Tickets are still available for Sweet Smell of Success, starring John Lithgow, with music by Marvin Hamslich. Join our second annual Broadway Theater Party on April 18, 2002, with a pre-theater reception at Sardi's, followed by Sweet Smell of Success at the Martin Beck Theater!

For more information, call 607-777-4278 or contact harprsvp@binghamton.edu.

For more information about the musical, check out http://www.sweetsmellthemusical.com
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Harpur College Dean Featured in Binghamton Alumni Journal

Alumni who haven't met Jean Pierre Mileur, Dean of Harpur College of Arts and Sciences, now they have the perfect chance. The Spring 2002 Binghamton Alumni Journal features him on page 11. Click here to view a copy of the article.

The article stresses Dean Mileur's priority of attracting faculty who are gifted teachers and devoted scholars "who can bring the excitement of research into the classroom." Parallel to that is his desire to continue competing with the top universities for the best students possible. The Binghamton Alumni Journal praised Mileur's "remarkable enthusiasm and optimism."

The journal was mailed to alumni in mid March. If you did not receive a copy, please contact the Office of Alumni and Parent Relations at 607-777-2431 or at alumni@binghamton.edu.

(Editor's note: You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the article. You can download a copy here.)

Harpur College Dean's Film Workshop Explores "Blaxploitation"

On March 15, 2002, the Harpur College Dean's Interdisciplinary Film Workshop featured Amy Abugo Ongiri, assistant professor of English at University of California, Riverside. She presented "Spectacular Blackness: Blaxploitation, Black Masculinity, and the Question of Black Spectatorship."

Ongiri writes about literature and culture of the African diaspora, visual culture and film theory, and gender studies. She is author of "In a Desert Somewhere between Disney and Las Vegas': The Fantasy of Interracial Harmony and American Multiculturalism in Percy Adlon's Baghdad Café" (Camera Obscura), and "We Are Family: Black Nationalism, Black Masculinity, and the Black Gay Cultural Imagination" (College Literature 1997). She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University. Her current research explores the Black Arts movements of the 1960's and 70's, and Blaxploitation film, a genre in which African-American characters and lifestyles are presented in a manner that reinforces negative stereotypes.

After defining Blaxploitation, Ongiri explained that academics usually regard it as "garbage not worthy of scholarly study." She said that while Blaxploitation is "degraded cinema", the films have a deeper message. She divided her presentation into three sections: authenticity, spectatorship, and body politics and violence.

"The notion of Black identity was up for grabs in the 60’s," Ongiri said. "Blaxploitation films allowed Blacks to authenticate themselves." She cited the 1971 book "The Black Aesthetic" by Addison Gayle, Jr., and talked about the period of artistic and literary development among black Americans in the 1960s and early '70s.

In order to make this point visually as well, Ongiri showed a clip from the 1972 movie "Super Fly", the story of Priest Youngblood, a drug dealer who wants to make one last score before leaving the business for good. The sequence represents a confrontation between Priest and black militants. The film’s unspoken theme is black authentication. "The black arts movement celebrated jazz and blues as the highest forms of culture," said Ongiri, "Super Fly contested this and offered the image of acquiring wealth, power, and acting as a predator."

Blaxploitation films also exemplified spectatorship. "The black urban film-going population was thought to be young and male, so the genre focused on horror and violence. It showed a very limited view of black masculinity," said Ongiri. "The black tradition of witnessing social injustice is as old as slavery," said Ongiri. To make her point that witnessing of social injustice took all kinds of forms, Ongiri showed reproductions of photographs of lynchings that were sold as postcards. While bigots collected the images for nostalgia, the images are able to report the truth. "Slaves had their right to gaze oppressed, and they embraced witnessing as a mechanism for social change."

As Ongiri explained, Blaxploitation films tended towards violence. "People tend to forget the 60’s were really violent," said Ongiri. Blacks have a history of being represented as violent. TV images of the Watts riots in the 1960s’ further portrayed this. Urban riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King made it worse. To make this point, Ongiri showed a clip from the 1973 film "Coffy" about a nurse who fights the drug trade in her neighborhood by posing as a prostitute. She shoots the drug dealers in retaliation for the addiction of her 11-year-old sister. Ongiri said "Coffy" was one of the first films to depict blacks dealing with their emotional pain and outrage at social injustice.

"I think that Ongiri's scholarship on Blaxploitation films is pathbreaking and we were fortunate to have her speak on campus," said Ingeborg Majer-O'Sickey, assistant professor of German and moderator of the Film Workshop, "She is part of a generation of academics in Black Cultural Studies who work interdisciplinarily to great effect. To me, her analyses of the aesthetic aspects of this particular cinematic practice are especially important because she teaches us to look beyond the films' violent images by placing them within a carefully researched historical framework. I'm sure that I wasn't the only one who was inspired by Ongiri's talk to want to learn a more comprehensive way of looking at these films that are generally neglected and even maligned by film scholars."

Ongiri's presentation established that Blaxploitation is an important part of not only black cultural studies, but also cinema studies as a whole. Just as authentication, witnessing injustice, and violence are part of American history, they are an essential part of Blaxploitation films. Rather than dismissing Blaxploitation films as low budget and silly, Ongiri urges us to look at the ways the genre portrays and sometimes critiques an important and constitutive part of American history.

A Poet Among Us

Luiza Franco Moreira, associate professor of Comparative Literature, specializes in twentieth-century Brazilian literature, and is also interested in 20^th century literature of North and South America. Her book "Meninos, Poetas e Heróis" ("Children, Poets, and Heroes"), (EDUSP, 2000) explores the ways that poetry participates in cultural and political hegemony, through a discussion of the work of Cassiano Ricardo, a Brazilian poet and political propagandist. The book has been well received.

Moreira recently made the creative jump from scholarly writing to poetry and has had her first collection, "O Exagero do Sol" ("Excess of the Sun"), reviewed favorably in the February 2002 issue of the Brazilian publication Cult. The reviewer, who notes the simplicity of her language and technique, stresses that Moreira's poetry is far from easy; it is constructed, rather, "with a great deal of specifically literary sophistication."

Professor Moreira took some time from her busy schedule to speak to the Harpur Hotline.

What does the title, O Exagero do Sol, mean in English?
Oh boy, that’s a hard one to translate. Sol means sun. Exagero means something like excess. So it would mean "Excess of the sun," but it’s hard to translate "O Exagero do Sol" as "excess of the sun" because the word excesso exists in Portuguese; excesso would be a very close correspondent to the English "excess." If I wanted to call my book "Excess of the sun," I would have called it "O excesso do sol," not "O exagero do sol." I chose a word that is slightly different. We use this word for people when they make drama out of something ordinary, or when they make too much of something.

How would you describe your work?
They are very short poems, about a moment, or a feeling, or a single image, and often about all of that all at the same time. It's always more fun to read poetry than to talk about it. We're in upstate New York, so you'll understand this poem, "Outono" or "Autumn": We are not going to die / One leaf said to the other.

How long have you been writing poetry?
For twenty years. There are poems in this book that I wrote in the early 80’s, and there’s one poem I wrote last year, just before I published the book.

Who reviewed your book of poetry?
It’s called "Cult," which is short for "Culture." It’s like a literary journal, but not for small circles. It’s something people who have an interest in literature read, so it has a wider appeal than an academic journal. It’s not big-time media, but it’s not small press. I was very pleased and surprised that it was reviewed. It was my first book of poetry. I don’t know if I even think of myself as a poet.

So you’ve done literary criticism and poetry. Where will you go next?
Poetry is something I can’t stop writing, so I’m sure I’m going to go on writing and translating poetry. I'll continue my scholarly work, of course. I will go on doing research on modern poetry in Brazil and in the Americas as a whole. The main project that I am working on right now is an anthology of the poetry of Cassiano Ricardo, the writer I discussed in my last book. This summer I hope to go to a conference in Brazil, a meeting of the Brazilian Association of Comparative Literature. I have been preparing, together with my colleague Fernando Rosenberg from Romance Languages, a symposium on "Nation and Affect."

Moreira is one of the new faculty hired by Dean Mileur. Her photo appears with the Dean on page 11 of the Spring 2002 Binghamton Alumni Journal. She appreciates that research and publishing in the Humanities have been the traditional strength of Harpur College and enjoys the students’ enthusiasm for learning.

Seen Around Campus...

The Student Association, which represents all students, arranges activities, oversees clubs, and distributes information, held elections last week. Anyone walking from the Bartle Library tower to the union, by way of the Watson School of Engineering, was fair game for the campaigners eagerly handing out fliers. Candidates were not allowed to campaign around polling sites, so they braved the cold weather to get one last chance at persuading a fellow student to cast a favorable vote. Does this bring back any memories? Click here to have a look.

In response to your much-appreciated feedback, the Harpur Hotline has begun a regular feature of alumni news. Send us anything you want: publications, promotions, marriages, babies, graduations, retirements, or anything else you wish to share. We want to share the good news about our Harpur friends and family. A great, big thank you to everyone who replied to the last Hotline's inquiry for your latest news. Here's what a few of your fellow Harpur alumni are doing:

1973: Bruce Freeman is president of ProLine Communications, a marketing firm based in Livingston, NJ, specializing in launching products and services for high technology companies. He is also an adjunct professor of marketing and business management at Kean University in Union, NJ. His publications include "How to Fail in Business Without Really Trying" in Business News New Jersey (Jan. 2002) and "It's Not the Technology, It's the Psychology" in ASBA Today (Summer 2000). Freeman has been interviewed on "Joe Connoly's Small Business Report" on CBS Radio and "Jersey's Talking" with television host Lee Leonard.

1979: Florida Governor Jeb Bush recently appointed Lee Seidman to the bench of Broward County court. During his tenure as an assistant state attorney from 1984 to 1999, Seidman examined many complaints of elderly abuse. He formed a team of social workers, code inspectors, police, and human-rights advocates to make unannounced visits to adult congregate living centers. Seidman earned his law degree from Emory University in 1982. (Source: The Miami Herald, 12/11/01)

1984: Jeffrey Gold, a partner in the law firm of Israelson & Gold, located in Plainview, N.Y., has been appointed to the Nassau County Board of Assessors by Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi for a four year term. The Board oversees the assessment of residential and commercial real property throughout the County.

1987: Inspirational Lyricist, Azeez Felder, a.k.a. "Z", has been selected as a finalist in the McDonald's Gospelfest 2002 competition. He will be competing in the area of spoken word/poetry at the Palace Theatre in Stamford, CT on May 26, 2002. "Z" has previously performed at the world's famous Apollo Theater, and competed in Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam competition in Philadelphia. Although he graduated with honors in Psychology, and received a Master's in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Brooklyn College in 1989, writing poetry and lyrics is his true passion.

1994: Gayle Pollak got engaged in November of 2001 to Eric Harris. They will be married in Cold Spring, NY this August.

1996: Lisha Rubin is engaged to Adam Levin of Arlington Heights, IL. A June 23, 2002 wedding in Binghamton is planned. Lisha earned an M.S. in Communications from Ithaca College in 1998. She is a pre-school teacher at the Jewish Community Center in Northbrook, IL.

Please send all information and photos (.jpg preferred) to Ingrid Husisian, Hotline Editor, at husisian@binghamton.edu or by mail to the Harpur College Dean's Office, LN 2430, Binghamton University, PO Box 6000, Binghamton, NY, 13902-6000. We look forward to hearing from you!

Shop Harpur Online!

New merchandise coming in the next Harpur Hotline! Shop the campus bookstore from the comfort of your PC or Mac. Want to pick up a copy of the new Harpur history book The Cornerstone? Visit...
Binghamton University Harpur College Shopping Online

Check out the Harpur mugs, the cool notecards and bumper stickers.

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