Tag Archives: Ellison

Killer Mike and the “groove of history”

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For those of you who don’t know him, Killer Mike is an Atlanta-based hip-hop artist and one-half (with El P) of the hip-hop dynamic duo Run the Jewels. He’s one of my heroes: hilarious, angry, smart, talkative, and open to the entire world. This episode, from the NY Times‘ “Sway” with Kara Swisher, got me to thinking about the end of Invisible Man. I’ve always found it unsatisfying the way the novel sort of dispatches the Brotherhood and Ras and street-level anarchic struggle and leaves the narrator snoozing underground.

Mike is someone who has lived an above-ground life trying to think about how to pull people marginalized and oppressed by the hyperinequalities and white supremacy of our era into what Ellison calls the “groove of history.” And he sounds like the love child of Ras and Jack doing it, mixing elements of black nationalism and a highly conscious socialist reading of politics and economics. If you haven’t checked out this year’s RTJ 4 album, do so: I’ve linked to it below as well.

 

Opinion | Killer Mike Says He Has a Choice to Make (Published 2020)

The rapper and activist on transforming fear into power.

RTJ4 Full Album Stream

Listen to the full RTJ4 album here!

 

Thursday’s assignment (asynchronous class day)

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For Thursday, you will read an article on Ellison’s novel, now that you’ve finished Invisible Man. Thus begins our real work of the semester, which is to go “under the hood” and figure out how criticism works. Here, we’ll read an excellent example of literary critical scholarship, one that chooses a very specific and “weird” angle on the text and applies a particular methodology to explore it.

In order to best analyze not just Blair’s argument, but the enterprise of literary criticism in general, we’re going to read the article together. We will do this via the hypothes.is annotation tool, a free and open tool (i.e., it costs nothing and it doesn’t profit from you in any way). Sign up via this link: log in if you have an account already; click the LOG IN link and then a) log in if you have an account or b) click SIGN UP if you don’t and follow the prompts:

Now you should be able to click the arrow on the upper right-hand corner of the Blair article page, pop out the sidebar with the hypothes.is tools, and log in:

From there, you can highlight text to create new annotations, make general comments using “page annotations,” and (most important) respond to others’ annotations. I say “most important” because I’ve posed questions and made comments throughout the article that I’d like you to respond to. Note that you will be part of an ENGL 252 private group, so your comments will be viewable only by members of the class.

I don’t have a set number of comments each student should make, but I do want to see evidence of every single student spending time with the article and my questions on it.

Questions? Feel free to ask me via email.

call and response/antiphonal development

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We explored today Ellison’s interest in antiphonal forms to link an individual musician/orator/writer with an audience. I wanted to share links to two blog posts that help us grasp this connection more concretely. First, the post I shared on Zoom:

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And second, a jazz-centric post from Lincoln Center’s blog. This one is more relevant in some ways, since the IMs performances in chapters 12 and 16 are jazz-like in their improvisiatory riffing, their lack of a “blueprint” as Peetie Wheatstraw has it:

https://www.jazz.org/blog/playlist-call-and-response/

 

NYT article on blackface

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Fascinating article about the persistence of blackface in our own era. As I’m sure you know, there have been numerous scandals recently exposing incidents of whites “blacking up” at parties: VA Gov. Ralph Northam, for example.

This article looks at something more subtle: the range of uses of blackface, ranging from utterly uncritical and exploitative to extremely self-aware and critical uses (e.g., Spike Lee’s brilliant film Bamboozled). The whole enterprise resonates powerfully with Ellison’s novel, which features many encounters with the culture of minstrelsy and blackface, taking very seriously its appeal to a wide range of subjects (including Mary Rambo, as we’ve seen already).

PSA: as CUNY students you all have access to the New York Times for free. Use it: it’s basic mental equipment for navigating the complex world we live in!