A Matter of Life and Def: Poetic Knowledge and the Organic Intellectuals in Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry

In December of 2001, Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry (Def Poetry Jam) turned HBO viewers into audience members of a televised poetry reading, featuring spoken word and performance poetry. Over six seasons, actors, rappers, comedians, and the host, Mos Def, joined poets in a unique representation of counter-public open mic poetry readings and poetry slams. This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the intellectual capacity of spoken word and performance poetry, and poets as intellectuals, where poets produce and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and data, in the form of narratives, that contribute to critical consciousness. The effectiveness of the series lay in the consistent blurring of entertainment, knowledge, anti-capitalism, and capitalism. This research demonstrates how Def Poetry Jam provided organic intellectuals, through poetry, a space to name the pain of history, demonstrate pleasure amid structural inequality, and to imagine themselves in liberatory ways. The following questions guided this exploration of Def Poetry Jam: from which poetic traditions did Def Poetry Jam originate and thus represent to television audiences; how did the on-screen representation of performers and poetry contribute to the production of cultural consciousnesses; and finally, how did Def Poetry Jam offer an archive of knowledge about the United States, particularly those experiences of African-Americans and people of color, in the early twenty-first century? Following a content analysis of the three hundred ninety-four performances on the series, supplemented by interviews with talent coordinators Shihan Van Clief and Walter Mudu, as well as poets Mayda del Valle, Abyss, Willie Perdomo, Javon Johnson, and Bob Holman who appeared on the show, this research found Def Poetry Jam, as a commercial project, negotiated cultural resistance within the controlling images of Black bodies and people of color on television. Their poetry extended the Black radical poetic tradition, that, in-large part began with the Harlem Renaissance, and continued through jazz poetry, the Black Arts Movement, hip-hop, and poetry slams. Building on the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, poets on Def Poetry Jam served as organic intellectuals, engaging in the cultural and political struggle for hegemony and the dominant ways of understanding social processes. Whereas poets are typically considered traditional intellectuals who participate in the struggle for hegemony through narration and observation, Def Poets were presented as participants who use spoken word and performance poetry to build critical consciousness among Black communities and communities of color. In performing this intellectual work on television, poets represented themselves and were represented by the television series as easily recognizable members of racial and ethnic groups by invoking the controlling images and stereotypes that their poetry confronted. This research, therefore, builds on Mark Anthony Neal’s work on illegibility, where subjugated bodies challenge the very representation they seem to embody. Neal’s introduction of the ThugNiggaIntellectual, especially captures the representation of Def Poetry Jam, as poets subverted the stereotypes and controlling images to link the imperialism and systemic racism of the United States to the interpersonal relationships, community building, and daily life in the 21st century. As a television series, Def Poetry Jam’s collection of performances serves as an archive of knowledge confronting the ideology of American patriotism and neoliberalism in a post 9/11 United States. In presenting Def Poetry Jam as an archive of knowledge, this research introduces sociopoetix as a method of critical analysis for spoken word and performance poetry. Grounded in Aimé Césaire’s valuing of poetic knowledge and Michel Foucault’s method of problematization, sociopoetix further depicts the poets of Def Poetry Jam as organic intellectuals in the struggle for hegemony. However, like much of Russell Simmons’ “Def” projects, this research finds Def Poetry Jam to be a television show that negotiated political and cultural radicalism with a commercial viability grounded in the multiculturalism of hip-hop. The series’ negotiation of critical consciousness and reproduction of neoliberal ideals, especially where cultural and political radicalism became the commodity, illustrates what Regina Bradley describes as messy intellectualism. As Def Poetry Jam allowed performances, particularly by Black poets, to speak candidly about systemic oppression and to make meaning of their own experiences, identities, and humanity on television, this research explores the series’ role in the context of Black television. Building on Manthia Diawara’s of outline of new Black realism in film, this research offers Def Poetry Jam as a televised successor of that genre, pioneering a narrative technique defined as matter-based narration. While much of this research foregrounds the relationship between performances of poetry and the social contexts to which these poems responded, the mise-enscene and representation of Black bodies, particularly Black women’s bodies, made Def Poetry Jam a significant, if understated, television series in history of Black television

From Reynolds v. Sims to City of Mobile v. Bolden: Have the White Suburbs Commandeered the Fifteenth Amendment

In 1964, the United States Supreme Court held that the fourteenth amendment requires state legislatures to apportion themselves by population. The new constitutional rule of one person, one vote set forth in Reynolds v. Sims was derived largely from decisions prohibiting racial discrimination in voting under the fifteenth amendment. In decisions following Reynolds, the Court recognized that the one-person, one-vote standard could be satisfied by creation of multimember districts or at-large voting plans that would be likely to disadvantage racial minorities. This Article traces the development of the problem of minority vote dilution and the Court\u27s attempts to articulate standards governing such cases. Particular attention is given to City of Mobile v. Bolden, where a plurality opinion held that black voters must prove an at-large voting plan was motivated by invidious purpose, and Rogers Y. Lodge, in which a majority of the Court approved the Bolden plurality\u27s intent requirement. The Article concludes that the Court\u27s enunciation of a higher standard of proof in cases involving racial vote dilution than that required to challenge population malapportionment has created an intolerable inversion of historical and constitutional priorities. In addition, the Article concludes that none of the standards proposed by various members of the Court would provide the necessary judicial manageability, and proposes a manageable standard of proof that reconciles the implied constitutional right of majority rule with the explicit constitutional demand for the protection of racial groups

The role of motivation and self‐efficacy on the practice of health promotion behaviours in the overweight and obese middle‐aged American women

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107386/1/ijn12155.pd

Diffusional and microstructural profiles in metallic-to-UHTC conversion by carbonization

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Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, Volume 1 of 2 (Petition with Appendix Pages 1a-563a). Lynch v. Alabama, 135 S. Ct. 53 (2014) (No. 13-1232), 2014 U.S. LEXIS 5672

QUESTIONS PRESENTED (1) The district court found that several provisions of the Alabama Constitution of 1901 were adopted for the purpose of limiting the imposition on whites of property taxes that would pay for the education of black public school students. The first question presented is: Do black public school children and their parents have standing to challenge the validity under the Equal Protection Clause of state constitutional provisions adopted for the purpose of limiting the imposition on whites of property taxes that would be used to educate black public school students? (2) In 2004 the District Judge in Knight v. Alabama held that certain aspects of Amendments 325 and 373 to the Alabama Constitution were adopted for racially discriminatory reasons. In 2011 the District Judge in the instant case, applying different legal standards, concluded that the Amendments were enacted for a nondiscriminatory purpose. The second question presented is: Which district judge applied the correct constitutional standard? (3) The district court in the instant case found that prior to 1971 real property in Alabama was assessed far below its fair market value, and that the primar[y] reason for those low assessments was to protect white landowners from paying property taxes that would be used to educate black public school students. After 1971 Alabama adopted two constitutional amendments whose purpose, the court of appeals recognized, was to entrench those race-based pre-1971 assessments. The third question presented is: Is the Equal Protection Clause violated by a state constitutional amendment adopted for the purpose of entrenching pre-existing race-based property tax assessments

Panel Discussion: Social Justice: The Best Preventative Medicine

Tavora Buchman, PhD (Moderator) Director of Quality Improvement, Epidemiology and Research Director of Tuberculosis Control, Nassau County Department of Health David Fagan, MD Chairman, Department of Pediatrics Nassau University Medical Center Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld, PhD Professor, Sociology Program, Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics Arizona State University Erika Blacksher, PhD Assistant Professor, Department of Bioethics and Humanities University of Washington School of Medicine Jennifer Prah-Ruger, PhD, MSL Associate Professor, Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvani