Paul Robeson

The play Toussaint Louverture, staged in London in 1936, was the first in a series of interventions by C. L. R. James into the representative politics and historical implications of the Haitian revolution. The theme was most famously to recur in The Black Jacobins (first published in 1938), a text whose shifting frames of reference and lines of emplotment have become central to contemporary discussions of the current postcolonial moment (Scott 2004). Despite the attention accorded Jacobins, the play has received little critical notice, largely because of the absence of a script authenticated as that originally performed in 1936, but never copyrighted or published. Using a range of archive evidence, this article is the first to argues that a document held in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, is, first, a copy of the text that formed the basis of the performance; and, second, a document whose circulation helps position James within the complex network of activity that constituted the black Atlantic response to the political and cultural opportunities of the early twentieth century, including links between London and New Negro movement. It considers the critical reception of the play, the significance of the London metropolitan setting, and the ways in which the plot may have been designed to anticipate, and play to, an audience self-image rooted in ambivalence to its own past, yet drawn to increasing possibilities of the politically and aesthetically ‘new’.

Design Walter van Rooij, Villa 33 grafisch ontwerper BNO Printed by Drukwerk Unlimited Cover photo Joris Ivens and Ernest Hemingway in Hollywood, July 1937 © Ivens Archives / Coll. EFJI The EFJI is an associate of FIAF (Féderation Internationale des Archives du Film)

The original brief for the Sydney Opera House was for two major spaces that would accommodate a range of activities: ballet and dance; chamber music; choral; concerts and recitals; dramatic presentations; opera; lecturers; pageants and mass meetings; and symphonic concerts. This encompassing list of requirements indicates that from the outset, it was intended that the city would receive an edifice to reinforce its desire to be Australia's leading city. What rose out of Bennelong Point has become perhaps one of the most famous buildings in the world. As an icon for the city, and possibly the nation, the Sydney Opera House maintains a special relationship with the city and its people. Despite numerous controversies, and a turbulent history, it is a place of and for people. Bennelong Point has been a place of gathering and belonging for millennia; this paper focuses on examining the notion of belonging through the various ways in which the people of the city engage with the Sydney Opera House as an example of the built environment and as an active performing arts centre. Utzon's masterpiece of architecture is more than a simple venue, it is a site based on engagement: for patrons, performers, and workers. This engagement is not limited to attending an event, giving a performance or doing a job; it extends beyond the physical borders of the site and embraces communities far and wide to foster a sense of belonging and how this famous site allows everyone to engage in a performance of belonging.

During the 1950's and 1960's local performance of Negro-Spirituals songs was popular in Israel. These songs were titled "Shirim Cushim" were often translated to Hebrew and were performed within communities and culture venues such as concerts, radio shows and choir conventions. This repertoire was highly popular thanks to the biblical textual content of the songs and by a certain feeling of identification between blacks and Jews and their shared history and fate. However, the local musical performance of Spirituals in Israel managed to change the original context and meaning of the songs as religious slave songs that were written out of oppression and hardship into a reality of utopic Zionism in a secular and socialist environment. My work has examined both solo and choral performance in Hebrew and English, both types of local performances were highly influenced by the activist, singer and actor Paul Robeson (1898-1976) who functions as the main role model vocally, aesthetically and politically. This topic also raises a question of inner racial and class differences at the time, since these songs were mostly performed and consumed to by middle and upper class Ashkenazi section of the population. The last chapter of this works discuses four examples of Hebrew translations and local performances of "Shirim Cushim". All examples and most of the information used in this work were based on primary sources such as archive recordings, musical scores, newspaper articles, letters and interviews.

Memorialization of specific individuals necessitates processes of remembering and forgetting, memory work, and obfuscation. The African American Paul Robeson is considered an “honorary Welshman” and a “Welsh achiever.” How could Robeson, erased from the history books in his own country, be appropriated by popular vote as a Welsh national hero? This paper questions how Robeson’s philosophies, evident in his arts and actions, were memorialized into those of a Welsh hero through the theoretical lens of absent presence and geographies of biography. I explore this relationship between Wales and Robeson further to understand his influence and commemorative presence in Wales via the material memorial landscape of Robeson and how he is represented within broader Welsh memorialization and nationalism. Through the discourse of the memorial landscapes of Wales, elements of his philosophy may be over or under‐represented. For example, he connected with the strong socialist history in Wales, but the complexity of Robeson’s philosophical framework remains absent. Why were only some of his philosophical beliefs transmitted into Welsh society and the memorial landscape? This paper reveals both the presence and absence of Paul Robeson’s complex biography in the material memorial landscape in Wales. As a case study on the inclusion of (auto)biographical knowledge in the context of complex geographies and landscapes, this work frames biographical inclusion and exclusion as vital geographic concerns, particularly in the precarious Black geographies of Paul Robeson in Wales. In so doing, it further reifies the indelible connections between geography, biography, and the sociopolitical contexts from which memorial landscapes emerge.

Paul Robeson (1898–1976), afroamerický zpěvák, sportovec, herec a levicový politický aktivista, navštívil Československo v letech 1929, 1945, 1949 a 1959. Byl v kontaktu s oficiálními československými autoritami, psal o české hudbě a učil se česky. Tento článek se soustředí zejména na jeho návštěvu Československa v roce 1949 a na Robesonovy ekonomické a umělecké vztahy s Československem. Zkoumá také širší kontext vztahů mezi afroamerickou komunitou a Československem na pozadí rané studené války, dekolonizačních procesů a začínajícího boje za občanská práva ve Spojených státech. Sleduje přitom mechanismy kulturní výměny v rámci radikálně levicových internacionalistických sítí včetně dominantní role, kterou hrál Robeson jako „uvaděč“ afroamerické hudby a kultury v Československu padesátých let, a věnuje pozornost kontrastním pohledům kulturních mediátorů, jako byli spisovatel Josef Škvorecký (1924–2012) či muzikolog, novinář a hudební kritik Lubomír Dorůžka (1924–2013), na jazz a afroamerické spirituály. V českém kontextu je Robeson připomínán zejména ve spojitosti s kritickými komentáři Josefa Škvoreckého, který Robesona označil za „Stalinova černého apoštola“. Ve Spojených státech byl Robeson naopak až donedávna často prezentován v depolitizované podobě, která podceňovala význam jeho mezinárodního působení. Pohled na kariéru Paula Robesona založený na českých a amerických archivních pramenech stejně jako nové studie o Robesonovi a internacionalistických sítích, v nichž se pohyboval, zpochybňují oba tyto narativy a představují šanci na nové pojetí této historické postavy i transnacionální dynamiky, která ho do Československa dovedla.

Klíčová slova: Paul Robeson; Československo; Spojené státy; afroamerická hudba; jazz; spirituály; studená válka; kulturní výměna; levicové mezinárodní sítě; hnutí za občanská práva


Stalin’s black apostle. Afro-American singer Paul Robeson in Czechoslovakia

Paul Robeson (1898–1976), an African American singer, athlete, actor, and Leftist political activist, visited Czechoslovakia in 1929, 1945, 1949, and 1959. He was in contact with official Czechoslovak structures, was writing about Czech music, and learning Czech. This article focuses especially on his 1949 and 1959 visits and Robeson's economic and artistic relations to Czechoslovakia. It also explores the broader context of relations between Czechoslovakia and the Afro-American community against the backdrop of the early Cold War, decolonization processes, and the onset of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. In doing so, it also looks at mechanism of cultural exchange within the Radical Leftist internationalist networks, including the dominant role Robeson played as the "introducer" of African American music and culture in Czechoslovakia during the 1950s, and also at views of Czechoslovak cultural intermediaries, such as writer Josef Škvorecký (1924–2012) or musicologist, journalist and music critic Lubomír Dorůžka (1924–2013), on jazz and African American spirituals, which contrasted with those of Robeson. In the Czech context, Robeson is mainly remembered through Škvorecký's critical comments, labelling Robeson "Stalin's Black Apostle". US accounts of Robeson, on the other hand, have often, and until recently, presented a depoliticized version of Robeson, understating the importance of his international activities. A view of Robeson's career based on Czech and US archival sources, as well as new studies on Robeson and the internationalist networks within which he was operating, cast doubts on both of these narratives and offer a chance to reconsider and re-evaluate this historical figure and the transnational dynamics that brought him to Czechoslovakia.

Keywords: Paul Robeson; Czechoslovakia; United States; African American music; jazz; spirituals; Cold War; cultural exchange; Leftist internationalist networks; Civil Rights movements

In 1947, African American baritone Paul Robeson traveled to Panama to give several concerts on behalf of a local West Indian Panamanian labor union. Six years later, African American baritone William Warfield gave a series of concerts in Panama to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the nation's independence from Colombia. This article compares the production histories of the two tours, noting similarities and divergences, to illuminate their respective engagements with questions of labor rights, racial identity, and cultural diplomacy during the transnational Cold War.

Paul Robeson is one of the greatest yet most unknown figures of the 20th century. This article goes beyond the traditional bibliographic style of documenting this great life, toward constructing a usable philosophical framework from it. Utilizing Robeson's own works, and building on the small critical literature already in existence, I present his philosophical framework-comprised of anti-colonialism, socialism, and human rights. I present these dense, interconnected, and ever-expansive philosophical stances into a form of communication that can be easily understood, evaluated, taught, and compared. Understanding the philosophies, actions, and examples of his ideological framework will provide the appropriate contextual background for understanding (to play off the title of Robeson's 1958 book, Here I Stand) where Paul Robeson philosophically stood.

Between the anti-racist movement, post-colonialism and the Cold War: musician and actor Paul Robeson and anthropologist Eslanda Robeson were US civil rights activists for whom the Akademie der Künste of the GDR founded an archive. A conversation about the reverberations of their struggle for freedom and decolonial perspectives on socialism with Matana Roberts (composer, artist), Doreen Mende (curator, theorist), Kira Thurman (historian, University of Michigan), and George E. Lewis (composer, Professor of American Music, Columbia University). https://www.adk.de/en/programme/?we_objectID=62427

This essay identifies a tradition of American poets for whom metaphysical inquiry is the condition of possibility of vital poetic form. The essay further considers ways in which such poets' social politics may undercut such inquiry, and thus such form. The essay meditates on how, in Plato's late dialogue the Sophist, nonbeing and untruth in turn constitute the conditions of possibility of metaphysical inquiry. The essay uses this dark metaphysics of the Sophist to frame the differences between the metaphysical visions and thus aesthetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Gertrude Stein on the one hand, and Fred Moten on the other.

Perry Brass: “Russian Revolution: A Contested Legacy,” at the International Print Center New York

2017, besides being the first year of America’s misadventures in Trumpism—i.e., lies, corruption, trash crazy talk, foreign interventions and other dangerous and nefarious liaisons—has another distinction: it is the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which succeeded basically because the dysfunctional regime of Tsar Nicholas II, the last Romanoff, was drowning in World War I. Most people born after World War II have little to no consciousness of the Russian Revolution, except for movies like "Dr. Zhivago." It was brutal—but then most European revolutions were, (think of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror when 13,000 people were executed in roughly 6 months)—and, for a while mind-boggling. For 18 years, from 1917 to 1935 when Stalin solidified his power, leading to his famous purges, Russia was the most progressive country on earth. Russia basically divorced morality from the domination of religion, specifically the Russian Orthodox Church. Women were given an equality unknown in any other country; gays and lesbians were no longer penalized, or even ostracized; civil rights for racial minorities were guaranteed; birth control, abortion, and family planning were readily available, even birth outside marriage was condoned.

Tato kapitola z knihy o africké poezii se věnuje básni "Deixa passar o meu povo" lusofonní mozambické básnířky Noémie de Sousové. Na příkladu českého překladu této básně z roku 1958 ukazuje nepředvídatelné trasy lidí, myšlenek a kulturních artefaktů.

In 1926, director James Light wrote a detailed letter to the manager of London’s Ambassadors' Theatre – Captain H. M. Harwood – providing him with tips regarding how to stage Eugene O’Neill’s expressionist masterpiece The Hairy Ape. These recommendations were based on the premiere staging of the play by the Provincetown Players in New York in 1922. (Light was the director of that production, although – it should be noted – he was significantly assisted by O’Neill.) Harwood ultimately chose not to stage the play in 1926, but he did put it on in 1931 and interestingly chose to have Paul Robeson star as “Yank”. That 1931 Ambassadors production was directed by Light; therefore, the letter from Light to Harwood helps us to get a strong sense of what it was like to actually experience the early, high-profile productions of The Hairy Ape, as mounted in New York and London.

This documentary film project presents the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and the African American performer Paul Robeson as protagonists and highlights the internationalist and cosmopolitan forces in the making of modern Chinese culture. I continue the comparative approach introduced in my first book, in which Joris Ivens and Paul Robeson embody the tangled relationship among international avant-garde, international socialism, and Chinese revolutionary popular culture. Together with their counterparts in China, they created and disseminated Chinese revolutionary popular culture from the post-WWI moment to the condition of the Cold War. Chinese revolutionary popular culture, in turn, shaped the interwar international avant-garde and its postwar transformation.

Slavery and Abolition 40.1 (2020): 167-185.

This article situates Paul Robeson's performance as a photographic subject in the 1920s and 1930s within a tradition of revolutionary image-making by African Americans that has refuted and resisted regressive, primitivizing or otherwise exploitative representations of black subjects. Using Edward Steichen's images of Robeson as Emperor Jones, it identifies an aesthetic of risk at work in Robeson's multiple and multi-layered performances as an actor and a visualized subject. It examines risk as resistance in images that form part of a popular modernist project that steps away from the heroic characterizations of nineteenth-century portraiture, and explores the possibilities and limitations of Robeson's radical vision.

Steichen images referred to may be accessed here (copy and paste):

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339092696_Pretending_to_catch_a_mouse_photographing_Paul_Robeson_the_aesthetics_of_risk_and_the_modernist_game

Other images referred to may be accessed by clicking on the relevant link in the endnotes.

Since his first interactions with Welsh miners striking in London in 1929, Paul Robeson has been considered by some as an “honorary Welshman.” While the African American actor, athlete, activist, singer, and scholar never lived in Wales, he did have various interactions in Wales throughout his life. This special relationship persists on the memorial landscape of the country in various ways, but none as extensive as the Let Paul Robeson Sing! exhibition. This article extends beyond an overview of the exhibition to identify it as an example of exceptional memorialization techniques. Combining the concepts of participatory, temporary, and mobile memorialization, in order to commemorate Paul Robeson through a sensorial, spatially, and conceptually diverse program, Let Robeson Sing! exhibits memory through a unique and engaging memorial landscape. This article situates the exhibition within the techniques of participatory, temporary, and mobile memorialization, and how the combination of the three provides a unique, effective, and affective form of commemorating Paul Robeson in Wales.

Paul Robeson  (1898-1976), athlete, lawyer, actor, singer, scholar, linguist, and political activist, was physically attacked when he was the only Black player on the Rutgers University football team. Attacks on him continued due to his political activism. Disillusioned with the treatment of Blacks in the US, he was drawn to the left and visited Moscow more than once. Called up before the Committee of Un-American Activities, he said: "I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this not in Mississippi and they are not ... in Washington... You want to shut up every Negro and fight for the rights of his people... That is why I am here today." In 1972, he was declared one of the ten most important black men in American history.

In 1949 Paul Robeson (with support from Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, Howard Fast, and others) attempted to and then successfully held a civil and workers’ rights concert in Peekskill, New York. Marring these performances, however, were protests that turned progressively violent. These violent protests have come to be known as the Peekskill Riots and serve as a major milestone in the nation’s history surrounding protest, music, politics, and Paul Robeson. This paper reflects on this relationship, particularly how it is being remembered today. Through field research, including participant observation, interviews, landscape analysis, and primary and secondary archival research, I demonstrate how British-Nigerian writer, singer, actor, activist, and architect Tayo Aluko “performs history” through his musical Call Mr. Robeson. This includes how Paul Robeson and the Peekskill Riots are remembered through performance and how the continued performances place the identity and history of Peekskill in a state of becoming. This is also a case study more broadly for how social movements are influenced, fueled, and remembered through performance.

In 1952, having been barred from crossing into Canada by the US government, the internationally renowned singer and activist Paul Robeson staged a concert directly on the border, performing to tens of thousands of people from both nations. Robeson’s voice transgressed national boundaries where his body could not, and in doing so he enacted a prefigurative moment of the border’s dissolution. This paper considers the possibility of border abolition through an engagement with Robeson’s political artistry and his diverse modes of media activism. Recent border scholarship has reoriented its study of the border as a strictly material site, approaching it instead as a system of interrelated social processes that work to determine people’s legal and social status. Thus, rather than looking at the Canada–US border as something fixed in space and time, its historical formation can be seen as a contingent process, one with a multitude of related effects on other political and social histories, including resistance to settler-colonialism and the abolition of the slave trade. With his concerts at the border, Robeson produced a phenomenological experience of border crossing for his transnational audience, leaving us with a powerful precedent from which we can now imagine borders otherwise.

[https://online.ucpress.edu/res/article/2/3/411/118502/Performing-AbolitionPaul-Robeson-in-the-Canadian]

Taking a critical look at critical thought touches on the acceptance criteria for knowledge as well as the pursuit of knowledge. This essay, which was in-process at the time of the Jan.2021 storming of the Capital Building, was modified and posted "while the iron was hot" to address the ancillary problem of bamboozlement. 

'Bamboozlement' and its overt uses in propaganda, has its origins in our cognitive structures and is based on a tendency to bamboozle the self. Wm. James' multiple realities are discussed in regards to our inborn ability to swap-out different functional universes of discourse having different 'goods,' utilities, and meanings that  obviate ideologies.

A key problem that is identified regarding critical thought, and "free-thought" itself, is in the ambiguity between performance-based knowledge and 'received knowledge.' Much of a student's task is to demonstrate their skills with that which has been passed down by the current 'system' (e.g. the latest knowledge).  Yet the gospel of critical thought is sold to students and educators alike as a brother-in-law to the  paradigm of business, married to dreams of scientific creativity, giving birth to untold realms of  entrepreneurship. This causes a conflict of interest in the education mission, which is essentially technical.

This paper represents a sketch of ideas to be developed. Here the author briefly suggests a new look at hermeneutics, which developed as a methodology for interpreting 'received knowledge', yet which can serve as a springboard for highly innovative thought.  Such a program would more truthfully address the current breach between the preacher and the professor, the gospel and the dogma.  The technological program considered as a cultural intervention for critical thought is introduced, referencing the author's paper 'Genius and Social Cognition'.

This article utilizes the African American Paul Robeson and his representation on YouTube to address three critical and underexplored arenas in heritage studies. First, Paul Robeson is an individual all but lost in the public memory of the USA, despite having been one of the USA’s most well-known celebrities. This article presents, for the first time, a global analysis of his representation and presence through the medium of YouTube. Second, in only a limited number of studies has YouTube been utilized to analyze memorialization and heritage; this article solidifies, channels, and expands upon those techniques. Finally, this article presents a spatial component to the otherwise nonspatial technique of analyzing YouTube social networks, presenting specific spatial data, which can be mapped and analyzed. Utilizing values of connectedness among videos of different topical clusters, as well as audience reactions to videos of a specific topic or place, allows for a deeper and broader understanding of both how Paul Robeson is memorialized and represented globally and how YouTube is an essential tool in social spatial heritage studies.

As a transnational agent of avant-garde documentary and international socialism, Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens connected interwar European avant-garde with socialist cultural production in East Berlin, Paris, and Beijing. Before his departure for Paris in 1957, Ivens was orchestrating documentary films on international women’s and workers' movements in East Berlin, collaborating with Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Pablo Picasso across the “Iron Curtain.” His documentary Zao chun (Before Spring, or Lettres de Chine), shot in China and narrated in Chinese, produced by the CNDFS in Beijing in 1958, brings to mind Chris Marker’s landmark work Lettre de Sibérie (and Dimanche à Pékin) made around the same time, as well as Ivens’s own poetic love letter to Paris, La Seine a rencontré Paris, an award-winning documentary made right before his departure from Paris for Beijing.

Joris Ivens and his generation of interwar international avant-gardists such as Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Sergei Eisenstein, Yokomitsu Riichi, Federico García Lorca, and Tian Han were active in Amsterdam, New York, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, Madrid, and Shanghai at the post-WWI moment. For those who survived WWII, they became key players in the field of cultural production in East Berlin, Moscow, Paris, New York, and Beijing. This paper presents Joris Ivens and his contemporary international avant-gardists as protagonists in a shared political and cultural struggle from the post-WWI moment to the condition of the Cold War, and probes their legacies for today’s interconnected world.

In 1952 the legendary singer, actor and orator Paul Robeson stood upon a stage at the Canadian-US border and performed for thousands of fans from both countries gathered together in Peace Arch Park. Barred from leaving the United States as punishment for his outspoken anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-war politics, Robeson’s voice transgressed the border where his body could not. With this concert, Robeson marked the borderscape as a distinct site of black geography: the crossroads, an intersection of the borderline, the color- line and the path to freedom. Cast from the absolute height of celebrity, Robeson was blacklisted for his refusal to accommodate the tide of anti-Communism, or be silent in the face of American racism. From halls filled with multi-racial audiences in Jim Crow America, to telephone concerts for English laborers, to loudspeakers directed at the front-lines of the Spanish Civil War, Robeson used any medium at his disposal to sing out his message of peace and international solidarity. In this talk, I tell the story of Robeson’s internationalisms —
Red, Black and Blue — and how he wielded his voice as a sonic weapon in the service of a utopian humanistic vision.