A site maintained by National Geographic on the Top Ten Underground Walks in the World, the list is enlightening concerning the importance of what goes on underground and as such good background for your reading of Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground."
http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/top-10/cave-tunnel-walks/
Some of these underground locations are naturally occuring but some of the most interesting to me are manmade. One of them is the "Cu Chi Tunnels" which provided access to an underground village composed of kitchen, dormitory, meetings rooms and hospital for the Viet Cong during the Vietnamese War (1954-1975) first with France and then with the United States. The network of tunnels stretched over a length of 125 miles. Berlin has an underground radiation proof bunker built in 1971 to withstand nuclear attack for 14 days. One of the most famous is the Paris Sewers, apparently a wonder of human ingenuity. Also the Catacombs in Rome which go back to the early years of Christianity. There's the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt. The Great Pyramid is apparently 30 times the size of the Empire State Building.
11/17/10
Top Ten Underground Walks
I am a writer and a professor of English at the City College of New York, and the CUNY Graduate Center. My books include Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979), Invisibility Blues (1990), Black Popular Culture (1992), and Dark Designs and Visual Culture (2005). I write cultural criticism frequently and am currently working on a project on creativity and feminism among the women in my family, some of which is posted on the Soul Pictures blog.
The Man Who Lived Underground
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/photogalleries/100720-london-sewer-fat-clog-flushers-weird-news-pictures/#/sewer-fat-cleaning-leicester-square_23690_600x450.jpg
Sewers and underground cities have become a topic of great fascination to me stimulated by my reading of Richard Wright's story. I find it helps to have a more precise sense of what the world he was creating might have looked like since Wright was so given to realistic, precise detail and description. He was greatly influenced by the great Russian writers, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy among them, and this fondness for detail may have come about through reading this prior work.
In any case, on to the interesting links that one will find in relation to issues of sewers and the underground, some of the best stuff is from National Geographic, which has done many shows on the topic. The following link is to a story about a wall of fat having formed in the London underground. A lot of people don't know what a danger it is to throw fat down the sink drain or the sewers but apparently it accumulates and blocks up everything. I guess it does the same thing to the pipes that it does to our bodies.
Sewers are extremely crucial to modern life and to concentrations of human population such as one will see in a city. Without an effective sewer (which New York didn't have until less than a hundred years ago), the result of concentration of populations in one place and the accumulation of their untreated waste and disease on a massive scale. Indeed some of the places in the world where particularly childhood disease remains at plague level it is because of the lack of adequate sanitation arrangements such as modern sewers. Whether Wright intended it deliberately, the choice of the sewers as this young man's adventure has the impact of maximizing how important of everything that happens to him.
Below find a link to a story about the problem of cholera in London in the 19th century when untreated sewage was still getting into the drinking water supply of the city. Can you imagine people not being willing to believe that combining waste and drinking water would cause death and disease but people continued to deny it even after it was known because the needed corrections would be expensive and time consuming.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0614_040614_tvcholera_2.html
Sewers and underground cities have become a topic of great fascination to me stimulated by my reading of Richard Wright's story. I find it helps to have a more precise sense of what the world he was creating might have looked like since Wright was so given to realistic, precise detail and description. He was greatly influenced by the great Russian writers, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy among them, and this fondness for detail may have come about through reading this prior work.
In any case, on to the interesting links that one will find in relation to issues of sewers and the underground, some of the best stuff is from National Geographic, which has done many shows on the topic. The following link is to a story about a wall of fat having formed in the London underground. A lot of people don't know what a danger it is to throw fat down the sink drain or the sewers but apparently it accumulates and blocks up everything. I guess it does the same thing to the pipes that it does to our bodies.
Sewers are extremely crucial to modern life and to concentrations of human population such as one will see in a city. Without an effective sewer (which New York didn't have until less than a hundred years ago), the result of concentration of populations in one place and the accumulation of their untreated waste and disease on a massive scale. Indeed some of the places in the world where particularly childhood disease remains at plague level it is because of the lack of adequate sanitation arrangements such as modern sewers. Whether Wright intended it deliberately, the choice of the sewers as this young man's adventure has the impact of maximizing how important of everything that happens to him.
Below find a link to a story about the problem of cholera in London in the 19th century when untreated sewage was still getting into the drinking water supply of the city. Can you imagine people not being willing to believe that combining waste and drinking water would cause death and disease but people continued to deny it even after it was known because the needed corrections would be expensive and time consuming.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0614_040614_tvcholera_2.html
I am a writer and a professor of English at the City College of New York, and the CUNY Graduate Center. My books include Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979), Invisibility Blues (1990), Black Popular Culture (1992), and Dark Designs and Visual Culture (2005). I write cultural criticism frequently and am currently working on a project on creativity and feminism among the women in my family, some of which is posted on the Soul Pictures blog.
11/8/10
Josephine Baker, The Siren of the Tropics (France 1927)
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| French Theatrical Poster from the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. also visible at http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackheritage/2156229568 |
Last week, we watched in class the first half of a silent film called "La Sirene de Tropique" starring Josephine Baker (1927). We will finish watching it this Tuesday. It is possible to watch it free online at : http://www.ovguide.com/
For those of you having trouble following the action or anything else about the film, since it was a "silent" film please see this description provided by IMDb (The Internet Movie Database).
Although it would appear that the first part of the film was made in the "French Antilles" or the West Indies, in fact it seems as though it might have been entirely filmed in Paris on a sound stage. The West Indian cast looked genuine enough though. I am attaching here as well a quite wonderful paper I found on line concerning Baker's role in juxtaposition with the male star Pierre Batcheff who was apparently quite well known as an actor. I send you these materials as support for the fact that silent film was indeed quite important worldwide up through 1927, also the time of the Harlem Renaissance. It will be difficult for you to grasp anything about the issues for the participants of the Harlem Renaissance if you are unable to recognize any of the significant constituent elements of their world, i.e. this important silent film starring Josephine Baker which apparently premiered at the Lafayettle Theatre in Harlem in 1929 to much fanfare.
As some of you may know, Josephine Baker was an important black female performer (actress, singer, dancer) born in East St. Louis who moved to New York and travelled to Paris in "La Revue Negre" in the early 1920s. Baker remained in France for the rest of her life and became a major star there, making a number of films, and widely considered in Europe one of the most beautiful and talented women of her time. Her career as an international star of stage and film would have been impossible to launch in the U.S. because of racial and sexual prohibitions that were strictly enforced in the U.S. film industry and in the theatre, which was largely racially segregated as well.
(Segregated doesn't mean that black stars didn't exist. They did. Indeed, sometimes it seems as though segregation actually allowed more participation than integration ever has. The first result of integration in the 1960s was that black stars and black institutions faded. Neither Harlem nor any other black community has subsequently re-established its ascendancy since integration.)
For the most part, black women who were cast on stage and in film in the United States during the 20s and the 30s were restricted to narrowly defined and smaller roles (I have written about and screened every single occasion which while important to black audiences was never commensurate with the lavish attention that white female stars were receiving). They were rarely if ever featured in leading roles in American films (although there was a somewhat prolific but entirely separate race film industry which I have studied as well).
So far as the stage, black women were largely restricted to black cast shows, often musicals. Nonetheless the freedom of black performers in live performances in clubs and on stage was always greater than on film, and as the concentration of the film industry in Hollywood was more extensively institutionalized, black participation on screen was ever more diminished. Whereas, during much of the silent period the film industry was much more decentralized with major pockets of production in a variety of locations throughout the United States, Hollywood almost immediately became the capital of color and sound film and took on right away many of the characteristics of the Southern United States in that it was extremely racially segregated from the outset, reflecting the pressures and the censorship of its central industry of feature film and its concern for its Jim Crow audiences in the South.
This arrangement also encouraged white performers to borrow what they could from black performers in live venues all over the country and refurbish what they had gathered for their own appearances in film. It was often done and during the sound period it made Hollywood a profoundly rich and entertaining place in which racial representations were scarcely limited to those few presentations of African Americans in leading roles on the big screen.
When Baker decided to emigrate to Europe, she opened up for herself a range of possibilities. These possibilities were much more promising, albeit not unlimited in France either, as our viewing of La Sirene indicates.
One of the reasons I chose to show you this film, and to introduce you to Josephine Baker in this section of our course is because we've been reading the work of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, both really important figures in the Harlem Renaissance as writers. Baker's career in the U.S., in France and touring through Europe overlaps in time with theirs. No doubt in a different world, Hughes and Hurston would have written for and collaborated with Baker. As it was both Hughes (who travelled to Europe as a young man) and Hurston probably were both aware of Baker's work but rarely got to witness it since she only performed in the United States on two occasions after she went to live in France. Although she was active in the French Resistance and supportive of the Allied Forces during WWII, she was effectively blacklisted in the United States in the 1950s because of her liberal and progressive political associations.
More images of Josephine Baker in the course of her illustratious stage and film career in Europe.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackheritage/2149959458/in/set-72157603860664259/
More images of Josephine Baker in the course of her illustratious stage and film career in Europe.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackheritage/2149959458/in/set-72157603860664259/
I am a writer and a professor of English at the City College of New York, and the CUNY Graduate Center. My books include Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979), Invisibility Blues (1990), Black Popular Culture (1992), and Dark Designs and Visual Culture (2005). I write cultural criticism frequently and am currently working on a project on creativity and feminism among the women in my family, some of which is posted on the Soul Pictures blog.
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