Texts and Meanings in the Year 2013 - Bright Skylark Literary Productions


                   Albert Camus graphic with quote by Aberjhani provided by Postered Poetics.

After kicking off the Text and Meaning Series with an article on Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech in August, the latest installment is on Albert Camus’ classic book, The Myth of Sisyphus. The Text and Meaning Series is one reminder that some of the battles we’ve found ourselves struggling through in 2013–– as if thrashing while asleep and trying to wake from nightmares–– have been fought before. In many cases it was believed victory had already been won.

I started the Text and Meaning Series largely as a way of introducing classic works into conversations on current topics and events. It presently consists of the following:

1) Text and Meaning in Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream Speech
2) Text and Meaning in Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
3) Text and Meaning in Langston Hughes The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
4) Text and Meaning in Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus


Employing MLK’s I Have a Dream speech to launch the series made sense because the year 2013, now drawing rapidly toward its end, marked the 50th anniversary of the speech. Focusing on it also provided a way to help amplify dialogues on multiculturalism and race in America. That such dialogues must not be stifled have been made disturbingly apparent this year by several high-profile events, from the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial for the murder of  Trayvon Martin to the glaring lack of diversity at the Emmy Awards and subsequent reports in Huffington Post on racial divisions in Hollywood.

Please click the link to read this full post by Aberjhani:
Texts and Meanings in the Year 2013 - Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Year of James Baldwin Now in Full Classic Literary Swing (part 1) - by Aberjhani

Image
Author James Baldwin in St. Paul de Vence, France, 1976. (photo by Dmitri Kasterine) “It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our labels: the labels change, the terror is constant.” –James Baldwin, from  the essay Nothing Personal Members of New York City’s cultural arts community made a rare kind of decision earlier this year and the results of that decision continue to generate exceptional events and responses. They–– as in Columbia University School of the Arts, Harlem Stage, and New York Live Arts–– elected to observe The Year of James Baldwin from April 2014 until June 2015 in honor of the late iconoclastic African-American author’s 90th birthday August 2, 2014. Long before he died on December 1, 1987, millions came to recognize the indelible mark of Baldwin’s impact on, and the incredible depth
Read more

THE EXTRAORDINARY TALENT OF BEAUFORD DELANEY

Image
    This 1941 portrait of celebrated author James Baldwin, entitled “Dark Rapture,” is one of numerous masterworks created by the equally celebrated Harlem Renaissance artist Beauford Delaney (1902-1979). Delaney (whose brother Joseph, 1904-1991, was also an accomplished artist) enjoyed a remarkable career that spanned some five decades. That he was a visual artist whose creative aesthetics profoundly influenced the work of a major literary artist like James Baldwin is one indicator of how powerfully charged the creative energy of the Harlem Renaissance truly was. Aberjhani Co-author of ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE And the author of I MADE MY BOY OUT OF POETRY
Read more

Facing the Challenge of the Unfathomable: #BringBackOurGirls

Image
                     Nigeria and Mother's Day illustration by John Cole for The Times-Tribune . When confronted by something too painful, incredulous, or monstrous to believe, a person will sometimes say, “I  couldn't  even wrap my head around that!” Such was probably one of the main reasons the international community took so long to respond in any meaningful way to the abduction of the almost 300 Chibok school girls in Nigeria. The emotional impact was, and is, not completely unlike that of seeing for the first time a film clip of the aircraft exploding against the Twin Towers on 9/11. It was an image unprecedented in one’s mental model of what reality is supposed to be and therefore an image one was not able to immediately process.   Who could believe that an army of armed adult men would attack and abduct nearly 300 school girls in the middle of the night? Moreover, in retrospect, why were the girls left in such a vulnerable position in the first place?  F
Read more