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Budapest W8: Performing Arts - Utopian Movements

Bernstein, Robin. “Utopian Movements: Nikki Giovanni and the Convocation Following the Virginia Tech Massacre.” African American Review 45 (3), 2012

 "the black aesthetic always contained within it a sense of motion, of movement toward" p.343

"This theory of black arts not only as a movement but literally as movement co-existed with
demands for unification around stable black identity." p.344


"Lorrie Smith was right when she recently observed that the BAM's black aesthetic was neither "a programmatic set of precepts doomed to fail," nor, in Horace Coleman's incendiary term, "a
cement 'straitjacket' limiting freedom of expression," but was instead a set of "multiple, rhizomatic, enabling practices that redirected the course of black poetry and that continue to be enacted in enormously diverse and diffuse ways" (Smith 359;" p.344


"In a community on the verge of xenophobic factionalization, "we" is a potentially dangerous concept. The concepts of "we" and "they" define each other and define lines of difference" p.344

"A mode of MOC flamboyance, dapper styling is a loud, even exhibitionistic statement of gender and sexuality that attracts attention while it deflects it and announces gender-queerness while it protects
female skin from scrutiny." p.348


Giovanni omitted a line from her poem that would've been a dig at Bush, who was present at the convocation: "instead of competing with the president, Nikki Giovanni,
in an act of strength, style, and self-determination that exemplifies the best of the
Black Arts Movement, eclipsed him." p.349


"when Giovanni and the audience performatively disintegrated the systemically
imposed sense of racial otherness that is the basis for double consciousness. The
Utopian moment was not one in which the audience transcended race.18 Rather, it was
one that disabled the practice of othering—and with it, the conditions for double
consciousness." p.350


Question: Munoz's queer utopia, please explain more clearly 

 

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