Tweet @UTCEnglish what you’ve been doing in preparation for #blackpantherweek

The English department will be hosting a series of three events this October discussing the cultural significance of Marvel Comics’ Black Panther.

On October 23rd, students and faculty are invited to attend a roundtable discussion of diversity and comic books. On October 24th, Dr. James Arnett and his African Sci-Fi class will be presenting the whole history of the Black Panther comic series. Black Panther Week will culminate with a screening of the 2018 Ryan Coogler film on the 30th. For information on the times and location of the events, see the Black Panther posters posted around campus, or on the UTC English calendar and social media accounts.

In anticipation of these events, Dr. James Arnett and Tiffany Mitchell, English professors at UTC, wanted to talk about the sorts of things they will be exploring in the events to follow. Arnett and Mitchell have worked together on diversity projects before. In the spring of 2016, Arnett and Mitchell worked on Lemonade Week, a series of four events based around Beyonce’s visual album, Lemonade. The event was a great success, culminating in a massive symposium-style presentation where nine faculty members and around four dozen students contributed videos, writings, and performances.

Tiffany Mitchell, UTC

“We are adept at giving any number of proper academic lectures on campus,” Arnett said, “We receive notices all the time, but we don’t have many opportunities to bridge the gaps in between those art objects and objects students are seeking out in their free time. Black Panther Week is a way to create a standardized conversation across the board that avoids jargon and rarification, and allows all of us to speak about the same things.”

James Arnett, UTC

Black Panther tells the story of T’Challa, heir to technologically advanced Wakanda, who must stop a challenger to the throne named Killmonger from ascending to power and dispersing Wakanda’s secret technology to the African diaspora. Black Panther stands apart in the Marvel pantheon and as a Hollywood production for its nearly all-black cast and production. Arnett and Mitchell hope Black Panther Week will get students thinking about what it means to circulate cultural objects about blackness. One of the things that interests both of them about Black Panther as an art object is that it poses an alternative history to Africa grounded in strength and self-protection, rather than fear and violence.

 “Black Panther shows us this beautiful Africa if it wasn’t raped and pillaged and carved up,” Mitchell said, “It is this one little slice of land that could have been. Unfortunately, we have a monolithic view of Africa. When you think of Africa, you think of the bush. Black Panther portrays parts of Africa as it really is . . . varied, plus this sci-fi, futuristic vision of what it could look like.”

Black Panther showcases in both the foreground and background individuated blackness. Many of the lip plates, hairstyles, and costumes represented in the different tribes of Wakanda are all inspired by actual African tribes. For instance, Ruth E. Carter, costume designer for the film, modeled Okoye and the Dora Milaje on the Turkana and Maasai tribes. This sect of warrior women in red first appeared in the Black Panther comics in 1998. In the original, they sported stilettos, red mini skirts, and straight black hair. For the 2018 film, Carter adapted the characters to be more battle ready. The stilettos and mini skirts are gone, and instead the Dora Milaje are uniformly bald and wear practical battle armor. “We needed to present another female warrior that was fully clothed with her vitals protected,” Carter said in an interview with Vulture. “She’s really, truly ready for battle” .

“I thought it was beautiful,” Mitchell said, “When T’challa and Okoye were in the casino in Korea. As soon as the fighting starts, Okoye flings her wig off. That was powerful.”

Design choices like the shaved heads of the Dora Milaje are immediately relevant to American culture and politics. Colonizer mentality has always had a stranglehold on black hairstyles. Back in May of this year, the Supreme Court refused to hear the 2013 lawsuit of a black woman whose job offer was rescinded after refusing to cut her dreadlocks off . In Tennessee, a stylist can be fined thousands of dollars for practicing braiding without a license, placing unnecessary regulations on black business owners under the guise of civic well-being.

“Facilities that do braids in Tennessee have to meet the same requirements that a regular salon would have,” Mitchell said. “But these are things that a braiding salon would never need. Its crazy!”

While events that celebrate diversity and bring attention to the overwhelming whiteness of Hollywood enjoy popularity and success within the English department, programming such as this is under constant threat of defunding and disintegrating.

“I think we are responding to some of the legislative pressures against diversity programs at UTK and here at UTC and trying to sort of rush into the gap that is being made by the evacuating of financial and political support.” Arnett said, “Our students are still our students, and we want to respond to attempts to disaggregate them. It is more and more important for us to have these sorts of events that bring people together if the spaces themselves are under existential threat.”

Black Panther Week Poster
Tuesday, October 23, 5:30 pm, Multicultural Center UC
English Faculty Rountable, Diversity and Comic Books
Wednesday, October 24, 5:30, Raccoon Mountain Room, UC
Whole History of Marvel comics’ Black Panther
Tuesday, October 30th, 8pm
Derthick 201, Black Panther Film Screening

Poet, author Edward Hirsch

Dr. Edward Hirsch has devoted his life to advocating poetry. He is the author of nine volumes of poetry, most recently Gabriel: A Poem. He is the author of five books of prose, including How to Read a Poem an Fall in love with Poetry—a national bestseller. He is the president of the John Simon Guggenheim memorial Foundation, and the recipient of both MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships.

He will deliver a lecture on the nature of reading poetry, the interchange between the poet, the poem, and the reader.

Dr. Hirsch was kind enough to answer a few questions in regards to his upcoming visit.

What originally drew you to poetry? Was there a specific experience with poetry that crystalized for you the transformative power of poetry?

I was first drawn to poetry out of emotional desperation. As a teenager, I was overwhelmed by feelings I didn’t understand and I gravitated toward poetry as a way to try to describe the intensity of what I was feeling. I wasn’t writing poems, I was writing expressive lines.

It was after I started college that I began to see the connection between reading and writing poetry. I fell in love with the English Metaphysical poets. I loved the way they structured arguments. I started to try to do that myself. That’s how I stumbled into the realization that the poet is a maker and the poem is a made thing.

Your book How to Read Poetry came out in 1999. Between then and now, the world has transformed in unimaginable ways. Do you feel your book is more important now than when it was first published? And how have you observed America’s culture of poetry and literature change in that time?

I can’t speak to the importance of my own book. But I still recognize the need for an intervention. I still believe that poetry speaks to our inner lives in necessary ways. And I believe that we need poems to help us clarify our response to the world.

The news cycle is even more intense now. Everything is even more distracting. Poems help to focus our attention. The good news is that it turns out that a lot of social media is quite good for disseminating poetry. The bad news is that it doesn’t encourage people to take much time and pay attention.

The first poem I encountered of yours was “For the Sleepwalkers.” It was in my senior year of high school and I was struck by how in the opening line you declare your desire to “say something wonderful.” Do you feel that is the proper function of poetry: to say something wonderful? If so, are you comfortable being classified as a romantic?

I loved the challenge of the first line in “For the Sleepwalkers,” I’m glad you responded to it. I would say that saying something wonderful is just one of the tasks of poetry. Perhaps it’s equally important to say something deep. I’m comfortable, in any case, with the designation as a romantic poet. I’d love to be able to continue the American romantic line, which runs from Whitman through Stevens, Crane, and Bishop.

Dr. Sean Latham, Walter Endowed Chair of English, University of Tulsa.

Dr. Sean Latham will be coming to deliver a special lecture on James Joyce and Modernity, titled “Becoming Human: James Joyce in Four Objects.” Wednesday, Sept. 19th at 5:30pm in the Raccoon Mountain Room.

Dr. Latham is the Walter Endowed Chair of English at the University of Tulsa, Director Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, Editor of James Joyce Quarterly, and Director, University of Tulsa Institution for Bob Dylan Studies. Dr. Latham, scholar of modernism, and major figures James Joyce and Bob Dylan, was kind enough to answer a few questions regarding his lecture.

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What do you want to tell us about your lecture?

Well, I was asked to give a talk that would connect Joyce to the perpetual, though now acute, sense that humanities are in real crisis.  Enrollments and majors in fields like English and History are declining as universities increasingly focus on assessment regimes that demand measurable outcomes.  At the same time, parents and students alike have shifted their focus away from the ideals of the liberal arts education and toward higher education as pre-professional training.  So, this talk will ask some hard questions about the humanities while also showing that these concerns are not at all new. I also hope that it will have something useful to say about how Joyce’s work can help us think about some of the complicated questions we now face—questions about information overload, data management, and the internet of things. We’d like to think these problems are new, but they’re not.  And Joyce offers us some creative ways to think through and even beyond them.

What originally drew you to the study of James Joyce?

Well, my first encounter with Joyce’s wasn’t entirely a happy one.  I remember reading Portrait of an Artist in college and clearly the idea was that we were somehow supposed to identify with the inner agonies of the complicated young man the book describes.  His struggles with religion, family, and home were familiar, but his world seemed distant from my own and parts of the book seemed downright remote. As I’ll argue in my talk, however, I think that book has the potential to become newly relevant, especially if we see in it the plight of a young college student struggling on the edge of debt, uncertainty, and the demand that he quickly get a career and start earning money.

My larger engagement with Joyce also came out of a struggle with his writing (and reputation) rather than an initial love of his work.  I’m a first-generation college student who grew up in Colorado and went to college and then graduate school at elite schools in the East.  I loved it, but also found myself often anxious around students who seemed so much more worldly and sophisticated than me. I tackled Ulysses as a way of proving myself, and in graduate school I wrote a dissertation called Am I A Snob? which was, in part, an attempt to think through why someone like me should read and value a difficult book like Ulysses.  I still struggle with that question.  In fact, one of the first talks I ever gave was called “Hating Joyce Properly” and one reason Joyce matters, I think, is because his books can continue to offer compelling answers even to these hard and skeptical kinds of questions.

Any hints on your slightly enigmatic title?

Nope.  I hope folks will consider coming out to see how a cup of coffee, a computer, a joystick, and a bar of soap all tell us something important not just about Joyce but about the dense complexity of our modern lives.

Modernist figures, and perhaps Joyce especially, have an air of mysticism and intrigue that has only grown over this last century. Why do you think that is?

That’s a big question, so my short answer would be that we have never stopped being modern. Our culture trains us to value the new and to forget the old—to imagine that our lives now have little to do with those of say Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust.  The disruptions they experienced, however, connect intimately to our own sense of a world in perpetual change, and the closer we look at their writing, their art, and their confusion, the more intimate and revealing their work becomes.

Joyce is loved by some and hated by others for his difficulty. What is your advice to students who might not be familiar with his works, who may or may not have read Portrait of an Artist, who want to read his late masterpieces but feel intimidated?

My short answer to this question would be that Joyce’s work are actually quite accessible, but you have to approach them on their own terms.  If you treat them like a series of coded messages that somehow have to be decrypted, then they will always be aliening, difficult and elitist.  The annotations to Ulysses, for example, are longer than the book itself—but no one really holds all that knowledge in their head, nor do you need it to read the book.  Joyce’s earliest readers certainly didn’t have it and found themselves just as baffled by the details of life in 1904 Dublin as contemporary students do.  I think all Joyce’s books have a strongly anti-authoritarian streak. That is, they work in such a way that no one reading or interpretation is correct, authoritative, or commanding.  This is particularly the case in Finnegan’s Wake, where the puns are so various and complex that novice readers regularly see or hear things that have long eluded even the most dogged veterans.

In the article “Hating Joyce Properly” you describe an ever-growing threat of recycling criticisms when writing about ubiquitous literary figure such as Joyce, and a sense of “fury” in trying to tackle all the swollen shelves of criticism to that artist. Do you still enjoy the research you do on Joyce?

Yes, I love doing research on Joyce.  I read bucketloads of articles each week for JJQ and that work comes from all over the world—from people who are discovering new, exciting, or confusing stuff in works that have now been in studied in detail for over a century.  Sometimes, this novelty comes from meticulous historical research. In the forthcoming issue of the journal, for example, we’ve got an article on a curious Irish tradition called Women’s Christmas—an informal holiday with deep Celtic roots that fundamentally changes the way we read Joyce’s most famous story “The Dead.”  Just as often, however, new approaches emerge because readers need to put Joyce to work in new ways. This explains, for example, the emergence of the broad array of work on Joyce’s Irish contexts that have dominated the critical conversation for the last two decades—a moment when Ireland itself finally embraced Joyce and made its way more confidently onto the world stage.  And I hope my talk will reveal other kinds of uses to which Joyce might be put as we struggle, for example, with the challenge of living in a world in which objects have become increasingly lively, active, and powerful.

Is there anything you would like to say that we haven’t covered?

The only thing I want to stress is that the talk I’ll deliver is not for specialists and you don’t need to know a thing about Joyce in order to attend.  I’ll be talking about the internet of things, about living in a world inundated by data, and even how to respond to those who think English majors all become baristas at Starbucks.  This is timely stuff, and Joyce remains very much an artist of our time.