Table Of ContentDiasporic Avant-Gardes
Diasporic Avant-Gardes
Experimental Poetics and Cultural
Displacement
E
DITED BY
C N
ARRIE OLAND
AND
B W
ARRETT ATTEN
DIASPORIC AVANT-GARDES
Copyright © Carrie Noland and Barrett Watten, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61629-5
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
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ISBN 978-0-230-10272-9 ISBN 978-1-137-08751-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-08751-5
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First edition: July 2009
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments and Permissions ix
List of Contributors xi
Introduction 1
Carrie Noland and Barrett Watten
1. Aimé Césaire and the Syntax of Influence 31
Brent Hayes Edwards
2. Alan Sondheim’s Internet Diaspora 51
Maria Damon
3. Remediation and Diaspora: Kamau Brathwaite’s
Video-Style 77
Carrie Noland
4. re-opening a poetics of re-openings
(a.k.a. “naked strategic partners”) 99
Rodrigo Toscano
5. O n the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics in
the Shadow of NAFTA 115
Michael Davidson
6. Franco Luambo Makiadi’s Universalism and
Avant-Garde Particularity 137
Barrett Watten
7. a h noh musik dat: Speech in the Discourse of
Nationalism 157
Mark McMorris
8. On the Nomadic Circulation of Contemporary Poetics
between Europe, North America, and the Maghreb 173
Pierre Joris
vi Contents
9. Diaspora and the Avant-Garde in Contemporary
Black British Poetry 189
Lauri Ramey
10. Something Nation: Radical Spaces of
Performance in Linton Kwesi Johnson and cris cheek 207
Carla Harryman
11. From Spanglish to Glossolalia: Edwin Torres’s
Nuyo-Futurist Utopia 225
Urayoán Noel
12. from Bass Cathedral 243
Nathaniel Mackey
13. from Vaduz [performance poem] 253
Bernard Heidsieck
Bibliography 257
Index 267
Illustrations
2.1 Alan Sondheim, “subtropic languageturtle lesson.”
Reproduced with permission of author. 58
2.2 Alan Sondheim, “lovely irma input.” Reproduced
with permission of author. 59
2.3 Alan Sondheim,“After Auschwitz.” Reproduced
with permission of author. 64
2.4 Alan Sondheim, “My Wonder Unemployment.”
Reproduced with permission of author. 70
2.5 Alan Sondheim, “Negative Diaspora.” Reproduced
with permission of author. 72
3.1 Kamau Brathwaite, from Ancestors, copyright © 1977,
1982, 2001 by Kamau Brathwaite. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. 84
3.2 Kamau Brathwaite, from ConVERSations with Nathaniel
Mackey, copyright © 1997 by Kamau Brathwaite and
Chris Funkhauser. Reprinted by permission of We Press. 93
6.1 Le Grand Maître Franco Interpelle La Société dans
“Attention na Sida,” Sonodisc CDS 6856, 1994. 140
10.1 Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread Beat an’ Blood. 1978;
Heartbeat CD HB-01, 1989. 209
12.1 Mute-stereoptic emanation: B’Loon (composite sketch
based on eyewitness accounts). 249
Acknowledgments and
Permissions
We would like to thank the following institutions and individuals for lending their
enthusiastic support to “Diasporic Avant-Gardes,” the 2004 conference that led to
the publication of this volume: Ngu˜g˜ı wa Thiong’o, Director of the International
Center for Writing and Translation; David Theo Goldberg, Director of the
University of California Humanities Research Center; the Departments of French
and Italian, English, Asian-American Studies, the Dean of Humanities, and the
Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine; the UCI Cross-Cultural
Center; California Poets & Writers; the French Consulate of Los Angeles; Professors
Maureen Mahon, Fred Moten, Ellen Burt, and Jill Robbins; our fabulous coordina-
tor, Shelleen Greene; the terrific graduate student volunteers Brook Haley, Rebecca
Stigge, Erin McNellis, Allan McVicar, Julien Weber, Aleka Calsoyas; and the
numerous poets and scholars who participated in the conference and made it such a
vibrant event. A conference at Universität Tübingen, Germany, on “Authorship and
the Turn to Language” (2005) heard a presentation of Michael Davidson’s essay,
and the Humanities Center at Wayne State University sponsored lectures by Brent
Hayes Edwards, Carrie Noland, and Barrett Watten that continued the intellectual
excitement generated by the conference.
Brent Hayes Edwards’s “Aimé Césaire and the Syntax of Influence” appeared
in Research in African Literatures 36, no. 2 (Summer 2005); Pierre Joris’s “On the
Nomadic Circulation of Contemporary Poetics between Europe, North America,
and the Maghreb” in Justifying the Margins (Cambridge: Salt Press, 2009); and
Michael Davidson’s “On the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics in the Shadow of
NAFTA” in Textual Practice 22, no. 4 (December 2008). The extract from Bass
Cathedral by Nathaniel Mackey was first published by New Directions in 2007, and
the extract from Vaduz by Bernard Heidsieck appeared in an edition by Al Dante
in 2007. Permission to republish extracts was also graciously accorded by Patience
Agbabi, Kamau Brathwaite, cris cheek, Anthony Joseph, Mark Nowak, Cristina
Rivera-Garza, Lisa Robertson, Alan Sondheim, Habib Tengour, and Edwin Torres;
the publishers Jeff Clapper at New Directions; Chris Funkhauser at We Press; and
James Sherry at Roof Books. The English translation of “Attention na Sida,” com-
posed by Franco Luambo Makiadi, is reprinted from Graeme Ewens, Congo Colossus:
The Life and Legacy of Franco and Ok Jazz (Norfolk, U.K.: Buku Press; distributed
