In the past three weeks we have engaged with various sources—music, literature, academic writing, a play, and an interview. Often those genres have overlapped in productive ways. What are some of the genre cross-pollinations that you’ve noticed in this unit’s material? Is there a function to multimodal forms of critique? What do you think that function may be?
Within the three-week Spirit unit, engagement with various source genres has resulted in significant overlaps between varied mediums. When examining the sources, being an interview, literature, a play, and music, one may observe several overlaps and overarching concepts. The imbrications between Blood at the Roots, The Souls of Black Folk, “The Threshing Floor,” spirituals, and the interview expose an underlying scaffolding that productively contributes to the meaning of the whole. In this way, it appears to an observer that the sum is greater than the parts.
This scaffolding is closely connected to the kaleidoscope metaphor employed by Dr. Webb in his production of Blood at the Roots, which reveals an example of commonalities between different mediums. Within this play, the characters display nuanced identities using the play as a mode of delivery. Several monologues exemplified these nuances by placing them in the centre of the light and stage, while the characters spoke about the self, who was only then revealed to the audience and themselves. This concept of an exterior and interior self was coined “double consciousness” by W. E. B. Du Bois, but just under one hundred years prior to the events upon which the play was based on. Du Bois claimed that the Black individual experienced a sundered consciousness, separated by a veil. This veil acted as a filter through which society saw the Black person differently through, while also serving to reveal this alternate self to the Black person. Thus, the self is fragmented into the true self and the self as perceived by society.
This double consciousness is explored by James Baldwin in his “The Threshing Floor”. This chapter, using the technique of free indirect discourse, reveals that John experiences a complex journey that may not be understood by those who only see him from the outside. Baldwin leans into the local aspect of this hallucinative experience in order to then separate John from reality, describing how he viewed even his physical surroundings with an altered lens, or veil. James Baldwin wrote Go Tell it on the Mountain in 1953, which forms an almost perfect midpoint on the interval from The Souls of Black Folk and Blood at the Root.
Regardless of the shared principle, in this case double consciousness, this reveals the scaffolding that contributes to the sum in being greater than the parts. This is intrinsically related to continuity and humanity as a temporal construct, as Du Bois’s academic writings created a vector that is clearly followed through from before his time, to the time of James Baldwin and Dominique Morisseau, the playwright behind Blood at the Roots. All three of these artists communicated a similar principle using techniques exclusive to their art and unique experiences. This, in itself, is the scaffolding that adds value to evaluating the sum of the parts. This connective tissue is a ubiquitous concept that follows a vector or streak through time from the past to the present into the future, that may be understood in multiple disciplines. Taken into a macro level, the overlaps observed in cultural artefacts such as these reveal common themes etched in humanity over time.
