to problems of racial inequality and geographically uneven development. If environmental criticism endorses anecocentric outlook or land ethic that includes the earth itself in our sense of community, it must also come to terms with Du Bois’s observation that “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”²

"The destruction of farm implements by those working them on American plantations belongs to the..."

whatijustread — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 05:01:06 -0400

“The destruction of farm implements by those working them on American plantations belongs to the story of Luddisn, not just because they too were tool-breakers, but they were part of the Atlantic recomposition of textile laborpower.”

- Peter Linebaugh
Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811-12

"The first three figures (stockinger, cropper, weaver) are the three crafts corresponding to the..."

whatijustread — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 02:09:00 -0400

“The first three figures (stockinger, cropper, weaver) are the three crafts corresponding to the three regions of Luddism and to three machines that were undermining them. To [E.P.] Thompson three of these five examples were machine-breakers, suggesting an identification between them and the class of all working people. The prefigurative power of a chronologically specific tactic found expression as myth, and since myth may transcend the time and place of its birth, Ned Ludd continues to wield his hammer centuries later.”

- Peter Linebaugh
Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811-12

this particular passage allows me to think about the “Three Jennys” that i’m working through presently — an enslaved woman Jenny, Jenny Marx and Jenny Seymour — and i want to consider them as likewise mythical figurations in order to suggest an animaterial “identification between them and the class of all working people,” where working people in my theorizing will be those who produced Work Songs under the lash, under duress.

haha…i’m sure these videos of dude playing an organ...

whatijustread — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 03:27:09 -0400

haha…i’m sure these videos of dude playing an organ mean little to others … but this ish is SO exciting to me …….. !

more Hammond B-3 greatness … this guy knows how to make an...

whatijustread — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 02:10:37 -0400

more Hammond B-3 greatness … this guy knows how to make an organ scream …

"The song ‘Yes Lord’ is a critique of the exploitation that is foundational to..."

whatijustread — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 03:16:46 -0400

““The song ‘Yes Lord’ is a critique of the exploitation that is foundational to capitalism; it is the refusal of abstraction and alienation by the proclamation of a ‘yes’ found in another world. The world, oft, is religious and cultural and this world is generative of the resources necessary for the constant pursuit against marginalization. The ‘Yes’ functions as a ‘no’ to present conditions, accretional towards a new directionality, a different positionality, a queer way to be. ‘Yes,’ is holy.””

- Chapter 2 (of the diss)

this is my video. i’m writing about the Hammond B-3...

whatijustread — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 02:59:04 -0400

this is my video. i’m writing about the Hammond B-3 … and this is perfect.

Question that struck me last night before bed.

joshuabrandonbennett — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:46:28 -0400

Can an animal dress up as an animal? Put differently, what sort of counter- primitivist work is potentially done by William Henry Johnson’s performance(s) as part of P.T. Barnum’s “What Is It?” exhibition? What sort of becoming-animal is that?

"Marxism is a critique of capitalism—the most searching, rigorous, comprehensive critique of its kind..."

whatijustread — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 01:52:18 -0400

“Marxism is a critique of capitalism—the most searching, rigorous, comprehensive critique of its kind ever to be launched. It is also the only such critique that has transformed large sectors of the globe. It follows, then, that as long as capitalism is still in business, Marxism must be as well.”

- Terry Eagleton
Why Marx Was Right