7th Annual Midwest Black History Month Conference
February 25, 2010
Luther College,
Decorah, IA
Playing in the Dark: Performing Black Expressive Cultures
Commemorating the Legacy of August Wilson
Conference Description
In 1992, Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination explored how literary criticism in the United States conceals its racial politics. What Morrison suggests is that whiteness is situated as normative and therefore allows literary criticism to evade a central feature of the American literary enterprise which Morrison argues is race.
Playing in the Dark: Performing Black Expressive Cultures expands Morrison’s premise to include a range of black expressive cultures and art forms. In a time when African and African-American culture plays increasingly significant roles in the expression of popular culture worldwide, the conference explores both the historical roots of black cultural expressiveness and its contemporary context.
The conference seeks to examine four aspects of black expressive cultures: 1) the current context in which black artistic expressions have come to define both modern, post-modern, and post-colonial art forms and expressions of popular culture. 2) the historical context surrounding the bodies of knowledge that inform and define black expressive cultures, 3) the theoretical context that shapes our understanding of how
these art forms connect the black experience in Africa and the Americas, and 4) the ways in which contemporary black cultural expression creates new narratives of resistance to slavery as well as colonial and post colonial forms of social injustice. The conference also seeks to explore whether the expropriation of these art forms and their preeminence in the aesthetics of the vernacular mask the way in which contemporary
dance, music, visual, and literary arts become acts of resistance and empowerment.
Performance is broadly conceived to include the aesthetics of a variety of forms of black expressive culture. We include visual arts, music, martial arts, personal narratives and expressions of faith. Specific expressive 2 art forms including dance, music, martial arts, contact improvisation, literature, and theatre have aesthetic histories that are central to the ideas behind ‘playing in the dark.”
The conference will be held at Luther College on Thursday, February 25, 2010 with an Opening Plenary at 9:00 a.m., a Plenary Lecture at 9:40 a.m. and a Closing Plenary at 7:30 p.m. The conference will also host Master classes in capoeria, and ‘52’, important performative martial arts. The conference will also host an August Wilson’s reader’s theatre and an Artist’s reception and gallery tour.
Conference Location
Luther College is a Phi Beta Kappa institution of approximately 2,500 students. One of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges, Luther is built on the rolling wooded hills and limestone bluffs of northeast Iowa. The scenic Upper Iowa River flows through the lower portion of the 175-acre central campus.
Conference Rationale
The conference focuses on black expressive arts broadly defined to include historical context, aesthetics, technical skill, and vernacular origins of particular expressive arts as well as how these expressions are forming new discourses of creative expression that has embody, transmit, and actively support black physical and cultural survival while fostering contemporary insurgencies against oppression and injustice. As African and African-American cultural traditions have become global expressions, the conference seeks to explore texts that exemplify the literary, theatrical, visual, social, political, and physical movement arts that define black expressions in Africa and the Americas.
Conference Performances
The conference will feature master classes in Capoeira (ka.pu. ej.), an Afro-Brazilian art form that makes a ritual of movements from martial arts, games, and dance. This dance/martial art came to Brazil from Angola some time after the 16th century and is prevalent in the regions known as Bahia, Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro. Participants form a roda or circle and take turns playing musical instruments, singing, or ritually sparring in pairs in the center of the circle. The game is marked by fluid acrobatic play, feints, and extensive use of sweeps, kicks, and head butts. Mestre Yoji Senna, founder of the Afro-Brazilian Capoeria Association has been invited to conduct master classes.
Conference Speakers
Invited speakers include: Sandra Shannon, Professor of African American Literature, Criticism and Drama in the Department of English at Howard University. Dr. Shannon is the author of the Dramatic Vision of August Wilson, 1995. Professor T.J. Desch-Obi, Department of History, Baruch College. His research explores cultural transmissions between Africa and the Americas through African martial arts. Desch-Obi also has competitive credentials in martial arts and thus blends social history with cultural practice.
Conference Exhibit
The conference will also feature an art exhibit by the late Robert Porter. The exhibit, arranged by Emma Graeber Porter, member of the Board of Regents of Luther College, begins in mid-January and will extend through March, 2010.
Legacy Honoree
This year’s conference honors the life and legacy of August Wilson, an American playwright, whose principal legacy is a series of ten plays on the African-American experience known as the Pittsburg Cycle or the Century Cycle. Each play is set in a different decade, depicting the comic and tragic aspects of black experience in the twentieth century.
Born April 27, 1945, August Wilson grew up in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His childhood experiences in inner city Pittsburg informed his plays. In 1984, August Wilson achieved critical acclaim with the success of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. The play was voted Best Play of the Year (1984-85) by the New York Drama Critics' Circle. Each of Wilson's plays in his Century cycle focuses on what Wilson perceives as the largest issue to confront African-Americans in that decade. His second play, Fences was set in the 1950's and tells the story of Troy Maxon, an illiterate garbage collector who because of racism was denied the baseball stardom he feels he deserved. Fences opened on Broadway in 1987 and earned Wilson his first Pulitzer Prize. In April of 1988, Joe Turner's Come and Gone opened on Broadway. This play tells the story of Harold Loomis, a black man who in 1910 was imprisoned for seven years by white authorities for an unknown offense. Once he is freed, Loomis sets out to find his wife Martha. Joe Turner's Come and Gone was voted by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle as the Best New Play of the Year. The Piano Lesson is set in the 1930s and opens with the arrival of Boy Willie at his sister Bernice’s house. Willie dreams of buying the same Mississippi land that his ancestors once worked as slaves, but in order to raise the capital for this purchase, he must convince his sister to part with a family heirloom, a piano that is both a reminder of the family's enslaved past and a tribute to their survival. The Piano Lesson was named Best Play of the Year by the New York Drama Critics' Circle and earned Wilson another Pulitzer Prize.
In April of 2005, Wilson completed his ten-play cycle when Radio Golf premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Two months later, he was diagnosed with liver cancer and on October 2, 2005, Wilson died at the age of 60.
Criteria for selection of conference papers
The conference Committee will review all abstracts and select proposals that meet one or more of the following criteria. Papers and/or performances selected for presentation will:
• Address the constellation of African traditions in the performing arts as they have expanded worldwide
• Explore contemporary aesthetics, techniques, and expressive forms in visual, performing, and martial arts
• Explore connections in themes, motifs and tropes in literature of the African and/or the Americas
• Explore black expressive cultures as resistance to injustice
Playing in the Dark: Performing Black Expressive Cultures welcomes the work of younger scholars and artists. Please e-mail a recent Curriculum Vitae and a one-page abstract of no more than 250 words on the proposed paper to Sheila Radford-Hill, Executive Director of the Luther Diversity Center at radfsh01@luther.edu, Richard Merritt, Associate Professor of Art at merritri@luther.edu, or Martin Klammer, Chair/Africana Studies Department at klammer@luther.edu. The committee needs to receive all submissions by December 18, 2009. For more information, call 563/387-1014. Or visit our website at http://diversity.luther.edu.
Send abstracts and vitae by US Mail to:
Sheila Radford-Hill, Ph.D.
Luther College
Dahl Centennial Union
700 College Drive
Decorah, IA 52101