Jeremy Matthew Glick: The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution (2016)

“As the first successful revolution emanating from a slave rebellion, the Haitian Revolution remains an inspired site of investigation for a remarkable range of artists and activist-intellectuals in the African Diaspora.

In The Black Radical Tragic, Jeremy Matthew Glick examines twentieth-century performances engaging the revolution as laboratories for political thinking. Asking readers to consider the revolution less a fixed event than an ongoing and open-ended history resonating across the work of Atlantic world intellectuals, Glick argues that these writers use the Haitian Revolution as a watershed to chart their own radical political paths, animating, enriching, and framing their artistic and scholarly projects. Spanning the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Black Radical Tragic explores work from Lorraine Hansberry, Sergei Eisenstein, Edouard Glissant, Malcolm X, and others, ultimately enacting a speculative encounter between Bertolt Brecht and C.L.R. James to reconsider the relationship between tragedy and revolution. In its grand refusal to forget, The Black Radical Tragic demonstrates how the Haitian Revolution has influenced the ideas of freedom and self-determination that have propelled Black radical struggles throughout the modern era.”

Publisher New York University Press, New York, 2016
America and the Long 19th Century series
ISBN 9781479844425, 147984442X
xiii+266 pages

Reviews: Slavoj Žižek (LA Review of Books, 2016), Marina Sofia Magloire (Women & Performance, 2017), Paige A. McGinley (TDR, 2017).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF

Kenneth Goldsmith: Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013)

“What are the words we use to describe something that we never thought we’d have to describe? In Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Kenneth Goldsmith transcribes historic radio and television reports of national tragedies as they unfurl, revealing an extraordinarily rich linguistic panorama of passionate description. Taking its title from the series of Andy Warhol paintings by the same name, Goldsmith recasts the mundane as the iconic, creating a series of prose poems that encapsulate seven pivotal moments in recent American history: the John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and John Lennon assassinations, the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the Columbine shootings, 9/11, and the death of Michael Jackson. While we’ve become accustomed to watching endless reruns of these tragic spectacles—often to the point of cliché—once rendered in text, they become unfamiliar, and revealing new dimensions emerge. Impartial reportage is revealed to be laced with subjectivity, bias, mystery, second-guessing, and, in many cases, white-knuckled fear. Part nostalgia, part myth, these words render pivotal moments in American history through the communal lens of media.”

Publisher powerHouse Books, New York, 2013
ISBN 9781576876367
176 pages
via Marcell Mars

Interview (Christopher Higgs, Paris Review, 2013)
Reviews: Dwight Garner (NYT, 2013), Douglas Luman (Found Poetry Review, 2014).

Publisher

EPUB (updated on 2015-10-9)