"Discuss as you see fit connections between one of the fictional texts (Du Bois, Schuyler, McDuffie) and one of the non-fiction essays (Du Bois, Mullen)."
The idea of "race pride" has always been a controversial, interesting topic. On the one hand, it seems silly to take pride in something you have no choice over; you can't choose your race any more than you can choose your parents. However, racial identity is often so strong that it's easy to latch onto, to define yourself by race. In The Conservation of Races, Du Bois pushes the importance of maintaining a positive, moral African identity. He states that Africans have already given America much of what it is - We are that people whose subtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amid its mad money-getting plutocracy.
However, in order to come together as a race and become an influential force in America, Du Bois insists that Africans must give up sloth, crime, and prostitution, vices which they've fallen into out of slavery. There is absolutely something worthwhile in the African racial identity, but it must be worked for with integrity.
Switch over to Schuyler's Black No More. In The Conservation of Races, Du Bois addresses ...Negroes of some considerable training, of high minds and motives, who are unknown to their fellows
. This suggests that there are African Americans of perhaps lesser training, lesser minds and motives, those who want nothing to do with the African racial identity as Du Bois portrays it. These are the people Schuyler seems to be portraying. Dr. Crookman in his story recalls a sociology teacher's three solutions for the African "problem" in America: To either get out, get white, or get along. Du Bois' solution was more or less to get along; Schuyler goes for "getting white". In the excerpt, Max Disher literally jumps at the opportunity; he has no black pride, he wants only to be successful, and maybe have a chance at that Atlanta girl. Along the way, he encounters a few road bumps: the reporters' treating him as a novelty, nostalgia for the comfortable past and discomfort with the ironically less refined pastimes of white Americans, and the outright disapproval of other African Americans. However, the desire in him to become white and abandon his black identity is so strong that he pushes through.
Du Bois argued that Africans are American in their birth, citizenship, political ideals, language, and religion, but in nothing more. Everything else that Africans as a cultured race have to offer, they should, embracing the hard work in the process. Schuyler, on the other hand, feels that $50 and the abandonment of a rich cultural identity are well worth finally being able to get along in the land of opportunity.
"Discuss as you see fit links between [The Last Angel of History] and anything we have read (or watched) so far."
To be honest, I'm having trouble seeing many connections between Lilith's Brood and the African Diaspora. There's obviously the analogy between Africans taken as slaves for America and humans pushed into genetic bondage with the Oankali; there's black suffrage and Akin's efforts to represent the humans and secure a human Akjai. However, other details, especially the eventual merging of the races, resonate much less with me. That doesn't mean that The Last Angel of History is invalid. The hypothesis that science fiction shares themes with the African Diaspora follows through in those two examples, and they're broad enough to warrant further discussion.
Factually speaking, Africans were taken from their homes, put on strange ships, and transported to a foreign land as slave labor. In Butler's post-apocalyptic fiction, humans are taken from Earth, put on strange ships, and are eventually replanted on a foreign, drastically changed Earth to engage in labor of a more biological kind. In both cases, the vast majority of the enslaved reject their captors, despite the slavers' belief that they are somehow helping the enslaved. The Oankali are utterly convinced that without a "trade", the humans are doomed to destroy themselves. I wouldn't doubt that the colonial slavers believed that without their help, the Africans would similarly degenerate into barbarism.
As for black suffrage and Human Akjai, I'm reminded of the post topic from last week. Historically, it wasn't a "hybrid" African-Caucasian human who fought for black rights. However, the most famous of them, Martin Luther King, Jr., had insights into cultures on either side, just as Akin eventually came to have. It's this mutual understanding that allows real progress to be made between opposing groups.
I think I may have taken those connections a bit far. The link is much cleaner where it concerns music and the technology and themes used to produce it. Eshun wrote in "Future Considerations on Afrofuturism" that music, despite not being sci-fi, shares many themes and occupies just as important a space in Afrofuturism. Artists like Sun Ra and George Clinton make the connection explicit, bringing to their African audience the idea of space travel, new technology, something better. In a nutshell, the connection is this: science fiction and African creative output are both concerned with imagining something new, something better and more hopeful than the present state.
"Once referred to as the Xenogenesis Trilogy, the three novels constituting Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood imagine a new race of "constructs" that are fundamentally different from their creators, both the alien and the human. For your second blog post (BP2), discuss what strikes you most (or least or both) about this new hybrid race."
I'm a bit over a day late on this one, but for completeness' sake, and because I like the question...
The construct race Butler describes has a number of characteristics that I find interesting, but which don't necessarily have much to do with each other, and which aren't necessarily emphasized in the book. The first concerns a shift in the perception of humans as both emotional and logical entities. Usually, on the spectrum of emotion vs logic, humans are placed roughly in the middle, between purely instinctual animals and soulless, calculating computers. In Lilith's Brood, humans, at least those without significant interaction with the Oankali, tend more towards the emotional side, with the Oankali more or less representing the logical end (this pervades through the first portion of Dawn, but changes as Lilith grows closer to Nikanj). In the middle, where the humans normally are, are the constructs. Despite the fact that the ooloi can empathize on an unimaginably deep level, the Oankali as a whole seem to miss the importance of the resisters, beyond their genetics. In a conversation with Tino, Dichaan reveals that the resisters are thought of as simply violent:
"Then learn from him! Let him alone and learn!"
"Learn what? That he enjoys the company of resisters? That he enjoys fighting?" (AR, 423)
And later, I'm sorry. The resisters don't seem very complex - except biologically.
However, Akin, after living with the resisters, comes to realize how the resisters are being disrespected. This is just one suggestion that the constructs are middle-men for the resisters and the Oankali.
Without the constructs to act as go-betweens, the resisters and the Oankali can't communicate effectively with each other. At the heart of the resister "cause" is their desire to continue like pre-war humans, without the interference of the Oankali. On the other hand, the Oankali are willing only to take the resisters in and make them part of a construct-bearing unit. Having seen the human contradiction between intelligence and hierarchy, the Oankali assume that the humans brought themselves to a pre-programmed end. There is no allowance for a human Akjai group. However, Akin, the human-Oankali construct who has seen what both species are capable of, what their flaws are, believes in a human future. There should be a Human Akjai! There should be Humans who don't change or die - Humans to go on if the Dinso and Toaht unions fail.
(AR, 378) This is the first indicator that failure is even a possibility, and that humans should be allowed to continue unchanged. Both critical points were raised by Akin, a construct.
Blech. I'm not particularly content with this post, but I'm having trouble getting thoughts into coherent chunks of text. Will try again later.
Thought: the Oankali are introduced as "traders". In the traditional sense, a trader takes goods from one group and sells them to another. However, the Oankali seem much less like traders than the constructs; the Oankali engage in trade, but the constructs are the ones who take bits and pieces from either group for the benefit of the other.
"Discuss how the idea and/or history of “turntablism” (and, more broadly, sampling, hip-hop, and DJ culture) relates to, extends, or elaborates some aspect of “Afrofuturism” set forth in Kodwo Eshun’s theoretical essay, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.”
Before I do that, I need to vent a bit: the only benefit I could think of (and I'm surprised I came up with any) to writing in a style like Kodwo Eshun's (i.e. obtuse, unclear, full of buzzwords and pseudo-buzzwords that even Google define: couldn't clarify) is that it forces one to read critically, to the point of anger and frustration, in an attempt to try to wring some sort of meaning out of the text. Which is admittedly what I attempted to do, so here goes.
Early in his essay, Eshun describes the 21st century as a cultural moment when digitopian futures are routinely invoked to hide the present in all its unhappiness.
Turntablism fits right into this: In a time and place where African Americans were living in the "projects" and struggling with violent gang influence, people like Afrika Bambaataa used turntablism, a new, technologically reliant art, to overcome their less appealing circumstances.
Eshun later makes a perfect space for turntablism, first connecting Afrofuturism and music: It is difficult to conceive of Afrofuturism without a place for sonic process in its vernacular, speculative, and syncopated modes.
From there, he allows for the technological characteristic of turntablism and mixing/sampling: ...the Afrodiasporic musical imagination was characterised by an Afrophilia that invoked a liberationist idyll of African archaism with the idea of scientific African modternity, both held in an unstable but useful equilibrium.
So now we have the pursuit of new art forms explicitly tied to Afrofuturism, and we have a balance between older African tradition and newer African adoption of science and technology. Turntablism is the new art form, and the balance is between the old (older phonograph technology, older preexisting records, "older" analog interaction between musician and instrument) and the new (new sound mixers and technology, new beat tracks and music, new techniques). Thus turntablism is established as an integrated part of Afrofuturism.
Besides the defined, explicit connection, turntablism and mixing seem to be connected to Afrofuturism and the tradition of countermemory in other ways. The idea of writing Africa into history through countermemory is represented when DJs take classic American music, like the childhood record Bambaataa famously introduced, and add their own maybe-cultural touch. In the same way that a Caucasian historian might not recognize history when fleshed out with African experience, new listeners may not make any connection between the familiar records and breaks, and the scratches and beats that are based on them. Somehow, without any sort of narrative to rewrite an erroneous history or describe a more positive future, turntablism perfectly represents the blend of countermemory and future sight characteristic of Afrofuturism.
Whew, I'm calmer now.
