Big Freedia - "Y'all Get Back Now" from stereogum on Vimeo.

Big Freedia, "Y'all Get Back Now"

this is super dope. marginalized bodies doing marginalized shit reinserting themselves back into the cityscape in ways that can’t be ignored. y’all better werq.

Legendary dancer Carmen de Lavallade on the cover of the June 30, 1954 issue of Hue magazine, a Johnson publication.

(via Vintage Black Glamour)

Zion I, "Geek to the Beat"

i like this video for several reasons.:

1. his hair. im having a bit of an obsession with thick locs right now.
2. i can respect any hip hop track that incorporate djembes/African drums.
3. the first words out of his mouth is “you’re over-civilized.” instant win.
4. he’s so bouncy!
5. i dig the concept and the execution.
6., and the is most important, i ESPECIALLY dig how they filmed the dance sequences. not a bunch of quick cuts attempting to generate artificial excitement, the dancing is allowed to speak for itself. i don’t know why editors have insisted on butchering dance on film for so long. look at Michael Jackson's videos and how dance was framed, versus how it's treated today. (and, i realize that might not be the fairest comparison. Michael and Usher were/are operating from vastly different places in terms of how the music industry worked and how music videos were made. MJ was able to do what he did w/ music videos because at the time - the 80s - the music video was still an experimental form. and Usher is coming from a post-90s, post-Hype Williams, post moment of codification of what music videos "have" to look like. and he's also coming from an era that has effectively collapsed the boundaries between rap and R&B - R&B (contemporary anyway) is basically rap's little brother now. but at the same time i think there's something there worth investigating in terms of the increasing marginalization of dance and dancing bodies in rap/pop/R&B music videos since the 80s, where it goes from this really central thing to this more ornamental thing....and maybe the gendered dynamics of this process?)
7. i also like how they’re doing hip hop dance in fancy dresses.

But what if you are ‘normal’ – sound of mind and hale of heart, standing there on your own two feet looking at this page with your naked eye, independent and sovereign over skin and meat and bone – and what if everyone important in your life is normal too? How do these power-knowledge networks affect you? The answer this book suggests is that the power-knowledge networks that produce and regulate disability also produce and regulate ability, ableness, normality. The practices and institutions that divide, for example, the ‘able-bodied’, ‘sane’, and ‘whole’ from the ‘mentally ill’ and ‘deficient’ create the conditions under which all of us live; they structure the situation within which each one of us comes to terms with ourselves and creates a way of life. Normality has a history, a set of investments, an entire array of supports and assumptions that bring it into being, sustain it, and alter it when conditions so demand.”

- Ladelle McWhorter’s Foreword to Foucault and the Government of Disability.

The way I survived the turmoil and onslaught against my spirit was through practicing art at home. Sometimes I am a performing artist, but most of the time I am a Solitary Single Artist at home.

- Abbey Lincoln in an interview at the Schomburg. (See Farah Jasmine Griffin If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery).

h/t Black Feminism Lives!

"Lieux de memoire, the place of memory, has two senses here: the body as the site of production of cultural memory and the body as the object of the history remembered. The dancing body not only writes counterhistory, but the dance resists and reconfigures the subjugating history written on the enslaved or laboring body."

- Celeste Fraser Delgado, “Preface: Politics in Motion” in Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America

(i seriously just need to go ahead and tattoo this on my forehead)

like ta heah it heah it go

*blows away cobwebs*

in my defense, i really *did* mean to keep posting, but i got sidetracked by....stuff, i.e. writing/finishing a thesis, graduating/getting my degree in Southern Studies, moving to Nashville, starting school again, this time for a PhD program in history, making it through my first semester in one relative piece........yeah. it's been real.

but it's also 2011. i've got plans and one of them includes allowing/encouraging alla that stuff knocking round inside my head to exist outside of my head, and wouldn't you know i have this old thing lying around, so i figured i'd dust it off and see if i can't get anymore use out of it.

so this still won't be personal, save for agnst-filled soliloquys on being a grad student, complete with occasional pre-quarter century crisis cries of "WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE BLAH BLAH BLAH" thrown in. but i intend to spend 2011 answering that question, so i'll keep the whimpering to a minimum. but the point is i'm not about to get all anne frank or post pictures of my dinner or anything. (although i should note, ya girl definitely threw down on some collard greens yesterday. nobody was ready, not even me. i am glorious.)

what im interested in now is working through all of the artistic and academic questions that incessantly popping up for me. my field, as much as i've declared one, which i haven't, is black performance and performativity in the 20th century (former) Atlantic world/circum-Atlantic. by performance, i pirmarily mean dance; by performativity, i mean how blackness is performed and is mediated through things like gender, place, and time; by the 20th century (former) Atlantic world, i mean the U.S., the Caribbean, and Latin America, namely New Orleans, Haiti, Jamaica, and Brazil (a mess i know); by circum-Atlantic i mean this. oh yeah and im also trying to get back into that whole working artist thing, a goal that academia has slowly chipped away at the past couple of years. im trying to find a balance.

i need space for teasing out the kinks. for making and dissecting connections. for throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. blah blah blah you get the point.

& just because i've been here don't mean i've been gone. i've got a nifty little tumblr, Dust Tracks On a Road, that's kinda a sister to this space, so there will be some overlap 'twix the two. and my main tumblr is here. im just all over the place in that one.

so yeah, fall down a bunch of times, get back up one more time. or something.