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I remember the moment like it was yesterday. It was the summer of 1986, I had just finished watching a Rob Base and DJ Easy Roc video, and I bet $40 with my father over the impact of hip-hop culture. He said it was a fad that would disappear from the Black music scene like disco. I argued that rap music--and more importantly hip-hop culture--would stick around for years to come.Sixteen years later, Rob Base and DJ Easy Roc are hip-hop afterthoughts, and I still have not collected on my bet. But hip-hop culture and the generation that grew up listening to its music have not faded away. This group is now a pivotal force within the Black community--Blacks born between 1965 and 1984 make up over 18 million of the 33 million Blacks in the United States.The author of this excerpt (Hubbard, 2002, online) provides an interesting insight on the generational debate and the competing opinions surrounding the significance of hip-hop culture and its most important artistic manifestation: rap music. To Black baby boomers, rap music may sound like incoherent, nonsensical noise with strong, overbearing beats packaged on television videos with scantily clad, gyrating women and men with gaudy jewelry (otherwise known as the "bling") and sagging pants. However, to Black youth, rap music is the medium where their hopes, aspirations, fears, and anger are expressed. Moreover, rap music represents to Black youth a form of individual self-expression where there are no rules and where their culture is defined and celebrated. In short, rap serves as the "noize" of Black youth and reminds America that they have their own leadership, their own views, and are a socioeconomic and political force.The goal of this article is to explore the relationship between hip-hop culture, Black families, and the Black church. My analysis will examine three areas: (a) a socio-economic overview of hip-hop/rap in the context of record companies and media conglomerates; (b) a paradigm for hip-hop culture as a socio-political mobilizer for African American youth; and (c) a strategy whereby the Black church may increase Black male participation. In order to do this effectively, I must define and analyze hip-hop, its meaning, and role in relation to African-American families and the Black church.About Hip-Hop/RapHip-hop or rap, an art form and culture nearly thirty years old originating from the Bronx, New York, has provided a forum for African-American and Latino youth to express their respective cultures and speak on a number of issues. Today, hip-hop is a global phenomenon that appeals to almost all ethnicities and is synthesizing a new culture that goes beyond race, education, and income.Despite the growing acceptance of hip-hop within White America and the middle class, hip-hop is also under siege. Blake (2003) highlighted some of the comments on rap or hip-hop by Bill O'Reilly, popular talk show host on the Fox News Channel:When I confronted perhaps the most powerful rap and hip-hop executive in the world, Russell Simmons, about explicit lyrics that may be a corrupting influence on high risk children, he looked at me like I was from Mars. "These things need to be expressed," he said. "The plight of Black kids is now much more vivid to the white world because of rap."That may well be true. But what about those Black kids trapped in ghettos with little parental supervision and guidance? Are rap themes going to help them get out of their dire circumstances?The answer is no. If those kids adopt vulgarity in their speech, an anti-white attitude, and an acceptance of dope and violence, the only way they're likely to leave the hood is on a stretcher or in the back of a police cruiser. Hard work and discipline punch the ticket out of poverty. Thinking up rhymes about cocaine is not going to go far on a college admissions application.The fatal flaw of the rap world is that it doesn't harness the legitimate rage that exists in the bottom end of our economic system in any positive way. …

Among the thousands of Americans who studied music in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century, few stayed as long or developed ties as strong as Edward MacDowell (1860-1908). During a decade in Germany (1878-1888) he attended the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, taught piano at the Darmstadt Conservatory, established himself as a composer and pianist with performances throughout Europe, and made many lasting friendships. Nor did his ties end with his relocation to Boston in 1888. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is his correspondence with Doris Raff (1826-1912), widow of his former teacher, Joachim Raft (1822-1882). This series of five unpublished letters to her in the manuscript division of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, along with the other half of the correspondence in the MacDowell Collection at the Library of Congress, demonstrates his affection for his former teacher and also provides insight into the process of transatlantic publication before the Copyright Act of 1891.(1) MacDowell enrolled in the recently established Hoch Conservatory in the spring of 1879 for the purpose of studying piano with Karl Heymann.(2) In addition to his piano studies he had the good fortune to be admitted to the composition class of Raff, the Conservatory's director. MacDowell studied at the Conservatory for three semesters, leaving in the summer of 1880. He continued his composition studies privately with Raft until the latter's death in 1882. During this time, Raff was consistently encouraging to the young American, urging him to make his career in Germany. Raff helped him establish a name for himself by recommending his work to Franz Liszt, who gave MacDowell the opportunity to perform his Erste Moderne Suite at the Zurich festival of the Allgemeiner deutscher Musikverein on 9-12 July 1882.(3) Raft is best remembered today for his years with Liszt in Weimar. In the early 1850s Liszt was developing his symphonic poems, but his background as a piano virtuoso had not adequately prepared him for the work of instrumentation. He consequently enlisted the services of Raff, a gifted orchestrator, who lived in Weimar from 1850 to 1856. The two collaborated on the earliest tone poems, and the extent of Raff's contribution has been debated hotly.(4) Despite his early association with Liszt, Raff as a composer assiduously avoided aligning himself with either the New German School or the "classicist" group of Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, and their followers. His works, while characterized by brilliant orchestration, are marred by this philosophical stance. Horst Leuchtmann summarized his musical style harshly in the New Grove Dictionary of Music by stating: "Raff's attempt at synthesis led to an unattractive eclecticism and mixture of styles, and his penchant for salon-like music made him susceptible to triviality and sometimes vulgarity."(5) Woldemar Bargiel (1828-1897), half-brother of Clara Schumann and professor of composition at the Berlin Hochschule, described his music as "cold and hollow," and went on to say: "The man is puzzling to me musically. He gives ideas and melodies that appear as if they should tear the soul from the body, but one is left with the conviction that their inventor felt absolutely nothing for them; and on top of that this most modern harmonic impurity!"(6) Despite the negative opinions of his contemporaries, MacDowell retained a fondness for his former teacher and a respect for his music, which led him to initiate the exchange of letters that is the subject of this article. Shortly after he moved from Germany to Boston in the fall of 1888, he wrote to Raff's widow Doris, now living in Munich, about the possibility of publishing some of her husband's works: 12 January 1889 Dear Frau Raff! In the hope that you have not yet forgotten my name, I take the liberty of addressing a few lines to you. I would namely like to inquire whether you have published the contrapuntal studies of our unforgettable master - and if not, whether you would be opposed to it. …

E VERY time I teach Othello, whether to graduate students or to undergraduates, I must always start with the question of racial bias and where that bias enters the play and our readings of it. "Must" because, in my experience, the majority of students assume that Othello's problems start in Venice, where, as a Moor, he can only be an outsider. There is, of course, evidence in the play for this assumption. By the end of scene one, Roderigo and lago have called "the Moor" (whom they never name) "the thick-lips" (I.i.66), "an old black ram" (88), "the devil" (9i), "a Barbary horse" (III-12), "a lascivious Moor" (I26), and "an extravagant and wheeling stranger" (I36), and have accused him of "making the beast with two backs" (ii6-I7) with Brabantio's "fair" (I22) daughter, Desdemona.1 By the end of scene two, Brabantio has joined vehemently in the fray, to accuse the "foul thief' (I.ii.62) of "practi~cing] on" Desdemona "with foul charms" (73) and drawing her to his "sooty bosom" (70), of being "an abuser of the world, a practiser / Of arts inhibited and out of warrant" (78-79). And in scene three, the duke orders Othello to Cyprus to fight against the Turks, as if happier to expend Moorish than Venetian blood. Yet although these expressions may suggest an undercurrent of racial bias that makes them especially effective for underhanded personal and political maneuvers, that bias does not determine Othello's position in the court or on the stage. To the contrary, the racial epithets of the opening scenes-the stereotypes that classify and condemn Othello as a black manhelp place Roderigo, Brabantio, and lago outside polite society, the vulgarity of their sexual imagery calling their otherwise respectable social and political standing into question.2 And, although Othello's commission may invoke the European practice of hiring Moors as mercenary soldiers, that practice does not necessarily prove bias against the Moor.3 In fact, the duke also con

One feature of this year's silly season has been a spate of silly articles attacking Blackpool. Allegations include its descent from stylish vulgarity into seediness and mess, and the decline into decrepitude of once great attractions such as the tower. Well, I have good news for Blackpool's tourist department. Visiting its resort is beneficial to health. “Blackpool is valuable for the treatment of tubercular adenitis and adenoids; early phthisis; cardiac disease, where there is enough muscle power; anaemia and convalescence; neurasthenia, and mental overstrain,” writes Dr Edgar Hawkins. One of very few places he advises doctors to send their patients to, not only in summer but …

"Snow or Leavis? The bland scientism of The Two Cultures or, violent and ill-mannered, the one-track, moralistic literarism of the Richmond Lecture?"--that was the choice offered by Aldous Huxley's Literature and Science, published in 1963, four years after Snow's Rede Lecture. Huxley's characterization of Leavis seems almost temperate-after all, Leavis had termed Snow "a poseur, a vulgar stylist, a dispenser of cliches and an expounder of 'Sunday paper culture.' " Snow, according to Leavis, was "intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be." Lacking mental rigor, he presented but a "show of knowledgeableness," and his Rede Lecture had moreover betrayed "an embarrassing vulgarity of style," though that was hardly surprising in view of Snow's failings as an author. "Snow is

Etsu Sugimoto's autobiography, A Daughter of the Samurai, was published in 1925, and critics since have sometimes dismissed it as the work of a conciliatory Asian American writer intent on furthering relations between Japan and the United States by lavishing praise upon her adopted country. Elaine Kim, in her ground-breaking introduction to Asian American literature, situates Sugimoto among the "ambassadors of goodwill," who saw themselves as diplomats whose mission was to gain understanding for their homelands by explaining foreign customs to a Western audience (24).(1) Although Sugimoto does indeed fulfill this role in her autobiography, beneath the bowing facade of a compliant Japanese woman is a wordsmith whose love for and pride in her native culture refuses to be quashed by the weight of American misunderstanding.(2) Throughout her autobiography, Sugimoto gently rebuffs American disapproval of Japanese customs and employs subtle humor to critique America. In doing so, she seeks to establish her identity as an intellectually and morally superior individual who delicately maneuvers the boundaries between two cultures. If we accept Foucault's argument that the control of discourse yields power, then Sugimoto occupies a unique position as both autobiographer and humorist. As autobiographer, she assumes the triple role of author, narrator, and protagonist in her narrative. As humorist, she is teller, audience, and often the butt of her own humor, which both originates from her and frequently situates her as a target through self-effacing criticism of her own actions or Japanese customs.(3) Sugimoto should also be identified as the primary audience of her humor, because none of the reviewers of her day or critics of ours have bothered to mention this facet of her writing. From this site of ultimate control, Sugimoto subtly manipulates discursive positions, moving from the role of a naive immigrant who does not comprehend the laughter of those around her to that of a knowledgeable cultural anthropologist whose own humor is subtle but pointed. It should be understood that Samurai is not a comic text, nor is Sugimoto a comic figure as those terms are usually applied to Western literature. In his study of ancient and early Japanese humor, R.H. Blyth notes that the jokes and antics that often characterize Western comedy are "just wit, without any increase of our wisdom or understanding of life" (162). In contrast, japanese humor tends to contain some deeper meaning that is often didactic or informational. This is not to imply that bawdy witticisms are not also an important element of Japanese humor; however, Sugimoto employs the humor found in classical Japanese literature, which J. Thomas Rimer describes as displaying sobriety and a lack of vulgarity" (16).(4) Her use of a more refined form of humor is in keeping with her purpose to assert her humanity and to establish her moral superiority, as a representative Japanese woman, over an American readership. Ironically, Sugimoto's use of humor to defy American interpretations of Japan mirrors the development of humor in Japanese literature, which evolved as a form of opposition against the very class that Sugimoto represents. During the Tokugawa era (1600-1868), the rapidly expanding merchant class of Edo (now Tokyo) employed humor to express its dissatisfaction with life under samurai rule. The laws of Tokugawa's shoguns centered upon Chinese-derived Confucian traditions that placed restrictive doctrines upon many forms of social behavior. As an escape from moralizing ideology, the masses turned to literature, and jokebooks were produced that gave voice to the merchants' intent to subvert rulers' decrees (Levy 2). As an expression of her dissatisfaction with American responses to Japanese culture, Sugimoto uses humor to explain the Japanese character to an American readership by comparing customs of the West with those of the East and defending the one that she believes to be more practical or moral. …

Fonctionnement dramatique et symbolique de la grossierete et de la vulgarite dans Waiting for Godot de S. Beckett

N ONE of his Reith Lectures, broadcast on the BBC in the summer of 1993, Edward Said suggested that we might very well regard the present-day university as a "quasi Utopia." The phrase stuck in my mind, not least because it seems to involve an element of internal paradox. The very definition of a Utopia seems to imply that we are looking at things in a "quasi" manner, as if they could be considered to be real. So where does it get us to think of the university, or anywhere else, as a "quasi-quasi"? This quibble apart, I think that we can all understand perfectly well what Said means, particularly as he makes the point in relation to a fairly strong orthodoxy which has the tendency to argue in the other direction. Many academics write and act, so he would argue, as if the university were entirely permeated by the same structures of power and ideology that hold sway in the world outside. Now that may be true up to a point, or in certain respects, but it is certainly not true in the unilateral and automatic way that is sometimes taken for granted. I imagine that Said himself has particularly good reason to know what power structures dominate the outside world, and in what respect they differ from the structures that obtain in the university. At any rate he thinks it worthwhile to insist on the difference, and hence the suggestion with which I began: the university is a quasi Utopia. What I want to do in this essay is to generalize and broaden the issue that is implicit here. I agree with Said that there is a certain kind of professional masochism, very prevalent in contemporary academic life on both sides of the Atlantic, which aspires to negate, for the purposes of argument, any sense of a barrier or any other kind of distinction between the world at large, and the reserved spaces within which teaching, research, and education in its broadest sense continue to take place. An obvious example is that of the museum, in connection with which we have not ceased to be told, over a number of years, that the great collections perpetuate the vulgarity of wealth, and lend respectability to historic or contemporary acts of theft by individuals or states.

"A play that never ended," is Athol Fugard's recollection, in a conversation with me in 1986, of the first performance of The Blood Knot: it went on for four hours "on a terrible little stage, only about six inches high at one end." The momentous event took place in Johannesburg in 1961 with Fugard and Zakes Mokae playing Morrie and Zach. The tiny rehearsal room of the African Music and Drama school in Dorkay House, a rundown factory in the automobile district, was packed on that suffocating summer's evening. Egg boxes were glued to one wall to shut out the noise of traffic, but through blacked-out windows on the opposite side came the beat of drums from a nearby mine compound. The play, I wrote in the London Times, gave South African theater international status. During that original South African run of The Blood Knot, Fugard spoke to me of his roots in the Karoo--a starkly beautiful region of semi-desert in the Eastern Cape where he was born, grandson of an Afrikaner patriarch, Veldkornet Potgieter. "So I think like an Afrikaner," he explained, "and believe that certain things about South Africa achieve their truest statement made from an Afrikaner background. The tragedy," he added, "is their love of country has become a passionate but shriveling emotion." In Johannesburg, while writing plays during the morning, Fugard earned a meager living at the African Music and Drama school. The students were part-time, with jobs as messengers, factory workers, cleaners, teachers--all living under apartheid's oppressive conditions. Yet the place hummed with enthusiasm as young singers and musicians aspired to emulate Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, while for the sinewy, darkly bearded, intense Fugard, working in the rehearsal room meant, he told me, "continuity without the compromise that led to vulgarity." He also affirmed his belief that in his country the creative impetus must come from cooperation between the races. The humble surroundings of Dorkay House seemed peculiarly appropriate as a setting for Athol's magical performance in Krapp's Last Tape, which was directed in 1961 by his friend Barney Simon. The local tour of The Blood Knot and its London production enabled him to risk writing full-time. With his wife Sheila and their baby daughter Lisa he returned to the Eastern Cape, sharing a cramped apartment with his parents in Port Elizabeth. The early sixties were a time of intensified arrests throughout South Africa and he wrote to me--I was back in London--to describe a journey to Johannesburg to discuss his new play, People Are Living There: "I can't begin to tell you how important that trip was for me--just the trip, the twenty-four hours in the compartment going up, and again coming back. I think I came nearer to understanding my purpose than ever before. It is to love the ugly--the unloved because that is all that ugliness is. . . . Has this poor, blighted country ever been uglier? Is it possible for the stain of injustice on this earth to be deeper?" By December 1964 he was at last able to afford a small cottage on the coast and wrote happily, "The sea is at our doorstep. There is enough land and need for the highly moral activity of tree-planting and the beginnings of a vegetable patch. . . . I'd never realized fully how much of an Afrikaner I really am, until the moment when I kicked off my shoes and stood barefoot on the earth. I keep looking at my toes to see if roots haven't appeared." His sense of rootedness became a recurring theme. "I know that I have mastered the code of one time, one place," he confided in another letter. "My life's work is possibly to witness as truthfully as I can the nameless and destitute of this one little corner of the world." And so he wrote about Johnnie and Hester Smit living in a back street of Port Elizabeth and in the first production of Hello and Goodbye, directed by Barney Simon at the Library Theatre in Johannesburg, gave a poignant and wonderfully comic performance as Johnnie. …

rTROILUS AND CRESSIDA IS NOT ONLY A notoriously slippery play (comedy, l tragedy, or history?) but one founded on a familiar contradiction. The play's relentless vulgarity constructs a scathing critique of the dominant forms of sexuality in Western culture, but at the same time the partners in its central romantic couple engage the sympathies of even the most sophisticated readers. When Cressida reflects sadly that "Men prize the thing ungained more than it is" (1.2.291),1 and when Troilus wryly observes that Helen's reputation for beauty derives from the amount of blood shed over her (1.1.93-94), they appeal to our own knowingness about sexuality and expose the sexual cliches and conventions of their, and our, culture. But the complicity engendered by this shared knowledge has the paradoxical effect of making an audience identify with Troilus and/or Cressida as they reenact those conventions. Despite their worldly-wise cynicism, Troilus and Cressida, as they enter into the romantic partnership, idealize each other without reserve and without self-consciousness about the utter convention

The author of this article first refers to the influence of Joseph Conrad's seamanship on his sea novels and then examines thoroughly the writer's personal circumstances such as his motives for going to sea, and the inevitable clash of his refined manners and education, as well as his sensitivity, with the predominant vulgarity on board ship. The article goes on to point out the young seaman's disappointment on finding far more monotony than romanticism in life at sea, and to suggest the writer's sublimation of his thirst for adventures as a basis for his literary creativity. Finally the author discusses other aspects of Conrad's life such as his attitude to the sea and ships and his love of seafaring.