March 1, 2018 Arts & Culture What Would W. E. B. Du Bois Make of Black Panther? By Clint Smith Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong’o in Black Panther. “Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written. What would people in a hundred years say of black Americans?” This is the question posed by W. E. B. Du Bois in his lecture “Criteria of Negro Art.” The remarks were made at the 1926 NAACP annual meeting in Chicago and later published as part of a multi-issue series titled “The Negro in Art” in The Crisis, the NAACP’s official magazine. Du Bois gave the speech at a ceremony honoring the contributions of the eminent author, editor, and historian Carter G. Woodson. Woodson had made it his life’s work to document the positive cultural, social, and political contributions black Americans had made to the development of the United States. He did so in an effort to combat the empty but popular rhetoric of those who suggested that black people had no history, no culture, and had nothing to add to the country beyond the labor of their bodies. That same year, Woodson developed Negro History Week, the precursor to what would eventually become Black History Month, an extension of his effort to illuminate black contributions to the American project. And while Du Bois sought to honor Woodson in his remarks, he also used the opportunity to espouse his own beliefs regarding the role and importance of black artists as America wrestled with the evolution of white supremacy only a generation after the end of slavery. I was thinking of Du Bois and the concerns he raised when I entered the theater to watch Black Panther. I was thinking of what he might make of the scene unfolding across the country: sold-out cinemas with lines snaking out the door and around the block; the intergenerational thrill experienced by families of every hue ornamented in African garb, an array of spectacular patterns and colors exploding across theater lobbies from Atlanta to Oakland. I imagine Du Bois and his distinctive handlebar mustache, its thick, curled edges accentuating his smile as he observes black children and adults dressed as a cast of characters too often unseen in a mainstream cultural production. Read More
March 1, 2018 Bulletin Announcing Our Spring Issue By The Paris Review After months of germination, our Spring issue is out today! Shrug off the winter doldrums with the bright splashes of color on our cover, painted by the Lebanese artist Etel Adnan especially for the issue. Look between the covers for a portfolio of her color-infused landscapes, text-based works, and abstractions, curated by our interim editor Nicole Rudick. The issue features two Art of Fiction interviews. The Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, winner of the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 2013, discusses a career devoted to chronicling the experiences of women and the poor: My own deepest interest as a writer is in fiction but as I have learned, it is my work that is most socially engaged that is also the most valued by my readers … There is a moral obligation to write of this. I could not ignore it. And Charles Johnson, author of the National Book Award–winning novel Middle Passage, describes the philosophical novel and writing about black America: I know that black life, like all life, outstrips our perceptions, that so much of black life still remains—to invoke Ellison here—invisible, unseen. Also: A new story by Joy Williams (“Sometimes I ride in the chthonic with the luggage, the boots and coats, the boxes of fruit and gin and books”), her tenth for the magazine. Williams will receive the Hadada, the Review’s lifetime-achievement award, at the Revel on April 3. Plus: fiction by Rachel Cusk, Kathleen Collins, Chia-Chia Lin, JoAnna Novak, Katherine Kilalea, and Danielle Dutton (you may notice a commonality in this list); and poems by Ishion Hutchinson, Dorothea Lasky, Mónica de la Torre, Alejandra Pizarnik, Major Jackson, Ange Mlinko, Nick Laird, Peter Cole, and Michael Hofmann. Subscribe now!
February 28, 2018 Look Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Portraits Bring the Dead Back to Life By The Paris Review Hiroshi Sugimoto, Norma Shearer, 1994. All photos courtesy of Damiani. Hiroshi Sugimoto has spent a career photographing fictions. When he moved to New York from Japan in 1974, by way of Los Angeles, he intended to find work as a wedding photographer. Instead, he took his camera to the Museum of Natural History, where he developed a lifelong fascination with dioramas. He photographed the taxidermy there, already frozen in their meticulously staged tableaux, and, as he writes, “I realized that I too could bring time to a stop. My camera could stop time in the dioramas—where time had already been halted once—for a second time.” This doubling of perspective, which has since become a signature of Sugimoto’s work, can produce unexpected and uncanny transformations: a 1976 photo from his “Dioramas” series, for example, shows a stuffed polar bear on a faux icescape, looming over a seal, its teeth bared, as though ready to strike. Twice removed from its natural setting, the scene unfreezes. It could easily be confused for a photo of a real bear, a real icescape. “My life as an artist began,” Sugimoto writes, “when I saw with my own eyes that I had succeeded in bringing the bear back to life on film.” Sugimoto achieves similar feats in his latest collection, “Portraits,” which will publish this month. For this series, Sugimoto traveled to the Madame Tussauds wax museums in London and Amsterdam, where he selected subjects that span some two thousand years of history. As in his Diorama series, the imposition of photographic distance has a kind of embalming effect on Sugimoto’s subjects, rendered somehow more lifelike in the act of preservation. “Photographs,” Susan Sontag once wrote, “are a way of imprisoning reality.” But in Portraits, Sugimoto uses his camera to opposite effect, creating counterfeit realities that give history back to the dead: “However fake the subject,” he writes, “once photographed, it’s as good as real.” —Spencer Bokat-Lindell Read More
February 28, 2018 Arts & Culture Corsets and Cotillions: An Evening with the Jane Austen Society By Ted Scheinman From the Jane Austen Society of North America’s 2013 Netherfield Ball. In Minneapolis that fall, while my mother lay on a couch in upstate New York with her legs elevated as she healed from a recent knee replacement, it fell to me to deliver her paper at the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). During the Q&A that followed my rendition of her paper, I was roundly congratulated for this service to my mother, though no one voiced the rather obvious question of why such an apparently dutiful son wasn’t where he ought to be: at her bedside. The answer would have been that I was working on a book, researching and trying to understand the Janeites, this intoxicating secret society of superfans that was beginning to feel like an unexpected birthright. But they were too polite to ask, and I would have been too guarded to offer the answer. At the grand ball in Minneapolis, my dancing showed certain improvements since the long weekend I had spent at the Jane Austen summer camp three months before. Though still clumsy in following the choreography, I was at least not a total amateur the second time around. Nevertheless, the size alone of the annual JASNA meeting meant the ball would be far more populous, collisions would be more frequent, and no one was safe from a camera. As the ball was set to begin, the writer Deborah Yaffe dragged over a friend, the two of them insisting that “Jane Bennet” (an elegant-looking historical novelist with bouncy blonde ringlets) had been eyeing me. Read More
February 28, 2018 Arts & Culture Memoirs of an Ass By Anthony Madrid 1. Just to give you the essentials: Probably around 180 A.D. (which is to say probably during the reign of the emperor Marcus Aurelius), a novel was written in Latin. It really is a novel. Trot out any definition of novel: it’s that. Also, it’s the only one, complete, that we have from ancient Rome. Other similar books in Latin have been reduced, over the centuries, to rubble. The one I’m talking about is still whole. Corrupt, but whole. The author’s name was Apuleius. He was famous during his lifetime as a Platonic philosopher. There were statues of him in North Africa, where he was from. They’re all gone now. And we don’t know how many copies of the novel existed during his lifetime. We do know that every one of ’em had to be copied out by hand. The text requires about two hundred pages of modern type, I don’t know how many pages of Latin holograph. Read More
February 27, 2018 Redux Redux: Jamaica Kincaid, James Salter, Robert Bly By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Jamaica Kincaid This week, we bring you Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “What I Have Been Doing Lately”; James Salter’s story “Bangkok”; and part 1 of Robert Bly’s “Choral Stanzas,” from the very first issue of The Paris Review. Read More