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Dans ce bref essai initialement paru en 2015 dans Slate, l’auteur s’interroge sur la relation entre l’activité de création artistique et la conscience des désastres liés à l’Anthropocène : peut-on et faut-il encore se concentrer sur des oeuvres d’art en se détachant du monde ? Évoquant son engagement de jeunesse en tant qu’activiste écologiste en Alaska, Adams se rappelle avoir choisi d’être compositeur parce qu’il était, dans ce rôle, irremplaçable. Pour lui, s’engager pleinement dans l’activité créatrice, sans s’assigner d’objectif politique ni même de thématique à évoquer, est précisément ce qui rend possible une expressivité authentique de sa musique, libre de charrier d’éventuelles significations sociales et capable d’inspirer un renouveau de la conscience chez ses auditeur·trice·s. La responsabilité de l’artiste porte sur son art, qui en retour contribue à transformer la manière d’être au monde de notre espèce., In this short essay, originally published in 2015 in Slate, the author looks at the relation between art-making and an awareness of the disasters associated with the Anthropocene: can we, should we, still focus on making works of art, detached from the world? Recalling his youthful involvement in environmental activism in Alaska, Adams remembers choosing to be a composer because, in that role, he was irreplaceable. For him, being fully engaged in a creative activity with no political agenda, or even a particular theme, allows him to make music that is authentically expressive, free of possible social meanings, and thus capable of inspiring renewed consciousness in its listeners. The responsibility of the artist is to their art, which may then help our species transform its way of being in the world.

During the period between 1930 and 1970 more than 17,000migrants were drawn to Louisville, challenging us to rethink the centralityof rural to urban migration narratives during the era of the Second GreatMigration. African American migration in Louisville, Kentuckydemonstrates the necessity of recognizing the distinctiveness of theSecond Great Migration as well as the need to turn our attention to Blackmobility within the South. Between 1935-1940, the largest Southerncities witnessed an influx of Black population; many of these migrantsoriginated in the urban, not rural South. That Kentucky's Blackpopulation was primarily urban stood in stark contrast with much of theSouth; however, Blacks in Tennessee, Alabama, Florida and NorthCarolina were also predominantly urban. Not only does examining urbanto urban migration patterns offer a more complex view of AfricanAmerican migration, it also offers a more nuanced view of AfricanAmerican urbanization as a process. African American migration inLouisville, Kentucky challenges us to rethink the centrality of rural tourban migration narratives during the era of the Second Great Migration.

Book review The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. By Lance Hill (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. x plus 363pp.). In his Deacons for Defense, Lance Hill directs long overdue attention to the Deacons for Defense (DFD) and what he rightly calls, "The Myth of Nonviolence." Using an impressive array of sources including: archival materials, government documents, FBI files and a substantial body of oral history, Hill argues "that black collective force did not simply enhance the bargaining power of moderates; it was the source of their power." Even the limited success of civil rights organizations such as SNCC, CORE, the NAACP or the SCLC depended upon the threat of collective black violence in the form of Malcolm X, urban rebellions or the DFD. As one of African Americans' most successful, if least remembered, indigenous working class political movements in the South, the significance of the Deacons for Defense rested not only in their advocacy of armed self defense, but also in the ideological challenge they represented for middle class black leadership. The Deacons were organized in Jonesboro, Louisiana in 1964 by local Blacks to protect the larger community and civil rights activists from the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilantes. However, they also represented, "a growing disillusionment of working-class blacks with the pacifistic, legalistic, and legislative strategies proffered by national organizations." The Deacons often clashed with middle class black leadership as well as the Klan. Considering their rapid expansion from Jonesboro to Bogalusa to an organization with twenty-one chapters and a national profile, Hill rightly argues that the platform of armed self-defense held deep resonance in working-class black communities throughout the nation. Despite public perception to contrary the Deacons were "not ideologues or revolutionaries" as much as they were pragmatic reformists. Hill asserts, "They were simply hardworking men,—barbers, mill hands, factory workers, church deacons—who wanted nothing more than quality and justice within the framework of the traditional American dream."(217) Though the history of the Deacons was "purposefully forgotten" due to their stance on self-defense, their efforts resulted in material gains for rural blacks in Louisiana and Mississippi and neutralized the impact of the Klan; and much like the "New Negro" movement of the 1920's the Deacons helped usher in a new era where fear and passivity were replaced by dignity, manhood and a new sense of self-determination.