Black thoughts on Black notes

To take an insight from Lippert’s paper (Ch. 7), which brings us to the enchanted forests of the novel Barkskins where migrant woodcutters in the so-called New World lose themselves to the rhythm of their dull axes, the grind of nation building cannot be disentangled from the breeze of songs, words, and fantasies. It might be that scholars of performance are not too different from queer fan cultures like the ones Horn explores in a study of Lady Gaga’s digital followers (Ch. 10), who are ever looking for the magical Monster Ball. The magic of space and time travel that the collection performs is aptly rendered in the coda to the last chapter by Linda Sturtz. In searching for the location of the graveyard through which the enslaved Jamaicans of yesteryear would pass into the spirit world of their homes of freedom, we encounter a tombstone repurposed as a paving stone. And so, as this collection demonstrates, that which has passed and keeps passing is precisely what keeps us moving into place.