[Peace-discuss] [Peace] [OccupyCU] upcoming events: "Birth of a Nation" w/panel tonight...

Tue Oct 11 17:02:42 UTC 2016

"It's wrong to think that those organizations just sprouted from one brilliant messianic leader and a bunch of followers, which is pretty much how it looks in this film.    The real Black community was important in making Turner's planned rebellion actually happen"
I'm sure that's true.  For the first nearly 200 years of American history, the Appalachian barrier could not be crossed in any numbers, and slavery was largely confined to a relatively narrow strip along the eastern seaboard.  Slaves could be and were bought and sold, but most often to neighbors no more than a few miles away.  Family ties were not necessarily broken, and local African-American communities could develop and persist across generations.
It was only at the very end of the 18th Century that significant numbers of settlers began to move west, and really not until the 1820s-30s, as the indigenous tribes were subdued, that there began large-scale development of the interior South -- Alabama, Mississippi, etc. -- which required huge numbers of slaves.  An enormous -- and enormously profitable -- internal slave market came into being.  Being sold suddenly meant never being seen again, and the by-then ancient slave communities in places like Southampton County were being devastated precisely at the time of Turner's rebellion.  I have to think there was a connection.

      From: Stuart Levy via Peace <peace at lists.chambana.net>
 To: Irenka Carney <renny.carney at gmail.com>; "Storm, Rachel Lauren" <rstorm2 at illinois.edu> 
Cc: Peace Discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>; C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com>; Peace <peace at anti-war.net>; occupycu <OccupyCU at lists.chambana.net>
 Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2016 10:35 AM
 Subject: Re: [Peace] [OccupyCU] upcoming events: "Birth of a Nation" w/panel tonight...

 [I started by omitting the Peace list, but hope the below brings enough new information that I'll copy Peace too for now.   But please, try to keep arguments off the Peace list - it's intended for announcements.]

 tl;dr summary --
     * Artists may make great art.  They may also do things that are repellent, or criminal.   The one does not excuse the other.
     * Despite the limitations of the "Birth of a Nation" as a film, and the cloud over its director/lead actor, it's an important film.   I hope especially that many white people will see it, and come out wanting to know more.
     * You can read Nat Turner's Confessions, made in prison after he turned himself in.   Lou Turner, on the panel on Sunday, recommends them.  Text is on line here (and likely many places): http://www.melanet.com/nat/nat.html
     * Many many thanks to the panelists on Sunday!  Robert King, Gus Wood, Malaika Mckee-Culpepper, Charisse Burden-Stelly, Lou Turner, Sundiata Cha-Jua.
     * Glad Paul Mueth worked to make an audio recording - I hope it turns out to be usable.

 I have to agree that "manufactured outrage" is an unfair dismissal of a real issue.    St. Clair deserves to be criticized for putting it that way.   Thank you, Rachel.

 At Sunday night's panel, there was a good deal of discussion over the accusation against Nate Parker, and over artists (male) with a history of sexual bad conduct - Woody Allen, Vladimir Nabokov, it's too easy to name others.

 Lesson I'd want to take: artists may make great art.  They may also do things that are repellent, or criminal.   The one does not excuse the other.

 [In another field: the astronomer Geoffrey Marcy has done groundbreaking work in discovering planets around other stars over the last several decades.   He is also, it was revealed, a serial sexual harasser of his female graduate students.   His scientific work remains valuable, but that doesn't mean he should be allowed to have anything to do with students.   UCBerkeley didn't respond well until they were pushed hard.   In another case, Christian Ott, Cal Tech did much better.]

 One comment from Sunday: Nate Parker has been involved in several feature films, but the focus on the accusation of rape against him is brought up strongly now - when he has made a film about a black rebellion.    A few years ago he was prominent in a popular - but non-threatening - film, Red Tails, about Black pilots in the US air force.   Were people suggesting boycotting that film, or other Hollywood movies he's been in, over Parker's past?   Here's the double standard David Green mentions - a legitimate claim which seems to be selectively used to distract from the substance of the film.

 There were plenty of complaints in Sunday's panel about the substance of the film as presenting historical events - opportunities missed (from what people said that evening, there is still plenty of room for better historical films about Turner's slave rebellion!).   For example: there were frequent small rebellions happening everywhere in the years around this time, though most went no further than a single family.   All the great rebellions - including Toussaint L'Ouverture's in Haiti - were led by people who were mobile.   (L'Ouverture was a livery driver, and the French colonizers had lots of parties to display their wealth!)   Mobile people could gather information, and organize people, and quietly plan and build an organization, over years of work.   Turner's preaching travels must have been opportunities for organizing as well.   How did movements get built?   How did people come to know each other well enough that they'd trust one another with their lives?   We don't see anything like that here.

 It's wrong to think that those organizations just sprouted from one brilliant messianic leader and a bunch of followers, which is pretty much how it looks in this film.    The real Black community was important in making Turner's planned rebellion actually happen - a date of July 4th had been set, but Turner got cold feet.   The community pushed him to go forward, and the actual uprising came in late August.   How were those tensions expressed?

 The grievances against the slaveowners look personal in the film - brutality, rape - but they had an economic foundation as well.   A depression had started in agricultural prices in 1819 - the bursting of a banking bubble!   (Grievances against those same bankers were important in the 1830s rise of Andrew Jackson, populist and scourge of the Native Americans.)   Slaveowners responded to the loss of income.   Some sold their slaves south to Georgia.   Some hired brutal overseers to squeeze more labor out of their slaves, as the film does show. 

 Some curious facts are preserved in the film: there was an actual annular solar eclipse, taken as a sign that the time had come - in February of the year of the rebellion, 1831, and Southampton County VA was nearly on its center line.   Turner, who had (pre-rebellion) escaped and fasted in the wilderness, had visions during his fast, including of blood coming from the corn, and of black and white angels wrestling in the sky.

 Lou Turner, on the panel, recommended to us Nat Turner's Confessions, dictated in prison after he turned himself in.  They became maybe the first American best-seller book.  (Text is on line here and surely elsewhere.)   The film doesn't try to show anything about them.  And it only hints at the great influence Turner's rebellion had going forward.

 It really was a wonderful panel (whose good comments the notes above don't begin to summarize).   Thanks to all who took part!   Paul Mueth made an audio recording - I hope it turns out to be usable.

 And even with its limitations, this looks to be an important film.    I hope people, especially white people, will see it.

 On 10/10/16 2:44 PM, Irenka Carney wrote:

 I couldn't agree more, and that is spectacularly well put, Rachel! 
 On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 2:38 PM, Storm, Rachel Lauren via Peace <peace at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

   “Don’t let the manufactured outrage about what Parker may or may not have done as a teenager deter you from seeing this liberating film.”   I’m disappointed by this endorsement of a message/an op-ed that dismisses concerns about violence against women as “manufactured outrage” on a listserv allegedly concerned with anti-violence and peace-building. I think we need deeper conversations  about gender and race-based violence and a recognition that we can’t separate war and structural violence from interpersonal violence.    See the film, sure—but rather than dismiss outrage as “manufactured” and sexual assault allegations as dismissible because of a lapse in time or worse yet, because Parker was a “teenager,” understand that sexual assault survivors are frequently disbelieved,  blamed for their own victimization, and failed by the criminal justice system. Parker’s victim, clearly suffering from trauma both from the assault and the aftermath, took her own life after no one was held accountable for the harm she experienced.  As people committed to anti-war, anti-violence, and social justice— we must be able to hold our own accountable.          From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists. chambana.net] On Behalf Of C. G. Estabrook via Peace
 Sent: Sunday, October 09, 2016 7:58 PM
 To: Stuart Levy
 Cc: Peace Discuss; occupycu; Peace
 Subject: Re: [Peace] [OccupyCU] upcoming events: "Birth of a Nation" w/panel tonight...      [A good note on Birth of a Nation from the editor of CounterPunch, Jeffrey St Clair]       Styron’s Historic Libel

 I never took to William Styron’s writing. He aspired to be Virginia’s William Faulkner, but Styron never had the master’s heart or humor. Behind those ornate, fractured, Cubist sentences, Faulkner was a writer who was haunted the barbarities of his own nation’s history and he had a deep feeling for those on the losing end: the blacks, the poor, the dispossessed and, especially, the women, all straining under the cruel shadow of the debased Southern aristocracy. Check out Light in August, a searing testament to Faulkner’s extraordinary empathy.

 By contrast, William Styron seemed obsessed by the failures of his own mind, which can make for powerful fiction in the hands of Dostoevsky. But Styron was no Dostoevsky, either. Styron’s self-loathing is projected onto his characters, nowhere more morbidly than in his book The Confessions of Nat Turner. Styron’s portrait of the black revolutionary is depraved. His Turner is almost subhuman, a kind of black Caliban driven by animal instincts and wild emotions that overwhelm his intellect and sense of morality. This is white fantasy, since we know very little about the man himself, except for the brutal treatment he received from the Virginia slave masters. Styron’s own family were slaveowners and the most generous reading of the novel is as a kind of psychological exercise to purge those ancestral demons, at the expense of one of the most heroic black figures in American history.

 My familial roots grow deep into the Virginia piedmont country and I went to school in DC, where I got to know many Virginia writers–novelists, essayists and poets. Few had any respect for Styron;  some were embarrassed for him. Styron later blamed the hostile reaction toConfessions from black writers and intellectuals, such as Cecil Brown, for the onset of his crippling episodes of writer’s block, which seems like one more case of blaming the victims. Once Styron was considered one of the three Great White Male Hopes for the American novel, along with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer. Now Styron is regarded, if at all, for Darkness Visible, his rather austere chronicle of his battles with depression. Perhaps there’s a measure of cold justice in that fate.

 Alexander Cockburn used to bump into the Styrons, Bill and Rose, when he lived on Cape Cod. He adored Rose and spoke glowingly to me of their dinner conversations. Alex claimed that Bill was usually plastered by 4 pm, babbling incoherencies deep into the evening.

 Nat Turner’s life and fiery uprising against the slaveowners has been redeemed from Styron’s libels by Nathan Parker’s powerful new film,Birth of a Nation. Don’t let the manufactured outrage about what Parker may or may not have done as a teenager deter you from seeing this liberating film. Watch the movie and judge it on its own merits. I bet that, like me, you’ll leave the theater uplifted with a joyous anger, rather than depressed, which is exactly the way revolutionary art should make you feel.         
  On Oct 9, 2016, at 1:33 PM, Stuart Levy via OccupyCU <occupycu at lists.chambana.net> wrote:    
 7pm Sun 10/9 *tonight* - "Birth of a Nation" film at the Art Theater, 
    with panel discussion to follow.  (The film is showing at many other times too over the next couple of weeks, but this is the only panel.) Nate Parker's acclaimed film about Nat Turner's slave revolt addresses U.S. history and revolutionary violence, and raises several necessary specters of discussion - on & offscreen.

 More info:  http://www.arttheater.coop/ the-birth-of-a-nation/ 

 Post-show panel:
 Malaika Mckee-Culpepper (Department of African American Studies, UIUC)
 Charisse Burden-Stelly (Department of African American Studies, UIUC)
 Robert King (Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault and the Breakfast Club)
 Lou Turner (Department of African American Studies, UIUC)
 Moderated by Sundiata Cha-Jua (Department of African-American Studies, UIUC)   

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