In Soledad Marimbo’s Retazos Una conversación con Sylvia Molloy, the Argentinian writer speaks about memory, writing, and the passage of time. When talking about two of the houses where she lived–her parent’s house in Argentina and one she owned in Long Island–Molloy talks about their similarities, specifically the courtyards. The two houses, due to some of the similarities, mingle within her mind, joining together into a memory that did not actually occur but that arose out of events that actually took place. For Molloy, one memory becomes a contaminación of the other; they become so entwined that, as she says, “in the end you don’t know what you are remembering, what you’re inventing, what you’re contaminating, but you get mixed up with the spaces.”
Retazos Una conversación con Sylvia Molloy from UiB – Universitetet i Bergen on Vimeo.
Continue reading “Contaminación of Memory”
It is that time of year again, the time of year when I reminisce about some of the things that I have written and done over the past year. Last post, I talked about writing essays for On the Stump and Bitter Root. I talked about learning some of the racist history of my hometown and the massacre that occurred in 1868. I talked about the ways that the present repeats the past, because the past is never past. Before ringing in the new year, one that will hopefully be much better than the one we are leaving, I want to highlight three more things that I worked on this past year.
Continue reading “Year End Round Up: Part II”
+ black reconstruction, bossier massacre, chuck brown, critical race theory, david f walker, frank yerby, intersectionality, religion, sanford green
Year in Round Up: Part I
It’s that time of year again to talk about some of my favorite posts from 2020. Usually, I merely pull from my blog and discuss my top five favorite pieces; however, this time I’m going to cast a little wider net and talk about some of the pieces I published in other venues alongside posts from Interminable Rambling. A lot has happened in 2020, and a lot has changed. Yet, with even these changes remind us that a lot remains the same.
Continue reading “Year in Round Up: Part I”
+ christianity, comics, graphic novels, incognegro, lillian e smith, mat johnson, warren pleece, white supremacy
Christian Nationalism and “Incognegro”
Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro focuses on constructions of race and the ways that whites use these constructions in order to maintain power or to even hopefully achieve power. The graphic novel does not detail the intersections between white supremacy and the church, but there are at least two brief moments that cause readers to think about these intersections. Today, I want to focus on these moments, all of which encompass only three small panels within the book. However, these moments drive home the ways that Christian nationalism and the construction of religion serves to maintain control and power.
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In the last post, I wrote about Zane Pinchback discussing the social constructions of race and identity in Mt Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro. Today, I want to continue that discussion by looking at the last section of the graphic novel, specifically Zane’s comments to Alonzo upon arriving back in Harlem and the reveal at the end the final pages where the white citizens of Fayetteville, MO, see Huey, the Klan member, as Incognegro and label him as such. Each of these scenes, as the previous ones I have written about, drive home the ways that we construct identity. specifically the manner in which identity comes to serve the needs of others, not necessarily ourselves.
Continue reading “Mistaken Identity in “Incognegro”?”
