|
Books by
Eldridge Cleaver
Soul on Ice /
Post-Prison Writings and
Speeches / Target
Zero; A Life in Writing /
Conversation with Eldridge Cleaver
Being Black /
Education and Revolution /
Eldridge Cleaver /
Eldridge Cleaver Is Free
* *
* * *
“Preface”
to
Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice
By Ishmael Reed
On
Malcolm & Black Male Rhetoric
Malcolm
made wolfing and jive an art form, and though his battles were
fought on television (Marshall McLuhan referred to him as ‘the
electronic man’) and his weapons were words, he was a symbol
of black manhood; our living ‘shining prince’ was the way
Ossie Davis put it, in a eulogy delivered at Malcolm’s
funeral.
Manhood—much
on the minds of black men during the sixties . . . black
children were blown to bits during church services in
Birmingham, Alabama . . . the desperate cry of men whose women
were being poked with cattle prods and beaten to the ground by
white thugs in uniform [We were in need of an Avenging Angel].
That’s
how we saw Malcolm. He would make them pay. Pay for the
humiliations we suffered in a racist country. Young black
intellectuals were out for revenge. They were in a Kikuyu
warrior mode.
Elijah
& Religious Rhetoric
Elijah
Muhammad’s generation called whites devils, because they had
come out of the Southern racist hell where the whites had shown
themselves to be capable of the most fiendish acts.
Cleaver's
Literary Development in Prison
Cleaver—in
jail—reading, writing, meditating, and practicing his
intellectual style of mentors, who was obviously no match for his
probing, hungry intellect.
*
* *
“former
career as a rapist” --
“a recovering racist” – “a former black muslim, who
read and admired Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro.”
*
* *
[Cleaver's]
recurring theme – “eternal struggle between the black
supermasculine menial and the white omnipotent administrator—a
struggle that continues in various forms, to this day"
White Male Backlash
while
white males were on the receiving end of criticism by black
writers during the sixties and early seventies, some white male
writers and media commentators have since gotten even by
bonding with the black feminist movement an criticizing the
treatment of black women by black men.
*
* *
In
this war, women are regarded as bargaining chips and loot for both
sidea, the black one, Amazons, the white ones, gullible Barbie
dolls.
*
* *
white
men . . . regarded all white women as their property while black
men feel that black women belong to them. Both groups were upset
when the women declared that they owned their own bodies, their
souls, and their minds. In Soul on Ice, the women are either
madonnas or whores.
Cleaver
& the Old Left
[Cleaver]
published as a celebrity by the New York Old Left and its branches
in Northern California and Los Angeles – “black prisoner as
proxy in their fight against capitalism”
[Cleaver]
“quintessential American” – in that he uses – “guile,
wit, and flattery to accomplish their ends. – “You knew I was
a snake.”
Cleaver
the Trickster
[In
Soul on Fire, Cleaver] worked his tricks too many times;
the book was ignored and his description of his conversion to
Christianity mocked (he said
he joined the fundamentalists because they had brought him from
exile, and if the Panthers had brought him home he would have
sided with the,”
Cleaver
& Panthers Pawns for White Left
[Cleaver
and Huey Newton and the Panthers were] used as pawns in a struggle
between the white Right, who destroyed them, and the white Left
who piled an agenda on them that went way beyond their original
community concerns, and who viewed them as cannon fodder
In
this political and cultural environment Cleaver seems a has-been
and the villain in his book . . . --in comparison the sinister
crowd in power now—seem like populists from the quaint old days
of the America Weimar
Cleaver
& Panthers Abandoned by White Left
Former
white allies that prove that prove that the authors were white
nationalists all along because they omit, or give scant attention
to, the role of blacks, who created the political and cultural
matrix for that decade.
Importance
of Soul on Ice
The
reissue of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice will challenge
the current bleaching out of the black influence on the cultural
and political climate of the sixties. This book is a classic
because it is not merely a book about that decade, regarded as
demonic by some and by others as the most thrilling and humanistic
of the century. Soul on Ice is the sixties. The smell of
protest, anger, tear gas, and the sound of skull-cracking billy
clubs, helicopters, and revolution is present in its pages. * * *
* * Ishmael Reed
-- poet,
essayist, and novelist -- was born in 1938 in
Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was raised in Buffalo, New York, and
attended the University of New York at Buffalo. Reed's
first novel,
The Free-Lance Pallbearers, was published in
1967. That same year he moved to Berkeley, California, later
relocating to the adjacent city of Oakland, where he currently
resides with his wife, Carla Blank, a dancer and choreographer.
They have a daughter, Tennessee. Reed also has a daughter,
Timothy Brett, from a previous marriage.
Reed named his philosophy and aesthetic processes
Neohoodooism. Hoodoo, the African American version of voodoo,
appeals to Reed because of its "mystery" and its
eclectic nature, thus provided him with a metaphor for his
understanding and realization of art. Reed's view of neohoodooism can be found in his first book of poetry,
Conjure (1972)--especially "Neo-HooDoo Manifesto,"
"The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic," and "catechism of d
neoamerican hoodoo church"--while the most successful
actualizations of neohoodooism as a practice are his novels
Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1969), the aforementioned
Mumbo
Jumbo, and
Flight to Canada
(1976).
Neohoodooism is an undeniable mix of ingredients in the New World.
Instead of black essentialism, Reed argues for hybridity as a virtue. Immersion
in blackness is simultaneously an immersion in Americanness. Africa
helped to make America and there would be no America without Africa.
America is a gumbo of cultures. Ishamel Reed's artistic vision is unique
among American writers.
He
is the author of five collections of poetry:
New and Collected Poems
(Atheneum, 1988),
A Secretary to the Spirits (1978),
Catechism
of D Neoamerican HooDoo Church (1970),
Chattanooga
(1973),
and
Conjure (1972). Reed has also written nine novels including
Japanese
by Spring (1993),
The
Terrible Twos (1982),
Flight to Canada
(1976),
The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974),
Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1969), and
The Free-Lance Pallbearers.
Among his plays are Mother Hubbard (1982) and The Ace Boons
(1980).
He is also the author of four collections of essays:
Airing
Dirty Laundry (1993),
Writin' is Fightin': Thirty-Seven Years of
Boxing on Paper (1988),
God Made Alaska for the Indians: Selected
Essays (1982), and
Shrovetide in Old New Orleans
(1978).* * * *
*
|
Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory
Douglas
—The Black Panther
Party for Self Defense, formed in the aftermath
of the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965,
remains one of the most controversial movements
of the 20th-century. Founded by the charismatic
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the party
sounded a defiant cry for an end to the
institutionalized subjugation of African
Americans. The Black Panther newspaper was
founded to articulate the party's message and
artist Emory Douglas became the paper's art
director and later the party's Minister of
Culture. Douglas's artistic talents and
experience proved a powerful combination: his
striking collages of photographs and his own
drawings combined to create some of the era's
most iconic images, like that of Newton with his
signature beret and large gun set against a
background of a blood-red star, which could be
found blanketing neighborhoods during the 12
years the paper existed. This landmark book
brings together a remarkable lineup of party
insiders who detail the crafting of the party's
visual identity.
—Publisher Rizzoli
Douglas was the Norman Rockwell of the ghetto,
concentrating on the poor and oppressed.
Departing from the WPA/social realist style of
portraying poor people, which can be perceived
as voyeuristic and patronizing, Douglas’s
energetic drawings showed respect and action. He
maintained poor people’s dignity while
graphically illustrating harsh situations.—Wikipedia
|
 |
* *
* * *
 |
The Price of Civilization
Reawakening American Virtue and
Prosperity
By
Jeffrey D. Sachs
The Price of Civilization is a
book that is essential reading for every
American. In a forceful, impassioned,
and personal voice, he offers not only a
searing and incisive diagnosis of our
country’s economic ills but also an
urgent call for Americans to restore the
virtues of fairness, honesty, and
foresight as the foundations of national
prosperity. Sachs finds that both
political parties—and many leading
economists—have missed the big picture,
offering shortsighted solutions such as
stimulus spending or tax cuts to address
complex economic problems that require
deeper solutions. Sachs argues that we
have profoundly underestimated
globalization’s long-term effects on our
country, which create deep and largely
unmet challenges with regard to jobs,
incomes, poverty, and the environment.
America’s single biggest economic
failure, Sachs argues, is its inability
to come to grips with the new global
economic realities. Sachs describes a
political system that has lost its
ethical moorings, in which ever-rising
campaign contributions and lobbying
outlays overpower the voice of the
citizenry. . . . Sachs offers a plan to
turn the crisis around. He argues
persuasively that the problem is not
America’s abiding values, which remain
generous and pragmatic, but the ease
with which political spin and
consumerism run circles around those
values. He bids the reader to reclaim
the virtues of good citizenship and
mindfulness toward the economy and one
another.
|
* *
* * *
|
Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
 |
updated 25 February 2008
|
