AFAS Featured Event: Works of Dr. Zachary Manditch-Prottas & Dr. Gabriel Peoples

Dr. Zachary Manditch-Prottas presents:  A Native Son in a Foreign Land: Donald Goines, the (Anti)Canon, and Transnational Iconicity

In 1993,  Holloway House Publishing rolled out a peculiar new marketing campaign around their most celebrated author, Donald Goines. Goines had been dead for 30 years. The advertisements suggested that this author, who was largely dishonored amongst American critics since his death, had been re-born abroad. The advertisements boasted that “France Discovers Goines.”  Goines’ novels had been acquired by Gallimard Publishing and were translated into French as part of their Série Noire collection. In the shadow of this 30-year belated Francophone renaissance was the fact that Goines had never been critically acclaimed in America. Goines’ iconicity among working-class and incarcerated African Americans was concurrent with his marginalization among critics and literati. Indeed, much of America had never “discovered” Goines. This essay asks, what did French readers and critics see in Donald Goines that American literary circles did not? 

Dr. Gabriel Peoples presents: When Streaming Goes Wrong?: Glitch as technocorporeal Black performance

Moments of communal ecstasy have gained noted importance to me over the years of DJing, as they often represent a kind of solidarity for partygoers that coalesces through erotics, play, and music. In the Fall of 2021, I adapted a performance ethnography into a staged moment. The performance recounted and enacted a moment at a party I DJ’d where Lil Jon’s music was the central catalyst. My performed recounting of the moment was done over a mix I recorded of Hyphy, New Orleans Bounce, and Crunk music. However, the live stream recording of my performed ethnography dropped the music and only captured my narration, the smiles, claps, and other gestures from the panel and audience who were moving in tandem with what they heard. The glitch revealed something fundamental to how music operates on a level of feeling that can be seen and felt without being able to be heard. Here I, as C. Gingrich-Philbrook & J. Simmons suggest about the glitch, reframe “error/randomness as desire/pattern.” I contend that it is not the recording that failed but, the reorganization of the senses beyond the mono sensor that succeeded, what Lamonda Horton-Stallings calls the “transaesthetic.” Indeed, the technological brings us into focus as rhythmic, affective, and performative beings in ways that reveal the contours of the music that has otherwise failed to be heard.