Fellows and Fellow Travelers: We did not have time today to discuss Seth Moglen's essay, "Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso." I'd like to prompt a discussion of this important article via email. I am going to raise a couple of questions and I hope that you will respond, first to some of the questions and then to each others' responses. Or drop your own questions. Moglen argues that Hughes' poem explores/reveals how modernism (which equals an expanding capitalist economic system which was becoming imperialist and global) was the source of both the exploitation of people of color and avant-garde aesthetic practices and political resistance. How does Moglen support this argument? Can you find other examples of this dialectic, this contradictory dynamic, in the work to which you have been drawn? Why, according to Moglen, are the formal/formalistic innovations of modernistic art important? How does he see Hughes employing such methods, despite his apparent reliance on vernacular language? Did you see other examples of these practices in Hughes' poem in the play we saw last week? How, according to Moglen, did Hughes expand his sense of exploitation to include the production of pleasure? Can you push this further and think about the implications of this exploration/ revelation for your own projects, the writers, artists, performers, and activists that have interested you? How did Hughes' understanding of modernism and the place of people of color within it rest within a transnational/diasporic framework? How does this apply to the knowledge producers who have interested you? What the heck does all this have to do with Picasso's cubism? And, can we make a connection to Robin Kelley's seeming support for Richard Wright's contention that Black lives were "already surreal"? I look forward to your responses. They can be off the cuff, from the hip, i.e., not formally organized, but they should also come, at least in part, from your brain. Love and Solidarity, Peter
_______________________________________________ Mellon Myers Undegraduate Fellowship Program at Macalester (http://macmmuf.org) [email protected] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html http://macmmuf.org/mailman/listinfo/list_macmmuf.org
