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Books by Arthur Flowers
De Mojo Blues
/ Another Good Loving Blues
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Reviews of
De Mojo Blues
A Novel by A.R. Flowers
Three black soldiers are dishonorably
discharged from the Vietnam War due to a mutinous "fragging"
incident. They return home resolved to take on the world, but
ambition and poverty begin to dissolve their precious
brotherhood forged in the trenches of southeast Asia.
To counter this growing fragmentation, the
hero-prophet of the group, Tucept HighJohn, inspired by a set of
mystical bones passed on to him by a dying brother in Vietnam,
undergoes "hoodoo" training in his isolated house on
stilts in a wilderness park in Memphis. His new self-mastery
enables him to relive his memories of Vietnam and to rally his
ex-companions-in-arms with a vision of the triumph of black
people everywhere.
This rich first novel about the Vietnam
inheritance of three black combat veterans, written in an
original, rhythmic prose, marks the debut of a gifted young
black novelist.—Publisher
Weaving the experiences of the
veterans in war and in peace, Arthur Flowers forces us to
understand why the powerless become mythmakers trying to
determine their own destiny. De Mojo Blues portrays the
ugliness and violence of war, but it's a story told with humor
as only a brother can tell it.—Rosa Guy
Art's jungle war scenes were so
vivid and dynamic that I literally craved more of them.—Louise Merriwether
Arthur Flowers novel is a late
twentieth-century fable . . . not only a compelling tale of
several young black men fighting in a war on behalf of ideals
that are not honored in the country where they are not espoused,
but also a meditation on tradition, destiny, and the exercise of
mojo (power) as a healing force in a world poised for
destruction.—Wesley Brown
Arthur Flowers is one of the most
serious, interesting, and blue deep artists to appear in some
time!—Amiri Baraka
His fast wit comes at you from
every whichaway.—Ishmael Reed
De Mojo Blues is a resounding
success. . . . Walk, run, get to the nearest bookstore and buy
this book.—John Oliver Killens Published by E.P.
Dutton, New York, 1986 posted Fall 2002 Arthur
Flowers, a Memphis native, is the author of two novels,
De Mojo Blues and Another Good Loving Blues (Ballantine Books), and a children's story,
Cleveland Lee's Beale Street Band. He is a
Vietnam veteran, blues singer, co-founder of the New Renaissance
Writer's Guild. In addition, he is the webmaster of Rootsblog:
A Cyberhoodoo Webspace and a performance artist whose presentation, Delta Oracle: A Griot
Speaks in Tongues, keeps him busy and Professor of MFA Fiction at Syracuse University.* * *
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Eyeminded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art
By
Kellie Jones
A daughter of the poets
Hettie Jones and Amiri Baraka, Kellie Jones grew
up immersed in a world of artists, musicians, and
writers in Manhattan’s East Village and absorbed in
black nationalist ideas about art, politics, and
social justice across the river in Newark. The
activist vision of art and culture that she learned
in those two communities, and especially from her
family, has shaped her life and work as an art
critic and curator. Featuring selections of her
writings from the past twenty years,
EyeMinded reveals Jones’s role in bringing
attention to the work of African American, African,
Latin American, and women artists who have
challenged established art practices. Interviews
that she conducted with the painter
Howardena Pindell, the installation and
performance artist
David Hammons, and the
Cuban
sculptor Kcho appear along with pieces on the
photographers
Dawoud Bey,
Lorna Simpson, and
Pat Ward Williams; the sculptor
Martin Puryear; the assemblage artist
Betye Saar; and the painters
Jean-Michel Basquiat,
Norman Lewis, and
Al Loving. Reflecting Jones’s curatorial
sensibility, this collection is structured as a
dialogue between her writings and works by her
parents, her sister
Lisa Jones, and her husband
Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.
EyeMinded offers a glimpse into the family
conversation that has shaped and sustained Jones,
insight into the development of her critical and
curatorial vision, and a survey of some of the most
important figures in contemporary art. |
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Michelle Alexander: US Prisons, The New Jim Crow
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Judge Mathis Weighs in on the execution of Troy Davis
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
By
Michelle
Alexander
The
mass incarceration of people of color through the War on
Drugs is a big part of the reason that a black child
born today is less likely to be raised by both parents
than a black child born during slavery. The absence of
black fathers from families across America is not simply
a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time
watching Sports Center. Hundreds of thousands of black
men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away
for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed
by whites. Most people seem to
imagine that the drug war—which has swept millions of
poor people of color behind bars—has been aimed at
rooting out drug kingpins or violent drug offenders.
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Nothing could be
further from the truth. This war has been focused
overwhelmingly on low-level drug offenses, like
marijuana possession—the very crimes that happen
with equal frequency in middle class white
communities.
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” |
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His father distrusted the police, who had frequently
called him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr. Kennedy’s father
“relished Muhammad Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never called
him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light.
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Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of
Bayard Rustin
By John D'Emilio
Bayard Rustin is one of the most
important figures in the history of
the American civil rights movement.
Before Martin Luther King, before
Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin was working
to bring the cause to the forefront
of America's consciousness. A
teacher to King, an international
apostle of peace, and the organizer
of the famous 1963 March on
Washington, he brought Gandhi's
philosophy of nonviolence to America
and helped launch the civil rights
movement. Nonetheless, Rustin has
been largely erased by history, in
part because he was an African
American homosexual. Acclaimed
historian John D'Emilio tells the
full and remarkable story of
Rustin's intertwined lives: his
pioneering and public person and his
oblique and stigmatized private
self.
It was in the tumultuous 1930s that
Bayard Rustin came of age, getting
his first lessons in politics
through the Communist Party and the
unrest of the Great Depression. |
A Quaker and a radical pacifist, he went to
prison for refusing to serve in World War II, only
to suffer a sexual scandal. His mentor, the great
pacifist A. J. Muste, wrote to
him, "You were capable of making the
'mistake' of thinking that you could
be the leader in a revolution...at
the same time that you were a
weakling in an extreme degree and
engaged in practices for which there
was no justification."
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 26
June 2012
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