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The New International of
Rhythmic Feeling(s)
ABSTRACT
Thamyris/Intersecting No. 18 (2007) 31–56
Fred Moten
The New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s)
Rupert Westmore Grant, the great Trinidadian Calypsonian known as Lord Invader,
recorded “Crisis in Arkansas” in March of 1959. A couple of months later, bassist/
composer Charles Mingus recorded “Fables of Faubus.” This article takes up the
convergence of Mingus’ and Lord Invader’s musical indictments of the infamous
former governor of Arkansas, who tried to block black students from attending the allwhite
Little Rock Central High School in 1957, and argues that the convergence reveals
articulate divergence in aesthetic and political ideology within Afro-Diasporic culture/s
and illuminates some of what remains to emulate and correct in the tradition of
anti-colonial, anti-racist, trans-oceanic aesthetic and political endeavor.
This is Natures nest of Boxes; The Heavens containe the Earth, the Earth, Cities,
Cities, Men. And all these are Concentrique; the common center to them all, is decay,
ruine; only that is Eccentrique, which was never made; only that place, or garment rather,
which we can imagine, but not demonstrate, That light, which is the very emanation of
the light of God, in which the Saints shall dwell, with which the Saints shall be appareld,
only that bends not to this Center, to Ruine; that which was not made of Nothing, is not
threatened with this annhiliation. All other things are; even Angels, even our soules; they
move upon the same poles, they bend to the same Center; and if they were not made
immortall by preservation, their Nature could not keepe them from sinking to this center,
Annihilation. (John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions 51)
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