Wake Up Black People: Are Our Communities in Peril? (Dreams Do Come True!) By: DeVere O. Kelley Why are so many of us Black Americans afraid to accept the blame for our own peril? Yes, we have been victims of systemic racism, poverty, wealth inequality, and police violence, but we have also caught ourselves in patterns which contribute to our demise. This book examines the history of not only the societal issues and stereotypes that have plagued our community for decades, but also the self-imposed burdens that continue to hold us back. Black homicide, drug usage, welfare, decrease in life expectancy, black incarceration and health problems are just a few issues covered in this thorough debut work by DeVere O. Kelley. Drawing from his own experiences and from the patterns of history, Kelley offers remedies for the obstacles still facing the Black community.
In Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play, Jennifer DeVere Brody places punctuation at center stage. She illuminates the performative aspects of dots, ellipses, hyphens, quotation marks, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points by considering them in relation to aesthetics and experimental art. Through her readings of texts and symbols ranging from style guides to digital art, from emoticons to dance pieces, Brody suggests that instead of always clarifying meaning, punctuation can sometimes open up space for interpretation, enabling writers and visual artists to interrogate and reformulate notions of life, death, art, and identity politics. Brody provides a playful, erudite meditation on punctuation’s power to direct discourse and, consequently, to shape human subjectivity. Her analysis ranges from a consideration of typography as a mode for representing black subjectivity in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to a reflection on hyphenation and identity politics in light of Strunk and White’s prediction that the hyphen would disappear from written English. Ultimately, Brody takes punctuation off the “stage of the page” to examine visual and performance artists’ experimentation with non-grammatical punctuation. She looks at different ways that punctuation performs as gesture in dances choreographed by Bill T. Jones, in the hybrid sculpture of Richard Artschwager, in the multimedia works of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, and in Miranda July’s film Me and You and Everyone We Know. Brody concludes with a reflection on the future of punctuation in the digital era.
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