The Helios Biblios Hour : Jacqueline Clay Chester, Malcolm X and President Obama

Jacqueline Clay Chester, playwright of A Conversation Between Malcolm X and President Obama. This jan 25 at 600pm at little Five Points 1083 Austin Ave first fl. $20.00 at door or EVENTBRITE

Jamal Petrus as President Obama James Womack as Malcolm X.  Atlanta-based author and playwright Jacqueline Clay Chester, spent seven weeks in Russia as a runway model Can you imagine one day being on an airplane, flying from your hometown in the USA to the city of Moscow in the Soviet Union?In his lifetime, Malcolm X covered so much ground that years after his murder, cross-sections of this country—well beyond the conscious advocates of my youth—still fight over his footprints. What shall we make of a man who went from thoughtless criminal to militant ascetic; from indignant racist to insurgent humanist; who could be dogmatically religious one moment, and then broadly open-minded the next; who in the last year of his life espoused capitalism and socialism, leaving both conservatives and communists struggling to lay their claims?Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father. It places the narrative within the history of African American literature and rhetoric and argues that Obama uses the text to create a life story that resonates with central concepts of African American selfhood and black male identity, including double consciousness, invisibility, and black nationalism. The article reads Dreams from My Father as an attempt to arrive at a state of “functional Blackness,” which moves away from questions of racial authenticity and identity politics but recognizes the narrative powers of African American literature to shape a convincing and appealing black self.