Make It Funky-- James Brown (1933-2006)
The English Department at The University of Alabama is pleased to welcome you to this year’s semi-annual symposium on African American culture. The featured speakers this year are Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Mark Anthony Neal, Cheryl Keyes, Kalamu ya Salaam, Tracie Morris, Rickey Vincent, and
Thomas Sayers Ellis. Entitled “Eruptions of Funk,” the symposium is intended to provide a forum for cultural workers and enthusiasts of black culture to participate in dialogues about a wide range of artistic forms. In the process, we will engage the concepts implicit and explicit within Afro-vernacular culture, theorizing and historicizing some of the specific features and nuances of what many of us have come to identify as the funk. As suggested by the subtitle of Funkadelic’s 1978 recording of “Lunchmeataphobia (Think, It Ain’t Illegal Yet),” funkativity tends to resist either/or logic, instantiating kinesis as a discreet expression of (organic) intellectuality. The symposium, like African American cultural theory generally, recognizes no binary opposition between criticism and creativity, analysis and performativity. As such, we will attempt to propose an alternative to the one-dimensionality of many academic gatherings. So let’s Jam!!! And get down, knee-deep in the funk!
Call for papers
Registration Form
Schedule of Events
Eargasms
For Rondee
Yr voice is mojo song.
A vibraphonic vamp, an eargasm
of paralinguistic sound. Sankofa solo
like polyrhythmic e-pomes
of call and response. Bent notes
crammed into amen corners
and fried chicken shacks. Cross rhythms
spiced with double dutch chocolate
and cinnamon skinned black girls
dancing on the funk. Mix tapes
with ladies first. Independent
expression and revolutionary ride
or die. Push it, baby. Yr smile
is an African violet and you
are a melody maker with true
devotion. You sing Afro Gospel
Blues for Mama. Perform magic
like Nzinga, who transformed valleys
of bronze black vertebrae
into softness
like a red silk sofa.
If Billie’s voice was a horn
yrs is an alto. I hear the pitch
and timber of jazz delight. Vocalized
reflections of unwed mothers
and grandmothers with narratives
of mules and men. Sunbaked memories
of Mississippi goddam. The moon
walk migration to Flint. B-boys
and fly girls banging the boogie
and doing it good. Krunk beats
simmered in bottle trees and rail
road tenements. Fresh rhymes
cut with drum syllables. Or mean
Makaveli hooks. Sonic graffiti
flashlights of hipnotic street
life. The screech and scratch
from 9 millimeter gats. Prosodies
of muffled ghosts and doorstep babies.
Yr emotions pouring into song
and you testify like a righteous saint
in lyrical flow, pulsating
and reverberating in guttural octaves
like a stone soul singer
of the changing same.
--Tony Bolden
Index | Vol. 1 | Vol. 2 | Vol. 3 | Vol. 4 | Vol. 5 | Vol. 6 | Vol. 7 | Vol. 8