Publisher's Synopsis
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Fiction. African & African American Studies. Art. Music. OBSIDIAN'S WHAT TELL FREEDOM NOW offers three folios from editors Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, Khanyisile Mbongwa, and Douglas Kearney. Celebrating the ingenious work of contemporary literary giant and MacArthur genius grant winner John Keene, editor Kimberly Quiogue Andrews presents the folio Counter/Narratives: An ASAP/10 Roundtable in Conversation with John Keene. Documenting conversations at the New Orleans ASAP Conference roundtable, Andrews contributes to a sustained engagement with Keene's work, experimental Black art, and the broader and ever-unfinished task of writing (and re-writing) Black historiography. The folio closes with a response from Keene. In the folio What Do We Tell Freedom, Now? Emancipation & Art, editor Khanyisile Mbongwa invites writers, curators, and artists to share their perspectives on emancipatory practices. The contributors take us on various paths and reflections on the relevance of creativity within the spectrum of emancipation. This work coincided with Mbongwa serving as chief curator of the Stellenbosch Triennale, allowing her to to explore and examine what the cre-ative industries offer to the struggle for liberation and, at the same time, how the Stellenbosch Triennale can position itself within the biennales, festivals, and megaexhibitions existing in Africa and the world. For the final folio, See What I'm Saying Is: Writing + Image, editor Douglas Kearney invited writers to select a song from Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun and compose a cover using text and image. Following this opening of the folio, the section Unprompted, But On-Time consists of work composed without prompting. More specifically, what's gone down up in here is the contributors have worked writing + image, as in writing writing into image, writing and/by/with/along/on/under/over image, and even photographic images of writing in which the textual object's depth and width isn't simulated by vectored stacking, but feral in the three-dimensional world.
