Coffee Hour - 2/28 - Figuring Out Black Minneapolis & the Minneapolis Sound
This Friday's coffee hour will be presented by Dr. Roy Kay, at 3pm in 445 Blegen. Coffee and snacks are available at 2:45. Dr. Roy Kay is an independent scholar, a local teacher, and a third-generation Minneapolitan. He earned a Ph.D., in literature at the University of Geneva in Switzerland (1996). His areas of interest are semiotics, modernity, narrative, orality and literacy, music (American such as blues and jazz), Judaica, and emergent literatures. His work examines how emergent populations, literatures and music present non-Western forms of collectivities, subjectivity, and new possibilities for human life. His book, The Ethiopian Prophecy in Black American Letters, was published by the University Press of Florida in 2011.
Abstract
For a handful of decades in the twentieth century, black neighborhoods in the Twin Cities formed a community. They were particular places where black people experienced time shared; where black people lived poetically, worked, died, and anticipated and responded to the vicissitudes of race and the human condition with style and elegant counter phrases informed by the vernacular. Moreover, this community and the institutions produced a black Minneapolitan ethos, a way of walking in the world and with others, that black musicians embodied and which informed the sensibilities of the Minneapolis Sound.
