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Sekou Sundiata CDs
Long Story Short /
The Blue Oneness of Dreams
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Books by Louis Reyes Rivera
Who Pays The Cost (1978) /
This One For You (1983) /
Scattered
Scripture
Bum Rush the Page
(co-editor) /
The Bandana Republic (co-editor)
Sancocho: A Book of Nuyorican Poetry by Shaggy Flores
(edited by Louis Reyes Rivera)
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Gifted Poet Sekou Sundiata
(August 22, 1948 -- July 18, 2007)
Obituary by Louis
Reyes Rivera
On Wednesday, July
18, 2007, at 5:47a.m. (ET), poet Sekou Sundiata passed
away. A highly esteemed performing poet, Mr. Sundiata
wrote for print, performance, music and theater. Born
Robert Franklin Feaster in Harlem, on August 22, 1948,
Sundiata came of age as an artist during the Black
Arts/Black Aesthetic movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
While attending the
City College of New York (CCNY), where he began reciting
poetry publicly, Sundiata converged with several other
student activists, including once-mayoral candidate of
Pittsburgh and longtime friend, Leroy Hodge, to form the
basis for what soon became known as the Black and Puerto
Rican Student Community of City College (BPRSC). This
phalanx of 400 students soon made their own history,
closing the 21,000-student campus during the Spring of
1969, to demand, among other things, that CCNY be
renamed Harlem University. The net effect of the student
takeover culminated in both an Open Admissions Policy
that took effect in September 1970, the full
legitimization of ethnic studies departments throughout
the nation, as well as the requirement that all
education majors within the City University take courses
in African American History and to have Spanish as a
Second Language.
Among his
acknowledged mentors at City were Toni Cade Bambara,
June Jordan, and fellow student Louis Reyes Rivera, with
whom Sundiata helped to establish the first Black
student newspaper in the City University, CCNY's The
Paper. Their association would span close to forty
years of mutual respect and admiration.
Upon completing his
Bachelor's Degree (circa 1974), Sundiata enrolled and
completed his Master's in Creative Writing while
regularly producing community-based poetry readings that
were known to draw SRO crowds. In 1976, his creative
sensibilities, his innate organizing skills, and his
associations with a convergent generation of excellent
poets, musicians and dancers immediately led to a
collaborative project he directed that would commemorate
100 years of Black struggle for freedom and Human
Rights. Titled The Sounds of the Memory of Many
Living People (1863-1876/ 1963-1976) , this
production, which included upcoming novelist Arthur
Flowers and such poets as Safiya Henderson-Holmes, BJ
Ashanti, Tom Mitchelson, Louis Reyes Rivera, et al, was
staged in Harlem over a period of two days, signaling
much of what was to come from Sekou's sense of vision,
steadily breaking ground for what was then a new
literary genre, Performance Poetry, fully
anticipating elements of both Hip Hop Culture and Spoken
Word Art.
In 1977, the
aforementioned poets, along with Zizwe Ngafua, Rashidah
Ismaili, Fatisha (Hutson), Sandra Maria Esteves, Akua
Lezli Hope, Mervyn Taylor, and Sekou, among others,
formed the Calabash Poets Workshop, which group signaled
the arrival of a new literary heat in New York,
regularly producing soirees and forums (1977-1983) that
included all of the arts and culminated in a three-year
attempt (1979-1982) to establish an independent Black
Writers Union.
Upon the release of
his first vinyl album (circa 1980), Are & Be,
Sekou Sundiata was dubbed by Amiri Baraka as "the State
of the Art." Since then, Mr. Sundiata established a
longtime relationship with CCNY's Aaron Davis
Performing Arts Center, through which venue
he intermittently produced new material for the stage,
consistently collaborating with musicians, dancers, and
actors. He was eventually selected for a number of
earned fellowships, including a Sundance Institute
Screenwriting Fellow, a Columbia University Revson
Fellow, a Master Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic
Center for the Arts (Florida), and as the first
Writer-in-Residence at the New School University in New
York, in which university's Eugene Lang College he
remained a professor.
He was, as well,
among those featured in the Bill Moyers' PBS series on
poetry, The Language of Life, and in Russell
Simmons'
Def Poetry Jam on HBO.
Among several
highly acclaimed performance theater works in which he
served as both author and performer are: The Circle
Unbroken is a Hard Bop, which toured nationally and
received three AUDELCO Awards and a BESSIE Award; The
Mystery of Love, commissioned and produced by New
Voices/New Visions at Aaron Davis Hall in New York City
and the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia;
and Udu, a music theater work produced by 651
ARTS in Brooklyn and presented by the International
Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, the Walker Art
Center and Penumbra Theater in Minneapolis, Flynn Center
in Burlington, VT, the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth
College in New Hampshire, and Miami-Dade Community
College in Florida. Throughout this period and since
1985, he developed a close association with
co-collaborator and legendary trombonist Craig S.
Harris.
blessing the boats, Sundiata's first solo theater
piece, an exploration into his own personal battles with
kidney failure, opened in November 2002 at Aaron Davis
Hall, NYC. It has since been presented in more than 30
cities and continued to tour nationally. In March 2005,
Sundiata produced The Gift of Life Concert, an
organ donation public awareness event at the Apollo
Theater that kicked off a three-week run of blessing
the boats at the Apollo's SoundStage—in
partnership with the Apollo Theater Foundation, the
National Kidney Foundation and the New York Organ Donor
Network with support from the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services.
Since 2006, his the 51st (dream) state has been
presented throughout the U.S. and in Australia. Both
blessing the boats and the 51st (dream) state
were produced in collaboration with MultiArts Projects
and Productions (MAPP). In addition to working within
community engagement activities at Harlem Stages/Aaron
Davis Hall, the University of Michigan and University
Musical Society (Ann Arbor, MI), the University of North
Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC), the University of Texas
Austin (Austin, TX), in Miami Dade College (Miami, FL),
and the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Sundiata has
appeared as a featured speaker and artist at the
Imagining America Conference (Ann Arbor, MI), at the
Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA), and at
the Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed Conference
(Minneapolis, MN), among others. Prior to his demise, he
was engaged in producing a DVD documenting the America
Project for use by universities and presenters as a
model for art and civic engagement.
In addition to the 1979 Are & Be album, Sundiata's
other releases include a second album, The Sounds of
the Memory of Many Living People, and two
CDs, The
Blue Oneness of Dreams, nominated for a Grammy
Award, and Long
Story Short. Each of these works are rich with
the sounds of blues, funk, jazz and African and
Afro-Caribbean percussion, with the latter two featuring
Craig Harris.
He is survived by
his mother, Virginia Myrtle Feaster, his wife, Maurine Knighton,
daughter Myisha Gomez, stepdaughter Aida
Riddle, grandson Aman, brothers William Walter Feaster
and Ronald Eugene Feaster, as well as a host
of relatives, admirers, students and friends.
A private funeral
service of family and friends is scheduled for Saturday,
July 21, and a commemorative celebration of his life and
work is scheduled to take place on August 22, his
birthday. Details to follow. In lieu of flowers, the
family requests that donations be made in the name of
Sekou Sundiata to the New York Organ Donor Network or to
the National Kidney Foundation.
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 27 July 2007 / updated 18 May
2008
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