- ...Grime is a medium of the unknown, it refuses everything but possibility: its violence is one without immunity, but its real is dispossession, and is inconsolable without knowing it. Black-owned the skin, the strut, the churches, and emcees.
—D.S. Marriott, from "Preface: 16 Bars," in Duppies
The Poetry Center, in collaboration with The Green Arcade, presents the second of two evenings in its inaugural Black Study Series, featuring influential poet-scholars Frank B. Wilderson III and D.S. Marriott reading from their poetry. Supported by an anonymous donor and the National Endowment for the Arts, this event is free and open to the public.
D.S. Marriott is originally from the UK, but now lives in Oakland, California, and teaches in the History of Consciousness Department, University of California, at Santa Cruz. In addition to Duppies ("...a poetry of grime, the London street music, one that is 'late shift, zero hour.' Mixing lyric tonality with grime’s aggression, grit, and speed, this is a coruscating study of the racial politics of austerity."), which is just out in the US from Commune Editions, Oakland, his recent books of poetry include Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman, 2008) and In Neuter (Equipage, 2012). Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being, is also new in 2018, from Stanford University Press, following his influential earlier works, On Black Men (Columbia University Press, 2000) and Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (Rutgers, 2007).
Frank B. Wilderson III is an award-winning writer, poet, scholar, activist and emerging filmmaker. Wilderson spent five years in South Africa as an elected official in the African National Congress during the country’s transition from apartheid and was a member of the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto We Sizwe. His books include Incognegro: a Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (South End Press 2008; reprint edition, Duke University Press, 2015) and Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010). Ishmael Reed called Incognegro, awarded the American Book Award, “an important contribution to the African and African American canons and a rare American work that bridges two cultures [Black American and Black South African].” Wilderson's collection of poems, Sideways Between Stories, was recently published as a pamphlet (available for free download here) by Commune Editions, Oakland. Much more here.
Related event:
Black Study Series
Frank B. Wilderson III
reading and in conversation
Thursday FEB 14
7:00 pm @ The Poetry Center
HUM 512, San Francisco State University, free and open to the public
supported by an anonymous donor and the National Endowment for the Arts
The Poetry Center's Black Study Series takes its title and impetus from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s collaborative work, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013):
- “But the student has a habit, a bad habit. She studies. She studies but she does not learn. If she learned they could measure her progress, establish her attributes, give her credit. But the student keeps studying, keeps planning to study, keeps running to study, keeps studying a plan, keeps elaborating a debt. The student does not intend to pay.” —Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, “Debt and Study,” 62