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Minor Notes Vol. 1 features the work of three poets. Published in
1837, Poems by a Slave is one of the lesser-known works by George
Moses Horton (1798-1883), once popularly known as the 'black bard
of North Carolina.' Visions of the Dusk (1915) is an American prose
poem known for its formal innovation by Fenton Johnson, a poet,
essayist, editor and educator from Chicago. Georgia Douglas Johnson
was the most widely read black woman poet in the US during the
first three decades of the 20th century. Bronze: A Book of Verse
(1922) was introduced with a foreword by W. E. B. Du Bois.
The Bern Book is a travelogue, a memoir, a "diary of an isolated
soul" (Darryl Pinckney), and a meditation on the myth and reality
of race in midcentury Europe and America. In 1953, having left the
US and settled in Bern, Switzerland, Vincent O. Carter, a
struggling writer, set about composing a "record of a voyage of the
mind." The voyage begins with Carter's furiously good-humored
description of how, every time he leaves the house, he must face
the possibility of being asked "the hated question" (namely, Why
did you, a black man born in America, come to Bern?). It continues
with stories of travel, war, financial struggle, the pleasure of
walking, the pain of self-loathing, and, through it all, various
experiments in what Carter calls "lacerating subjective sociology."
Now this long-neglected volume is back in print for the first time
since 1973.
Ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates's case for reparations to D'Angelo's
simmering blend of R&B and racial justice, Jesse McCarthy's
dazzling essays capture debates at the intersection of art,
literature and politics in the twenty-first century with virtuosic
intensity. In "Notes on Trap", McCarthy borrows a conceit from
Susan Sontag to dissect the significance of trap music in American
society, while in "The Master's Tools", Velazquez becomes a lens
through which to view Kehinde Wiley's paintings. Essays on John
Edgar Wideman, Terrance Hayes and Claudia Rankine survey the state
of black letters. In "The Time of the Assassins", McCarthy, a black
American raised in France, writes about returning to Paris after
the Bataclan massacre and finding a nation in mourning but
dangerously unchanged. Taken together, these essays portray a
brilliant critic at work, making sense of our dislocated times
while seeking to transform our understanding of race and art,
identity and representation.
"William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the author of this small,
paradigm-shifting book, was a brilliant polymath, a pioneering
historian and sociologist, a fierce advocate for racial justice,
and a towering social philosopher, widely regarded as one of the
greatest black geniuses of the modern era. In The Souls of Black
Folk, he sought to synthesize the different modes of inquiry that
he was trained in-philosophy, history, rhetoric, and sociology-in
order to produce a sweeping mural of epic history and local color
telling the story of black life in America." -JESSE MCCARTHY, from
the Introduction
Ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates's case for reparations to D'Angelo's
simmering blend of R&B and racial justice, Jesse McCarthy's
dazzling essays capture debates at the intersection of art,
literature and politics in the twenty-first century with virtuosic
intensity. In "Notes on Trap", McCarthy borrows a conceit from
Susan Sontag to dissect the significance of trap music in American
society, while in "The Master's Tools", Velazquez becomes a lens
through which to view Kehinde Wiley's paintings. Essays on John
Edgar Wideman, Terrance Hayes and Claudia Rankine survey the state
of black letters. In "The Time of the Assassins", McCarthy, a black
American raised in France, writes about returning to Paris after
the Bataclan massacre and finding a nation in mourning but
dangerously unchanged. Taken together, these essays portray a
brilliant critic at work, making sense of our dislocated times
while seeking to transform our understanding of race and art,
identity and representation.
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