Patrick Howell - Dispatches from the Vanguard: The Global International African Arts Movement versus Donald J. Trump

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A Repeater Books paperback original 2020

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ISBN: 9781912248667

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Cosmic Spirit Force, My God

To Daddy, Dr. Bing P. Howell, the brilliant Trinidadian, former Consumnes River College, Stanford and Roger Williams University professor, co-founder of the Alternative to Western Civilization Program and author of 1999s The Ideology of Racism (Simon and Schuster), who often said to me as a little boy, Our people are some of the most brilliant, most creative, most creatively-endowed people in the world bar none!

I know you receive this missive Spirit.

CONTENTS

DISPATCHES FROM THE VANGUARD IS PROUD OF, MADE POSSIBLE BY, INSPIRED BY AND SUPPORTS THE LITERARY ARTS.

Proceeds from Dispatches from the Vanguard are made in donation to:

100 Black Men of America

PBS SoCal

Many of the essays and interviews were originally published in:

Denene Millners My Brown Baby

Los Angeles Review of Books

The Nasiona

The Tishman Review

Into the Void

Huffington Post

PoetryFoundation.org

The Good Men Project

THE GLOBAL INTERNATIONAL AFRICAN ARTS MOVEMENT (GLOBAL I AAM, OR I AAM GLOBAL)

The Next Movement in Our Artistic Expression

There has been a virtual saints and soul revival processional in the canon of Black arts globally since 2014 Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Ruby Dee and Walter Dean Myers, and before that Chinua Achebe. Our griots the repository of our culture(s) and original technologies are moving to the other side of our cosmic reality where creativity and audacity color the demarcations between day and night. Most recently, there have been the literary giants and our laureates of the twentieth century: Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott. We would include Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortzar in that tribe for their engineering of the Latin American Boom which set the global stage for a new school of thinkers outside the conventions of Faulkner and Hemmingway. Mission accomplished: New Age dawned.

Amiri Baraka, our firebrand and godfather of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), was one of the first to jump in line and light the celestial fire, so others could see it was time to ascend. His movement, our Black Arts Movement, was born from Malcolm Xs assassination in 1965. In fact, in the poem Black Art penned by Amiri for BAM trumpets, he writes:

We want live

Words of the hip world live flesh &

Coursing blood.

Or as Harvards Werner Sollors observed, Amiri saw the need to commit the violence required to establish a Black World.

BAM helped to usher in the boom of hip-hop, born in the 1970s when block parties became increasingly popular in New York City. Popcorn raps, freestyle battles and sheer rhymes over beats went viral in communities all over the USA before that term even existed (events not unlike 2014s 16th annual Harlem Book Fair). From Afrika Bambaataa to Lauryn Hill, from A Tribe Called Quest to J Dilla, hip-hop packages together liberation, creativity and social commentary, and it is a global gift that the youth, marginalized and voiceless patrons embrace and cherish. Hip-hop stands on the shoulders of BAM. Lady Griot Poet Magistrate of the Black Arts Movement, Sonia Sanchez, certainly acknowledges the direct legacy:

Because when the bebop people started to play nobody could keep up with them. It was so fast you couldnt even hear. I would always say to my kids when I first heard hip-hop, I cant hear it/I cant understand It came at a fast pace and if you turned your head, you missed it. It was gone. The bebop, the bam, and the hip-hop.

Now, if we turn our heads to the future, we can see that a current movement seems to have been seeded, certainly in part, by President Barack Obamas literary ambition and accomplishment, with Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope , seeding a transcendent moment for America and the peoples of the world, where hope and change were homogenized and momentarily materialized in 2008 as a north star.

Perhaps, this could just as soon be dubbed The Age of Obama, but it is not. It is something much more. As Obama has noted, I stand here on the shoulders of giants. Indeed, a generation of writers, artists, intellectuals, creatives, entrepreneurs, seers, visionaries, healers, mystics, clairvoyants, knowers, followers and more are awoken and activated. Names like Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jason Reynolds, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kwame Alexander, Denene Millner, Colson Whitehead and Paul Beatty become standard bearers of powerful voices going back to antiquity, with the invention of culture, language and story.

The Global International African Arts Movement (or the Global I Aam) has grown organically from the Harlem Book Fair, beginning as a way to round out the global self-perception the diaspora holds of itself through mass media. For a quarter-century, the Quarterly Black Book Review s ( QBR also runs the Harlem Book Fair) mantra has been, Our words, our lives, our stories. As such, it publishes reviews of books and provides literary content for, by, and about writers of the African Diaspora: this includes American, African, Caribbean, Latino, British, and other writers of African descent. It is fitting that the Harlem Book Fair holds space from the Harlem Renaissance, bridging the nineteenth to the twentieth century for a movement which will bridge the twentieth to the twenty-first.

In the twenty-first century we look to increase that consciousness and build upon this twentieth-century platform. Max Rodriguezs Harlem Book Fair and Quarterly Black Book Review occupy the same space as the independent book movements in New York City and Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. We hold firm to director Shekhar Kapurs observation that: We are the stories we tell ourselves. A story is the relationship that you develop between who you are, or who you potentially are, and the infinite world.

QBR has been called The African American book review of record by Martin Arnold, cultural critic of the New York Times . Along with the traditions of Troy Johnsons African American Literature Book Club, Mosaic Literary Magazine , Cave Canem, Aaduna Literary Magazine , Black Bird Press, African Voices, Kweli Journal , Black Orpheus , Jalada, Callaloo , Killens Review of Arts & Letters , Chimurenga , Black Renaissance Noire , Third World Press, Xavier Literary Review , Home Slice and other online periodicals we see an effort made to precisely define ourselves. We can also note QBR and the Harlem Book Fair, the Leimert Park Village Book Fair, Ujamaa Book Festival, Virgin Islands Literary Festival and Book, Anguilla Literary Festival, African American Childrens Book Fair, Schomburg Literary Book Fair, the Sacramento Black Book Fair and dozens of others are a continuing record of the global African expression.