In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books…
I have finished reading:
Black Ceasars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema by Odie Henderson- I will be reviewing this book this coming Tuesday in Black Kos. What I will say at this time (and I will look at more closely): Sidney Poitier attributed a major change in his career to Blaxploitation movies. For example, the first movie that I ever saw Poitier in was the comedy Uptown Saturday Night with Bill Cosby; I didn’t find out about his best known dramatic work until I was a teenager.
“It’s time black people have some fun at their own expense,’’ explained Poitier. “They don’t always have to be angry or hostile. We made an effort to make the situation familiar. The characters are right out of Black life.” Indeed, Black audiences like the one the author saw this film with back in 1975 were happy to see recognizable features like playing the dozens, side hustles, church picnics, and “hitting the number” depicted in comedic fashion on the big screen.
I saw Uptown Saturday Night at the drive-in with my grandfather; a man that had major and side hustles.
I am reading:
Journey of the Mind: A Life in History by Peter Brown- I could not put this book down. Read all the way from the aftermath of Brown’s bio of St. Augustine (now I want to read the Confessions again!) to his encounter with Michel Foucault at Berkeley in the early 1980’s (it’s through Foucault’s History of Sexuality volumes that I know Brown). Brown’s two trips through Iran in the 1970’s is the most exceptional material not only for his adventures but also for his nagging sense of foreboding that he felt being in Iran at that time. Now I’m looking up his essays at NYRB.
I was already determined that no history that I studied would be of any use unless it could be communicated in such a way as to reach a wide and cultivated public, such as I liked to imagine existed, beyond the walls of Oxford. When asked for whom I wrote, I would always say that I “wrote for my aunts.” That is, I wrote for persons of sufficient education and cultural interests, but who had never been to university, such as my aunt Mai and my aunt Freda.
The next excerpt from Journey of the Mind is a long but very important insight.
This is Brown giving a lecture about the Sasanian Empire to Iranian students in Tabriz, Iran in 1974:
The students and I were on a collision course. My lecture had been devoted to what I thought was a worthy cause— to rescue the history of Iran from Eurocentric value judgments. I wanted to present the functioning of the Sasanian Empire in terms of its own, distinctive political culture, so as to avoid the usual negative value judgments, based on Western ideas of what an empire should look like, that had been applied to the Sasanian political system by Western scholars. My aim was to vindicate the Sasanians, in the face of this orientalist prejudice, by showing how the system worked in its own terms.
But this was not at all the way that my audience heard it. To them, my attempt to defend the Sasanian Empire from Western prejudice sounded like an attempt to whitewash the present-day imperial regime of Shah Reza. Seen by the radical young of Tabriz, the Sasanian Empire (corrupt, caste-ridden, and doomed to fail) was a mirror of their own times: to attempt to view it in any other light was to surrender to the shah.
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