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On the occasion of the Amazon Studios release of Barry Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad, a ten-episode adaption of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel, FQ board member and frequent contributor Michael Gillespie convened a roundtable with scholars whose work is deeply attentive to the art of blackness, especially regarding literature, television, and cinema. Walton M. Muyumba, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Kristen J. Warner each offers a distinct assessment of the series as critical provocation and aesthetic practice while also posing necessary and difficult questions about conceptions of history, culture, visuality, narrative form, temporality, and—not least—the media industries. Together, these scholars share their thoughts on the complications and import of the series as part of what is sure to be an ongoing consideration of its meanings and methods.

The goal of this project is to outline the emergence of blues philosophy in contemporary American letters. The study begins by constructing a genealogy of American philosophers concerned with the issues of identity, race, and social hope. The subsequent chapters uncover the ways in which the blues has become a framework for American artists to confront the philosophical ironies attached to American identification, mourn and memorialize past loss, sing the body electric, and narrate heroic struggle. This is a particularly charged field of inquiry. My claim is that this Negro-engineered American philosophy of improvisation and antagonistic cooperation is at the core of cultural production in the West, especially in American literature during the second half of the twentieth century. The essays presented here “play” on and delineate the pragmatist qualities and aesthetics of the blues through various texts. After setting the themes of the dissertation through an examination of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, I outline the extensions and riffs that American writers, such as James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, John Edgar Wideman, and Jamiaca Kincaid, make on the Ellisonian philosophical approach. As a philosophy, the blues emerges from the historical experience of African Americans in Western hemisphere—it is the philosophy of the Black Atlantic. I will be tackling the shifty definitions of postmodern aesthetics in an attempt to posit the blues as a more culturally appropriate angle from which to discuss the questions concerning contemporary human existence. In this study attempts to present the blues as an intellectual alternative to the now status quo approaches of postmodernism and postcolonialism. This project is important because it charts an American philosophy little acknowledged by the larger critical community.

Muyumba goes against the grain of previous criticism by linking Baraka and Ellison. Because of the tensions between Ellison's liberal individualist perspective and Baraka's cultural nationalism and Marxism, the two writers have rarely been considered in tandem, and to do so here is a bold and challenging move. [...]it is difficult to swallow the notion of Baraka as pragmatist - the literary instrumentalism he theorized during the 1960s was far more attack-minded (poems were conceived as \"weapons\" with which to bring down the white power structure and so on) than the open, democratic approach pragmatist thinkers take to culture - and his inclusion in the discussion is perhaps the least convincing aspect of the book. A project that examines the ways African American writers have revised that tradition is without doubt an interesting and potentially fruitful one, but the question of what exactly is being recalibrated is never satisfactorily defined. Because we only get a snap definition of pragmatism in the introduction, one of the book's main arguments - that jazz improvisation is akin to pragmatist experimentalism because of the democratic possibilities it implies - arguably lacks weight.

I. Historical Convergences II. Poetry on Dance I. Historical Convergences. In the cultures of Crete and ancient Greece, dancing and