Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Invention Of "African Rhythm", Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

"African ryhthm" was invented in the 1950s when, thanks to pioneering research by the Reverend A. M. Jones, Alan Merriam, Gilbert Rouget, Erich von Hornbostel, and John Blacking, among others, "African music" was construed as an essentially rhythmic phenomenon. Three decades and a sizable body of empirical research later, it is easy to see that an overriding ideology of difference (between "Africa" and the "West") motivated these early efforts. This essay reinvents "African rhythm" not by denying its own ideological construction but by engaging in an imaginary dialogue with earlier researchers in an effort to concretize that which was missing …

Black Nations/Queer Nations Conference, Cathy Cohen

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Black lesbian and gay men have made significant accomplishments but continue to confront a number of urgent challenges, such as AIDS, unemployment, racism, and homophobia. Our future survival turns on our ability to break new ground toward overcoming these challenges. It is therefore necessary for us to dialogue, debate, and develop new strategies of resistance and community education that will advance the politics of lesbian and gay people of African descent, our communities, and society as a whole. To this end, we will sponsor an unprecedented three-day conference.

Asses And Wits: The Homoerotics Of Mastery In Satiric Comedy, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

This essay explores master-servant homoeroticism in three seventeenth-century satiric comedies: Ben Jonson's Epicoene and Volpone and George Chapman's The Gentleman Usher. Whereas "sodomy" always signifies social disorder, "homoerotic" useful for describing same-sex relations that are socially normative or orderly. Thus homoerotic master-servant relations become "sodomitical" only when they are perceived to threaten social order. In Epicoene, the character associated with the disorder of "sodomy" is neither Dauphine or Epicoene, but the "unnatural" Morose, even though he has not literally had sex with the boy he marries. The erotic master-servant relationship in Volpone is sodomitical because it transgresses against …

The Lesbian And Gay Past: An Interpretive Battleground, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

The lesbian and gay past is an interpretive battleground that mainstream archives have refused to enter, assuming few risks in collecting, naming, or identifying archival collections. At the same time, libraries offer up worlds to those who work to unearth the secrets there.

The New York Public Library's 1994 "Becoming Visible" exhibit trumpeted The Arrival of lesbian and gay history to New York's cultural mainstream. The NYPL exhibit denies the library's role in secreting lesbian and gay history, and diminished the contributions of community-based archives to the exhibit.