Washington Informer

Beginning March 5, the Harlem Remembrance Foundation will be presenting a collection of work from anthropologist and artist, Ella Maria Ray, Ph.D. The exhibit will be on display at Prince George's Community College's Marlboro Art Gallery through April 11.

Dr. Ray is an associate professor of African-American Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver in Colorado. She earned a B.A. from Colorado College, and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University, and studied figurative and conceptual ceramic sculpture independently with Arthur González, Gayla Lemke and Barry Rose.

"My vision of my art is to reveal the history, stories, emotions and the endless possibilities of Diaspora and continental African people," said Dr. Ray. "It is my desire that my sculptures challenge viewers to "read" the narrative in each piece and to dismantle any boundaries they may have to segregate imagination from the rigorous analysis. As an anthropologist/artist, I want my work to entice viewers to celebrate and embrace their own inherent magnificence."

Ray's work reflects her analysis of social science through the humanities, particularly visual art. As an anthropologist and artist, she uses three- dimensional art to understand the complex vision Africana people continuously create for themselves. She creates a relationship between ethnographic data and visual art as a tool for understanding our human experience.

Ray's arts-based research has led her to Cortona, Italy as an artist-in-residence for University of Georgia's Study Abroad Program. She has presented her work nationally and in Panama City, Panama and Liverpool, England. While her exhibitions explore the culture, history, stories and the endless possibilities of Africana people, Dr. Ray's fired-clay art is a reflection of humanity's potential as we move further into the 21st century.

Ray's art exhibition will include pieces from four of her ongoing series:

• SPIRIT IN THE TREES – inspired by African Americans of Gullah heritage, who hang glass bottles particularly cobalt blue bottles in trees to mesmerize ancestors and capture evil spirits.

• CHILDREN OF AKUA - a call to the Ghanaian Asante ideas of beauty and fertility.

• PEDAGOGY II - created as an assessment tool for students enrolled in Black Women Writers at Metropolitan State College of Denver. Each mask is a visual analysis of the novels the students are required to read. This body of work insists that students challenge their notion of what it means to "read".

• WOMEN'S WISE WAYS - uniting Akan akua'ma figures and Akan adinkra symbols--life and death--together to bear witness to women's resiliency, their relationship with ancestors, and their commitment to life's longing for itself.

"Just Us – Sankofa: Heritage Revealed" Art Exhibit is free and open to public Monday – Thursday 9 a.m. – 8 p.m. and Friday 9 a.m. – 3 p.m. Please call 301-918-8418 to schedule a group tour.

Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation By Lisa Diane McGill

In 1965, the Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Act ushered in a huge wave of immigrants from across the Caribbean—Jamaicans, Cubans, Haitians, and Dominicans, among others. How have these immigrants and their children negotiated languages of race and ethnicity in American social and cultural politics? As black immigrants, to which America do they assimilate?

Constructing Black Selves explores the cultural production of second-generation Caribbean immigrants in the United States after World War II as a prism for understanding the formation of Caribbean American identity. Lisa D. McGill pays particular attention to music, literature, and film, centering her study around the figures of singer-actor Harry Belafonte, writers Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, and Piri Thomas, and meringue-hip-hop group Proyecto Uno.

Illuminating the ways in which Caribbean identity has been transformed by mass migration to urban landscapes, as well as the dynamic and sometimes conflicted relationship between Caribbean American and African American cultural politics, Constructing Black Selves is an important contribution to studies of twentieth century U.S. immigration, African American and Afro-Caribbean history and literature, and theories of ethnicity and race.

The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context By J. Michael Dash

A wide-ranging work that explores two centuries of Caribbean literature from a comparative perspective. While haunted by the need to establish cultural difference and authenticity, Caribbean thought is inherently modernist in its recognition of the interplay between cultures, brought about by centuries of contact, domination, and consent.

The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern By Antonio Benitez-Rojo

In The Repeating Island, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, a master of the historical novel, short story, and critical essay, continues to confront the legacy and myths of colonialism. This co-winner of the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize has been expanded to include three entirely new chapters that add a Lacanian perspective and a view of the carnivalesque to an already brilliant interpretive study of Caribbean culture. As he did in the first edition, Benítez-Rojo redefines the Caribbean by drawing on history, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and nonlinear mathematics. His point of departure is chaos theory, which holds that order and disorder are not the antithesis of each other in nature but function as mutually generative phenomena. Benítez-Rojo argues that within the apparent disorder of the Caribbean—the area's discontinuous landmasses, its different colonial histories, ethnic groups, languages, traditions, and politics—there emerges an "island" of paradoxes that repeats itself and gives shape to an unexpected and complex sociocultural archipelago. Benítez-Rojo illustrates this unique form of identity with powerful readings of texts by Las Casas, Guillén, Carpentier, García Márquez, Walcott, Harris, Buitrago, and Rodríguez Juliá.

Beginning in 2007 and continuing through 2011, Illinois Congressman Jesse L. Jackson Jr. amassed a collection of celebrity memorabilia, furs, jewelry and furniture, according to the New York Times. The Post states that as a result of a lavish lifestyle of Jackson shared with his wife Sandi Jackson, he is expected to plead guilty in a case involving misuse of campaign money.

Jackson, 47, also reportedly used campaign funds to purchase a $5,000 football signed by U. S. presidents and two hats that once belonged to the late singer, Michael Jackson.

Also charged with conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and making false statements, Jackson resigned from his congressional duties in November in the wake of a federal investigation. According to federal documents, Jackson -- the son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson -- was in direct violation of campaign finance laws.

He faces up to five years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

The government has also filed charges against Sandi Jackson, a Chicago alderman, accusing her of filing false tax returns. Mrs. Jackson, who resigned her post in January, is expected to plead guilty and faces a maximum of three years in prison and a $100,000 fine.

The Post further reported that in July 2007, according to the investigation, Jackson had a $43,350 gold-plated men's Rolex watch that he had bought with campaign funds shipped to Washington from Chicago, and that about two months later, he obtained two pieces of Bruce Lee memorabilia with campaign funds, each for $2,000, from a dealer called Antiquities of Nevada. The Post report goes on to state several other purchases Jackson made from campaign coffers amounting to thousands more dollars, including mink furs and items that once belonged to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

(Source: The New York Post)

The role of women in the fight for civil and social rights cannot be overstated. As one Freedom Rider explained recently, "Black women rarely had hold of the microphone, sometimes because of sexism, but they wrote the speeches, they organized the marches, planned the boycotts, took part in the sit-ins and demonstrations, and were beaten, arrested, sexually assaulted, and dehumanized for their efforts alongside the men." In the interim, these women earned degrees, reared families, inspired a new generation of God-fearing and patriotic Americans, and shared their love for life. The Washington Informer encourages its readers to study the vibrant history of African American women.

Among Our Top Picks:

Black Women as Cultural Readers, by Jacqueline Bobo

This work demonstrates that African-American women, as a separate interpretive community, view cultural products in a unique way. In interviews with black women, she examines their specific responses as spectators and consumers of films and novels, including Waiting to Exhale, The Color Purple, and Daughters of the Dust.

Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South, by Anne Valk and Leslie Brown

This groundbreaking book collects Black women's personal recollections of their public and private lives during the period of legal segregation in the American South. Using first-person narratives, collected through oral history interviews, the book emphasizes women's role in their families and communities, treating women as important actors in the economic, social, cultural, and political life of the segregated South. By focusing on the commonalities of women's experiences, as well as the ways that women's lives differed from the experiences of southern black men, Living with Jim Crow analyzes the interlocking forces of racism and sexism.

When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost by Joan Morgan

In this fresh, funky, and ferociously honest book, award-winning journalist Joan Morgan bravely probes the complex issues facing African-American women in today's world: a world where feminists often have not-so-clandestine affairs with the most sexist of men; where women who treasure their independence often prefer men who pick up the tab; and where the deluge of babymothers and babyfathers reminds Black women who long for marriage that traditional nuclear families are a reality for less than 40 percent of the African-American population.

Producers of the Lifetime movie, "Betty and Coretta" could face legal action by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, according to a commentary on Black America Web.

The movie, which debuted earlier this month, recounts how the widows of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. – Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King – coped with the deaths of their husbands. Shabazz and King are played by Mary J. Blige and Angela Bassett, respectively.

While Farrakhan has not taken action against either the film's producers or executives of the Lifetime Network, the movie makes references to him being behind Malcolm X's Feb. 21, 1965 murder.

Farrakhan said he's falsely depicted in the movie, which he added, seeks to destroy his reputation.

"It is because the murder of Malcolm X is still alive in the hearts and minds of many, and they wish to charge me with that crime in order to seek to destroy my reputation with the people that love and admire me," Farrakhan said in a Final Call interview. "And also, to plant the seed in the hearts of those who don't know me that I am, in fact, a 'murderer.'"

In December 1964, Farrakhan denounced Malcolm X in the Nation of Islam's newspaper, but admitted years later that his words contributed to the climate of hatred, acrimony and retribution between NOI members and Malcolm X's followers.

"I have appealed to the government to open the files," Farrakhan was quoted as saying in a BET report. "So that everything in those files could be made manifest, not only to the Shabazz family, and the families of those so ill-affected by his murder, but also my family and the lives that are constantly put in the public."

(Sources: Black America Web, BET)