This starts out as a fashion shoot, but it leads somewhere.
In the end, RZA says something that had me excited all day.
“When you look at a picture or
something that somehow has nothing to do with you, and yet, describes
everything you’re about…”
He is talking about Leutze’s iconic Washington Crossing the Delaware, which Dr. RZA made into
THIS
Here is a perfect example of a non-academic using American
history in a way I can point my students to and say “this is just as valid
HISTORY as anything I will ever write, so yes I want your opinion.” I showed
these in class tonite and I’m sure that %80 of these kids are too young to even
know who the Wu-Tang Clan even is. Oh
well.
RZA got me to thinking about a passage from Stephen Pyne’s Voice and Vision that everyone seems to
be reading:
“If the nineteenth century was
partial to progressive histories, told with providential confidence, the
twentieth and twenty-first have favored declensionist versions, told with
ironic condescension.”
Is RZA’s historical vision, with all it’s struggle and
progress more akin to nineteenth century history? Or is it, with all its ODB
and salesmanship, ironic? Either way, if my work can only contain a smidgen of
historiographical complexity and imagination as RZA’s, I’ll have done some good
in this world.