Tag Archive for Multiculturalism

Announcing “Un-American”

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Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter’s debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The Nigerian-born daughter of a Nigerian-Muslim woman and a Black man born into a Southern Baptist family in the Jim Crow South and George Wallace’s Alabama, Geter charts the history of a Black family of mixed citizenships through poems complicated by migration, language, racism, queerness, loss, belief and lapsed faith, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Amidst considerations of family and country, Geter weaves in testimonies for Black victims of police brutality, songs of lament that hone each tragedy and like Antigone, demand we bear intimate witness to the ethical failings of the state. Through her mother’s death and her father’s illnesses, we witness Geter lace the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord in a collection rich with unflinching intimacy that, turning outward to face the country, examines how all of this is, like the speaker herself, stretched between the context of two nations. This collection that thrums with authenticity and heart.

“Hafizah Geter’s Un-American reads like a high lyric conversation overheard. Poem after poem, the most ordinary of items—cups, cards, couches—get ratcheted up into their proper glory. In other words, Geter sees the world as a stage set for what she needs to tell her family but can’t, what she needs to hear from her family but won’t. And all of this is done with attention to what this one beautiful story says about the so-called American story.”
—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

“Here is the history of this country in all its blood and complication, with all its promise and betrayal. These poems are an accounting, a testimony, a prayer—poems meant to quiet the animal inside us. A beautiful book.”
—Nick Flynn, author of I Will Destroy You

“In Un-American, Hafizah Geter creates a new kind of portraiture. A family is slowly etched in relief in language both lush and exacting. This gorgeous debut troubles and reshapes notions of belonging against the backdrop of a country obsessed with its own exclusions, erasures, borders, institutions, and violence. Geter’s poems simmer original forms of witness and resistance.”
—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

HAFIZAH GETER, born in Zaria, Nigeria, is an author and editor whose poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Longreads, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

Announcing “The Cultural Work: Maroon Performance in Paramaribo, Suriname”

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“Based on in-depth ethnography, this book presents a fresh and theoretically provocative view of some of the most prized, but least documented, African-based music and dance traditions of the Americas—as they exist today rather than in some idealized past.”
–Kenneth Bilby, author of True-Born Maroons, and Words of Our Mouth, Meditations of Our Heart

How do people in an intensely multicultural city live alongside one another while maintaining clear boundaries? This question is at the core of Corinna Campbell’s fascinating study The Cultural Work: Maroon Performance in Paramaribo, Suriname, which illustrates how the Maroons (descendants of escaped slaves) of Suriname, on the northern coast of South America, have used culture-representational performance to sustain and advocate for their communities within Paramaribo, the capital.

Based on the author’s long-term fieldwork, The Cultural Work focuses on three distinct collectives—Kifoko, Saisa, and Fiamba—known locally as “cultural groups” (cultureel groepen), all of which specialize in the music and dance traditions of the Maroons of Suriname and neighboring French Guyana. Weaving together performance analysis, ethnography, and critical theory, Campbell demonstrates the broad spectrum of functions and meanings that culture-representational performance can have, while highlighting competing pressures that feature prominently in the lives of Maroons in Paramaribo. She suggests that ambivalence—fundamental to the folkloric enterprise and magnified here by the urban Maroons’ social circumstances—enhances possibilities for social criticism for performers and audiences alike.

A vital contribution to scholarship that seeks to broaden our knowledge of the cultural map of the African diaspora in South America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this interdisciplinary book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of ethnomusicology, dance studies, performance studies, and anthropology.

A Fiamba dancer illustrates a choreographed move.

CORINNA CAMPBELL received her PhD from Harvard University in 2012 and is assistant professor of music at Williams College. Her work focuses primarily on traditional genres of music and dance throughout the African Diaspora, with particular interest in Suriname and Ghana. Her research has been funded by Fulbright Program, Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.