Subjects

Ralph Lemon coming to Wesleyan University 2/25/16

by jgagne • February 18, 2016

As part of the World of Arts in the Heart of Connecticut series hosted by the Wesleyan University Center for the Arts, Ralph Lemon will appear at Wesleyan’s Ring Family Performing Arts Hall on February 25, 2016. His presentation, Ceremonies Out of the Air, touches upon both his new and old work in relation to an imagined South.

As a choreographer, writer, director, and conceptualist, Ralph Lemon is a dynamic voice, canonizing what is African American literature and history through his in-depth research and presentation of traditionally African American culture through dance, art, and memoir. In his latest book, Come home Charley Patton, Lemon examines and imagines the South through memoir, documenting the Civil Rights era and contemporary southern culture through his journal entries. Sketches and photographs are included, capturing the haunting sites of lynchings, Civil Rights protests, and meetings between Lemon and the descendants of musicians and activists. A few images from the book, documenting Lemon’s travels, are included below:

One of the bedrooms in Mose Toliver’s home. Mose Toliver was a folk artist whose art can be found in the Rosa Parks Museum.

a framed image of Elvi Presley in Mrs. Kent's house in Memphis, TN

A framed image of Elvis Presley in Mrs. Helen Kent’s house in Memphis, TN.

Helen Kent, the daughter of Frank Stokes, an African American blues musician, in her living room.

In memory of the many protests and marches of Birmingham, AL, Lemon captures an image of a hose, a common weapon to deter peaceful protestors.

#tbt: Happy Birthday Emily!

by jgagne • December 10, 2015

Born December 10, 1830, Emily Dickinson did not became a literary icon until long after her death. Today, she is appreciated for her revolutionary poetic form and syntax . After the posthumous release of her journals, poems, and multitude of letters, Dickinson became one of American literature’s most prominent figures. Below is an excerpt from Wesleyan’s Dickinson anthology, A Spicing of Birds, a collection drawn from the 222 poems in which Dickinson mentions birds.

324

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—

I keep it, staying at Home—

With a Bobolink for a Chorister—

And an Orchard, for a Dome—

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice—

I just wear my Wings—

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,

Our little Sexton—sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman—

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last—

I’m going, all along.

Consider shopping local this holiday season!

by jgagne • November 19, 2015

We reached out to our local independent booksellers to find out what fun events they have planned for Small Business Saturday, Cyber (or CIDER) Monday, and the rest of the holiday season. If you shop for the holidays, please consider ordering or purchasing gifts from local retailers. You might also consider giving a book from a small press or university press. Wesleyan has number of books that would make great gifts, some are included here.

November 28th SMALL BUSINESS SATURDAY

Bank Square Books
53 W. Main St
Mystic, CT 06355
Day-long celebration with local authors: James R. Benn, L.M. Browning, Sarah MacLean, Ruth Crocker, Ann Haywood Leal, Susan Kietzman, David K. Leff, Adam Shaughnessy, and Robert Steele.

Breakwater Books
81 Whitfield St
Guilford, CT 06437
Book signing with Mary Sharnick, Orla’s Canvas, 12–2PM

Hickory Stick Bookshop
2 Green Hill Rd.
Washington, CT 06794
Book signing with Marilyn Singer, Tallulah’s Tap Shoes, 2PM

Mystic Seaport Museum Store
75 Greenmanville Ave
Mystic, CT 06355
Book signing with Roger C. Taylor, L. Francis Herreshoff: Yacht Designer, 3pm

November 30th CIDER MONDAY

Breakwater Books
81 Whitfield St
Guilford, CT 06437
Join us on “Cider Monday” (our version Cyber Monday) & enjoy warm cider and snacks as you do your holiday shopping. Leave your computer and shop in a local bookstore where real people can help you with your selections. Enjoy an old fashioned shopping experience! (View more events here.)

Hickory Stick Bookshop
2 Green Hill Rd.
Washington, CT 06794
Enjoy a cup of cider and a snack as you have an old-fashioned holiday shopping experience in a real bookstore with real people to help you. We promise our “servers” won’t crash, but instead will offer recommendations that will help you with your selections. We’ll even wrap your gifts!

Additional Events

Bank Square Books
53 W. Main St
Mystic, CT 06355
December 1 – Mystic Stroll, businesses in Mystic stay open late for holiday shoppers! That night, we will host cookbook author Ellen Stimson for a cookie contest and cookie swap. More info here.

Breakwater Books
81 Whitfield St
Guilford, CT 06437
December 3 – E-List’s annual Girls Night Out Guilford, 5PM. Meet at Whitfields, to start with a 1/2 price glass of wine! More info here.

Broad Street Books
45 Broad St
Middletown, CT 06457
December 19 – Scooby Doo books and read by Santa
Broad Street Books is also a one of the sponsors of Middletown’s Holiday on Main Street.

Burgundy Books
1285 Boston Post Rd
Westbrook, CT 06498
November 21 – Luncheon with Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, 12PM
December 15 – Book signing with Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, 12:30PM

Harbor Books
146 Main St
Old Saybrook, CT 06475
December 4 – Old Saybrook’s Winter Stroll, stop by at our table for a free novelty bookmark!

Hickory Stick Bookshop
2 Green Hill Rd.
Washington, CT 06794
December 5 – Donna Marie Merritt, We Walk Together, 2PM
December 6 – Jack Chaucer, Nikki Blue: Source of Trouble

Mystic Seaport Museum Store
75 Greenmanville Ave
Mystic, CT 06355
December 5 – Book signing with Carlo DeVito, Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex: The Complete Illustrated Edition, 1PM
December 6 – Book signing with Paul S. Krantz, Riding the Wild Ocean, 2pm

R.J. Julia Booksellers
768 Boston Post Rd
Madison, CT 06443
December 2 – Book signing with Ellen Stimpson, An Old Fashioned Christmas, 7PM
December 3 – Teens Talk Books Holiday Party, 6PM
December 6 – Santa Letter Writing Workshop, 12PM–1:30PM
December 18 – Voices In The Bookstore, local authors read their work, 6PM
December 20 – The Grinch Story Time, 10:30AM

Gift Ideas from Wesleyan University Press

Honoring Veterans of Connecticut and Beyond

by selliott • November 11, 2015

Connecticut Veterans

The Battle of Antietam, pictured here, claimed over 22,000 casualties in one day. Years later, a soldier remembered: “for the six months following everything I ate drank or smelled had an odor of dead men in it and the memory of the scene and the place and the four trees that stood in the field to mark the place of burial will never be effaced.” (Manuscript of William Relyea, pp. 54–55, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford.) From Heroes for All Time.

Nurse Harriet Ward Foote Hawley, who hailed from Connecticut wrote of her charge: “I can’t let them die—if they do a piece of my life dies too.” From Heroes for All Time.

Connie Nappier, Jr., Tuskegee Airman and native of Connecticut, c. 1944–1945. Courtesy of Connie Nappier and The Veterans Oral History Project at Central Connecticut State University (40-1, p308) From African American Connecticut Explored.

Wesleyan poets who served in WWII and the Vietnam War

Left: The late Harvey Shapiro earned a Distinguished Flying Cross serving as a B-17 tail gunner during WWII.
Right: Yusef Komunyakaa earned a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, working as a specialist for the military paper Southern Cross.

Announcing “Radicalism and Music” from Jonathan Pieslak

by jgagne • November 3, 2015

A comparative study of the music cultures of four radical groups

Radicalism and Music offers a convincing argument for music’s transformational impact on the radicalization, reinforcement, and motivational techniques of violent political activists. It makes a case for the careful examination of music’s roles in radical cultures, roles that have serious impacts, as evidenced by the actions of the Frankfurt Airport shooter Arid Uka, Sikh Temple murderer Wade Page, white supremacist Matthew Hale, and animal-rights activist Walter Bond, among others. Such cases bring up difficult questions about how those involved in radical groups can be stirred to feel or act under the influence of music.

Radicalism and Music is based on interviews, email correspondence, concerts, and videos. As a “sound strategy,” music is exploited to its fullest potential as a tool for recruiting and retaining members by members of al-Qa’ida, the Hammerskin Nation, Christian Identity, Kids in Ministry International, Earth First!, and Vegan Straight Edge. But, as the book points out, the coercive use of music is not isolated to radical cultures, but in political propaganda, sporting events, and popular music as well. Ultimately, Radicalism and Music shows how music affects us through our emotions, and how it triggers violence and enables hateful ideology.

JONATHAN PIESLAK is an associate professor at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War.

Listen to interviews with the author here:
To the Best of Our Knowledge
WAMC’s The Academic Minute
The Mike Huckabee Show

“Radicalism and Music is a compelling read, rigorously researched and accessible to the interested reader. Pieslak is to be commended for his neutral approach: he comes across as intellectually intimate with his subjects without being committed to their respective agenda or passing judgment.”
—Nelly Lahoud, author of The Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction

“Radicalism and Music is a well-argued foil to the notion that music is a universal language that brings people together. The subtheme of music and its relationship to the Internet provides important groundwork for thinking of music as a particular ‘information technology’ without divorcing it from its ritual function.”
—Benjamin J. Harbert, coeditor of The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity

“Pieslak’s work reveals uses of music that are questionable and discomforting and thus rarely studied. By skillfully comparing music’s role in a range of extremist cultures, Pieslak remaps the bounds of human musicality, showing how music’s social and emotional power can inspire violence as much as community, cultivate hatred as much as beauty.”
–Daniel Cavicchi, author of Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum

November
320 pp., 8 illus., 6 x 9”
Unjacketed Cloth, $85 x
978-0-8195-7583-8
Paper, $27.95
978-0-8195-7584-5
eBook, $21.99 Y
978-0-8195-7585-2

#tbt: Readings Across Time & Space with the Ancestors

by agansley • October 15, 2015

On November 29th, 1781, somewhere between the coast of West Africa and the island of Jamaica, some 150 enslaved Africans were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean on orders of the captain of the ship Zong. The book length poem, Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, was written entirely from the words of the legal decision regarding this massacre. This legal document is the only extant public document related to the massacre. Participatory and ritual, Zong! is an interplay between noise and silence. It performs, even as it seemingly unperforms, ideas of history and memory.

On November 29th, 2013, those who lost their lives aboard Zong were remembered with readings in Toronto, Brazil, Tobago, Trinidad, Blomfontein, and in New York at Unnameable books. Participants were invited to the sacred a space where ancestral voices join with voices of the living. The exchange was facilitated through spoken word, music, video, movement and improvisation, creating a polyvocal, counterpointed soundscape. View a video of one of the events here.

You can catch M. NourbeSe Philip at Wesleyan’s Memorial Chapel this evening, where she will be joined Wesleyan’s own Gina Athena Ulysse for an evening of poetry-based performances.

The Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory

#tbt: “The Hidden Musicians” revisited

by jgagne • October 8, 2015

January 11th–12th, 2016, Open University in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom will hold a conference surrounding The Hidden Musicians by Ruth Finnegan, who is a music professor at the university. More information about this event can be found at here.

The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town, was originally published in 1989, but was reprinted by the Wesleyan University Press in 2007. The book is comprised of various studies by Professor Finnegan who studied the practices of amateur musicians and music ensembles in the small English town of Milton Keynes. She studied the differences and distinctions between what makes a band ‘professional’ or ‘amateur’, seen through the lens of professional and candid photographs taken at rehearsals and musical events, as seen below.

_{above: The eighty-year-old Wolverton Town and British Rail Band. The current members in their band uniform.}

_{Above: An informal photograph of the Woburn Sands Band shortly after competing in the National Brass Band Finals, showing the age range typical of many music groups (here 11 to 70).}

The book also explores the different genres of music made in the town, comparing the different rock bands, musical theatre ensembles, and variations of marching bands and community bands in the town. Through this, Finnegan creates a new methodology of studying music and how music is made and performed as seen throughout the book’s illustrations and its resonance within the musical academia of Open University.

Outside of Milton Keynes, amateur bands and musicians like those of the small English town, have continued to flourish throughout the years upon the same premises of being communal, casual, and organized by camaraderie. In the Wesleyan University Press office, our director, Suzanna Tamminen, below, spends her lunch hour practicing her tuba for her community band.

Announcing “She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks” from NourbeSe Phillip

by jgagne • October 6, 2015

New edition

The groundbreaking seminal collection by the author of Zong!

Brilliant, lyrical, and passionate, this collection from the acclaimed poet M. NourbeSe Philip is an extended jazz riff running along the themes of language, racism, colonialism, and exile. In this groundbreaking collection, Philip defiantly challenges and resoundingly overthrows the silencing of black women through appropriation of language, offering no less than superb poetry resonant with beauty and strength. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks was originally published in 1989 and won the Casa de Las Americas Prize. This new Wesleyan edition includes a foreword by Evie Shockley. An online reader’s companion is available at http://nourbesephilip.site.wesleyan.edu.

NOURBESE PHILLIP is a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright who was born in Tobago, in the twin island state of Trinidad and Tobago, and now lives in Toronto. She is the author of four books of poetry, including Zong!, a novel, and three collections of essays. EVIE SHOCKLEY is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, and author of the new black, winner of the Black Caucus of American Library Association’s Literary Award for Poetry.

“Philip’s tragic transport—as a curate of the impure word, the degeneration and regeneration of grammar—bears the black history of romance. No sojourn in contemporary poetry is more necessary or more beautiful than hers.”

—Fred Moten, author of The Feel Trio

“Since the original publication of She Tries Her Tongue, the critical community has been catching up with NourbeSe Philip’s seismic poetic voice and her radical philological project—continued in Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence and Zong! This collection should be required reading for all students of Caribbean art and literature.”

—Emily Greenwood, author of Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century

“She Tries Her Tongue richly touches upon the difficult intertwining of race, gender, sexuality, history, and language. No other work brings these concerns so centrally to readers.”

—Samantha Pinto, author of Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic

“She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks“

All Things are alter’d, nothing is destroyed

Ovid, The Metamorphoses (tr. Dryden).

the me and mine of parents

the we and us of brother and sister

the tribe of belongings small and separate,

when gone. . .

on these exact places of exacted grief

i placed mint-fresh grief coins

sealed the eyes with certain and final;

in such an equation of loss tears became

a quantity of minus.

with the fate of a slingshot stone

loosed from the catapult pronged double with history

and time on a trajectory of hurl and fling

to a state active with without and unknown

i came upon a future biblical with anticipation

August

100 pp., 6 x 9” or 5-1/2 x 8-1/2”

Paper, $15.95

978-0-8195-7567-8

eBook, $12.99 Y

978-0-8195-7568-5

NourbeSe Philip & Gina Ulysse team up!

by selliott • October 5, 2015

Atlantic Reasonings Between Caribbean Sisters
Performances by M. NourbeSe Philip and Gina Athena Ulysse
October 15th, 7:30PM in Wesleyan’s Memorial Chapel.

Two Wesleyan Press authors, M. NourbeSe Phlip and Gina Athena Ulysse are teaming up for an evening of powerhouse performances sponsored in large part by Wesleyan’s own Center for the Americas, with a additional support from our English Department’s Concentration in Creative Writing. Other funders include the Andrew W. Melon Fund for Lectures in Ethics; Center for the Arts; Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies; the English Department’s Concentration in Creative Writing; Office of Equity & Inclusion; and Romance Languages & Literatures.

Please, also join us on October 14th, 4:15 PM, in Russell House, for a conversation between M. NourbeSe Philip and Indira Karamcheti–who will discuss Caribbean diasporas, the arts, race and self-care, followed by an open Q&A with audience members.

About the artists:

Gina Athena Ulysse is a performance artist, anthropologist, and author of Why Haiti Needs New Narratives, Downtown Ladies, and Haiti, me & THE WORLD.

M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, lawyer, and author of She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks and Zong!. Her essay collections include A Genealogy of Resistance and Showing Grit.

Respond to the Facebook invite here.

#tbt: “A Blessing,” by James Wright

by selliott • September 24, 2015

Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is a James Wright poem found in a forthcoming poetry collection for children: Book of Nature Poetry. The poem was originally published in Wright’s 1963 volume, The Branch Will Not Break, which is also available as an adorable mini-book.

“A Blessing”
by James Wright
from The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan UP, 1963)
Also found in The Book of Nature Poetry (National Geographic Society, 2015), from which this photograph was taken.