The
book launch party featuring readings by Cherise Smith and Meta DuEwa
Jones that was scheduled for tonight has been postponed. It will be
rescheduled at a later date, to be announced. We are very sorry about
the short notice!

Reading, Signing + Celebration - Meta DuEwa Jones & Cherise Smith

The Muse of Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word: This wide-ranging, ambitiously interdisciplinary study traces jazz's influence on African American poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary spoken word poetry. Examining established poets such as Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, and Nathaniel Mackey as well as a generation of up-and-coming contemporary writers and performers, Meta DuEwa Jones highlights the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality within the jazz tradition and its representation in poetry. Applying prosodic analysis to emphasize the musicality of African American poetic performance, she examines the gendered meanings evident in collaborative performances and in the criticism, images, and sounds circulating within jazz cultures.

Meta DuEwa Jones is Associate Professor in English and faculty affiliate in African and African Diaspora Studies at University of Texas, Austin.

Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith: The artists Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, Anna Deavere Smith, and Nikki S. Lee have all crossed racial, ethnic, gender, and class boundaries in works that they have conceived and performed. She is attentive to how the artists manipulated clothing, mannerisms, voice, and other signs to negotiate their assumed identities. Cherise Smith argues that by drawing on conventions such as passing, blackface, minstrelsy, cross-dressing, and drag, they highlighted the constructedness and fluidity of identity and identifications. Enacting Others provides a provocative account of how race informs contemporary art and feminist performance practices.

Cherise Smith is Associate Professor of Art History and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.