Full Description
Collaborative Spirit-Writing and Performance in Everyday Black Lives is about the interconnectedness between collaboration, spirit, and writing. It is also about a dialogic engagement that draws upon shared lived experiences, hopes, and fears of two Black persons: male/female, straight/gay.
This book is structured around a series of textual performances, poems, plays, dialogues, calls and responses, and mediations that serve as claim, ground, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, and backing in an argument about collaborative spirit-writing for social justice. Each entry provides evidence of encounters of possibility, collated between the authors, for ourselves, for readers, and society from a standpoint of individual and collective struggle. The entries in this Black performance diary are at times independent and interdependent, interspliced and interrogative, interanimating and interstitial. They build arguments about collaboration but always emanate from a place of discontent in a caste system, designed through slavery and maintained until today, that positions Black people in relation to white superiority, terror, and perpetual struggle.
With particular emphasis on the confluence of Race, Racism, Antiracism, Black Lives Matter, the Trump administration, and the Coronavirus pandemic, this book will appeal to students and scholars in Race studies, performance studies, and those who practice qualitative methods as a new way of seeking Black social justice.
Contents
1. Introduction: Collaborative Spirit-Writing 2. Exploring Self with/for Others 3. Spirit-Writing: Creating from the Collective/Collaborative Vibe 4. Suggestions to Further Engage with This Book; Section I: Introduction to Revolution 5. The Revolution Will Be Televised (with Apologies to Gil Scott-Heron) 6. Freedom 7. "Common Sense" and "Oh Freedom" 8. The Devolution of Gil Scott-Heron 9. Dreamscapes and Escapedreams: An Autoethnography through the Art of Jerry Weems Section II: Introduction to Resistance 10. Unprecedented Times (January 6, 2021), or: The Insurrection Was Televised and New Normal (January 6, 2021) 11. Cultural Capita(o)l 12. 119 13. Black Trauma; Section III: Introduction to Reimagining 14. Talkin' on a 20 Dolla Bill 15. Lagniappe 16. I Am a Woman of Prayer 17. O' for my Grand/Mother 18. O! Say Can You See?; Section IV: Introduction to Reparations 19. The Payback 20. Say It: Or Reparations My Ass!; Section V: Introduction to Redemption 21. Black Notes 22. Black, Black Notes - 2-24-2021 23. Tale End and Spirits-Free 24. 3-4-2021 Early A.M. Dream
