Based on a recent, archival discovery of the script, “But Amen is the Price” is the first substantive writing about James Baldwin’s collaboration with Ray Charles, Cicely Tyson, and others in a performance of musical and dramatic pieces. Titled by Baldwin, “The Hallelujah Chorus” was performed in two shows at Carnegie Hall in New York City on 1 July 1973. The essay explores how the script and presentation of the material, at least in Baldwin’s mind, represented a call for people to more fully involve themselves in their own and in each other’s lives. In lyrical interludes and dramatic excerpts from his classic work, “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin addressed divisions between neighbors, brothers, and strangers, as well as people’s dissociations from themselves in contemporary American life. In solo and ensemble songs, both instrumental and vocal, Ray Charles’s music evinced an alternative to the tradition of Americans’ evasion of each other. Charles’s sound meant to signify the history and possibility of people’s attainment of presence in intimate, social, and political venues of experience. After situating the performance in Baldwin’s personal life and public worldview at the time and detailing the structure and content of the performance itself, “But Amen is the Price” discusses the largely negative critical response as a symptom faced by much of Baldwin’s other work during the era, responses that attempted to guard “aesthetics” generally—be they literary, dramatic, or musical—as class-blind, race-neutral, and apolitical. The essay presents “The Hallelujah Chorus” as a key moment in Baldwin’s search for a musical/literary form, a way to address, as he put it, “the person and the people,” in open contention with the social and political pressures of the time.
Introduction ‘In Syria, I was always like, bring me this, bring me that.’ Before the Syrian conflict, 38-year-old Marwa 1 lived in various working-class neighbourhoods in Damascus, sheltered by her parents and, later, by her husband. At the age of 17, Marwa dropped out of high school to get married to a tradesman and thereafter never left the house unaccompanied. Seven years after the family fled to Jordan, we met with Marwa in Al Hashmi Al
role of ongoing knowledge production in biomedical and public health fields as defining features of the pandemic response. However, his analysis highlights the importance of social factors, notably ‘the intersections of questions of race, class and power with public health interventions’ as key mediators in the success of health responses. Questions of biopolitics and power loom over the discussions of public health interventions, especially in the call to consider the possibility of a plague
‘Central America’, displayed reproductions of images from the IDPL, including some by renowned Canadian photographers like Dilip Metha, accompanied by the words of writers and the editor-in-chief. ‘We also made maps by continent, we had … Africa, Asia and the Americas,’ recounted Marc Rockbrune. ‘We also had a silent map. It was just the outline of the world and the educators could work in class with a map on which there was just the outline, you didn’t see the countries. It was an interesting tool’ ( ACDI, 1986 ; CIDA, 1988 ; Canadian Geographic Education, 2008
. Moreover, important topics or questions remain to be explored by further research, including the practical ways in which humanitarianism can engage in gender-transformative action, its complementarity to the longstanding work of feminist activists, and the relationship between humanitarian action and other cultural identity factors, such as race, ethnicity, class, caste, age, disability and legal status. Definitions Building on Enloe (2004 : 4
.1080/13552074.2019.1664046 . Martin de Almagro , M. ( 2017 ), ‘ Producing Participants: Gender, Race, Class, and Women, Peace and Security ’, Global Society , 1 – 20 , published online 11 October, doi: 10.1080/13600826.2017.1380610 . Martínez , S. and Libal , K. ( 2011 ), ‘ Introduction: The Gender of
working-class women adopt in exile in Jordan, the article carefully interrogates shifting gender and power dynamics. In doing so it questions the fashionable humanitarian focus on self-reliance and entrepreneurship, as well as youth, but demonstrates how individual and family well-being often relies on rather different parameters. A better understanding among humanitarian actors of what refugee women themselves perceive as valuable lives would be a welcome step in advancing gendered aspirations
making and planning pre-dating Trump. Costs associated with school books and other materials will invariably be prohibitive for many, especially families with multiple school-aged children, and yet this is only one of many pressures limiting education systems and more concretely children’s experiences of school and learning. For instance, the eight-year-old daughter of one of my interviewees attends a double-shift UNRWA school in North Lebanon, where she is one of more than 50 children in her class. 13 As an UNRWA science teacher noted, it
, however, the refugee woman’s insertion into paid labour markets is depicted as a solution to the multiple problems ranging from the traumas of war, gender-based violence, rape and displacement to economic hardship. Such market-based solutions are actively created and dependent on a privileged class of Northern – and often private – humanitarian saviours as well as compassionate consumers who may purchase the products that are manufactured within the initiatives. What is
liberal about a majority of humanitarian practitioners, we can define it as a commitment to three things: the equal moral worth of all human lives (i.e. non-discrimination on principle), the moral priority of the claims of individuals over the authority claims of any collective entity – from nations to churches to classes to families – and a belief that as a moral commitment (one that transcends any sociological or political boundary) there is a just and legitimate reason to intervene in any and all circumstances where human beings suffer (even if